Like I've said elsewhere it looks like they literally copied the exchange code from neverwinter, just the price to be paid for removing blackbox code and replacing it with the lowest risk option, sometimes we have to suffer short term for longer term benefits of having code they know how to work.
Also https://sto.fandom.com/wiki/Personal_Karemma_Trader_Comm_Code this is your saviour and has been for a long time, I don't know why so many people don't seem to know about this, and you can reset the cooldown for it instantly with chroniton jolt, you have exchange, mail and bank EVERYWHERE anytime you want!
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Community Moderators are Unpaid Volunteers and NOT Employees of Gearbox/Cryptic
Views and Opinions May Not Reflect the Views and Opinions of Gearbox/Cryptic
I dont think Cryptic thought this through... First an unclaimed sale from the exchange counts for one of your market orders (AND probably counts toward your mail item cap. If they didnt increase the mail item cap, my box is gonna get jammed up quick and daily) Buying from the exchange and leaving unclaimed it counts against your market orders until you claim it. Now for every sale you have to take the EC and delete the mail, Twice as much work. The system now has to track all the EC in the mail and that is going to increase the mail server load dramatically. They just gave us a 40x increase in our EC cap. With no increased cap you can have 40 market orders at 15m each. Since sale EC goes to the mail, claim, move off the character or spend, go back to mail get another 15m.
This is HORRIBLE unplayable for people that used the exchange a lot.
I know HATE people that post one key at a time. I also know who they are... thanks for that Cryptic.
Why do people need to know who they are buying from. Now we can all look forward to weird tells and attention from people. THANKS... you saved yourself a few customer service requests from people to dumb to learn there is a 2 billion EC cap (which if you have 2 billion you should know better sorry I don't feel bad if you accidently loose 200 million... if you are playing the game long enough to have 2 billion you know how the system works) On the flip side you are now going to get griefing CS tickets instead... or perhaps people annoyed you broke up their list 100 items 50% lower then normal to scam weekend people out of items will put you on ignore with a few of their friends to earn you a mute you if you take the time to now perform 400 clicks to buy there price block out.
Cryptic this is a bad system a bad design... and ya. I want to go doom here, I won't but to me this smells like. Lets make selling things as much of a PITA as possible so people will stop sharing their overages and every one will just spend $ on things instead.
I sometimes do some selling of doffs and r&d material, the new email delivery system will make this time consuming and annoying. I will be reconsidering how much i sell on the exchange, what little that is, rather than deal with 40 plus emails at a shot when i sell doffs. NEGATIVE IMPACT IMPROVEMENT! bye bye exhange, it was nice selling on you.
That about sums it up. I'm going to miss being able to get on the exchange and quickly buy 300 particles rather then messing around transferring particles between toons and stuff. Listings for stuff like that are likely going to dry up completely... or start heading up as most people say na I'm not going to bother selling a few extras. Never mind people that might sit there for a bit and fill a few markets with particles or doffs.
I aprove this change, it was clear that it was done to break AH bots.
Well then this is a massive fail. It would be a buff for auction house bots if anyone is bothering to make such things.
How do you figure this would hurt a bot? Bots are great at mindless clicking not sure your aware... not that things purchased need to be retrieved they can just sit in the mail. They just tripled the amount of clicking required to purchase things.... bots don't care about that.
PS You will notice I am calling it the auction house now. That is the new terminology as per Cryptic. Don't dead name the auction house.
...not that things purchased need to be retrieved they can just sit in the mail.
Any unclaimed item sitting in the mail counts against your total of items in the Exchange. (That's not deadnaming, that's its preferred name, emblazoned proudly above the door and displayed when you use the terminal.) And bots may be good at "mindless clicking", but they're somewhat less adept, oddly, at walking across the room to a specific console.
Honestly, after using the "new" Exchange, I'm not seeing a significant difference. Still auto-deposits my EC when stuff sells, still holds unsold items in my mail until I claim them, things are still selling for ridiculous prices that I'm willing to take advantage of (honestly, Synthale sells for 20 creds at the bar - why are you dropping 5000 creds for a bottle on the Exchange?) - why the complaints? Or are the complainers mostly people who try to buy low and then immediately resell high? 'Cause I don't know if anyone's told you this, but that's not really the focus of Star Trek.
I suspect this measure was in response to a bunch of angry messages from newer players who lost their EC.
This sort of justification is often used as an excuse to cover up some other factor, such as truly terrible design on the part of a dev who never actually trades. Or possibly a lazy dev who was tasked with "improving" the email system and just copy-pasted code from Neverwinter without considering STO has a different context.
However, actually new players who haven't paid Zen to unlock their EC caps, already get a warning message whenever they try to execute a trade that would take them over their EC cap.
And new players who have unlocked their EC cap would need to be executing billions of EC worth of trades to run into an issue.
It seems unlikely that either of these situations occurs with enough frequency to justify making the exchange take 4 times the effort for 99.5% of the player base.
Unless it's just an excuse for a money-grab down the line of course, such as "streamlining" mail/exchange access for Life subs or some such.
I aprove this change, it was clear that it was done to break AH bots.
Well then this is a massive fail. It would be a buff for auction house bots if anyone is bothering to make such things.
How do you figure this would hurt a bot? Bots are great at mindless clicking not sure your aware... not that things purchased need to be retrieved they can just sit in the mail. They just tripled the amount of clicking required to purchase things.... bots don't care about that.
PS You will notice I am calling it the auction house now. That is the new terminology as per Cryptic. Don't dead name the auction house.
AH bots cant click away to make money now, the need to go to a mail box makes it ALOT harder to botting AH, again glad they made this change.
Any unclaimed item sitting in the mail counts against your total of items in the Exchange. (That's not deadnaming, that's its preferred name, emblazoned proudly above the door and displayed when you use the terminal.) And bots may be good at "mindless clicking", but they're somewhat less adept, oddly, at walking across the room to a specific console.
As a programmer I can tell you that it's hardly any trouble to add the additional required code. If there are Exchange bots then you can have them up and running again in about an hour worth of additional coding. The person maintaining the script would probably enjoy the challenge as well.
Meanwhile, all the players are screwed.
I'll sell my surplus assets and after that I'm not going to bother again with the Exchange. For me it was one of the key end-game features next to doing whatever event is running at day. I've already maxed out the endeavor system last year for the third time. Changing a good working system after thirteen years for no good reason killed a lot of the fun I had in the game.
Although I've not seen the changes yet, I can't say I relish this coming to console. Carefully moving excess EC into the account bank or to another character so as to not go over the two billion feels like a small price to pay compared to the increase in faff at the mail terminal for every single item. Quality of life reduced, I fear.
And with all the extra traffic in the mailing system just think of the chaos when a bug develops and it doesn't work properly, as has happened before. Everyone's transactions screwed up. Yikes!
...not that things purchased need to be retrieved they can just sit in the mail.
Any unclaimed item sitting in the mail counts against your total of items in the Exchange. (That's not deadnaming, that's its preferred name, emblazoned proudly above the door and displayed when you use the terminal.) And bots may be good at "mindless clicking", but they're somewhat less adept, oddly, at walking across the room to a specific console.
Honestly, after using the "new" Exchange, I'm not seeing a significant difference. Still auto-deposits my EC when stuff sells, still holds unsold items in my mail until I claim them, things are still selling for ridiculous prices that I'm willing to take advantage of (honestly, Synthale sells for 20 creds at the bar - why are you dropping 5000 creds for a bottle on the Exchange?) - why the complaints? Or are the complainers mostly people who try to buy low and then immediately resell high? 'Cause I don't know if anyone's told you this, but that's not really the focus of Star Trek.
I am not a botter... I am a human. Which is why my market workers are now parked at K7... where the exchange and mail box are on top of each other.
Any bot could handle clicking it open.... no walking required.
No the exchange doesn't auto deposit anymore. If you sell on the exchange the EC goes in the mail as well.
As for the exchange not being part of the game... what are you on. Lots of people playing the game lots of ways. The exchange is part of the game. Also I would like some clarification if I'm still calling it the exchange. In all seriousness if anyone from Cryptic reads this... WHY do I keep winning auctions. At least get the email text proper.
I aprove this change, it was clear that it was done to break AH bots.
Well then this is a massive fail. It would be a buff for auction house bots if anyone is bothering to make such things.
How do you figure this would hurt a bot? Bots are great at mindless clicking not sure your aware... not that things purchased need to be retrieved they can just sit in the mail. They just tripled the amount of clicking required to purchase things.... bots don't care about that.
PS You will notice I am calling it the auction house now. That is the new terminology as per Cryptic. Don't dead name the auction house.
AH bots cant click away to make money now, the need to go to a mail box makes it ALOT harder to botting AH, again glad they made this change.
It does not. You guys fail to realize that if someone was to actually run a bot they would use a Ferengi bridge to keep people from seeing some toon sit in the same spot all day. No walking required. Clicking isn't nothing to a bot. Annoying to real people not bots. You guys are acting like they added captcha to mail retrieval or something. Also a botter doesn't have to have the bot retrieve the mail... why. Let the bot sit there and search and buy all day. Come by and pull out the goodies like a vending machine. I hope no one is actually doing that... and I suspect no one really is. But this change doesn't do anything to combat it if it is happening.
Honestly, after using the "new" Exchange, I'm not seeing a significant difference. Still auto-deposits my EC when stuff sell
That is not how the new exchange works auto deposit has been removed. I was in space I had to to go though 3 or 4 load screens then run to a mail box to get my EC then had back to where I was though another 3 ish load screens. There is no way you are not seeing a significant difference if you have really used the new system.
This change is so bad I have lost count of have many people have said they are quitting the exchange for good, cancelling spending real money on STO or leaving all together. For crafters who buy minerals, craft, sell the change is a nightmare to manage.
What's worse is players are now losing more EC with this change by losing mail and/or deleting mail with EC attached then they did from the overflow EC cap.
You get spammed with way more mail now, so are pressing delete all more often, you better hope no EC mail comes in at the same time you press delete all.
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rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,523Community Moderator
That is not how the new exchange works auto deposit has been removed.
Actually I believe the way they're trying to set it up is that any EC OVER the cap gets mailed to you. Anything not over the cap should still autodeposit as normal.
I have yet to put the Exchange through any real use since this change, but if it's as bad as is being claimed (when I do finally get to using it) and it comes off as just another timegate meant to artificially boost metrics, then I'll be deleting another captain from my account.
Actually I believe the way they're trying to set it up is that any EC OVER the cap gets mailed to you. Anything not over the cap should still autodeposit as normal.
This is not how it is working now. I have characters nowhere near the EC cap who have to claim money from exchange sales by opening mail. Definitely is not auto-depositing funds.
+1 for no auto-depositing funds for any of my trades. Its one of the reasons I was complaining about all the extra running about, map moves, mail spam + clicking.
The more I use this change the more I hate it. I am now more likely to lose EC in the new system then the old system. There is no extra protection for the player in that what was safe trades with auto depositing are now at risk off being lost/deleted.
To put it another way. The past 100 trades in the old system where 100% safe for me. No risk.
The next 100 trades in the new system are 100% at risk with a possibility of EC being lost which would have been impossible to lose in the old system.
Actually I believe the way they're trying to set it up is that any EC OVER the cap gets mailed to you. Anything not over the cap should still autodeposit as normal.
This is not how it is working now. I have characters nowhere near the EC cap who have to claim money from exchange sales by opening mail. Definitely is not auto-depositing funds.
There is no extra protection for the player in that what was safe trades with auto depositing are now at risk off being lost/deleted.
To put it another way. The past 100 trades in the old system where 100% safe for me. No risk.
The next 100 trades in the new system are 100% at risk with a possibility of EC being lost which would have been impossible to lose in the old system.
Not sure I follow? How are they at risk of losing their EC? By manually deleting the mail? As I recall, you get a warning about mail with unclaimed items still attached to them.
A few people in ESD where talking about how they thought the mail was empty and they deleted the wrong mail losing more EC after this change then they did before. I can only assume a miss click or perhaps being tired and making a mistake. Either way in the old system the trades would have been safe. Now there is a risk of losing EC every single time you trade.
There also the possibility to press delete all, confirmation yes right at the same time a new EC mail comes in. Which in theory will delete that mail as well. I have not tested this but it seems feasible with the slight delays and lag.
A few people in ESD where talking about how they thought the mail was empty and they deleted the wrong mail losing more EC after this change then they did before. I can only assume a miss click or perhaps being tired and making a mistake. Either way in the old system the trades would have been safe. Now there is a risk of losing EC every single time you trade.
There also the possibility to press delete all, confirmation yes right at the same time a new EC mail comes in. Which in theory will delete that mail as well. I have not tested this but it seems feasible with the slight delays and lag.
I just tried this. I am unable to check the Delete box next to any mail that have unclaimed items on them. The Delete Selected button is greyed out until you claim the items. Seems like the claims people are making on ESD are hyperbole.
Puzzled because I just sold an item for 1 EC and deleted the mail with EC. I did that before reading your post. I wonder what we have done differently to each other.
So yesterday, our executive producer, Jarrod, basically said, "What do you MEAN they have to go to a mailbox to pick up their items, is this 2002?"
So that's already been changed and will be in a future update.
Thank you so much that was a big part of the problem. Will this apply to EC or just items? I am still not keen on the possibility of losing EC that used to be safe in the old system.
I can only hope this "EC from Exchange to Mailbox" is a Bug, cause this is ABYSMAL and needs to be fixed ASAP, like wth... 40 items sold = 40 Times "Take Item" just to collect all the EC from the Mailbox?..and with several Characters....yea thats a BIG FAT NOPE
So yesterday, our executive producer, Jarrod, basically said, "What do you MEAN they have to go to a mailbox to pick up their items, is this 2002?"
So that's already been changed and will be in a future update.
That's a good start. Can you also request that we only receive an EC mail when we pass the limiet on our character and otherwise receive the EC directly by default?
If it's changed that way then it'd be a fine addition that has little impact to how things worked while it actually protects those that would otherwise lose EC.
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Also https://sto.fandom.com/wiki/Personal_Karemma_Trader_Comm_Code this is your saviour and has been for a long time, I don't know why so many people don't seem to know about this, and you can reset the cooldown for it instantly with chroniton jolt, you have exchange, mail and bank EVERYWHERE anytime you want!
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First an unclaimed sale from the exchange counts for one of your market orders (AND probably counts toward your mail item cap. If they didnt increase the mail item cap, my box is gonna get jammed up quick and daily)
Buying from the exchange and leaving unclaimed it counts against your market orders until you claim it.
Now for every sale you have to take the EC and delete the mail, Twice as much work.
The system now has to track all the EC in the mail and that is going to increase the mail server load dramatically.
They just gave us a 40x increase in our EC cap. With no increased cap you can have 40 market orders at 15m each. Since sale EC goes to the mail, claim, move off the character or spend, go back to mail get another 15m.
I know HATE people that post one key at a time. I also know who they are... thanks for that Cryptic.
Why do people need to know who they are buying from. Now we can all look forward to weird tells and attention from people. THANKS... you saved yourself a few customer service requests from people to dumb to learn there is a 2 billion EC cap (which if you have 2 billion you should know better sorry I don't feel bad if you accidently loose 200 million... if you are playing the game long enough to have 2 billion you know how the system works) On the flip side you are now going to get griefing CS tickets instead... or perhaps people annoyed you broke up their list 100 items 50% lower then normal to scam weekend people out of items will put you on ignore with a few of their friends to earn you a mute you if you take the time to now perform 400 clicks to buy there price block out.
Cryptic this is a bad system a bad design... and ya. I want to go doom here, I won't but to me this smells like. Lets make selling things as much of a PITA as possible so people will stop sharing their overages and every one will just spend $ on things instead.
That about sums it up. I'm going to miss being able to get on the exchange and quickly buy 300 particles rather then messing around transferring particles between toons and stuff. Listings for stuff like that are likely going to dry up completely... or start heading up as most people say na I'm not going to bother selling a few extras. Never mind people that might sit there for a bit and fill a few markets with particles or doffs.
I was going to ask the same question. Been playing on and off since 2012 and never watched them. Usually I don't even know they are happening.
If this is a petition to restore the exchange to the previous system then consider this me adding my name.
@smi3th
Well then this is a massive fail. It would be a buff for auction house bots if anyone is bothering to make such things.
How do you figure this would hurt a bot? Bots are great at mindless clicking not sure your aware... not that things purchased need to be retrieved they can just sit in the mail. They just tripled the amount of clicking required to purchase things.... bots don't care about that.
PS You will notice I am calling it the auction house now. That is the new terminology as per Cryptic. Don't dead name the auction house.
Honestly, after using the "new" Exchange, I'm not seeing a significant difference. Still auto-deposits my EC when stuff sells, still holds unsold items in my mail until I claim them, things are still selling for ridiculous prices that I'm willing to take advantage of (honestly, Synthale sells for 20 creds at the bar - why are you dropping 5000 creds for a bottle on the Exchange?) - why the complaints? Or are the complainers mostly people who try to buy low and then immediately resell high? 'Cause I don't know if anyone's told you this, but that's not really the focus of Star Trek.
This sort of justification is often used as an excuse to cover up some other factor, such as truly terrible design on the part of a dev who never actually trades. Or possibly a lazy dev who was tasked with "improving" the email system and just copy-pasted code from Neverwinter without considering STO has a different context.
However, actually new players who haven't paid Zen to unlock their EC caps, already get a warning message whenever they try to execute a trade that would take them over their EC cap.
And new players who have unlocked their EC cap would need to be executing billions of EC worth of trades to run into an issue.
It seems unlikely that either of these situations occurs with enough frequency to justify making the exchange take 4 times the effort for 99.5% of the player base.
Unless it's just an excuse for a money-grab down the line of course, such as "streamlining" mail/exchange access for Life subs or some such.
AH bots cant click away to make money now, the need to go to a mail box makes it ALOT harder to botting AH, again glad they made this change.
Meanwhile, all the players are screwed.
I'll sell my surplus assets and after that I'm not going to bother again with the Exchange. For me it was one of the key end-game features next to doing whatever event is running at day. I've already maxed out the endeavor system last year for the third time. Changing a good working system after thirteen years for no good reason killed a lot of the fun I had in the game.
And with all the extra traffic in the mailing system just think of the chaos when a bug develops and it doesn't work properly, as has happened before. Everyone's transactions screwed up. Yikes!
I am not a botter... I am a human. Which is why my market workers are now parked at K7... where the exchange and mail box are on top of each other.
Any bot could handle clicking it open.... no walking required.
No the exchange doesn't auto deposit anymore. If you sell on the exchange the EC goes in the mail as well.
As for the exchange not being part of the game... what are you on. Lots of people playing the game lots of ways. The exchange is part of the game. Also I would like some clarification if I'm still calling it the exchange. In all seriousness if anyone from Cryptic reads this... WHY do I keep winning auctions. At least get the email text proper.
It does not. You guys fail to realize that if someone was to actually run a bot they would use a Ferengi bridge to keep people from seeing some toon sit in the same spot all day. No walking required. Clicking isn't nothing to a bot. Annoying to real people not bots. You guys are acting like they added captcha to mail retrieval or something. Also a botter doesn't have to have the bot retrieve the mail... why. Let the bot sit there and search and buy all day. Come by and pull out the goodies like a vending machine. I hope no one is actually doing that... and I suspect no one really is. But this change doesn't do anything to combat it if it is happening.
This change is so bad I have lost count of have many people have said they are quitting the exchange for good, cancelling spending real money on STO or leaving all together. For crafters who buy minerals, craft, sell the change is a nightmare to manage.
What's worse is players are now losing more EC with this change by losing mail and/or deleting mail with EC attached then they did from the overflow EC cap.
You get spammed with way more mail now, so are pressing delete all more often, you better hope no EC mail comes in at the same time you press delete all.
Actually I believe the way they're trying to set it up is that any EC OVER the cap gets mailed to you. Anything not over the cap should still autodeposit as normal.
The more I use this change the more I hate it. I am now more likely to lose EC in the new system then the old system. There is no extra protection for the player in that what was safe trades with auto depositing are now at risk off being lost/deleted.
To put it another way. The past 100 trades in the old system where 100% safe for me. No risk.
The next 100 trades in the new system are 100% at risk with a possibility of EC being lost which would have been impossible to lose in the old system.
Exchange chicanery confirmed. Appropriate action taken. Now down to eight captains n my account.
I can confirm this as well.
There also the possibility to press delete all, confirmation yes right at the same time a new EC mail comes in. Which in theory will delete that mail as well. I have not tested this but it seems feasible with the slight delays and lag.
So yesterday, our executive producer, Jarrod, basically said, "What do you MEAN they have to go to a mailbox to pick up their items, is this 2002?"
So that's already been changed and will be in a future update.
That's a good start. Can you also request that we only receive an EC mail when we pass the limiet on our character and otherwise receive the EC directly by default?
If it's changed that way then it'd be a fine addition that has little impact to how things worked while it actually protects those that would otherwise lose EC.