State of the Economy�Star Trek Online

BY CASUALSAB

INTRO

• In this video we will be looking at the main issues the STO economy faces and what needs to change to fix them.
• I will be focusing on the Energy Credit (EC) and Dilithium (Dil) parts of the ingame economy.
• Chapters are listed below if you wish to skip to specific topics.
• This PowerPoint is linked in the video Description if you would prefer to read.

WARNING

• In this video I will be talking about Bots, Gold-Sellers, and Regional Price abuse.
• Using bots, gold-sellers, or abusing regional pricing is against the ToS of the game and can get you banned. DO NOT USE THEM.
• Many STO communities will frown on ANY discussion of these topics.
• However, they are a major cause of many of the economic issues in the game and need to be addressed.

ECONOMY BASICS

The main currencies I will be focusing on:

• Zen – Purchased with $$$
• Unrefined Dilithium – Rewarded to players via ingame actions.
• Does nothing until refined.
• Refined Dilithium
• You can refine 8,000 unrefined dil into refined dil on each character per day.
• You can get an additional 500 converted each day via a mission at the Fleet Dil Mine.
• Lifetime Members can refine an additional 1,000 every other day via the Veteran Dil Refiner NPC
• Each account can have up to 61 characters, meaning it is possible to refine 549,000 Dil per day. (61 * 9,000)
• Energy Credits (EC) – Many sources, is the currency used on the player exchange/market.

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ENERGY CREDITS (EC)

• EC generation has massively blown up in the past few years due to the Admiralty and Endeavor systems, but there has been no new EC sinks to counter and remove some of that EC from the game.

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• Gold-Sellers have established large bot farms that generate EC & Dil at a massive scale.
• More on this later in the video.

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BOTS / GOLDSELLERS & EC

• https://twitter.com/BorticusCryptic/status/1570231321070538753

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• Admiralty is basically a mobile game and can be fully automated by experienced gold-sellers.

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• Even just 10 decent admiralty missions a day can net 1m EC per character per week.
• Some of the bot farms are operating with thousands of characters…
• And Admiralty is also generating dil...
• https://old.reddit.com/r/sto/comments/zkhruk/i_ran_35700_admiralty_missions_during_admiralty/

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LOCKBOX / PROMO SHIP EC PRICES

• As I discussed in a previous video released in 2022, one of the largest lockbox issues is the fact that we can’t directly sell the ship choice packs.
• Instead, when someone wins a T6 ship box, they must select a ship and sell that ship.
• So as more ships get added (especially desirable ones), it is dividing the supply of each individual ship and causing prices of all ships to shoot up.
• The recent launch of the Excelsior II and the Crossfield Refit being added to Infinity have had a massive impact on the ship economy.
• Either Cryptic unbinds the choice packs, or Lockbox ships will join Promo ships being priced and sold above the 1.5b exchange cap.

Zen & Regional Price Abuse

• Regional price abuse is when someone finds a region where the game currency (Zen) is cheaper and uses a VPN to purchase Zen cheaper there than what it would normally cost for them in their country.

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• THIS IS A BANNABLE OFFENSE. I KNOW PEOPLE WHO WERE BANNED FOR DOING THIS. DO NOT TRY THIS.

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• But Gold-Sellers don’t care and have burner accounts setup to buy Keys/Promo Packs at a fraction of what it should cost.

Zen & Regional Price Abuse (cont.)�Argentina Prices (Thanks Martin for the Pic!)�Argentina Avg Wage is ~1/8^th of the US Avg

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Zen & Regional Price Abuse (cont.)

• Regional Pricing exist to make sure people in various regions are not priced out of the game.
• The issue is that people use VPNs and burner accounts to make Cryptic think they’re in that region and are getting Zen much cheaper by doing so.
• This is a common issue in the gaming industry. Cryptic could counter it by being more aggressive with tracking accounts buying lots of Keys/Promo Packs in those regions that then transfer them to other accounts rather than opening or selling them.
• AGAIN, IF YOU TRY TO ABUSE THIS, YOU RISK GETTING BANNED.

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DILITHIUM EXCHANGE (DilEx)

• The DilEx allows us to exchange Refined Dil for Zen and Zen for Refined Dil.
• The exchange rates are determined by players, with the exchange having a minimum of 25 Dil per Zen, and a max of 500 Dil per Zen.
• If the min or max is hit, then a backlog forms and the exchange will operate on a first come-first serve basis.
• This system is what makes the game so accessible to Free To Play.
• Allows you to grind out Dil to get the Paid Zen currency, which allows you to buy anything but the Lifetime Subscription (PC only, console can buy it)

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Xbox DilEx (Thanks Turtle!)

PC DilEx – Drastically Different from Console

PC DilEx Issues

• The PC DilEx has hit the max exchange cap of 500 Dil Per Zen, which has led to a massive backlog with over $94,000 worth of Dilithium sitting in the queue waiting to be converted to Zen.
• This means for players selling Dil to get Zen, orders can take several weeks to go through due to the first come first serve functionality of the exchange.

PC DilEx History (from u/Tidus17 on Reddit)

• Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/sto/comments/u0l0v6/dilithium_exchange_2014_2021/

PC DilEx Backlog (How much dil was being sold at 500 Dil:Zen)

What Happened? (Community Opinion)

Let's start with the most common answers STO players respond with.

1. Nothing to use Dil on
2. Blame players with larger accounts of 50+ characters that refine dil on them daily.
1. Remember, the max possible characters on an account is 61, and each can refine 9k Dil a day (8k if you don’t do the Vet Dil Refine or Fleet Dil missions)
2. 61 characters * 9,000 = 549,000 Dil that can be refined daily.
3. 549k Dil/day is 1,098 Zen per day at the current 500:1 exchange rate!

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So, is that really the problem? (cont on next slide)

What Happened? (Community Opinion)

I believe those are contributing factors, but I don’t believe either explain the full set of issues we are experiencing on PC.

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If those were the only issues, then XB and PS would be facing the same issues. Yet, Xbox has an exchange rate of ~254 Dil:Zen, and Playstation has an exchange rate of 370 Dil:Zen.

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Not only are console exchange rates drastically lower than what we have on PC, but I’ve also been told that the Xbox DilEx has remained quite steady for the past 2-3 years.

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Common Community Solutions 1/2

• Increase the DilEx cap from 500 to 750 or 1000.

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Cryptic tried this over in Neverwinter and it immediately backfired with the Dil:Zen rate instantly increasing to the new cap.

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Neverwinter now has a Backlog over 6x worse than what STO has on PC, and it takes several months for orders to go through.

Common Community Solutions 2/2

• Implement an account wide Dil refinement cap.

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This is floated quite often as “the solution” to the DilEx, but it would only serve to make things significantly worse.

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It would lower the amount of Dil a huge farming account could get daily, but there aren’t that many people maxing out the 549k Dil that a 61-character account can do each day.

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Rather, this would open the floodgates and allow players who have tons of Dil on one character to refine massive amounts of dil, introducing even more Dil into the market.

Potential Cause #1: Dil’Hadars

• Victory is Life introduced the playable Jem’Hadar faction back in June 2018.
• Jem’Hadars start at level 60, and it became quite common for players, making them a great choice for Dil Farming alts as they can do Admiralty very early on.
• Players quickly started to use Jem’s to farm the Dilithium rewarded from hitting Tier 5 in a reputation, creating the “Dil’hadar” farming approach.
• Once a Dil’Hadar alt had reached T5 in all reps and refined that dil, the dil was moved off the character and the character deleted to start the process over.
• This lasted for many years and was nerfed in March of 2022 via Reps being changed to reward Rep Dil Vouchers at T5 rather than raw Dilithium.
• Image by u/Berwfy93 - Source: https://reddit.com/r/sto/comments/uev201/victory_is_life/

PC DilEx History (from u/Tidus17 on Reddit)

• Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/sto/comments/u0l0v6/dilithium_exchange_2014_2021/

The Issue with Dil’Hadars being the main cause.

The Real Issue – Bots

• Bots have been an issue in STO for a very long time, and Cryptic has tried to counter some botting approaches in the past. Most notably was the Omega Minigame bots that forced Cryptic to change the Omega components to bind-on-pickup.
• I’ve had suspicions of bot farms having a severe economic impact for quite some time, but most bot farms are hidden and virtually impossible for us players to notice.
• However, one botter recently slipped up and exposed a large portion of their farm in a way that players were able to identify it.
• This bot farm consisted of hundreds of accounts with thousands of characters.
• Bots also explain why this is a PC unique issue. Can’t really run automation software on a console, nor multiple accounts at a time per device like a PC can.

Starbase One AFK Bot Farms

• The “Defense of Starbase One” (SB1) TFO Launched Oct 9, 2018 and was quickly found to be easily completable (even on Elite) while being AFK or by just using abilities like Fleet Support.
• The AFK issues with this queue were reported shortly after it launched, but Cryptic never addressed them.
• In late 2022, a group of players found and exposed a bot farm with hundreds of accounts that were running private instances of SB1.
• When looking up “Starbase One” in the social window at most points throughout 2022, you would see dozens of instances at all hours filled with mostly Jem’Hadar Science captains.
• Jem Science used as they have command spec unlocked right away, which gets a starship trait that lets them deploy Fleet Support at any HP %.

SB1 Bot Farm Banned?

• After myself and others had gathered enough data on the publicly visible SB1 bot farm, it was reported to Cryptic who acted on some of the accounts.
• However, there are clearly still instances of SB1 running right now, just with accounts that are hidden.
• Take note of the Instance number after the name of the map. When I took that picture earlier today there were at least 40 instances of SB1 active, with most of them hidden from public view.

Interview with a Bot Farmer

• After I discussed the SB1 botting on a recent stream, one of the gold-sellers that runs an SB1 bot farm and was partially hit by the report I had made reached out to me and gave me some interesting information.
• They claimed to have a bot farm consisting of over hundreds of accounts that they have been using to bot various things in the game for the past decade.
• They said that at their peak they were refining a total of 350,000,000 Dil per month. That’s 700,000 Zen worth of Dil a month, which is worth $7,000.

Bot Farms and the DilEx

• While an insane number, 350 million refined dil over the course of a month is quite doable with just the number of accounts that were publicly visible via the search window over the month that I was watching.
• At a minimum, ~1,460 characters would need to refine 8k dil/day to get 350m dil in a month. Easily doable for a bot farm with hundreds of accounts.
• There are clearly more farms out there, and if each are of the same scale or larger, then they are having a significant impact on the DilEx.
• For reference, the DilEx usually sees about 300k Dil move through the backlog daily. That means this one bot farm from this one gold seller may account for as much as 7.7% of the Dil supply to the DilEx.

How wasn’t this detected by Cryptic?

• Outside of the huge market impact these bot farms are having on the market, you must wonder how Cryptic didn’t detect and/or ban this bot farm.
• The SB1 bot farm I showed had been publicly visible for months, and only stopped after I sent in a report with over 100 accounts to Cryptic (who didn’t even ban all the accounts I reported).
• Their internal metrics should be showing SB1 being the large majority of TFOs being played.
• Makes me wonder; Is their bot detection really that bad, or do they like the boost it provides to their metrics to appease management and/or their new owner?

What Cryptic Needs To Do

• Revamp “Defense of Starbase One” to make it so people can’t just AFK it or clear enough of it with just a Fleet Support.
• Identify other TFOs that may have similar AFK potential.
• Have a serious sit down to look at where Energy Credits and Dil are being generated and identify accounts that are only doing those actions.
• Clearly, Admiralty has set off some alarms per Bort’s tweet earlier in 2022. If an account is just doing that and transferring the resources to other accounts, might be worth looking into and acting on.
• Unbind T6 LB/Promo Ship Choice packs so people can directly sell the choice packs on the Exchange.

Summary

• On PC, the Dilithium and Energy Credit Economies have been massively impacted by large bot farms that Cryptic has failed to address.
• No Dil-sinks can counter the amount of Dil that bot farms are dumping into the economy.
• One Gold-Seller told me their Bot-Farm was producing 350,000,000 Dil per month.
• That’s equal to $7,000 worth of Zen!
• STO has several Gold-Sellers of similar or larger size, each with their own farms to generate EC and Dil.
• The EC economy is also hit due to some bot farms being focused on Admiralty.
• Cryptic needs to tackle these types of Farms if there is to ever be any hope of the ingame PC economy recovering.