Economy mess and pay to win

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Spec into the Atlas node that gives 10% for waystones to drop corrupted. Run a bunch of T15s.

Hunt the Immured Fury to get Fracturing Orbs.

Kite Amanamu rares so they chase you, to get Omen of Abyssal Echoes.

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Pay to win what? I'm not sure what the pay to win here is. You don't need 100div in gear and gems to do all content in the game. Many builds can do it with 10 div. The rest, as long as they are smartly made and the gear choices are right, with a couple of dozen.

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What is true though and what I sorta dislike myself as well is the fact that end-game crafting is essentially kinda reserved for a minority group of players. You need so much of very rare currency to successfully craft end-game items that it's just not realistic to most players. However, simply making those currencies more common doesn't exactly fix the issue; that would lead to crafted gear becoming cheaper and ergo more affordable on trade and so trade would still be the number 1 option for most players. Also, then the dedicated players would hit a progression wall and start having very close-to BiS gear even sooner than now, which is also not good.

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Savage_Tha_Clown#1530 wrote:

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I have not seen a single Preserved Vertebrae and there is none for sale in the currency exchange. Hasn't been in at least a month

if you would have read patch notes you can't craft waystones any more

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- Omen of homogenizing Exaltation: have not found any, and none is (nor has been) available for purchase at the currency exchange.

also read patch notes these have been disabled

try read more and rage less most of the things you complained about is in all games top tier items are for top tier players is it crappy that things cost so much yes, but that is how market works

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SaKRaaN#0012 wrote:

Thank you for pointing that out.

This is exactly what I’ve written several times on these forums, and no one listens. The omens you mentioned—I haven’t even used a single one since the beginning of this game. Every league their prices are insane, and players who exploit the game for fast divines and market inflation just keep buying them all up. As a result, the market is completely empty of these omens.

This means the game is unhealthy and the market is broken. When I go to the currency exchange, I expect to be able to easily trade for the items I need to craft—not get stuck in the middle of crafting because of a missing omen that costs half the price of a decent item on trade.

In the end, I’d rather just trade for finished items instead of gambling with these overpriced omens.

The devs don’t respect players, and they don’t care about the economy system as long as the black market and real-money trading keep working fine.

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JackStrong90#1370 wrote:

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AtenK#3898 wrote:

Looks like the currency business model is way more profitable than the cosmetics business model.

Interesting ;-)

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Savage_Tha_Clown#1530 wrote:

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I have not seen a single Preserved Vertebrae and there is none for sale in the currency exchange. Hasn't been in at least a month

if you would have read patch notes you can't craft waystones any more

"

- Omen of homogenizing Exaltation: have not found any, and none is (nor has been) available for purchase at the currency exchange.

also read patch notes these have been disabled

try read more and rage less most of the things you complained about is in all games top tier items are for top tier players is it crappy that things cost so much yes, but that is how market works

"

My quick and dirty solution - make an inherently large item rarity drop boost in SSF - I would enjoy it immensely if I could easily farm the rarer currencies and play around with crafting more :)

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AtenK#3898 wrote:

When I compare version 0.4 with version 0.3, what strikes me the most is how messed up the economy is and how crafting became an impossibility. I understand that my post comes late, with so many people having stopped playing already, but really my feedback was already true a month ago.

Let's maybe first start with the Abyss, my favorite part of the game. I have done a lot of abysses, but I notice that I am not really getting anything out of them... so what's the point for me now ? With version 0.3 I did not find much more either actually, but at least you could buy the crafting items at the currency exchange. I want to desecrate waystones for example... good luck with that, I have not seen a single Preserved Vertebrae and there is none for sale in the currency exchange. Hasn't been in at least a month. As far as crafting materials are concerned, I personally found 3 omens of abyssal echoes in total and if you want to buy one it costs roughly 1 div. That's a total joke, you need dozens of these things so obviously I don't really try to desecrate anything. Should I mention the omen of light: for the wonderful price of 30 divs a piece obviously crafting using abyss/desecration is just not an option for me.

Without going into too many details, my main observations on crafting at this point:

- Omen of homogenizing Exaltation: have not found any, and none is (nor has been) available for purchase at the currency exchange.
- Omen of Recombination - have not found any, costs almost half a div. I guess that could be ok as it is less blocking, but really for me it isn't really and here we are barely talking about a starting step before crafting for real.
- Omen of whittling: have not found any, costs 33 divs.
- Omen of Sinistral Annulment: have not found any, costs 49 divs. I have done a lot of rituals, on occasion I see one for 15.000 - 17.000 tributes. I typically I make around 3000 - 3500, so all I can do is defer until the one time I am unlucky and I don't even have enough tribute to defer, and so in the end I never got one. Rarely I have been able to make 4000 - 5000 tribute, but it doesn't really change anything and I will point out that it is quite difficult to stay close to the Azmeri spirit when your headhunter belt constantly teleports you elsewhere. Hint hint.
- Omen of Dextral Annulment: have not found any, costs 35 divs. Same remarks as for the sinistral one.
- Fracturing Orb: have found 1, costs 16 divs.

So putting all these things in perspective and considering you need way more than 1 omen or orb to get anywhere with crafting, crafting is just out of reach. I wonder why it is even in the game at this point. If you are going to spend divs, it is way more cost and time effective to just buy the item from someone else for 1 to 50 divs in most cases. But then, are we still playing an RPG that is loot and crafting centered ? I would argue that this is plain pay to win. And let's be honest, we all know where the divs come from. But that's another discussion. I think my main take here is: first, crafting is in the game but you can't actually use it unless you are a professional gamer or unemployed and ready to play 8 - 16 hours per day; second, the prices for complete items do not reflect the reality of crafting material prices, something is just very odd here.

What's even more messed up is the prices for uncut gems:

- Skill gem level 20: 3.6 divs
- Spirit gem level 20: 63 divs

Now that is really amazing, these prices equally do not reflect reality. Not even closely. Now you can't find one anymore, but a while ago I bought a bunch of corrupted level 21 / 23% quality gems with 5 sockets for way less than that. In effect, at the time, it was way cheaper to buy the perfect level 21 compared to trying to make it yourself. Now I guess the market has caught up, nobody is trying anymore and so you can't buy them anymore either.

And while I am whining about how frustrating things are LOL, I might as well mention the T16 maps that I never play because, well, you need to be playing many many hours per day to have enough waystones to trash with corruption, with an upgrade success rate from T15 to T16 of about what, 1 on 10 waystones ?

So to summarize it all up as I understand it: crafting and good loot is apparently reserved to professional gamers and unemployed people, and the game is pay to win: use real dollars to buy divs to buy gear to be able to play the content, while never finding anyway all the good stuff that you don't need anymore anyway. Looks like the currency business model is way more profitable than the cosmetics business model. And that could be fine, if at least we had the actual possibility to do some crafting just for the fun of trying and doing things.

I wonder what the target audience is exactly for this game. Probably not people like me who will be able to play 1-2 hours per day during the week and a little more in the weekend.

By the way, I wonder what the point of the "Notify Me" checkbox is when you post a thread, I never get any notification when someone replies.