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Why is the exchange so expensive ?
grazyc2
Member Posts: 1,988 Arc User
I know people like to get EC ingame to buy there Mk XIV gear....
Why do people put it on therefore reasonable prices I mean a ship for 94.000.000 EC if you have to buy that with keys you have to sell almost 40 keys to get there ...
I don't want to complain but I just don't understand it what could it is to sell stuff that high because there is no one having that much stuff to sell to get the EC except if he or she is selling Ship upgrades, Fleet Ship Tokens or Keys....
Like to know what players think ?
Why do people put it on therefore reasonable prices I mean a ship for 94.000.000 EC if you have to buy that with keys you have to sell almost 40 keys to get there ...
I don't want to complain but I just don't understand it what could it is to sell stuff that high because there is no one having that much stuff to sell to get the EC except if he or she is selling Ship upgrades, Fleet Ship Tokens or Keys....
Like to know what players think ?
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Post edited by grazyc2#7847 on
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When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
Simple, if it takes between 1 and 200+ keys to open a box to win a ship, that ship is not something you want to give away for free.
Also, the ship is one of the rarest rewards from the lockbox. It isn't open a box and get the ship. It has like less than 1% chance to come out. So value for rarer things goes up as a matter of Supply vs demand.
Take the DOFF packs for example from the lockboxes, common thing so they are 15-40k typically.
Top DPS 102k
Ironically the Lobi ships, which takes a set amount of boxes/promo packs to open tends to be cheaper than it really should be.
Take into account this, if you averaged 4 lobi (on VERY bad luck) per lockbox opened, you need to open 200 boxes just to get all the lobi you need. That's equal to $200 ship.
If 40 keys can be sold to get this ship, than you just got a $200 ship for $40....
Top DPS 102k
To expand on this. If you make a mk II weapon and get a nice VR and it has [Acc]x3. You are doing good. But probably took an hour or three to get crafted for one of them. Now level it up. By 14 you have good odds of getting a UR. But the new mod was Thrust or PvP Res. Now you have to start all over. So rarity really is key here on weapons.
Originally Posted by pwlaughingtrendy
Network engineers are not ship designers.
Nor should they be. Their ships would look weird.
^ This. Rarity of supply in relation to demand is the most basic comprehension point for economics.
If your complaining about the price of that ship, you would've gone insane knowing what Very Rare Saurian BOffs with BO3 used to go for.
Simple, because players are willing to pay the prices.
There are several ways of stockpiling ec without spending a dime, but to your original complaint.. Supply and demand my friend.. If people didnt pay 94 mil for a ship, the price would gradually go down until it hits a point where people are willing to buy it. With weapons, the other posters here are correct, getting the mods you want is frustrating at best if you are crafting and upgrading (starting at mk ii and upgrading is the most efficient and best chance for qual upgrades) so the better stuff like crtdx4,crtdx3 pen, and others are hard to come by.
Weeeeeeellllll, there is the part where you'd also have gotten the other contents of those 200 boxes. So it's not like you "spent $200" for just the lobi. That's why the lobi ships are cheaper. (especially if the lobi ships are coming from people who opened the boxes for the other stuff, and the lobi crystals are just a byproduct)
Let's do the math, shall we?
Several 200 box runs have been done. Out of 200 boxes the average seems to be two to five ships. 200 keys is roughly 470 million EC (or 25,000 ZEN, which is something like six million dilithium.
Assuming the rate holds, if you ran 40 boxes you MIGHT get one ship, but probably would get nothing. Selling a ship for anything LESS than the stated price only means the seller is losing money. Why would they do that?
Furthermore, some of the more highly desired ships seem to drop more rarely than that.
Lifetime members get 500 Zen a month. Whales have (repeatedly) been shown to drop upwards of a thousand USD to buy Zen to turn into keys. When a guy can drop 50 stacks of 10 keys on the exchange they can buy even the 500 million EC ships outright.
I got a Galor, a Ferengi Marauder, and an Elachi ship from a lockbox drop. TBH, most of them aren't worth the money.
Long answer: The game has many more ways for players to put EC into the economy than ways to take it out, so the net is that EC constantly flows in with nowhere to go except from player to player on the exchange.
Every time you go out and play content, your inventory fills with junk items you don't want. Occasionally, you get something you can sell or trade, but odds are you sell it to an NPC vendor. The NPC vendors don't work from a finite pool of money like a real life business, they just mint money out of thin air and hand it to you. Conversely, when you buy from an NPC, your money vanishes. But, there's very little reason to ever spend your EC with vendors, except to buy common consumables. Nobody uses white vendor equipment, and it's cheap even if you did. Even fleet and reputation projects aren't much of a drain overall (especially since daily rep projects hand you back an item that's probably worth more than you put in). So, almost all the EC the NPC vendors mint just stays around in one player's wallet or another's.
The more EC there is in play, the less value it has, just as in a real economy. The US government can't pay back the national debt by just minting the appropriate number of dollars and handing them out, because doing so would devalue the dollars and crash the currency's exchange rate. But that's what happens with EC, we just keep minting it, so the value has crashed. The only thing you can do with it is hand it to another player in exchange for some item. Then, they sit on it until another player has something they want and it just keeps circling around.
There's basically two ways to solve this problem:
1) Create a massive EC sink that will drain a lot of it out of the economy. This sink would have to give something really good to encourage people to do it, but in order to work would have to be more than most players could afford. This will inevitably anger the newer or less EC rich players, since they can't get whatever the shiny thing is. It would also be temporary, since after the rich players got their shiny, they'd just start getting rich again. This option is, therefore, a bust.
2) Move the exchange to a currency that has appropriate sinks AND limits on how fast it can be minted, thereby preserving its value. We already have this, it's dilithium. If you look over to Neverwinter, their player auction house is already based on their equivalent of dilithium. The devs have talked about converting STO to work the same way. I'm not sure why they don't, perhaps just wanting to avoid the forum rage such a change would provoke as people's billions of EC (yes, there are people with billions) suddenly became worthless. It's really the only way to fix the economy of the exchange and get it back to a healthy place where people can reasonably afford the items just with what they earn through typical gameplay.
For the Lobi ships, you HAVE to use Lobi to get them, irregardless. Whether you did to get and sell, or someone else did, Lobi ships are ONLY purchasable via Lobi somewhere along the way.
Sure you could sell the items you get to try to buy more keys.
Sure you might have got a special trait worth the big EC or a ship, but somewhere down the line the Lobi was earned to get the ship. That fact will not change on any Lobi ship. One has to come before the other. And not everyone is lucky enough to get enough of the other dropped items with the lobi. I know many who all they seem to get are DOFF packs and maybe a junk ship or two from the packs.
Top DPS 102k
Ugh. Neverwinter's economy was a flaming disaster when I played that game. And the exchange being based on refined diamonds (dilithium) was a huge factor in that.
(People complaining that there was no use for gold - NW's version of credits; people exploiting the heck out of dungeon runs to get the best gear to sell on the market & amass huge amounts of diamonds; massive manipulation of the diamond exchange by those people with their huge bankrolls.... of course, this wasn't helped by Cryptic including bulk quantities of refined diamonds as part of the premium bundles; etc, etc, etc. And in-game prices were factored around some of these things as well.... stuff on vendors that cost 1-2mil refined diamonds, for instance.)
At the time I left the game, the diamond exchange had been pegged at 500:1 for weeks, with no zen available for trade because it all sold out immediately. Typical way to do a zen trade was to put your 500/per diamond offer up and then wait 4-6 days for it to actually happen. Good times.
Yeah, I'm not sure using Neverwinter as an example of how to do an MMO economy is a great idea.
Doesn't change the fact that you're not just getting lobi for those 200 keys. Or that a lot of lobi come from people who open boxes for the other stuff. Which is why lobi ships aren't as expensive.
(honestly, I'm kind of baffled by the thought "I opened boxes for lobi", it seems insane to me that someone would do that. I've always seen lobi as the extra consolation prize, the box-tops you collect off your cereal to mail in for a toy. If you want a lobi prize, you either look for it on the exchange, or you offer to pay someone EC to buy the item you want with their lobi.)
Sounds like Neverwinter screwed up and didn't add enough sinks. Usually the complaint in STO is we have too many (which if people are complaining about that, you probably have it right). What happened recently is that they've added a whole lot more ways to get dil. You now get it from all episodes and all queues. We also had several big payouts back to back with limited time events, plus multiple bonus dilithium events. The exchange will start to settle back down once some of that extra dil flushes out and we get yet more sinks. I don't think it's ever going to settle back to where it was, but it should stabilize. As long as everybody, new player and old, has equal chance of earning dil through normal gameplay, it should be fine whatever the rate winds up at. You'll never have the kind of inflation or income disparity you see with EC unless Cryptic massively screws up. Hopefully they've learned from whatever mistake they made on NW.
Couple things to note:
First, remember that the things you see for sale are items that have not yet sold, so there may be more reasonably priced from time to time that you don't see nearly as much because they sell, while overpriced items might stay there forever.
Second, always search the specific category for what you are looking for. For some complex reasons (that have to do with database posting delays mostly) if you search in the ALL category for your item, you will only be shown a subset of the items posted, and not necessarily the cheapest.
Third, sometimes people just post things at super high prices thinking someone's going to be sucked into buying them who doesn't know better. I find this practice disgusting, and hopefully those things will never sell.
Fourth, unless you really NEED Mk XIV very rare or ultra rare or whatever, look and see if uncommon will suit you instead of very rare, or if very rare one MK lower will suit you just as well. Sometimes you can see some significant cost savings without much hurt.
And probably a bunch of other things people already mentioned...
STO Resources: <Ship Comparison - All Tiers + Small Craft + Hangar Pets> <Damage Resistance>
<R&D + Upgrade Costs> <Duty Officer Finder> <Suliban Doff Reqs> <Fleet Costs> <Rep Costs>
<Keybind Tour the Galaxy> <Fleet / Armada Management> <Currency Exchange> <Other STO Links>
What fix are you thinking of? The devs have admitted that the EC economy was poorly planned and hopelessly broken. That's why everything new depends on dil. How can a currency be stable if it constantly mints new currency without ever removing any? Also, 18.75% inflation over 2 years seems pretty high to me. I've only been playing since 2012, and I remember selling a Zemok back then for like 12 mil. Oh, how innocent we were.
I agree about the fleet holdings, that was certainly the start of the decrease in dil value. That was some time ago that the major fleets all wrapped up, and there's no longer any significant inflation from the smaller fleets finishing (if they ever do). The recent problem is because of some poor planning as far as rolling out way too many ways to get dil too fast without adding any new sinks besides the Iconian rep. Hopefully they'll chill out for a while and let that bleed off before running any more events. We're also in a position now where every new piece of gear is a new potential dil sink, as people pour unspeakable amounts into trying to upgrade to Epic. On balance, I think that's a good thing economically speaking (though as an individual user, it's damned annoying :P ).
You may have a point about older lockbox items, but it's natural for the price of an item to drive up as it becomes less available. Items from the current lockbox are always highly available, and the wise Ferengi holds onto the most desirable items until after that box is retired. :cool:
Dil was stable around 130-140 for a long time after the shakeout from the fleet starbases finishing settled down. The recent huge spike has been because of a broad and deliberate change in the earning rate, and the back to back events (which was a mistake on their part). The difference is, the dil value will stabilize, and it'll still be better than where it was in 2012 when there were literally no dil sinks. EC won't stabilize, it'll just continue to inflate.
If you think the items are too expensive
Build them or buy them yourself :P
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