[NEW MERCENARIES] Please note that all new forum users have to be approved before posting. This process can take up to 24 hours, and we appreciate your patience.
When I played back in 2013-14, and season 2 rare mats were a pain to get.
The population then was decent or at least better than it is now.
I wonder if implementing an upgraded version of the seal shop was not beneficial because it shot the economy.
When you get a rare drop now it's not worth very much like it was then and people play less because they are already done upgrading.
Maybe s3 chapter 2 will raise prices and the implement of new scrolls too?
Comments
''This game sucks, everything is so easy to get and cheap, no way to farm''
See where I am going with this?
I don't know, man.
There are still items in game that can strike you with milions of gold. Just gotta aim for those.
It's a much better situation with the lowered cost for S2 mats and the S3 mats available for seals as well.
I actually think the seal shop is a very clever way of Nexon indirectly encouraging more players to purchase NX for runes and such, because suddenly a lot of players have access to the best in slot gear. What do they want to do with that best in slot gear? Enchant! Enhance! Buy runes! It's a very subtle way of tapping into the "free" system and pulling some money out of it. It used to be that orange stuff and such was an entirely "F2P Mechanic" save for those who bought boxes for essences, but by increasing the availability of this best in slot gear, it encourages players to look past the step of just acquisition, and look into upgrading, which is money for nexon.
TLDR: Yeah, some things have deflated in price, but that has only made the money makers shift to different items...
Oh my oh my
Here is the problem though: When you have such good gears and then there is nothing to do in this game, ofc it's gonna be a wasteland. Neamhain is the only raid in this game that will push gears (and 99% people cannot run), but everything else is a snoozefest after running them for 2 weeks.
Their way of solving the problem is to bring a new RNG box with each update instead of coming up with more content. RNG box =/= real content, but whatever keeps them float I guess. I'm betting the next update in late march/early april will be some sort of RNG box sale.
You think people are playing less because they already upgraded their gear to +10 orange weapons?
People are not playing because they realize that no matter how much they play they can no longer progress their gear. Orange +10 is the limit. It's too hard to get past that and there is no guarantee. So if you have a +10 orange weapon why should you waste your time playing this game if you can't get any better than that?
Seal shop was a great addition to the games.
Seal shop must not be the reason.
Things like seal shop are only complained about by the more fortunate. The real reason everything is so cheap is because everyone who has money isn't buying anything so there's no gold in circulation. Blame the people hoarding for 95 cap, not the seal shop.
I was thinking they should add mysterious shards to seal shop as well
Enhancement system where they think its okay to BLOW UP some HARD TO GET (originally) items for a chance to increase the stats. Attack speed and +bonus damage make a HUGE difference. Do you know what causes people to quit the game? Knowing that if they get LUCKY to get over +10, that if they are lucky to get +12, IF THEY CHANCE IT TO GET MORE, EVERYTHING IS LOST. And here is a fact, I have tried to +11 my longsword 8 times with Gob stones. Not ONCE has it succeeded. Not ONCE have I ever gotten over +10 on ANY of the 13 characters. I have been playing since BETA.
Enchanting is WORSE because its god damn required. Exquisite runes are $25 and only sold SOMETIMES. If they REALLY want to make money, $10 MAX. $2 for regular runes, $4 for premium runes. THOSE are valid prices. $25 is practically half the price of a NEW AAA game. Why is it okay to think "Well, yeah they had to find a scroll by chance, and they have a slim as hell chance for it to land, so lets stab them in the eyeball for a fair shot at the game" for something REQUIRED to be meaningful.
RNG is offset by seal shop but not all things are in seal shop. Seal shop was the best thing this game ever had done to it. Prices are currently amazing. I agree with mysterious shards and all that to be added to it. Gives rewards for people playing and offsets the TERRIBLE RNG of drops.
And optimization is just something that needs to happen if they want the game to live.
they don't. rebuilding the game just to improve the experience for the existing playerbase and maybe bring back a few veterans is not a good business decision.
The problem is not really that the seal shop update killed the economy, but the drop rates not being updated to reflect the seal shop update.
Look at OJ solids, super rare drop, not worth much because it only costs 50 seals. If OJ solids dropped often enough, then the price would match the drop rate and people wouldn't feel cheated by getting a super rare drop that is not worth much. Now, the price doesnt reflect the drop rate at all.
I think it would be better if all seal shop mats were unbound and could be sold back to the seal shop for the full purchase price. This would do the following :
-Allow people to gear up alts easier (and encourage people to buy runes) since they could farm seals on their main, transfer them to their alt or expertise character and then make end game gear
-Allow people to help their friends gear up easier (similar to above, very important for getting new players to stick around rather than jumping ship to BDO or whatever)
-Make low level seal shop mats worth something, most people just NPC teten frags since they are worthless
-Give people a reason to run lower level raids since the rare drops would be worth something
Another problem is the drop ratios. Devcat has consistently demonstrated very poor understanding of proper ratios. E.G. Look at purple solids vs purple smooths. You need 5 solids to make a full armor set, vs 2 smooths. So the drop ratio should reflect that (5:2 ratio). Instead, smooths are much more common than solids. End result? Purple smooths are worthless compared to purple solids because anyone running s3 dailies have far more smooths than they could use, which reuslts in an excess of smooths in the economy.
The roch revamp is another great example of poor ratios. Lets say you need 1 rare drop + 10 trash mats to make one item. The roch revamp made the rare drop so common that the limiting factor is getting enough trash mats to make the item, so the rare drops are now worthless.
First of all lets assume an economy without massive inflation from gold sellers.
Most items that are worth anything are drops that you -might- get once a month if you do end game stuff every day (which not every can do due to IRL commitments, etc). Things like r7 scrolls for example. Because if you could get r7 scrolls once a week or more, they wouldn't be worth much, because most people would be willing to wait to get the scrolls themselves rather than spend gold on them.
Back when roch/drags was end game, roch was great because roch drops was a consistent source of gold (titan ankle frags, etc). That went out of the window with drags and beyond due to the super rare drops and bad ratios. No point buying drag trash mats when you could do drags for 3 months and not get a single rare mat.
If the only thing worth anything are rare drops, then you run into the problem of people quitting or refusing to do certain battles because "Im not going to get anything good anyway, why bother?". Plenty of people refuse to do s2 dailies precisely for this reason.
Problem 2 is that newbies find it hard to get money, they need a lot of money to get geared up, but the stuff they can get consistently is worth pretty much nothing. The only thing that they can get consistently, that is worth anything, are enhancemnet elixirs, which is completely reliant on whales willing to buy runes to mass enhance weapons for a +15. But new players ALSO need elixirs to get geared up (outside of rare events where you get a coupon or whatever), so its kind of a catch 22.
End result : newbies often quitting because they cant get money for gear, dont want to spend long hours farming elixirs or whatever, and they find the game too hard so they quit and jump to another game.
Seal shop -kind of- helps but most newbies loath the idea of talking to people to do raids so they just give up and jump to another game instead.
This is a bit simplified. Even if you have a full OJ set, theres still scrolls, plus the accessories arent in the seal shop. Even if you do have full everything, you can still gear up an alt, get gold to prepare for future content, play for the fun combat, play with friends, etc.
If on the other hand you hate the combat, you are never gonna stick around for long.