It first happened right about the time the New Genesis bundle launched. They tried doing a bit of a quick fix with an easy to do dil sink (the account bound Vanity shields for dilithium event they did recently) which helped, until the spring sale when demand for Zen again outstripped the supply. They're working on more dil sinks, which will probably be introduced gradually over time once done. But obviously they're not ready yet. They mentioned on Ten Forward that trying to balance out the dil/zen exchange has been a goal for a while, but it's previously gotten it's priority bumped down by more urgent stuff.
And before anyone mentions it, they had a similar situation on another game, where they tried raising the price cap, and that didn't help there. So they're not intending to do that here. The thing to remember is that, in order for there to be zen to buy with dil, another person has to buy the zen and sell it. Right now any zen for dil orders are likely to be completed instantly while normally you'd have to wait a while.
Currently (key word) this is not actually a big deal. If you put some dil up for sale before you go to bed it will be sold by the next day.
What will be a big deal is if that waiting period turns into days/weeks/etc. To prevent that from happening Cryptic needs to regularly introduce new things people want and can only be obtained by dilithium.
rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,577Community Moderator
Personally I feel the Vanity Shield sale was a success. It DID get people selling Zen again, even for a short time.
As a test run it worked. Combine periodic DL sales like that with other measures, and it may very well be the shot in the arm the DL Exchange needs.
Dilithium needs to be desirable again. No one can dispute that. But this is not something that can be fixed overnight. Its going to take a lot of elements working together. And while there may be some setbacks, such as previously scheduled C-Store sales conflicting with emergency measures for the DL Exchange, its going to take time and effort.
Personally I feel the Vanity Shield sale was a success. It DID get people selling Zen again, even for a short time.
As a test run it worked. Combine periodic DL sales like that with other measures, and it may very well be the shot in the arm the DL Exchange needs.
Dilithium needs to be desirable again. No one can dispute that. But this is not something that can be fixed overnight. Its going to take a lot of elements working together. And while there may be some setbacks, such as previously scheduled C-Store sales conflicting with emergency measures for the DL Exchange, its going to take time and effort.
Some solutions are complicated, but some are not.
As you said, the vanity shield thing worked temporarily. So let's forget about the complicated solutions for a minute and say at the very LEAST they need to stick some new desirable item in the dil sore every.single.month.
Get that system in place and then you can worry about figuring out a more complex solution.
Personally I feel the Vanity Shield sale was a success. It DID get people selling Zen again, even for a short time.
As a test run it worked. Combine periodic DL sales like that with other measures, and it may very well be the shot in the arm the DL Exchange needs.
Dilithium needs to be desirable again. No one can dispute that. But this is not something that can be fixed overnight. Its going to take a lot of elements working together. And while there may be some setbacks, such as previously scheduled C-Store sales conflicting with emergency measures for the DL Exchange, its going to take time and effort.
Some solutions are complicated, but some are not.
As you said, the vanity shield thing worked temporarily. So let's forget about the complicated solutions for a minute and say at the very LEAST they need to stick some new desirable item in the dil sore every.single.month.
Get that system in place and then you can worry about figuring out a more complex solution.
Personally I feel the Vanity Shield sale was a success. It DID get people selling Zen again, even for a short time.
As a test run it worked. Combine periodic DL sales like that with other measures, and it may very well be the shot in the arm the DL Exchange needs.
Dilithium needs to be desirable again. No one can dispute that. But this is not something that can be fixed overnight. Its going to take a lot of elements working together. And while there may be some setbacks, such as previously scheduled C-Store sales conflicting with emergency measures for the DL Exchange, its going to take time and effort.
Some solutions are complicated, but some are not.
As you said, the vanity shield thing worked temporarily. So let's forget about the complicated solutions for a minute and say at the very LEAST they need to stick some new desirable item in the dil sore every.single.month.
Get that system in place and then you can worry about figuring out a more complex solution.
Yes, but what would you say would be something that is universally desirable? (Yes, I'm saying universally since almost everyone will agree there will be something that they could all agree on that they'd get if it was available and that everyone has different opinions on what they feel they'd go for).
Personally I feel the Vanity Shield sale was a success. It DID get people selling Zen again, even for a short time.
As a test run it worked. Combine periodic DL sales like that with other measures, and it may very well be the shot in the arm the DL Exchange needs.
Dilithium needs to be desirable again. No one can dispute that. But this is not something that can be fixed overnight. Its going to take a lot of elements working together. And while there may be some setbacks, such as previously scheduled C-Store sales conflicting with emergency measures for the DL Exchange, its going to take time and effort.
but a limited time purchase is not a good solution mainly at 230000 dil each shield. almost nobody stock this amount of refined dil and wait for an eventual sell (at least not me). Cryptic should understand that a lot of players are not dil farmers and just play the game (contents - missions etc)
And if they don't add more shields for an future hypothetic sell, it will be a failure. farmers have already bought everything.
if only they could give use a way to move a character bound console -from a ship or not- (from lobi store or lockbox) to an other character for a fair amount of dil, that would be cool. I want to delete a character, but I don't want to loose a dprm, when i see the current price of this console.
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rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,577Community Moderator
I think you missed one of the points of having the Vanity Shields available for DL.
Dilithium Exchange.
It wasn't JUST for people who stockpiled Dilithium. It was to get people trading DL and Zen again. Which it did.
It may have "worked" for a short period of time, if you call it dropping to what...495-496ish at BEST for a few days, working. But then Cryptic had to sabotage that with another Zen store sale before the vanity shield FOMO week ended.
*Points to Cryptic also having 2 Zen store sales of the 10th anniversary bundle within the same month* Care to defend how something like this was "planned" months in advance? Sure seems like there was a switch flipped with this one.
If the intent is to make a pressure release valve, you don't hamstring it by offering something at the same time that calls for one of the components, a component that is already in short supply and high demand.
The same thing happened with the 2nd launch of the Phoenix Pack(a few years ago), when they decided to negate any good that pressure release valve would do, by dumping a key sale on players at the same time.
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rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,577Community Moderator
It may have "worked" for a short period of time, if you call it dropping to what...495-496ish at BEST for a few days, working.
That did work because before that the DL exchange was capped to non existant. It put Zen on the market again. And this was a TEST to see how effective it would be. They're still going over data and working on other things as well.
Again... there is no magic pill to revive the exchange instantly. This was just the first step, small as it was.
While I do admit to some frustration with the timing of some sales... odds are they were planned out months in advance. I bet most of the time they were planning these sales they weren't thinking about economic fallout with an as yet undecided method of trying to revive the economy happening on day X of month Y. Do you seriously expect them to have prior knowledge of how the economy's going to be 6 months to a year down the road? Sales they can plan for because that's always going to make money. They can't plan for the fluctuations in the Dilithium Exchange as accurately, if at all. I wouldn't be surprised if the Devs facedesked when that key sale activated because it was planned long in advance. And they can't just turn it off after it starts because then we'd have fallout from THAT with people getting upset they couldn't buy keys on sale when they were SUPPOSED to.
Its a fine line to walk, and I'd put good ECs on many desks feeling pain from things like that.
Which amount would only indicate selling about 1000 shields... if you go by the common wisdom that most players have somewhere around six characters and assume they bought one for each, that's like 175 players.
Pretty sure there's a lot more market out there than that. "A rapid and significant impact"? No. I've seen fluctuations in the exchange rate in the past, that were 20+ in the same period of time, and did not revert nearly as quickly. (In one case for example, I sold Zen at 310 and bought it back at 290 the very next week. It was during the 2018 Winter Event.)
What I'm getting at, is that an effective dil sink, needs to be something that people actually want to spend dil on. Particularly people who are willing to sell zen to get the dil. In this case, it may have been that the item itself was desirable but the price was too high. In some other cases the item is simply not wanted, and in others the player has already purchased as much as they need.
Still... we had movement in the Exchange. A sale like this actually did something. No one is disputing we need an effective sink. But things like this can HELP. That's what we're trying to say here. Its not the end all solution, its only a PART of the overall solution, and can be deployed again in the future, maybe with different items in it.
Currently (key word) this is not actually a big deal. If you put some dil up for sale before you go to bed it will be sold by the next day.
What will be a big deal is if that waiting period turns into days/weeks/etc. To prevent that from happening Cryptic needs to regularly introduce new things people want and can only be obtained by dilithium.
Well, unfortunately my post did not age well. In less than a month the situation has gone from "post it before you go to bed and the next day it will have sold" to it's now been 3 days since the last sale I posted and it still hasn't gone through.
So yeah, we can no longer wait for the devs to come up with some complex solution. They need to be doing something about this constantly, even if it's only a short term band-aid fix.
Comments
And before anyone mentions it, they had a similar situation on another game, where they tried raising the price cap, and that didn't help there. So they're not intending to do that here. The thing to remember is that, in order for there to be zen to buy with dil, another person has to buy the zen and sell it. Right now any zen for dil orders are likely to be completed instantly while normally you'd have to wait a while.
What will be a big deal is if that waiting period turns into days/weeks/etc. To prevent that from happening Cryptic needs to regularly introduce new things people want and can only be obtained by dilithium.
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
As a test run it worked. Combine periodic DL sales like that with other measures, and it may very well be the shot in the arm the DL Exchange needs.
Dilithium needs to be desirable again. No one can dispute that. But this is not something that can be fixed overnight. Its going to take a lot of elements working together. And while there may be some setbacks, such as previously scheduled C-Store sales conflicting with emergency measures for the DL Exchange, its going to take time and effort.
Some solutions are complicated, but some are not.
As you said, the vanity shield thing worked temporarily. So let's forget about the complicated solutions for a minute and say at the very LEAST they need to stick some new desirable item in the dil sore every.single.month.
Get that system in place and then you can worry about figuring out a more complex solution.
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
Yes, but what would you say would be something that is universally desirable? (Yes, I'm saying universally since almost everyone will agree there will be something that they could all agree on that they'd get if it was available and that everyone has different opinions on what they feel they'd go for).
but a limited time purchase is not a good solution mainly at 230000 dil each shield. almost nobody stock this amount of refined dil and wait for an eventual sell (at least not me). Cryptic should understand that a lot of players are not dil farmers and just play the game (contents - missions etc)
And if they don't add more shields for an future hypothetic sell, it will be a failure. farmers have already bought everything.
if only they could give use a way to move a character bound console -from a ship or not- (from lobi store or lockbox) to an other character for a fair amount of dil, that would be cool. I want to delete a character, but I don't want to loose a dprm, when i see the current price of this console.
Dilithium Exchange.
It wasn't JUST for people who stockpiled Dilithium. It was to get people trading DL and Zen again. Which it did.
*Points to Cryptic also having 2 Zen store sales of the 10th anniversary bundle within the same month* Care to defend how something like this was "planned" months in advance? Sure seems like there was a switch flipped with this one.
If the intent is to make a pressure release valve, you don't hamstring it by offering something at the same time that calls for one of the components, a component that is already in short supply and high demand.
The same thing happened with the 2nd launch of the Phoenix Pack(a few years ago), when they decided to negate any good that pressure release valve would do, by dumping a key sale on players at the same time.
That did work because before that the DL exchange was capped to non existant. It put Zen on the market again. And this was a TEST to see how effective it would be. They're still going over data and working on other things as well.
Again... there is no magic pill to revive the exchange instantly. This was just the first step, small as it was.
While I do admit to some frustration with the timing of some sales... odds are they were planned out months in advance. I bet most of the time they were planning these sales they weren't thinking about economic fallout with an as yet undecided method of trying to revive the economy happening on day X of month Y. Do you seriously expect them to have prior knowledge of how the economy's going to be 6 months to a year down the road? Sales they can plan for because that's always going to make money. They can't plan for the fluctuations in the Dilithium Exchange as accurately, if at all. I wouldn't be surprised if the Devs facedesked when that key sale activated because it was planned long in advance. And they can't just turn it off after it starts because then we'd have fallout from THAT with people getting upset they couldn't buy keys on sale when they were SUPPOSED to.
Its a fine line to walk, and I'd put good ECs on many desks feeling pain from things like that.
Still... we had movement in the Exchange. A sale like this actually did something. No one is disputing we need an effective sink. But things like this can HELP. That's what we're trying to say here. Its not the end all solution, its only a PART of the overall solution, and can be deployed again in the future, maybe with different items in it.
Well, unfortunately my post did not age well. In less than a month the situation has gone from "post it before you go to bed and the next day it will have sold" to it's now been 3 days since the last sale I posted and it still hasn't gone through.
So yeah, we can no longer wait for the devs to come up with some complex solution. They need to be doing something about this constantly, even if it's only a short term band-aid fix.
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008