Will high end/auction quality items ever be made available for silvers again, not including buying the item(s) from another player? Or should we just accept the fact that going forward, acquiring any new high end stuff will require Simucoins?

Just curious.

~ Methais

Of course. We've had one of the biggest silver auctions in the last decade in December 2016. My Creating Adventure piece also talked about something coming. In between this, we also sold booklets to Duskruin for silver, allowing you to accumulate bloodscrip with no SimuCoin costs.

---

Wyrom, PM

Every time I read 'silvers don't have value' posts, I go check to see how many hundreds of dollars silvers are being sold for, right now, currently. Which, to be fair, is less hundreds than it was back in the day. Thats kinda the subtext here: "I cant sell my silvers for as much anymore."

Silvers do indeed have value. The current W/P/S system is silver based, and that works quite well as a silver drain. Its gotten a lot of mine! And it will be getting more.

That said, could silvers be more interesting and useful? Absolutely. There are a lot of things they could do to up its desirability.

The REAL issue is not the devaluation of silver. Its the devaluation of gear. What is considered HIGH END now is far, far different than what was traditionally High End. Ive seen people argue that their 8x HCP ithzir armor is 'mid grade', or some nonsense like that. Its harder and harder to balance the needs of the game with the wants of people who've been playing 20 years who, quite frankly, have a ton of game-breaking gear. Its an arms race of sorts, and this will continue to be an issue in the future. How to fix it? Well, theres several possibilities they could try... but I am no prophet and have no idea what will actually work.



Berbels shrilly exclaims, "Ise takings hims tos secretses lairses!"

Berbels grabs you and drags you east.

>The REAL issue is not the devaluation of silver. Its the devaluation of gear.

That.

I remember being pleased with a merchant that sold a krolvin backslasher, a vanilla 5x short sword. Now Reim drops 5x on a regular basis.

Expectations have changed greatly.

:D

The problem with this line of thinking is that anything that Simutronics sells for silvers--like books of DuskRuin tickets--gets them no money. They created the silver in the first place. And there is a limitless flow of it.

It is conceivable for a single account--and F2P, at that!--to farm one metric squajillion tons of silver out of the game, and sell it to <everyone else who wants any amount of silver> (for real-world cash), which silvers then get turned around and used to buy DR ticket books, that get used by hundreds of people to farm DR, and buy up all of the HESS goodies and bling out their items at a cost of GM time for design and following up on certificate emails...
...and have brought in precisely ZERO dollars to Simutronics, because F2P did the farming, and silver bought the books of tickets. The only money that changed hands was player-to-other-player.

(Likely? Oh, hell no. But it could happen like that.)

.

I will repeat my offer: Anyone who feels that silver is worthless, you just feel free to heap yours up riiiiight over here around my feet, where I don't even have to bend down too far to collect it up, kthxby.

.

So, no. I don't think that "silvers for ticket books" is in Simutronics' interest (other than as an "every so often, to keep waning interest from flagging too much" thing to be hoped for) nor would I expect to see it happen terribly often (most likely in the "once per year, if you are LUCKY" range).

Yes. The GMs have, many times, stated that they design creatures around 4x/+20 equipment.
Anything over that, just makes your job easier (higher weapon endroll == more damage == dies faster == less time to grind the hunt) by that much.

Sickening is a bit of a strong way to put it.

I'd save that term for things like the tragic situation in many third world countries, terrible shooting violence in schools, other such stuff...

Your examples arent helping your case, btw. Keep in mind that the cost for competitive magic the gathering, as well as many high-end larping events, are comparable to the Duskruin costs of HESS items. For a tournament worthy MTG deck, at least when I played years ago, was about 400 dollars. Give or take. Thats about what I've spent on the last TWO duskruins. Can you just go to Friday Night Magic and do a few drafts for a tenner a week? Sure. But you can also just do 10 bucks worth of arena-ing and buy some bane potions. /shrug

LARPing is...well, its something that can run you considerably more if you want actual armor. Not to mention one of the more well known LARP events, (Bicolline in Canada), just to get in...by yourself...for a week? 350 USD. Thats not counting equipment, travel, etc. Oh and if you want to go with a group, such as the Voyage North? Thats aboooout 500-1000$. Again, this is ENTRY FEES, gear is sold separately.

Hey. Im not happy about the pricing either on some of these items. But again as was mentioned, Gear Devaluation means that people are really mostly interested in GAME BREAKING things. Which they have to limit in some fashion. So they gate it behind a high pay wall. If you want just decent stuff? You can get it! At costs that wont break the bank! The 6x/6x nervestaff was a deal, I felt. And if you settled for the 5x/4x version? HALF the cost. HESS is, unfortunately, something I will simply never be affording direct off the shelf. Thats just the realities of my budget.

Sickening though? Hmmm.




Berbels shrilly exclaims, "Ise takings hims tos secretses lairses!"

Berbels grabs you and drags you east.

Make the fusion shaman and a W/P/S NPC available all the time. Inflate the silver cost of W/P/S a bit for this so that merchant services are still desirable.

I haven't seen W/P/S offered anywhere near the frequency that everyone thought it would be for the change to be worth it.

There are some very interesting points on all sides in this discussion. And oh, yes - I have my opinion. But, point one - each of these is opinion.

I did, however, want to respond to:

>>Can't a character be successful with regular 4 or 5x gear?

Someone already said yes, but I'll amplify a bit - we have a cadre of players invested right now in proving the case that in fact one can be successful fully with the skills / spells available only to that character in the game. HARDCORE! (Not for everyone, but if it can be done there, it certainly can be done with spell-tanking armor-grubbing buy-up-the-world's-items-from-player-shop approach we have today as our 'minimalist' standard category.)

Doug

<W/P/S needs to become way more available IMO. Don't put caps on the services when its offered. If someone wants to blow a billion silvers, let them.>

Oh sure. All for that! Put it up as an NPC merchant for silver in FWI. Add a 'non-event tax' to it of some sort.

<I'm well aware of what kind of money can be dumped into those things, they also don't have a monthly fee so those comparisons are apples and oranges. I chose them because they're niche games that have managed to stick around an managed attract a steady stream of younger people to keep them viable despite not being the cool new thing.>

They are, despite your efforts to claim to the contrary, an 'apples and oranges comparison' simply because one has a Subscription fee...though I dont know if you've looked at MTGO nowadays but theres a high end subscription on offer there...


<As for my choice of words, I may not be an english major, but I'm well aware of what they mean and will kindly ask you not to attempt to dictate when or how I use them.>

I feel that if you go back and actually read my post, friend, you will find that not once did I say "Dont use that word" or try to dictate your actions or feelings or anything really. I simply stated what I felt were appropriate times when I would use that word.

If you feel lesser for the comparison, well...



Berbels shrilly exclaims, "Ise takings hims tos secretses lairses!"

Berbels grabs you and drags you east.

>Every time I read 'silvers don't have value' posts, I go check to see how many hundreds of dollars silvers are being sold for, right now, currently. Which, to be fair, is less hundreds than it was back in the day. Thats kinda the subtext here: "I cant sell my silvers for as much anymore."

And the reason for that is because silvers are being quickly phased out of the high end market in favor of bloodscrip. So prices are bottoming out because there's no demand. Why is there no demand? Because you can't buy anything good with them anymore because everything that comes out now requires bloodscrip. There used to always be something on my radar I was farming silvers for, but not anymore because everything is bloodscrip based now. I'd much rather use my silvers on some high end stuff in game vs. selling them, which probably won't be an option for much longer either, but I'm not going to sit on them while they become more and more worthless.

>I will repeat my offer: Anyone who feels that silver is worthless, you just feel free to heap yours up riiiiight over here around my feet, where I don't even have to bend down too far to collect it up, kthxby.

Worthless for the high end market, not worthless for buying a lifetime supply of pure potions.

A typical P2W model would run DR as is, but with a silver option that will take longer to grind out. But it still gives the players options. One takes less time and costs more, one takes more time and costs less. And all that without massive monthly subscription fees. Players should always have more options than just cash, even if it requires more time. The only thing missing would be being forced to watch ads before a DR fight. Which I'm kind of surprised Simu isn't at least toying with (optional ads at least), as with the scripting capabilities of a lot of players, ads could probably be easily rigged with a Lich script to click them all, similar to how ;autovote votes for GS every 12 hours on topmudsites without even opening your browser.

>The problem with this line of thinking is that anything that Simutronics sells for silvers--like books of DuskRuin tickets--gets them no money. They created the silver in the first place. And there is a limitless flow of it.

They're also getting no money from any of the people who have quit the game who didn't like the direction things have been going over the past couple years. But it's probably fair to also say that 1 or 2 whales with piles of money and/or no self control could potentially offset that, at least until they stop whaling, which could be tomorrow, or could be never.

Either way, even if DR books were permanently available for silvers, nobody would be able to generate silver fast enough to sustain buying them regularly. They'll either run out of silvers and finish their grind via Simucoins, or they'll start farming silvers again until the next DR run and pick up where they left off. I'd also bet that a lot of people would do a mixture of both. I'd probably be doing a mixture, but with the current model where cash is the only option, I'm doing nothing, which is another instance of Simu getting no money.

It might take someone X months or a year longer or whatever to actually get their item via DR for silvers or whatever than the person who spent a paycheck on Simucoins, but the option is still there, and they're still subscribing to the game instead of taking their money somewhere else.

>A bit of a hijacking here and maybe this question should be elsewhere but....Can't a character be successful with regular 4 or 5x gear?

There's plenty of great non-combat high end gear out there too. Most of the really interesting high end stuff to me isn't combat gear. Multi-setting and cross realm teleport items are a good example. I think the 12 (10?) setting rings went up to 500k BS last DR if I remember right. That's insanity.

Nobody needs more than 4x to do anything in this game. I'd even argue you could go from 0-100 with plain 0x gear. You'll probably die more, but it's not at all impossible to do.

>I haven't seen W/P/S offered anywhere near the frequency that everyone thought it would be for the change to be worth it.

Most if not all instances of it being offered so far have been spinner based and pretty limited in picks, which Simu specifically stated that they were moving away from luck based progression when they first gave us the details when W/P/S was first announced. Which I've been hoping they'd give an explanation for, but they seem to have been unresponsive to that request when it was brought up before.

>W/P/S needs to become way more available IMO. Don't put caps on the services when its offered. If someone wants to blow a billion silvers, let them.

This. Or at the least, leave the service window as is with the increasing costs, but keep the rest automated with whatever restrictions are deemed appropriate. It's still going to take someone several years and hundreds of millions if not billions to max out an item. Services that require being in the right place at the right time + getting lucky on a spinner are incredibly annoying and obsolete.

If Simu is worried about ultra rich characters running in and maxing out an item in a day, just add DR books for silvers as a permanent option beforehand so everyone wipes out their bank accounts first. The W/P/S system is fine. Its only real problem is its lack of availability.

"But before WPS, padding/weighting services were really rare!"

They also didn't require 500 services to max an item. Not that I'm suggesting items should be being maxed all over the place, but yeah. Even the luckiest person in the world who's at every WPS event and gets picked every time, at 25 services every 2 months, they're still looking at 40 months to max an item. And that's in a completely unrealistic, will never happen, absolute best case scenario without factoring in silver costs.

Simu has been complaining for decades about the game's lack of a silver drain. They have the ultimate silver drain staring them right in the face. Two ultimate silver drains, if they were to automate W/P/S. That would be almost as good as a world with two Ultimate Warriors.

https://youtu.be/iqi0zbgHDuA


~ Methais

<They also didn't require 500 services to max an item. Not that I'm suggesting items should be being maxed all over the place, but yeah. Even the luckiest person in the world who's at every WPS event and gets picked every time, at 25 services every 2 months, they're still looking at 40 months to max an item.>


FYI, it isn't 500 services to max out an item, it is 5,000. That rate of 25 services every 2 months would get you 20 CER points (Masterful amount) at 40 months.

>FYI, it isn't 500 services to max out an item, it is 5,000.

https://i.imgur.com/PEkBoao.gif

~ Methais