Since this does seem to be a major point of contention for some players, I felt a few clarifications could be beneficial. As this topic has started to derail elsewhere, I've created a separate thread. The poster to which I am most particularly responding to is this:

http://forums.carrionfields.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=6&topic_id=56349&mesg_id=56450&page=

Previously, piles of treasure reset to specific amounts when the area reset occurred. This value was fixed, and the treasure would either be there (or not, if it had been taken and no reset had occurred). Therefore, the only real balance to the size of the treasure would be
the difficulty in retrieving it. Fighting difficult mobs, obtaining keys, etc. Unfortunately, the nature of players and this situation leads to a feast or famine result. Piles that are too difficult become ignored, and piles that are simple for particular individuals become exploited to excess. This isn't particularly beneficial to the overall environment.

Current design - Gold piles begin at smaller values, and increase over time. Area designers now have more control over these treasure piles, and the nature of the current system creates an automatic devaluing of coin piles that were previously over-used. Unfortunately, this means all of the popular sites to gather easy coin have lost value. However, consider the following pros to this new system.

1) Coin piles may start much smaller, but can now be allowed to grow larger than previously allowed as they can no longer be repeatedly gathered in succession. This favors the creative or adventurous explorer, taking the effort to go after previously unfavorable or unknown treasures. This is also not unlike the existing economy in regards to selling to merchants for coin.

2) Treasure piles in general are more acceptable to be placed since they will naturally control themselves. It might not be 300 gold that will tide you over until next year, but it can be more accessible overall.

Also, keep in mind that this change does cover many different treasure piles, and so adjustments will continue to be made as time progresses. As with many other changes, the purpose is not to specifically make this process inherently more difficult, but to better control the extremes. Piles become too simple to raid will overall have less coin, and piles that go unused will become more valuable on their own.

Hopefully this will help assuage fears or concerns some of the playerbase have. I'll try to respond to what posts and questions I am able to answer.

Thanks!
Nythos

The old system was very broken. Someone could step away from their PC and run a script to accumulate an endless hoard of cash without even having any player input.

You really don't think that is a broken system? You would rather have a system with zero time (yes, that's right.. not just a little, zero) spent by the player for an essentially unlimited cash supply? How is that not a broken economy?

With regard to the status quo and cabal powers. I have worked my way up the Imperial ladder without using any of the treasure troves mentioned on the other forum.

This game should not be a process of who can most efficiently automate their characters to farm out X, or Y. Hence why a routine to non-routine shift is fine in this instance.

I'm ok with your feedback regarding not wanting to make changes like this because no one is happy about it without even giving it a chance. Realism changes are very low on my priority list as a player.

Here's the thing, to me the only changes I want are ones that make the game more accessible or competitive (so long as it's not at the cost of accessability). The fact that lots of people are running around with lots of gold or pouches of nourishment doesn't impede my desire to play. Having to spend more time farming gold on the other hand, does.

It's not about giving stuff a chance, it's about priorities. My priorities are things that make the game playable for me (obviously). I'm not really in favor of changes that make that less and less likely to happen.

The game has too high a ratio of "farm" to "fight" as it is. Does that make sense? If I don't have enough time to play right now as it is, why would I ever be happy about any change that has any impact in making anything take *more* time than it already does without some kind of compensation?

Of course the players will adapt. And of course, eventually, people will prefer the system after all the knots have been worked out. None of that is the point, the point is that no one really cared about this to begin with - not nearly as much as people care about how much time they have to spend farming gold for preps or other activities.

Edited (again) to add:

To give you another example since it was brought up in the other thread. How many hours over the years have been dumped into various wand systems? This is in spite of repeated feedback from the community that wand mechanics are boring and time consuming and detract from the fun of the game. I'd much rather see changes like better unlimited gear so that I can stop playing for 2 weeks to launch a project and not come back to a naked, cabaless and useless character that I dumped 100 hours into skill practice and another 100 hours into gearing up.

In a world where people have extremely busy lives that they would want to minimize aspects of the game that they consider to be a time sink.

I am completely sympathetic with regard to that angle. But I also don't think that the game should be a series of routine tasks that can be programmed and left to run. It adds nothing at all to the game beside a bunch of robots running around.

I also do concede your point about survivor bias. It was a fair point to make.

I just wish some players would give a little with regards to some of this stuff, because honestly, I don't think anybody quite grasps why this change was made. It wasn't about realism, or one particular broken chest, or trying to force people to undertake a mass exodus to Outlander.

It is literally about routine vs. non-routine and script abuse.

And I get the motivation for it. I (and others I presume) just look at thing from the perspective of having less and less time available. I'm on the outside wanting to play and hoping that some day it's more realistic - so that's my entire perspective.

I don't mean to make anyone angry, that's just how I view it. This one change won't make a huge difference but it's also not helping me specifically ;). So I'll take whatever hand-outs I can get. I'd like to see things like this mixed in terms of delivering a fix to one item and taking the opportunity simultaneously to make the game more accessible by lowering the bar somewhere else.

In fairness to you, and many other posters, some of the points made are completely understandable.

But I am frustrated today having read through the other forums, because of the (in my opinion completely unjustified) personal attacks and so on that were made against some members of the staff. It's also too early to gauge this change's impact, for the staff and for the players.

I apologize if I have been on the defensive and/or confrontational posting to you. It is not specific to you at all.

.

The most common farming spots (aside from those which required certain, even specialty builds) were in heavily trafficked areas. The idea of stepping away with a script doing the dirty work would just be asking to come back to your pit and no gold at all.

Unless, of course, they were doing it under level 11. Though the amount of gold acquired then wouldn't be enough to warrant a change like this from my perspective. Sure there's still merchants to sell things to but there's a long list of classes that can't reliably kill the dragons and other common targets at low-to-mid ranks. This just ultimately makes me want to play something that doesn't require gold.

Most players have a different perception of the game than the staff. In one sense it is myopic, and in another sense it is less so.

Players are generally more in touch with the game than a staff member who never plays, but likewise they don't see the full spectrum of behavior from other players(especially the best and worst).

Valg details all this really well below.

...when you limit currency you also need to adjust where you're gating things based on it. For instance - did you guys change the auto-promote requirements for Imperial? There's a couple quality of life things that, if you address those, people will be less angry about this.

For me and a lot of other people gold only really exists because :

1) There's donation systems I have to hit certain levels in. Empire being the big example.

2) Training is actually somewhat expensive.

3) Since everyone out there seems to be stocking up on 90 different preps to be competitive you have to do similar.

I'm cool with it as long as it doesn't mean that, in addition to skill spam, role writing, finding groups to finally level, etc etc etc I now also need to spend that many more hours saving up for things like trap ingredients to spam up my trap skills or farming gold so that the imperial leaders get off my case.

It would be interesting to see what the game would be like if preps were gated harder, but they would have to be booted to progressively higher levels on classes where they are innate to compensate, flight being the biggest example, but damage reduction (and the damage that makes it necessary) being gated in different places could shift around as well...

Anything that makes the game harder for veterans to flee from a fight they didn't start without involving lagging moves specifically, while changing very little for players with less mechanical and area knowledge is invaluable at this point for mixing things up and filling the pre-40 levels with more bodies for longer periods of time. More carrot, less stick. It's more than likely the gold changes are a step in a larger project rather than done purely for the sake of realism.

To put it another way, I would be interested as a neutral observer to see if this closes enough loopholes to cause people like Nepenthe, Marcus, Crafted, Kostyan, Shapa and other high-tier players to be forced to lose 3 or 4 CON before heroing as a matter of course rather than solely due to lazy or inattentive gameplay. Gold wouldn't do it by itself, but fooling with enough other gates to make things interesting without invalidating the mechanical knowledge gained during the Third Age entirely would raise a few eyebrows if nothing else.

I wouldn't worry about ingredient-intensive classes becoming any more difficult to play, chances are those ingredients will go down in cost sharply, the Conserve Ingredients edge cost or success rate can be tweaked further, and non-shop ingredients will appear in batches rather than singular item pops where necessary. Likewise, once the economy is adjusted for a potentially crippling amount of deflation, we may see more benefits for being first or second in donations in Empire for example, and may see the leads in Empire or guild donations narrow from the vast gulfs we see today because of exploits and loopholes we all had to learn. As it is right now, when it comes to thief guild politics, it's whoever has the most patience to gather the most gold as early as possible in life, NOT whoever is cleverest or the strongest IC political animal.

This is more exciting in the long term in what balance tweaks it allows to keep up with empowerment classes and cabal power arms races for example, than it is short-term for what classes it hampers. Hit and run tactics on players don't potentially take hours because of town healers, nor does it cause as much of a risk of a player shoving their head in the sand deep in some explore area to avoid bad odds as often, and starting combat with blind might do something other than cause a player to immediately reach for a handy return or teleport potion to instantly undo the ambush. I'm ready to see how the playing field changes and what else is planned, balance has needed to go into the blender and come out in a new form for some time.

Good post...I think you're actually highlighting a lot of problems.

Re: class skills taking the places of common preps - to me this just makes sense. Give warriors, for instance, some ability to negate lag for X number of hours, with a cooldown of (X * 2). Having to be running around enlarged and flying every time I want to fight is not fun, it's just a kinda boring requirement (and for those that say it's not necessary, let's face it, there aren't any high end PVPers who are running around in fights against orcs without doing something to mitigate bash, etc).

Conserve ingredients edge - this to me is stuff that actually should just be part of the class. Quality of life changes that make something actually tolerable to play shouldn't require farming/spending edge points.

I'm not worried that eventually things will even out, it's just that occasionally that can take years. Changes tend to go in that take 5 minutes but quality of life isn't improved afterwards for a very very long time.

>I'm not worried that eventually things will even out, it's just that >occasionally that can take years. Changes tend to go in that take 5 >minutes but quality of life isn't improved afterwards for a very very >long time.

I think there's been a bunch of evidence in the past few months that this won't be the case this time around, and I'm as cynical as anyone else with regard to mechanical balance that has been stagnant or too RNG/dam redux/passive skill and legacy reliant for some time.

It looks to me like there's a bunch of more recent imms and heroimms and such who have all spent more time playing more recent PvP and MMO games than the implementors have possibly been able to and are taking those experiences to heart. We're all aware that CF game balance is a burdensome bureaucratic process full of red tape, at times unnecessarily so, up to the point a veteran abuses or exploits a certain build or item to force an inefficient band-aid fix in lieu of something blindingly obvious and more efficient that didn't introduce artificial difficulty.

At this point you've got this one guy pleading for six months of patience or so while a bunch of balance tweaks he probably can't mention all in one post play out because quality assurance testing is messy as you also know. We don't have a whole lot to lose at this point to do what he says and shut up till next year or so, we don't have a Russian Imperial Lich with a Pseudo Council Permagroup running roughshod over the entire game for a year and a half aside from Baer passing out imm XP to paladins like crack in a vague attempt to compensate for it or anything like five years ago, so we've got time to rub some chins in thought.

Chances are this Mendos guy is the type to pound the table in Immland hard if these balance changes cause people who are 'playing the game right' in the eyes of the imms PvP-wise to lose CON unnecessarily to things other than a massive run of poor luck with the RNG, so let's just give him the time he's asking for the staff to evaluate this rather than abusing the word realism as a code word for Korean MMO grindfest artificial difficulty.

It's not hard to raise gold without these exploits.

Selling stuff lying around can make you a lot of gold. Just not by botting.

My current has about 300 gold in the bank and could have more if I cared to donate lots more. Personally as an imperial I just don't call centurions all the time. So my donation requirement is way down.

Without using these chests you can gather very significant amounts of money. It might involve getting a little to hire a merc pack horse but it is still not hard. Just means travelling to a variety of merchants.

Am I a smart enough person to figure out how to get gold without that one chest that I barely used? Of course.

Is that what I want to spend time doing? Not really. See my post above re: priorities.

One that people got used to finding ways around. I am glad this got fixed for the same reason I'm glad the wand system got changed.

It used to be a/b/s on a stick or delete. Now we see mages fighting without having every single protection all the time.

I recently saw someone buy at least 20 healing potions in one shot. And really, it used to be flee, eat/drink healing, come back and fight some more. As long as a healer was around to buy healing/refresh/mana from, it could potentially be a drawn out fight too. Its a great strategy but it should be expensive and require some time investment. Same as a mage wanting to be a/b/s all the time.

Outlanders lose all their preps ever single time they die. It takes time to gather stuff IF they want to be full preped for every fight.

All this means is that people might not be able to prep to the teeth for every single fight. Or maybe think twice about blowing all their healing preps for one fight. I might actually get a kill now :D

I hope they keep making these changes to outline the true value of gold. Healing blindness, disease and poison at the healer should be made more expensive as people gain levels too. They always felt like minor inconveniences at hero so long as you had a recall potion/spell.

I'd just remove some of those preps.

That healing potion probably has no place in the game without some kind of cooldown.

Honestly, I'd just reduce a lot of the preps.

There's three ways to go about something like this:

1) You try to fix the 'economy'. This is, in a game as small as this is player wise and therefore having no market/crafting/etc, more or less impossible.

2) Use a gated currency system that isn't money (tokens, etc) like other games do and gate preps with that. IE, instead of buying your enlarge potions with money, you buy them with tokens and you get X tokens per daily quest where X is a small number.

3) Get rid of the prep, throw it onto the character and give it a cooldown timer (CC breaks in most games work like this).

Trying to make currency as it stands right now in the game work might theoretically be possible but it's really not even worth it. Everything is worth so much that vendors won't buy it because they don't have enough money...NPCs drop so little it's hilarious and you get into this feast famine cycle where people "not in the know" like newbies are virtually poor *ALL THE TIME*. If anything, that's a great way to figure out who a newbie is...because they're the only people in the game that can't scare up some money. And it's just a confusing system for them as well because in most games you can vendor anything you pick up.

I'll add one more thing here. The learning curve for CF is huge. There are certain things that...while they make sense to you or me, won't make sense to a newbie. If a newbie finds a chest and it's got 300 copper in it, they'll assume all chests are crap in this game and they'll just get frustrated. There's no way anyone besides people like us who've played for 10+ years will *get* that this was a "popular" chest that now is not as good. It's almost better to remove the chest entirely.

Then selling decent stuff is an option. Personally I'd rather have stuff like this available to those who choose to spend time getting stuff like this instead of something else (eg pk'ing, exploring, gambling, raiding, emoting in the inn).

No reason that a player should get handed all good things without having to make a consider the price.

Those healing potions are reasonable as long as the gold being given up has value. Your proposal to take out the potions but leave the gold on tap means that healers just get used extensively instead. That's not much of an improvement. With the gold tap switched off, you can run down the resources of someone using the potions or healers.

The automated 1st promotion for Empire is/was 75 gold and you are/were expected to do it before level 30. If I can farm that much in a reasonable period of time at those levels - then gold is sufficient to make the healing pills too powerful, whereas if I can't, then there's major QoL concerns for being an Imperial in a down-swing where there's not lots of active players.

That's part of why I suggested either changing those preps to be gated by murdering something for them or use an alternate form of currency - thus you could allow the normal gold-related activities (like donations, guild, practice costs, ingredient costs) to be relatively fast while not making certain preps overpowered.

Otherwise, you're in a balancing situation that is so difficult to achieve that major game companies like MMOs with 7 figure budgets can't keep up with keeping it balanced (that's why they don't gate things that way).

First couple of promotions are relatively easy. You can scrounge that up in a handful of hours without touching a treasure pile.

Tougher ones are the final because of the gap between what is mechanically neccesary and what players demand. That had been inflated a bit because of a few people who obsessively compulsively farm.

But the beauty of it is that it's player controlled. So imms don't need to do anything.

I'll write more on this later, but a summary:

Fundamentally, the prices you are talking about were named in a world where many characters were extremely wealthy, even if you (and all new players) weren't. When we were gathering data before making this adjustment, we saw, among other things:

1) A fairly intricate method of gathering ~2.3 million copper pieces per (RL) hour as a high-level character. The setup was involved, but once everything was just so, it was executed by a script (until we stepped in, but logs noted that this had been done before). A more optimized version (not implemented by mortals to my knowledge) would be over 3 million copper per hour.
2) A dirt-simple method of gathering ~90,000 copper per hour which could be done by anyone, even below level 10.
3) A character with personal assets of 67+ million copper, and several in the tens of millions.
4) These very wealthy characters purchasing (not especially earth-shattering, just "very, very good") gear for 500,000 to 1,000,000 copper. Not because of demand, but because they could.

And of course, things like thief guild donations, Imperial donations, etc. were being bid up by people with a slice of that pie.

If you're a casual or new player, you probably didn't have access to that kind of bankroll, but you had to compete with the people who did. You're complaining about how "everyone out there seems to be stocking up on 90 different preps" without asking how they were able to do that. Even if you killed and looted Mr. 67-Millionaire, in his ghost period he could hit a bank and repurchase a full backpack worth of stuff.

You also had to deal with the area and code teams making decisions in that world such as:

1) We couldn't put high-end items in shops.
2) We had to cap the size of many currency treasures low, because high-efficiency farming was that lucrative and common.
3) Currency as a cheap resource meant high thresholds for things like Imperial donations, etc.

When I made the changes to the currency piles, I also slackened the reins on the above, and we'll be revisiting these things as time goes by. Since this change hits repetitive farming and not more interesting ways of amassing cash, it's very likely many people will come out ahead.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

I hope imperial donation reqs are looked at.

This change cures a symptom of a bigger problem. A problem I have brought up before to no avail. The fact that CF doesn't really have a very good economy. Some changes have been made to address this which I assume this is part of but overall I believe the intentions are good but the results end up being bad.

Here is what I suggest:


1. Limit the amount of gold each bank can hold.

Why does each bank need to hold an unlimited amount of cash? Set varying limits on each bank and have more banks. This would lead to more people carrying larger amounts of gold on them. Which would naturally place more gold in circulation which would alleviate the problem that comes with this change.

2. Create more 'natural' ways to earn gold. I have always been a fan of subclasses whose skills can be used to do things that can't be done by merchants which would allow for an actual economy to develop.

For example the repair thing could have been part of a subclass so players not mobs could earn gold. I could easily see perhaps a more robust way of doing repairs by actually requiring 'ores' and people collect those. Make ores plentiful so that it isnt a real time sink and a blacksmith subclass could farm ores to use to repair metal items for a fee for the repair. The ores would be useless for doing anything but repairs so farming them wouldn't have the effect farming gold does that the Imms are wary of. Throw in non-metal things like wood, crystals, etc. and that would be cool.

3. Treasure Quests

A simple idea for a quest is to just grab some people and fight some monsters and have some treasure waiting at the end of it. Do this more often and these changes won't hurt as much.



4. More gambling

More places that allow you to gamble for gold and nice items that can be sold or traded besides Eternal Star.

5. More things to spend gold on.

This strangely relates to limiting the amounts carried in banks and to the fact people were accumulating tens of millions (i'm looking at a certain herald thief right now) of gold. Accumulation is a result not just of having it too easy in terms of farming gold but also because there isn't enough to spend it on. I was one of those characters who was blessed to have someone gift them with more gold than any other character I have ever had COMBINED had and what I found out was that I didn't really have much to spend it all on.

You can only carry but so many healing potions. I'd like to see some really high end things that a player can purchase that would give possessing gold a purpose beyond donations to the Empire and preps. Leader weapons without being a leader for example. It can pop back to whatever pit you use. 500 gold. Whayt about those houses in Udgaard you get thrown out of...maybe make a few of them empty and let us walk in without being thrown out? 1000 gold.

Just a thought

Adding this to the #1 thing about limiting the amount banks could hold.

I'd have one mega bank that can't be used by players. It would be where all the other banks deposit their gold. And have the gold delivered once a bank is 'full' to this mega bank via caravan...that can be robbed with extreme hardship depending on the amount of gold being delivered.

The mega bank like todays banks would have its own account which provides insurance for any thefts so folks don't lose the gold they deposit. Maybe even make it so robbing these caravans would be under the purview of the Spire and robbing one could get you a WANTED flag.

Just a thought.

At the same time, not sure if it was as big of a deal as you think.

Through a very nominal method of gathering gold, my last Imperial could make over 100 gold an hour using relatively easy methods. None involved exploiting a treasure bug however (in fact, the main component of the ease in this gathering is not getting bothered by someone trying to PK me since it involves moving between multiple areas).

So while yes, it's bad that someone was scripting something that could possibly get them 3,000 gold an hour, it's not necessarily game-breaking IMHO.

PS the gambling/luck bug to me was much worse. That led to certain players having absurd amounts of gold much more than this current exploit.

(So I'ma let you finish) but this was very game breaking. It is essentially preps/donations on demand.

That is a very broken economy. It empowers the scripter immensely, encourages really shady behavior and allows people to bolster their own allies/friends way beyond the average player.

Should I be penalized as an honest player in terms of Imperial donations because some guy can walk away from his computer for an hour while scripts run and drop 3000 gold on a friend?

I'd be annoyed too if I was 3000 gold/hour guy but for the majority of players this is actually beneficial.

NT

As someone who has never been arsed to collect much gold, even when playing Imperials, it was getting pretty ridiculous.

It just has to be broken when I get handed 1 000 gold before level 40. Even still Althamael had an order of magnitude higher donations than I did, or likely ever would have collected.

Honestly, it's been this way for the longest time. We'll see if high end stuff hits stores any time soon (for a price that you can actually afford) but this was something that was mentioned back when gold changed to gold/copper/silver...

Like I said, I don't inherently mind the change, I just mind the 'farmy farmy' stuff. If I don't need 75 gold anymore to get imperial promotion then I'm ok with that. 75 gold sucks though. That's a lot of farming and you effectively nuked every chest in the game (instead of the one that you're talking about where you could've totally just moved the key ;)). I'd be real mad if it took me 90 minutes to battle my way through an area explore just to find a chest with 10 gold in it ;).

Honestly, it's been this way for the longest time. We'll see if high end stuff hits stores any time soon (for a price that you can actually afford) but this was something that was mentioned back when gold changed to gold/copper/silver.

In this very thread, you're complaining that a healing potion is too good and needs to be removed.

As another poster pointed out, the problem you're seeing isn't the healing potion. Remove that potion, and traffic just moves to a slightly less efficient choice. But if money is unlimited (and only to certain players), the only limit on an item like that is weight. That's how players end up fighting someone who carries 50 of them.

That's a lot of farming and you effectively nuked every chest in the game (instead of the one that you're talking about where you could've totally just moved the key ;)). I'd be real mad if it took me 90 minutes to battle my way through an area explore just to find a chest with 10 gold in it ;).

That chest wasn't on anyone's radar when the changes were discussed. It was noted during data gathering, and I did fix the bug exploit (*) as I went.

I know you essentially don't play any more, but we're watching the actual impact in the game, and letting the data drive decisions.

If you battled your way through an area explore for 90 minutes and the chest in question was near the minimum, maybe you should have done something about the other person that was running past you and grabbing it.

(*) The key in question was inside the mouth of a (dead) guard. The guard was stuffed in a locked container. Because of ROM's issues with nesting (that are not trivial to resolve without breaking other things), people could previously remove the key from the guard's mouth without unlocking/opening the outer container via a second key that is more challenging to get.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

My thing about high end stuff is consumables aren't really what I'm interested in I guess. I'd like to see real gear that's equivalent to some of the weaker limited options because I'd like to be able to chill with a char in an unlimited set and still be competitive. White worm is actually good enough for some builds but any build that requires a decent weapon usually has a tough time having a 'casual friendly set'.

Other then that...if you're saying you're on top of farming rates, great, happy to have you back then :).

I was having to dedicate untold lengths of time to exploiting/farming that lowbie chest just to tread water in terms of gold expenditures. Incredibly dull, and I wish it weren't a necessary part of the game. With these changes I'm thinking of ways to adapt that might make it feasible to keep up with heal refresh expenditures on a lowbie, but I can't imagine playing an Imperial beneath the 35-40 range at all.

Seriously, healing potions? You don't get to afford those by farming any chest I've ever been able to unlock.

Firstly, the chest with the exploit yields enough for a potion a pop.

Secondly, if you can summon or buy a merc you can easily raise gold. So that's everyone that needs gold.

You must be plowing money into donations and calling centurions very regularly if you're not able to afford these.

Moreover, if you use these the cost is often offset by the gold you take from kills you otherwise would not have got.

Part of me wonders whether the benefit to you is less than most because if heavy use of abs (reducing the impact of the potion relative to where you'd be without potions, proportionately), and your means to buy them is impaired because you spend gold on donations (or gambling?).

I've used the twilight chest and it is definitely able to finance this kind of stuff.

So call it 8 ticks for a potion of healing. Heal heal at a healer costs 0.9k to 1.2k. If you've got 500 hp you might quaff 5 potions to heal to full, go back at the guy and be forced back again. Maybe he's a battlerager who progged deathblow and did 200 more damage or 15 minutes farming the mansion, maybe he's a shaman who was doing com mend while you were typing q heal, maybe he's an outlander who types cham and sleeps up, in any of these cases you've burned through 15-20 minutes of gathering to mitigate something your opponent does nearly instantaneously at no cost.

It's a very inefficient way to go about things. As an imperial in a typical session I might expect to spend time on retrievals, defenses, orders to place centurions, journeys to prep vendors, sleek wand retrievals, and using up preps, sleeks, and visiting healers to survive the process. Generally all the time not spent doing any of this would be spent farming gold to cover the dents this makes in donations and bank balances and at the end of the day I'd count myself as having done well if my donations and bank balance where the same as what they were when I began.

Very occasionally you kill a guy with 50 gold on them. You stop putting off repairing that item that got stoneshattered, round off your donations, deposit 10 or so in the bank and enjoy the luxury of having 26 gold in your pocket instead of 16 until the next time you need to use healer.

As a lowbie, each of those healing potions is a very significant portion of your total.

Also, if you can see it's going to be inefficient to use the potions, you don't, unless it is really worth the expense for a low chance of gain.

Within an hour you can effectively farm 20 of these or more. That's 2000 hp worth, which for some clases at some levels is a very helpful amount. (In fact, a fraction of this is still helpful.) Also, are you considering the items in the chest that you can sell at many many shoppies in your figure of 4.2k? Or the fact that you can haggle? And the potions cost 5k, I thought?

I think the difference between us is that when I play imperials I tend not to use the expensive powers much, so my gold demands are much lower than they might otherwise be. But to me, that's not a bad thing.

Obviously, all things being equal, using a healer is dramatically more efficient than healing potions or pills.

Efficiency isn't always everything, though. Maybe you need to heal someplace where you can't easily get to a healer, or maybe you don't want to telegraph to an opponent that you are or might be healing fast. There's nothing quite like bashing someone who expects to have "caught" you almost dead but found you fully healed instead.

My assassin was being asked to donate > 400 gold to get elite. Yes, that was player suggested - but regardless, it's non-trivial. If you can farm 400 gold, you can buy healing pots and use them like candy. It's a bit of a conflicting interest there.

There is an obscene number of ways to stockpile gold as a lowbie that don't even involve using that or any other chest. The reason that chest was used so much was because it was an easy thing to automate with no risk. Its even easier to stock up on random stuff that you can toss in a bag and use to spam heal refresh if you want to keep on the move instead of having any down time.

This begs the question though: what do you consider to be 'enough' gold on your char at the various level ranges?

There's lots of stuff I was doing before I discovered the dodgy chest to earn gold, I did play imperials before then, and had a method whereby I'd gather 100 or so gold in a multi-hour session to buy some basic gear and preps and get my donations rolling. On a given day this won't always be possible and I may have to wait for a reboot. This is a meta-game advantage to people who play less frequently.

I'll admit I could probably adapt to incorporate bartering for refreshes and healing and it might even up my game, but there are already so many considerations involved in playing an efficient game that I'm not sure I want to. There are various things I do beside farming a chest which allow me to complete certain character objectives in a fraction of the time that might be necessary if I hadn't built up the knowledge of where, when and how. These are all there to save time and allow me to get into the game quicker. I farmed gold in the most efficient, automatic, mindless way because I hate gold farming.

If playing an imperial, level 20-40 I'd aim to have 100 gold in donations, 40-51 I'd be trying to keep it closer to 200. I generally consider myself to be doing rather well if my bank balance is half of my donations, but I have to keep an eye on what I spend and occasionally take time out from cabal interactions to get more to keep it there. A comfortable amount to have on my person is 10-20 gold, and this doesn't change much according to the level of my character. Quite often, for example following a death, I'll be penniless.

When Saguntius got 2k dropped on him, it completely made the character. Suddenly I didn't have to spend a massive chunk of time farming just to tread water, and didn't have to bail on fights because they were costing too much or shy away from them because I had no gold in the bank, no preps, the danger of demotion because of bleeding donations and having been order to place cents, and all the best gold-getting locations too dangerous to visit because of people I had no business fighting without a lot of preps and a lot of gold on hand to heal with. Instead, I was practically unstoppable until the money ran out around level 40.

The success I had with that character was so much greater than anything I'd done previously, and while I've gotten close on other characters the chance to get the experience of what it's like to be the guy who knocks was a direct result of being comfortably wealthy. A lot of classes depend on the ability to spend money, and therefore the ability to acquire it without massive fuss, as a part of game balance (seriously, battleragers and outlanders get an awful lot of perks to make up for this).

But a lot of the things that you talk about, like needing to farm gold and be more efficient in order to play etc, are things that are a non issue to me. I think that the way I approach the game is very different than a lot of our players which makes it a lot more difficult for me to really understand the 'why' aspect of the things they do.

For instance, I will almost never spend any time working on skills instead of leveling (in some instances I will spend about 25 mins to work on defenses, but that is usually only if there is a learning bonus occurring during said limited window of time). I also feel that investing the time and energy into prep gathering is oft a waste of time and one that I almost never utilize. So to me, the need for gold is fairly small and irrelevant other than the occasional use of healer for things like plague.

Having watched a lot of your characters, I think its pretty safe to say that you don't mind dying so I think you should attempt to play a character without attempting to min/max along the way and see how you do. I imagine you will end up doing better than you think and even learn a few new tricks that make it even easier to be competitive without investing a ton of hours into mindless skill spam and gold farming.

I think we can agree the importance of devoting time to acquiring currency is greater on Imperials than other characters? I think this is maybe why you've been known to hand out gold on occasions. But that eases the burden once for one player's character. In fact, as grateful as I am for being able to play Saguntius as I was, in an abstract sense I consider directly handing out gold to mortals as a bit dodgy in terms of immortals getting directly involved in mortal affairs. 2k was a fortune and it had massive implications as to how well I did with the character.

Furthermore, it might be something that's doubly accentuated by my favourite choice of class - one thousand of the gold received was from Ergoth, a bard. I imagine bards could quite possibly less often find themselves forced to part with large sums of currency to be able to stay in a fight.

I do occasionally play a character with no real strategy in mind and just play along with anyone who wants to group with me, as a variety of different classes. Some go better than others.

Rather than talking about each class individually, suffice it to say that some gold-dependent methods of play are available to most classes. Anti-paladins can be especially deadly to a variety of opponents but also especially vulnerable to a similar variety (how many classes can you think of that have neither dodge nor a class ability to defend themselves from bash with?).

Downtime between fights is the issue here. An anti-paladin is typically fighting under the effects of an uncancellable haste which inhibits natural regen, with parry as their sole melee defense, making it rather a necessity to use sleeks much of the time which can triple healing costs. To some extent that's balanced by the variety of ways in which an A-P can themselves quickly defeat an opponent but it's still a huge weakness in terms of cabal defenses or any matchup wherein multiple bouts take place before someone hits the dirt and to play the class successfully you have to put in extra work to keep pace with other classes. Even hiding in a dark corner and making your opponent exert themselves keeping you pinned down is not usually an effective strategy, wars of attrition are something to be avoided (waiting off bloodlust after a fight instead of healing means your sleek buffs run down and you're using more wands per fight, for instance).

But the point is that the ability to buy goods and services is a part of game balance both in terms of classes and cabals. This change did make it harder to accumulate currency and in relative terms favours outlanders, battleragers, rangers and orcs and disfavours imperials and other classes to different extents. It may have made it impossible to do mindless farming, but it doesn't change any of the stuff that made mindless farming less unpleasant than the alternatives. Regardless of my personal ability to choose to play a character that doesn't rely on it.

That 2k gold bounty was created purely from an IC thing, so if you consider that to be a dodgy thing then I really don't know what to tell you =). It seemed the better alternative than me just directly killing the guy who was mouthy at Dest as a lvl 14 shaman.

Where I used to mud, there were no imm rewards of any kind at all ever, it was very clear cut. Carrionfields explicitly allows a grey area of what is and isn't acceptable. This was definitely gray area, it was a substantial power boost, you could have given me an avg 28 +6/+6 weapon and it would not have had as big an impact on the character. As I say I'm grateful because it facilitated the experience, and I very much enjoyed getting plagued by Destuvius as Kailin, but large gifts of currency from imms who can simply create the gold I very much see as the divine having a direct hand in mortal affairs.

Consider which classes have neither of the following:
A way to conceal themselves from most opponents (hide, camo, duo)
A class ability to heal themselves with

You are left with:
Warrior
Shapeshifter
Invoker
Conjurer
Anti-paladin

Warrior is the only non-mage class here. They don't rely heavily on damage reduction and will get more bang for their buck at a healer. They also have several available edges and a legacy that improve regen rates.

Shapeshifters, depending on their focus, are likely to get a regen form and/or a hiding form, and air forms all have the ability to quickly go where their opponent can't reach them. They also have slow as a class ability, which is available to all other classes as easily obtainable preps.

Invokers admittedly don't have anything special in the way of speeding recovery or taking themselves out of harms way, just a boatload more damage reduction than nearly anyone else.

Conjurers depend on flavour, but archons can obviously provide healing and some familiars improve regeneration rates.

Anti-paladins have the added difficulty compared to conjurers and invokers that to fight effectively they should be using bloodlust which hampers regenerations and prevents them from slowing themselves to recover - you can be stocked up on slow preps and still not be able to keep up with someone who isn't.

All of this adds up to the fact that an A-P will find themselves urgently needing to use a healer more often than almost anyone else.

> bloodlust which hampers regenerations

For your things to play with pile: situationally, bloodlust is beneficial for some kinds of regeneration.

In combat right? Not between bouts. You'd have to leverage it by fighting things that aren't hurting you. I've gotten some hps by putting up aura of despair and swimming round on the open sea or wandering around the grove. That is very situational indeed and has a lot of drawbacks.

Something else that was pointed out to me after the Emerald Forest revamp was that you could summon a pixie and attack it with a lightning weapon. Not sure how kosher that would have been anyway.

Bloodlust is suboptimal imo because of the issues you describe, imo.

"For instance, I will almost never spend any time working on skills instead of leveling (in some instances I will spend about 25 mins to work on defenses, but that is usually only if there is a learning bonus occurring during said limited window of time). I also feel that investing the time and energy into prep gathering is oft a waste of time and one that I almost never utilize. So to me, the need for gold is fairly small and irrelevant other than the occasional use of healer for things like plague."

This is a problem in many situations and it kinda depends on the types of characters you play. If you play a necromancer and you don't have sleep perfected...this will get you killed. You're not going to perfect sleep while leveling, it's not something you cast while you're ranking unless your group is really forgiving. Try being a trap thief with 75% in all your skills, it'll leave you slept on eastern road or in the middle of a cabal defense for hours at a time.

I could get behind this idea if I thought all competitive Imm players worked this way. If there were no Cabdru's and et al around with everything perfected, I could see that maybe perfecting stuff isn't necessary. But it is, to be top tier competitive in PVP and that's a valid reason to play this game - arguably the most valid reason people still stay around.

Not to hijack this thread on skill practicing but it does roll into the whole "farm vs feast" balancing act that needs to happen for the game to be fun. Arguably, you could change things around so that practicing is either faster or not necessary and allow casual players to be more happy - but being a casual player doesn't mean I want to get rofl-stomped every time I try to use one of my skills in PVP because it fails and crits me in the face for over 9000.

First, a quick implementation note. Technically speaking, the new "system" is optional. Area writers can control whether a treasure resets as a lump sum (the old way) or accumulates (the new way), and how quickly. What this means is that you are very unlikely to see massive treasure stashes that are trivial for either anyone or a particular build to safely/easily farm. It also means that going forward there will likely be more treasure piles (of the new type) put into the game because we can prevent some of the mechanics that we felt cheapened things.

Second, just because an area author didn't fully understand how a treasure stash might be more vulnerable to "farming" than they intended doesn't mean that once we identify it as a problem we're the bad guys for addressing it. The same goes for when the game changes over two decades and things like class revamps introduce mechanics that area authors and coders from the past couldn't have predicted.

I understand the disappointment (from a somewhat selfish perspective) of one day being able to farm hundreds of gold per session safely and the next day not being able to do so, but to anyone who genuinely believes that a change like that is actually unfair... that's just silly.

Lastly, I still think the task of collecting enough gold to cover the expense of preps, healing, Imperial donations, guild donations, or whatever other reasonable thing a person might need gold for is still nowhere near insurmountable.

EDIT: for to spell gud

This change really shouldn't impair imperials in my opinion. There are reasonable ways to collect reasonable amounts of gold at every level and I'd be happy to show any one IC. They take modest time investment but you can net around 100 every real time hour. Imperial donations aren't that much so reasonably any character can spend a couple hours RL and have enough to be mechanically elite. So I pass on this aspect of the bitxh fit.

That said. My evolution of thieves goes a long way back. When we were thugs who would bind your legs and get cheap sh. s in between our backstabs. Before paths. I have played every combo of thief extensively, excluding trappers after knocking myself out on eastern for ten hours. So these are my opinions based on that experience. Shanta, Charlee, Rockeano, Messervy, so so many others.

Poisoners were extremely flawed in the implementation from the on set. They are extremely buggy and that has been a problem for the staff since creation. Not an offensive statement but a truthful one. Back when I made the king of blindenstone power word himself at rank 35 without a scratch to me I was convinced. That said I believe NEP did worse with his emperor and I pick up my experiences after that original Nerf after his character died. Then changes were made to make suggest toned down and seclude more commands you could use while suggesting. (ie hit drink suicide cb). All reasonable changes. The seantryn thing had been reviewed and left as it was. I know it was blatantly exploited but I had always assumed the big Z (amen) left it as it was to offset the huge Nerf he implemented. That Nerf made suggest and mind control a trick pony skill and no longer a broad versitile option. That single allowance made it reasonable to collect 500 gold in a RL hour plus or minus RNG. Currently changes are being made to restrict suggest even more in addition to taking away this source of gold and all other thief inspired sources. The most expensive path thief path left to gathering moderate quantities of coin.

Let's compare some rough numbers. Lets say it costs 1 gold for you to attempt to make knockout. 2 gold for fear, 3 gold for mind, and 2 for neuro. Let's also say emetic is free but it costs 1 RL minute for each. Consider the math on time and gold to come close to skill mastery. A well versed poison path will require at least 2000 gold to be moderate, nothing above 90% aside concoct, and some RL spam time in seclusion. Now that you have that out of the way. A sack of poison preps is going to cost you about 150 gold for 20 knock outs, 15 fears, 15 mind, 10 neuro +/-. Add another 50 gold to that for various must have preps. This sack will not last long either, if you're lucky you will have left overs when you restock constantly.

To me 1000 gold is enough gold to last any character a lifetime, imperials included. A poisoner with a 1000 gold is 2 good logins.

My suggestion to add depth and not be so disruptive, add weight to coins. So that hording massive piles becomes unrealistic? That prevents this behavior and all the exploits from the gambler without, in my opinion, hurting a very enjoyable thief path. If he can't hand you that much gold, then you can't win it.

>That said I believe NEP did worse with his emperor

Istendil is the only character I've ever played that was Emperor.

Yanacek is the thief I was referring to. Do know it was not intended to be an insult to the player of Yanacek, to you, to the staff, or any other person involved. I had assumed NEP played said character, I was wrong.

Loved the wand updates.

PS. Maybe consider my suggestion? Seems realistic IC and OC to do less coding and less reevaluations of time and economy.

N/t

I'll respectfully disagree here, poisoners definitely have it much worse but 1000 gold for a lifetime of play? As a dwarf paladin at hero level, sleeping, well fed with moderate morale buffs, I'd get 50 - 65 mana per tick. It costs something like 450 mana to fully prep and that lasts around 8 hours. Assuming you are playing solo. using a consumable slow buff constantly or healing mana at the healer is the only reasonable way to regenerate. So each time you prep you spend atleast 2K outside of any other consumables.

Most easily available defensive prep carries a level 60 poison. Even as a dwarf, you are getting poisoned one in five preps. This will cost you 10 gold on average to cure at a healer. One in five times you prep, you spend another 10K.

Just that sink alone will add up quickly. My last character I regularly used a chest that yielded on average 300 gold in an hour of time. I'd need to do this every 2 - 3 days. I likely collected 6000 gold this way. Never gambled, never bought large quantities of healing potions or pills, the most expensive thing I did was buying alacrity potions, maybe 400 gold spent on them. Maybe another 500 gold on purchasing items from other players, and I gave 1500 - 2000 gold away, because you know, paladin.

If I'd played this character through to age/con death, I'd easily have needed 10 - 15K gold to keep this (conservative) style of prep play up.

Edited to add:
While I understand the realism aspect of nerfing the chest repops. I hate the change. Is gathering gold fun? No. Do you really want to increase the down time of characters further in this game? No. If you are nerfing gold collection for everyone, how bout decreasing down time in some way? Spend three consecutive hours asleep? +100% health/mana regen, add rooms with mana or health regeneration bonuses, something that takes some of the down time away!

I still don't understand why this is called a "realism" change.