Zarbi

What a load of rubbish. I didn't miss the siege, if you did it's your own fault, not the maintenance which ended well before the siege time.

Around 1k kinah has been a shard price for ages on the brokers, so the shugo is a bit more expensive, but it has stock. I still get my shards from Dredge mob drops.

LFG is also flooded with kinah spammers, and I expect many users have no idea how to deal with that so they ignore LFG. When 2.7 comes out on May 9th, there will be a stack of players rolling new toons, so it will be a golden opportunity for people to find groups for the lower level stuff. Should also spike up the number of low level stigmas on the brokers.

Go farm Haramel and NTC

Level 28 stigmas are dropping in NTC, eg. word of protection which is pretty rare.

It is in Korea since Feb it seems.

The devs caused the reduction in the world drops, it's not some glitch they missed.

So what? If players can get kinah or items they need from quests and instances, then they don't have a need to buy kinah from bot runners.

You understand that NCsoft will have thought about that, and have had since Feb to observe in Korea if the bot runners are going to bother with such things. They know the sources and sinks of kinah in the economy and can adjust them to maintain a desired inflation rate. eg. if an instance becomes exploited, reduce it's rewards. Just like they have done with the rewards from world drops.

Instances have limits. Bots can't run those all day.

How do bots generate new kinah to sell other than world drops?

Of course it fixes the crazy inflation. Where do you think the extra kinah comes from that gets into the economy to drive up prices, Tiger pink candies? No, it comes from the bots selling drops to the merchants.

Do we get an extra character slot unlocked so we can play this new class?

Cheating is a value judgement, not a fact, which is not for you or I to determine, it is decided and enforced (or ignored) by the NCsoft staff.

Cool, May 9th.

It's obviously not directed at cheaters, they are trying to stop the kinah inflation from bot runners selling stuff to the merchants. Where do you think the gold spammers get their kinah from? They want people to get their rewards by doing quests, sieges, and instances, not farming mobs in the open and selling the drops to the merchant. I am not making this up, I have read the February notice on the Korean servers board about this, which you clearly have not. If you want to see an English translation of the kinah notice, watch this video at the 18:25min mark.

Game is back up, siege in 10min go go go

Well you are not going to get it, so run away and troll elsewhere. The devs have already announced their intention with drops 2 months ago in Korea, they wan to kill kinah from bots, and I have seen absolutely nothing here to say NA is going to be any different.

They way they are addressing it in Korea is to make dropped items worth only 1 kinah when sold to the merchant. That should reduce the bot farmers, and hopefully allow an increase in the drop rate again. The bot farmers have been injecting too much kinah into the economy via selling to the merchant, so they are going to stop that. When we get the patch I don't know, Korea got it in Feb.

Cutting into Dredgion I can live with because there are 3 sessions per day, cutting into the Ingg/Gelk siege is just plain stupidity, it's going to make a mess.

"Everyone else" is not leaving as you claim. The devs are trying to address the serious bot problem, and you are simply impatient. Some people even claim the bots are a good thing, but that is not the global consensus, in other countries they hate them.

I am a bit worried that this new maintenance time eats into Dredge and possibly the Ingg and Gelk siege.

As I pointed out, above, from the Korean patch notes, expect the drop rates to get even worse. The devs are trying to kill bots. Instead you will get kinah etc from quests, dungeons, sieges, so get over it.

The devs have chosen in Aion 2.5, to make the game harder to obtain items from mob drops. I am sure they are aware of the overall impact. It's the same for everyone, get over it and find another way to progress like everyone else. In Korea the merchant price of world drops was changed in Feb to just 1 kinah, obviously an attempt to kill bot runners, which Korea call "bad users", to balance that they have added kinah rewards to quests and sieges. So, the intention of the devs is quite clear, make the game not worth it for bot runners.

It's the drops per-capita that count, obviously with more players they also consume more dropped items, it's not an economy of scale thing, it's proportional. To change the balance, you need to change the portion of the server population that needs the specific drops. eg. if the server is full of physical damage players, then magic stones are probably not all that popular, and there may be a shortage of crit and attack stones.