[STO] Dilithium at 1:135!

On Tuesday Dan Stahl said that the devs would be monitoring the Dilithium economy. More to the point:

Not everything is sunshine and roses, though. As we mentioned in previous posts, we continue to monitor the Dilithium economy reaction to the changes in Season 7 and as previously stated, we will be making some additional adjustments which we feel will address issues that have been discussed. Some of those changes are going to happen in an update tomorrow (Wednesday Nov 21) and some of them are going to happen in the following week's update on Nov 29. If we feel more changes are necessary after that, we will certainly make them because our goal is to keep the game balanced while ensuring that players are having fun. Even though we've managed to get more Dilithium into more players hands, we agree that STF runs and Dilithium have been a challenging change that needs to be addressed and we are going to continue to do so.

 Hopefully the changes for November 29 will have a positive influence. Right now the Zen:Dilithium exchange rate is the lowest I've seen it, and I'm really not sure that's good. Possible factors?

• With all the players coming back for Season 7, Fleet projects have begun again in earnest, meaning less Dilithium for the Exchange.
• With all the players coming back for Season 7, Fleet projects have begun again in earnest, causing a very high premium to be placed on Dilithium.
• Exploitation of the Foundry and player created missions accounted for more of the Dilithium being sold that I ever dreamed of. From the sounds of forum complaints, the exploits made it trivially easy to max out Dilithium per character in minutes, thus making farming Dilithium via alts a very viable proposition. 8,000 Refined Dilithium per character times how ever many characters? Maybe 10 minutes per character? Geez.

Just off the top of my head, of course.

My main concern is that the market is going too Zen heavy. Why does this matter? Isn't that good for PWE? I'm afraid that buying Dilithium will become such a poor  proposition that fewer players will do it. While prices might become more equitable in time, there's no telling if players will continue buying Dilithium. If they opt to earn it themselves or drop out of the game? That affects players like me who earn Dilithium for the purpose of selling it.

In short, I hope they don't accidentally kill the "golden goose."

Now, we're still over 1:100, which is relieving. If it were to drop to 1:99 or lower? I'd really begin to worry. 1 Zen for 25 Dilithium means 250 Dilithium per dollar. That's really a poor value, in my opinion, especially when you consider not only how easy it is to get 250 Dilithium, but how little that much actually gets you. In theory these wild market extremes ought to correct themselves, but I guess I'm more worried about perceptual issues. Also, the exchange needs to be win/win, in my opinion. 1:25 is no more win/win than 1:500. If they narrowed it down to 1:100 and 1:400 being the ranges, I might be a bit happier.