This server doesn't want players to have access to free owls. That's fine. However, I believe it would be healthy for all players to get at least some free FM searches, allowing even poor players to participate in the economy to some extent. This could be a repeatable quest from Maple Administrator with a random task like "kill 200 monsters", "collect 3 tokens of teamwork", or "spend 1 million mesos in the Free Market", rewarding 1 Owl of Minerva. The cooldown on the quest can be adjusted to whatever it needs to be, but I don't see a reason why it shouldn't be daily.
someone else already explained why the price guide, an unofficial community resource maintained purely through altruism, does not solve everything this statement is extremely vague, and I am going to request that you elaborate how a daily quest that requires actual gameplay is more abusable than the 3m owl that is sold at the FM entrance
someone else already made the same post you are asking and people have already explained why its not a good idea. https://royals.ms/forum/threads/re-suggestion-lower-the-price-of-owls.244587/#post-1529302 please also look at the older post he made which was about making owls free.
But I'm not asking to make owls free. Requiring a quest means that this will have a time/effort cost associated with it. Same reason why Reuel isn't considered "free HP" and the time cost is compared to the meso cost of the equivalent number of APRs.
I understand and I think that some of the options you mentioned are not really quests that people have to go out of the way for. Killing 200 monsters or spending 1m mesos in the fm are already things that people will be doing anyway. just based off these two quests I could be getting 10-12 owls for free daily. As a merchant this would allow me to undercut my competitors more often than I already am. This would be too unfair for my competitors. Im sure more sweaty merchants (if there are any and im sure there are) would exploit this for their 50-60 characters. Partying up and spamming mage ultimates in hhg1 for 1-2mins can get them 6 owls.
In that case, I would change the quest so it requires all 3 of the things I mentioned, instead of just one of them randomly. Would this be acceptable?
I think this would be a good idea as long as it was a special owl that was untradable, unstorable, and unique (only 1 per inventory). That way the quest can be done if you need an owl, but you don't get daily quest FOMO if you're not hoarding them. You could put a Lv.50 requirement on the quest if you wanted to prevent people from having hundreds of owls available from all of their mules. Even if a few sweaty players get a ton of owls, isn't players undercutting each other sort of what a free market is supposed to look like? Unlimited owls and zero sales tax might give players too much power to arbitrage, scalp and monopolize portions of the market, but the presence of the existing sales tax should make that unprofitable. One of the arguments in the previous thread is that the server needs meso sinks. That's true, but just because the server needs meso sinks generally, doesn't mean it needs this one specifically. If the server needed meso sinks that direly they could just add more event meso sinks like chair gacha. For the argument that we can just get owls by voting- it's the same as buying one from the FM npc. The existence of APRs and gachapon tickets in the cash shop means that daily NX is pure meso, so it's not free and anytime someone buys an owl (or anything other than an APR or ticket) they are incurring a cost just the same as if they bought it. The problem isn't that people are so poor they're unable to buy owls, it's that they have to choose between saving up for their next piece of gear and being able to search for stuff. You could argue that players shouldn't treat daily voting NX like universal basic income, but if that wasn't the intention then APRs/gacha wouldn't be tied to NX in the first place.
Let's have an owl here and there randomly appear out in maple world, like golden balloons during anniversary (where anniversary?). When killed, you get an owl. Or, same as above, but you don't kill it to get loot. Instead, you use a net to catch it, the same way you catch bees at rose garden. If caught, it's transformed into an FM owl.
At the point in the game where you need many owls, 3m is like selling 7 equips or something u can loot from monsters. Wich is basicly a free owl. if u need it before and u dont have spare money, vote nx is free.
I feel like either this is gonna be hard to balance. Either people are gonna do it on all their mules all the time and it removes a meso sink from the game, or it takes too long and it's not going to be worth it compared to just farming the 3M the owl would cost. Maybe if it's not infinitely repeatable but instead you.can do a quest every 10 levels or so. New players hitting level 120 with 12 owls should be enough to let them search some stuff to buy or sell, and after that they'll just have to pay 3m like everyone else. But honestly, 3m isn't that much so I don't really see the need for this. And as a previously and still currently somewhat poor player I just learned not to owl everything unless I know it could save me more than it costs.
the real solution is for one of us to just vibecode a simple web-based auction house that everyone uses as ubiquitously as the price guide And then once everyone depends on it, push an update that makes them watch an ad for every search
Daily repeatable owl quest? Big support! Meso is often the biggest wall for new players to progress and it might help them opening up shop for the first time and/or not getting scammed. Rich veterans dont give a shit about 3m and barely pay taxes anyway (just like in real life).
Make it take like 100 of a low level Victoria Island mob drop, like bubbling bubbles or mushroom caps, Orbis exchange style (but 1/day). Hard for vets to abuse, but gets noobs training there a bit extra stuff to help them get started.
