TOPIC: Token Prices plummet?

Wysterivern wrote: Compared to 5-10 years ago would you recommend to new players to buy/invest in builds?

It would be in my interest for new players to want to buy all of the tokens I want to sell.

What I would recommend is that new players play long enough to not be new players before investing in the game. Someone's situation is going to vary, so making blanket statements doesn't work for anything, but there was a nine year gap between when I started playing and when I bought any tokens. Someone else can probably wait a year before deciding whether it's a hobby worth investing additional money in.

Also, investment levels are all over the place. People have bought uncommons and rares from me for their Normal play at a fraction of the cost of a ticket. Someone buying one UR is not the same as someone pursuing a Nightmare build.

Then, is someone playing by themselves? With one other person? With a small group? With a group large enough to buy out runs? With people who have collections?

Advice should be tailored to the individual. Having said that, for the reason Zych mentioned, I would not expect tokens to retain value. The age of collection/speculation seems over. If buying tokens, it's because you get value out of playing them. If I view every time I use a legendary as $5 of value from that token, the cost of those legendaries is considerably less than if I'm somehow hoping I get to play with them for years and still sell them later for what I bought them. I don't really regret any buys for tokens I've used significantly. My regrets have been around buying tokens my group *might* use but didn't to any significant degree or when I speculated on tokens going up in value.

Quite a few valid points have been brought up. I’d like to color in one that was mentioned but not in detail.

Several big collectors sold their collections. The ones who did it are key here. If I sold my collection, there would be a lot there but only 1-2 each of big items (RoSP, Skulls, dragon orbs, legendaries, etc.) It would depress prices briefly but not enough to fill the need for everyone looking for oranges, etc..

1 collection, in particular, had double digits of all of these. He set a timetable for selling then sold it all. Most for half of what he previously sold them for.

Suddenly, hundreds of thousands of dollars in tokens flooded the market. For Relics and higher, it will take years for the secondary market to recover.

For URs, power creep has obsoleted most tokens 3+ years old. The other side of power creep has reduced player desire to keep building up. When getting to nightmare and a +15 in attack and saves is enough - why keep going? Epic doesn’t offer anything new in rewards and the gap to get there is thousands of dollars.

There are ways to make URs more valuable but that is best handled in a different thread.

I predicted a year or so ago that Legendaries would be sub $500. They are well on their way. I'm guessing they will settle in the $250-$300 range, at best.

Too many Tokens in the market. Too much VTD, it's getting stale and it continues to flood the market with Tokens. High level builds aren't fun anymore in VTD or in person because there's no challenge now. Sealed runs are the most fun and only require a ticket and the 10 pack. Rare and lower builds are also fun and don't require big Token purchases. I really think VTD is killing the game a bit, that's just my opinion though. It was more fun before VTD when you had more downtime between in person runs. TD every month just seems like too much. Just felt nicer when there was only in person Cons. Have a great time at a Con with new runs and then take a TD break for a few months, then the anticipation would begin to build again as the next Con approached. It was awesome. And in person Cons draw the new blood, not VTD. All that being said I'm still spending a fair amount on Tokens. Betting Jeff and company will launch a cool new version of the game when the next Safeholds are announced. They really need to. Time for a full reboot. We need True Dungeon 2.0 with Safehold 1 as the gateway to entry. I think they can pull it off, if not and TD continues on the same path I will stop my Token purchases after Ring Con.

Randal, shoot me a text and let's go have lunch sometime.

Rob

What I would prefer is to decrease the amount of VTD in a year.

February, March, April, then September, maybe November, maybe December.

What I would prefer is Mythic now where having a top level build would still mean a 10-person run is challenging. There is still value in a top end build but not for anything easier than like an Epic Double Down.

But, having more challenging play doesn't do anything for Ultrarares. Ultrarares are for people at Nightmare. With the vast quantities of relics, Eldritch, Arcanum, and legendaries in circulation, don't need URs for anything. Could just run R&R (Relics & Rares TM, R, C, NFT, QED, ...) for NM, where relics are the $100 token and so many rares are at the same power level as old URs.

Btw, while VTD may have changed other people's buying habits, I was getting vast quantities of URs before VTD. Being able to make multiple high end builds even while only playing two months out of a year was appealing. Not that this really matters as the VTD effects happened and the fallout is ongoing.

Anyway, we still don't understand what the new normal [sic] is, and we aren't likely to know as things change so often with this game.

TD PvP tournament please.

Annual player verse player tournament. Where players go head to head with their top high-end builds. Sliding against one another, different boards or new dual ended head to head boards where they are bumping Tokens, progressively harder memorization challenges with casters getting it correct slinging massive spell damage, etc. To make it fair maybe don't use a players Tokens in their build, rather only assign a point value to each Token a player has in their build (better points for higher Rarity Tokens) and then players get certain HP, slide certain pucks, given certain spells, etc. based on the points they have. Now it's a simple game of sliding/memorizing.

Have a leaderboard, crown an annual Champion of the Realm, give the Champion of the Realm a cool unique one off Token, give the Champion a special one of a kind character card for the year to play, give them a unique in game benefit for the year, give them a discount on Tokens for the year, etc. Also have benefits for second and third place. Maybe give players that play VTD a small special bonus that would help them in the annual tournament, same for players that attend the smaller Cons. This would give players more of a reason to continue to chase the high-end builds, spend money on Tokens and play VTD and go to Cons. Now UR's, Relics, Legendaries are worth more $$ because of a higher point value they confir in the tourney. How it would all work I don't know, but Jeff's super creative, he can figure it out.

Rob F wrote: TD PvP tournament please.

Annual player verse player tournament. Where players go head to head with their top high-end builds. Sliding against one another, different boards or new dual ended head to head boards where they are bumping Tokens, progressively harder memorization challenges with casters getting it correct slinging massive spell damage, etc. To make it fair maybe don't use a players Tokens in their build, rather only assign a point value to each Token a player has in their build (better points for higher Rarity Tokens) and then players get certain HP, slide certain pucks, given certain spells, etc. based on the points they have. Now it's a simple game of sliding/memorizing.

Have a leaderboard, crown an annual Champion of the Realm, give the Champion of the Realm a cool unique one off Token, give the Champion a special one of a kind character card for the year to play, give them a unique in game benefit for the year, give them a discount on Tokens for the year, etc. Also have benefits for second and third place. Maybe give players that play VTD a small special bonus that would help them in the annual tournament, same for players that attend the smaller Cons. This would give players more of a reason to continue to chase the high-end builds, spend money on Tokens and play VTD and go to Cons. Now UR's, Relics, Legendaries are worth more $$ because of a higher point value they confir in the tourney. How it would all work I don't know, but Jeff's super creative, he can figure it out.

That is interesting, but it wouldn't really do anything to prop up UR or Relic prices, as the few people that would participate would be focused more on Legendary/Eldritch/Arcanum level tokens. I'm guessing most of the people that would participate already have top-end builds.

One could have "levels" to the titles.

Rare champion
UR champion
Relic champion
Legendary champion
Overall champion

I think it's interesting, but have no interest in PvP. I think it doesn't work well for support classes.

Now, if it was Team v Team, that might be something I could get behind. It could even include solving puzzles.

I fully agree with the PVP discussion. I know it's been brought up before. I think team battles 3v3 would be awesome. For "levels" I would recommend breaking it down by "points". For example highest level could be unlimted points (all gear top end). Next level could be X points maximum. Where each grade of token is assigned a point value and you need to optimize your build based on how many points you are willing to spend on a given item or slot. The lower tiers allow less point maximums. So a totem of heroism is great in normal TD because it is slotless but in PVP since it is orange it may "cost" too much to equip compared to using a set bonus to level up or a relic..


Found my old post of PVP league:

Just thinking out loud..

No set design, no story mode. Just players and a moderator. 60 minutes to vanquish the other team. For the last ~10 minutes everyone receives X eldritch damage every round until one team is dead.

Double elimination bracket

5v5 Team duels.
1. no healing or 1-up consumables

It would be cool to have two leagues.
1. Restricted rare (rares and below only)
2. Unlimited (Anything goes other than healing above)

The prize is bragging rights only. Or, if there must be a prize then a True Grind style participation token that everyone receives regardless of place.

$50 bucks per person for a season? That's buys you two guaranteed team duels and the potential for more if you win.

Survivor pins were a team v team tracking system, if a very limited one, in how groups did against an established challenge. It's not surprising, as people like to win, but this is where dungeons being harder mattered - a NM survivor pin was supposed to be a real challenge not a "just kill me in epilogue as I already have plenty".

What could do instead, though it would require effort on room DMs, so it may not fly, is to have a tracking system on party card where get points for how well do in rooms and point totals are recorded in a DB at the end of a run. Would never tie this to more treasure, it would just be for people who like to see rankings. Now, this already has a problem in that it can't be that granular, so lots of folks should have same scores.

Maybe some folks would find it appealing to get 100pts. every dungeon as a status thing, even if a bunch of groups got 100. Then, someone could aim for 100pts. on every solo run, or whatever.

It's not PvP, but I don't know how many people would really care about PvP. I certainly don't.

Love that people are throwing out ideas to reinvigorate the game. I encourage that line of thinking. My issue with the last idea is PUG runs. I go back to how they eliminated "Treasure" rooms because people running more than once would ruin a puzzle just to make sure they got the treasure token for that room. Would the same type of behavior occur if we were getting points for how we did in the dungeon? Again, it's sad, but it only takes a few to ruin the experience for many.

Counterpoint: the game is doing great! Nothing is "killing" it.

The tokens are not the game, the token "economy" is certainly not the game, and the fact that fewer people are currently lining up to spend $$$ buying tokens on the secondary market does not imply that the game itself is in need of reinvigoration. Depending on the extent to which it impacts TDA's bottom line (which only they can know), this may incentivize TPTB to do some hard thinking about cause and effect and token design... or not. But we're all here because we love playing True Dungeon, and we'll still be here for as long as that continues to be true.