One of the first major things I "bought" in game was a "festival icy burst kit" to add to some item or another. Cost me 150k in plat. Still feels like a good deal all these years later. Cannot recall what I put it on...
So... the platinum AH is useless?
- Thread starter cocopufff
- Start date
Yvonne Blacksword
Deliverer of Quirk
Sarlona has always had maaaaannny people with way too much plat and nothing to do with it. That AH is kinda known for anythng of any value getting bought and posted on the shard exchange. fast! I used to sell things there for unreasonable prices and had them bought out and posted on shard within minutes... shards build good airships after all the plat amenities are paid for. You lose mone on the AH when you don't/do sell. you get your posting fee back on the shard exchange for unsold items, unless they changed that.
Some servers wont bite on a non-buyout post till end of auction. some servers have players with alts that run up prices. bidding wars can get brutal.
I rarely win an auction on Sarlona, other servers its like 25%.
Some servers wont bite on a non-buyout post till end of auction. some servers have players with alts that run up prices. bidding wars can get brutal.
I rarely win an auction on Sarlona, other servers its like 25%.
Platinum AH is very useful for new players.
If you are not a crafter (even some long term players ignore this) and have not enough bank space and time to farm all named things to fit most configurations, then you may easily find items to fill your gaps.
If you are a crafter, then you can buy collectables/ingredients, augments, two slot blanks.
There are other valuable things if you check well enough once or two per day, depending on what you need at given time.
You do not have to spend money for Astral Exchange.
Just get 10 astral shards for some ddo points (its cheap and you probably already farmed enough with favor) and start selling there like you already did with platinum AH.
I use both.
Yes, Astral Exchange has much more valuable items, but platinum AH has occasions that may help to save some of your astral shards and even get more of them if you are good trader that know prices.
If you are not a crafter (even some long term players ignore this) and have not enough bank space and time to farm all named things to fit most configurations, then you may easily find items to fill your gaps.
If you are a crafter, then you can buy collectables/ingredients, augments, two slot blanks.
There are other valuable things if you check well enough once or two per day, depending on what you need at given time.
You do not have to spend money for Astral Exchange.
Just get 10 astral shards for some ddo points (its cheap and you probably already farmed enough with favor) and start selling there like you already did with platinum AH.
I use both.
Yes, Astral Exchange has much more valuable items, but platinum AH has occasions that may help to save some of your astral shards and even get more of them if you are good trader that know prices.
PersonMan
Well-known member
Gone are the days of buying High Cells to charge up and make Green Steel.
Gone are the days of restocking ALL of your guild amenities.
At least you can still buy your 5th bag slot with Plat, respec trees, buy Yugo pots and reaper wings.
If rerolls, saga skip and/or saga upgrade were available through plat suddenly everyone would want as much as they could get.
Gone are the days of restocking ALL of your guild amenities.
At least you can still buy your 5th bag slot with Plat, respec trees, buy Yugo pots and reaper wings.
If rerolls, saga skip and/or saga upgrade were available through plat suddenly everyone would want as much as they could get.
If these things were all made available for plat, we would be looking at the most effienct plat-farming techniques(E.G. "run the fastest quest with the most chests, sell vendor trash, repeat").
Having things to spend plat on only solves one half of the problem.
droid327
Well-known member
Better yet - a few Monster Manuals award AS for their milestones. Buy those, earn a few AS, and use it to break into the ASAH economy by trading SXP stones, filigrees, and event items from 6 months ago
The demand for plat farming is directly proportional to the value of plat. Creating good plat sinks increases the value of plat, yes, and will eventually lead to more plat farming...but that's just the sign of a healthy currency. As long as you dont allow any really harmful plat farms (ie either grossly out of proportion to other rates of earning plat, or involving really undesirable gameplay) then its not actually a bad thing.
RocknRolla
Member
My friends and I have at times made a concerted effort to keep the plat AH valuable... Whenever I find a really good combo, such as a scepter with multiple enchantments all focused on boosting the same element (power + lore + evocation for example), I would always try to sell it multiple times for basically nothing... Not for the plat since it is in fact worthless. But just to let someone else have a cool item and not see it go to waste. Sadly, for every 20 such items I post, I maybe sell 1 or 2. So it just isn't worth the time.
The thing is, it's not just plat that is worthless... It's those items too. There is literally nothing you can find that is better than you can easily craft with less effort. And for example, literally every player pulls 2-3 such "really good" items every hour or so in Gianthold or the like. So everyone who has played for a few months already has inventory and bank full of that stuff (which they don't need because they have crafted better.)
The thing is, it's not just plat that is worthless... It's those items too. There is literally nothing you can find that is better than you can easily craft with less effort. And for example, literally every player pulls 2-3 such "really good" items every hour or so in Gianthold or the like. So everyone who has played for a few months already has inventory and bank full of that stuff (which they don't need because they have crafted better.)
Jeronimo
Well-known member
I sometimes still try to use the AH, looking to buy something specific during TRing, but it usually fails because there are so many things listed without a buyout. Personally I don't care much about the price.... I've got huge amounts of plat... I just want to pay for some trash... now... not in a couple of days when I no longer need the item. 
Just give me a fixed price... if it's decent... you'll have my plat.
Just give me a fixed price... if it's decent... you'll have my plat. That power+lore+evocation scepter will sold on second or third try.
I sell such things for long time and I also feel its better to put it on AH, so some new player can have good use of it.
I was one of them in the past and until I started crafting few years later (I ignored it for long time and I know others that do same thing) or have enough bank space to store all items I want, so AH was my great solution.
It is just about low player base that contains mainly long term players.
Just examine them in market place and you will see that most are completionists.
Your item must match current need of specific player at given time like sorcerer/wizard that is focused on that spell power and has proper level.
I sometimes still try to use the AH, looking to buy something specific during TRing, but it usually fails because there are so many things listed without a buyout. Personally I don't care much about the price.... I've got huge amounts of plat... I just want to pay for some trash... now... not in a couple of days when I no longer need the item.
No buyout has also good side.
It increases chance that you will get something rare that you really want, but you could not buy it, because you do not check AH often enough and others were quicker with buyout.
You are not the only one who have lots of platinum and astral shards and can buy something at crazy price, so you probably missed many items "thanks" to buyout.
Just put high bids (2000001 is max in case of platinum) on things that you will need in near future (few levels later or another character).
DDO Gaming
Well-known member
Reaper trees are being abolished???
haagmaar123
Well-known member
imagine that a company that needs to make money to function! You people expect to pay no monthly fee and to have everything free then complain when theres no bug fixes or new content well of course there isnt because they only can afford to have like 5 people working on the project.
Reaper trees will be replaced with something else in the near future. What that is remains to be seen.
Jeronimo
Well-known member
I agree... it might be good for such items. I was more talking about mundane stuff... maybe a stat or spellpower item on a specific item slot in order to solve the gear tetris.... things that usually drops like candy in the chests, but when you actually want one in the middle of a TR, your bank misses it, you don't have time to search all the bank toons and you find that all of them on the AH miss buyout prices, I find it a bit annoying... and a day or two later I no longer need the item... usually for me this happens when I'm in heroics in the lvl 15-18 range.
In the past, when green steel was still useful, I had similar issues... I just wanted to craft stuff with any random trash items... but sure... peeps insisted on having trash items up for days.
kmoustakas
Scourge of Xaos
Wings are very pretty and they cost a lot of plat if you are doing racials.
The game has changed alot in 8 years. To say the least, on all servers population is much lower from when you last played. If there are less people playing, there will be less people posting at the AH in general.
The remaining players in the game are mostly die hard and endgame players. Those type of players usually aren't bothing with the AH for platinum, since they are usually platinum capped on all thier toons.
dur
aka Cybersquirt
Be interesting to see if what you say is actually true. I've been playing from the start and have never been "plat capped."
Mary
Well-known member
DDO is a game with multiple forms of currency—too many, in fact. The roots, dating back to beta, by Turbine, included copper, silver, gold, and platinum pieces, borrowed from the pen-and-paper game. In the early days, when things cost copper, silver, and gold, platinum was mainly used as an investment coin. Today, almost 20 years later, the only one of these coins relevant due to inflation is platinum. Even then, transactions between players usually involve sums greater than the maximum cap of each character.
DDO coins, originally Turbine Points (?), represented the free-to-play model—a bound-to-account pay coin. Then came Astral Diamonds, which dropped in chests, and could be bought, that later became shards, another bound-to-account pay coin.
These of course go alongside all the other in-game currencies, such as the Night Revels materials used to buy items, materials from quests, raids, events, etc., many have unique mats. One need only mention the original Temple of Elemental Evil mushrooms. A good example of how developers often try to create a balanced and enjoyable game but end up making it a complex mess by adding too many currencies.
So why then doesn't SSG change us over to a simpler, single-universal currency to provide a more streamlined and enjoyable experience for players?
We still have a need for currency, clearly. One of the first times a new player will encounter this need is to purchase a hireling (which are still priced very reasonably in platinum but insanely expensive in Astral Shards) or in repairing gear (again, very cheap with platinum, very expensive relatively in Astral Shards).
While playing the game, the player quickly learns that it is very easy to spend vast sums of real-world money on shards to do things that, if one used in-game platinum, would be much cheaper.
So what, if anything, can be done about it? And would SSG ever want to do anything about it if the system favors players spending real money?
The Free-to-Play micro-transaction model was introduced for use many years ago in Module 9. However, the game is much different now than it was then. Astral Diamonds were introduced as ultra-rare drops and sold in the store until Update 16 when replaced with shards. Bound to account, shards are also bound to the server one is playing on, unlike platinum or other materials, which can be moved from one server to the next.
The main problem with the multiple currencies is that there is no way to fix an exchange rate. Items on one server sell for different prices on another; this is expected, but the mechanisms of valuation are clouded in convoluted behind-the-scenes math. Do you know how much one Astral Shard costs compared to one platinum piece and one DDO store point? What if we try to convert any of them into materials from Night Revels? Or Giant Hold? Or Isle of Dread?
This extremely difficult exchange sets up what is called arbitrage, where one currency is utilized to exploit differences in markets of another. This leads to an unfair advantage for certain individuals who benefit from disrupting that particular exchange.
And so we have currency devaluation, difficulties in price setting, confusions in value, and market volatility in the game. They are not fun for new players.
All of this has led to something called fragmentation, where large sections of the economy no longer use many of the currencies, and as a result they lose most of their value. We see this in the mats of Gianthold which sell cheaply because that armor is no longer relevant.
This, of course, leads to confusion, angst, and eventually, the giving up of new players who, testing the waters, are encouraged not to play and earn platinum, but to buy with real money coins for the in-game economy.
DDO has too many currencies. The game should be simplified into one 'universal currency' that can be earned in-game and used to buy anything, even a monthly subscription. These universal coins should be freely tradable and allow for movement across servers. Such a change, encompassing every currency from every quest, every raid, every transaction, would make the game vastly easier to understand. However, I fear the resources to do such a change would not be allocated, even if they could.
After all, DDO is a candy machine. All they need to do is refresh the old candy with new candy and players will buy, and the confusion and uncertainty about the in-game economy will continue, and numerous currencies will go largely unused, relics of the game's roots and a nod to its pen and paper origins.
DDO coins, originally Turbine Points (?), represented the free-to-play model—a bound-to-account pay coin. Then came Astral Diamonds, which dropped in chests, and could be bought, that later became shards, another bound-to-account pay coin.
These of course go alongside all the other in-game currencies, such as the Night Revels materials used to buy items, materials from quests, raids, events, etc., many have unique mats. One need only mention the original Temple of Elemental Evil mushrooms. A good example of how developers often try to create a balanced and enjoyable game but end up making it a complex mess by adding too many currencies.
So why then doesn't SSG change us over to a simpler, single-universal currency to provide a more streamlined and enjoyable experience for players?
We still have a need for currency, clearly. One of the first times a new player will encounter this need is to purchase a hireling (which are still priced very reasonably in platinum but insanely expensive in Astral Shards) or in repairing gear (again, very cheap with platinum, very expensive relatively in Astral Shards).
While playing the game, the player quickly learns that it is very easy to spend vast sums of real-world money on shards to do things that, if one used in-game platinum, would be much cheaper.
So what, if anything, can be done about it? And would SSG ever want to do anything about it if the system favors players spending real money?
The Free-to-Play micro-transaction model was introduced for use many years ago in Module 9. However, the game is much different now than it was then. Astral Diamonds were introduced as ultra-rare drops and sold in the store until Update 16 when replaced with shards. Bound to account, shards are also bound to the server one is playing on, unlike platinum or other materials, which can be moved from one server to the next.
The main problem with the multiple currencies is that there is no way to fix an exchange rate. Items on one server sell for different prices on another; this is expected, but the mechanisms of valuation are clouded in convoluted behind-the-scenes math. Do you know how much one Astral Shard costs compared to one platinum piece and one DDO store point? What if we try to convert any of them into materials from Night Revels? Or Giant Hold? Or Isle of Dread?
This extremely difficult exchange sets up what is called arbitrage, where one currency is utilized to exploit differences in markets of another. This leads to an unfair advantage for certain individuals who benefit from disrupting that particular exchange.
And so we have currency devaluation, difficulties in price setting, confusions in value, and market volatility in the game. They are not fun for new players.
All of this has led to something called fragmentation, where large sections of the economy no longer use many of the currencies, and as a result they lose most of their value. We see this in the mats of Gianthold which sell cheaply because that armor is no longer relevant.
This, of course, leads to confusion, angst, and eventually, the giving up of new players who, testing the waters, are encouraged not to play and earn platinum, but to buy with real money coins for the in-game economy.
DDO has too many currencies. The game should be simplified into one 'universal currency' that can be earned in-game and used to buy anything, even a monthly subscription. These universal coins should be freely tradable and allow for movement across servers. Such a change, encompassing every currency from every quest, every raid, every transaction, would make the game vastly easier to understand. However, I fear the resources to do such a change would not be allocated, even if they could.
After all, DDO is a candy machine. All they need to do is refresh the old candy with new candy and players will buy, and the confusion and uncertainty about the in-game economy will continue, and numerous currencies will go largely unused, relics of the game's roots and a nod to its pen and paper origins.
dur
aka Cybersquirt
I don't know about too many currencies (Astral Shards exist to make SSG $$$, period, IMO.) There is PP (Gold) & AS.
On Sarlona, AS rules(z) :(
Off topic: why do I still see a bid breakdown in Gold/Silver/Copper price on items once in a while? They're always very obvious and were more common, but how is it even possible?
On Sarlona, AS rules(z) :(
Off topic: why do I still see a bid breakdown in Gold/Silver/Copper price on items once in a while? They're always very obvious and were more common, but how is it even possible?