Make WS/CS available from a NPC

@Ferencz

Hey, thanks for replying! So I read that having WS and chaos as main forms of currency is bad because players stockpile WS and chaos and quit. There are many players who have tons of WS and chaos and expensive gear who have quit, and I agree with you that the low supply of WS and chaos is a bad thing. But WS and chaos prices were just fine in old source, stable at 300m, and there were plenty of rich players who quit with all their WS and chaos still on their characters. Players quitting and them having these scrolls didn't affect prices because WS and chaos were steadily being generated into the economy from active players continuing to gach.

It's a problem now because the gach rates for WS and chaos being obtained have gone down. I agree that we should be like Nexon on the point that we should make WS and chaos easier to obtain and put more scrolls into circulation, but an NPC does this function just fine with the added benefit of stabilizing prices, amongst all the other things I pointed out in my first post on this thread. The NPC is indeed another meso sink idea, but it is also an idea for making WS and chaos available at a stable price and making them into liquid assets. I'm glad you see how such an NPC would stabilize prices, but I'm puzzled at how you think the NPC idea would NOT get more WS, chaos, and endgame equipment in circulation. The NPC would literally allow you to purchase a WS or chaos for 300m each. Provided you have the meso, you can buy as many WS and chaos as you so like. GMs (well, not GMs, admins more specifically, and the admins that make server decisions are Matt and John) can change the prices of course. But it's unlikely this will happen, provided Matt and John listen to their playing staff members, if not the playerbase itself.

So as far as I can tell, you and I actually think very similarly! We agree that having more WS and chaos in circulation is healthy for the server. And I'm pretty sure that the NPC idea would solve the issues you have with the situation as well. I read your post carefully, and I just have one question. So if players could buy WS and chaos at 300m from an NPC, and sell their WS and chaos to that NPC as well, why would an NPC not change anything you think?

Edit: Admin has spoken. Hopefully the reintroduction of merchants, owls, and reorganizing the gach item table will restabilize WS and chaos prices back at 300m or so. I'm not confident that merchants and owls will do much, and I don't expect significant change with gach, but I sincerely hope I will be wrong. In the case that these scrolls continue to dwindle in supply and continue to inflate in price, I hope staff will reconsider the idea and its merits for the wellbeing of the server, and not reject possible solutions outright because of its novelty or because of it being unorthodox to what is defined as nostalgic. A short but fun discussion; I hope it was and possibly will be useful.

 

well i mean at 300m, still thats quite alot, I have befriended quite alot of oldschool players and they said cs/ws rates were inbetween 50-100m when they started way back when the server was still new, but having an npc would make it simple but too easy, i beleive having the monster drop tables would give players reasons to farm those maps and would also increase reasons for players to farm mobs for these items, or farm period, but still not making it easy if they had a low % chance to drop making the game as it was originally intended to be played.

 

I really like the boss or mob farm idea. Gives a sexier reason to farm and grind.

 

I feel like farming already has enough incentive to do it with the godly drop system in play. Just my 2¢

 

The problem with adding cs/ws to an npc is that currently we have a soft cap on how many of these scrolls can come into the game each day, and that's limited to how much nx you can earn per day. Right now none of the bosses drop nx so you're capped at 8k nx per player each day from voting which equals to 8 gachapon tickets = 8 chances per player to pull a cs/ws. By adding these scrolls to an npc you're essentially lifting that limit, which isn't necessarily bad per se but is that something we want to change?

It's funny you @Shiyui say that Legends is bad because they lack godly end game gears but I actually find that to be way more appealing than here where we have so many people running around with perfect gears. In this server it's easy to make a perfect gear. It's easy in a sense that you know given enough time that you'll have enough ws to finish scrolling your gear. It's not a matter of if, but a matter of when. So by adding these scrolls to a shop you're making it even easier for those that are crazy enough to farm and sell leech for 12 hours straight (and we all know these people exist) to obtain these scrolls, and what's the fun in having so many people with perfect gears soloing and carrying boss runs? Maybe it's just me but that ruins the fun and sorry for using this word but nostalgia. IMO ws are one of the stupidest items in the game and would hate to see it more easily obtainable.

 

This is the 2nd thread in the past couple months about how bad it's gotten, and how terrible the drop rates are, even considering if the prices still go down to 300m again these two items shouldn't dictate an economy and should be dropped from something other than lyka. And yeah I suppose "when" shops come, but honestly how long is that?

 

This isn't the first time I've seen someone say this in the past couple of days. I don't know what world people are living in to think that perfecting an item is in any sense any easy thing to do. I can't do 12 hours consistently, but I can do some pretty insane hours daily & grinding up to what is now 25b JUST FOR THE WHITE SCROLLS (not including the clean perfect weapon you are going to be perfecting) we're talking perfect items here btw, not an 84 attack King Cent or some shit. That would take ~250 hours of leech, I don't understand how that is a simple thing to achieve.

 

The effort should reciprocate the reward. If someone is willing to put in the effort and spend 12 hours leeching, then they should be rewarded. In this case the reward is the ability to buy more WS/CS than someone who sits in the FM socializing.

If bossing with people who have godly gear takes the fun out of the game for you just...don't boss with them? I think a lot of the fun comes from bossing with friends, regardless of what gear they have.

 

That PLUS the fact that the NX glitches ( we all know that 3rd job boss glitch, easy 1k gacha+ per day ) being abused by hackers, that with the new source was fixed made prices go up and made the rarity scarce up, i've seen up reported players (hackers) get ~7-8 scrolls per DAY on only 1 CHAR, imagine if they were using 3-4 or more, it'd be simple to just make a steady price by not selling them all and holding some of them, but now there's no hackers that can abuse any kind of nx glitches the scarcity of scrolls becomes obvious

 

This wasnt an issue in old source because the prices were stable, for many reasons.
Within the year I've played after making my claw up to the beginning of new source, CS/WS only went up about 50m total.
New source brought with it many changes, some good some bad, but they all affect the amount of CS and WS that come into the game.
Once these changes are balanced again, I think we'll have less of an issue and prices will return to their normal. I would say that we should hold off on making any kind of big decision like that until things are back to normal again.

Here's some of the things that have changed and may or may not have contributed:
- 4 to 5 months of no cash shop working, with hundreds of players saving NX. This allowed players to stockpile several hundred thousand NX up to a million NX and blow it all on gach or resets.
- No merchants. No merchants means less people are going to gach at places that fill your inventory with items that need to be sold, ie: Shrine.
- No scrolling for ~3 to 4 months. No scrolling meant people had limited ways to make money.
- No APQ. Works with the above - no easy way to make money.
- Shit spawn in most maps. Works with the above yet again. No easy way to make money.
- No (real) bossing for 5 months. With the d/cs, it just wasn't worth trying to zak. No horntail yet, so no books from there.
So people turned around and spend their time farming heartstoppers for money. Which in turn reduced their price because everyone and their brother is farming stoppers now.
- Screwed up drop tables. Some items are more common than they used to be. Some are more rare. Examples being like Helm Dex 60%s drop much more frequent than they should from master chronos. Some people stockpiled hundreds of these scrolls. Maybe even thousands. Did this affect CS/WS prices? Maybe maybe not.
- Area bosses don't drop NX. How many people run zak on a daily basis? Imagine that 5k NX multiplied by just 200 people, twice a day. It quickly adds up, not even counting anego or bigfoot, or even mini bosses.
- No registration/character creation for ~5 months. How many new players are the source of our WS/CS? Quite a lot actually. For newbies, gaching is an easy way to try your hand at making some money and getting started.
- Abusable glitches like the one with the mini bosses and NX have been fixed. That was a huge source of NX if you think about it. Some players had over 500k NX in a day from that glitch before we caught them.
- The 'drop rate' of WS/CS scrolls seems to be lower than intended. Possibly related to the itcg items being added and thus some other items being removed, possibly not. It's something Matt said he would look into.
- NX is finite. Once you run out of your 8k NX a day, thats it. You can't just go and farm Lyka for more. Cant pop open a galore bag for that last 1k. Can't go zak or pap for more.

I think once we're back to a baseline and things get returned to our previous normal, the prices will stabilize. A lot has happened in 6 months. We have a ways to go still, but every day it's getting better. @Kai counted 1.1k players online just the other day. After an SC, we counted about 700 players online (which basically means all the AFKers are out).

All in all though, I disagree with making CS/WS easier to obtain by simply buying them from an NPC. Part of the struggle of making perfect weapons/gear is that there is a finite amount of those scrolls in the server, and sometimes many other people are buying them at the same time. (e same affects AP resets, which are now hovering around 10.5m to 11m each. You're lucky to find a seller for 10m.) If we could buy CS or WS in the Fm right now at this moment, at 300m each, I could buy 33 of them and still have money leftover. I could buy those in an instant. Compared to having to search for what would end up being a few days to find someone willing to sell them to me. Those 33 scrolls means 300m to other players.

By putting it in an NPC, you're not only taking it out of the player's hands, but you're also making gach worthless for Shrine and NLC (who sells Smegas anymore ever since they were removed from drops and put in the NPC?). Everyone knows that's the big ticket item that makes those places appealing. Remove it, and people will only gach there when they need a specific item from there. By putting it in an NPC, you're taking the control out of the players hands, and removing what a "free market" is meant to be.

 

will this be fixed? or is it intended? plus won't making Money easily make the prices go even higher as inflation hits?

 

@Sila

You make some fair points Sila, but I disagree with others.

The struggle, in my opinion, should be getting the money to afford the scrolls, not finding the scrolls. The truth is getting the scrolls in old source was never a big struggle. From my personal experience having done 2-3 trades in old source that required a substancial amount of WS/CS, for none of these trades it took me longer than a day or two to find those scrolls. Just owling at any given time would result in 8-10 scrolls and then smegaing a couple times would get you the rest.

Regarding Gacha, as I posted in my original post, I think WS/CS should still be a reward. This way people have an incentive to gacha in NLC/Shrine, and this incentive would be even bigger than before given if you get a WS/CS you just go to the NPC and sell it to him, no need to smega or put it in store.

The real problem here is the devaluation of peoples time. If the meso amount you were able to hold/trade wasnt limited then the problem would no longer persists. If there is no clear item with a stable price that can substitute my mesos for the same value, then I will never know the value of my time. You mention you have enough mesos right now to buy 33 WS,well in my case I got my bish account full of mesos on every single character possible plus storage. I actually have to ask buyers to go to FM and pay me on other account because I simply cant hold any more mesos. Even more, I got to tranfer my NPC mesos from one account to another just to be able to keep selling leech, making me lose tax money every trade. All of this is because I REFUSE to pay 1/3 for an item that used to have a stable price. Thatd mean my time is now valued at 1/3 less than before while people were able to make the same items for 1/3 less in the old source.

Also, the argument that Itd "make the game to easy" makes no sense whatsoever. Getting the scrolls was never a problem in old source. Maybe if you needed 100 or something that could take a while. But honestly who needed 100 at any given time? If it wasnt "too easy" then, how would that change with the implementation of this NPC? Besides, even if you could buy 100, thatd be 30b of mesos, and if you think getting 30b is easy to get, then you got no clue what you are talking about.

The truth is this NPC would solve all those problems and more.

 

I wrote something in reply then my browser crashed and I lost it all.
Tl;dr I disagree and we can agree to disagree. I dont find it hard to gain the mesos, it just takes time. If you really try hard you can make a couple hundred mil in a short period of time. Owls make it easy - if you want to buy overpriced scrolls. Otherwise you're lucky to buy one or two per day from the FM merchants. I already perfected one weapon and I was in the process of making facestompers/pgc before new source.
I'm also in the situation where I have an account filled with max mesos and have had to use another account to hold mesos because I refuse to spend 400m on a WS when I'm certain they will go back down to 300-320m once things are functional again.

 

Fixed Investments aren't counting in Maple GDP yo, which would screw up the Economic, simple as that.