A controversial topic: Is it time to make items scarcer or cost more?

[tidge]

1 hour ago, Greycat said:

People don't play on Beta not because things are free, but because it's beta and subject to massive change and/or getting wiped at any time - and that's warned about. I wouldn't want to play there and have hundreds of hours on a character just to have "New patch, beta's had to be wiped" hit it. 

 

Asking for a friend: Is this "hundreds of hours" played on a character all at 50+, or is it leveling up a character from level 1? I've been suggesting the Beta server to the players that only want to play at level 50, immediately slotted with a full-kit that they don't want to pay for, and who have more-or-less said that a hundred hours is something they wouldn't accumulate for a long time, certainly not on only a single character.

[The Witchfire]

Scarcer and more expensive...  Well, that would be a great way to drive off new players; make them unable to acquire or afford anything.

[Neiska]

12 hours ago, Erratic1 said:

 

My soul is screaming in pain at the thought of using unslotters to remove enhancements from unused characters.

 

Respec unslots everything, and unless you respec a whole heck of a lot more often than I do on a character, you probably have some on just about every character you've ever made. And for the cost of using 15 unslotters to get less than a quarter of your enhancements unstuck, you could just buy a respec recipe and make it (or of course run the trial for free to get one).

 

Also very true! Quicker and easier. But my main point was to re-use enhancements from characters don't play anymore. If all you do is buy then yea, you gonna need lots of inf. But if you recycle? Not so much! Just takes bit of time to keep stuff organized.

[Excraft]

4 hours ago, Greycat said:

People don't play on Beta not because things are free, but because it's beta and subject to massive change and/or getting wiped at any time - and that's warned about. I wouldn't want to play there and have hundreds of hours on a character just to have "New patch, beta's had to be wiped" hit it. 

 

You can just re-copy the character to BETA or re-roll it with all the bells and whistles in a few minutes.  It's not like you'd need to level up the character running all the content from scratch again.  I think it's more people don't play on BETA because of the low population and most do want some feeling of progression.

Edited 6 hours ago by Excraft

[Zombra]

I'm confused.  How would costs be increased?  Everything I buy, I buy from the market with prices set by player vendors.  Increase the listing fee?

[Greycat]

6 hours ago, tidge said:

 

Asking for a friend: Is this "hundreds of hours" played on a character all at 50+, or is it leveling up a character from level 1?

 

If I'm playing a character, it's from level 1, and then playing them, RPing them and more. Which, again, is not something I would think anyone would want to do on a server that is at risk of being wiped or changed at any time. Thus "Nobody plays on beta." Because nobody's going to want to spend time on a character that could just go away at any time. 

[Greycat]

3 hours ago, Excraft said:

 

You can just re-copy the character to BETA or re-roll it with all the bells and whistles in a few minutes.  It's not like you'd need to level up the character running all the content from scratch again.  I think it's more people don't play on BETA because of the low population and most do want some feeling of progression.

 

... which means you're probably spending most of your time playing it on live, not beta. 

[ThatGuyCDude]

42 minutes ago, Zombra said:

I'm confused.  How would costs be increased?  Everything I buy, I buy from the market with prices set by player vendors.  Increase the listing fee?

Increased scarcity of item drops (salvage, recipes, and I assume enhancements), as well as the removal of enhancement conversion items, will make the game cost more INF to gear up.

This is because the drop in supply will consequently result in an increase in demand, raising costs and subsequently raising prices to justify the time and energy to create said items.  Suddenly what you would expect to pay 3 million inf for will cost 300 million.  The removal of conversion items will make the values skyrocket even higher, as important enhancement pieces are further rendered scarce by the inability to roll them from less important ones.  The auction house will empty out as the players who already have that kind of INF to throw around clear all the listings, and that would be the end of it.

As many others have said, it would also drive off new players (even veterans from the live version of the game) because the investment of both time and virtual currency to set up a build would be too high for the benefit.  It would cause cascading collapses as group activities drop off to make time for more influence and salvage and recipe farming, and a large percentage of the already quite small population of the game would drop out.

[Zombra]

11 minutes ago, ThatGuyCDude said:

Increased scarcity of item drops will make the game cost more INF to gear up.

 

Ah OK, thank you.  I was confused by the OP - seemed to be talking about reducing drops and increasing costs as two separate issues.

 

If they are one and the same, then absolutely not.  Decreasing drops would simply further concentrate wealth to the "haves", the farmers, the efficiency experts.  Part of what I really enjoy about the current economy is that every player has a good chance to get a really valuable drop once in a while.  As a more casual hero, those occasional big ticket drops help keep me interested in participating.  Dampen my economic leverage and my interest in building sets will decline proportionally.