Thoughts from a Returning Player

Mharduz

I last played Aetolia seriously sometime around 2015, and I decided to give retirement a whirl and roll something new. So far, I've had some fun with the Archivists. It's good roleplay.

Generally, I'm enjoying the changes and having to re-learn some of the mechanics helps the game feel fresh.

That said, the lack of gold drops from bashing are becoming a problem. Bashing used to be a fantastic social activity, and you could always get some kind of group together for Tiyen or Xanhaal, or Tcanna. Now? I've largely been stuck bashing in the 1-2 on level areas for my character level that I can solo as an Archivist. In talking to people who used to bash quite often, the inability to make enough gold to replace the curatives used has been a major issue.

Now, it seems like the alternatives are forcing everyone to repeat the same handfuls of quests for gold, resorting to vermin hunting, or sitting around at the Inner Gate doing nothing. It may be good for the game's economy, but the social aspects of the game have definitely taken a nose-dive over the last couple of years.

Rhyot

Speaking as someone who primarily bashes/hunts, I understand where you're coming from. However, bashing is no longer about making gold. Nowadays, bashing is more geared primarily towards xp gain while questing/fishing is your primary gold making.

If you are wanting gold, I would suggest doing the quests and maybe invest in fishing. I hear a lot of people make a lot of gold just by using their autofishing scripts and then doing random roleplays throughout the day.

As for social aspects, there are plenty of people who enjoy roleplaying. There's even a clan called the Roleplay Syndicate (not sure if its still around or not) that people are in and use that as a means to inform others of their availability and desire to roleplay. As far as hunting social aspects, rumor is that there are dungeons coming up soon (tm) ((at least it was talked about in the latest townhall)) and that alone might force people to socialize for hunting a little more... but we'll see what happens.

Mharduz

Rhyot said:

Speaking as someone who primarily bashes/hunts, I understand where you're coming from. However, bashing is no longer about making gold. Nowadays, bashing is more geared primarily towards xp gain while questing/fishing is your primary gold making.

I'm not looking at bashing to generate a profit, just to break even on the cost of curatives. Maybe it's just being an Archivist and not having particularly good DPS or a strong audit while bashing, but it's expensive.

I went through something like 800 sips of health, 80 anabiotic, and around 100 mending in six hours yesterday. I stopped to kill Venicus and Agrasha once or twice to earn enough gold for refills.

Perhaps the issue is my class more than anything, as Bloodloch currently has both of the Shadow guilds that are considered the "top" for bashing, but my Teradrim (at a similar artifact level to my Archivist) didn't go through nearly as many curatives.

As far as the fishing license, or mindlessly repeating the same quests, I hope @Tiur doesn't consider that a reasonable solution. If I was a true newbie instead of someone with many retirement credits, I think I would have been fairly disenchanted with the idea that I need an fishing license (worth ~$40 in credits) just to make enough gold to bash.

When bashing at least paid for itself, it was a more social activity because more people did it. Aetolia doesn't need less opportunities for people to play together, and that's what so severely nerfing the gold drops from bashing has done. It did nothing about the millions of gold I had on my retiree but it has made life as a new character quite the pickle.

Rhyot

From my gathered information when I've spoken to Tiur, its that bashing isn't SUPPOSED to generate a profit. You're trading commodities, curatives, and gold for experience. A trade off where you're essentially willfully saying that experience > gold/curatives. Is that necessarily the case for every player? Probably not. But that's the inherent trade off.

When it comes to the whole 'economy' talk, you could spend hours/days talking about it and still be nowhere near to fixing it. Multiple players have millions of gold because there's nothing to spend it on. Even commodities/curatives is a moot point if you aren't actively bashing/fighting to eliminate them. Also, the gold nerfs wasn't something done during Tiur's reign as Producer. That was decided back when Razmael was Producer (and there has been a few extra threads regarding said topic).

If your goal is experience gain to level 100 through bashing, yes, you're going to lose a lot more gold than you'll gain because you're trading currency for experience. If your goal is to get to level 100 while being still somewhat capable of purchasing various items, then questing/fishing is what you need to do.

Mharduz

Rhyot said:

From my gathered information when I've spoken to Tiur, its that bashing isn't SUPPOSED to generate a profit. You're trading commodities, curatives, and gold for experience.

I see where you're coming from, but I think the issue is that you're looking at it from a perspective of making a profit whereas I'm looking at the notion of things being relatively revenue neutral.

I would also argue that the gold nerfs are merely keeping people from bashing rather than directly removing gold from the economy, but time will tell how things balance out.

Rhyot

Bashing isn't meant to be neutral either. You're supposed to walk away with a net loss because you're willfully trading currency and commodities for experience. 

Gold nerfs really did nothing to change the amount of people who bash all that much. Now people have to make a conscious decision about whether or not they want to bash? What are they hoping to get out of it? What are their goals? Most times people look at it from a gold standpoint and decide it's not worth it to spend 15k gold on curatives for a few hours of bashing. Instead, they roleplay, quest, or fish. Bashing, in itself, is pretty much done by a handful of people on a consistent basis BECAUSE it's a negative income for zero use besides checking off a box. 

The economy will never balance out because everything will always generate more gold. There is no cap to how much gold is in the game, so when you have an unlimited pool of currency, your economy will never stabilize. 

Haven

Is that the official purpose for bashing now? Because the game doesn't properly reflect that.