This exactly, it should be a choice for mesos or NX. Especially when i'm trying to spend as wisely as possible, I would rather conserve mesos and spend a bit of NX instead.
It's a luxury item, really. If you want to be lazy and find an item quicker than searching the FMs, then you can spend the bit of extra mesos to do so. That's how I personally see it anyway. It's a good thing to have a bit of a money sink in the game, and 3mil isn't very hard to come by- training normally for an hour and NPCing your equips will net you that much if not more.
The only reason the free market is so stupidly ineffective for selling items is so that nexon can make money off selling owls. That's the same reason that hired merchants were 1 time use too. There's a reason fan sites like basil market implemented a useful trading system that didn't cost an arm and a leg to use. If we don't have the terrible expiring merchant system here I see no need to keep the terrible lack of efficient browsing legacy from Nexon as well. As for the money sink, merchant fees would be a far better solution surely? I don't know anyone that uses owls except for items they don't expect to be in any stores, so that most of the time they won't be used up. Owls as a money sink would be trivial compared to having working merchant fees.
Pretty sure over 1bil mesos have already been sunk into owls just on the first day. While I agree hired merchants taking out tax would also be decent, I dont know if it would take out as much because people always find a way around it (lowering prices, doing multiple transactions, etc)
Whilst that's a reasonable figure, I expect in as little as a week's time that the amount of new sales will drop significantly. We'll have to wait and see I guess, perhaps they'll end up being more popular even at a high price than I would have expected. I'm not actually a huge fan of taxes myself, but I understand the importance of a money sink. I just feel that having a market with such asymmetrical information is terrible for the common peasant, and having a more accessible market leads to a more efficient market outcome. There's a reason no trading site worth a damn has a prohibitively expensive search function (or even worse, no search function at all).
There's a buying/trading section on the forums if you really dont want to use the in game tools, or you can just do it the long way to search the FMs individually. Owls were always a luxury tool, not a necessity, and so even though they cost mesos here instead of NX, they still cost something. If they cost NX, then that would be less NX you could spend on other ways to make money (ap resets, tele rocks, gacha), so either way it really doesnt make a big difference.
This is one of the main reasons why I started a community money making guide. Making money is this game is so easy that having a money sink even more extreme than this is required in this game to balance out the economy.
The idea was tossed around about whether the Owls should have cost mesos or NX. In the end, mesos was decided for the reason stated previously, a money sink is needed. I think the value of mesos is quite small since people have literally billions of mesos, greatly deflating it's value. 3 million is a small amount that can be afforded by anyone buying from a merchant (let's be honest, how many things are you buying from a merchant that are less than 3M?) and also allows mesos to increase in value. Should it become necessary the cost of Owls can always be modified but there is no plan to do so in the near future.
Pretty much. It's disappointing when F2W rubbish gets conflated with proper gameplay. In games like WoW, it costs nothing to search the Auction House and the very idea of that being a thing is absurd. If a money sink improves gameplay then it should scale - ie, the cost should scale with level/ available money. 3m isn't something I will regularly spend, and at lower levels is prohibitively expensive.
What's stopping very wealthy people from making low level accounts themselves and buying a load of Owls for cheap. Like I've said in a previous post, there's nothing stopping anyone from making enough money to consider 3m as a drop in the bucket.
That's rather obvious don't you think? Things that significantly improve gameplay should be affordable to newbies while making the money sinks scale better (potion, travel costs, etc) or purely vanity (expensive chairs, NX, etc).
Like already stated, Owl of Minerva is supposed to be a luxury item. People who cannot afford or do not want to spend money on an Owl of Minerva can look for items manually.
I decided to look further into the owl system(Category search) and was looking for 1handed swords. Was it intentional to include such badass lvl100+ GM exclusive items? or will these beautiful swords be implemented to be available to players at a later time? Either way, it was cool to get a look at their stats.
Actually its been mentioned on the forums multiple times. I at least, and I'm sure many others were under the impression it was intentional.