Just wanted to give the people a heads up who watch this forum and pop into the game.
Currently the Dilithium exchange is emptied of Zen. So if you go in and see the one tab empty that’s why. As soon as any zen is put up to purchase it is gone. Right now the rate is about 500 dil to 1 Zen. You can post dilithium offers and they should sell eventually as people are selling zen. Right now it looks like about a 6 hour to 24 hour sell rate as of this weekend. However the exchange is run on a first in First out rules. So the offers posted prior to yours will get settled first. But as more people try to sell dithium for Zen, the turn around time will increase.
I’m given to understand this happened in Neverwinter, and Cryptic ignored the problem and now the turn around time there is weeks to months from what I have read in the NOP channel. So take that as heresy unless someone who plays Neverwinter wants to chime in. They appear to be trying sorta to avoid this in STO but so far it is more band aid attempt at the moment. I think this caught them by surprise (at least the emptying of the zen completely from the exchange) But that’s what happens when you run a two recruitment events, followed by two only Zen packages that were considered Pretty nice, followed by a Summer sale event. people are spending their zen rather than converting it.
So the short warning is unless you plan to buy zen directly from Cryptic, there isn’t a way to generate it from dilithium on a short notice for impulse buying for anything you want to get with zen.
Mith
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Well, just figured I would do an update for those that might be interested.
Today the outstanding sell orders for Dilithium at the 500 to 1 Zen topped over 1 million. I put up a couple of sell orders myself about 10pm. I’ll let you know how long it takes to work themselves through this backlog.
It just seems Cryptic/PWE can’t help themselves and are proving they just don’t really care much anymore. Once again they are running multiple Zen item promotions. So this weekend they posted the Legendary Romulan Warbird package with a legendary Scimitar and D’Deridex ship package. as well as a 20 percent off ship sale and finally a flash sale on Infinity Promo packs.
So as this continues the game is becoming more and more Free to play unfriendly. As you need to plan ahead now by selling over time. The impulse spending for free to play players are not able to be met with the delay in converting dilithium to zen being over days now rather than minutes/hours it has in the recent past.
So once again a word of warning, if you might want anything be prepared to open your wallet unless you happen to have a stash of Zen sitting around already.
For now I personally am taking a pass on everything they are offering and just building up a reserve of Zen as time goes by between my small multiple postings over a week and my lifetime stipend. I’ll sit on it until the holidays. In the past they have done some 50 and 75 percent Zen sales, and if the market keeps going south those are when I will hold off to buy anything to make what I have been able to earn go further. But impulse buying is now out the door for me.
I can’t honestly say when I am likely to lose interest as a free to play player (currently out of work on medical leave so I have no disposable cash to spend) in STO. It might be when it gets to the point of taking a week or more for each sell order to process. Since you are limited to just 5 of them at a time.
Mith
Thanks for the update Mith. I haven’t been playing in a long while, just logging in occasionally to check on things. But I will keep this in mind before using my Zen stash if/when I play again.
Well the offers to buy went through finally. Just under 72 hours to work itself through a million backlog. And it is still sitting at over 1 million dil for zen offers still backlog.
Mith
Another update, After the rush of the new legedary pack, the dill exchange has settled down to between 750k to 800K ish range. So it is still about 2 to 3 days to work through from posting to having your Buy Zen with Dill offer to be processed.
They dropped their next wonderful dil exchange correction on us that is going live with tomorrow’s patch. We can now spend 2500 refined dil on an admiralty or Endeavor pass tokens. Oh and they are disabling the ability to get them for free through the system. So you will need to pay for them once your out of your current supply.
I’m ambivalent for the admiralty, the work i have put in on my ship collection over the last 10 years has given me more than enough ships that I haven’t used a pass token in years, just throw some ships at it and move on. The endeavor ones I’m a little peeved with since they just love to throw in multiple TFO’s especially the ones that no one really like to run and honestly the Random TFO’s are pretty lousy with how quickly they pop and the ability to complete them in a reasonable time with the constant events being held one after another with no breaks being thrown at players. I have several recruit toons from the last couple events that haven’t run much if any other faction missions due to lack of time.
I don’t expect this to have much in the way of effect on the dil exchange and honestly they are throwing the next Discovery ship into the infinity box probably tomorrow or next week, so I expect the dil exchange to move back up over the million mark again soon.
Mith
Well the backlog has cleared out. I’m going to predict it is only temporarily. What did it was they are finally doing the first rerun of the Agents Of Yesteryear Recruitment event. So everyone who missed the first one is jumping on and making a new character and of course that increased the need for Dil for weapons and other stuff. But I think it is really only short term. So if you want to convert dil to zen now would be a good time to hop on and put your convert orders in. It should happen fairly quickly.
Mith
Right now it is at about 250,000 back orders. I never really used the exchange much, as I never had enough dil to be rid of, but the fact that it doesn’t work any more makes me kind of sad.
What do you think would happen if they just got rid of the cap? It’s just a thought experiment, because everything I read makes be believe that would be the last thing they would ever do.
Well technically it is working, It is just delayed processing.
Well from everything I heard it won’t do anything but skyrocket the price of dil to Zen. When they raise the limit in Neverwinter nights it was at the new cap by the end of the first day. And hasn’t budge from there since. There has been talk about an account refine limit to reduce the amount of Dil farming being done. But all that would do would shift the farmers from using one account with 50+ characters to doing multiple accounts with the max character per server accumulating. And mostly it would shift their space rich from Zen to EC.
There are others that say just get rid of the exchange completely. But all that would do is shut down the Free to Play portion of the Playerbase and they are going to be more likely to move onto a different game than have themselves be force to spend money to get the nice shinnies within the game.
Neither wouldn’t really make anyone who does grinds Dil open their wallet to buy Zen. Which in the end is all Cryptic and PWE care about. From everything i have heard and I admit it is all second hand they need a lot of wallet warriors to purchase Zen to keep them in the black with all the refunds they have to do for the Magic the Gathering game people who bought Zen while it was in Beta after it will shut down at the end of OCtober.
Mith
Honestly, I think the thing to do would be for Cryptic to completely take over the market, put a price on dilithium per ZEN and take the supply side out. It would create a market use for dil, and while it would make some people very happy indeed, these are the same ones who always used the market in ways it wasn’t designed for. At least those who farm some dil for zen could use the exchange for something other than another button that does nothing.
Well just an update, Haven’t been paying too much attention to the Dil market for the last couple months as I’ve only really been popping in to slot projects and invite people.
Decided to check today. So as of now there is 4 Million zen worth of dil (500 to 1) posted. From the talk in NOP it is taking about 11 to 12 days to clear a transaction. Of course that is during the holidays when people treat themselves so it might turn into longer turnaround once we get into January.
I haven’t bought anything really in months with Zen, nothing they have put out really interested me at all. The last two Mudd Ship packs were nothing I was interested in and their sales this Holiday season were mediocre to say the least. Guess they are still trying to farm money from people in this game to pay for what they own people for the failed Magic game.
Mith
It is a pretty sad and sorry state of affairs. I wasn’t excited about the holiday ship either, but I did see a good build put together for it by MC Stu on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=sto+eisenberg+class+build
Oh, I’m so use to it just for a free ship, I did just run the race daily to complete the required 20 times. Normally I just keep doing it for the dil bonus, but given the state of the exchange I didn’t bother this year. Mostly I do get them for the Admiralty ship card. And never actually use the ships ever.
Mith
Update:
Back log is about 10 days right now to turn over a sell order.
Mith