So... the platinum AH is useless?

[PaleFox]

Well, more for me then.
I'm not going to post the things that really are super useful as it would just drive up their prices.

 

[Marshal_Lannes]

If you'd like to see a functioning AH economy try out hardcore. PP has a ton of value there. One of the joys I get from playing hardcore is building up my PP horde by buying and selling. If you post items for reasonable, priced to sell PP points you can make some good coin. In general, PP still has value for Reaper wings which go away after a TR and need to be purchased again. Orien also has a somewhat functioning AH will all the new people coming over after the server move. Or at least it's a lot better than before.

 

[Xaerxiessia]

the more people use it , the more it will have value
for one simple reason : as the sales fee is 30% and the the only source of PP is gaming activity , the monetary mass would be self-regulated. Which is not the case for AS , bought for real money or offered to VIP (vs real money), so non-self-regulated out of the IRL gamers'wealth.

 

[cocopufff]

If you'd like to see a functioning AH economy try out hardcore. PP has a ton of value there. One of the joys I get from playing hardcore is building up my PP horde by buying and selling. If you post items for reasonable, priced to sell PP points you can make some good coin. In general, PP still has value for Reaper wings which go away after a TR and need to be purchased again. Orien also has a somewhat functioning AH will all the new people coming over after the server move. Or at least it's a lot better than before.

Yeah... that's actually what bummed me out so much. The AH in hardcore was a lot fuller and more reasonable. In Sarlona, it's... really bad.

 

[Buddha5440]

If you browse th Plat AH you can often find dual augment items/weapons/armor for cheap prices. Great place to look for crafters.

Also, anyone playing this game for a length of time has enough Plat to bring down an airship, but they are still able to walk around with it... I say spend it. At the very least, you can get things to Decon for Cannith Essences. You will also see airship amenities on there from time to time.

 

[Col Kurtz]

if players stopped buying stuff for shards...then the more premium stuff would appear in the platinum house...

Shard exchange really shows how little the game owners know about how to monetize a sector of the game. Sure, it worked for airships but, that 'ship' has sailed and they keep making every new equipment piece bound to account or character.

I know they want players to earn things by playing> The premium equipment is the only thing people would potentially buy shards for at this point.

*Shards are like a dirty middleman between ddo points and your cash, but each has limited selection. Just like ddo points you can earn them without buying them for cash. Patient players can profit off them.

Just like every mmo..the whales get most of the food

 

[Pfill]

In terms of purchasing power, the sub BIS gear you can get on the AH is going to cost less than 1/5th than the same gear on the shard exchange. If you know your prefixes well, you can get all the important pieces from random pieces of gear on the cheap.

Obviously, it isn't good in the end game, but if you know what you are doing, you can basically skip gear grinding until like level 26 playing tetris with your classes needed specs. You just pick up some random items with deathblock, vitality, fortification, const, primary stat, your melee primaries, etc.

Most heroic gear was actually balanced in 2012 and is surpassed by base canith crafting drop rates in the same mission after they were buffed, so it's not like the old days where your character would require side farming to get to 20.

 

[Dragavon]

The problem is not really the currency's fault. There are also precious few uses for astral shards. The core problem is a while back the game went balls to the wall into BtA everything, to the point where there's nothing to trade.

100% this.
There is pretty much nothing valuable players can trade with each other after looting it from chests. Just a few crafting ingredients every now and then when we get a new system.

 

[SiliconScout]

Agreed, it would be nice if there was more BtCoE or even add a BtAoE option. The random gen is better that it used to be but it's still random so while it's relative power level if fine you will have to hope you get a good combo or someone else puts one up.

Even essences are losing their value as most crafters have thousands more than they can actually use at this point. There was a time when plat was valuable and I remember vividly the first time I managed to save up 100k, it was an event for me. Now though you can get 100k in an evening if you are running high level content and just sell all the "vendor trash".

And let me preface the below that I know this will never happen but ......
They could make some valuable plat sinks if they had a better handle on their crafting system and had a vendor you could just by the collectable from that you needed. Make them cost something like 10k * Tier per rarity level each.

So you need 1 string of prayer beads, that's 10k
You need a vial of contagion, that's 30k
You need a Silver Bowl, that's 80k
You need a Shimmering Spore Pod, that's 180k

That makes a pretty solid plat sink there and I would say what's on par with what they might earn in a 1 to 3 sessions at those tier levels. Then I would add the ability for a 5 for 1 trade to step up 1 rarity level in the same Tier to that same trader, allow that 5 for 1 to also take you up a tier. This would make crafting a lot easier to get into because you could then just choose to buy the ingredient you needed or trade up for it. Granted it would take millions of Tier 1 Commons to give you a Tier 6 rare but this trading mechanic is not meant to get you from the very bottom to the very top, you should just use your Platinum for that.

I would also add some new crafting recipes that allowed you to create consumables. Allow the player to create potions, wands or no recharge items. Craft that Suppressed Pale Lavender Ioun Stone or Scarab of Spell Absorption maybe some Keoghtom's Ointment or a potion of death ward.

Finally, for the real fun bit, and assuming the engine can handle it, the ability to craft some clothing dye and color or gear as we would like. I know that is probably too big an ask.

Realistically though build out more crafting uses to encourage more ingredient buying and therefore more plat draining out of an economy that just makes millions of PP a day out of thin air.

 

[Toblakai]

I'm a Sarlona player who's returning after like 8 years away from the game. When I used to play, you could get all sorts of very useful things from the AH, and it was used all the time. The shard exchange didn't exist.

Now... it seems like platinum is a totally dead resource. The few things that are actually useful are all posted in the shard exchange. I remember scrimping and saving platinum to buy scrolls on first life, or being able to buy a silver longbow from the auction house for a different character. Now, I've got over a million platinum from a single sale, and I've realized it's pretty much useless for any sort of in-game trading.

Honestly disappointed that the base resource of the game has been allowed to become so devalued, and the solution was to move the in-game economy over to a "you have to buy these with real money" resource instead.

The astral shard auction house was added in March 2013, so more than 10 years ago, so it would have existed when you were playing last. 8 years ago in 2015 plat had already become a lot less useful except for a rare find on the AH and the AS shard exchange had mostly already taken over the selling of the good stuff. Plat is definitely less valuable than 8 years ago but a fix for this would probably be quite hard to do.

Wonder if they added a vendor that sold AS for 1,000,000 or 500,000 plat each would work to remove plat from the economy.

 

[erousted8]

100% this.
There is pretty much nothing valuable players can trade with each other after looting it from chests. Just a few crafting ingredients every now and then when we get a new system.

Even when that does happen the unbound ingredients are never the bottleneck. You always end up with 3x as many unbound ings as you need, while the actual gateway to the crafting system is BtA/BtC.

Even essences, still sought after, aren't a great medium of exchange because you cannot list them with buyouts.

Its nuts.

 

[erousted8]

The astral shard auction house was added in March 2013, so more than 10 years ago, so it would have existed when you were playing last. 8 years ago in 2015 plat had already become a lot less useful except for a rare find on the AH and the AS shard exchange had mostly already taken over the selling of the good stuff. Plat is definitely less valuable than 8 years ago but a fix for this would probably be quite hard to do.

Wonder if they added a vendor that sold AS for 1,000,000 or 500,000 plat each would work to remove plat from the economy.

Plat was still useful 8 years ago. I routinely bought crafting essences and item blanks. There was less plat in the economy so people actually needed it for feat swaps/point respecs/repairs/etc.

If they did add a vendor that let you swap plat for shards the plat-glut would be drained immediately and we MIGHT actually get to have a plat economy again.

 

[droid327]

If they did add a vendor that let you swap plat for shards the plat-glut would be drained immediately and we MIGHT actually get to have a plat economy again.

That would be completely defeating the purpose, because then we'd just have an AS glut and both currencies would be worthless

The issue is that there isnt any plat sinks in the game. With nothing to spend it on that takes it out of the economy (ie not the AH that just moves it between players), there's going to be constant inflation. With the 2M cap on plat, that means you cant actually hold enough plat to have any meaningful buying power.

We need to be able to buy useful stuff with our plat from an NPC...even if its stupid expensive, like 2Mpp. Consumables, ideally, to keep people buying them

- +2 Stat Tomes
- 5% XP pots
- 25% Slayer pots
- Chest rerolls @level*1000pp
- Single-use fast travel tokens to various destinations
- Silver rolls @ ?100kpp

etc. etc.

 

[Toblakai]

That would be completely defeating the purpose, because then we'd just have an AS glut and both currencies would be worthless

The issue is that there isnt any plat sinks in the game. With nothing to spend it on that takes it out of the economy (ie not the AH that just moves it between players), there's going to be constant inflation. With the 2M cap on plat, that means you cant actually hold enough plat to have any meaningful buying power.

We need to be able to buy useful stuff with our plat from an NPC...even if its stupid expensive, like 2Mpp. Consumables, ideally, to keep people buying them

- +2 Stat Tomes
- 5% XP pots
- 25% Slayer pots
- Chest rerolls @level*1000pp
- Single-use fast travel tokens to various destinations
- Silver rolls @ ?100kpp

etc. etc.

I don't think 1mil plat for 1AS would create an AS glut in any way. A million plat takes a bit of time to get, faster to grind favor for DDO points and just buy them. But I do like the idea of your list also.

 

[Fhrek]

That would be completely defeating the purpose, because then we'd just have an AS glut and both currencies would be worthless

The issue is that there isnt any plat sinks in the game. With nothing to spend it on that takes it out of the economy (ie not the AH that just moves it between players), there's going to be constant inflation. With the 2M cap on plat, that means you cant actually hold enough plat to have any meaningful buying power.

We need to be able to buy useful stuff with our plat from an NPC...even if its stupid expensive, like 2Mpp. Consumables, ideally, to keep people buying them

- +2 Stat Tomes
- 5% XP pots
- 25% Slayer pots
- Chest rerolls @level*1000pp
- Single-use fast travel tokens to various destinations
- Silver rolls @ ?100kpp

etc. etc.

Don't think the trade off is a bad idea either... 1KK plat for 10 AS isn't that bad, since 4KK plat is the Cap even for VIPs.
People would be willing to sell thing in the plat AH to flip for AS that has more specific uses (Dice and chest rolls), so the economy (hypothesis) would shift between the two currencies.

And I like your vendor idea

 

[droid327]

Don't think the trade off is a bad idea either... 1KK plat for 10 AS isn't that bad, since 4KK plat is the Cap even for VIPs.
People would be willing to sell thing in the plat AH to flip for AS that has more specific uses (Dice and chest rolls), so the economy (hypothesis) would shift between the two currencies.

I think that'd just get people to farm plat to convert to AS, which limits its utility as a plat sink...and it'd devalue AS, which means we'll just see both currencies come to an equilibrium. But since plat is sooooo devalued right now, the equilibrium point is going to be way too low for either currency to be useful. Plat would just drag AS down with it, essentially.

I think you'd need to re-establish plat's value first by introducing sinks, and once both currencies are stable, then you can establish a proper exchange rate.

 

[Chacka]

It would be relatively easy to significantly improve the current situation. Here are a couple of suggestions:

1. Implement a currency reform where 1000 platinum is equivalent to only 1 platinum. This adjustment would ensure that everyone can store the same value, which is currently equivalent to 4 billion platinum.
2. Introduce valuable but expensive consumables such as potent cure/heal potions or SP potions. These high-quality items would contribute to making platinum more valuable and revive the purpose of the platinum Auction House (AH).

While these steps are crucial in making platinum valuable again and revitalizing the DDO economy, other tasks need attention to fully "fix" the situation. Unfortunately, it appears that SSG is not even willing to fix the DDO economy..

 

[erousted8]

I think that'd just get people to farm plat to convert to AS, which limits its utility as a plat sink...and it'd devalue AS, which means we'll just see both currencies come to an equilibrium. But since plat is sooooo devalued right now, the equilibrium point is going to be way too low for either currency to be useful. Plat would just drag AS down with it, essentially.

I think you'd need to re-establish plat's value first by introducing sinks, and once both currencies are stable, then you can establish a proper exchange rate.

Except that there ARE a whole lot of VERY EFFECTIVE sinks built into the AS system. Chest re-rolls and dice gold rolls for starters. Feat swaps, on-the-go item repairs, tons of augments. There's a large number of things in the game to spend AS on but precious few to consume plat.

 

[rish57]

I'm setting here reading this rememebering when there wasn't even an AH or store...you would post things up for trade, meet the person in game, and trade, that was when platnium was actually big...heh, yep, that was a long time ago...probably even before there was that public event where the tent in the marketplace was destroyed, that day must have had at least 20 instances, and that lag was legit!

 

[Ying]

Still plenty of outlets in the game for plat: Reaper wings each life, rez/heal scrolls, yugo pots and respecing enhancement trees.

The plat AH on live servers is mostly useless because it's barren. Hardcore is the exception where the plat AH thrives. On Khyber right now, there are 7 pages of jewelry and clothing each on the AH. On hardcore, there are 100 pages between the two.

The ASAH doesn't have much on it because there's not much tradeable in the game. But the things that are tradeable and valuable are few and far between. There's no thriving economy because there's not enough gear worth trading. Tomes, some augments, certain rare filigree, sentience XP and certain pots are not enough to sustain a thriving economy. It's a problem SSG needs to tackle when they integrate with Daybreak's krono system.