Announce post #3159: Multiple Artifacts

Tetchta

Seurimas said:

Tetchta said:

Not trying to disagree here, but those aren't true gold sinks. A gold sink pulls gold out of the game, not merely into other players' pockets.

Well, most of the gold moves between players, but some of it goes towards gold/silver/ice/ash. Mostly gold/silver for elixirs, since ice/ash aren't really necessary for pills any more. At least, I assume the village commodity shops represent sinks in that way. If there's another source, that blows that away entirely. I can definitely see how that's just pennies on the dollar, though.

I literally came back here hoping I could edit my comment before you saw it to be like "I more properly woke up from my nap and realized you were referring to the commodities used to make curatives." But yeah, like you said, they're not really necessary that much. There's also production problems (is the production linear?) and other stuff but overall I don't think they're an adequate gold sink to stave off supposedly runaway gold production. But I'd still struggling to see the problem with gold production in game. Is it just because I bash quite a lot myself and therefore never really go broke for too terribly long? Are prices a huge problem for other players? Maybe it's one of those things that you don't start to see the consequences of until waaaaaaaay down the line, but I'd still like some clarification about how much gold generation is too much, and what the real downside to the game economy is.

Illikaal

Czcibor said:

I have never knifed anything. Feel like I'm seriously missing out now.

And yeah, fully chocolated Tcanna around 40 minutes for me.

As for gold sinks I know Illidan spams transmuted wisdom which is 25k a pop. I've bought some prizebags in the past for the off chance at compendium pages but I've decided it's not worth it. Curatives are extremely minor in the grand scheme of things.

I'd still like to know what constitutes "absurd" gold generation.

They're 20k a pop, but yeah. I only have level 8 gauntlet so i'm offsetting 20k every 6 hours. Would help immensely to have level 18. I've only recently acquired a knife of my own, and if it were me, I'd only be knifing Tcanna (for experience) or Tiyen/The new bashing ares if I were bashing for gold. I've never in 6 months needed to knife a milestone mob, as I think it's truly a waste. It's certainly interesting to see people claim the need for multiple knives for milestone mobs to deal with the inconvenience of them being down because they don't have the time to do them otherwise while simultaneously claiming they need all those knives for bashing.

Savas

Some times I only have 2-3 hours tops to play a day.

Some times those 2-3 hours are during peak when everyone is out rushing milestones and/or clearing areas when I'm in the mood to bash.

During those times; boy would I sure enjoy having multiple knives. I doubt I'm alone.

But at this point I'd do terrible things just for one.

Illikaal

Savas said:

Some times I only have 2-3 hours tops to play a day.

Some times those 2-3 hours are during peak when everyone is out rushing milestones and/or clearing areas when I'm in the mood to bash.

During those times; boy would I sure enjoy having multiple knives. I doubt I'm alone.

But at this point I'd do terrible things just for one.

Well of course, even though I don't necessarily agree you need knives unless you're just super unlucky. Even in that case, would you need say, more than five? Ten?

Tetchta

Is there a useful endgoal to arguing about how many knives is excessive for one person to have? Honestly, I can say that I definitely benefit from other people having hunting knives, even if I don't actively track it myself. Throwing steak to the big bashers so I can get the scraps benefits me as a non-knife-haver. What's the point of this argument?

Illikaal

I think it's bad design to have the need for knives to begin with, change my mind. Aside from that, I personally don't care how many knives someone has. I just think it's interesting for people to be making the arguments that they're making to justify their given reasons for having the amount that they do. It's like owning multiple yachts or private jets. There's nothing wrong with having as many as you want, but you're going to have a hard time convincing me that you absolutely cannot do without that many.

Tetchta

Your first statement ain't wrong, @Illidan, but you're really going off target if you act like a hunting knife is comparable to a yacht or something. You benefit passively from the existence of other knives, as I do, as do lots of folk. You can't act like you bought/built your knives or whatever in a vacuum when the entire endgame bashing economy is currently depending on them. Do I think they shouldn't be necessary? Abso-freakin'-lutely. But Validan or anybody else doesn't really need to justify what you view as an excess to you, especially given that they, I think, are rightfully anxious and angry that not only money, but time they spent building them will be rendered useless.

I don't even have a knife and kinda think that having multiples be a viable strategy is kind of indicative of some kind of failure of design, but at the same time, optimizers are gonna optimize, and it's also possible that nobody ever thought that someone would own multiple, let alone an amount that can be counted in batches of ten. But you're not going to get anything out of arguing it's in excess, and I think someone who spent that time and money is well within the realm of reason to be like "WTF I literally agonized over getting these you can't just drop a casual 'we might nerf them into the sun' line in a news post and expect nothing to happen."

Aeryx

No matter how many knives a person has, from 1 to 21, I think that devaluing the purchase and effort that went into obtaining them is neither fun, nor a good idea. I personally have 5 of them, and while I don't play right now, I still do not agree with the game design decision of devaluing what people have. Instead of doing something that feels bad, just come at it from a different and more positive angle. Make more stuff for us to spend gold on, instead of trying to nerf gold production, etc.

In regards to not even needing to have knives in the first place, yeah, the most obvious way to fix that in my opinion is to have more instanced bashing areas. I really, and truly hate competing for resources in Aetolia and other games, though. Even when I'm the one benefiting and getting to those resources first, I still feel miserable about taking them from someone else, because we're all adults who do this for fun, and not all of us want to be in a rat race at every single point in the game.

Bulrok

Eat the richwhales.

Illikaal

Aeryx said:

In regards to not even needing to have knives in the first place, yeah, the most obvious way to fix that in my opinion is to have more instanced bashing areas. I really, and truly hate competing for resources in Aetolia and other games, though. Even when I'm the one benefiting and getting to those resources first, I still feel miserable about taking them from someone else, because we're all adults who do this for fun, and not all of us want to be in a rat race at every single point in the game.

Some changes recently happened to adjust this. They nerfed crits to slow down bashing, increased mob density in several areas, reworked others to be more bashable, and added new ones entirely. Also I think most people would prefer instances, but we were recently informed that instances are an issue because they massively lag the game.

Alela

Bulrok said:

Eat the richwhales.

You can just @Elene you know?

Trikal

Oh god 21 knives. The fact that I don't have them is the reason this wasn't nerfed long ago... About all I can say about that. With 21 knives I'd likely be back to earning 1M gold a day like it was pre-gold nerfs. There's absolutely insane gold generation that's possible.

As far as anyone wanting to bitch about something like that getting nerfed, all I can say is scattering on the gauntlet. That was a straight out $579.99 purchase I made for the gauntlet because of scattering. It got nerfed, we all moved on.

How do you refund the knives? Break the pieces up so that the people who have multiple knives can sell them / give them to their friends to use for them. The knife refund does feel pretty shitty, but then again balance always feels shitty when it happens that you're on the OP side of the equation. Believe me it's been a lot of my experience that what I'm doing gets nerfed, doesn't mean it isn't fair though.

Rhyot

@Trikal I don't have 21 knives, but I have a veritable set of knives where I could bash Tcanna all day long while I'm online if I wanted. By me doing that, it allows other places to remain open instead of me running circles around everyone else and just pulling the high and mighty horse of "Fuck you, I'm getting mine." Which is something I used to do quite often and people got pissed about... QUITE OFTEN.

Like I previously said, there is absolutely nothing wrong with having multiple knife sets, nor is there anything wrong with having multiple fishing spears. If there is any inconsistency, it is the lack of quantifiable and DECENT gold sinks in Aetolia that doesn't revolve around commodities. We used to have cryptic chests, but you and I saw exactly how that turned out.

This is comparably different because people have spent hundreds upon hundreds of dollars buying these items. Only to then be told "Welp, we're going to nerf it so you can have one, but we're going to break them apart so you can sell/give them to your friends!" That comes nowhere close to the $300 that I spent to get all my knife sets, nor the near $500+ that Validan spent to get his 21.

Quite frankly, there is a difference between being fair and slapping people in the face because of a misconceived notion of practicality of "gold abuse".

Trikal

How is it different than just removing scattering’s effect from an artifact I paid 600 for? With no warning or offer to refund that I remember. 

Tetchta

Well, for one thing, knives are generally more than 600 credits, but also considering that knives are a net benefit to the entire game and generally, if nothing else, reduce competition, there's lots of reasons to keep them and not invalidate hundreds (if not thousands) of people's dollars, not to mention the time it took for them to build them.

Bulrok

This thread reads like trickle down economics if you just replace a few words in the right spot. Knifing Tcanna benefits people bashing Tcanna. People not bashing Tcanna getting to bash what's left is a happy side effect, not anyones intent.

Trikal

Uh I’m talking 600 cash. 2k credit purchase was required. Also help the game by making people not bother exploring or competing at all? Sounds like everyone just wants a 1 player game with a built in discord chat?

Ehtias

21 knife sets is more than 600 dollars given what the pieces tend to sell for. Like significantly more.

Tetchta

idk what you're really trying to argue @Trikal but it sounds a lot like whataboutism and seems like you're not really trying to engage with the points people are making.

edit: this came off as more antagonistic than I intended, I'm pretty tired--I do see that there are possible problems with inflation in game, but I would really like to see alterative ways to address than than to simply nullify a ton of artifacts--especially since I think it's entirely possible to do so and knives are easing a lot of pressure in game right now.

Bulrok

I think he's saying that multiple knife sets are capable of breaking the game. Just because people don't do it in obvious ways doesn't mean it's not possible to do. The comparison to losing Scattering isn't whataboutism, he's saying that sometimes you might lose money on Aetolia because design decisions that weren't immediately obvious in being bad were later discovered to be bad, and they have to be changed.

Tetchta

Sure, I get that--but at the same time, I really don't see the argument for knives breaking the game as it sits right now. Multiple knives, if anything, are a (bad, frankly) patch to the lack of decent endgame bashing. I don't disagree that multiple knives shouldn't be necessary, but I really wish that the way they were made superfluous was a level of bashing zones that could compete with peak bashing times without problem. There's a reasonable limit to how much any person can bash in mobs-per-hour, and at some point, enough bashing mobs would kinda make knives worthless anyway. But just ripping them out of the game seems like asking for trouble to me, especially since the endgame bashing economy seems depending on them at the moment.

Drystin

I get everyone's point here honestly. Everyone is right to some degree. I don't mind changes to things that have just been released for balance purposes. What I absolutely hate is when something has been out forever, a promo occurs where people drop massive amounts of money to obtain 21 sets of said thing, then all of a sudden.. it's time to nerf it. That reeks of used car salesman tactics.

If a change happens, I really hope the worst were looking at is only one knifing per area per person. So if Validan knifes tcanna, he can't do it again until next howling but I still can. If a change like this occurs, people with multiple sets still deserve compensation. This should go without saying but as I've already experienced myself, IRE is fine with screwing people over. It's a new year though so I hope that's a pattern that doesn't continue.

Czcienn

Would really like some more input from @Tiur. It has been a few days since this announcement dropped, and a couple more since these changes were implemented. I don't think it's unfair to expect more dialogue on an issue that involves as much real money as this does.

Czcienn

Bumping and tagging @Tiur again. It has been 3 months now and nothing has been resolved or clarified, and people have issues stemming from this change that have just been sitting there.

Xavin

If nothing else the playing field needs leveled. If there are people who have multiples of those artifacts that this rule now applies to, those people should get full refunds and the multiples should be removed.

Tetchta

Xavin I will eat your skin if I get my pack runes taken away. But also seriously can we get an update on this and which artifacts (if any) are going to allow multiples?

Gavramel

The ap info on the pack runes say they stack to 65k storage or something so I think you're safe there mate, heh

Tetchta

You say that, but I've learned to never underestimate how dedicated some Aetolians are to crab in a bucket ideology, and given that this is exactly the sort of thing Xav is advocating for (and considering that the pack runes are also on the list of arties that you can't buy multiples of right now) he better watch his skin, or it'll be cracklin's.

Czcienn

I'm fairly sure Xavin is talking about things like fishing spears, where there is actually an advantage some people (including myself!) may have because we bought multiple before the change.

The pack rune explicitly states that they can stack so it seems more like another bug/oversight with this change.

Xavin

That is exactly what I'm talking about. Things like fishing spears and the like that don't explicitly say they can be stacked. If you can't buy more pack runes at this point, that's probably an oversight - something this change was full of initially. Ultimately, if having multiples of an artifact gives an actual advantage and you can't buy multiples of that artifact anymore, that advantage needs to be eliminated. This isn't 'crab bucket' mentality.

In addition, there is for some unknown reason a 'total artifacts' ranking. And allowing people to retain multiples of artifacts that can't be purchased in multiples anymore skews that.