Zen Currencies. It's a currency bought for real-life money, for Zen you will be able to buy most luxurious items available in game. In Zen Market panel (opened from quick menu icon) you can check what epic items can be bought for Zen. You'll pay with Zen for best quality mounts, companions, bags, items with unique skins or services like name. The first bag is the one you start with, the second bag you get is from a main story quest in Black Lake and the third bag comes from a quest in Neverdeath Graveyard. Beyond those bags, you have to buy them in the Zen Store. Spend 5 in the zen store and you get a free starters pack, in that pack is a large bag as well as some other crap. Description of problem: Zen exchange on PC has a backlog of 37 million Zens, resulting in no easy way for new players to acquire zen without purchasing them. New players can either pay real money to acquire some zen (for basic necessities such as VIP service) or they can save up 700k AD, which is a lot of AD for a new player, and then wait for.

4Inflation, Rough AD, The ZAX cap and AD sinks

Intro

The aim of this short guide is to give a quick overview on Neverwinters basic economic concepts and currencies: Astral Diamonds, Rough Astral Diamonds, ZEN, The ZEN AD eXchange (ZAX) and its cap, AD sinks, refinement cap, inflation and so on.

Neverwinter getting zen without real money free

This is not a guide on how to make AD or how to get rich.

Basic Currencies: ZEN & AD

Neverwinter has two fundamental currencies as the basis of its economy. The first is the time currency, named Astral Diamonds or AD in short.
AD is used to buy important game resources, trade with other players at the Auction House (AH) and in short, is treated as the base currency in the economy. This is the player`s “salary” for investing time in the game.
In a very simplified way, AD is gained by playing the game.

The second basic currency is ZEN, which represents an investment of real money. ZEN is generated from real money purchases.

ZEN AD eXchange (ZAX)

The ZAX allows players to exchange AD for ZEN and ZEN for AD. The exchange is made among players. If players do not list ZEN that they are willing to exchange for AD, then no player will be able to exchange AD to ZEN.

The mechanism is somewhat similar to auctions or stock exchange listings. A player will list the amount of ZEN they want to buy or sell and the price they are willing to pay or wish to get for it in AD.

There are some limitations:

The minimal price possible to list is 50AD per 1 ZEN, and maximum is 750AD per 1 ZEN. The 750AD maximum is often called the ZAX cap.
A player can have at most 5 listings at any time. Each listing is limited to a maximum of 5k ZEN.
If there is a higher buy listing and lower sell, the highest will be fulfilled at the higher buy rate. Meaning that if a Player A asked to sell at 50AD per 1 ZEN (50:1) and Players B and C, offered to buy at 500:1 and 750:1 respectively, player A will sell and receive at 750:1 even though they only asked for 50:1.
Important to note: This prevents costly mistakes of players selling their ZEN for very low price, and prevents ZEN transfer even at a loss. One can’t list at some arbitrary price lower than all the requests and another to sell at exactly same price.
This means that if someone offers to buy something from you for ZEN, with a promise that they will then transfer the ZEN to you after the trade, they either don’t know how it works, or they are trying to scam you.
Listings are fulfilled in order, like a regular queue, first in, first out.

In the game the ZAX is made of 3 panels, one to list an offer to buy ZEN, one to list an offer to sell, and one shows your current and past listings.

The buy tab:

The window is made up of two parts: the top part, in which a player can list their buy offer/request with the amount of ZEN and the price point (per one ZEN).
The bottom part lists the offers to sell. The locations of the sell offers on the buy window allow the buyer to see the current offers and adjust their price easily. Offers to sell are listed from low to high (5 lowest offers).

We can see that the offer list on the PC screenshot is empty. This happens when there is more demand for ZEN than people offering to sell. This means that any offer to sell will be immediately fulfilled and the list remains empty. Many people, erroneously, think this a “broken” ZAX, while this is exactly how it should work. This occurs when there is a backlog of buy offers.

The sell tab:

We can see that the sell tab is constructed in the same way. The offer form on the top and the buy offers at the bottom, which allows a seller to quickly see all the highest selling offers. Offers to buy are listed from high to low (5 highest offers).

As before on the PC screenshot we can see the result of the backlog. There is a huge amount of ZEN requested at the cap price.

The listings tab:

This panel shows the current listing. As seen before, there are a maximum of 5 listings with a maximum trade of 5k ZEN per listing.

The bottom part shows a log and a history of the listings. In the case of a backlog there is a wait time. The simplest way to roughly predict the wait time, is to write down the backlog amount at the time of the listing (18.4mil in the sell screenshot) and then divide the amount by the number of days that it took to fulfill the listing. It is Important to note that we want the amount at the time the listing was made and not at the time that it was fulfilled. So we know “How many were in the queue before us” and then “How much time for that queue to process”. Dividing the first by the last we know how much of the queue is processed per day. At the time of writing, it is about 500k per day, so now if we post when there is a backlog of 18mil it will take about 36 days (rough estimate).

Inflation, Rough AD, The ZAX cap and AD sinks

Looking at the above we can ask how all that backlog was created and why there is even a cap to begin with. To answer this we will need to look into the basic economic concepts of Printing money, Inflation and Hyperinflation.

Printing money, Inflation and Hyperinflation.

The fundamental issue in MMO games economies is that the time based currency, AD in our case, is constantly printed. Players must get a reward for their time: stabbing monsters, completing dungeons and so on. Each such reward is generated by the game from nowhere, essentially printing money to pay players.

The problem in that is that, is that every economic value is bound to supply and demand. The more supply of something we have (or less demand) the more that the economy is flooded with it and the less value that items or currencys have.

In our case, we generate huge amounts of supply so the value of the currency / money drops lower resulting in the prices for the same traded products becoming higher to compensate. Eventually the market is flooded and the currency becomes worthless.

This money printing has several side effects:

Inflation – we print money, the money is worth less, but we want still the same value for our items, so we charge more money for them. The process where prices rise is called inflation. (In the context of MMO games, inflation generally is used in reference to the money printing cause.)

Backlog – As we saw, the supply and availability of AD is so much higher than the supply of ZEN offered in trade for it, that people must to wait in line for a significant amount of time.

To combat this, there are several methods:

Limit supply (the rough AD refine cap)

If we can limit the amount of AD that enters the economy we can slow down the rate of inflation and the devaluation of the currency. One artificial method is the daily refinement method. Players get Rough Astral Diamonds (RAD)

Neverwinter Getting Zen Without Real Money