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Dilithium Exchange Discussion and Ideas
thetrekspert
Member Posts: 31 Arc User
For example, after "Brushfire", you select Console - Engineering - House Martok Defensive Configuration.
After finishing Brushfire on a captain (this would be character-by-character thing), you can - for an appropriate amount of Dil relative to rarity - purchase House Martok Transphasic Torpedo Launcher Mk XII and House Martok Omni-Directional Disruptor Beam Array Mk XII to complete the House Martok Skirmisher Configuration set.
This would be applicable to all missions with unique non-repeatable rewards, like the Breen Absolute Zero set from the Deferi missions and the Trilithium-Laced Weaponry set from "Beyond the Nexus".
You would still be able to replay the mission the requisite number of times and get them for "free", but if you wanted to fast-track (or if you just plain can't stand that one mission because aughhhh!) you can fork out Dil to 'buy' the rewards from the Dil Store.
I'll leave the numbers up to the number-crunchers to figure out, but in my head it's something like 3 million Dil for a Very Rare reward. Again, just in my head. The "fair trade" price may be higher or lower.
It'd likely burn off a lot of Dil, especially for builders, it's repeatable (especially since it's character-based, not account-based), and it can be retroactively applied to about 80-90% of the missions, and the underlying fundamentals are there - greyed out boxes in Event Reclaim and Dil Store for unowned/unpurchasable items. (I know it's harder than that, but the foundation is there, you just gotta build the house.)
Possibly - again, I'll leave this up the number-crunchers and other folks who are more knowledgeable than I on such things - it could be applied to repeatables, which would play towards builders or just folks who want to do a theme build, but those would be a substantially lower cost - like, 100,000 Dil relative to VR's 3mil.
After finishing Brushfire on a captain (this would be character-by-character thing), you can - for an appropriate amount of Dil relative to rarity - purchase House Martok Transphasic Torpedo Launcher Mk XII and House Martok Omni-Directional Disruptor Beam Array Mk XII to complete the House Martok Skirmisher Configuration set.
This would be applicable to all missions with unique non-repeatable rewards, like the Breen Absolute Zero set from the Deferi missions and the Trilithium-Laced Weaponry set from "Beyond the Nexus".
You would still be able to replay the mission the requisite number of times and get them for "free", but if you wanted to fast-track (or if you just plain can't stand that one mission because aughhhh!) you can fork out Dil to 'buy' the rewards from the Dil Store.
I'll leave the numbers up to the number-crunchers to figure out, but in my head it's something like 3 million Dil for a Very Rare reward. Again, just in my head. The "fair trade" price may be higher or lower.
It'd likely burn off a lot of Dil, especially for builders, it's repeatable (especially since it's character-based, not account-based), and it can be retroactively applied to about 80-90% of the missions, and the underlying fundamentals are there - greyed out boxes in Event Reclaim and Dil Store for unowned/unpurchasable items. (I know it's harder than that, but the foundation is there, you just gotta build the house.)
Possibly - again, I'll leave this up the number-crunchers and other folks who are more knowledgeable than I on such things - it could be applied to repeatables, which would play towards builders or just folks who want to do a theme build, but those would be a substantially lower cost - like, 100,000 Dil relative to VR's 3mil.
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
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Some of my characters want specific gear sets, but I don't enjoy replaying the same episode on the same character 3-4 times in a row to get a set. I'd happily pay dil to avoid that.
It won't make much of a dent tbh. It'll have a similar effect to Vanity Shields.
Regardless of what it does to the backlog it would be a mice QOL adjustment.
Placel a random Endeavor Point Box in the Phoenix Box so people will spend dilithium buying the phoenix boxes. This will give people the chance to catch up in Endeavor points and maybe help fix the Dilithium Exchange. It's better than doing nothing which is what is being done now.
If you think you're going to solve a problem with a hundred little "fixes" you're not because the problem is getting exponentially worse so you'll never catch up. In order to fix this problem we need players to spend a lot of money on Zen and to buy dilithium and there are not enough people playing this game. Charging players dilithium to get the rewards will only result in leaders telling new players which missions are worth playing and which to ignore... and the ignore missions list will be much much longer than the worth playing list... so this idea will fix nothing.
I don't really follow the logic of this. Perhaps you misunderstood the idea?
The suggestion isn't to make all players pay for every gear set piece, it is to give them the *choice* to pay dil for pieces 2,3,4 of a gear set *if they want to* instead of having to replay or do without the gear. Only people who want the gear and want to spend dil for it will do this.
People will have exactly the same motivation to play every episode once that they do now.
Unless you're one of the handful of PVP players, there's no need to catch up.
Every little bit helps, I figure.
Unfortunately, the PC DilEx issue is a problem without a straight-forward solution that wouldn't tick off a kajillion people, so it may have to be 100 small things instead of 2 big things. If there was some sort of straight-forward solution, I'm 100% certain they would have discovered it by now.
The other solution is a lot more monetization - shifting things from Infinity and R&D and Phoenix boxes to Zen/Mudd's, but they've said that R&D events are a major revenue stream, so it'd disrupt their financials quite a bit, and monetization is definitely more than a bit of a hot topic (in everything, not just STO).
This.
If you love a mission and can play it a trillion times, you can still get the set through playing through it repeatedly. But if you don't want to, or HAAAAAAATE that mission with the passion hotter than perdition's flames, you can use Dil to "purchase" the rest of the set after playing through it on that particular captain at least once. Once you clear the mission, the "store" for that mission opens up.
The problem with the PC dill ex is simple. There is nothing for anyone to really spend Dill on anymore. The fault is Cryptics lack of development. It should have ground out a few years earlier but the colony was a proper sink.
Cryptic now seems unwilling to create new or add to existing fleet holdings. They also have taken the lazy road on all new lockbox weapons. Lockbox weapons where fantastic dill sink... Cryptic would release something new and shiny and more important better then old options. People grabbed sets of them and burned resources upgrading them. The box before this one the weapon boxes didn't even include a space weapon option. This last box meh. People are using the same weapons they golded years ago already at this point. Its not that cryptic is against power creep... they are all over power creep directly for zen. They seem to simply not understand the impact something as simple as a good lockbox weapon cycle can have on Dill... which does directly make them money as well. They push all the creep into some promo ship or lockbox ship trait.... spread it around to upgradeable items. For that matter put a special weapon or two directly on your lockbox ships (like a quad cannon ect). There are people that bought ships like the Vulcan Jelly mudd unlock specifically to get Quad Photons... which is a win win, Cryptic makes a direct sale AND they burn dill with people upgrading.
They also have to stop giving people ultimate upgrades every red alert. Pick any other reward. With 95% of fleets fully upgraded the only major sink anymore is upgrades and Cryptic is constantly giving away ultimate upgrades.
They could expand minor fleet holdings to tier 4. They could add more reputation items. Or add ship/ground set stat spin reputation gear. Give people things to burn upgrades on. At least with this event they added digitizer weapons as a mission drop with 4 per box... I am not sure how many people will gold a ton of those. Its the right idea though. People need more reasons to put their 5 year old set of gold guns in the bank and upgrade new stuff.
That's true, and the dilex alone might not justify the effort, but I'd still like to have it as a QoL change.
i want to say up front i really REALLY dont want to see STO die. i want the economy to get fixed and provide a more balanced experience for all players new and veterans and neither lose cryptic money, nor gouge players for zen in the process of trying to "get rich quick".
i see several immediate problems that i believe are contributing to the state of all ends of the economy right now though im not entirely sure how to word them.
lets start with the exchange first however. first. the EC cap being raised was a horrible mistake given the current state of the game. and i dont say that for any reason bashing the economy. the state of the exchange has divided the community outright, free to play players will NEVER be able to acquire the EC to take part in it. this has done two things. its severely artificially limited the total amount of EC possible in the game, and gated almost ALL endgame content from new players. the lower cap being 15 million compared to 2 billion is an untenable gap. new players will see the numbers on the exchange alone and the time it takes them to get a few hundred thousand and will despair on the spot and quit before sinking time into it.
my solution would be to dramatically increase the initial cap on EC or remove it entirely outright and allow all players to store 2 billion. OR lower the upper cap to 1 billion, chop all current EC numbers in half from players gamewide (dont change sell prices, endeavors, admiralty etc) and raise the initial cap to 150 million to bring the two groups of players a bit closer together and try to cut down on the exchange gap.
the other end is trickier and i dont have a clear cut solution i dont think... zen to dilithium...
the problem right now stems from 2 things i can see... too many dilithium claims from infinity boxes. and lots and lots of sales and pretty shiny things to buy in the Cstore. now i dont WANT to touch the Cstore side. as i said i dont want to cost cryptic money. but i DO want to fix the massively overinflated dilithium market.
you could artificially re-value dilithium by reducing drop rates from common sources... but i feel like this would make it worse. if its harder to acquire dilithium through common sources you might manage to lower the dilithium exchange pricess.. eventually... but it would take a long time to trickle across and expend the remaining dilithium.
so i propose something different. allow conversion of dilithium for lobi. AND remove lobi from lock boxes. and heres why i say this.
master keys currently are the SOLE avenue of getting most "meta" ships. the only way to get master keys as a free to play player is by using dilithium. and lobi is even HARDER to get as a F2P than it is for a paid player by magnitudes because its hidden behind two layers. it is nigh impossible for a free player in the current state of the game to EVER see a lobi ship. they dont have the increased EC cap, they will never be able to exchange enough dilithium in a reasonable amount of time to buy a lobi ship that way either.
removing lobi from lock boxes removes an entire segment of demand from master keys and puts it squarely in the hands of free to play avenues. this also means free to play players can get access to exceptionally valuable things in the form of lobi ships, with the EC cap changes i mentioned earlier it will dramatically reduce the pricing of such ships on the exchange and forcibly reset one end of the market.
now we get into something more complicated. exchange flipping. exchange flipping is hands down the worst offender of STOs inflation problem. i would know. i tried my hand at it today in an effort to try and make some EC for a build and thats what prompted me to look into threads about the state of STOs economy.
exchange flipping is horrible for the game. the only people even capable of it are the ones who have bought the EC cap. and it is completely and wholly beholden to the financial whims of maniacal whale overlords who have 20 toons whose sole purpose is to funnel EC to as additional banks. this is hurting EVERYONE, cryptic, new players, old players, etc the only people it DOESNT hurt are people who spend money and have too many things saved up and nothing to do with them except gouge EC out of people. the Exchange is no longer about selling things youve made. its about getting rich quick or getting richer so you can buy everything when the next update comes out.
the infinity R&D promotion still comes around and carries with it a lot of good ships. the infinity lockbox still comes around sometimes and is hands down the best lockbox to open
i beg you cryptic please, i want to introduce my friends and other people into this game and help them grow and become long time players, but the current state of the game is so incredibly punishing. the number of meta traits and ships that new players have little to no access to is incredible. and there needs to be some way to divide the demand of zen and Cstore items out a bit more to bridge the gap between free to play and paid players. lobi ships being available for dilithium would carve away a massive chunk of the premium economy that has led to this artificial inflation. adding more things to craft would also go a long way for it.
i have no idea if anyone from the dev team will read this thread or if theyll care. but please if you do. consider something of what ive said even if its just to give inspiration to fix the problem... the number of ship bundles and Cstore packs is already astronomical. master keys and infinity promotion R&D too. taking some things and adding ways to get them for dilithium will go a long way towards reducing the runaway inflation from dilithium mining claims.
changing the EC caps or removing the different EC cap totals will also go a long way. bringing those two groups of players together in the economy will help fix the exchange by allowing more players to reach into the exchange and get gear other players are selling without being price gouged
there also needs to be a true permanent EXPENSIVE EC sink in the game... something enticing enough that players will spend LOTS of EC on it. to remove the enormous pool of EC from the game
the last couple times ive come back however ive noticed the ever growing problem of the rampant economy inflation. this time i came back to see the dilithium exchange capped out with over 2.6 billion dilithium pending trade for zen.
ill start with dilithium then get to energy credits. ive noticed that cryptic is adamant about not raising the dilithium refinement cap and thats a good call. raising the cap will not fix the problem it will make it EXPONENTIALLY worse. as it will only amplify the reason theres so much pending trade to begin with which is whale accounts with multiple dozen characters all farming dilithium.
i have a few proposed changes, not intended to all be used together but theres no real reason i guess you couldnt use them all
1: add lobi and exclusive ships to phoenix lockbox along with cosmetics.
by adding lobi to the phoenix box you remove a large portion of the demand from master keys for lobi crystals and allow players who are free to play to have a way to accumulate lobi.
2: add lobi directly to the dilithium store. a more rash solution as it will very suddenly and abruptly change the direction of the in game economy.
3:add a way for fleet credits to purchase things like master keys. high end ships, or even lockbox or new exclusive gear for fleets specifically.
this one is a little more complicated. the problem right now is players with too much dilithium are likely either ignoring fleets altogether, are already part of a maxed out fleet. or are just mining so much that you cant donate it fast ENOUGH. if you add a way for an endless dilithium sink into the fleet coffer, cryptic is able to add cosmetics to fleets at their own leisure while still siphoning dilithium out of the economy instead of it accumulating endlessly. it will take a while for this to fix the dilex but it WILL create a new unfillable sink as there can be extremely EXTREMELY expensive items involved here that are still a better guarantee for whale players to get something otherwise they would only be able to get from master keys and lockboxes.
4:reduce or remove sources of dilithium.
admiralty, doffs, patrols, TFOs, reps, the list of dilithium sources goes on and on and on. converting some of these to vouchers will fix the true dilithium pool over time. but you will still have an ever accumulating unshrinkable pool as players use vouchers for everything instead of refined dilithium.
unfortunately dilithium being a semi precious resource of the three, zen being the most precious and EC being the least, you cant utterly remove value from it or you will upset the entire game economy. it has to be semi comparable to both EC and zen simultaneously.
which leads me into my next issue. energy credits. EC is also massively inflated because of increasingly prevalent sources. however EC suffers even more than dilithium its just not apparent because of the dilithium exchange. there is virtually no sink for EC in the entire game EXCEPT the exchange. it doesnt cost EC to transwarp anymore. admiralty provides an abundance of it, along with endeavors. and selling gear you get in missions.
1:remove the different EC caps. make all players 1 EC max. and remove the cap extension in the Cstore.
why do i say this one? the EC cap increase does nothing at this point except make new players feel pressured to spend real money because of the capped out dilithium exchange. it pushes free to play and paid players much further apart. and new players hear about the exchange, go and look at it and then leave the game because they find out they cant even save enough to buy the item they wanted. this is universally visible. all products that require real money being spent to get to enter them into the game economy, start at around 5 million, 1 third of the cap, and average around 20 million. NOT counting stuff like ships. all of the ship traits. space traits. personal traits etc. all this energy credit cap does is create two completely sectioned off groups of players. the ones with the cap extension price all of their goods based on that cap. and free to play players will never touch anything they have. so the rich players with the 2 billion cap are just trading EC between each other.
2: add an EC sink to POSTING something to the exchange. the more expensive something is posted as on the exchange. the higher the post tax. this will dramatically discourage "playing the exchange" especially if its done on a scaling level. something posted at 1000 EC might have no tax. 100,000 has a tax of 1% 100,000,000 might have 10% etc. this way buying low and selling high may still make some money to a point where the profit side of this becomes negligible compared to the risk nobody buys
exchange flipping is probably the single biggest driver to the insane exchange prices. once you have the EC the value is perpetual. it goes nowhere. and once reps and such are maxed out it literally accumulates without end up to the EC cap.
I don't think you calculated the pending dil correctly, see this (current wait time 21 days, 5.x million not billion pending) - https://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/startrekonline#/discussion/1268428/dilithium-exchange-duration-testing
Also, there have been many long discussions about improving the dil market, you might be able to find them even with the not-so-good forum search. Some of the threads have even included indirect comments (from the livestreams) by the devs.
Cryptic has recently squashed some farmers using exploits which helped a lot, and have offered band-aids with vanity shields and phoenix events, but they haven't come up with any great long-term dil sinks to increase demand for it and thus reduce the backlog.
Cannibalizing key sales is not a good dil sink because key sales pay for running the game. It helps free-to-players while hurting the ability to pay staff, the voice actors, the server bills, etc.
thats possible. the dilex menu is a little confusing for me to read but if i understand it correctly. 5.2 million zen available on the sell zen tab at 500 dilithium means theres enough dilithium to fill 5.2 million zen exchanged for 500 dilithium a piece which comes out around 2.6 billion dilithium required to fill an exchange order for 5.2 million zen
[quote="Also, there have been many long discussions about improving the dil market, you might be able to find them even with the not-so-good forum search. Some of the threads have even included indirect comments (from the livestreams) by the devs.
Cryptic has recently squashed some farmers using exploits which helped a lot, and have offered band-aids with vanity shields and phoenix events, but they haven't come up with any great long-term dil sinks to increase demand for it and thus reduce the backlog.
Cannibalizing key sales is not a good dil sink because key sales pay for running the game. It helps free-to-players while hurting the ability to pay staff, the voice actors, the server bills, etc."[/quote]
true... i guess the main problem is very simply boiled down to one question "how do you make it enticing to spend a resource that COULD buy anything in the game. on something OTHER than the currency to buy anything in the game"
how do you incentivize people to spend dilithium on something that isnt zen. i saw one person on reddit suggest adding dormitories for player housing essentially where dilithium can be used for cosmetics on a massive scale. that might work temporarily. but really what the game needs is a permanent out for dil and EC...
without a permanent drain from the economy you will inevitably reach this problem again...
assuming im reading the dilex menu right. 5.2 million zen pending exchange for 500 dil a piece on the sell zen screen equates to the equivalent of 5.2 million zen worth of dilithium currently present on the market. which means its the equivalent of 5.2 million zen times 500 dilithium adding up to roughly 2.6 billion dilithium on the 500 exchange rate alone.
at this point nothing short of adding a permanent true dilithium sink that is actually limitless will really fix this problem... the number of ways to acquire dilithium is growing constantly. and the backlog is piling up. maybe adding more cosmetics to ships like interior cosmetics. materials for hulls. or fleets or such can reduce it substantially. but ultimately there needs to be a definite "out" for the economy. something that permanently reduces the amount in circulation. the same way the Cstore does for zen.
Cryptic is a for profit company so anything that causes those profits go away is not really an option.
Ah, my bad. I was looking at the wrong side of the conversion and your number is correct.
what if cryptic added a new gear tier that was exclusively purchasable with dilithium from maxed out fleets and required a new holding. an experimental holding of some kind. it could be separate from the normal mark system. the minmaxers who grind out a metric ton of dilithium would certainly be interested in something for mass fine tuning. or maybe adding a mechanism to add procs to weapons with dilithium through re-engineering.
actually that could be it! spend 50k dilithium to add an additional proc then 100k for a second then 200k for a third. or enhance existing procs.
it would be a very small amount of improvement at first but the more dilithium you put into it the higher and higher the price goes and the more refinement you can do. you can get people pushing their ships and builds to the absolute limit and providing an actual REAL form of build feedback into the dilithium market. procs have been neglected for a very long time as it. making them relevant would be entertaining for more players than just endgames. and for the theme side of things once you reach endgame it would make a lot of players rabid for dilithium again for this.
unfortunately the only other thing i could think to limit the dilithium hoarding is adding some kind of halflife to dilithium to make it decay or lock a refinement cap to entire accounts which will NOT be received well on either front
We need to move away from locking more things behind Fleets. This idea does not help anyone who does not want to be a part of a fleet, and to be frank, we don't need more power-creep. The solution MUST be global.
For EC, yeah having to buy the EC cap expansion on PC is something I'm surprised is still around, given it was a enticement to subscribe and all the other monthly subscriber perks (like Account Bank slots) were recently given to everyone, but for some reason this stuck around. Consoles never even had a lower EC cap for non-Gold players.
I've played games with a tax (a harsh, but easy to calculate 10%) on the one that put up items to sell when they sell, and while it does take some money out, inflation still occurs. It's not going to fix the issue, only slow it.
I don't think flipping is the largest issue, the largest I'd peg is the amounts of EC Endeavors and Admiralty generate. Not that flipping isn't an issue, it's just hard to manage well, and the same game mentioned that had taxes on market sells also implemented a resale timer, where you can't list something you bought until a certain time, and still inflation rises. This was actually done due a botting issue where accounts were being, err, "borrowed" (forum doesn't like the H word) to use as mules to transfer items/money where that wasn't allowed, but still numbers go up on in-demand items.
a way to stop flipping outright would be to bind items on purchase from the exchange. it would *technically* fix part of the inflation as people wouldnt be able to buy swaths of items from the exchange to resale them. but i feel like this would ONLY be a good idea if the EC cap item in the Cstore was removed and everyone was brought to the same EC limit.
i dont particularly like the idea of preventing resale of things necessarily. but at least if everyone is playing on the same field of EC gain high prices wont be such a bad thing if all players are capable of selling items and gear and building an equally large fortune. combine with a tax and you might be able to stifle inflation to a near standstill.
It's not that tricky, there needs to be constant stream of Zen for the Dil conversation to work, the Zen side is all player based, not alot of people could do that in the long run because it costs IRL money and that could be used for other stuff like rent, groceries, gas, which prices also going up on those stuff, it's not sustainable to whale in our current economy, so once the Zen started drying up the DilEx stopped working.
Also most players aren't rich enough to be Whales.
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
"my solution would be to dramatically increase the initial cap on EC or remove it entirely outright" so theft if you remove the cap (cause i paid for the increase) or TRIBBLE over your supporting player base by increasing the base limit so that i paid for nothin hmmm
all winners here imo haha
i stopped reading after the ec parts so.....