State Of Astral Diamonds Contains Perplexing Numbers

The State Of Astral Diamonds blog note (We’re again a bit late commenting on the latest post because we’ve been busy with our Toolbase) introduced major changes to the AD economy in favor of the players once again, but also left me a bit puzzled about some of the numbers that were listed.

First of all, the changes of course are great. Players across the board will profit from lowered prices for Companion related stuff and the raise to the daily refining cap. Especially the latter one has been requested by players time and time again and while it wasn’t wise to realize it in the past due to Leadership botting, it’s a very practical change right now.

It’s also an approach by the devs to get the ZAX exchange up on the Xbox, which is listed comparably low at 140. Flooding the market with additional Astral Diamonds and simultaneously lowering some prices should free up free-to-play currency to buy ZEN, which should drive up the exchange rates so that real-money players get more out of their investment. Overall over time you can probably expect both platforms to move closer together once all the exploited AD on PC are spent.

One thing though that caught my eyes was the data about ADs players are able to get before and after a series of AD changes (1) (2) (3). The amounts seem either off or are poorly worded. Before the tweaks non-exploiting players were allegedly able to get over 30k AD and that amount doubled on PC after the changes. I mean, this can’t be rough ADs right? Or not per day. Because this would mean players were already able to get more than one character to the daily cap before the tweaks and two and a half characters after. If you’re comfortably able to run dungeons and are a VIP with extra keys per day, it’s easy to reach the cap through salvaging and stuff, but on average? I would assume casual players might do a dungeon or two each day, if at all. A PVP match here and there, that’s it.

So my best guess is that we are talking weekly numbers, because 8-10k per day sounds much more likely currently for most of the playerbase and the devs already confirmed that only a minority does actually hit the daily cap. Which makes you think whether a higher cap is the right move for the current population or whether more players should be enhanced to reach 24k instead of raising the bar for the few that already do.

But these are minor concerns and it’s hard to be overly critical with a change that benefits us so much. The devs have shown they are willing to move the system towards the players and we sure hope that they keep it up.

j0Shi

j0Shi plays the Neverwinter MMORPG since the open BETA in 2013 and is a regular contributor to the blog and the whole UN:Project. Originally a Guardian Fighter, he has built up ALTs of all classes and plays on BIS/near-BIS level.

2 thoughts on “State Of Astral Diamonds Contains Perplexing Numbers

  • November 23, 2015 at 10:54 am
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    I’m pretty sure the data was by player, so a player with 10 characters could easily be making 171k rAD a day from Leadership alone — and post-Leadership players with multiple active characters could make 60k AD with invoking and skirmishes/dungeons on multiple characters. The use of the phrase “Leadership exploits rankles.

  • November 23, 2015 at 4:24 pm
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    Regarding “non-exploiting players were allegedly able to get over 30k AD and that amount doubled on PC after the changes”, I suspect they subtracted AD directly created by Leadership. You also receive quite a bit of RP from Leadership (even today). They are probably also looking at average rather than median numbers. A single account with 50 toons botting Leadership plus max invoking each day makes up for a lot of non-exploiting accounts.

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