Hello hello! As we all know there is a bit of a buzz regarding mage farming and whether it should be nerfed, policed, limited, or completely erased, but I think that looking at mage farming by itself is like only looking at a single part of a more systemic issue. People turn to mage farming as a way to earn mesos because it's simply the undisputed best rate of return for time spent. We all have lives outside of the game and it's natural to want to maximize efficiency for what precious little time we have to spend on our hobbies. Rather then discuss mage farming I would like to suggest an alternative solution to the question at hand: How do we encourage players to participate in other content when the mesos per hour doesn't add up? A big part of the problem, in my opinion of course, is that the majority of bossing content just simply doesn't make sense when you break everything down into Mesos earned vs. Time spent. Nothing feels worse then running 2 hours+ of Horntail to end up empty handed. How many times do we run Auf and miss the scrolls? V2 not dropping fragment C over and over again, etc etc. Does anyone even do the Boss regularly? I myself have never even run Toad once. Running Zakum, Scarlion/Targa, and Krex are strong arguments for bosses that are simply not that profitable and certainly do not even come close for the time spent/mesos earned ratio. So how do we solve this? The idea: Weekly Mystic Scroll Content Roulette quest. Reward: 500m raw mesos Once a week you are provided a quest that will highlight up to seven bosses or content in the ledger that must be completed in order to receive the quest reward. The content will be selected at random and each selected piece of content must be completed in full by the end of the week. So if it's 2/2 you have to do it twice! Ideally this would also scale based on level and available content for players. So lower level characters that can't do all content would still be able to participate, but would have less highlighted content and would still receive the same reward. This would act as a boon to new players especially because then they would be able to get at least a little bit of mesos for doing the Zakums/Scar/Targa/Krex that they were likely already going to do. New players would also benefit from established players that may seek larger parties simply for the clear (Obviously some people will still solo, but I think at this point that's largely unavoidable). Potential Pros: - Diverse parties and people running more a variety of content - Boon to new players and provides slightly better mesos returned for time spent - Old players may be incentivized to run content they aren't actively running and helping new players - Gives a small reason to say yes to running alternate content - Alternate way to make mesos Potential Cons: - People may make "mules" that stay below a threshold to complete this quest weekly by only doing lower level content - People will still solo content with multiple characters (unavoidable) - The liquid mesos may have a larger unintended impact on the economy (500m for one week hopefully doesn't impact it too negatively) Would love to hear your thoughts and opinions on this idea! I think solving the question is really difficult (obviously). Making it too easy to make mesos isn't a solution and providing players too much raw mesos would only de-stabilize the market and cause hyper inflation. People having access to more liquid mesos doesn't really change the issue of supply and demand. Mage farmers, for better or worse, do inject a lot of raw equipment into the market and allow people to scroll items/generate better items to move around so I personally don't think it would be a good idea to completely eradicate them. I think easing up on the grind a little bit for newer players would be beneficial long term, but let me know if my idea totally sucks.
The thing with mage farming is, yes people are doing it but not that many people in the Grand scheme of things. Making an easily accessible money making method that everyone will for sure do, generates so much extra mesos that it would cause huge inflation. Which is not necessarily bad and I don't think this is a bad idea, but it would need to be very well thought out. Maybe make it so you can't do this on all your accounts, like with the Valentines boss you only being able to enter with 1 account, make it so doing this on one IP locks you from all other characters doing it on that. But ofc that would massively increase staff workload because they'd have to check if people are not using different IPs/computers to do it multiple times.
Thank you for saying this! I completely overlooked how it would be across multiple accounts. In my head I was already considering it as "Once per person" reward, but oh god this would be way too high if it was once per character per week. Maybe this would have to be something verified via the forums or some kind of tracker kind of like voting? I think trying to implement a way to police once per person would be very difficult in hindsight which is a big bummer.
