Note from Game Director: Removing Ingots

[Deathstalker]

Thanks FC, this just made things so much easier for me and everyone else that has everything + a huge pile of credits for when LE hits.

Isnt it always that way?

[Xaun]

Thank you FC! A good first step toward fixing the issue with farming. I will be hopeful for a proper follow through. I do believe it won't fix the problem rather spread it out some. But at this point anything to discourage the heavily farmed areas is an improvement.

I agree on the p-stores purchasing access to froobs. To me that just makes sense. I also liked the idea of adding the ability to purchase from global. One idea stood out to me the best. Don't title cap an area, just make grey mobs not drop ingots. That way you cannot farm as a 200 in an area where the mobs are so much lower. The problem with farming is not that there are too many people within range camping and killing hecklers.. its that people 40 levels higher who can easily OD a team in range are doing it. To me this sounds like the only idea that will not nerf ingots but nerf the unsavory method of collecting them.

Though I have fought Hecks, I try to keep myself balanced in how I advance. As a Soli Keeper thats probably no big shocker. :P Yes I can actually use my nano abilities near the title cap. Have my T1 set and am very much hated by the unredeemed... you know the other sided mobs in Nac.

[Aiiane]

How about an allowance?
Hey Uncle FC I require 1b a month kthxbye

How about a job? Once or twice a day you're contacted with a mission and a timeframe to do it in, if you complete it you get a certain amount of points with the "company" (in addition to possible regular mission rewards) that employs you that you can use to acquire certain items from their storerooms - things like decent armors (carbonum, et cetera), a new weapon, or some other such. Also be able to trade in a lower ql weapon + points with the company for a "upgrade" as you level.

[Omniphase]

How about a job? Once or twice a day you're contacted with a mission and a timeframe to do it in, if you complete it you get a certain amount of points with the "company" (in addition to possible regular mission rewards) that employs you that you can use to acquire certain items from their storerooms - things like decent armors (carbonum, et cetera), a new weapon, or some other such. Also be able to trade in a lower ql weapon + points with the company for a "upgrade" as you level.

How about just earning money the same way we did in the past without a change to the game dynamic? It really isn't too hard to put some work in as a casual gamer and earn money. If you want to earn 100s of millions you can, similary if you want to just about survive from credits earnt then that isn't much of a problem either.

And these jobs you're talking about? Let's call them 'missions'.... (bare with me on this one). You complete these 'missions' and get ... 'tokens'. Still with me? These 'tokens' (maybe not the best name for them - im just putting my ideas down) give you access to an upgradable item that improves after you have collected a certain amount of 'tokens'.

You complete a 'mission' and get maybe some credits, an item and a 'token'. Sounds fantastic.. maybe we could add a boss in there somewhere for teams to kill and some extra items to loot like chests or something

[iLootAlot]

ow i like these "jobs" called "missions" ... can FC add these too pls? oh wait, these are already ingame ... humm FC, please can i have 1bil ?!

[jokzer]

You complete a 'mission' and get maybe some credits, an item and a 'token'. Sounds fantastic.. maybe we could add a boss in there somewhere for teams to kill and some extra items to loot like chests or something

Sounds like it'd require a huge amount of coding to make it work.. Interesting idea though, very interesting indeed. Maybe if we kick it around some we can come up with an idea to automatically give us these "missions" - like in a city or something like that..
I dunno, this could even make it to the suggestions forum, if we polish it a bit..

[Lunaspell]

Question, on average, how much money per hour do you ppl make on ely hecks when you are in a team? I have done about 40 levels of hecks and I only got around 10 ingots or something, thats imho not worth the time/effort. RK missions seem like a lot better imho, in 10 levels worth of missions I got around 5m of junk, a few items worth 500k ish and a GA2 :P, and even without the GA2 I feel I was way better off doing missions.

with enough damage im told u can do ~8-10mill per hour sold by a trader, give or take a few mill, this is after all a game of chance

soloed a team mission some time ago out of boredom took 1½ hour and had 1.8mill in junk and a 40% CRU, and didn't even get what I wanted the most, ql200 Stims and nano packs

[Aanelr]

Why didnt u instead remove the credits to buy nanos in your shops and have it only at the player need to meet the requirement. In fact remove all credits, let everything be based on requirement instead.

Or instead of removing ingot, let all creature drop em at a highrate, make money useless not necassary!

U r goin the wrong way FC! Your inteend will be the opposite in reallity.

[Ms_Idoru]

Sounds like it'd require a huge amount of coding to make it work.. Interesting idea though, very interesting indeed. Maybe if we kick it around some we can come up with an idea to automatically give us these "missions" - like in a city or something like that..
I dunno, this could even make it to the suggestions forum, if we polish it a bit..

Maybe some sort of terminal, like a shop?
If we wanted a bit more effort put in, FC could even give them a degree of customisability with scaled options. But the sheer amount of effort to implement something like this, I wouldn't hold my breath

[jokzer]

Maybe some sort of terminal, like a shop?
If we wanted a bit more effort put in, FC could even give them a degree of customisability with scaled options. But the sheer amount of effort to implement something like this, I wouldn't hold my breath

Yeah, that's what I'm talking about!
We could maybe even get different types (at least as the system matured) and have them take place in different areas, perhaps.. Would be great, imho, and if they had different kinds of rocks in them to bash so we could actually use our toolset!

But like you say, it's prolly not going to happen anytime soon.. :/

[Geriston]

As much as I tried to read the whole thing as the thread is quite interesting... the clock told me to rather skip to last page when I was on page 12 or I wouldn't get any sleep (scratch that, I went to sleep then finished draft after waking up). :P

At first I was deathly afraid of the ingot nerf not causing any deflation due to the majority of players being d00ds under age 16 who don't know nor care squat about economics, and so instead of bring their prices down and help with deflation would only b***h and flame at the forums and refuse to drop prices, but if such thing has already happened in the past and deflation did ensue then I guess it can happen again after all.

Yes, it may seem drastic in the global perspective, and I recognize that ely lngots were my main source of income for a long time, but also I have never been "rich", mainly because I'm a party player, not a solo farmer (what's the point of suscribing to an ONLINE game otherwise?) so ingots didn't come as often or fast to make me "filthy rich", and to top it off most of my income comes from monster parts actually (now that if they nerf monster parts next I WILL be raising torches and angry mobs :P ).

My pooled money from all alts doesn't even reach 10 mils, mainly because I play to have fun with my friends, not to push myself over the top with obssessive farming or powergaming. If my paltry funds will be worth more after the economy stabilizes then yay, more power to me, but I'm also for the initiative of lowering city upkeep's cost... not that much but a little would be fine, same as with the other game's money sinks.

Likewise I'm all for freeing the global market to fr00bs, note that this does NOT mean letting them have a player shop, just allowing them inside p-shop buildings and buy stuff. Mass market, the larget a market our products reach, the more sales we'll have... consummers are happy, we are happy, everyone is happy, I don't think it THAT hard to do, all FC would need to do is including in next patch for basic client the "player shop inside" area... and if fr00bs already have bundled in basic client the graphics of aliens (regardless of whether they get axp or not) player cities (regardless of whether they can enter the buildings or not), and alien weapons and armor (regardless of whether they can use them or not), then adding one extra area in the bundle wouldn't hurt exclusive content any more than it does now, and in turn all people hosting a player shop would be able to sell their stuff to more people.

[LordLucan]

I never made much credits off hecklers either, to be honest. I don't know why anyone is complaining. Sure, when team loot is on alpha, I'd loot an ingot if one fell on my heckler, but I only made a bare fraction of my total credits this way.

I keep seeing people saying "this will hurt lower players no end". Am I the only one who levelled up through Elysium in a team of 6 pertinent to the level range of the Hecklers without making obscene amounts of credits?

I made far more recently taking a doctor through there and looting the monster parts from my hecks and any strays the team wandered across which people had left to rot than I ever did from Heckler ingots on my previous visit to Elysium.

The only reason for people to say that removing ingots is wrong are people who see them as an easy, fast, risk free form of cash that they can go and farm there when there character reaches a certain level. Or level an NT as fast as possible to a level which is able to kite them as a "cash-cow" character. Which are exactly the reasons (I imagine) why Funcom are removing them from the game.

[Geriston]

Am I the only one who levelled up through Elysium in a team of 6 pertinent to the level range of the Hecklers without making obscene amounts of credits?

*raises hand* Neither did I. Perhaps we both suck.

[Wizardkiss]

I'm looking for the inflationary trends here... and I'm not seeing them.

VTE's - dropped
Symbiants - dropped
Perennium weapons - dropped
Icebreaker - dropped
Pepper pistol - dropped
ELLT scopes - dropped

I agree. I'm fascinated by checking the shop search and prices overall have most definitely gone DOWN over the last few months, not up. I have no objection to removing ingots by I'm baffled by why Znore would claim runaway inflation when anyone paying attention knows it's simply not true. Is it an attempt at some sort of Jedi mind trick? Does "inflation" mean the opposite in Norway of what it means in the US? *Confused*

[Zorro]

I agree. I'm fascinated by checking the shop search and prices overall have most definitely gone DOWN over the last few months, not up. I have no objection to removing ingots by I'm baffled by why Znore would claim runaway inflation when anyone paying attention knows it's simply not true. Is it an attempt at some sort of Jedi mind trick? Does "inflation" mean the opposite in Norway of what it means in the US? *Confused*

Yep that reason is not valid at all, on RK2 at least.

[Siorai2]

I think maybe if znore had said they were being removed to ease the horrible situation in Ely then the arguement would have been "well leave them in Ado, Pen, Inf etc. as noone can really farm against the teams there". This of course would have been a little imbalanced as it would be punishing those people in Elysium simply to get rid of farmers.

So, is the economical reasoning just an umbrella to remove all ingots, whilst their main concern was clearing up the cesspool Ely brink had become?

[Alita-A3]

i'm happy about it anyway even if i got some money from it....but it was more the loss than the gain cause of the economy inflation..
true though the farming was only in Ely, but i guess they wanted to give a clear strong sign that they do not tolerate such things, and i feel the sameway.

good job Funcom


P.S.
i'll have to get back on my Plasma

[Nova]

Darm, I actually read all pages....anyywayyy...zzzzzz


GOOD JOB FC.
This is nerf what got my aproval.

[Hawksbane]

The small problem with your idea of level locking is that of the /terminate function. All one of those players has to do is terminate after every 4 or 5 kites and boom, back to 0xp and still in the lvl locked zone. For now though, believe me, if you aren't high enough to get ingots then be grateful you don't have the chance to be tainted by its effect before they are removed. Ingots never were the best way to make cash, and it might make your life when you get to those hecklers that little bit more bearable.

The way to do it is to level lock exits from the gardens. any level can go to the gardens but only up to certain levels can go through the statues.

This is why it woud solve the farming problem in ely: the farmers are high level NOW. level locking (to say maybe 160 odd) would mean they would NEVER get back in. Terminating would be useless beacause they would be too high to get back in.
Instantly removing one of the biggest farming groups out of Ely.
Yes, people could just stay at level 160 and keep terminating, but who wants to have to terminateafter every.. hmm maybe 3 or 4 kites and have to keep fighting for the kite spot each time.. eventually they will realise it's to much time and effort for the reward and find soemthing else to do.

Personally I would hate to see SL areas level locked, it would be a pain for those, like me, with high level toons that go around SL helping lower level orgmates do key quests/ find items/ generally learn the area.

[Hawksbane]

Amazing how when there were 10 threads running on Ebay farmers, everyone and their dog wanted to bitch about them, then FC actually do something to get rid of them and suddenly people want to bitch at FC, make up your minds people.

That's because there are better ways of doing it. FC have attacked the symptom not the problem. the problem is buying/selling online (eg ebay) THAT is what has to be stopped not the way people make the creds in the first place. stop the selling and the farming will stop too.

But it's probably cheaper to change a handful of lines of code to remove an item than it is to pay a lawyer to deal with ebay/ online sellers etc

Other games have managed to fix the ingame enconomy by stopping out of game buying/ seliing WITHOUT changing a single thing ingame. why can't FC??