If anyone doesn't remember, these were the changes introduced in #65(& #65.1): We also had additional changes that seem to target meso making/farming: What's everyone thoughts about these changes in retrospect?
Damn those NLC pot price changes for mana bull and ginger ales hurt to look at for someone who uses both of those pots. As for the power elixir drop rate decrease, like mentioned above it's still pretty easy to farm them if you dedicate the time to it. Also, just farming in ulu2 with pet loot on you can get a good amount of power elixirs from just staying there for 45 min-1h depending on how fast you kill. Don't have a sin or corsair, so can't really speak on the star/bullets recharge as well. And the last part, I never used macro for blizzard when farming or w/e so it didn't really effect my gameplay overall.
One year on, WS/CS still 500-600m. Everything else seems to have deflated though. Is it really these changes or is it just that we’re getting less new players in the server with the COVID rush finally over?
hackers,vote abusers,mulestory,broken environment-progress... dosn't make good home for new players especially with this broken market(somehow only ws and cs seems to be undefiled) we just had duku trio noob mage fiasco for almost a year that generated alot lvls/meso, it will take a lot time to recover just from this issue alone
Didn't do anything but hurt legit players grinding mesos. The actual problem is bot/voteabuse which is the major contributor to a imbalanced economy. Involuntary Meso sinks or nerfing grinding/farming only hurts people. If anything, the consequence of making it more time consuming and less rewarding to farm mesos for legit players might make them resort to RWT. Seen it before, it will keep happening. I also think that just the sheer amount of bans there are is insane, and influence this drop in player count. We talk about player retention sometimes, but holy crap how many of new players just vote abuse or RWT? Maybe player retention is so poor just from the design of Royals and how easily accessible RWT/voteabuse is for people. Just a thought I had thinking about why new players don't like royals. I wonder what % get banned.
Why can't it be both though, they are not mutually exclusive. Both contribute to overall deflation despite it occurring at uneven levels for different items. I see lower wa gear such as 12 FS dropping to 9bil from 10bil+, 12 wa bfc dropping from 4.5 to 4, 8 wa shoes dropping from 3.5 to 3, and so on. Demand for end game and high wa gears will always be there, which is why prices for CS/WS don't drop, not to mention the support from Rwters for these sort of items. A lower player base and nerfs on meso farming both contribute to lower prices.
Fair point and what I write below is largely speculation, so please take it with a grain of salt. Lower wa gear deflated by modest amounts at best tbh - your observations I think are fairly accurate and probably means demand/supply for these items haven't changed in proportion all that much. The fact that APR deflated from 17 -> 12m, HP washing gear and INT scrolls deflated by roughly 30-40% yet WS/CS stayed the same price suggests to me though that: - the deflation we observe seems consistent with the amount of NX circulating from actively voting players (+ vote abusers) and hence is related to the COVID effect - the deflation occurred over a period of roughly 3 months from the start of this year, correlating with return to work for a large proportion of the player-base alongside with downward trend of active COVID cases across most Northern hemisphere countries - this was roughly 7-8 months after the 'meso sink' patch, after which despite these changes market prices were relatively unchanged In summary, I think deflation occurred evenly for items related to the volume of circulating NX (i.e. APR and gachapon items) with the exception of WS, CS and, to a certain extent, iTCG items. While it's certainly possible the deflation changes introduced had an impact - especially the ulu drop nerf - I have no idea why no effect was seen for at least 6 months after these changes were made because the ulu change in particular has meant a significant reduction in raw meso injection into the economy from the legitimate playerbase. In the absence of an alternate explanation I can only conclude that what I feel is a large volume is merely a sprinkle compared to the volume of underground cash flow that occurs with the rampant RWTing beneath this server, especially as the hacker situation is, as I've been informed, a lot better than before.
Yes, of course, player base contributes largely to deflation. I think the reason wa gears are less affected by deflation compared to int gears and other non-rwt items is apparent. I also believe that deflationary meso sinks implemented during the covid period specifically to counteract this large influx of players should also be reverted, especially given that the hacker situation has improved, as I don't think the current state of the market is very healthy at all. In fact, I don't think meso sinks should have been implemented in the first place, as they punished the hardworking. Also, although I am not fully sure, I felt that these deflationary pressures occurred gradually, as I believe APRs dropped slowly to 15, stagnated a while, and then dropped again to 13 and finally 12. And this is only natural considering deflation and a large drop in player base do not occur overnight. A slight bit of inflation is always healthy, you don't want the market stagnating in deflation.
I'll tackle them one by one: 1. I'm still not a big fan of the Equip droprate nerf. It was made with the goal of nerfing mage NPC farming, but instead of doing the naturally logical nerf of reducing price of certain equipments, especially in the more popular leech and grind spots, they decided to hurt all the players in the game. For a "targeted nerf", this was a pretty wide shot of a nerf, which hurt new players more than it help discouraging this meso making method. [Heck, even after the nerf, there was still an NPC farming boom, which tells me that nerf didn't do what it was supposed to do]. 2. I'll group the Elixir changes with the NLC shop change. The goal of the NLC shop was to match the potions to their actual value, that's a very valid balance point as these potions were INSANE VALUE. But, personally as someone who like to go through his daily solo bosses, I found myself with a buttload of potions from bosses, to the point that i never need to visit NLC to buy pots. Heck, i have 3 mules already full to the brim with P.Elixirs on my Bucc, and I sell my normal elixirs to the shop to save space LOL. That means that this NLC shop nerf ended leeching money only from the Leechers, and tanks. Leechers still need a lot of mana bulls, and the 150 stacking let them stay and leech for longer, the price of buying these will stack up eventually tho. As for tanks, They need to either go through the pain of buying P.elixirs from others, or buying expensive potions from NLC cause they end up eating through their supply rather quicky on face tank bosses. All in all, I think the buff to Elixirs and P.Elixirs was a tad bit too strong, which completely negated the effect of the NLC changes. 3. Ulu nerfs. A targeted nerf at arch mages that didn't quite change the status quo, but did lower the value that can be gained in those broken maps. I still see many smegas on leech in those areas, and I still see people selling leech and farming when i go by these maps. So i'd say these changes did what they were supposed to do (to some degree). As for the effects it had on the economy, I'm honestly not informed enough to say for certain its effects on the market. 4. Star recharge changes. After the hotfix they did to some of the prices, I believe this change reached an acceptable spot. Only the highest attack stars really drain your meso, but by the time you can afford these sort of stars, you probably already have a more steady meso income that can handle this constant investment. Or you can accept using a slightly weaker star so you can save more meso for an upgrade. In the grand scheme of things, it's only a small speed bump for growing NLs. 5. Disabling macro on mage ultis. Thank god for that one. Some people in this server took muling to the extreme, which is fine when the difficulty exceeds what the normal player may attempt. But because it was so lucrative, it creeped into the meta, and made both an unhealthy meta gameplay (that devalued investing in a single character, and encoraged multiclienting even harder), and an inflation machine. A good chance imo. [they do need to do a follow up and check on the current balance of the mage class tho, the job is not done yet] 6. A small little insight regarding the Leprechaun change. I hope @Joong is fine with me telling you guys this, but this update wasn't directly aimed at lep farming per say. This was actually a bug fix. Apparently, like many other buggy aspects of NLC, Lep had a very silly bug that was never fixed: The devs in wizet forgot to give the mob MP. That caused it to just stand there, and let you kill it instead of fighting back. After giving the mob MP, it started working like intended (Yes, even the crazy damage). This change gave this low hp, and low lvl mob a reason to have such a high lvl equipment drop pool, which in hindsight explains the design of this mob. Btw, A friend of mine showed me that he can still do summon farming without getting hit by the leps if he stands in the dead center, so other than you needing to be more careful when you go to collect the drops, I'm not sure how much of a change it would do on lep farming. And even if they can't do lep farming anymore, stoppers is still a thing
It's kind of weird that seemingly out of nowhere this bugfix comes out when no one asked for it. The excuse can be given that it wasn't aimed at Lep farming, but it actually was. It primarily affects Lep farming. One could argue that having leps in its 'bugged' state is nostalgic. But hey, that's just me. Maybe Joong would like to "bugfix" the Dojo boards that's supposed to be in Victoria Island towns that'd actually help players rather than bugfixes that nerfs players.
i agree with the points made but i don't think on point 2. that it was given fair chance for market to get the actual pot price not long after the NLC pot price change PE's were above ginger ale, when duku exploded PE price got simular to ginger ale and with drop rate events PE slowly started to get cheaper the final crash happend when duku fiasco reached the peak and when CNY (red tickets + wish ticket) got introduced so many pots for cheap that made NLC change pointless but i think elixir and power elixirs slowly recovers and gets 10k+ea & 16k+ ea (maybe ginger ale will be considered "cheap" again and we can see their initial change effect )
because nobody knew it was a bug until they found the attack animations inside the files (how will people ask for the fix when they didn't know it wasn't intended?). This was already in the game since gms, but only recently was it discovered. no matter how you look at it, a lvl 45 mob that dies in one hit, and provide a "double drop" of its own item table, where the drops include some items from lvls 60-80, in a pretty high droprate, is not a fair mob. This design choice was made by wizet, the people who made the game you are nostalgic about. if they made a change, but it wasn't applied at all due to a bug, i don't see it as unreasonable to try and revive it, as it is their ORIGINAL VISION. if it does too much damage to the server it can always be reverted or nerfed. heck you can go make a feedback about the damage of leps right now if you want to.
