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Spent 1400 gold for the rod, and 300 gold for bucket (beyond the 100cr to obtain Fishing, and the time it took to reach this level). I am fishing at an ice pool.
Obtained about 59 fish, total. (Note that if I went to an Sea spot, it would've taken me a lot longer to fish up a lot of fish, but they payout would've been a lot bigger)
6049 gold earned, 1700 spent
It'd probably take me a looooot longer to fish out a spot in the Sea, but that's how you get 30-50k gold payouts.
Going to record how long it takes to get 200 fish in a Sea environ, and what that pays out. Using the Gulleyes Rod.
Basing the numbers off a rough average of prices of steel in various places, let's say steel is 250 a pop.
Since 30 steel is needed for each bit of fullplate, and for kindness sake we'll say this lovely forger is only charging for their materials and not attempting to make a profit (which isn't the case at all, shops need money)
The Steel ALONE for a set of fullplate costs 7500. That's seven and a half HOURS of bashing, if we're talking 500 gold profit per half hour. That's not counting cloth, that's not counting the profit forgers typically want to make. And that's just for ARMOR, that isn't even with WEAPONS.
Again, someone like me or you who has gold already in the bank, or has shops we can make gold from? 500 is okay. it's not great, and it won't make me go bash, but it's okay. For a newbie? That's nearly a whole work day they're spending bashing to get one, required item.
Let's say you get a low entertainment value from bashing, so you can only tolerate 30 minutes every other RL day. Yeah, that'll take you awhile to replenish. With any luck, quests will become more accessible and people who aren't into bashing can make gold other ways than vermin, too. There isn't any reason people should have to bash to make gold in this day and age, anyway.
For those who are into bashing, if you netted a roughly 500 gold/30minute profit (I recognise that that isn't happening across the board here, and I am not claiming it is, I am saying 'if' ) than in a week of only bashing 90 minutes a day (which is quite conservative for someone who is into bashing) you would have replaced that full plate. Unless full plate only lasts a couple RL weeks that doesn't seem like a very unreasonable amount of time to me. (and if it does only last a couple RL weeks, I would say this is definitely a problem)
No one has actually answered with what they think is a good profit to come out of 30 minutes of playing effort. If not 500, how much do you think is?
A secondary, related question, for those who are into bashing, how much do you need to be making in profit for it to be fun and worthwhile for you?
I tossed up the napkin numbers on chocolates on the other page, and I think scaling from there is probably the "right" way to go about it, or we need to seriously re-balance our promotions.
So for the 'how much' is going to depend on how much chocolates help. But, with napkin numbers (to preserve current promo weight etc.), you'd want like +15k gold/hr (because you need to turn a profit with chocolates) for bashing with all those buffs. So if I kill mobs 10% faster with chocolates, chocolates should add 10% more gold to the equation, and with the ideal gold amount being 15k as 10%, 150k/hr would be the "fair" amount. That's because 150k base, then buff with chocolates and you gain 10% kill speed which puts you at 165k, adding an extra 15k/hr.
Chocolates are probably worth more than a 10% kill speed, but it's late and I'm tired (so please like triple check my numbers) - so you get the idea. For a bashing buff to be "worth it", with a timer like chocolates have, they need to be kind of worth more than you spend on getting them (turn a profit for your effort - because bashing IS an effort).
I think the weak spot in my numbers is I have no idea how many buff chocolates total there are now because they keep changing and I couldn't find a helpfile that had them all listed - though admittedly I didn't look super hard - and what they did. So, basically my formula/method for balancing bashing would look like:
#chocolates that speed up bashing (not mint, for example) = b (for buffs) cost of chocolates (low and high) = c (for cost - 3cr low, 5cr high) duration of chocolates buff = d (8 hours) (b*c)/d = cost of chocolates (x) Pad x with some profit amount - ideally if you pay 5cr you should pull a thin profit, if you get them on sale at 3cr (almost 50% off) you pull some decent profit. Call the offset for profit y. x+y = z, which is how much per hour you should make with chocolates. Next, calculate how much those chocolates help you kill things faster- I'd say this is the tricky/finnicky part because yeah tankiness and dps and all that are going to vary wildly. Eyeball it, don't get too caught up on the details. That's going to be p (for percent). So your percentage speed-up p correlates with income goal z - z is a percentage of g (goal), which is how much gold you make on a normal run. If chocolates speed you up by 100%, z = g. If chocolates speed you up by 50%, then z is half of g. If chocolates cost you 3k to fully buff and we pad with profit to 5k, and speed you up by 100%, bashing on its own should net you 5k/hr, because when you chocolate up you double that and reach 10k, which gives you the desired profit margin. If chocolates cost you a more realistic 10k gold to buff, and chocolates boost your bashing speed by 25%, then 40k/hr is fair for base bashing.Pls2doublecheck this, as this is the last cognitive thought I plan to make tonight and am thus already half asleep.
EDIT: also re income vs profit, that's easy to fix. Pills cost 9gp a pop, you know roughly the average amount of pills it takes to kill a mob. Just up the area's gold based on that. An area like FM that spams affs and takes forever to kill should have cost of pills built in- aim for a median number of hits (it might take me 5 hits to kill with calculated dps, it might take @Teani 's babby char 15 hits to kill) so that there are areas that are NOT profitable to bash without high dps/not having to hit-and-run and spam other curatives and you incentivize bashing artifacts, buffs, etc. You can literally build the cost of curatives into the gold drop table, though.
I agree that chocolates aren't worth the current cost/value if you're purchasing them to increase your gold payout while bashing, but that is a separate point from the question I am attempting to ask.
Are you trying to say "5k profit" is still what you consider fun or reasonable profit in 30 minutes, or a different amount?
Since Gold is no longer tied to bashing, there has to be some reason to bash. The reason we are all going "Why bash if you lose gold" is because there is nothing really worth gaining otherwise. As @Toz pointed out, he'd have to die 2500 times before he even begins to care about gaining XP. If there is no reward, the act feels pointless.
That's just my feelings on the matter. You all can keep throwing numbers about, though. I'd say a 2k gold profit would be nice, since I can earn about 10k gold, if not more, with 30 minutes of questing.
5k in 30 minutes won't pay anybody's bills, when you look at the costs of the enhancements. Similarly, 100,000,000 gold/hr will make the chocolate market explode because they will improve gold gathering time by a percent of that amount which makes them worth more.
So I'd only be able to answer your question if they delete temp bashing buffs (and probably bashing arties too, tbh)- but if they did that, 1cr/hr seems okay to me. So 7k an hour+refunds for all bashing buffs - that seems a tad unreasonable though.
The questing income comparison is very interesting as well, thanks Satomi!
5k in 30 minutes seems like it would add up quickly. That’s 10k an hour. There are players that bash for 4-5 hours a day on average. That’s upwards of 300k a week. If 10 players do that you would end up with 3 million additional gold added to the game every week.
I think some of the problem with considering a product like chocolates in this is that chocolates don’t take money out of the game. Right now we only have commodities for that. Gold added to the economy and then spent in this fashion just changes hands between players and if we consider this a “cost” of hunting and factor it into how much gold people should earn we will end up with a lot of inflation in the Aetolian economy.
I certainly have no way of measuring this but I would be curious to know how much gold is added or removed from the game on a weekly basis. That’s probably the most important question and I don’t think any player has the answer to it. With the amount of gold currently in the game maybe we actually need a period of deflation. The part that is still unclear to me is if we are supposed to make a profit on bashing, break even, or trade gold for XP. The last one seems like it might provide the most solutions to the problems with the economy but it may also end up frustrating the player base.
If questing is great and fine gold, and there's enough quests to sustain our population, seems to me the gold flow problem remains without the gold sink solution, too- turn that faucet off, or nerf quest gold to buff bashing back. Quests are harder to initially solve then wildly easier with less risks to actually do thereafter.
Additionally , as I've said before... xp has no real intrinsic value. The only thing it does is offer a few augmetics, racial skills, and haven points. These options are useless to most people, which in turn stops any desire to want to perform in the PVE realm. People dont do PVE for xp (unless youre a masochist like me), but instead do it for the gold profit. If there was an ability to make a profit of say 10k/hr then people might want to do it more.
Yes, you do have to take chocolate costs into account because it is a huge buff that IS used in most of the monthly promotions that Aetolia has. If people made a profit, there would probably be more chocolates to buy because people would be able to make a profit off those. Instead, you have useless items that you can trade in an very few people buy. So you're wasting your money when supporting a promotion that provides plenty of chocolate buffs (gift bags, cryptic chests, Wheel spins, prize bags, etc).
Furthermore, that 500 gold in 30 minutes was already debased due to the premise of using 50 anabiotic during those 30 minutes. Sure, Teani later on said that she didn't use any pills... but do you really want to bash level 40 areas for hours on end just to make gold?? Cause then what about novices, where will they hunt if they chose to hunt alone??
Lastly, why should a player be punished for wanting to do PVE?? Because that's essentially what's happening. You're paying a massive amount of gold into curatives, weaponry, enhancements/enchantments, and the like just to be able to perform in PVE. And for what?? An intrinsic and useless resource as experience?? You can't trade experience for anything of real actual value. Likewise, if you die... you lose hours of work (1% xp loss). Sure, xp does have no intrinsic value (with the exception of a few of us), but I like to equate that to this... what if your computer just randomly shut down and you lose hours of work because you were unable to save your work?? Nobody likes losing hours of work. Nobody.
There are many players who dont have alot of disposable income, in other games bashing is a means of participating in things like auctions, credit sales and otherwise, the curve in Aetolia is far steeper and difficult for someone who wants to be able to make said purchases based on IC means.
While I am not advocating for the potential for characters to make 1000's of credits off the market or gold hoarders to be the only ones who win all the auctions during these type of events. I would think there being the means to say, earn enough gold over a length of time to buy a chunk of credits here and there, to save a good amount over time to participate in an auction or lottery. Would be the best solution. Right now I have learned that fishing is the only way to do this, and even then I have managed over the past week to get enough to maybe buy 20 credits off the market with hours and hours of fishing documented.
I wouldn't say that is entirely game breaking, but it does give me potential to learn skills and otherwise be part of things that normally only cash players can do and that makes me feel good, it makes me feel like I am working towards a tangible goal.
I could save up gold and credits eventually to buy bashing artifacts to help me bash, to eventually help me buy other things.
I think that is fair to want to be included in the community on the same level as someone with disposable income. I certainly dont want to be overpowered or super powerful, I just want to feel like the work is for something.
EDIT: Actually got 22 credits per Enorian, at 2900 gold per as an Ambassador aide, plus one above the normal ten for my City Rank
Then cashed in City rewards for double purchase!
63800 gold for 22 credits is a good deal in comparison to market, and that still took me NUMEROUS solid days of fishing.
I got to put some into my miniskills though, and now I have some thermology so my own fire doesnt kill me O.O
Full time + overtime
before passing you a bag of gold coins and the now empty bucket.
[Gold]: You have gained 19044 gold.
You have gained 50 faction points with The Gulleyes.
Hob begins to root through the bucket with a hungry eye as he mutters to himself
before passing you a bag of gold coins and the now empty bucket.
[Gold]: You have gained 19502 gold.
You have gained 50 faction points with The Gulleyes.
7-ish hours of fishing nothing but Sea creatures using the Master gulleyes rod.
about 3800 gold investment for a 200 bucket, fishing hat, and gulleyes rod
Idled for the entirety of it, so you know. Playing it safe.
Also gained about like.. what.. 3%-5% xp? Cause I died twice since I started and gained that back plus a little. (Obviously this wasn't in a single stretch, cause fishing spots drain, but like.. a couple hours a night while I catch up on youtube/netflix?)
Is it true people with higher STR can catch fish better than others, cause I bring in only half of that...in the same timeframe.
@Tiur
I could test being int for it but I didn't notice any differences since I was mostly idle while doing it. I could test, but would prefer hard answers
Sorry @Rhyot
Valkyrior system