Close the ASAH

[capsela]

The ASAH was a great idea and it would still be if certain players weren't abusing it.

The ASAH has become a money laundering system where cheaters can profit from their cheats. The regular AH doesn't reward cheating so much because of the plat cap. But there is no shard cap, cheaters are accumulating 10K plus shards. I heard one cheater had 50K and was bragging about it.

I understand the ASAH was put in with good intentions but you are just encouraging the wreckless and willful destruction of the endgame loot. New players will quit because the economy is ruined and they can't earn in game money fairly. And old players will quit because they can buy all the stuff they need from the cheaters who are laundering it through them and profiting hugely.

Seriously, if Turbine can't figure out who the cheaters are by just doing a search of who has 10K shards and has never spent a dime on the game... Maybe, they are donald trump in the art of the deal or maybe they are just lucky traders... yeah right!

TLDR- The ASAH rewards bad people by making it easier to convert/launder their illicit items into whatever they want and it grants them anonymity, before the ASAH they had to make their trades face to face and risked getting caught that way.

[Nestroy]

The ASAH was a great idea and it would still be if certain players weren't abusing it.

The ASAH has become a money laundering system where cheaters can profit from their cheats. The regular AH doesn't reward cheating so much because of the plat cap. But there is no shard cap, cheaters are accumulating 10K plus shards. I heard one cheater had 50K and was bragging about it.

I understand the ASAH was put in with good intentions but you are just encouraging the wreckless and willful destruction of the endgame loot. New players will quit because the economy is ruined and they can't earn in game money fairly. And old players will quit because they can buy all the stuff they need from the cheaters who are laundering it through them and profiting hugely.

Seriously, if Turbine can't figure out who the cheaters are by just doing a search of who has 10K shards and has never spent a dime on the game... Maybe, they are donald trump in the art of the deal or maybe they are just lucky traders... yeah right!

Since somebody had to pay for the AS first hand, Turbine just already got the money. So no harm to them...

[Blackheartox]

As i know from some people who are lunatics on astral house, there is a astral shard cap as well

[BigErkyKid]

The whole point of the austral shard auction is to milk players willing to real money for power in the game in the form of items, that is, pure simple P2W in just another form (aside from tomes, another excellent P2W example).

In other games, this is forbidden and they try to enforce bans on people who sell stuff for money.

Here Turbine has been smarter by monopolizing this market.

One could think, as it has been said here, no matter the origin of the items sold in the ASAH, someone has to buy with real money the shards to pay for them. Which means that in the end it is WAI for Turbine.

The only problem with this would be if people duped the shards. As long as they don t have evidence of that (and I bet it is extremely simple to check), there isn t a real problem for the company. At least an apparent one.

Duplicating items might be a problem more broadly, but I don t think it causes a further problem by the fact that those items are placed in the ASAH.

[FlameDiablo]

Economy always sucked horribly on DDO, i gave up on hope to improve it, but is nice to see that someone still fight for it.

[AbyssalMage]

One could think, as it has been said here, no matter the origin of the items sold in the ASAH, someone has to buy with real money the shards to pay for them. Which means that in the end it is WAI for Turbine.

I may be wrong but AS drop in game, very rarely. Then again, this may have been am oversight on Turbines part and removed.

I know that is how I acquired all of mine.

[FuzzyDuck81]

I may be wrong but AS drop in game, very rarely. Then again, this may have been am oversight on Turbines part and removed.

I know that is how I acquired all of mine.

Not sure about astral shards, but yeah the old astral diamonds used to be able to be found in chests (and a barter box was added to allow them to be converted to shards when shards were introduced) - i think they still can from time to time in a few places, i'm sure i pulled one from devil assault a couple months ago & i remember being surprised they were still on the loot list. You can definitely still get small amounts of shards from the monster manual deeds though, and i'm not sure whether the daily dice are still giving shards out - all these are relatively small numbers though, the majority of them ultimately come from the store.

[Nédime]

I may be wrong but AS drop in game, very rarely. Then again, this may have been am oversight on Turbines part and removed.

I know that is how I acquired all of mine.

Used to be on daily dice (how I get mine, too). And there's been a free coupon once.


While understanding the danger of ASAH and the introduction of a second currency on an economy, I must admit I've benefited from this. Some items ppl find useful, I know I'll never use (extra green bags, some GH loot, shields and orbs), I put them for sale at very discounted prices. It allows me to buy rogue hires for my non evasion lives (yeah 15% worth it on certain quests and traps may be a pita on some lowlev like sharn syndicate ).

[grandeibra]

Economy always sucked horribly on DDO, i gave up on hope to improve it, but is nice to see that someone still fight for it.

I disagree. It was always a pretty much perfect self-fulfilling equilibrium market up until duping was figured out. Sure some people whined about stuff being expensive but that is pure market economy supply and demand.

[Noctus]

The ASAH, or rather a secound currency besides Plat was needed in-game, because of plat inflation combined with plat cap leads to many items being worth more plat than the AH can handle.

Before the ASAH this was largely done with Flawless Red Dragonscales or Large Devil Scales, but this was also not without drawbacks and clumsy, as you could only do face-to-face trades and had to organise through channels or the Server Tradeforum, which is extra-annoying if you arent on in the regular prime-time (odd jobs, different playtimes, not living in the continental USA).

The ASAH solved this with the added benefit of alllowing Turbine to earn extra cash from players with deep real-live pockets of $ or €.

The AS i have were made with selling named items i pull when questing normally. Sometimes i even choose which quests to run not only on an XP basis, but also if there are any potential juicy ASAH-able named drop in there. For example i often run the Schindlerin-cityquests on EH not just for some quick XP, but also so i can sell the Houseseals should i get one in the ASAH. Or the demonweb for Focus of Prowess.

There is almost always someone who will pay you 10-20 AS for any named item in the ASAH, if you put it up 3-4 times, If it is not utter trash.


The ASAH allows for convenient trading of high-value loot that is simply too valuable for the plat AH. This is by itself good for the game. That dupers are tradeing duped stuff is not the fault of the ASAH, but of the duping itself.

[-Zephyr-]

As i know from some people who are lunatics on astral house, there is a astral shard cap as well

You sure about that?
On Lamannia during devs events, they sometimes gave astral shards... And I had as much as 100,000,000 at some point. I'm pretty sure there's not that many AS on all servers combined

[SirValentine]

Although I suspect you're right about some cheaters selling stuff on the Shard Exchange, having lots of shards by itself doesn't automatically make one a cheater.

It's not that hard for a top player, who runs EEs a lot, to sell their fairly-earned items on the Exchange for a lot of shards. When the right EE Tor Dragon Helm sells for at least hundreds, if not thousands, of shards by itself, someone who routinely runs EE Tor (not to mention WGU, PoP, etc., all of which have desired loot) can acquire thousands of shards without cheating or buying them.

Perhaps they should be more suspicious about looking at WHAT people are selling (Stacks of hundreds of Fire/Shadow scales 2 days after raid is released? Same person selling 6 different copies of Draconic Soul Gem? Etc..) than the mere fact that someone has a big shard total.

[morkahn82]

The whole point of the austral shard auction is to milk players willing to real money for power in the game in the form of items, that is, pure simple P2W in just another form (aside from tomes, another excellent P2W example).

asah is pure p2w, burn it down. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeC2uILRsf8

you crossed a line when you introduced asah to exchange gear for real money, and when you started to sell chunks of xp and sell max tier tomes in ddo store.

[Vellrad]

The reason why platinum failed as a currency, is not the fact its capped.
People can have caps at multiple characters and multiple accounts if they farm hard enough.
The reason why platinum failed as a currency, is the fact there is no way to spend it.

You can buy few stacks of rezurection scrolls at NPC, and thats it. The most expensive consumable.
You can buy GH scrolls, heal scrolls fireshield scrolls etc. but they're really cheap.
You can buy potions, but they're cheap and not worth inventory slot for their effect.

If, instead of adding A$AH, they'd add a way for us to spend platinum, IDK, gold seal hires: 1-5kplat/level, thief hires: 2kplat/level, Ddoor scrolls: 10k plat/piece, healing elixers (that hot pots), bigger CL scrolls, wands, pots, some original counsumables not duplicating spell effects, DDO store consumables (lasting stat pots, DSD rods, cakes, etc).

Anything that would make us want to gather and spend coins was needed.

But instead, they chose p2w currency :/

[BigErkyKid]

The ASAH, or rather a secound currency besides Plat was needed in-game, because of plat inflation combined with plat cap leads to many items being worth more plat than the AH can handle.

Before the ASAH this was largely done with Flawless Red Dragonscales or Large Devil Scales, but this was also not without drawbacks and clumsy, as you could only do face-to-face trades and had to organise through channels or the Server Tradeforum, which is extra-annoying if you arent on in the regular prime-time (odd jobs, different playtimes, not living in the continental USA).

The ASAH solved this with the added benefit of alllowing Turbine to earn extra cash from players with deep real-live pockets of $ or €.

The AS i have were made with selling named items i pull when questing normally. Sometimes i even choose which quests to run not only on an XP basis, but also if there are any potential juicy ASAH-able named drop in there. For example i often run the Schindlerin-cityquests on EH not just for some quick XP, but also so i can sell the Houseseals should i get one in the ASAH. Or the demonweb for Focus of Prowess.

There is almost always someone who will pay you 10-20 AS for any named item in the ASAH, if you put it up 3-4 times, If it is not utter trash.


The ASAH allows for convenient trading of high-value loot that is simply too valuable for the plat AH. This is by itself good for the game. That dupers are tradeing duped stuff is not the fault of the ASAH, but of the duping itself.

I am surprised. If inflation was the issue, raising the plat max holdings would have sorted it out. Or introducing diamonds as a further currency and having those be exactly regular currency as in 1 diamon equal 1000 plat coins.

There was absolutely no need to introduce a currency that is 99% acquired from the store.

It is a fantastic way to buy powerful items, bound or not.

https://www.ddo.com/en/update-17-patch-1-release-notes

Furthermore, AS can be used for some of the p2skip (which again it is p2w) features of turbine, further reinforcing their p2w power.

I do not think this is turning point from the p2w right now, at this point I just don t believe many of the so called achievements in game are due to clever gaming. Almost every single high achiever is fueled by all around +5 tomes, loot from raids farmed with plenty of raid bypassers (card and not card based), p2w races (bladeforged) and high end consumables only available to those who grind to bleeding eyes or spend real money in the game.

[janave]

Havent used this yet, i treat it nonexistent so far. Well, i got 17 shards or so from the diamond conversions, but when i first logged back after 1yrs+, i hit one of the accident buttons on the UI - so there they went .

I guess if i ever find some more, i will see some use of them.

It really surprised my to see stacks of 20 red and green scales at the rate of a large green bag. That was quite a shocker in the first few days . When i left they were top currency.

I believe in the long run this is more degrding more than useful, id say they could have just enabled this when events are on. That would be overlookable. For burst income it must be quite good tho, many people are fed up with several ransacks without seeing that named gear.

[RedOrm]

I'm still surprised they didn't add seals and shards to the a$ha. They'd sell nicely, generating a lot of income for turbine.

Greetz,
Red Orm

[Ivan_Milic]

The ASAH has become a money laundering system where cheaters can profit from their cheats. The regular AH doesn't reward cheating so much because of the plat cap. But there is no shard cap, cheaters are accumulating 10K plus shards. I heard one cheater had 50K and was bragging about it.

Did you report him?

Also:Believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear.

[sebastianosmith]

If inflation was the issue, raising the plat max holdings would have sorted it out.

I'm afraid this would lead to more inflation. In-game specie is limited only by time spent acquiring it. It is essentially limitless. Removing the plat cap would require some extensive programming and make plat more worthless than it is now as the supply in circulation could increase without adding more characters or players to use it. Vellrad was correct to point out that plat inflation is the result of not being able to remove it from circulation in a productive or efficient manner.

[BigErkyKid]

I'm afraid this would lead to more inflation. In-game specie is limited only by time spent acquiring it. It is essentially limitless. Removing the plat cap would require some extensive programming and make plat more worthless than it is now as the supply in circulation could increase without adding more characters or players to use it. Vellrad was correct to point out that plat inflation is the result of not being able to remove it from circulation in a productive or efficient manner.

So? If there is more inflation, just keep adding currencies as it goes up.

I don t want to go on a lenghty expalantion, but plat does not need to be very valuable per se in order to be a mean of exchange.

How much is a dollar worth per se?