Infrastructure prices and the new drop rates

[Arysana]

So let me start off by saying I am not hitting the forums just to complain about the way the drop rates have been almost entirely shuttered. With any luck there is a reason for the dev team doing this and hopefully that reason will be apparent upon the revelation of new content.

So I have made a character on the Nezakan server and one thing I noticed, is that just funding my skills from 1-55 is nearly impossible. Even with the pink tiger candies given at the outset of the character's creation. If this were the only issue, it could eventually be overcome with time and effort. However not a single aspect of the infrastructure prices has been adjusted at all, leveling gathering, learning a craft, attaining expert in that craft, even teleporting around (albeit that point has been circumvented to some degree by means of quest teleporting for free), and so many other things that the game asks players to use Kinah for ,have not been adjusted at all. These systems were designed to help combat inflation within the game not completely stagnate player growth, if you have 4-500 players running around with 200m+ kinah each, and drops that pay up to 1.5m then the current prices are justifiable, as you will be sapping the players of that earned kinah for choices they make within that structure. But if you just remove the income and don't adjust the prices... well you keep the players from being able to do almost anything.

So, as I said I'm not here just to complain, though it is a point of frustration. I feel like the solution to this problem would be, to have someone adjust the prices for things the players need in order to progress (and yes I include in this craft/gather upgrading as it is an integral part of the game). Now if you want to keep prices for things like Expert designs from the merchant that wasn't in the game before as high as they are, sure that's fine because no one HAS to use them. The second thing would be to increase the drop rate for craft components (yes especially balaur materials) I was surprised to see I went through 3 BT runs and came out with 2 firm scales, I got a few other balaur mats leveling up ( I think 4 total various mats) even though what time I did grinding was spent killing balaur of appropriate level.  Lastly, manastones, seriously - this is a joke- most players on NZ are running around with mostly empty slotted gear, and no adding in 1 free (random and usually completely useless) nontradable  manastone per day with the option to pay you guys to get a few extras isn't going to solve this problem. Now, maybe this is all just a Nezakan problem, since you guys are trying to adjust Siel to come in line with the vision of whats to come going into the future. But if that's the case, a manastone pass is not the salve for all the problems plaguing the game.

Again, I get that if the development team is trying to adjust drop rates for (likely) a specific reason that we will understand it all soon. Or who knows maybe the Revenant update underperformed and we are seeing the dev team break the game to try to sell the fix before the servers eventually get the plug pulled. I sincerely hope it's not the later.

[Zurl]

The manastone event is an adhoc attempt to compensate for the plumet in drop rates, but it doesn't work on multiple levels.

Firstly, the event rewards are trivial. It takes a LOT of manastones to fill a piece of gear, let alone a set of armor, we are talking about several hundred, possibly a thousand manastones. Perhaps the GM should try it for themselves.

Secondly the devs left the manastone failure chance the same, rather than adjusting it to work with the low drop rates, hence the need for hundreds of manastones.

Crafting is seriously effected by drop rates and low server populations, the recipe for things like recovery potions, aether jelly,  are just not dropping. People go to all the work/cost of getting their crafting up to Expert or more, and they have no designs to use with that sill level.

[Chronobrrj-DN]

It feels like the Devs never played Aion on a low-populated server like Nezekan.  Or maybe they actually never played Aion.

I remember when I started on Aion 3.0 in 2012 in Kahrun Server, and I never struggled there like I am in Nezekan now.

[Zurl]

19 hours ago, Chronobrrj-DN said:

It feels like the Devs never played Aion on a low-populated server like Nezekan.  Or maybe they actually never played Aion.

I remember when I started on Aion 3.0 in 2012 in Kahrun Server, and I never struggled there like I am in Nezekan now.

If you are struggling on Nezekan, then re-roll on Siel, easy fix.

[Chronobrrj-DN]

15 hours ago, Zurl said:

If you are struggling on Nezekan, then re-roll on Siel, easy fix.

Nah.  Would struggle more there in Siel, because the prices probably are way higher.

[Cyfur]

3 hours ago, Chronobrrj-DN said:

Nah.  Would struggle more there in Siel, because the prices probably are way higher.

No way, Nezekan is way more expensive than Siel like 300% or more.

The only thing that is really expensive on Siel is the amount of AP you need for officers ranks.

eg. if you want to be Governor it's going require almost 29million AP.

 

 

[Zurl]

You wont find a single medal for sale on Nezekan, at least  on the Elyos side, no Sapphire boxes, no gold or silver medals.

That's a problem when you do Dredge, Tiak or arenas against geared Siel players, but the rest of the time it doesn't matter, everyone on NZ is in the same boat so world PvP is reasonably balanced.

 

[tinyman-KT]

 I really need  to let it be said,, The  manastone event is a joke,, sure you can pick your manastones but there is a huge piece missing.. Thats the proc  rate of it adhering to your gear or  weapon.  They have posted a  70% proc rate  of it not failing which is absolutely FALSE!!!! More like a 70%-85% failure rate.  example..

 I was   trying to fill a  6  slot   pvp gear.. I started out with  crit 17 an burnt thru 25  of them at a cost of 1, each 1,200,000= 30 million

so then i tried   crit 15    36   an it never fill it lucky the most was 4,,  36 stones  cost 500,000 kinah each = 18 million,, so then i tried   crit 13      40    cost  155,000 each = 6.2 million kinah an still did not fill the 6 slots.. I also used  enchanting items an failed which I haven't even included.   The total of 54.2 million kinah and  101  manastones.(not including  enchanting items)..     This is absolutely PATHETIC!!!!!, Tell me what good is this   manastone event with it  doing this  failure rate??  If you write them all they will say.. "We are so very sorry that your having such a bad time  trying to  get your manastones   to adhere. Its just another way of them saying they can care less!!!!,, Absolutely TERRIBLE!!!

[Shirene-DN]

On 6/10/2023 at 1:17 AM, Arysana said:

there is a reason for the dev team doing this

money.

[Zurl]

On 6/18/2023 at 3:46 PM, tinyman-KT said:

 I really need  to let it be said,, The  manastone event is a joke,, sure you can pick your manastones but there is a huge piece missing.. Thats the proc  rate of it adhering to your gear or  weapon.  They have posted a  70% proc rate  of it not failing which is absolutely FALSE!!!! More like a 70%-85% failure rate.  example..

 I was   trying to fill a  6  slot   pvp gear.. I started out with  crit 17 an burnt thru 25  of them at a cost of 1, each 1,200,000= 30 million

so then i tried   crit 15    36   an it never fill it lucky the most was 4,,  36 stones  cost 500,000 kinah each = 18 million,, so then i tried   crit 13      40    cost  155,000 each = 6.2 million kinah an still did not fill the 6 slots.. I also used  enchanting items an failed which I haven't even included.   The total of 54.2 million kinah and  101  manastones.(not including  enchanting items)..     This is absolutely PATHETIC!!!!!, Tell me what good is this   manastone event with it  doing this  failure rate??  If you write them all they will say.. "We are so very sorry that your having such a bad time  trying to  get your manastones   to adhere. Its just another way of them saying they can care less!!!!,, Absolutely TERRIBLE!!!

I agree, manastone failure and availability, are some of the biggest obstacles to gear progression.

The manastone pass event was a dud, it was flawed in 3 ways.

Firstly the stones received were  mostly determined by chance, instead of by selection.

Secondly you can't trade the stones you don't want.

Lastly, charging 690 Quna for a flawed event pass was extremely unattractive.

[Scalay]

i think the DROP rate from moobs could be better i think very low rate would be a good stuff moobs rarely drop manastones or gear woulf be a good think to fix

[Arysana]

On 6/19/2023 at 6:48 AM, Shirene-DN said:

money.

Yes, obviously, money. But what I meant by they have something else planned it was more like "they are going to have end bosses in dungeons be the most reliable place you can get stones" which is already the case. However as stated here already by others, the drop rate being in the single digits from these sources is not enough with the current supply needed to be successful in socketing the stones. Same with Enchantment stones though since the numbers there can be slightly (and I mean only slightly) more predictable. 

The honest part of the conversation that the game runners need to understand is that given the current trajectory of how drop rates are, the back logged supply (on Siel), and the rates for successfully enchanting the gear you get, running along their individual timelines it is not far off from where people like one of the other posters wont have 101 stones to try and throw at their gear anymore, and when that happens and basically no amount of kinah will fix your problem people will quit. 

I made this thread so that it might actually (although a long shot in the dark) reach the eyes of someone who can enact some change. You cannot keep this up, you will lose your game, classic will no longer exist, and I don't mean how most gamers call anything that isn't brimming with 100k+ population dead, I mean you will not be able to afford to keep the lights on. Something must be done about this, this is not an area where you can break the game and try to sell back the solution to us, especially in the ways you've chosen to attempt it.

One other example of how the game has now become broken is Crafting, in general its pretty bad, but more especially Balic crafting. If we absolutely can't have drop rates made more favorable on balaur mats, if that's not an option, then please adjust the recipes. I turned in 35 fighting spirit gems (killing 35 world bosses minimum) to get the bag of balic mats, and got 3 firm scales, the ONLY firm scales I've gotten from the 2 months I've been back playing the game. When one recipe of green quality asks for 37 of those and they are nowhere to be seen, there is a massive problem. And what's sad here is that they aren't even really trying to sell back the solution to this.

[Zurl]

The game is currently extremely buggy, lots of things are in Korean instead of English, so I would imagine the same level of quality assurance applies to things like drops in instances.

 

[Chronobrrj-DN]

Also, it´s totally unnaceptable seeing an NPC charging 10 million kinah for a Recipe...

[Arysana]

14 hours ago, Zurl said:

The game is currently extremely buggy, lots of things are in Korean instead of English, so I would imagine the same level of quality assurance applies to things like drops in instances.

 

Well the issue with the games code is for the dev team, what we have here in global is not a dev team but a "localization" team they can make minor tweaks to things like drop rates and have a little more freedom when it comes to events to help ease some of the issues we are having but ultimately they get little say in how things grow and evolve with the game. 

The reason I mention this is, if something is brewing, like say a major change where the manastones in the next update ( 2.9 or 3.0 or whatever the next big content pack is going to be) will only destroy themselves rather than everything you have in the sockets, there could be a directive from the dev team to the localization teams to make sure that the stockpile of previously unused stones get used up so that people aren't just having a hayday with new drops under the new system. But they can't let us know that something like that is going to happen because if they did, it would literally cause people to hoard their stones which is exactly what they want to avoid. It's what I've been alluding to this whole discussion. There might be -something- (note: I do not know if there is something,  or what that might be just speculating and throwing out ideas) that the devs have planned that could actually make these new drop rates or the focus on drops being from bosses, work better for the player base in general because they want to take the game in a different direction but need to have certain starting conditions first. But again, yes it is about money, so they want us to buy from them but if they were just doing a blatant cash grab with blind abandon then why don't we see packs of manastones available by catagory or even specific stones on the cash shop? I'd like to think that there is somewhere that the developers deserve a little bit of the benefit of the doubt when it comes to stuff like this before we all jump to conclusions that they just want to screw us over.

All that being said, there is still a great deal that needs addressing even if something like a systemic change is the goal, what we are experiencing now is not particularly fun when you can't socket your gear or have no amount of confidence that what you have to socket with will work. And surely there must be someway to balance those 2 without making literally everyone mad.

[Chronobrrj-DN]

The manastones supply is so bad, and the success rate is so bad, that I have to have 2 manastones per gear piece at most...lol

[2s65F09]

37 minutes ago, Chronobrrj-DN said:

The manastones supply is so bad, and the success rate is so bad, that I have to have 2 manastones per gear piece at most...lol

The reasoning behind the change is simple, and intelligent, if you think about it.

Hoards of bots plague the game in Korea. It would spill over here as we don't have much of a team.

I am enjoying the new system personally, it's like working an actual job.

Once a week perhaps everyone can gather in either Sanctum or Pandaemonium depending on faction and have a celebration of sorts.

Dancing, emoting, firework items, etc.

With the celebration will bring, hopefully, better rng.

We can only be positive and try our best as players and supporters of the game.

Edited July 1 by 2s65F09

[Zurl]

The reason why the open world drop rate will never be back to how it was, is to fix the open  world bot farming  problem.

Now they need to tune the new sources of the items which use to drop in the world, to where they drop now, eg instances.

Remember NA is a tenth of the server population that say the EU or Korea servers have, so the flow of drops ending up on the brokers is nowhere near as regular.

One thing, which is simple, and would really help, would be to set  the event manastones to be tradable like the enchantment stones are.

[Chronobrrj-DN]

The fix would be pretty simple.  Just let the manastones drop DECENTLY inside instances like Haramel, Nochsana, Kromede, Steel Rake, Talloc and Tempus.  Most people in Nezakan dont even have 3 manastones in each gear piece. This makes us way weaker against the Balaur fights.

[Zurl]

2 hours ago, Chronobrrj-DN said:

The fix would be pretty simple.  Just let the manastones drop DECENTLY inside instances like Haramel, Nochsana, Kromede, Steel Rake, Talloc and Tempus.  Most people in Nezakan dont even have 3 manastones in each gear piece. This makes us way weaker against the Balaur fights.

Yes,  getting enough manastones is a massive problem on Nezekan, with no end in sight.