Sam on Maui

You received 1,500 Omega Marks You received 1,000 Dilithium Ore Items acquired: Borg Neural Processor x 8 Thank you for your dedication! Additionally, with today's patch, anyone working the OMEGA Reputation System can now access the Ongoing War Efforts assignment. For 50 Omega Marks, you will receive 500 Dilithium and 5 OMEGA Reputation points. So, that alone will earn me 15,000 Dilithium!

First off, its amazing what a few hours can do. I checked back in for lunch, and the Z:D was at 1:115, even touching 1:114 for a few moments. WOW! I'm very curious to see the impact of tomorrow's patch on the game economy as a result. The two notables? Reputation XP projects now reward a small amount of Dilithium upon completion . 340 for the 2000 XP projects 140 for the 800 XP projects Removed Tier requirements on Mark-to-Dilithium conversion projects.  These projects can now be slotted immediately upon reaching level 50 and unlocking the Reputation system. Which is fine by me. I'm enjoying the Romulan content, so chances are I'll be earning a lot of Dilithium off it via XP projects. The Omega stuff? Not so much, so all my marks from that will likely be converted to Dilithium, period. We'll see. Additionally, I managed to get enough Zen for yet another Master Key. As such, I'm now at 104 Lobi, so 1/4 of the way to my goal of 400 Lobi. This is a...

EDIT: I got the date wrong. How did I think it was 11/21 when it was 11/29? *sigh* Its almost the end of the month! Practically the end of the month, really. And, what a month its been! Without further ado… Now, this is two graphs in one. The Blue area is the Zen|Dilithium Exchange as normal. The other lines are just a snapshot of the volumes of Zen being offered/traded on the Exchange, using the Buying and Selling pools. While this does not measure total amount of traffic throughout the day, nor does it show successful transactions, hopefully it’ll still be able to offer us some insight. Important dates include: November 13th (Season 7 launched), and November 23th (first set of adjustments to increase Dilithium availability). Next week, we’ll want to keep an eye on how November 30th as there’ll be another adjustment. Now, for the rest.

Update: Chart revised! Took out period where I wasn’t tracking everything, and managed to add the Z:D price chart into it. Its showing the trends/movement of the price, and is there for reference. Season 7 has been out for a while now, and I felt it was a good idea to bring out another chart. What is it this time? The overall volume of the market! What is this? When I get the daily Z:D prices, I also record the top 5 buying and selling lots. Now, this does not show the value of the Z:D market, just how much is flowing through it. For instance, Tuesday, October 30th had a tremendous spike in traffic, with prices around 1:158. Thursday, September 27, was a incredibly low volume day when prices were 1:165. The obvious question is, is this due to price?

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 po...

Contraband is a wonderful item that is a common reward for Marauding Duty Officer assignments with the Klingons Defense Force. When combined with my favorite Duty Officer assignment – Turn Over Confiscated Contraband – it’s a very steady way to earn Dilithium in game, and thus Zen. In turn Zen can be used to buy things in the Zen Store that can be sold for Energy Credits. I’ve got a very small and decently run operation set up with three characters; 1 Federation and 2 Klingon. The two Klingons earn virtually all my Contraband, and all three characters turn it in. But, given the market changes recently, would turning in Contraband for Dilithium then Zen be the best way to buy Energy Credits? Or would it be better to sell the Contraband itself? What offers the better return right now? Excel to the rescue!

More than a few people have been lamenting the General Recruitment Duty Officer assignment now requires 1,000 Dilithium to complete. While a nice pack of DOFFs, its not the only way to get more Duty Officers. What you're paying for is convenience and relative speed to obtain; the two go hand in hand. Buying Duty Officer Packs in the Zen Store is the fastest (practically instant), but most expensive route. General Recruitment costs 1,000 Dilithium, but takes a day to get the reward. Also has a cooldown. Departmental Recruitment and Cultural Exchange Duty Officer assignments take two days, but are free . There is a cooldown for those as well. If you're not in a rush, you can recruit 11 free Duty Officers at Star Fleet Academy. Should you get a critical success on the Cultural Exchanges, you can get two more per critical. For those on a budget, not interested in spending additional money, or whatever, this represents a great means to get Duty Officers for use on your shi...

Ah, Thanksgiving. Since I’ll hopefully be busy cooking, eating and sleeping tomorrow with friends and family, I’m doing the tracking a day early. And, well, its still been a busy week! Yeah, YOWZA. And things aren’t done yet. Dan Stahl posted on the boards there will be more changes coming, and they’ll be increasing Dilithium earnings while decreasing a few Dilithium costs. There’s a lot more to it than just that, so read up!

Overall History With Season 7: New Romulus having launched on Tuesday, looks like we’ve got movement again! Obviously, its too soon to tell if it because of the new update (although that’s definitely a factor), or a return to weekends being a low price period. Just off the top of my head, however, I’m wondering if the relatively flat period represents people taking a break until the new update. Certainly, when I played City of Heroes, there was something called “the mid-issue blues” (or “blahs”). If you haven’t read the patch notes, now would be a great time to do so . One of the changes since test was they removed the Refined Dilithium requirements from the Reputation system. Previously, it would serve as another Dilithium sink, which made it unattractive to casual and alt-heavy players. I’m not sure how they compensated for that, as one of the purposes of that was to slow down the speed at which players could progress through the system. While the Reputation system was made to el...

I had a thought, and drew up another graph in Excel. While things have been relatively flat for the past while, I wondered how much variability was there? Looking back, there were four weeks where the market fluctuated tremendously during the course of a week. Two of those were wild fluctuations, followed by two lesser weeks each before returning to normal. I’m going to have to start doing some research if I’m going to speculate what caused these wild swings, though! Times like this I really wish I had more of a history for the market. It’d be really interesting to see how often this sort of thing happens.

We’re finally seeing some movement again! Really not much to say at this point. Season 7 is coming soon, people are getting ready, and that’s about that.

Not quite the 11th hour, but late, and I do apologize!     FMonday Tuesday Wed Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday 8/27/2012     160 165 161 156 158 9/3/2012 157 157 157 156 153 152 153 9/10/2012 154 153 154 154 154 154 154 9/17/2012 155 156 155 155 155 154 155 9/24/2012 154 155 159 165 163 158 160 10/1/2012 161 159 160 159 156 157 157 10/8/2012 157 157 158 159 158 158 158 10/15/2012 160 159 160 160 159 158 158 10/22/2012 158 158 158 158 158 158 157 10/29/2012 157 158 157 157         Finally! Some more movement!     I shan’t pontificate to much this go ‘round. I’m personally wondering if uncertainties over what changes Season 7 will bring has people less willing to participate in the exchange right now. We’ll see. It could also be Dilithium buyers are not quite as willing to pay the same premiums as before.