I have no idea how anyone could exploit staying in the past. But if it happened, I guess it's fine that they're changing it. It's not like it should have a huge impact on many players.
[4:46] [Combat {self}] Your Haymaker deals 23337 (9049) Physical Damage(Critical) to Spawnmother
I'm fine with making gold farming harder. This might improve the dil exchange and make Exchange prices better.
This will frustrate a few role-players who want to stay in TOS-land forever or never choose between KDF and Fed, but if people really really want to do that then they can skip the doffing minigame on that one character.
If you're RPing being a TOS captain or loner Romulan that hard then admiralty, doffing, TFOs don't really make sense anyway. Stick with episode replay for that one character.
Levelling a Romulan could be slightly more annoying if you can't play patrols or TFO's because you'd be forced to play the same episodes every time you create a new green faction character.
Again, I don't know how the system was abused. But since that's the only serious disadvantage I can think of, I don't care all that much about this change.
[4:46] [Combat {self}] Your Haymaker deals 23337 (9049) Physical Damage(Critical) to Spawnmother
The additional 500 Lobi to this "legendary" bundle is a boon for anyone that buys it so there's that.
I had heard about a few players sticking to non-aligned Romulans somehow but thought it was more of a playing outside the box mind-set & wasn't being used to potentially exploit. If some exploitation was happening because of it I'd hope Cryptic would take measures to reign it in.
Admiralty doesn't even kick-in until level 52 I thought, DOFFing around level 11& I thought Patrols & some TFOs around the same 11th level or shortly after.
As long as Cryptic doesn't "nerf" Patrols in helping get starship traits done lol
We have already seen Cryptic take other measures to control the dil economy(phoenix boxes being always on, lower tier Zen ships being converted to dil based, Ferengi and Klingon admiralty changes, event rewards being account wide instead of per character, changes to event dil payouts) I suspect this is just another change in that same vein.
And how has that worked?
Doing all that should reduce the dil supply and make the exchange more favorable towards dil, but it's the opposite. If dil is in short supply it should take more zen to get dil, but it's going the opposite direction.
it was around 2018 dil was at like 250, its now twice that. Even a year ago when I came back it was hovering around 360-400 and it's already 25% up from there. There are already many dil sinks in the game like fleet/rep gear, fleet projects, etc.
Right now, my 8 toons generate enough dil that I could get like 130 zen a day or something like that. Well I can easily trade $1.30 a day and just buy the dil.
obviously that is what cryptic wants. for me to spend money instead of grind it, but if they want me to spend money, they're going about it the wrong way. The ideal situation for cryptic would be if the zen to dil exchange was so high no one wanted to waste time farming and just dropped a few bucks a week to get the dil they want. In order to create that situation the amount of excess dil needs to increase. But they're trying to cut it off. Both their approach and the way the market is responding doesn't quite make sense.
When they started making these changes the dil exchange rate was near/at 500/1. It sunk down to 350 after these changes were made, and has climbed back up to 500/1 since then. Hence the likely reason for the timing of this change.
And the thing about zen exchange is that the zen doesn't just some from nowhere. Someone spent money for that zen in the first place. They earn money either way. Its in their best interest to keep the dil exchange down because not everyone can fork over cash themselves, but they can grind for zen someone else forked over the cash for. However people will only do that if they think the exchange rate is fair, and most people don't think 500/1 is fair.
They earn more money keeping the zen exchange down, and having people buy zen to put it up for trade on the exchange, then they do from tanking it to 500/1 all the time, and trying to force people to just outright buy the zen themsleves.
I would only spend zen on dilithium if the exchange was high.
If Cryptic's interest in non-paying customers is to use them to generate dil for the paying customers to buy, then they're doing it wrong.
if I have 1000 zen to spend, I want to buy it when 1 zen = 1000 dil, not when 1 zen = 250 dil.
From that perspective Cryptic should be making changes to encourage the price of Zen to go up. And you do that by making dil more plentiful, but what they're doing is restricting it. The ideal situation for them is if free to play players can easily generate their 8k dil/day across as many toons as possible as quickly as possible. It increases the supply and drives zen spending.
The key for them is to make it so that it's just convenient enough for the F2P to max out tons of toons but still more convenient for those who want to spend money to get good value. Right now at 500, it's not good enough value for me to pay for dil. If it hit 1000 though, I'd probably consider setting aside $X/week to buy dil instead of spending my time endlessly doing admiralty and doff missions for dil.
I still buy zen as my primary method but have been buying less & less over the last few years.
What I like to do is if/when I'm buying something is use my $ to buy the zen the whatever odd amount off of 100s I use my dilithium converted to zen to supplement for the final amount needed.
I still like to use my dilithium in purchasing Reputation & Fleet equipment, but since they don't seem to get updated have lost some but not most of their value imo.
I still buy zen as my primary method but have been buying less & less over the last few years.
What I like to do is if/when I'm buying something is use my $ to buy the zen the whatever odd amount off of 100s I use my dilithium converted to zen to supplement for the final amount needed.
I still like to use my dilithium in purchasing Reputation & Fleet equipment, but since they don't seem to get updated have lost some but not most of their value imo.
I've only really used dil for fleet kit and phoenix tech upgrades so I'm in the same boat.
I've bought zen to purchase ships but as I'm a KDF main and Cryptic continues to release feddybear content I have no real need to purchase zen anymore.
The lobi added to the bundle is an act of desperation at this point as the bundle is so universaly reviled as a bad deal and an insult to the players, especialy KDF players.
We have already seen Cryptic take other measures to control the dil economy(phoenix boxes being always on, lower tier Zen ships being converted to dil based, Ferengi and Klingon admiralty changes, event rewards being account wide instead of per character, changes to event dil payouts) I suspect this is just another change in that same vein.
Yeah with very little to zero success. Unless the plan was having the Dillithium price at 490 - 500.
C-Store Inc. is still looking for active members on the fed side. If you don't have a fleet feel free to contact me in game @stegi.
Comments
[3/25 10:41][Combat (Self)]Your Haymaker deals 26187 (10692) Physical Damage(Critical) to Orinoco.
This will frustrate a few role-players who want to stay in TOS-land forever or never choose between KDF and Fed, but if people really really want to do that then they can skip the doffing minigame on that one character.
If you're RPing being a TOS captain or loner Romulan that hard then admiralty, doffing, TFOs don't really make sense anyway. Stick with episode replay for that one character.
Again, I don't know how the system was abused. But since that's the only serious disadvantage I can think of, I don't care all that much about this change.
[3/25 10:41][Combat (Self)]Your Haymaker deals 26187 (10692) Physical Damage(Critical) to Orinoco.
I had heard about a few players sticking to non-aligned Romulans somehow but thought it was more of a playing outside the box mind-set & wasn't being used to potentially exploit. If some exploitation was happening because of it I'd hope Cryptic would take measures to reign it in.
Admiralty doesn't even kick-in until level 52 I thought, DOFFing around level 11& I thought Patrols & some TFOs around the same 11th level or shortly after.
As long as Cryptic doesn't "nerf" Patrols in helping get starship traits done lol
And how has that worked?
Doing all that should reduce the dil supply and make the exchange more favorable towards dil, but it's the opposite. If dil is in short supply it should take more zen to get dil, but it's going the opposite direction.
it was around 2018 dil was at like 250, its now twice that. Even a year ago when I came back it was hovering around 360-400 and it's already 25% up from there. There are already many dil sinks in the game like fleet/rep gear, fleet projects, etc.
Right now, my 8 toons generate enough dil that I could get like 130 zen a day or something like that. Well I can easily trade $1.30 a day and just buy the dil.
obviously that is what cryptic wants. for me to spend money instead of grind it, but if they want me to spend money, they're going about it the wrong way. The ideal situation for cryptic would be if the zen to dil exchange was so high no one wanted to waste time farming and just dropped a few bucks a week to get the dil they want. In order to create that situation the amount of excess dil needs to increase. But they're trying to cut it off. Both their approach and the way the market is responding doesn't quite make sense.
I would only spend zen on dilithium if the exchange was high.
If Cryptic's interest in non-paying customers is to use them to generate dil for the paying customers to buy, then they're doing it wrong.
if I have 1000 zen to spend, I want to buy it when 1 zen = 1000 dil, not when 1 zen = 250 dil.
From that perspective Cryptic should be making changes to encourage the price of Zen to go up. And you do that by making dil more plentiful, but what they're doing is restricting it. The ideal situation for them is if free to play players can easily generate their 8k dil/day across as many toons as possible as quickly as possible. It increases the supply and drives zen spending.
The key for them is to make it so that it's just convenient enough for the F2P to max out tons of toons but still more convenient for those who want to spend money to get good value. Right now at 500, it's not good enough value for me to pay for dil. If it hit 1000 though, I'd probably consider setting aside $X/week to buy dil instead of spending my time endlessly doing admiralty and doff missions for dil.
What I like to do is if/when I'm buying something is use my $ to buy the zen the whatever odd amount off of 100s I use my dilithium converted to zen to supplement for the final amount needed.
I still like to use my dilithium in purchasing Reputation & Fleet equipment, but since they don't seem to get updated have lost some but not most of their value imo.
I've only really used dil for fleet kit and phoenix tech upgrades so I'm in the same boat.
I've bought zen to purchase ships but as I'm a KDF main and Cryptic continues to release feddybear content I have no real need to purchase zen anymore.
The lobi added to the bundle is an act of desperation at this point as the bundle is so universaly reviled as a bad deal and an insult to the players, especialy KDF players.
Yeah with very little to zero success. Unless the plan was having the Dillithium price at 490 - 500.