[Official] Loot and Experience Changes

[royal epoch]

Are you resting between hunts or just going constantly?

[warped escarp]

I chain bounties, so I'm only on a node if saturated and another bounty is ready to turn in. Otherwise, I'm killing stuff to work on the current bounty. Along with 1-second attacks and good gear, I kill a lot of stuff. And I'm an offbeat build -- these players who are doing all of that, but have cookie cutter, are even faster.

[minor falcon]

I'm all for having the silver sell value / system value that would be utilized for orb gems, chrism, skins, etc. where that value never goes down due to cap. (also I don't hit the loot cap)

I think lowering the faucet overall is better than having a cap. By faucet I mean lower sell values overall. If that value decreases later in the month as you get closer to the loot cap the system value still retains the rightful value and you can still use that item in other systems, just not selling it for any good value.

I love the xp changes that were made. I love the less box with more value (it caused me to actually pick my own boxes again). But I see it killing the pool due to the higher prices. I think that needs a little reduction for the pool fee. I think the pool fee is still needed but definitely needs to be lower.

I really dislike the ingots. I feel like it would be better to just have notes like someone suggested. Ingots are just not user friendly at all and made even worse that they won't sell from a container which causes people to rely on scripts to sell them. But I always run into issues where I don't have any place to put an ingot when pulling it from a box so I have to go run off to sell it at the gemshop.

[queen pebble]

I wouldn't impose a cap this restrictive. If you want a upper bound fine, but 94 accounts hitting it is way too many.

All a cap does is:
-Discourage people from playing once they hit it
-Promote MAing to bypass it
-Force players to use annoying workarounds to store and sell post-cap

In addition it likely has zero shot at actually achieving what you want it to since it is easily bypassed.

I think the only real solution is to adjust prices in aggregate, remove mechanics that result in large increases in value (1004/trading) and then perhaps implement some clamping on people that start to exceed soft caps, but i'd even do that very carefully.

Then introduce options to drain silver. Countering increased generation with cost is the answer

Do you guys have a number on how much silver is paid out on bounties? I'd be interested to know if it's significant or not. MAing groups generate multiple times more then the average player through bounty sharing.

[civic niche]

I play a lot, because I have no life. My 2 guys in the pits can hit it in 9 days, and that's going back to the old hunt, rest, repeat method. If I do hunts till OOM and just recover mana, (more optimal for Gemstones) I can cap in probably 7.

Even my OTF alt though hit hard cap in 29-30 days last month. And OTF is literally the poorest place in all of the world except zombies.

Also, 5 minutes timers still suck.

[royal epoch]

Maybe Moonsedge is just poor.

[civic niche]

I only went there once, too many doors, I noped out.

[minor falcon]

Moonsedge is massively poor compared to HW. It's also a higher risk compared to HW.

For me I probably generate more loot than I ever would due to gemstones. I would rather not generate as much loot as I do and would just prefer to find a gemstone instead. I feel like grinding for gemstones has probably caused a bit uptick on it's own for the silver production. (I only go for 1 gemstone a month these days but even that can be a chore for a lot of people)

But even after finding a gemstone. I still go into ascension areas to burn my brooch daily and when you go a month looting and not finding that second one it can feel kinda frustrating. Even though I know my goal was to only go for that first one.

[queen pebble]

Moonsedge is terrible loot for me. Scatter is where I go, just wish it was ascension!

[royal epoch]

I have to admit I'm the odd man out, but I still love finding Gemstones.

I don't think they should be the ONLY incentive, which is maybe the mistake.

[tender condor]

I mean.... we've had i don't know probably dozens of times the entire topic in the ME channel was "this place is inexplicably poor"

timer edit: even before it was overhunted. it never made sense. there was literally like, 3 people i'd see at any given time for months before gemstones and such and it would be dramatically less loot than any other area

[royal epoch]

It's not inexplicable. It's overhunted.

[civic niche]

Finding gemstones is great, til you look at them. You have the tiny period of time where it could be good, despite knowing, in all probability it isn't. So Schrödinger gemstones are good, actual ones, in practice, not so much. Oh, I should just stop looking at them when I find them.

[tawny sierra]

Deliver on the “more interesting loot”

Make some loot that can’t be generated into new silvers but still has player value.

[minor falcon]

It's the excitement of possibly finding something good. but even that is pretty rare that you will even get a good gemstone.

It's like having a chance at winning a raffle that might be the biggest improvement your character can get. I feel like that could change though once more ascension training options are made available. But atleast with xp you can clearly see the goals where gemstone is RNG to get it, then RNG to get a good one.

[rough vault]

Use AI to condense the last six weeks of posts here. The community has provided many superb ideas. No need to rehash.

[royal epoch]

I use all of my AI credits on you people.

You think I'm made of cyberbucks!?

How do you think we got Gemstones in the first place?

I see emdashes in my sleep.

[queen pebble]

Nothing wrong with that--emdash is my favorite punctuation. Even when it should be a semicolon

[civic niche]

fwiw, the community has also had some pretty terrible ideas, so you know, take it with a grain of salt.

[rigid sparrow]

look at what gets sold to pawn the most- wands, cubes, orbs, small statues... what's making the silvers? give em another use where we have more value in using them vs selling them to pawn. give us something that doesn't generate silvers that will make us never want to sell those things again. same with junk weapons, armor and jewelry. if it's enhancive, let us break it down and charge our enhancives with it or create something new with it.
also A LOT less silvers in boxes. like 50%. why are we generating so many silvers instead of items that can be used and sold to other players? completely defeats the purpose of loot cap.

[umbral lotus]

I think that loot need not be valuable, if it has a chance to be valuable, get rid of the junk, get rid of the ingots, toss items that could be valuable or useful instead, I'd rather a 1 in 100 chance at something great than 50 ingot laden boxes that are entirly to heavy for the effort

[split hamlet]

Do you understand the concept of diminishing marginal payout based on cap utilization.
We're talking about a cap of 15,000,000 silvers in the game Gemstone IV.
Can you give me an estimate of how many gems would be necessary to find with that cap, with gem values ranging between 1000 and 5000 silvers?

Yes — I understand exactly what you’re describing, and your framing is basically correct for GemStone IV’s loot cap behavior.

1. How diminishing payout works (conceptually)
As you approach the cap (15,000,000 silvers in your example), the system effectively reduces the value of each subsequent sale.
A commonly cited model is roughly:
Each % of cap reached → % reduction in sale value

So:
At 0% → 100% value
At 50% → ~50% value
Near cap → values approach ~0

This creates a linear decay in payout efficiency, meaning:
Your average value per gem over the entire grind is about ~50% of nominal value if you go all the way to cap.

2. Turn that into math
Let’s define:
Cap = 15,000,000 silvers
Gem value range = 1,000–5,000 silvers
Average nominal gem value ≈ 3,000 silvers

Because of diminishing returns:
Effective average ≈ ~50% of nominal
So adjusted average ≈ ~1,500 silvers per gem

3. Estimated number of gems
Using midpoint average (most realistic)
15,000,000÷1,500≈10,000 gems
15,000,000÷1,500≈10,000 gems

4. Range depending on gem quality
Worst case (all low-value gems ~1,000)
Effective avg ≈ 500
15,000,000÷500=30,000 gems
15,000,000÷500=30,000 gems
Best case (all high-value gems ~5,000)
Effective avg ≈ 2,500
15,000,000÷2,500=6,000 gems
15,000,000÷2,500=6,000 gems

5. Final estimate (practical range)
High-end hunting (good gems): ~6,000–8,000 gems
Mixed realistic gameplay: ~9,000–12,000 gems
Low-end farming: ~20,000–30,000 gems

6. Key insight (the important takeaway)
Because of the linear decay:
The second half of your cap is twice as expensive in effort as the first
Your “true” average value is always ~half of what the gems say on paper

[queen pebble]

problem is that poses a bunch of different issues (like chrism gem values for one) and it doesn't actually address the problem. It's no different than a loot cap and can be bypasses by MAing like the current cap.

[umbral lotus]

100 charge statues, 50 charge quartz orbs, things players could use instead of 50 individual orbs or statues or whatever, quality of life items not just pawnable items, and if were going to get a huge pile of crap in boxes can we at least make the item weights reasonable, at it's current weight aquartz orb would be the size of a human head...

[royal epoch]

But this basically describes what we have. Gemstones have a rare chance to be incredible, and we did ditch most of the junk items like doorknobs and such.

[split hamlet]

It doesn't create a bunch of different issues when you understand how it works. See previous answers to understand why you're wrong.

The loot cap isn't going away, get used to it.

MA isn't going away, so again, get used to it.

[rough vault]

One gemstone per month is all that should be available. Any more only exacerbates obsessive hunting behavior. You can disagree but it's true. Ascension is not a fun experience and it is already overcrowded.

[queen pebble]

A, pass I can understand the math and don't need the sermon. I think it's a bad idea. I think if they mess with valuations, it needs to be done in aggregate. Account level limits won't work.

B. Sure, I just don't think the current limited cap is a healthy one

C. I don't care, I have 4 premium/plat accounts between mine and my daughters. My point is if they impose a cap this restrictive they are basically promoting MAing.

And Nairdin: I like the item grinder Idea, let us grind stuff for magic dust we can rub on things to charge them up!

[umbral lotus]

most people aren't hunting for Gemstones... and for heavens sake can we get rid of this damned 5 minute timer

[rigid sparrow]

every lockpick that drops is useless. crystal amulets could go away. Clothing (that isn't a container) is 99% useless. quartz orbs, small statues, moonstone cubes could be reduced by 50-75% and i don't think anyone would be mad. or give us a way to use them other than auto selling them to pawn. +1 on timer being reduced to 1-2 minutes.

I've never enjoyed the part of gemstone where i have to dig through my bags for 4-5 minutes just to see what nouns i need to use to sell different items. Nothing is good unless it's a 1/10,000 enhancive, a 1/100,000 armament or something with monsterbold text when it drops and that part is so much worse now.

[split hamlet]

If you think it messes up chrism values, then you obviously don't understand how it works, so I can understand why you think it's a bad idea.

However, I'll explain, again... chrism/deed/totem/517 will use what we call a "system" value. The "system" value is never lowered.

There will be a second "SELL" value, which is what is modified by your LOOT CAP PERCENTAGE.

This is how skins currently work, I believe.

A diminishing marginal payout based on cap utilization will solve the "no loot" issue. It does not create issues with chrisms/deeds/etc.

It would add diminishing returns to selling loot, and we know that diminishing returns are used throughout the game in many systems.

It would require those MA groups to most likely split up into solo hunting, because it would take each individual character more time to reach the loot cap.

Do you dislike the idea because your own 4 account MA group would earn silvers more slowly?

[tender scarab]

Better outflow-to-inflow rates: This part has been discussed about 87492 times, but...

[Pick some would-have-been or even have-been-for-a-long-time pay event items to make available for silver](#1461872047062908929 message).

[Do more with Gemstones. Examples](#gemstones message): Get rid of Dust costs on rerolling Gemstones so that people can blow their entire loot cap on it every month if they want (while still probably never getting what they want due to the near-impossible odds). Or let us fuse 5-10 of the same single property Gemstone to put that property onto a different Gemstone so more people are inclined to pay more unbinding fees. Or introduce property locking or some other expensive thing that people might be interested in that adds some degree of determinism to an RNG-based system.

Add the enhancive rerolling that was planned and never happened.

Introduce [new silver drains that are designed with demographic in mind](#1461872047062908929 message). More specifically, I mean ones that are either A) expensive because they're aimed at the high end or B) not particularly expensive, but do have recurring costs, because they're aimed at getting a wide swathe of players to buy in. The Temple of Lumnis donations are a great example of B, which is credit where it's due. So do more of that. (I'm assuming that people are sinking many millions into it, anyway.) As for A, it basically doesn't exist other than CLAIM and the WPS wagon, which are each dubious for different reasons.

Instead of breakage, [do the opposite of breakage](#1190341191074594846 message) where you can supercharge items for a limited time.

And many other things!

[queen pebble]

So what happens then when you give that pile of low value diamonds to a character on another account, which value does it use? Again, you're not actually solving anything. Either you're introducing a bunch of gems with nuetered values into the system or you're jsut forcing people to move them to another account to sell them

[umbral lotus]

let us convert enhancives into enhancive charge value, would take a decent chunk out of the pawn/gemshop silver tills. Turn enhancives into the AdvGuild and save up enhancive recharge points do the same for magic items for that matter give us some magical recharge points, heck let us bundle stuff like quartz orbs and statues too

[edgy hollow]

i haven't seen most of those lately but holy crap the amount of clothing items that don't sell.

[civic niche]

Honestly, there have been a ton of really good (and some also terrible) ideas for spending silver posted in the last 2 years of discussing silver. It was really disheartening to see the "silver problem" be solved by just a loot nerf.

[split hamlet]

The SELL value is determined by the character who found it. There is no "give to my other account" loophole to sell it and generate more silvers.

If they want to use it for a chrism or a deed, the system value will be used, if they want to generate new silvers, they will get whatever the SELL value is.

Again, you're not proving that the proposal doesn't work.

[south trail]

We starting the channel from scratch? There's like 2mo and 10,000 posts, maybe 15% of them are ideas.

[rigid sparrow]

imagine a diamond. it drops. the diamond has 2 values when it drops. 5000 is the value for totems/chrisms, etc. because the person that looted it was at 50% loot reduction due to their loot cap, the diamond, not matter who sells it, will sell for 2500 coins + trading bonus.

[gloomy lark]

I wonder who added that gold star 🤣

[split hamlet]

He earned a gold star because he was smart enough to understand how it works.

[rigid sparrow]

i think PART OF the soloution is way way way less silvers in boxes, find a use or get rid of all the things that are useless and immediately sold to pawn by literally everyone like crystal amulets, slow down the silver faucet and remove loot pressure. everyone has their own individual loot pressure now. the boot can use quartz orbs or moonstone cubes.

[civic niche]

Hey why all the hate on the fast way to RR. \j

And good lord yes, kill loot pressure.

[split hamlet]

All I want in boxes are gems, trinkets and gear(enhancive or non-enhancive).

Loose silvers add too much weight, ingots were a terrible addition because now you go from no encumbrance to 100% encumbrance instantly.

[crimson pond]

I mean, obviously. That's exactly why the encumbrance pieces are there - so you don't get to do that. It's an intentional throttle

[rigid sparrow]

at this point i'm looking for the area that is gonna drop the most pieces of jewelry, thinking hunting there till loot cap is best, then go back to moonsedge and hunt for gemstones while collecting dreadsteed skulls worth 11 silvers each to stockpile for bounties because i don't want to generate 35m silvers. i wanna find an item i can sell to ardwen for 35m silvers.

[split hamlet]

There was an intentional throttle before that seemed to work for 30 years.

I'd rather the base box itself weigh more if we need to accumulate weight via boxes as the throttle to stop hunting.

RE: Kaetel
Except before you didn't find a 400 lb box. You slowly accumulated encumbrance.

[ashen carbon]

Sanctum is already packed (except when I get Lurked, apparently), so don't go there. I like my loots

[crimson pond]

I am of the opinion that the throttle is nearly identical now as it was before box changes. So I guess it's still working

[rigid sparrow]

but it's not a throttle. it sped up my silver generation rate by A LOT. so you gotta run to town and drop off a box. we got a locksmithpool and lockers. it takes 10 seconds to drop off a box and go back out if you can't carry much. the 1/3 box drop rate was a magical idea. the 3x silver value in them was a mistake that none of us saw right away. I was one of the first to say let's make the silver gold and give it a different value. but at this point i say box value should be the one thing that gets rolled back.

[jolly palm]

Small tangent since Moonsedge's poorness was brought up.... but With loot cap in place, i'm amazed loot pressure hasn't been obliterated off the face of Elanthia yet.

Moonsedge shouldn't be poor just because my crew is in there farming the bejeezahs out of it.
Although it was wildly poor before I ever showed up - lots of people had already posted the analysis before I ever hit ascension.

I just come back to one overarching theme, regardless of how things are implemented, or what loot changes take place to control the production vs. reduction....

People like finding loot. It's the only consistent dopamine hit in the game. EXP is too slow a drip to offset a lack of loot.

Gotta feed some dopamine, otherwise people start walking away from the slot machines

[crimson pond]

I still almost never find a 400lb box. Nor even 100lb ones. Sure, average per-box weigh is obviously up, but for a vast majority of hunts it's essentially the same net encumbrance with a few more spikes here and there. I don't have to unload boxes any more frequently now than I did before. In fact the only change I've made at all with how I handle loot is that I'm depositing them for my own rogue rather than the pool - and very rarely having to pause my loot rotation to make sure a giant gets that big honker.

[calm bay]

The biggest problem here is that you don't have anything of value to replace the silvers with in the treasure system. You need better crafting infrastructure to introduce alternative in-game items that can replace silvers as loot, and which will not be sellable to merchants but drive trading between players.

I would suggest eliminating all silvers from the treasure system. No silvers in boxes, or looted from the various orifices of critters (wherever these things that don't wear clothes are holding their silvers). Replace the silvers with boons. Things like more boosts, crafting items, and even AG bounty credits (that guy was on the AG's hit list). The problem here is that crafting items are currently 1) sellable to NPCs, and 2) not very lucrative otherwise.

One simple thing could be introduce "orb shards" which when combined (say you get 10 of them) you can get a single nexus orb for access to quests. Ores that can be combined to create ingots, which can in turn be used to forge different metals, or that you could use to smelt into jewelry. Give us feather charms. You could make vials of viscous liquid that when combined create a full enhancive recharger potion for 3-7 days, items that can be collected and turned into the AG for waivers and vouchers. Anything creative that has active value to players, but doesn't create silvers. These kinds of items, however, demand better means of trading and delivering. Only a fraction of the population has a player shop, and the mail system is clunky to say the least, so ultimately people will find this "tedious" because if they didn't need to item and they're forced to interact to earn value from it, its a net loss to the casual crowd.

And finally, incentivize multi-character activity on single accounts / subscriber tier. Feeling like you're missing out on the main hunting incentive, loot, because you're premium or platinum and not spending the same amount for multiple accounts feels rough.

[royal epoch]

I hear you on the crafting infra. I am working on that.

Slowly.

[calm bay]

The other big issue is a public marketplace where goods can be sold by players to other players. Much like a Locksmith Pool. This becomes necessary because inventory space is limited, and if you have no use for the item but other players do, you need a way to distribute them without having to travel the globe.

You deposit your unwanted crafting components at the crafting guild hall and others come to buy said components, and then you collect the money like you would collect a box from the locksmith pool -- minus the marketing fees. This prevents generating silvers because you are exchanging silvers, and does a slight silver drain at the same time. Imagine if that was how the alchemist worked now, instead of buying your components and generating silvers, it went into their resale (its literally called a consignment shop) where other players can buy it... If they never do buy it, you'll never get your money, so the demand needs to actually exist.

[civic niche]

With respect to crafters and all, I hate everything about that idea.

[hazy osprey]

I empathize with the situation. You're stuck. You can't decrease the loot via a simple cap because players not earning loot is not fun. You can't decrease the sell value of the loot because it breaks other systems (and, I contend, will still not be very fun: nobody wants uncut diamonds worth 50 silvers). You can't keep up with big silver drains, like auctions. And building a long-term silver sink has proven difficult if not impossible.

It's not clear to me whether people who complain about MA armies are upset because they feel these armies are ruining the classic GS experience that these people cling to, or if they're truly upset about the silvers generated by MA armies. There's no solving the second problem: more accounts = more silvers. Frankly, I'd argue it's not even a problem; it's the cost of a subscription. And if it's the first problem, well, this isn't really the place to discuss that. (Full disclosure: I have three accounts, where one account never hunts, and the other two hunt solo.)

If we're totally blue-skying this, I think it'd be neat if the loot cap remained roughly as-is for now, and, as you entered the stage where your loot decreases, you earn something else that's bound to your character. Maybe it's experience in some form, maybe it's some other way to progress your character, but players need to get something if they're not getting traditional loot.

I don't think a public marketplace is the answer, because we're talking about gulfs of billions of silvers, and we already have player shops (with more offerings ).

I don't think taxes, e.g. the locksmith pool, are the answer, because taxes are un-fun.

I truly believe that the answer is a robust silver sink.

[split hamlet]

You can't decrease the sell value of the loot because it breaks other systems (and, I contend, will still not be very fun: nobody wants uncut diamonds worth 50 silvers).

I don't see how this is true, when skins have a selling value, and a system value (that totems use).

I think it's better to find diamonds that might generate 50 new silvers, but could still be used for deeds and chrisms instead of finding nothing.

I'll also point out that you would need to find THOUSANDS of diamonds before that diamond might generate only 50 silvers.

[hazy osprey]

We just talked about this two days ago: if deeds, for example, use the "system" value of treasure instead of the "sell" value, then there's nothing stopping me from getting cheap deeds at the end of the month. Same logic for chrisms. Same logic for totems. Same for gem eating things. If the "cost" to use gems for certain mechanisms is related to the system value and not the sell value, and the sell value is quite low, then those mechanisms can essentially be powered for no cost.

I know the behavior was changed for totems and skins, but I don't think that's a signal that everything will be changed to follow that pattern.

[split hamlet]

So on one hand you're saying it's a problem to use system value for gems to get cheaper deeds/etc but you're also saying...

... as you entered the stage where your loot decreases, you earn something else that's bound to your character. Maybe it's experience in some form, maybe it's some other way to progress your character, but players need to get something if they're not getting traditional loot.

That's it's completely okay to get things, at the end of your loot cap, that are bound to the character (like deeds).

Maybe it's experience in some form, maybe it's some other way to progress your character, but players need to get something if they're not getting traditional loot.

Experience and "character progression" cost way more than deeds and chrisms.

[hazy osprey]

I have no idea what you mean by experience and character progression costing more than deeds and chrisms. As far as I know, there's no reliable way to spend silvers and get experience, outside the new temple of lumnis stuff (which is a good system, IMO). And the "character progression" I mentioned is referencing a system that doesn't exist yet, so I'm not sure how you can opine on its cost.

If the system that staff thinks is best ends with players getting deeds on the cheap, then great. I don't really care. I'm just saying that the system you're proposing has non-trivial side effects.

Your proposal is interesting in that people keep getting stuff. I understand why you designed it that way. I'm not on a mission to try and change your mind. But my intuition is that, in addition to the side effects, a system like the one you're designing punishes the wrong people. I think we can both agree that people who earn very little will see an impact from day 1, which may not be a ton of silvers, but might be a meaningful percentage to people who don't hunt much. And I'm not totally sure, but using what I think are pretty reasonable assumptions for silvers per kill, it looks to me like one of two things are true: either folks who hit 15k+ kills per month end up pretty much in the same place they're at now and folks who hit 3-10k kills per month suffer the most, or everyone who clears 3k-ish kills per month suffers a ton compared to now. Maybe tomorrow if I have some time I'll try to work out some silver distributions per kill from my logs and be a bit more precise.

Fundamentally, I don't believe further decreasing loot is the right path forward. I think creating robust sinks is the way to go.

[rigid sparrow]

do it like the lumnis contest. turn off loot cap and loot pressure for 1 week a month and see who can get the most loot! take an average of the top 100 and that's the new loot cap.
JUST KIDDING!
Unless you want to. 40m a month loot cap would be fun.

[granite tartan]

It’s easy to hit loot cap just from farming gemstones and still not have your 2nd gem yet

Moonsedge rains loot for me. Kind of surprised to see people saying it’s poor.

[slate bluff]

They probably never thought people would be chasing 2nd and 3rd gemstones for 8,000 kills but here we are. It would be interesting to see how many the average ascensioner find per month. I assume it is slightly less than one but maybe all the MAers push it to between 1 and 2.

[granite tartan]

The drops being less terrible 95% of the time would help.

[edgy hollow]

that system didn't really exist until the lootcap changes at the start of the year. it was one of those "quick fixes" pushed out when unexpected systems were affected by the changes

[slate bluff]

We need a time cap. "You feel too exhausted to attack the disir". Please rest until next week.

[flint mortar]

Go home, Zhagen. You're drunk. LOL.

[split hamlet]

I have no idea what you mean by experience and character progression costing more than deeds and chrisms.

RPA orbs are available and can be purchased via silvers (or with event currency via silvers). There's also Lumnis that you can purchase with silvers. As far as character progression, it comes in the form of experience (Ascension) or enhancives or any of the number of things you can buy via silvers to "progress" your character.

All of which are more expensive than deeds or chrisms.

And the "character progression" I mentioned is referencing a system that doesn't exist yet, so I'm not sure how you can opine on its cost.

Because we need another system... lol

But my intuition is that, in addition to the side effects, a system like the one you're designing punishes the wrong people. I think we can both agree that people who earn very little will see an impact from day 1, which may not be a ton of silvers, but might be a meaningful percentage to people who don't hunt much.

It's a 13% reduction at 2 million silvers. 130 silvers out of every 1000. I think that's pretty trivial.

The original proposal also called for a Major Loot boost during Lumnis to help the casuals. Because it's not intended to "punish" anyone. It's about maintaining a sustainable economy.

Fundamentally, I don't believe further decreasing loot is the right path forward. I think creating robust sinks is the way to go.

Wyrom stated the loot cap didn't nerf generation in the amount they wanted. Search for his comments.

But we can agree that we need more silver sinks.

The biggest thing I could see being an issue is that it would take all month to reach loot cap. But I don't see that as a problem personally, it should take all month. I believe it would also reduce the income of MA groups because you can't quickly loot 10m on character A then switch to character B.

[slate bluff]

I think they can spin this into a marketing opportunity. "Gemstone iv, the text game so addicting we had to limit player game time per week"

[hoary prawn]

To your point about why MA armies are annoying - to me, it’s because, left unchecked, they will ultimately make it pointless for anyone else to play the game. They don’t interact, don’t help anyone or provide services or have personalities, or participate at all, they just wreck everyone else’s immersion and trample all over their hunting.

Many if not all of them are almost certainly ‘farming’ silvers to sell for real-world money (which, so far as I know, is still in contravention of the T&C).

They don’t care about the game, don’t even play it in any meaningful sense, they just leave BigShot running while they’re asleep, at work or playing another game. When they’ve succeeded in destroying this one, they’ll just move on to wreck another game.

Frankly, while I’d be a hypocrite to complain about the many ways in which Lich has improved the QoL in Gemstone, especially for those of us with arthritic hands, most of them are things the devs could, should and (in any normal game that actually paid its devs), would have achieved over the lifetime of the game, such as the interactive maps to simplify travel.

Do-it-all-for-you scripts such as BigShot are a step too far. I’ve never used it, not for reasons of virtue, but because there’s too much set-up involved for my playstyle; but I would argue that even one instance of using it AFK should be grounds for an instant, permanent ban, simply because of the negative behaviour it enables.

I watched one user a couple of weeks ago who was clearly not paying attention, because their character was stuck for hours in a loop of running to the departure point for the hunting ground, running back to town, buffing his armor, and running back to the departure point. I was not at all displeased that this person was burning through their urchin guide uses and spending hours achieving nothing whatsoever, but I reported anyway.

[fresh turret]

I agree with Irilis bigshot and similar hunting scripts that require little to no player interaction are the root cause here.

There is one thing you can't really automate in gemstone, RP and player interaction.
If there was a way to tie this interaction to loot gains it might actually enrich the player experience.
Lets say everyone has a hard cap on treasure generation that is well below the baseline like maybe 100k a day

if you sit on a node for x amount of time this increases because it means you're hunting less generating less silver so it bumps up to 200k
If you interact with Players you can get another modifier bumping you up to 300k things like picking boxes, healing, providing armor support etc.
if you roleplay with other players or the environment you can get a modifier above that amount - in other words you paying people in silvers to improve player experience which I think is a fair tradeoff.

The only investment really required by Simu is someone to monitor interactions on a node and divvy these out.
could be like a RP bonus for treasure

Doesn't address the the current silvers in circulation but it might help and be a win win

[fresh turret]

Did I just hear someone say mining and smelting???!!!

[chilly tulip]

You can't force people to play the game the way you want them to.

[hazy osprey]

This is your opinion and you're certainly entitled to it. But it has nothing to do with loot cap and doesn't belong here.

[hoary prawn]

It has everything to do with the reason for the lootcap, if that reason is too many silvers being generated in the game - or are you under the impression that people who spend all day and all night running bots are NOT generating silvers?

[crimson pond]

Just as an overly defensive retort on semantics, MA doesn't always mean "army of bots." I agree that the latter is problematic. But it is not necessarily inclusive of the former.

To circle it back to the topic, as one such MAer - I don't magically loot cap 10 characters just by virtue of having them, it's not a linear correlation. At least now how I play. I earn far less than 10 players could, playing + earning individually.

[snow oasis]

A question about the idea of heavily lowering the silver generated.
What am I supposed to do as a single account person to generate silver, that a multi account person won't also do?

Sorry didn't relies there was slow mode, to elaborate.
Anything RP based is going to require a GM of some type to evaluate and approve the bonuses. And who's to say a group of people hunting together can't also RP together. If it's truly automated interactions sure it might not pass muster, but just get a fantasy chatbot to talk to itself. Then you need actual brain power to constantly sift through it and judge interactions constantly. Or you end up with a "solution" that isn't actually used.
What happens when you have people's actual RP not being "good enough"? Who's standards is it? Guess some get to stay broke. Or when there's no one on?

[jolly palm]

Like Nitos said, you're entitled to your opinion, but this is a harsh generalization that doesn't hold true, just targeting a group you don't like.

I can name a dozen people who MA and care deeply about the game, who hit loot cap every month, and don't typically sell silvers. Many of them, i never even selling their resources. So their entire MA experience is in a bubble, not really effecting anyone else at all. It's just how they enjoy the game.

Many of those people have been in here trying to give feedback & ideas on how to balance things.

I MA and run 6-7 accounts together typically.
I RP, although admittedly I'm not good at it.
I have probably helped carry 400-500 people through the gemstone Quest. A few MA'ers have helped me with 1/2 of those.
I probably have 100+ personal DM's from various people that I talk to about gemstone on a regular basis. Most of them MA in some fashion, and most of them care about the game.

Yes, there are 4-5 major "bot" groups that do sell all their resources on a regular basis. They're a small fraction of the people who MA. You also dont know their motives or intent. You can't categorize their feelings. They may care deeply about the game as well.

I care deeply about the game, and I know a lot of the MA'ers do as well.

This also isn't the MA inquisition thread. It's about loot & experience changes and how we work through a solution to keep the economy balanced from a loot perspective.

[fresh turret]

Yeh true roleplaying is subjective but if you look at the proposal the idea is that whatever loot cap they land on, you could get to it with minimal effort and still be eligible to get gems/legendary drops/rare drops/keys and locks with the rp aspect only allowing some additional silver gain above lootcap.

[hazy osprey]

Well said. The only thing I'd add on is that some of the folks in the groups who never RP and never interact with or help others would exhibit that same behavior whether they were MAing or not.

[hoary prawn]

It isn't MA I care about. Knock yourself out, run 100 characters if you can afford 100 accounts. I MA myself in a very small and completely non-automated fashion, because I play at times when few people are about and find it convenient to have a picker, a cleric or a healer available when I or a friend need them.

If you're interacting, responsive to the game and paying attention, I wasn't addressing you.

[hazy osprey]

Much like real life, people are not required to interact with you. Why do you expect it of them?

If people are benefitting in any way (silvers, experience, etc.) without being attentive, that's a problem, whether they're an MA army or not. That's not the point of this thread.

[remote egret]

A simple man through and through. Love to see the consistency.

[sleek meadow]

1. decrease loot generation…slow the overall drop rate. If generating silver from nothing is part of the problem then cut the value dropped by boxes a flat 10-15%.

2. Change the cap from monthly (which is insane imho) to daily. Apportion it out so it’s reasonable but once you’ve got xxxk in drops make it slow down for 24hours. Then people still have incentive to play every day still.

3). Reduce loot in a room with more than x people. Silver/box drop d 1/2 if 7+ people in the room. 1/4 if 12+ or something. Incentivize solo and smaller groups.

4. restore gem prices so they make sense.

5)Finally, more uses for silver that players actually want. So many good ideas for that listed above.

[snow oasis]

Personally I'd say weekly instead of daily. Not everyone can play heavily each day, but the weekends are more commonly available. Basically the same idea behind lumnis

[chilly tulip]

Just tie it to Lumnis.

[cold zephyr]

The idea of finding a diamond that's only worth 50 silver is stupid. I don't care if the diamond has a secondary value that still allows folks to use it for a chrism/deed or what have you. It's just stupid that it only sells for 50 silver.

Your bucket idea isn't lost on people on how it works, it's lost on people because finding that what should be high priced gem is now worth less than a star diopside sucks. People don't want to lug around a bunch of diamonds that will only sell for a few silver.

Your idea should present itself as not reducing the price of items, but adjusting down the quality of treasure level a person can find as their bucket fills. Maybe up to soft cap you can always find high end gems (if they drop in your hunting ground), but once you hit soft cap you go from finding Tier 1 gems to Tier 2 and under until you hit the next threshold, then you step down to only finding Tier 3 and under and so on until you're only able to find bottom of the barrel tiered gems when you're capped.

Overall, I don't think a highly restrictive lootcap is necessary in the game if silver drains were brought back. Silver drains used to be events/merchants that came around. Spitfire showed up and the million silvers I had banked away....it's like a kid in a candy store. So many options and so little silver to use, but it got used. As they switched over to less silver based events and more alt currencies, the areas to spend silvers vanished so bank accounts kept going up and the rare silver auction barely puts a dent in all the silver in the game. A lootcap isn't going to fix this because the silver drains that were taken away haven't been replaced by anything.

[primal creek]

Since you are easily distractable and you included a term...MA...can you define what you, specifically, mean by "MA"? Also, are you prepared for an answer that means less monthly spend by there being less active accounts? If the answer to the second part is "Likely not" then I am not sure we can provide any answer depending on your definition. Because the goal post will move.

[umbral lotus]

Are bot armies actually playing the game though?

[rough vault]

Loot correlates with kills and some are simply able to cull 100x more than others in a month. Introduce required rest when fried with severe penalties to perception and looting if you stay hunting when mind is fried. Most games require actual sleep to absorb experience which slows down the hunting pressure.

[umbral lotus]

The bot army people and the regular MA people are two very different groups, and only one of those groups is beneficial to the game, the other seems to have a business model and prospectus

[hard folio]

I average 1 gem every 2-3 months. And I hunt up 50k resources a week.

[slate bluff]

wow, surprising you dont hit the 1500 mark more often

[sleek meadow]

With three 100 characters (2 alts so each has to play solo) I’m averaging 2 total gemstones in a month. Never come near the loot cap. I don’t know if I have 10m total to my name. I’m poor.

[dry sedge]

Not all people who MA are silver farmers or have a bot mentality. There's a bit of stereotyping and over generalization happening in that regard. Some folks enjoy having multiple characters because it allows us to interact with the community through different personalities.

[hard folio]

Like the movie Split? 😄

[remote egret]

I agree with your point (that finding a 50silver diamond is stupid) but I am also not in the category of people who hard cap. So i do wonder how many of the 94 accounts that hard cap would be happier if they still found a diamond worth 50 silvers vs...well. whatever they find now? I will say though - I probably WOULD be happy (if I loot capped) to find bound gems/skins of value that would work with all the systems they are meant to work with at their full value.

[civic niche]

And some because it allows them to interact less. I have 3 accounts so I don't have to deal with other people. But they all run separately, and I rarely sell professional resources. So, do I MA, yes. Do I have a "MA Army", no. Am I RPing with people, or broadly interacting with anyone, no, because I don't really like people, not because of some MA business model.

[umbral lotus]

Then you are role-playing an antisocial introvert

[remote egret]

I'm not sure that is a role he is playing...or just IS.

[civic niche]

Right. I wouldn’t call that “rp” as much as life.

[warm agate]

I'm pretty much the same between my hubs and I we do this with our accounts. Especially suits me when I'm in hunting mode. I think it has something to do with playing in Plat on and off for so many years, when in many instances you had to be somewhat self sufficient, or able to play with limited supply of other players. That's not to say, I don't enjoy some roleplay when the opportunity arises. I don't generally sell gear or services, I do enjoy finding loot, having silvers and attending merchant, raffles events, auctions or just plain shopping to spend the silvers. I rarely buy/sell anything player to player.

[south trail]

There are a lot of easy silver sinks that haven’t been implemented. Sell power for silver. Temporary monthly stat boosts. Lumnis donate was a huge success. Something similar for silver. +10 as for 1m silver /mo will has no real world impact but people have proven they’ll pay millions for +1 and love to see numbers go up. Fix weapon stats. Make all weapons viable - flails ignore shield bonus, whips flare major bleed. Give people a reason to start a new project and buy bs to work on it.

[fierce lynx]

1. Restrict MA groups (same person running multiple character accounts at the same time) to TWO characters. I think large MA groups are detrimental to the game in many ways (not just in the loot generation). EDIT: (Clarification - restrict a person from being logged in with more than two accounts at one time regardless of group status.) 2nd Edit: 2 isn't the right number? Make it 4. But something less than unlimited should be in place.
2. Scale loot down over time with the low point being something in the 10%-15% range (I don't know what 'feels' right - the goal being that hunting doesn't ever feel like NO TREASURE but definitely has a diminishing return.)
3. Stop gating nearly ALL the cool stuff people want to throw lots of money at behind pay events. Allocate a certain percentag of new "cool" stuff to large silver sinks (Not one and done auctions but literally look at what is in Duskruin today - some portion of that should be in a silver shop instead and available to anyone that earns enough silver to buy the (expensive) items.
4. Stop rewarding large MA groups with LOOT bonuses on searching. They already gain by killing faster than solo hunters. They don't need an additional boost to the loot found on top of that.

[civic niche]

So instead of 1 large group you get 5 small groups. Can't really say that's "good" in my mind. All you're doing is making more movement spam for everyone.

Edit for below:
Oh, you mean, actually limit the accounts someone can play on at once? Sounds like a great way to shut the game down. Wyrom basically said anything that does that leads to him likely being out of work.

[fierce lynx]

No - that would be a violation of policy if one person were running four 2-man groups. They would be running 6 too many accounts at once. I can try and wordsmith better...

Edit for above: I don't think it would (shut the game down) but since my opinion was asked I provided it. 🙂

[safe epoch]

Query... if (and this may or may not be true) so much loot can be attributed to MA or non-MA groups hunting Gemstones and racking up tens of thousands of kills... would addressing a group loot dynamic actually lower the overall grinding process for said loot generators? I've seen several mention that if they could find their gem(s) they'd move on to other things. As Gemstones are not nearly as valuable as I'd imagined since they are so very random even when they do drop, would it make sense to make their drops a bit more accessible and thus reduce the obsessive grind? To me, Gemstones are so randomly applicable, their extreme scarcity is unnecessary. Perhaps if Gemstones were more precious (less dust stones) or more numerous so that reshaping became more of a thing would 1) reduce the grind and looted creatures and 2) create a more useful reshape silver drain?

I'm posing a question with no opinion on it as I'm not sophisticated enough to possess one. Just a random thought I wanted to throw out there.

[fierce lynx]

They could easily (not popularly) solve this by dropping the number of gems you can find in a month down to two (or even one). Or alternatively they could remove the limit on how many you can find and just set a timer such that you can't find another gemtone until 2 weeks (or 3 weeks) have passed since your last gemstone find. Neither of these solutions would be popular but either would reduce loot grinding from chasing after gems.

The current gemstone find design (having you perform thousands and thousands of searches to find up to 3 in a month) is definitely at odds with the (apparent) Dev desire to have players hunt less during a month.

[bright pasture]

oh no what if it's determined by looking at them?

[tawny sierra]

schrodinger's loot?

[bright pasture]

you'll have to collect enough gemstones before looking at them to ensure a higher probability of rare and legendary when the state collapses

[civic niche]

They could also put a pity timer on it, like the 1st one.

[flint mortar]

I disagree. It ABSOLUTELY belongs here, it's a primary reason why they did all the damn nerfs in the first place years ago. We hit a nerve or something?

[civic niche]

Is it though? Because with new loot cap, if you really care about silver, more accounts is better.

[empty kernel]

You can play two characters from the same account at the same time?

[bright pasture]

i still think silver needs to scale more with experience or gear. this was a general trend that loot cap implementation thus far has totally ignored, except outside of gemstones.

i think this will be eventually addressed and i look forward to the solutions

[civic niche]

I'm pretty sure he means like, no more than 2 accounts per person logged in at once. Not 2 characters per account, since that's not possible.

[empty kernel]

Aw, my rogue always wanted to meet his sister the sorceress

[flint mortar]

This is strictly my opinion: Unfortunately, this has something that has festered since at least the mid-late 2000s. The side effect of some people running 24/7 scripts to power level their crews for eventual sale was this giant glut of silvers that people would also buy. This stuff got a lot easier to do when PSInet and Lich entered the playing field. Which, by the way is not an indictment on the creators or a majority of the users of those platforms, I wouldn't have lasted as long as i did in this game without the travelling scripts.

[valid orbit]

How would you detect or enforce "no more than 2 accounts per person logged in at once"?

[ancient scarab]

The honor system?

[civic niche]

I can think of a few ways. Ip's, but then VPNs, so you maybe have to block those. Billing info, but then you have to link billing and the game engine better. Those are the easiest two off the top of my head.

[safe epoch]

I don't think designing a better mousetrap is the solution. You can catch more flies with honey you know.

[civic niche]

Yeah I mean I wasn’t agreeing with the position just saying it’s not that hard to figure out how to do. (If that was at me)

[ancient scarab]

As 2nd generation GS player, limiting to IPs or billing wouldn’t have allowed my dad, myself, and 3 siblings to be able to play or get into the game at all

[safe epoch]

nah wasn't at you.... just thinking out loud to the group. It seems so much is focused on restrictions and rules. I'm wondering how to make a better carrot to accomplish the game goals instead of more throttles and harnesses. Maybe impossible but worth exploring I think.

[civic niche]

I think there's been countless carrots here. Most of them involve something to spend silver on instead of restricting it. That said, there' s absolutely a contingent of people who (right or wrong) blame all the woes of lootcap on MAing. I think it's just an easy scapegoat, or an ulterior motive.

[unique oyster]

Have we considered "reverse breakage" as a silver drain? Instead of paying to keep gear from getting worse, allow players to spend silver to temporarily power up gear.

[fiery cove]

Sounds like enhancives to me

[tawny sierra]

Yeah. I should be able to use silver to kill vampires easier

[safe epoch]

saw that mentioned earlier by Leafiara and thought it brilliant (as are most things she says)... also I wonder if silver recharging could be expanded. if folks are constantly running bounties to charge their enhansives then they are gaining silver not draining.. why not give those options?

[civic niche]

Several people have suggested some variant of that yes.

[royal epoch]

This is a great idea.

[jolly palm]

Essentially it's the same concept as the animal totem. skins/gems for power boosts.
Just let us throw silver in the totem and boom, done 😆

[civic niche]

I guess timing is everything. I feel like that idea has been suggested for literally years.

[safe epoch]

some say there is no such thing as an original thought... I do not claim any ideas as mine

[civic niche]

Oh yeah, that wasn't at you, I mean you outright attributed it to someone. It was a general comment on irony.

[safe epoch]

You're a friend. I took it no other way than friends chatting. I have like one feeling left in me after all these years... it would take a great deal to hurt it (assuming I can even find it again).

[queen pebble]

I still think just removing the silver payout from bounties entirely would be an easy one. It might not be a lot, but i'd rather have 10% more bounty points than the silver, I doubt many people would even notice it... but it might sum up to more than expected. It is also directly related to the number of people completing the bounty so ma group x 5 means silvers x 5 not generated.

[umbral lotus]

I'd imagine at lower levels bounty silvers matter

[bright pasture]

that bounty silver is most of my money at the end of the month!

[fierce lynx]

No. People literally have 4, 10, 20+ accounts that they run simultaneously.

[remote egret]

The only right way to MA is like me. 2 accounts. Sometimes run together but mostly separate. Everyone else is doing it wrong!

[crimson pond]

The ratios change based on character height, it's not a fixed value.

[snow oasis]

That's why gnome is the best race?

[fast cipher]

You'd notice it a lot of your hitting the cap currently even if your a solo player

[sleek meadow]

Some anecdotal reports which really need to be context driven with some real stats which I’m sure GS has but not sure if we will see. Right now I’m betting that the rich are getting richer and wealth is continuing to consolidate. For whatever reasons.

[split girder]

I'd rather have the silvers!

[queen pebble]

Right the point is loosening that so you don't end up getting nothing for half the month. I guess my suggestion on its own isn't good. I think they are going down the wrong path entirely with the hard cap.

[sleek meadow]

Too many changes all at once with no real control of all the variables makes a mess. Think we have established that. What’s the old saying? “No matter how far down the wrong road you’ve gone, turn back.”

Change yes, but Careful, strategic, measurable and controlled. One variable at a time and account for the confounds. And be sure that you can really define why you want and need that specific change.

Back to my sub optimal solo hunting now.

[rigid sparrow]

You search around in the treasure pile for a few moments, but find nothing of interest.
Guess it's that time of month again

[granite tartan]

Lowering the reroll cost would likely end up with more silver being spent on it. 562k with the Premium discount for the first attempt on a rare that doubles each time and probably not getting what you're after is insane even with a weekly reset

[granite tartan]

Adding a NPC to recharge merchant rechargeables wouldn't hurt either. Anytime I find a merchant rechargeable item it goes straight to the vendor. Or best case if it's Heroism or something, I'll dump it when it has 1 charge left if it's crumbly

[split girder]

Hi, asking again for gold ingots to be sellable from a container. Thx.

[rigid sparrow]

i don't think the silver cost is insane. the dust cost is out of control though

[civic niche]

Given that it has like, powerball odds of being terrible, all the costs are too high. Let me reroll one property at a time.

[granite tartan]

I'm curious how much is spent on rerolling each month. Maybe they can enlighten us

[remote egret]

I think Leafiara does it a bunch in TEST! Nordred I think did it quite a few times before the LC change...otherwise ya don't feel like you hear a lot of people talk about rerolling.

[civic niche]

I'd guess it approaches zero, especially since new loot cap. I had a double common I was re-rolling once or twice a month before, but now, no way.

[rough vault]

But if you ever had your perfect five gemstones maxed, would you ever care about grinding for them again?

[queen pebble]

Not grind maybe, but there will always be a market for them and dust

[cold zephyr]

Everyone should be a bard. Even a level 44 bard can really bump up the gem value.
140 gems valued at 450750
140 gems sung to (lost 7) so 133 gems valued at - 577980
Gain of 127230 silver for about 30 minutes of my time.

I never really tracked nor spent much time purifying gems before and I was curious what kind of return I'd see. This just from diamonds(40), rubies(20), emeralds(40) and blue sapphires(40) I've found out hunting so far this month.

My bard isn't skilled enough to take gems and sing to them until they can't be purified anymore, if I push my luck I tend to shatter more than I like. So, I generally do 5 purifies per gem before I pushed my luck too much. About 15% of the total gems were orbs before I started and maybe 5 were turned to orbs from singing. I'm guessing a capped bard could probably squeeze another 50-75k out of these gems.

The most annoying thing about singing to these gems was that out of the 7 that shattered, 5 shattered on the very first attempt to sing to them, 1 shattered after 2 attempts and the last one shattered when I tried to see how far I could push my luck (8th song and it shattered).

I can see how folks can easily pad their monthly loot amount by hoarding gems and spending a day or two at the end of the month to sing to everything. I find it rather tedious because you need a way to hoard them all (or sing to them prior to selling after each hunt) and you have to be willing to put in the time to it. Not really my cup of tea, but it certainly can be lucrative to those that like to do it.

[tender scarab]

Heh, so far I've rolled up premium alts named after trading, gems, purifying, cap, and silver to hoard 1856 gems and counting. It's horrifically annoying and time-consuming, but... I mean, I have to see if the end of month numbers bear out that it's worth doing.

[icy sentinel]

https://klipy.com/gifs/dog-cachorro-fsF

[safe epoch]

I'd like to see someone run the odds of this happening within the average mortality table of the players in GSIV. I think you'd find the odds somewhere around winning the lottery in 3 states on the same day... without buying a ticket... Also, with the way we all are the idea of the "perfect" Gemstone layout will likely change with our moods and needs to tinker.

I'm not suggesting that it is made easy.. just a bit more feasible as a reward, loot reduction, and silver drain in one.

[slate bluff]

Leafiara is extracting maximum shareholder value from these earth rocks. Literally squeezing out every ounce of silver.
I have my 1500 April gems spread across 5 different alt astral vaults

[tender scarab]

Mostly I want to convince myself there's cause to retrain Trading since untraining it left a bunch of ugly unspent training points lying around.

[slate bluff]

Having that all done on one premie alt does sound easier. Like a gemstone assembly line. Pop open 200 item premie locker, sing sing, stow, lockerswap to the next one, sing sing, stow...... all 2000 in one go. You could clear an extra 8mil easy. $20 is $20 or so i have been told.

[civic niche]

And this…..is why loot cap will never really work.

(Not throwing shade at anyone here. )

[cold zephyr]

The gem singing isn't as beneficial as one would hope for lower level areas that don't produce higher value gems. You won't see a level 30 bard pulling gems from a level 30 area and getting a great return on the work, but if you're hunting level 70+ where the creatures are dropping the emeralds/diamonds and so on, that's where the magic happens. You just want a halfway decent leveled bard with a quality amount of manipulation lore for singing to your gems.

The 140 gems I sung to, my bard was only level 44 with 200 mana. He could utilize COL for a fast mana refill, but I didn't bother with it. It takes a few extra minutes to keep track of data, swapping around unsung and sung gems and then finding the new value on them. I think I spent about 35 minutes with these 140 gems. I probably could have cut 5 minutes out by not tracking data and utilizing COL to help with mana.

Also, my character that checked the value on the gems pre and post singing, has no trading skill. I'm not sure how impactful having some would have been, but even without it an extra 125k for roughly 35 minutes of work is pretty nice. Depending on the character I hunt with and what I'm hunting, I usually see 250k an hour hunting so taking the 35 minutes for 125k return is about on par what I do for just hunting itself.

[queen pebble]

I can pretty easily average +50% on gems and I think do about 35-45 seconds per gem. That's like 2-5k per minute, assuming the wasted orbs I don't sell + rare failure. Probably that is an underestimation.

I always have enough gems to fill the time when I decide to because I find it tediouos.

[empty kernel]

I could be wrong but the current Silver Bloat and Treasure Famine seems to be caused not just by MultiAccount Botting, but also inflation of service costs, fear of a silver drought, no new viable silver sinks that players actually want, over valuation of pay event currency, and just lack of information all together.

[split girder]

It takes me 52 mana and 13 verses to max out a gem's value with a failure rate under 2%. There's no control against orbing before reaching max value. It's a roughly 42% increase in overall value including maxed trading bonus.

This research was done as a part of massive amounts of gem purification from group Reim hunts several years ago (I used to purify about ~8 hrs weekly).

During the bard review, we asked for 1004 to be less of a time sink, and staff declined the request.

My current approach to is to outright sell gems worth less than 3K, and hang on to more expensive gems for purification once I fill up a bag (200 gems).

[remote egret]

inflation of service cost? I mean I feel like you see prices coming way down in most cases or staying steady.

[civic niche]

I was thinking the same, but maybe meant, the amount of services you need to upkeep inflates the overall cost to a player. That's the only way that made sense to me.

[slate bluff]

It seems like any service that is item difficulty based is down but the most skilled people can command higher pay whereas the non difficutly services have cratered across the board

[empty kernel]

Inflation was more meant towards fluctuations I've seen for enchanting essence, grit, devotion, etc. Also the increase in locksmith pool fees. An example is that 25 - 30 was low to on par for essence, but now I'm seeing 40 - 50 be the standard request (keep in mind, I'm a night owl so pricing also fluctuates with who is available, their skill, etc). As a locksmith main, I've walked away from the pool due to scarcity and people leaving a 1 silver tip on a box that comes from 100+ lvl creature. And it's not that this happens once in a while, but that it's almost the norm now.

[queen pebble]

I do the same and sell orbs over and under a threshold (too cheap to chrism or worth too much to chrism).

I don't think they'll ever make purification less tedious, I think outright removal is more likely if it was to be changed at all (which I am for if its part of increasing/removing the hard loot cap)

[split girder]

Ya, possible. Retiring 1004 would leave a gap in the players' ability to create orb gems. Unsure how that would be rectified, and hopefully a solution would be implemented simultaneously.

[rough vault]

At one point they nerfed 420 because players were using it too often to gain experience. Same could be done here...you can only sing to 50 per day before becoming hoarse.

[queen pebble]

Easy to solve. Give bards a lore song option to convert gems of enough value directly to orbs. There are probably spells like Magic time creation (still a thing?) or 325 that could be utilized. Or just take out the need for gems to even be orbs to create chrisms and just base it on value

[fast cipher]

Make it an alchemy skill, bards really don't need to be the gate keepers of orbs just give them a better spell/ability in its place. Alternatively the could give the same treatment as trading with bard found gems being uncapped vs other peoples gems having a cap. I don't main a bard though so those are just outside thoughts

[split girder]

That makes sense, but coupled with the player push to make recall data automatic, bards will be stripped of their utility value pretty mightily. 🙁

[rough vault]

Give bard ability to sing an orb gem into a green orb once a day.

[primal creek]

TD spell in 1004 would be nice so we have it all the way up.

[queen pebble]

Smr/evoked bolt at 1008 and swap 1008 to 1004

[split hamlet]

You're all off topic

[south trail]

Very curious to see how that pans out. Im not sure I ever greased howloot cap is determined…. Potential loot dropped (not slimed) vs Looted vs sold and potential value vs actual sale proceeds.

[warm agate]

Yeah , I think if we are resorting to making further changes to the game and our game play to accommodate a loot change it needs to be reversed. As Fun of an experiment it may have been for someone.

[umbral lotus]

I wanna know who was having fun, so we could give them an attitude adjustment

[crimson pond]

✋

[remote egret]

👋

[sturdy ridge]

Hey GMs, since the loot change hasn't balanced everybody who has a spell or magic item that uses gem value to calculate benefit....

Someone suggested gem quality be tied instead. So an emerald that was once 8k and rare would provide the benefit it used to as a rare gem instead of only gaining the benefit of a 3-4k gem.

Does that make sense?

[civic niche]

Guess I'm close to hard cap again. Loot fix when?

+------------------+
| Eloot Breakdown  |
+---------+--------+
| Furrier |    235 |
+---------+--------+
| Total   |    235 |
+---------+--------+```

[remote egret]

Soooorrrry....but because of the upcoming festival all the GMs will be busy and so that means we'll have to wait for a fix!

[civic niche]

What's aggravating is, you're probably right.

[fresh turret]

I suggest that the only locksmith pool without fees be placed in Zul Logoth, we need more cart revenue to offset the raise the tunnel sweeper got for having to deal with the influx of bug poop being left around the tunnels by adventurers who harvest it looking for gems.

[fresh turret]

I have the best EVAR idea hard loot cap and once you reach it you find only collectibles at an increased rate then add to the menu of prizes in the collectables pool go wild with it! its like the gift of scavenger hunt. make one of the items you can collect for a collectors bag that works like a bag of holding for collectables only. anyhoot Eureka? add gems to the list since they are only worth 50 silver, add skins while you're at it. You could also add locks and keys into the prize pool and some gems too alternate methods of obtaining those things might be appreciated.

maybe also make people that hit loot cap really attractive to bandits and boss creatures. (::whispers::kill them more, for the 95% imagine the deed revenue alone...)

[rigid sparrow]

suggestion to help reduce silver generation- new verb for scrolls TEAR. tearing up a scroll will release some of the mana in the scroll (amount of mana dependant on some calculation TBD probably involving mana controls and spell level or silver value on the scroll) and add it to your mana pool. this reduces silver generation by allowing players to use scrolls that would otherwise be useless to them instead of generating silvers selling 95% of all scrolls to the pawn.

[chilly tulip]

Hi gang. Has there been an official explanation of how Cash'lo'nae works in terms of re-upping it at RW if you got it during DR? Want to make sure I don't blow any money or otherwise bamboozle myself. Hoping I just missed an official post somewhere that makes this clear.

[remote sun]

i dont think you can redeem it while the first one is active

[fast cipher]

Originally they expired so we'd have to buy 1 at each event but now it looks like they don't so can you buy 10 now and just use them as they expire?

[rough summit]

Has there ever been a thought to add a small but separate loot pool for group hunting. I realize it may seem advantageous for people who MA, but it would be a nice feature to encourage more interaction

[chilly tulip]

We really need a clear response from staff on the Cash’lo’nae thing.

[fast cipher]

The RW channel is probably the better place to ask though

[fresh turret]

I mean in theory Lumnus info tells you that you have xx days left on it so im guessing you just plan your re-up around the next event?

[remote sun]

you can buy as many as you want now, and reup when the first one runs out

[civic niche]

This "fix" at least for now is that they don't expire. So buy as many as you want, and when cash runs out redeem them. That was an official response.

Edit for below: Fair. However, the ones in the store do not have an expiration date.

[spring crow]

Pedantically, the official response only said that ones purchased in February wouldn't expire.

[remote egret]

I wonder what the business reason is for only making them available during events is.

[chilly tulip]

Juices sales figures for the event maybe

[civic niche]

Might not be entirely sold on keeping them around either. So if you only sell them at events and don’t let them stack easier to discontinue.

[snow oasis]

could be price/effect adjustment between events

[valid orbit]

#event-announcements message

[fervent hatch]

I have them on sale until the end of May right now.

[valid orbit]

Will they expire?

[fervent hatch]

Nothing has changed with them from last time being offered.

[valid orbit]

Not to be a pain, but that's a little vague because they expired, then they didn't. I assume that means they expire and the thing you did with the February disks was only for the February disks and these ones for Rumor Woods will expire so people shouldn't buy multiples expecting to use them later and they shouldn't buy one unless their existing Tutelage will expire before the new disk from Rumor Woods expires. Is this right?

OR

It means they don't expire, and they are exactly as they are described on the Simucoin store and I should stop overcomplicating this

[jolly palm]

Not sure if it helps, but analyze/read/look don't have any expiration callouts.

>analyze my disc
You analyze the bronze disc and sense that the creator has provided the following information:
The arcane symbols on the disc shift and dance before your eyes.

When claimed using REDEEM, this item grants Fash'lo'nae's Tutelage for 90 days.  When your Gift of Lumnis ends, Fash'lo'nae's Tutelage will activate, granting 5x experience absorption until you have gained 100,000 bonus experience in this fashion.

You get no sense of whether or not the disc may be further lightened.
>
A field of anti-magic energy becomes visible, surrounding you.
>look disc
The arcane symbols on the disc shift and dance before your eyes.

When claimed using REDEEM, this item grants Fash'lo'nae's Tutelage for 90 days.  When your Gift of Lumnis ends, Fash'lo'nae's Tutelage will activate, granting 5x experience absorption until you have gained 100,000 bonus experience in this fashion.
>read disc
The arcane symbols on the disc shift and dance before your eyes.

When claimed using REDEEM, this item grants Fash'lo'nae's Tutelage for 90 days.  When your Gift of Lumnis ends, Fash'lo'nae's Tutelage will activate, granting 5x experience absorption until you have gained 100,000 bonus experience in this fashion.
>```

[fervent hatch]

They are exactly as they are described in the SimuCoin store and nothing reverted or changed since the last time they were offered. They do not expire. If that changes, we'd announce it. I know I said that previously as well, but I don't remember where.

[royal epoch]

#general-announcements message

[hazy osprey]

What took longer: coding the change or coming up with the pun in the discord message title?

[royal epoch]

Definitely the change.

[split girder]

Thanks for that!!

[minor falcon]

yeah thank you for implementing that!

[rigid sparrow]

kinda hate that ingots are being worked on instead of removed, but it is what it is.
Also thanks auchand. any QoL is always appreciated!

[remote egret]

Really? You hate ingots? Why? They are awesome

[rigid sparrow]

https://tenor.com/view/deimos-r6-siege-gif-6204485797971098070

[remote egret]

Oh. I mean...keeps the big boxes lighter than they otherwise would be...It wasn't actually bait..

[civic niche]

Because they are a solution to a problem that shouldn't have existed. And solution is doing a lot of work there.

[umbral lotus]

The solution is vastly worse than the problem ever was

[remote egret]

How could the solution be worse than the problem? It made the boxes quite a bit lighter but also valuable?

[civic niche]

because it made boxes less convenient as a form of treasure, with no net gain ("interesting stuff".)

You were finding 3x the number of boxes with the same net value. (In fact, it could be argued, depending on how the loot is rolled for a box, it's a net decrease in per box value. Like if there's only one ehnachive roll per box, you're getting less of those now.)

The downside to larger boxes, is the obvious weight issue, and the less obvious but no less problematic fact that a box over 200 pounds doesn't fit in (most) containers. It's just annoying. Also, a 180 pound box ends a hunt. A 40 pound doesn't. Collect another 3 20 pounds, still good. Your encumbrance increases in steps instead of oh, box, guess I'm done.

And what's the benefit of larger boxes? Lets see.........

[remote egret]

Just imagine if they had kept many small boxes but also implemented the pool fee! You'd be paying a metric ton more in fees!

Larger boxes...benefits...umm..fun to find lots of 70 pound boxes? Hate 20-30 pound boxes...that is about all I got

[civic niche]

Fees are, to the best of my knowledge, based on net value of the box, so no.

[remote egret]

That is definitely not true! As I've still had 14lbs boxes still cost 2900 silvers to open. And they didn't have anything exotic to sell for much silvers.
Not even sure it has a level component as sub 20 boxes can still cost close to 3k to open

[civic niche]

I'll concede we don't actually know the formula for pool pricing. I actually speculate there's some sort of floor to the price, then a value added fee.

[rigid sparrow]

re:ingots- if only we had something that could be used to represent silver coins that had very little weight.
like a check.
or an I.O.U.

[civic niche]

Or a preloot cap diamond.

[rigid sparrow]

In the starsilk rucksack:
Special [28]: a Northwatch bond note (28)
Total items: 28

You carefully examine the starsilk rucksack and determine that the weight is about 15 pounds.
Roundtime: 5 sec.

[civic niche]

28 diamonds would weigh 2.8 lb.

I can totally understand creatures not having notes. That would imply that they are sneaking into the bank and getting them, or finding them on people they kill maybe. It wold also mean they ascribe some sort of value to a note aside from using it to wipe themselves.

But, no creature is running around fighting people with 200+ pound boxes of silver either.

[rigid sparrow]

right. creatures have lightning flaring vultite cestus, magic items, scrolls up to 1750, gems, coins, random magic items, armors, sometimes a legendary or rare treasure, but no notes. if you're gonna use logic, use elanthian logic where animals can talk, trolls exist, and when i jab something with a boxing move, plasma melts their face off. these aren't earth creatures

[civic niche]

Notes require a bank. I'm not generally one to "lean into" lore, but this is one instance where it makes sense entirely that mobs don't have something.

[crimson pond]

Yes, let’s continue to ignore the very intentional encumbrance function of these items and forget that one of the driving factors of any of these changes is to reduce the faucet output of silvers (either directly by removing value, or by introducing opportunities of choice - reward + risk)

[rigid sparrow]

I'm hitting 15m lootcap whether the boxes weigh 70 pounds or 25. i have to in order to get my 3 gemstones every month. why should i be inconvenienced by having to run to town every 3rd box i find and stuff it in the locker for my rogue to pick later, or throw it in the pool? Because i'm doing what i was told by a system designed by Gemstone staff? We never had these kinds of issues before. "Make it frustrating and annoying for them so it takes longer" isn't a good strategy. The product (Gemstone IV Subscription) is not the same as it was before loot cap changes, and now that i've found my 3rd gemstone and am approaching that 15m mark, I have to either A. Deal with the fact that i get no loot for the next 17 days, or B. Find a way to game the system and become part of the problem.

[civic niche]

I'm too lazy for B, but I agree with the rest of it. But you know, maybe the goal is actually just to get the people hitting lootcap to quit, I don't know.

[rigid sparrow]

let me rephrase... i'm not really inconvenienced by it. it doesn't do anything except speed up the rate at which i generate silvers from loot, because it literally takes 10 seconds or less for me to ;locker2, dropbox(alias to put all of my boxes in my locker), close locker, ;go2 bank, deposit all, ;go2 moonsedge and repeat.

i'd much rather see the boxes stay the same for items as they are now, and have silvers in them reduced by 50% or more, getting rid of ingots in all but the heaviest boxes with large amounts of silvers.

ingots should be a prize that says, "Hey this box was valuable!". not the norm

and before we get into the "Loot at cap vs loot pre 40" discussion, look at all of the changes to promote fast leveling, with what looks like more to come, based on my assumptions with wyrom making the exp orbs able to have different descriptions, like they'll drop from critters, prize pools in games, etc more often.

[jolly palm]

I dont understand why we dont have denominations of silvers.
Cannon in my head when someone hands me 10,000,000 silvers.... is that it's actually just TEN coins valued at 1,000,000 each, or something like that.

Silvers should just be weightless, and we assume denominations are used and that It's so common place that we dont even bother showing in the story window what # of each denomination are being passed.

[frozen tusk]

I agree that in a world with airships it's a little silly that we don't have denominations of currency

[bright pasture]

dragonrealms has denominations of currency. it really made pickpocketing valuable

[slate bluff]

Can you imagine if someone pickpocketed someone else's 10mil silver platinum coin in GS? Discord would burn down over night.

[frozen tusk]

I don't think we need to get that crazy, but having denominations of

1, 10, 100, 1000

would go a long way

[bright pasture]

we had moneybelts to protect our coins! they were very expensive and rare, of course

[umbral lotus]

CLearly we need to find where the critters are minting all these gold ingots, that's where the loot is

[remote egret]

Could you imagine how mad everyone with those weightless coinhands or any number of items they paid way way way too much money for to keep coins in weightless if they just...POOF'd silver encumbrance? And how would they make up the encumbrance taken away from silvers? Remember - they want you to be penalized the more loot you pick up. A lot of that encumbrance comes from the silvers in the boxes thatyou can't just poof into your coin hand.

[jolly palm]

Details schmeetails. 😉

[civic niche]

Past purchase should never stifle future innovation. It's honestly one of the underlying issues with the GS economy in my mind.

[remote egret]

Hey man - I just operate in the game environment we're in! Not what I think the utopia game environment should be!

[frozen tusk]

It depends on how much you change the weight. Coins worth 1000 silver help everyone while still keeping coin hands valuable

[rigid sparrow]

about as mad as volners were when symbol of recall got given to everyone. or any one of a dozen other examples of exclusive things that got given as QoL updates

[crimson pond]

I don't recall any volners being mad about that. It was a great change

[sleek meadow]

Getting mad because after years someone else gets something is pretty lame. And would apply to basically all gear almost anyone got 10-20-30 years ago. It’s far past time to free up travel and encumbrance. They both probably alienate more players than is justified by the money they may bring in. It’s 2026z

[tawny sierra]

I should be able to wrastle a polar bear in Pinefar and mount it

[gloomy lark]

my 25k weightless gambling kit is still my favorite thing, really helpful even after the changes

[rigid sparrow]

that was my point. weightless silvers would be such a wonderful change, anyone mad cause they don't have it exclusively can get bent.

[valid orbit]

Banks exist, so that solves that. Mobs don't need to hold an account to hold notes. They can just kill and steal to get the notes.

[civic niche]

I did say somewhere in this thread, maybe they killed people. But, I also said, most of the mobs who picked up a note would use it as TP

[crimson pond]

The comparison doesn't really make sense to me. The change to spell recovery was a QoL improvement to make resurrection more appealing because salve had become the status quo. On the other hand, changing ingots to notes would be a direct contradiction to the stated dev goals (arguably they themselves are also a contradiction by mitigating a big chunk of the encumbrance risk). It has nothing to do with weightless coin P2W items.

[shell phoenix]

I play a few of the smaller races, I don't mind the ingots, I just wish I could do other things with them like melt them and craft things. I wholeheartedly dislike the idea of notes in place of them

[civic niche]

Except the "dev goal" just serves to waste 15 seconds of my time, not meaningfully slow me down. It's just an annoyance at this point, not a control.

[remote egret]

Often times I get distracted by people's arguments against a "solution" rather than the original problem that required the "solution" in the first place.

Hi, my name is Oamir. I have a problem.

And now that I've admitted it I can continue on embracing my problem.

So while you might be only disrupted for 15 seconds of time - I feel that we often hear grandiose statements about how these HUUUUUGE boxes are hunt enders. I believe two things can be true (a small annoyance for you but taking folks out of a hunting grounds to deal with the HUUUUUUGE box and their disgusting ingots). I would say...in both cases - the Dev goal was somewhat achieved. That is 15 seconds you weren't continuously blasting bones apart (granted that box probably had more loot than what you would have earned in the 15 seconds of bone melting) but maybe is 10 minutes for another person who is trying to deal with that box. Less loot or more loot at the end of their "completed" hunt? Well...

I suppose the data supports that most players ended up making more money since the loot changes. Wait...i don't think this argument has led to the point I was trying to make originally...which was...well. Ok. So perhaps it hasn't helped achieve the dev goals if more players are generating more loot while a few accounts are generating slightly less. I think that is why Wyrom said they were going back over the data and trying to come up with solutions!

Perhaps a solution that will be even MORE impactful and really slow you down...like they SWAT people approaching the LC in less than 2 weeks. I guarantee you'll be slowed down having to deal with the legal ramifications of a SWAT team showing up at your house. Not to mention all the time you'll be spending trying to seek recourse from the government for the emotional trauma.

[civic niche]

I hate on the boxes because they are annoying.

They don't change behavior any in my mind. So if the argument for large heavy boxes is that that encumbrance is a dev goal, well, failed as far as I'm concerned. Because, it just takes an extra 15 seconds to clear them.

If the goal was to make boxes "better" also failed, because 3 boxes with the same loot as one box is "better"

So really, just an annoyance, for no real reason.

Also, swatting is never funny. That's some serious and deadly stuff.

[remote egret]

My apologies on the SWAT joke.

[remote egret]

Oh no...does this mean Im getting close to LC?

Roundtime: 3 sec.
R>stow l
You put a strong wooden wedge in your leather jacket.
>l in my tru
In the mithril trunk:
Special [2]: some silver coins, a bright gold ingot
Total items: 2
>weigh my tru
You carefully examine the mithril trunk and determine that the weight is about 55 pounds.
Roundtime: 5 sec.```

edit for below: I never skin so I wouldn't even know where to begin with that.

[granite tartan]

Skinning is the easiest way to tell how far in you are

[bright pasture]

i just keep one bank account that i deposit new silver in, with a transfer every month

anything i buy comes out of another bank account - super easy

[civic niche]

I did that this month because I didn’t trust ledger but it’s surprisingly far more accurate than I thought it was honestly.

[bright pasture]

i also keep track of bounties. so i know i'm well into loot cap if my silver/bounty rate flattens out - to the 9k/bouty or so + the 1% whatever it is

[fresh turret]

maybe we could tie it to the BANK ACCOUNT verb so we have an easy way to track it

[granite tartan]

^ This. All this not planned ahead for stuff happening with loot caps, just give us a verb to track it. Nobody wants to do math/spreadsheet experiments with this.

[remote egret]

IDK...some of the nerds seem obsessed with spreadsheets and figuring it out. I think that is their fun!

[rigid sparrow]

I understand the logic behind not wanting a loot cap verb from staff, and that is perfectly reasonable in other games. but we're gonna figure it out and make a 100% accurate way to track it anyway. we're already 90% of the way there. a loot cap verb for the masses, even if it only shows basic info like something telling if we are below 10m, above 10m but below 15m, or above 15m would be fair to all users, including those that don't have scripts to track it. (or wherever new numbers may land, if it changes)
The capability is there. It was done for DR.

[remote egret]

I bet they have a d1000 to determine if you’re actually loot capped. Anything over a 10 means you are! I’m flying goooood as my dice always turn up snake eyes.

[rigid sparrow]

kind of curious... hypothetically, if i have 15 accounts grouped and killing, 1 good skinner, have him skin everything, and search with one of my other accounts, who does the loot cap count against? does it all go to the one who searched? does the skin go towards the one who skinned and the rest go towards the one who searched? is it affected by ranger spells increasing the value/quality of skins for whoever gets it towards their lootcap? Has this sort of min/maxing even been looked at? i'm sure someone is doing it.

[gloomy lark]

I think it’s probably as simple as, loot cap for all treasure found from looting corpse goes to whoever searched, and loot cap for skins goes to whoever skinned it. curious what others think

[shell phoenix]

That's my understanding of it

[civic niche]

That’s how I understand it as well.

[rigid sparrow]

gonna have to have A.I. look through discord for that one. any idea where a GM covered this that you both understand it that way?

[shell phoenix]

They didn't. Not directly anyway. It's years of little bits of data pieced together, some individual and community experimentation, and some inference\guessing at how it could be coded

[golden thicket]

seems pretty easy to test with two accounts, i'm sure someone knows the actual answer from experience

[civic niche]

I'm pretty sure the looter getting cap hit is confirmed blue or Green. The skinning is inferred. I'm going to also infer from that, and the way trading and loresong hit cap, that a ranger skill that increases value counts towards lootcap and likely hits the skinner, but may hit the seller. Because it might be a "selling adjustment" as opposed to "looted value."

[fierce lynx]

Regardless of if this is 100% accurate or not. It's close enough. :p

[granite tartan]

Whoever loots kills and skins stuff gets their loot cap hit regardless of who sells. I would assume that the value increase from 1004 goes toward whoever looted the gem, but the looting/skinning is about as confirmed as confirmed can be without a GM confirming it.

[civic niche]

Pretty sure the value increase from trading/1104 goes to the sellers cap, not the looters. But, I'm not sure how something that impacts the value when looted/skinned, like a ranger spell or something, that probably goes to the looter/skinner. But that's just conjecture. It feels like there's 1 loot cap hit when the item is generated, then a true up to loot cap when it's sold.

[slate bluff]

This is so confusing, why can't they just lay out the rules for us to digest. It would be bonkers if main giving gems to my bard alt to sing and sell somehow affects said alt's or even main's lootcap past the initial find value.

[granite tartan]

Making players jump through a bunch of unnecessary hoops just to get basic info from the game has always been Simu's fetish.

[civic niche]

I understand why, because....people. It took 30 days for people to "game" the system without knowing anything. (I'm not suggesting anyone did anything against policy, or nefarious.)

But I 100% wish they would at least put something in wealth that was like. "You have hit soft cap" or "You have hit hard cap"

[fierce lynx]

They don't want to share the details for the very reason people seem to be chasing the details... they don't want for people to figure out how to min/max lootcap. "Basic Info" is that there is a soft lootcap at 10m silver worth of loot(ish) and a hard cap at 15m worth of loot(ish). I'm guessing it is pretty obvious when you hit hard loot cap so not sure why you need a text line to confirm that you aren't getting any loot from the things you are searching.

[slate bluff]

I get that but at the same time I do not want to WASTE my own time doing something that is meaningless for hours. If I need to untrain all Trading or never skin again so be it but don't hide the facts when they are changing a system that has been in place for DECADES.

[chilly tulip]

I get that but at the same time I do not want to WASTE my own time doing something that is meaningless for hoursYet, we all play GemStone IV. Curious!

[fierce lynx]

I get your point relating to trading and skinning. If you are going to hit loot cap anyway and these skills don't add any value then it would be good to know that.

[stark cargo]

I just want to point out that this "loot cap" is affecting every single player since the new release in January. Disks and Phase stopped working as expected and had to be repaired. Gems are still possibly an issue, with many bugs being found, at least some of them being fixed since January.

Now we see these changes barely had any effect on their stated purpose.

I propose we scrap what was implemented in January and go back to square one. The first goal is not affecting 95% of players who don't reach the lootcap.

[civic niche]

I approve of this message.

[pastel lark]

I am not normally one to complain, but I agree. I've never been anywhere close to the loot cap, but my non-RP enjoyment of the game is now totally cratered. Hunting is a bigger bore than ever, and even the steady gain I was getting for resource farming to work on my gear and my friends' gear is now impossible with the small amount of time to play that I have. If it's not working to curb the behavior of the people it was implemented for, then I can't see why we're continuing to derail the experience for everyone else over it.

[fresh turret]

The reason I suggested the collectibles idea was loot capped players could work toward some reward by turning in items devalued by the loot cap while non-loot capped players turning in normal value items would lower the silver generated by selling said item effectively rewarding both players for turning down the silver faucets (i guess that's what they are being called now.) maybe just give double reward credit to the latter of the two groups. Throwing things that players farm for such as gem dust/gems/keys/locks into the collection rewards along other desired consumables might provide enough of a silver sink to maybe work toward some sort of balance.

You could also maybe have a monthly regional specific gems and skins that are specific to over hunted locations forcing collectors into hunting areas that have lower silver rewards. The only issue is coming up with rewards that are valued enough to get players to want to participate.

Another idea .. maybe when you turn in collectables you have a tiny chance at being rewarded with a special treasure like the legendary boxes that rolled out.

[granite tartan]

I've been min/maxing loot cap since 2021. It's not about not knowing how it works. Figuring out how 95% of it works is mostly just common sense. Either way, making such a sweeping change like this 2nd loot cap that's so far been a net negative and broke other systems in the process, and then telling everyone to figure it out is just dumb imo. EDIT: I'm going to loot cap most months regardless, so this really doesn't affect me but that's beside the point. EDIT 2: These days I hit loot cap most months just trying to farm my 2nd or 3rd gemstone. That grind only made the silver problem worse.

[chilly tulip]

Need a 3rd, secret loot cap, only for Methais accounts imo

[granite tartan]

Make it 1337 so I can hit the leet cap

[fierce lynx]

I will say that it does feel like they made a number of impactful changes and then, after the fact were like... maybe we should understand how loot is being generated in the lands so we can figure out what would result in the changes we want. Possibly they should have spent a month or two capturing additional data points and analyzing the data before making these changes. If the argument is that they did this up front... then why such a big miss on the results?

I don't really care about loot cap; I don't like that the changes result in 0 loot for people that are impacted (that is no fun zone for sure for the 94? impacted characters.) I like larger, less common boxes. I do think they made changes that had a lot of unintended consequences while not even remotely hitting the stated target; I really dislike their "ingot" solution - just make silver weigh less! Seriously!

[flint flame]

To quote Coleman Francis: Touch a button, things happen. Flag on the moon...how'd it get there?

[fierce lynx]

That's kind of deep. 🙂
Edit: So I did some research on who Coleman Francis was. Made me laugh!

[rigid sparrow]

Agreed. be transparent about trading and skinning. these are skills that were meant to be trained to help you generate more silvers. if it doesn't do that anymore because there's a loot cap, that's fine but allow me the info so i can put the TP's elsewhere. As it is now, i see no reason to skin anything until i hit loot cap, then i can hoard 11 silver value skins in order to have them for quests next month.

[hoary prawn]

And when information is available, it's normally on third-party websites and not in-game where it belongs.

Yes, but - these are the same people who borked the entire locksmith pool, which was useful to everyone, because they didn't like it being used as storage.

I can't help thinking that setting a time-limit by which opened and uncollected boxes would be donated to the Home for Retired Locksmiths would have been a better solution to that problem, as well as a silver drain.

[granite tartan]

They said the locksmith pool fee was always supposed to be there

[hoary prawn]

That really doesn't inspire confidence. And people are still voting with their feet.

[crimson pond]

Trying to argue that the pool is broken doesn't make a lot of sense. It's still the best convenience-to-cost ratio of all the options to get your boxes open - cheaper than the NPC but less hassle than sourcing a live smith. It just isn't the only sensible answer now, which it was for years and caused major economic problems. It being used as storage was not the issue at all.

[granite tartan]

I don’t disagree. My point is that it wasn’t a reaction to anyone using it for storage like you implied.

[cold zephyr]

Someone left boxes and some random loot on the ground while I was out hunting. One box was 320 pounds; 32k in silver and a 32k ingot plus a few low-mid ranged gems. All in all, made about 150k from someone's loot they just left on the ground, on top of the 100k I pulled in myself. Not bad for about 15 minutes of hunting.

[granite tartan]

The best part being that should count against their cap instead of yours 😂

[cold zephyr]

i just figured they left the first box I found because it was 320 pounds and maybe didn't want to lug it around for whatever reason, but then i came across two more boxes around 80 pounds each, some wands, a couple of gemshop items to sell, heavy orbs.

my reduxmage has a big disk and can lug lots of junk around before getting encumbered.

[granite tartan]

Just imagine all the fun they missed out on when they could have called for a field picker. I heard that's where the real fun is

[crimson pond]

I mean, it seems like it's working as intended. The person who was willing to put in the work got the reward.

[warm agate]

Or bigshot broke and they aren’t there to notice

[cold zephyr]

Makes me wonder if the silver generated that Wyrom talks about takes into consideration loot that's left behind and gets lost to the janitor. Just think if I wasn't there to pickup and keep the stuff on the ground - it would be flagged as loot towards someone's account, but if it went back to the janitor then is it still counted as silver generated?

Also, it's not like folks didn't do this before the changes. Place I hunt with my reduxmage I had a couple of character's I noticed hunting there that always left coins, boxes and the heavy orbs/cubes on the ground. I haven't seen those people hunting there in a while, they may have out leveled the area since I don't hunt my reduxmage that often, plus I run 50/50 asc/exp split so it takes a while to gain levels for him. I used to pickup all their left behind loot, too.

[crimson pond]

Also working as intended! 😛

[remote egret]

I wonder if I'm somehow...negatively impacting my own loot generation. I'm probably not...but when I hunt my two accounts together...if my empath searches and finds a box and then when my rogue (on a different account) picks it and sells all the stuff inside...am I getting hit double (the empath's LC for looting it and the rogue's for selling)?

[granite tartan]

Only the character looting is getting hit. It doesn't matter who sells.

[remote egret]

Even if the character selling has tons of trading/racial/citizenship benefits? All of that extra silver just counts directly back to the looter?

[civic niche]

If the seller is getting excess loot because of skills, that extra loot counts towards cap. No one has definitively come out and said who's cap, but my assumption is the delta applies to the seller. It would be the height of absurd if you sold a jar of diamonds to someone, and they sold them to a pawnshop and you lost 1M lootcap for their skills. I'm not saying it's not possible mind you.

[granite tartan]

Background stuff like that I have no idea. I would guess that the extra silver generated by trading would hit the seller regardless of who generated the items, which I assume is how 1004 works too, but there's no real way to test for that sort of thing so 🤷

[remote egret]

Hmm...my capped character just killed an arch wight and pulled a 50lbs box from it. Was I incredibly "lucky"? I thought they tuned WAY down the loot based on the level disparity.

[civic niche]

Depends on loot pressure in the area. So you could get a huge spike from pressure and a reduction from over hunting.

[remote egret]

Also - I wonder if there is a CAP on the locksmith pool fee. 204 pound box - 3k to open. Roughly the same to open some of my 15 pound boxes!

[cold zephyr]

Best I can find is you're looking somewhere between 990 (990 silver was the lowest price for a box I had been quoted from the NPC locksmith) to maybe 7k (highest I've seen is 6500 or so) for the NPC locksmith opening a box. It seems to be heavily dependent on value of the content of the box and if the value is low then it will fall back to lock and/or trap difficulty (maybe). I know the NPC doesn't give a rip what creature the box is from.

I've had boxes from pre-level 20 creatures cost 6k for the locksmith to open and level 90+ creature boxes cost 6K or so to open, value in these boxes are usually in the 50K+ range (total value of content; coins, ingont, gems and other stuff).

I should have checked what the NPC wanted for the 320 pound box I had, but total value in that box was 70k and I'm guessing the NPC locksmith would have asked for around 6500 silver.

As for boxes from creatures you're way out leveled for, yep, they still drop. I've come across a couple and they can be pretty heavy still, but they usually only carry silver and ingot and maybe a gem or two.

[civic niche]

Yeah, like I said I think it's a floor, with a VAT on top.

[cold zephyr]

It's hard to figure out how the NPC charges because here are two boxes I got from the same hunt, NPC said both would cost 6,202 silver to open.
First box had a total of 21,782 silver, it had -66 vial trap and a -300 lock:

Second box had a total of 52,241 silver, it had a -76 boomer trap and -5 lock:

And these two boxes were from the same creature type.
I find it hard to figure out how exactly the NPC prices things, but it seems to be heavily tied to the value of the contents over everything else. There is a floor and a ceiling on the charges because I haven't been charged more than 6300 silver for a box to get opened and it was had 70k+ in it. 992 was the lowest I was charged and it had about 3.3k in it.

[remote egret]

I've had boxes cost about 500-600 for the fee. Just yesterday as a matter of fact. Was from a sub 20 critter. And I've never seen more than a 3200 fee for a box. And that had some real nice enhancives.

[cold zephyr]

Lower level creature boxes can be really nice at times. I don't think the enhancives I find in them are anything special (+2 to FA or swimming or hiding....big whoop), but they can sell for a good bit at the gemshop at times or at least 25k at the pawnshop.

Here are two examples of a good low creature level box and one closer to bottom of the barrel for me.

I average around 15-16k a box across all level ranges. Even after collecting 50 trash gems from low level hunting grounds and make about 1400 silver off those 50 trash gems, if I get a couple boxes on that hunt I can still end up with 30-50k in silver. But when you don't find boxes in low level hunting areas, the loot you get is pretty much worthless.

[fierce lynx]

@royal epoch since you asked for ideas in your question above.
Goal: Reduce Silver EARNED by 33%.

I took a stab at analyzing loot based on what has been shared on these forums to see where I might come close to the goal of reducing silver EARNED by roughly 33%. I think I was able to achieve something around 25%-30% with the recommendations (this will be posted in 6 PARTS due to character limitations - please be patient due to SLOWMODE)

ASSUMPTIONS:
For the sake of this conversation, I am making the assumption that loot GENERATED across the lands aligns roughly with the following proportions*:

Silver: 30% (this includes silver found on critters and in boxes, as well as ingots, and bounty rewards or similar.)
Gems: 50%
Other (Jewelry, Armor, Weapons, Wands, Skins, etc.): 20%

*Some hunting areas will not fall anywhere near these assumptions (e.g. a hunting area that only produces gems) and these assumptions don't need to be spot on accurate for the general points of this conversation following and in fact can be off by 10-15% or even more. Feel free to adjust to your liking if that helps.

For the sake of having some numbers to work with for illustrative purposes, let's assume that the loot GENERATED each month is 100 million silver (doesn't matter what the real number is, we're looking at the resulting percent of impact in the following topics).

Specific TOPICS to follow:

1. LOOT CAP
2. GEM PURIFICATION
3. TRADING
4. SKINNING
5. SUMMARY & RECOMMENDATIONS

.

1. LOOT CAP
   LOOT CAP should only be a restriction on loot GENERATED. I think presently there has been an attempt to include additional skills and spells such as TRADING and GEM PURIFICATION (and potentially skinning improvements) and this is a mistake as it leads to disproportionate impact or applicability on players. In order to illustrate, let's look at two example players that both hit loot cap in the month:

Player A:
This player hunts routinely and at the end of each hunt they open boxes, sing to gems, sell their loot and repeat. With all these activities being taken into account as they go along (including applying GEM PURIFICATION AND TRADING SKILL), Player A stops finding loot when they have EARNED roughly 15 million silver (LOOT CAP) in the month.

Player B:
This player hunts routinely but instead of purifying their gems and selling everything as they go, they collect everything until the end of the month (boxes into lockers or the locksmith pool, gems into jars, valuable items into lockers and similar) and generally continue hunting through the month until they hit loot cap. This player GENERATED roughly 15 million silver in loot but then they go on to purify their gems, sell their items with a trading bonus and similar (none of which are restricted by LOOT CAP) so their resulting silver EARNED at the end of the month is closer to 21 million silver (assumes 35% return on gem purification and 25% additional return on GEMS and OTHER items due to trading bonus).

When activities such as gem purification, Trading skill bonus, and Skinning bonus are applied against the LOOT CAP, then Player A is putting themselves at a significant disadvantage in monthly loot as compared to Player B.

.
2) GEM PURIFICATION
Gem Purification is probably the most egregious contributor to loot growth and loot disparity in the lands. I don't know what the best case scenarios is for gem purification improvement but my level 40 bard can generally improve gem value by a good 25% on average. Let's conservatively assume a capped bard with appropriate enhancives (if that is a thing) or special tools like gem picks can increase gem value by at least 35%.
This means that purified GEM LOOT can potentially generate up to an additional 17.5 million silvers. Not everyone purifies all of their gems but there are players that do this and other players that purify all of their 'valuable' gems.
.
3) TRADING
TRADING is a passive skill and grants a 1% percent improvement in loot sales (GEMS and OTHER, including SKINS) for every 12 Influence bonus or 12 Ranks in TRADING. As a result, most reasonably post-cap players are likely receiving an 18%-19% bonus to all of their loot sales. Add in an enhancive set or Ascension training in TRADING and a player can see as much as 25% TRADING benefit (I believe TRADING benefit is hard capped somewhere around 25% regardless of skill).

Also worth noting that gems benefit from both GEM PURIFICATION as well as TRADING skill on top of the improved gem value.

Using our initial assumptions this means that OTHER loot (from assumptions) can generate an additional 5 million silver (using our made up 100m in loot in the lands for one month) and GEM loot can generate up to an additional 12.5 million silver against BASE VALUE gems and an ADDITIONAL 4.375 million against gems that were first PURIFIED.

.
4) SKINNING

Base skinning should be included in loot cap but should factor in the worst case value that the skin can be sold for under whatever skinning "loot pressure" is in place (there are some factors on skins that adjust what they sell for based on how many have been sold; the player should not be penalized on LOOT CAP for this variable. To clarify, if a skin can sell for anywhere between 200 silver and 2,000 silver then 200 silver should be factored into cap when the skin is collected in the field. What that said, the range is skin values is too large and needs to be scaled back on the potential worst case and best case range for a specific skin.

.
5) SUMMARY & RECOMMENDATIONS

LOOT GENERATED: 100m
Silver: 30m
Gems: 50m + 17.5m (purification) + 12.5m (TRADING against loot base value) + 4.375m (TRADING against additional PURIFIED gem value) = 84.375m
Other: 20m + 5m (TRADING) = 25m

POTENTIAL LOOT EARNED: 139.75m
LOOT GENERATED: 100m
GEM PURIFICATION:17.5m
TRADING SKILL: 5m (Other) + 12.5m (Gems) + 4.375 (Purfied Gems additional value) = 21.875m

Recommendations:

1. In an effort to be more fair and to retain value for skills such as TRADING and SKINNING I would seek to restrict LOOT CAP to loot GENERATED and not try to shoe-horn these other systems into the LOOT CAP equation.

2. GEM PURIFICATION should be significantly restricted to a reasonable limit (15 gems per week or 60 gems per calendar month). While not everyone purifies their gems, enough players do that this change alone would drive a significant reduction in monthly loot EARNED and level the playing field a bit across players. This has the potential to reduce LOOT EARNED by up to 15%.

3. TRADING should be scaled back to have a lower max possible impact. Players should still benefit from training in this skill over and above any LOOT CAP on loot GENERATED, but I would suggest halving or even quartering the current benefit; e.g. every 12 points (Influence BONUS or Trading RANKS) increasing sale value by 0.5% which would result in LOOT EARNED by potentially 10% or more if GEM PURIFICATION changes were implemented as well.

4. SKINNING range in value should be brought in line with level of the area and a much tighter range in value between worst case and best case. Skinning skills should still increase value (not tied to LOOT CAP) but the benefit should be halved or quartered (similar to suggestion on TRADING skill). Rough assumption that reigning in the potential skinning value increased would net at least 5% reduction in loot generated (but this is definitely a guess here as I don't have any data on skinning as a percent of overall loot).

[civic niche]

Wall of text crits you for 30000

[chilly tulip]

I’m gonna be honest I’m not going to read that

[fierce lynx]

That's a shame. At least read the recommendations.

[remote egret]

Just get ChatGPT to give you a white paper or something.

[crimson pond]

Imagine writing words for players of a text based game to read

[civic niche]

There were no flares.

[split hamlet]

The recommendations are as terrible as the wall of 30000 text

[fast cipher]

I don't mind the skinning suggestions of skills bonuses it not hitting the loot cap but it seems to run contrary to your other goals of kneecapping trading and gem purification. I also think your proposed system will be a nasty headache since anyone who loot caps in 3 days is still going to loot cap with the reductions but anyone who isn't is going to fall behind. I don't necessarily disagree because you can only whack the loot capper pinata so many times but I wouldn't want to be a GM presenting that.

[fierce lynx]

I think for those that are hitting loot cap, it will take them longer to hit loot cap if we remove things like trading bonus and purification from the equation.

When you look at things like gem purification and trading, it will definitely impact higher level players more than lower level players and similarly will hit players that play more harder so not sure I agree it will cause people that play less to fall behind more; maybe I am missing something in your point.

That said - if I read Wyrom correctly, they didn't put but a dent in the 33% reduction target. I thnk a lot of the reason for the miss is that they assumed everyone sells as they go, hence they have a lot of people hitting cap and still making 20m+ (despite having a 15m loot cap on the month). So if 33% reduction is still the target that isn't changing... what would be the alternative? Note: I am definitely not a fan of having a diamond be worth variable amounts based on who looted it; that is just pure insanity on many levels in my book.

I don't think there will be a popular solution that is rolled out (and hits the 33% target) no matter what is implemented. I would still like to see TRADING and skinning and similar skills be a viable skill even for loot capped characters though.

[split hamlet]

Is this where I try to nerf all the other player abilities that might lead to silver gains.

[unique oyster]

Is gem purification enough of a problem to warrant a redesign of the spell? You could keep the orb creation part but give the spell something else rather than increasing loot value.
You could even rope in 604 for skinning since it increases sell prices too.

[split hamlet]

Let me figure out what profession you are so I can try to nerf your class too

[unique oyster]

I'm a rogue, but the locksmith pool already got hit.

[split hamlet]

Oh, that's easy then, you can only self-pick 1 box per week. You need to pay someone else to open all of your other boxes. You know, so you don't get too many silvers from your profession abilities/training.

If you don't have locksmith training, you can only hide one time per hour.

If you can't hide, then you're only allowed to aim attacks one time per hour.

This should reduce your silver generation by at least 33%.

[unique oyster]

Might be A BIT more than 33%

If they want to go crazy, they could remove the Trading skill and raplce it with something else. But that sounds like an insane amount of effort with little pay off.

[icy sentinel]

you must have good damage reduction against text to only take 30k

[civic niche]

40%

[valid orbit]

Make the trading skill increase the lootcap by the same percentage it increases the trade value.

[bright pasture]

trading seems broken right now anyways

[gloomy lark]

this idea should get more attention, the percentage prolly needs to be adjusted, but Trading Skill should increase lootcap is great idea

[minor falcon]

why is gem purification being targeted now? I am actually enjoying that part on my bard. If anything I feel like the sing roundtime should be reduced or work with rapid fire. It's definitely a lot of effort along with chance of blowing up gems.

If someone wants to go through all that effort / risk why wouldn't it be rewarded? I also don't think that process should even touch the loot cap. Just like picking the locksmith pool or picking your own boxes doesn't touch your loot cap.. well you save money not having to pay the pool or townsmith atleast.

[still sigil]

Because the nail that sticks up gets hammered down, and I have a feeling that people have been pulling that nail up hard

[hazy osprey]

In my absolutely biased take, I also don't like the way gem purification is being handled, but comparing it to the locksmith pool isn't fair: the pool doesn't create new silvers, but purification does.

[minor falcon]

well it sort of does create new silvers if the person is hard capped. They are getting additional silvers outside of the cap.

Ultimately at the end of the day I don't understand why you guys are nerf happy over things that people have to invest in. Trading is an expensive skill. Gem Purification has it's risk as well with the ability to lower that risk but it's not completely 0. Just like picking boxes also has the risk of breaking a pick and needing to spend money on repairs.

I think we are moving in the direction of how can we make this game not fun.

[hazy osprey]

The locksmith pool doesn't introduce new silvers into the economy - those silvers already existed; they came from another player. It just transfers silvers, the same way hiring a private locksmith (probably) would.

Which may be good or bad, I don't know. But gem purification creates new silvers into the world, which is why I said it's an unfair comparison.

[crimson pond]

Every time a bard sings to a gem, that same value is subtracted from a random gem in a random other character's inventory 😇

[minor falcon]

so the question is if I generate a box with a scarab and let's say I'm hard capped (I don't hit it still) and I pick the box and sell the scarab. Does that value go off mine? So if I pick someone elses box now I can get scarabs at someone elses loot cap that generated it?

If no one picked though then everyone would have to go to the townsmith and the cost and scarab would get deleted. So why couldn't the same apply to gem purification in the same sort of way? It's a skill that was trained up via a profession that has that ability. If rogues didn't 3x picking and get ascension training and enhancives those boxes would go to the townsmith. So I guess you can say the silvers were already generated but the picking allows it to stay in the game.

[chilly tulip]

https://tenor.com/view/thanos-balanced-gif-3226445978144001245

[granite tartan]

I've been curious about scarabs too. My guess is that the scarab is counted as generated loot by whoever disarms it, either from the box or on the ground. Things like this are impossible to test.

[minor falcon]

I would think all content of the box including scarabs would be the person looting. Unless scarabs completely bypass the system.

[granite tartan]

Maybe, but scarabs might not be counted as a gem until it's disarmed/dead since it's technically a trap up until that point. Plus the value of the scarab depends on how it's disarmed i.e. 408 = lower value. The whole "The scarab is for the picker" thing reinforces that, imo. But there's literally no way for us to tell and I doubt Simu will give up such basic info.

Can we adjust this slow mode already? This 5m timer is ridiculous when this thread isn't even super active anymore.

[minor falcon]

yeah... just like most systems.

so are clerics turning boxes with silvers to gold slabs a problem too? I feel like we can point out a bunch of other things now too. 🤣
Skills generate silvers or help keep silvers in the game. I don't think you can say they are different. They are different but ultimate goal is they result in silvers staying in the game.

[granite tartan]

Now I'm wondering how slabs add up if it's the slab value or the original silver value before blowing up the box

I like how these systems just work against the player now 😂

[sleek meadow]

Well it also drains and in the end we can keep with an endless boondoggle that doesn’t seem to have a meaningful impact…or which seems to harm the bulk of players while having no meaningful impact on the top…or we can re-evaluate if silver was really some culprit here.

Or we could simply reduce drop rates by x amounts in places suffering the highest “abuse”. But instead we have this.

And I still can’t see how the game was failing due to the way things were 3 months ago or how the game (players) are better balanced and incentivized to stay and play today. This has become a giant Silver redesign mosh pit and I still think the key question is “why?”

[granite tartan]

There's no "real" fix to the silver issue imo. The original silver drain that existed for decades became a cash drain, and there's been nothing meaningful to replace it with that players would want in high demand that wouldn't end up also getting monetized due to said demand, and after all these years, no one on the player or Simu side has a real solution. Probably because there isn't one. Because that's what happens when monetization takes priority whether people like it or not. I just know that making the game noticeably less fun for a huge portion of the playerbase isn't it.

[hazy osprey]

Nail on the head, imo. If GMs really want to drain silvers, and I believe they do, they need one heck of a good sink that won't be replaced by a cash sink, and that requires a tremendous commitment.

[warped escarp]

i do think players are beginning to get frustrated with the fact that dozens of good ideas have been suggested to fix this, that it ultimately comes down to the idea that silver drains have basically all been monetized, and that the only solution is to shift some of the cash sink back towards being a silver sink.

[rough vault]

If kill efficiency was significantly reduced, there would be less loot generated. Spawn rate should be lowered by group size instead of increased. Field learning off a supernode should be reduced to 1 per pulse if mind is above clear. Mana and stamina regeneration per pulse should be changed to slow down as the mind fills. Shops in town that buy gems and skins should only be open during limited hours. Sleep = hard roundtime for hours should be required for training in any skill. These would all be different to Gemstone and initially unpopular but everything else discussed is just a bandaid to the root cause of this disparity in wealth generation. Some of it is due to players having 60 hours to play while most have 10. Some of it is due to players having gear that makes hunting too efficient. Some of it is due to players multiaccounting for advantage. The bottom line is that there is too much loot being generated and then improved upon for sale. The only way to stop this is to limit how many things can be killed per unit time or to reduce the incentives for doing so.

[granite tartan]

I honestly can't tell if you're trolling 😂

[hazy osprey]

This is totally logical and 100% accurate and only comes with the minor side effect that it would make about 75% of players quit immediately.

[chilly tulip]

He's not, sadly

[remote egret]

Good news! if 75% of players quit immediately we'd see a huge reduction in silver generation. His plan just might work!

[granite tartan]

I'm honestly curious @rough vault do you think any of that would make the game more enjoyable for the majority of the playerbase?

[crimson pond]

Based on his discord history, I don't know if he finds anything enjoyable besides reminiscing in the "Golden Age" of Gemstone long since past

[remote egret]

I would hazard a guess he finds the reaction of people to his suggestions enjoyable.

[fierce lynx]

I mean... if the true reason behind dropping loot generation down by the stated 33% goal is simply to keep CLAIM (silver version) in the game then please just axe CLAIM.

[remote egret]

Just don't get rid of these:

Weapons [2]: a large carmiln runestaff, an orase runestaff
Magic Items [1]: an aquamarine studded ora talisman
Gems [6]: a piece of red jasper, a chunk of sand-smoothed chalcedony, a shadow amethyst, a blue topaz, a cloudy alexandrite shard, a star ruby
Clothing [2]: a trilliant-cut blue dreamstone earring, a jade and red sunstone earring
Special [2]: some silver coins, a bright gold ingot
Total items: 13```

Did I just win the lottery? IDK! I'm excited though

[fierce lynx]

Nice box! I continue to be a f an of the larger boxes.

[rough vault]

I'm not trying to be controversial, but it is clear that only draconian revolutionary changes will yield the stated goals. I don't think 75% of the player base would quit as the silent supermajority that don't follow this thread and who don't hunt like us or even really like hunting much would adapt and shrug it off. We would lose a lot of wealthy players and accounts at first, maybe, but where would we go? Love it or hate it, we all choose to be here anyway. Minor tweaks have only been disruptive so far and failed to change anything. I agree that the biggest frustration is how little staff seems to acknowledge all of our comments and ideas. We all want to fix this and move on, but right now everyone is distracted by Rumor Woods and the latest greatest shiny new marbles.

[split hamlet]

I don't think any of your comments are based in reality.

[rough vault]

I thought your solution was meritorious and cogent, but it too went over like a fart in church. We need bold solutions even if painful. Bard purification was never designed with any concept of thousands of gems worth 8k+ being generated and sung to. Just as 420 had to be nerfed when some were making hundreds of useless wands for experience, it needs a nerfing. Not popular but necessary.

[jolly pollen]

The problem is 24/7 afk scripting. The game was never balanced for that. It was balanced for actual people sitting and manually typing. Bust and ban them. Problem solved.

[warm agate]

I feel like if it’s abuse they are trying to address they should address the offenders. They won’t so there you go.

[south trail]

It’s a mistake to try to make players play the game you want them to play or think of the game in terms of 1990s playstyle. They ship left long ago. The right thing to do is embrace the current state of the game and figure out how to make it fun rather than trying to punish people for enjoying the game the way they best like.

[granite tartan]

Not saying that this isn't a thing, but it's not a silver bullet either. Source: I earned 25m last month and I don't bigshot or automate. I just ;wander and spam nuke macros, pick my own boxes, do things in a specific order throughout the month, etc. I'm also able to put in a lot of hours because I work from home and GS is the most work friendly game ever.

[warm agate]

Personally I’ll never understand the fun of scripting hunts. There is an alternative for prime for that = shattered. Now I understand if someone is doing it for accessibility reasons , otherwise I will never get it.

[slate bluff]

The cycle of abuse, you get outfarmed by an MAer so then you MA to outfarm others..... and on and on

[jolly pollen]

They don't enjoy scripting hunts. They enjoy abusing game mechanics to pay their rent.

[potent orchid]

I hate scripting except for when I use it to do things.

[warm agate]

It’s convenient for Go2 but for hunting I just don’t get it, I actually like hunting and typing commands and spells etc. I know I’m in the minority. I even type the foxhunt, the arena, the sewers it slows me down in my spending hah for DR and RW .

[potent orchid]

Ban :go2 bank! That will slow the silver generation.

[warm agate]

Unless you have a coin hand

[primal creek]

Whew. Safe.

[potent orchid]

That wasnt directed at you. I like hunting manually as well, but sometimes I don't want to/can't type everything out. And I've hated typing out travel since the late 90s. (and that's my excuse for a ~15yr hiatus)

[rain reef]

yeah I admit, having certain scripting capabilities, macros, aliases, etc, has saved my brain and my wrists

[rough vault]

Maybe we need an optional money pool addition for private homes...ala Scrooge McDuck. Players would first need to fill the pool with 5b silvers, then upgrade the coins to gold, then add gems until the pool is full of purified Eye of Koar emeralds. Then you could finally unlock the speedo beachwear pattern to your spiderbox and use ki-lin fur as the material to dive in and flex. [Yes, this is a troll post].

[umbral lotus]

Maybe it counts both to various caps. Then the gold too

The real issue is even before we went pay to win we generated vastly more silvers than we used. The problem just magnified when we went to event cash. Before we had all these alternate currency there were still multiple silver holding Billionaires, nothing there has changed, yes we paid silver for everything but we also got vastly less neat stuff, orders of magnitude less even.

[civic niche]

Still feels like all the changes and I mean all of them are a solution looking for a problem. And solution is doing a lot of work there.

[granite tartan]

And what would go for 100m back then would go for 1b today. You're not wrong, but the whole P2W thing basically made it unfixable without obliterating the player base. It is what it is, but the current "solution" was very obviously not thought out and just made everything worse.

[umbral lotus]

Unless the problem was happy customers and the wanted angry ones...

[potent orchid]

I remember when gas was $1 a gallon!

[umbral lotus]

That much?

[split hamlet]

It always amuses me when people blame scripting for all the worlds problems and its probably the only reason the game still exists. Nobody was doing all those event runs which funds this place manually.

[rough vault]

But now that there is an NPC instant option to generate currency, scripting events is much more obviously about gaining an advantage.

[slate bluff]

I wonder how much forced event scripting and extreme MA arena benefit progressed the use of both of those "weapons of destruction" onto the GS population. I know that I first became MA to directly compete in the DR arena so I could buy my own gear easier.

[granite tartan]

I wonder how many people generate more loot per month after gemstones than they did before gemstones. It's a real nightmare of a grind after the first gem and anything useful has an abyssmal drop rate, all that is just exacerbating the silver problem too.

"We want people to generate less silvers, so here's a new system that requires several thousand kills per month."

[umbral lotus]

The only Gem I found that I use is the quest one...

[warm agate]

Hah I’m still on personal boycott of that whole game

[royal epoch]

I'd personally be curious how many people actually hunt for Gemstones.

They can be acquired for silver. They're meant to be a fun power bump, not something to break your back over.

[split hamlet]

Um, a lot of people hunt for gemstones lol

RE: When I'm in moonsedge I'm hunting exclusively for a gemstone.

[royal epoch]

I mean, exclusively.

[granite tartan]

You can't buy what's not for sale. Source: My thread trying to by a Grace of the Battlecaster gem and 0 Battlecaster gems posted since early March. Please explain the workaround to this.

EDIT: +1 to what Alastir said. If I'm in an ascension area, it's because I'm farming for a gemstone.

[split hamlet]

The first Sunday of a new month I hunt exclusively for the 1st gemstone for each account.

I then hunt exclusively for loot up to at least 10m.

On the next Sunday I hunt exclusively until I find the 2nd gemstone for each account.

I then hunt exclusively for more loot until the third Sunday.

Then I hunt exclusively for the 3rd gemstone for each account.

[chilly tulip]

My mains would be doing what they're doing now. No change for them. My alts would be in Nelemar or SoS if not for gemstones. Moreover, my alts used to hit 50k exp per week and stop, and now I play them more (to farm their gemstones). So I'm sort of exclusively hunting (more than I would normally) for gemstones (on my alts).

[main field]

I hunt exclusively for loot and gemstones … it’s what originally brought me “back” into the game…

Before that it was just endless war camps , osa, and bandits to try to finish out lumnis and hopefully resources …

Now it feels almost like the same grind except it’s FOMO on missing out on lumnis donation and FT/cash.

It’s awesome that we can reach our endgame “goals” faster but it makes me question… what is the point? The fun was in the chase… the opportunity that the next milestone will bring you closer to greatness …

Now it’s like… oh, you can play a minimal amount and still reach what others have dedicated endless hours in the pursuit of

[chilly tulip]

I think a better question to ask may be "who began hitting loot cap because of gemstones who wasn't hitting loot cap before gemstones". I'd be a "No" to that. In terms of loot generation it didn't change anything for me. Just how I get there.

[civic niche]

I think less than used to, because well I won't get into that. But when a great gemstone (even post loot cap changes) can sell for 100M silver, why wouldn't the expectation be that some people are gonna chase that?

This isn't directed at you, per se, but I feel like 35 years of GS history should demonstrate that if you make something available, even at ridiculous odds, a statistically significant percentage of the GS population that will chase it regardless of those odds. It just seems like someone, somewhere in the chain of decision making, is ignoring this fundamental GS truth.

[civic niche]

I absolutely fall into this list. I used to be fine spending my days not hitting loot cap in OTF.

And why for the love of everything holy can we not get a reasonable timer on this thread. 5 minutes is nuts.

[royal epoch]

I don't subscribe to that particular mode of thinking. Every game does make things easier after a while.

What I think you'll see in the future is more stretch goals to keep you challenged at the ultra-high-end.

Letting players get to 100 more easily will definitely improve the game experience, though. It allows us to focus our resources much more cleanly.

Consider that we have 715 creatures in-game. We could spread time trying to improve all of them or look (for example) at the 57 Ascension creatures that we have and make that the best experience possible.

[civic niche]

So, selling a way to make dev easier. That's actually brilliant, from a corporate standpoint.

Edit for below. The "selling" was the key in that sentence.

[royal epoch]

You say "easier," I say "better."

[slate bluff]

I got a grace of the battlecaster with limit break consitution, RIP

[royal epoch]

Just consider that we have 10 Development GMs, with different levels of time availability and coding capacity. You really want those people to be highly focused on making the game better for you.

[blazing violet]

This is 100% opinion, one that I don't share. But, as long as the things that aren't being focused on aren't removed, I can just remind myself that not everything is for everyone and there's plenty of fun to be had elsewhere.

[royal epoch]

Not, y'know, wasting a month evaluating whether or not waerns in Bonespear could have cooler messaging for the 2 weeks you'd actually hunt them.

[royal epoch]

We don't typically remove much from GS.

And I will say that there are some cool concepts for how we can use old content that players might enjoy. They're a ways out, though.

[civic niche]

More creatures, better creatures, more ASC areas, none of those are "goals". And none of them make my loot any better. Saying you want better dev on creatures, sure, fine, but it doesn't address the "why". There's no reason for me to hunt in ASC except my 3 gemstones a month. The only "goal" introduced since ASC was Porter, and TDest.

I don't consider gemstones a "goal" because there's no (as I've said before) meaningful way for me to plan, influence, or otherwise progress that "goal", except spend silver (which you like to point out) and now I don't even get silver anymore.

[main field]

But who is going to use the new content if there is no one left ?

What is the purpose of the grind ?
Why are we grinding somewhere else if you can easily get the same rewards everywhere ?

It’s like … you have a job, and your boss says no matter how hard you work or you grind… this is your cap. You’ll never make more, only feel proud of working more.

[fast cipher]

I think since I've been back the game has done a lot more in those few years to improve the gaming experience than I can remember compared to all of the past years so making it easier to GMs to focus changes is a good thing. But to answer the question on hunting exclusively for gemstones that's all i do on my alts do these days I get the 1st one and sometimes i'll try for 2 or 3 but they are at a point where I don't really care about advancement or loot capping them. My main and co-main don't care and would continue to hunt for progression regardless of gemstones.

[tender scarab]

If I’m in an Ascension area, which I am all the time now other than one weekly group hunt with the Drakes, I’m hunting for Gemstones. Why wouldn’t I be? Anything else I could be hunting for I could get more easily elsewhere. I thought that was the whole point of Gemstones, drawing us to Ascension areas.

Edit because 5 minute timer is wild: Dust is part of the Gemstones system.

[remote egret]

DUST

[civic niche]

Ironically, I stayed in Pits of the dead, because there's nothing there that disarms me, like OTF. So it's actually easier for my play style. But I only ever went there for the gemstones in the first place, to Leafiara's point.

[rough vault]

I recommend much longer experience prerequisites to advance into ascension. Players under 100 should not be able to gain any ascension experience. At level 100, there should be a max of 25% toward ascension, with 100% available at 20m normal experience. The gemstone quest is ridiculous- no one could do that without being completely carried until transcended. Gemstones should be limited to one per month but we should be given a better mechanism to trade them in for powers we want. There should be transcendence only areas with a chance to get a second or third per month.

[chilly tulip]

You should only be able to get Ascension experience from Ascension creatures. But it's way too late to put that toothpaste back in the tube

[blazing violet]

I'd go the other way and let us divert 100% of our experience to ascension precap. That would effectively let me avoid ascension areas altogether.

[slate bluff]

Im 2 weeks away from 10/10 transD, which GM is coding my new title?

[civic niche]

The title will be "grift'lo'ne cheater"

[remote egret]

You shouldn’t be allowed to use lumnis donate or fash’cash to speed up ascension exp. Only legit role playing awards would help. (Edit: Tijay shouldn’t earn ascension exp or gemstones until he apologizes to me. Now Ufian too!)

[slate bluff]

Every 1mil character experience you need to participate in a legit sanctioned RP event or you cannot gain more experience

[minor falcon]

Anything more than my 30 minutes a day of burning my brooch in an ascension area is exclusively for a gemstone. That 30 minutes is for brooch burning as top priority though. Heh..

[granite tartan]

I'm all for anything that makes exp faster. Nobody is going to true cap ascension or anything like that so there's 0 reason to slow it down. Exp related stuff sounds like a great source for a silver drain tbh. Lumnis had the right idea.

[tender condor]

I just had a single day where i turned in my last like 6 months of collectibles and got a boatload of mind clears i was like LOOK AT ME. I"M THE BROOCH WHALE NOW.

[tender scarab]

On that earlier note of "You really want [dev] to be highly focused on making the game better for you," yes, indeed, I do.

Release a bunch more Elite Ascension and then I'll consider hunting to max exp again instead of maxing Gemstone odds, i.e. cycling through bounties ASAP instead of staying out minimum 15 minutes because that's the duration of a major loot boost. This would also hopefully solve Tservin's problem of too much exp too quickly these days because there would also be more things to chase.

[minor falcon]

Is there a script that turns in collectibles. Well collects the rewards. I haven’t done that in years. Wonder how many I have. Heh…

[civic niche]

I was just thinking I have like 5 years worth.

[slate bluff]

My main's Collect Info verb bugs out since I have too many things collected

[granite tartan]

;collectible will turn them in but not sure if one exists for collecting rewards. Thanks for the reminder that I probably have like 2 years worth of rewards waiting 😂

[crimson pond]

It does both. ;collectibles --redeem

[minor falcon]

I’ll take elite ascension abilities to train. I’m at 110m total xp now so training anything is a bit slow for any gain. Probably not worth the time for the gains at all until elite ascension tiers. More possible gains from loot hunting I guess…

Gemstones are the only real upgrade path unless I make money to start buying SKs… but then I’ll hit loot cap faster.

[fierce lynx]

I think a lot of people still do Auchand. SPeaking for myself, I still put in extra hunts in Ascension to get gem dust and a chance at gemstones. I've set my expectations to getting the first one on both eligible characters every month but they do spend extra time hunting ascension than other things because they might get another gemstone. I don't think I am alone in this and many players seem obsessed with having to get all three every month.

[potent orchid]

I 100% hunt until I get my weekly gemstone.

[split hamlet]

I agree that helping players reach 100 is a good thing.

[granite tartan]

A pity counter for gems 2 and 3 wouldn't hurt either. There's already like a 90% chance of finding trash anyway

[warm agate]

Personally I don’t see the need for everyone to get to Level 100 quickly. Whatever’s clever though.

[blazing violet]

Helping is a great idea, as long as it isn't forcing. Those are two different things. Probably most people want to be capped, but not everyone does.

[granite tartan]

Not capping is the easiest thing ever and requires literally nothing

[chilly tulip]

Because that’s where new content development is going to be. I get the impression they’re not developing transitional hunting areas anymore. Which I’m all in favor of. We have plenty. You level out of them. We don’t need more.

[blazing violet]

Only if you're not hunting. There can be an awful lot of enjoyment in precap hunting, and if you're going to hunt you're eventually going to cap. And if you're going to tell me that you can get just as much enjoyment or more out of hunting at cap, probably most people do. I don't.

[crimson pond]

None of the exp options are obligatory, they're all opt-in

[split hamlet]

It makes a lot of things easier, quests, invasions, you don't have to worry about smashing the little people when everyone is level 100. You're balancing around a single level. It allows them to focus on "the majority"

[warm agate]

Oh I agree there are plenty of of sub 100 level hunting grounds to enjoy and most are under utilized. However it still could be fun to have storylines in those areas , whatever though.

[granite tartan]

I was half joking but I get what you mean, some leveling areas like shan were pretty great. You can still throttle your leveling exp pretty hard, just set your exp to ascension for whatever % you're wanting to slow down. I forgot what level you can start doing that but it's pretty low, 20 I'm guessing.

[chilly tulip]

It’s 20, yep.

[civic niche]

It starts at 20, but you can't set the percentage higher than your level. So you can stay in the 80/90s for a long time. But you can't really meaningfully stay in the 40s for example.

[granite tartan]

Should still be plenty to offset any exp buffs. I agree with Kaetel though that it should be opt-in stuff. Lumnis donate was a good addition, they should do more stuff like that.

[warm agate]

I don’t know , so we have a bunch of under 100 training ascension and likely script hunting , blah , blah, blah to get to 100 level ascension areas for what ?

[civic niche]

The same thing, but at a more "interesting" place. Hunting is hunting, so I've never really understood the need to create new areas, except to help alleviate crowding. But then, they go and make a new area like SG and make it "annoying" to get to, like why. People are lazy, unless there's a compelling reason to go there (spoiler, there isn't) creating new areas that aren't easy to get to is sort of defeating the point.

[fierce lynx]

I'm going to respond to this one twice. Answering differently... there are a lot of hunting areas that I would prefer to hunt because of the gem drops or that are just more fun to hunt in that I forgo so that I have more chances at gaining another gemstone (and gathering more gemstone dust).

I don't find Ascension hunting areas to be "better" or "more fun" than other capped areas... I hunt there because of gemstones and gemstone dust and would quickly leave if there were other options.

Buying gemtones: I did buy a couple at quite the premium price because what generally drops when I find a gemstone is commonly really terrible. I do hope this gets address someday (dev focus item). Regionals were a poorly thought out idea for Ascension acquired gemstones with the current design. That said - I'll likely continue hunting in Ascension areas for gemstones and gemstone dust, not because I prefer these hunting areas but because I want to acquire more gems and would prefer to (eventually) gather them myself vs. buying them.

Hopefully the drop rate or ease of acquiring something actually useful is addressed at some point.

For pure hunting fun, I actually really enjoy pre-cap areas on many of my alts still.

[minor falcon]

I feel like south scatter should just be ascension or expanded to be ascension

[granite tartan]

Old Sheruvian Monastery and Shadow Valley when they swarmed like crazy nonstop was the best pre-cap

[rough vault]

Hunting OTF or Nelemar is like playing gemstone in slow motion on easy mode after Moonsedge. I prefer relaxing to frustration but justify ascension for gemstone chance. Without gemstones the ascension areas are unnecessarily challenging and do not let me use all my toys and buffs. Having regional gemstone buffs for non ascension areas is silly as most stay in ascension the entire month.

[warm agate]

I loved hunting OTF , and selling the crystal weapons when they had value, I also enjoyed Shan and in the Darkstone Castle and a few areas over there on Teras. As a really wee one I like the Temple of Love and the Cyclops area, and Woodsmen. I spent untold hours in Plat hunting in Skeletal Lords to get Brigit the bard to level 50. And of course the fun we had in tree spirits. So, admittedly, I do have nostaglia for all those hunting grounds and the old days. Hah. Ok slow day at work, back to your regular programming.

[velvet nebula]

I used to hunt to fried +5 or 10 critters, a little more if I was close to finishing a bounty. During gemstone finding weeks, I hunt until I can no longer store loot, which is typically fried +75 to 100 critters, depending on box finds. I've hunted HW since it opened, so I didn't change where I hunt, but I definitely kill significantly more critters than I did pre-gemstones.

I have gotten all three monthly gemstones on 2 characters since gemstones launched, with one char taking 3.7k as most searches to find a gemstone and the other at 5.7k searches.

[bright pasture]

i sit out in Ojandhaart for sole purpose of hunting gemstones. then i go back to the Sanctum

gemstones are not worth buying, imo, since we haven't really explored the bottom of the rarity market. but dropping a little bit of silver here and there seems fine

under the current model, there isn't much reason to go anywhere else. i'm expecting future expansions of hunting areas or loot mechanics to expand this, but GS is about patience so i am not going to be out there clamoring for it

i'm a proponent of every 10 mil experience -> 1 mil higher loot cap. but like every idea presented in this folder, i'm not going to die on the hill protecting it. i'm also a proponent of higher level areas having higher loot caps. but, same deal, i'm sure it comes with problems, and perhaps even more problems than it solves. but better spoken suggestions that don't work than unspoken suggestions that might.

[sleek meadow]

How about loot and exp get linked. The more you are absorbing the more loot can fall for you then it dwindles down to like 25% when you’ve used up Lumnis etc. this would incentivize people paying for Lumnis and Cash’O’Ne and also be on a weekly cycle. And you could keep hunting just with smaller returns. Someone suggested linking it to Lumnis and that might work well too. Weekly vs monthly controls

[icy ether]

Your loot cap in theory should be affected by the level of creature you hunt and your experience bucket, if you can't learn from it you cannot get loot from it, and then once you are at your bucket's capacity and reinforcing the "You must rest" = you get no loot

This allows people who want to hunt for experience and experience only to keep on keeping on, and stops strip mining to encumberance max and the only work around helps Simutronics in the form of a higher subcription which increases your experience capacity, a lumnis brooch rub, or boosts you get by playing the game from login rewards

[hard folio]

I'd be perfectly fine with this.

[chilly tulip]

I’d unsubscribe and move on

[hard folio]

something something break a few eggs something something.

[fresh turret]

finally a reason to use longterm experience boosts

[mellow gyro]

I skip non-dangerous creature bounties and boost into them. If I'm hunting, it's for my gemstone for the week/cap limit.

[hard folio]

Ya'll do know you can farm all the silver and loot you want in shattered with no loot cap right? You can even script it without danger of getting into trouble. If loot is your primary goal, just roll up a shattered character.

[south trail]

LOL. That's why you can get 3 a month and spend hundreds of hours chasing the second drop. I still think 2 should have some kind of cap/increased rate after X loots. If it really was intended as nice perk you might or might not get, then 1. they wouldn't be so powerful that everyone needs one, and 2. you'd only get 1 per month and it'd be totally random.

[civic niche]

If I could transfer characters there I would in a second. But if I had to start over, I’d just play some other game.

[hard folio]

starting over in shattered is not really that huge of a deal though. You can get to cap in a few months. The gear replacements is fairly easy to do as well.

[tender scarab]

Did you know that if you're in a sancted room when you loot creatures, you get no exp from them?

[split timber]

I guess if you want to more or less play by yourself. There isn't exactly 500+ people logged into that server.

[civic niche]

I have zero interest in starting over I’d rather quit.

[hard folio]

the shattered folks are some of the nicest people I've ever met in GS.

[split timber]

Noted! No insult was intended at all!

From my understanding however there just weren't nearly as many folks as in Prime and I value lots of interaction

[civic niche]

I have not played there. But the numbers are much much lower than prime yes.

How nice they may or may not be has nothing to do with that.

[frozen tusk]

Maybe every kill while must rest or saturated drops your loot chance or introduces the current loot cap by 2%.

At 50 kills past must rest or saturated you no longer gain loot.

[icy ether]

there's multiple facets that would need to be tweaked in background support systems, there's not a magic button that fixes the percieved problem and from the tone of finality to much of this, there's no rolling back of the code either

[tender scarab]

I agree there's no magic button. That's why, since spending several more months on this issue has been stated as [not the goal](#1461872047062908929 message), they probably shouldn't do anything that would take several more months of updating a slew of additional systems while identifying every bizarre corner case.

...or, maybe even worse, not identifying every bizarre corner case and then ending up having to update still more systems. Which is what we've seen going on many times already.

[bright pasture]

didn't they already implement this with the spawn changes

[remote egret]

They must not have. I just said the other day my capped empath happened to kill a <20 critters and pulled a 50lbs box.

[fierce lynx]

I can confirm - I need to hunt alchemy items at times and routinely get gems, silver, boxes from critters that are 80 level below me.

[unique oyster]

I was on board with the "full head = no exp" idea for a while but then a realized it wasn't an easy fix for the following reasons:

1. It doesn't take into account loot boosts. Loot boosts last 15 minutes and most hunts last a lot less, so you are guaranteed to be wasting the bonus. Maybe you could suspend the rule while the boost is in effect or use LTE boosts but it isn't the best option.
2. People would game the system. For example, people could under hunt to get less exp but more loot. This would be very bad for lower level hunting areas.
3. It makes ascension hunting grounds a lot less likable since you fill your head much quicker due to higher level mobs. The loot in ascension area would have to be MUCH better to justify hunting there.
4. Some loot isn't tied to searching. If I skin something with a full head, is the skin worth anything? Should I even be allowed to skin at all with a full head? You can see why this is a problem.

I'm sure people can think of more issues. But like it was said before, this isn't a magic button fix. It would take a lot more effort to get the idea to work without problems.

[split hamlet]

It's a terrible idea and it's a waste of time to even talk about it.

[bright pasture]

oh it must have been a temporary thing they rolled back

[remote egret]

Yeah - I'm not sure why they rolled it back. You definitely shouldn't be able to get boxes or anything of real value from mowing down little critters. But...perhaps for people who are trying to farm alchemy reagents they rolled it back? idk

[fierce lynx]

One of the few cases where Alastir and I are on the same page! It really is a very bad idea. I never hit loot cap but if we started in with the hunting police; YOU MUIST GO REST BECAUSE YOUR HEAD HIT MAX EXP. I would unsub because the game would be stupid unplayable for the way I like to play the game (20-40 minute hunts at a go).

[unique oyster]

It "sounds" like a good idea on paper but once you look into it, the flaws becomes really obvious.

[icy ether]

You raise some valid points, but there's a few things I'd comment on.

1. Utilization of login rewards wouldn't be penalized. They are an incentive to logging in and playing the game ( and by playing may lead to Simucoin purchases ) , so your boosts would apply in the hypothetical scenario.

2. If you cannot learn from a creature, you cannot get loot. No more underhunting to circumvent.

3. This one has merit, but I have faith in the current people handling this current world and fresh implementation of new systems/grounds to take a hypothetical into consideration.

4. If you skin it with a full head of experience, the skin itself gets tagged for no resale value. Furrier shrugs and says "No demand for that.", and everyone moves on.

I get the feeling as if we're not getting the toothpaste back in the tube, and there's not a solution that doesn't upset someone. My own playing time would be affected by the proposal, no one's getting out a solution without some pain points.

[split hamlet]

Do you understand the concept of diminishing marginal payout based on cap utilization.
We're talking about a cap of 15,000,000 silvers in the game Gemstone IV.
Can you give me an estimate of how many gems would be necessary to find with that cap, with gem values ranging between 1000 and 5000 silvers?

Yes — I understand exactly what you’re describing, and your framing is basically correct for GemStone IV’s loot cap behavior.

1. How diminishing payout works (conceptually)
As you approach the cap (15,000,000 silvers in your example), the system effectively reduces the value of each subsequent sale.
A commonly cited model is roughly:
Each % of cap reached → % reduction in sale value

So:
At 0% → 100% value
At 50% → ~50% value
Near cap → values approach ~0

This creates a linear decay in payout efficiency, meaning:
Your average value per gem over the entire grind is about ~50% of nominal value if you go all the way to cap.

2. Turn that into math
Let’s define:
Cap = 15,000,000 silvers
Gem value range = 1,000–5,000 silvers
Average nominal gem value ≈ 3,000 silvers

Because of diminishing returns:
Effective average ≈ ~50% of nominal
So adjusted average ≈ ~1,500 silvers per gem

3. Estimated number of gems
Using midpoint average (most realistic)
15,000,000÷1,500≈10,000 gems
15,000,000÷1,500≈10,000 gems

4. Range depending on gem quality
Worst case (all low-value gems ~1,000)
Effective avg ≈ 500
15,000,000÷500=30,000 gems
15,000,000÷500=30,000 gems
Best case (all high-value gems ~5,000)
Effective avg ≈ 2,500
15,000,000÷2,500=6,000 gems
15,000,000÷2,500=6,000 gems

5. Final estimate (practical range)
High-end hunting (good gems): ~6,000–8,000 gems
Mixed realistic gameplay: ~9,000–12,000 gems
Low-end farming: ~20,000–30,000 gems

6. Key insight (the important takeaway)
Because of the linear decay:
The second half of your cap is twice as expensive in effort as the first
Your “true” average value is always ~half of what the gems say on paper

The actual problems right now:

• It's too easy to loot cap, which means no loot for a majority of your monthly subscription.
• Wyrom has stated he wants to reduce silver generation by 33%.

Diminishing marginal payout based on cap utilization would resolve both of these. I imagine it would also heavily reduce the silver generated by those nasty scripting MA groups because time played becomes important again.

(Yes, I already know the arguments about chrisms/deeds becoming cheaper, it's an insignificant amount and it would be a net-benefit for most players.)

[mellow gyro]

Donno about actual problem. The impetus was too much silver generation, but that is done through excessive scripted automation which is a viewpoint of the community or parts of it as the real problem.

[remote egret]

It also isn't "way too easy" to hit loot cap...I mean. Only 94 accounts did. And I imagine many of the people we know who hit LC are running multiple accounts so again - maybe 50-70 people are hitting LC and find it "too easy". Nonetheless, Wyrom said he doesn't want those 94 accounts to not have fun. And it also sounds like it was really more of a problem of the average player making quite a bit more silvers that counteracted the ultimate goal of "reducing silvers" into the economy.

[civic niche]

I'd imagine some of the increase at the bottom was people in soft/hard cap using accounts they don't play as much, for more hours, but that's just a guess.

Anyway, hard capped on my two mains again, already. Hopefully we see some sort of change, since I have a solid 12-13 days of no loot this month. That's after I switched to a less loot centric hunting style, and untrained trading. So I've done my part here.

[civic niche]

#2 - You'd have to come up with some way to fix the fact that sometimes you have to underhunt to get things you need, like alchemy comes to mind immediately. You'd have to go through all the items that creatures can drop, and see if they are used in any other system, and find a way to make them available for people. That sounds....daunting.

[remote egret]

Why not just make alchemy components, at least the ones you need the most of, available for SILVER purchase...great silver sink. Makes ALchemy less tedious...and well. There ya go. Cut off loot from critters you can't learn from.

[civic niche]

I have always thought the fact that you had to scavenger hunt to do alchemy was terrible, so yes, do that, do that now. But there's other systems too. Sheath making (a dying art I know) also comes to mind.

After this debacle, I honestly don't have faith the guard rails exist on the process that even half of them would be fixed pre roll out.

[gloomy lark]

you two seem to be agreeing a lot these days so loot cap solved one problem

[unique oyster]

I'm all for this. There are a lot of fun consumables made by alchemy that would be nice to have like stamina potions but they are so hard to make that no one bothers making anything.

[remote egret]

I think people tend to make the stuff that can make them money...looking at you glowing ur'veneth potions!

[civic niche]

We've always agreed on a fair bit honestly. Except that he defiles the empath class by using a bow.

[bright pasture]

alchemy is an amazing, yet-abandoned, system, imo

[civic niche]

So....like most GS systems developed over the years?

[unique oyster]

Hey, I still play Spirit Beasts and Pennant Chase! They are fun dang it!

[bright pasture]

GS is beta, by their own policy standpoint.

but alchemy stands out in my mind as one of the most complex yet underused systems - for me

[civic niche]

Alchemy, Spirit beasts, collectibles, mini bosses, guilds, monk/warrior Player Service, ASC is starting to feel that way, Gemstones seem like they might go that way. I'm sure I'm missing a bunch.

[bright pasture]

making some items shop purchasable would just go a long way in making alchemy a mechanically useful system

all of the foundation is in place. it's just too ridiculously tedious to seriously consider making most anything useful

[mellow gyro]

Can we just get some Council of Light society lore?

[split hamlet]

Maybe try asking in a thread where it wouldn't be off-topic.

[granite tartan]

No it’s a secret

[bright pasture]

should just create a chatgpt run character named Lachies and feed it all of the CoL wiki lore. ask it to innovate the backstory

(it's been a while since we had a good assassination)

[fierce lynx]

If you could just buy all of the components for these there would be no money to be made in them at that point.

[remote egret]

to be clear - I said only the more common alchemy ingredients. I can't imagine they'd ever have the honey beryl (since it is also just a straight gem) be available for sale.

[fierce lynx]

Reading is hard! Thanks for the clarification. 🙂 Also... the common items are already available for purchase via silver from the town alchemist (in limited quantity over time) or are easy enough to farm already. And point in fact - they did sell Kezmonian Honey beryls at an event shop some 10 years or so back.

[unique oyster]

The alchemy ingredients fall under the "more interesting loot" discussion. I dislike how hard it is to find specific ingredients and that these isn't a good way to tell what will drop the more generic stuff. Sirens drop siren hair? Sure. But what drops golden seeds? This is the only game I've ever seen that made alchemy so clunky and unfun to use.

[flint mortar]

https://tenor.com/view/kekpunk-kekpunks-gif-1843620448175954372

[flint mortar]

I'd love for it to get some work. But that's for another topic. I'm waiting for that moment where Hapenlok goes all "Manchurian Candidate" because of the Poohbah owning the part of his Soul that Althedus or Amasalen(That's backstory stuff)didn't snag.

[flint mortar]

It's too bad that Lacheis went with Khaladon. We haven't had a good assassination in a long time. One of the first RPAs i got was for snitching on two mamalukes who were discussing the family business in TSC, years ago.

[icy ether]

Alchemy, though certainly a dated system was setup in somewhat updated standards and daunting is a very politically nice term it's likely MUCH easier to tweak then essential base system code

I'd defer to someone more knowledgable about the system, but for the dozens who may be working alchemy perhaps they could turn in reagants for an increase of credit to purchase common needs they can no longer acquire in the name of underhunting

alchemy component sale value 1000 silver
turn in credit 1200 silver ( items bought via credit marked +nosell for the folks thinking of churning etc )
less silvers created, more happy people with a streamlined alchemy setup

[frozen tusk]

Just offer all the alchemy stuff for silvers for cheap. Nothing drops anymore.
Removes silver generation. Creates a drain. Everything could be 100 silvers and it would still be a drain if nothing dropped that could be sold any longer.

[fresh turret]

still just throwing stuff at the wall to see if anything sticks... what if there was an item you could wear on your person that was account bound and you could put magic items that normally sell at the pawnshop and it would give you SK of the spell that item contained for a silver fee... so like you could put a silver wand into it and have SK 901 for x charges but it took xxxxx amount of silver from you as well? that might be fun

[remote egret]

The mage gauntlet creator at RW is gonna send its lawyers after you. Also the creator of the Bazz gloves.

[fresh turret]

actually thinking of maybe a hybrid between the totems and those items, i know the totems are a silver drain but they don't really use up enough charges to really drain anything i can usually keep mine at 500 just each hunt and still have skins to sell and I only skin level 16 critters

[remote egret]

I hear the exact opposite. I'm guessing it depends on what benefit of the totem you are using but I've heard it goes through charges insanely fast. I've never used 'em so can't say with any actual opinion. Just interesting to hear someone else say they don't go through charges fast.

[jolly palm]

100% depends on what benefit your totem has - If you have it on an offensive flare - it's basically drained every hunt.

[fierce lynx]

What isn't dropping any more? I still sell alchemy ingredients pretty routinely from the areas that I am hunting. Primarily essences, cores and sprite hairs from my current hunting grounds.

[remote egret]

Are you still having people send you honey beryls? I literally haven't seen one of those since the gem changes and that was primarily the reason I was staying in RR.

[fierce lynx]

I am finding Kezmonian Honey Beryls in the Confluence still but that is why I asked the question... is what is not dropping alchemy items or gems... because while alchemy uses gems I think it is a somewhat different statement to say rare gems aren't dropping like they used to vs. alchemy ingredient aren't dropping like they used to.

And I have been buying these from people still but hard to say if that was stock they already had or not.

[remote egret]

omg. Of course. After like 2 months of not seeing one - just pulled one from a box.

[fierce lynx]

Sadly - the universe seems to reward complaining. :p

[cold zephyr]

I haven't seen one since the gem changes, but I don't know what value they are now. You have to hunt the proper level range to find them. Rare gems (diamonds/emeralds and such) they only seem to drop from level 70+ creatures. My level 65 warrior got a gem bounty for emeralds, no creature under level 70 dropped any for him after multiple hunts with and without a boost.

Soon as I ventured into a level 70+ hunting area he started getting emeralds to drop with and without a boost.

Just like if I need a pink topaz for a gem bounty, no creature under level 20 appears to drop them. I have to make sure I'm hunting level 20+ creatures to find them even though my character is level 18 and is only hunting like level creatures, he needs to venture to a spot that level 20+ creatures are to get them to drop.

If you need a specific gem and you are unable to hunt the proper level range the gem drops from, you're screwed when it comes to gathering them yourself.

[fierce lynx]

I think there are some unintended consequences on the gem drops / gem bounties that need to be reviewed. Gem scarcity for systems and items that use gems. Some of these will become more apparent over time as peoples reserves of these items start to run dry.

[fierce lynx]

Hahaha... You've got mail! Please visit your local post office to check your mailbox (I've decided to up what I am paying for these for awhile given the potential challenges in finding new ones.)

[fresh turret]

crit weighting

[fresh turret]

throwing out another idea for a silver sink, have a token auction like the ones in the good-ole-days with three tents platinum tent with 1 billion silver entry fee with an attunement discount and a platinum subscriber discount, gold tent with 100 million entrance fee with a premium discount and attunement discount, and a silver tent with a simustore bought ticket entrance fee no attunement discount but still a premium and plat discount.

platinum tent - unique new items token bidding everyone gets something
gold tent - copies of items from past god auctions token bidding everyone gets something items not claimed in platinum tent trickle down to auction pool but are account attuned.
silver tent - moderate tier items from the pay events with a few sprinkled goodies and silver bidding items not claimed in token tents trickle down to auction pool but are account attuned.

[remote egret]

I love that your heart is in this. Unfortunately the issue has been stated to be so egregious that these auctions hardly make an impact. So we need consistent drains.

Unless you meant for these auction tents to be around all the time?

[fierce lynx]

Anything that has been available at pay events for 5+ years should now also be available for purchase at a high silver amount as an alternative (still available for purchase via pay currency as well).

[remote egret]

This is my favorite idea I’ve ever heard. I might have to approach things with a Leafiara timeframe in mind. I would def buy some big ticket items with silvers (not you KO flares).

[civic niche]

Probably not "anything" because some things were designed with the limited nature of them in mind. Not from a scarcity standpoint but a game mechanic standpoint. But even a selection of them would be great.

[fresh turret]

maybe tie bank account capacity to years playing the game (sorry nucky)

[flint mortar]

Yep. Then there's the fact that you have to have a member of staff devoted to running these things. Like there isn't enough work for the CE GMs already.

[tender scarab]

Unsurprisingly, I had a similar idea except that it was based on an item's sales having petered out instead of just existing for a number of years.

In either case, I'd never do it myself for the same reason I don't buy CLAIMs anymore. But other people do, so it would theoretically work as a silver drain.

[frozen tusk]

I was suggesting that nothing can be found hunting as a change and to simply sell everything for silvers at 100 silvers a piece.

No more gen. Drain only. But huge convenience.

[warm agate]

You all should be fired from the HYPE team.

[umbral lotus]

I love this idea...

[fresh turret]

we could also take a page out of jeff bezos book and sell tickets to an exclusive hunting ground on the moon where you battle zealots of the pantheon at odds with your aligned god and have major battles with avatars of the gods themselves. I mean that seems to be what our billionaires spend money on.

[proud rune]

Ki-lin's badder older brothers on the moon. Tickets 10million a pop?

-required to vlog after each hunt and upload to the wiki as proof of your visit

[south trail]

1 million ideas later….. crickets lol

[spring crow]

What were you expecting?

[jolly palm]

What I'd love, based on the new MO from Creating adventure in Q1, would be to see what they committed to come to life:
The most significant change in the 2026 workflow is the transition away from "monolithic" updates in favor of incremental releases. By breaking down massive projects into smaller, more manageable phases, the team can deliver content to the players faster and with greater precision. I know we've said this before, but we are starting this by no longer doing a full roadmap from the get-go.
Let's see monthly tweaks to zero in on a better player experience, related to Loot. I think we all want to see things improve, no one is asking for a grand reveal with a silver bullet to "fix" it all.
In hindsight, this was a monolithic update that missed the mark. I can't help but feel it would've panned out much differently if there had been slow and steady tweaks, with analysis and results behind each, instead of pulling many levers all at once.

Don't reverse everything, but let's see some tweaks!

[civic niche]

Yeah. Something. Would be nice.

[remote egret]

I thought we were expecting something from Wyrom in the not-too-distant future?

[civic niche]

Well. He said weeks, not months, and in another week that’s no longer true.

[remote egret]

My friend! The glass is not half empty. It is half full! We still have another WHOLE week! I have faith.

[rigid sparrow]

If they're on the same account, does it matter?

[slate bluff]

My example was them being on different accounts. I had a hoard of 1,000s of gems and it would of taken me like 50+ hours to sing to them all so I just sold it all.... ☠️

[civic niche]

Lootcap is so fun.

|        | hourly | daily | 
+--------+--------+-------+
| silver | -150   | -478  |```

[shell phoenix]

ledger went crazy on me yesterday and suddenly proclaimed I had gained 34m while sitting in the inn

[civic niche]

did on 2 of my 3 accounts as well. Not sure what happened there.
I'm guessing someone typed something on esp merchant that matched a deposit. The one that's fine doesn't have that channel on.

[shell phoenix]

Ah, you're correct. It's Nordred's fault.. well it's ledger not sanitizing inputs, but I still blame Nordred

[slate bluff]

Elanthian bank should be able to provide us with reliable and accurate deposit and withdrawal statements. I should take my business elsewhere.

[queen pebble]

You guys should get ;payroll and autostart it on everything... it even has a (intended a bit as a joke) dashboard! It also tracks payroll (lumnis weeks paid) 😄

[granite tartan]

This is why you hoard until the end of the month if you're trying to not "waste" any loot cap. It's super annoying, but it works

[flint mortar]

I wouldn't call some of what's been put forth ideas....let alone good ones.

[civic niche]

For sure, but there have been some really good ideas.

[umbral lotus]

They will ignore those first

[flint mortar]

And probably hire Frorin. 😆 🤣

[rough vault]

The Eye of Mordor has been focused on debugging mounts for combat.

[umbral lotus]

Nah Tarakan and Alastir just for the office fights

[remote egret]

I wonder what would happen if they tried to discord ban each other at the same exact time...whose ban would win?! Also - just let Alastair implement his bard changes with some forced changes from me and then retire him.

[fresh turret]

Wow... just wow. That is kind of hurtful you're not a nice person. 🥺

[proud rune]

Perhaps it's reverse psychology because he secretly believes you are the best person for the job?

[civic niche]

@fervent hatch So were we talking real weeks, or "GS Weeks" for some word on lootcap changes? Cause, we're almost into months now.

[chilly tulip]

I don't even know why you want more changes. They're unlikely to be buffs

[remote egret]

I thrive on change...good or bad...something different! Something to adapt to. Something to make me feel ALIVE!

[chilly tulip]

Yeah except we just had a bunch of change to loot, I'd love them to do a bunch of change to like, anything else at this point. Profession reviews. Ascension abilities. Gemstones. Just not more agonizing over how many quartz orbs a given person found this week.

[slate bluff]

You are supposed to buy the 150k Raik mage gauntlet for those, duh!

[chilly tulip]

A pay item that requires upkeep? Lol, pass.

[slate bluff]

Nvm, mage gauntlet doesnt use those, you need an orb baldric. That also weighs like 20 pounds and takes up a crucial shoulder spot and no pockets...... holds 5 charges!

[calm bay]

The main significant change I want to see is less punishment to single account players who actively play mulitple characters. Whether its a Prime w/ character adds or Premium / Platinum - making your entire account suffer the loot cap penalty seems counterintuitive as the 1% problematic wealth generators are MA armies. Give each character slot an extra mil on top of the loot cap that must be generated by that extra character slot -- that might be a challenge to implement, but worth it for retention.

[remote egret]

Fair. But people aren't really making that much noise about lack of development on all of those other things. LOOT is the big topic causing the rabble to rumble and grumble. I hope we keep the big loot boxes though!

Weapons [2]: a single bit mithril jeddart-axe, a gold-capped kakore runestaff
Armor [1]: some etched ora studded leather
Wands [2]: a twisted wand, a silver wand
Lockpicks [1]: a silver lockpick
Gems [7]: a green sapphire, a violet sapphire, a flawless aquamarine gem, an age-darkened ivory crescent, a blue-green chrysocolla stone, a formation of rainbowed bismuth, an uncut emerald
Clothing [1]: an oval-cut star emerald pendant
Special [3]: an ivory-inlaid platinum ewer, some silver coins, a bright gold ingot```

[fast cipher]

Orb baldric weights 6lbs the orbs are weightless and it does have pockets albeit a small one

[civic niche]

Because he broadly indicated they were thinking about what to do for those of us who do lootcap early and found the lack of loot to be "not fun."

[remote egret]

|      Eloot Breakdown       |
+----------------+-----------+
| Pool Return    |         1 |
| Locksmith Pool |     5,618 |
| Pool Depth     |         0 |
+----------------+-----------+
| Gemshop        |    88,189 |
| Pawnshop       |    31,343 |
+----------------+-----------+
| Total          |   125,151 |
+----------------+-----------+``` Not bad for 1 bounty hunt on 4/22!

[warm agate]

I recall some mention of wanting some data points from March into April before decisions/changes were made

[civic niche]

March was data. April was analyze, and adjust "within weeks not months"

[crimson pond]

Hey now, they have a tiny pocket! Holds a runestaff at least. Edit: Oh, Tijay beat me to it

[split hamlet]

If they used my suggestion, you could always find loot on your alt characters on the same account.

[civic niche]

You mean that manifesto you keep trying to get people to buy into? You haven't posted it in like 3 days, maybe it's time again?

[calm bay]

My concern isn't about the ability to find loot, but how the goal is to mitigate the top 1% earners who clearly run multiple accounts vs the standard earners who are often combined into a single account. If I want to double my income, I just stop playing 4 characters on a single premium account, and divide that into 2 prime accounts and now I get 2x as much total silver generated for less subscription costs ($40 Premium vs $34 w/ 2 accounts). Subsequently, I could split myself into 3 accounts for just $6 more than my premium sub, and get 3x as much silver generation.

This is problematic and my root concern with the current implementation. Penalizing people who focus their attention on a single account, those people who are super unlikely to be amassing the same volume of silvers as the multi-account players, should recover some of the loot cap by simply being active across multiple characters. You do this by making each character on the account have an additional bonus to your total silver generation for that account thus ensuring people are gaining silvers on different characters.

Not to mention it is waaay easier to cap when you can play multiple accounts simultaneously vs a single account spread across multiple characters.

[split hamlet]

Yes, if you want to double your income, you must pay them double the money.

[granite tartan]

Except he's paying $6 less to double his income. 34 < 40

[split hamlet]

He's also downgrading his account from premium to basic. Or are we pretending that there's no value to having a premium account?

I will say, I think the cost of a single account should matter, if basic is $14.95 and Premium is $39.95 then a Premium account should have access to ... 2.67x the loot cap, Platinum accounts should get ... 3.34x the loot cap.

[civic niche]

I wouldn't say there's "no" value to premium, but the value proposition is lowered somewhat substantially by making all the alt slots permanently poor. I agree that sub-tier based caps would alleviate that concern.

[calm bay]

I agree 100% that there is value in premium benefits, which is why a single premium account would be extremely unlikely double the income of a single prime account. If we were granted a per character bonus on any type of account, we could increase the bonus per account type.

1. Basic accounts get +1 million silvers "soft cap" per character that can only be generated on the additional character slot(s) - and keep in mind you pay $2 per character slot per month for this perk.
2. Premium accounts get a +2million silvers per character, bound to each character slot and you have what, 10 character slots included w/ the premium sub. So now you get into the world of picking between hunting for silvers, or progressing your favorite characters because you won't be able to do both effectively.
3. Platinum accounts maybe 2.5mil?

The above tiered silver generation concept would still net you less silvers on a single account than a multi-accounter could generate in a month simply because of the hours you need to play to achieve the same rate of income since you can't play these characters concurrently. It would simply mitigate the massive disparity that exists in the present implementation while encouraging people to generate silver on alts instead of power hunting their mains for loot.

[rough vault]

It doesn't seem like the premium gms are really in the loop with loot cap concerns. When these issues were raised in that thread it sounded like owls and crickets in a summer barn.

[jolly palm]

Not everyone makes all account decisions based on loot. I have platinum for Kontii's account, and he's the only character on it. It seems to be a very biased perspective to boil the value of standard/premium/platinum down to loot cap.

That being said, I'm okay with people who pay more, getting a higher cap 😆

[calm bay]

And to be clear, I have not specifically equated account type to loot cap. I am noting that multiple characters on a single account (regardless of account type) are being penalized vs spreading those characters out to multiple accounts, and the clear goal of this change is to reduce overall silver generation by the 1% (who have been noted to be running mulitple accounts) vs further penalizing those players who are primarily single account holders, but who play multiple characters.

The only way to improve the multi-character, single account experience while not making it "easy to abuse" is to add a bonus directly to each character slot that can only be earned by playing that character. This, however, might be difficult or impossible to implement.

[flint mortar]

Eh....

[unique oyster]

I REALLY don't want to see loot cap benefits tied to subscription tier. I'm not found of multi-accounting either but increasing the loot cap with tiers sounds like they would be saying "pay us more money and we will let you break the economy." It doesn't fix the silver problem. It would probably just make it worse.

[civic niche]

Alternatively they are saying, pay us more money to open more accounts and you can make more silver. It's already tied to how much you spend, thinking otherwise is just deluding yourself.

[unique oyster]

I have no doubt that multi-accounting makes people more money. I just don't want it to get worse.

[civic niche]

tier subs would make it less likely to get worse, not more. I am literally in the position of deciding if I should keep my plat account, or downgrade and open another account. I'd save money, and I'd increase my silver per month by 15M. I haven't....yet, because I'm waiting to see what the changes are.

[fierce lynx]

Only for 94 accounts which isn't a large percent of the playerbase. Everyone else isn't hitting loot cap so that messaging really isn't there.

[civic niche]

Well....maybe.
Or, maybe, 200 people already have multiple accounts (pulled number out of the air) and neither loot capped because they don't play them in an MA style. But if they were tied to one account they would have.

[fierce lynx]

I pulled the 94 (might have been 92?) from what Wyrom reported as accounts hitting loot cap last month.

That said - I DID open a 2nd premium account recently (i find value in Premium regardless of loot cap) even though I never hit loot cap but I do value resources and with two accounts I can leave someone logged in accumulating resources while I am playing the 'other' account. I used to earn most of my resources via off-line experience. I only occasionally sell my resourced but I do have lots of alts and alt projects I am working on!

[civic niche]

Right, I know where the 94 comes from. But, what I'm saying is, that just because only 94 accounts loot capped, doesn't mean only 94 people "loot capped". (Or, however many people the 94 represents.) There could be plenty of prime players who have multiple accounts, and play them both, but not enough to individually cap either one. Maybe each one is making 8M.

That person is making in excess of loot cap because they have multiple accounts. So, there may already be a meaningful number of people who are "avoiding loot cap" without understanding that they are. Those numbers aren't acounted for in your 94 number.

[fierce lynx]

I think generally if you pay for multiple accounts you should benefit from each of them. I think it falls into the realm of abusive and bad for the game when a player starts running around with their army of account alts simultaneously. Obviously Simu doesn't share my opinion. 🙂

[calm bay]

I'm technically on board with this, and don't care if we reward higher subscription tiers either. My primary interest is rewarding accounts that play more than one character to reduce the incentive to multi-account which frequently comes with downgrading account tiers. That just happens to mostly be premium and platinum accounts since the cost per character slot on a basic account becomes less attractive the more you add to a single account.

[rigid sparrow]

we also need to face the fact that if someone can afford to run 20-30 accounts, and has the computing power and financial means to do so, they probably have the financial means to not really care how much the sub is in more than a couple of cases. which means those would all get upgraded to premium if they're not already, just for the FWI access. increasing the army's loot cap by a significant amount

[fresh turret]

I've been playing since I got out of the Army summer of '96 coming up on 30 years and I've added accounts over the years for various reasons. Most recently because plat shut down and I brought my rogue here. I currently play 6 at the same time grouped together because it is efficient for leveling and experience gain. Right now after every hunt I sing to gems and sell with max trading skill and so far in April I've netted 1.1 million each account. Just shy of the 8m each you've estimated. Just because someone MAs does not mean they are loot capping or even close to it or even driven by that. I've tried to put forth fun ideas that would solve the problem and add a dynamic to gameplay because nerfs just suck. I don't really have any skin in the game because I'm not bothered by the loot cap for all I care they can just give everyone a million silvers a month. I just hate seeing all this shade being thrown on MAers by people who generally think we are the problem give it a rest you need a new hypothesis.

[civic niche]

I have literally never, not once, said MAers are the problem. If you are interpreting it that way, you are misunderstanding something.

[fresh turret]

no I just replied to your post mainly about the 8mil thing. I havn't been tracking who is placing the blame on MAers or anything

[crimson pond]

The obvious answer is that loot gain should be inversely proportional to height

[tender condor]

Me: "Oh hey, the month lootcap just rolled over."

boost loot major
-# Me: "ok, let's do this."

[fresh turret]

The amount of tarts would be unbearable

[crimson pond]

Sorry, I must amend - inverse to height AND proprotional to beard

[umbral lotus]

And number of knees

[visual oar]

I saw someone mention something about loot cap changes? What's changing?

[remote egret]

I believe I saw that we are going to a Universal Basic Income (5million silvers get deposited in your account on the 15th of each month)and no loot will be made from hunting. This will make everyone equal.

[rough vault]

All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.

[slate bluff]

I vote that critters no longer drop treasure but bitcoin.... 1,000 silvers = 0.01 bitcoins

[remote egret]

Good. Lord. SOS is crazy. My hunts from ME are like...7k.

|     Eloot Breakdown      |
+-------------+------------+
| Pool Depth  |          0 |
+-------------+------------+
| Gemshop     |    130,424 |
| Pawnshop    |     28,106 |
| Consignment |      2,742 |
+-------------+------------+
| Total       |    161,272 |
+-------------+------------+

>```

[fierce lynx]

LOL....

sea moul
You search the moulis.
It didn't carry any silver.
Interesting, it carried a heavy quartz orb on it.
It had nothing else of value.
Searching carefully, you find a heavy quartz orb!
A belligerent moulis crumbles into a putrid compost.
[You have been awarded 40 Long Term Experience!]

I am winning OrbStone!

[civic niche]

Looks like someone just realized how people hit loot cap in 9 days.

[remote egret]

Yeah - my rogue and empath have been hunting here most of the month. I must be into the soft cap by now.

[fierce lynx]

SOS has been pretty phat lootz since Gemstones rolled out.

[civic niche]

That's in line with a typical Pits of the Dead haul too.

[rough vault]

Captain Obvious suggests someone should monitor and do a better job of balancing loot...the loot pressure algorithm is obviously not good.

[civic niche]

Loot pressure has never in my mind achieved the goal it set out to, and in an era of lootcap is even less functional.

[remote egret]

Yeah. My rogue is virtually invincible in SOS though. Not sure how much risk you have in the pits of the dead.

[civic niche]

Me? My sorc dies there like once a week due to some sort of SMR roll then getting impaled by a disir lance through the eye/neck. My empath hasn't died there in at least a month.

[remote sun]

more like since the area came out

[chilly tulip]

I don't think SOS knows, or cares, that loot pressure exists

[cold zephyr]

I'm doing pretty good myself. This is just the ones I've found from looting creatures, I haven't bothered to have it add in the ones I find in boxes. I'm sure there would be an extra 20-30 orbs and 10-15 cubes if I did.

[loot_tally: Tracked Items:]
[loot_tally:   solid moonstone cube : 32]
[loot_tally:   heavy quartz orb : 56]
[loot_tally:   heavy moonstone cube : 3]```

[cold zephyr]

Did a 15 minute hunt, found 4 boxes that held 2 orbs and 1 cube (not added to my tally list), plus I found more from looting!

[loot_tally: Tracked Items:]
[loot_tally:   solid moonstone cube : 35]
[loot_tally:   heavy quartz orb : 57]
[loot_tally:   heavy moonstone cube : 3]```
+3 cubes and +1 orb from looting creatures.

I am so winning this.

[remote egret]

I really like finding all the orbs while hunting (on my empath). I now just USE THEM and become even stronger!

[civic niche]

Sure. But that’s because you’re some weirdo bow using empath. More cs for me arguably doesn’t do anything at this point.

[cold zephyr]

You can only use so many during your hunt since they don't stack and they suck if you can't use them because they weigh so much. The weights on these need to be dropped or allow the duration to stack....honestly once you get past level 20 you only get +10 bonus, that isn't going to really make or break anything if the duration is allowed to be stacked.

[tender scarab]

This thread reminding me over and over why the Sanctum is so great.

[bright pasture]

yes. come die here everyone

[remote sun]

moar lurks!

[remote egret]

I do agree - they should allow the duration to stack now that we find so so so many of them. And I'll take the +10 CS all day e'rry day!

[unique oyster]

I'd settle for something like "stacks up to 30 minutes" for cubes/orbs. As it stands, the spells are impractical to use. Also, +10 maneuver bonus isn't all that useful either when open rolls are the real killer.

[boreal trench]

I hear you sometimes get mana refills in SoS for no particular reason

[flint mortar]

Nope. And bots were still farming. The group bonus was an additional middle finger for players who ran solo.

[bright pasture]

hm never seen that is it accompanied by some particular messaging?

[boreal trench]

j/k, just the mana-ambushing I catch some of you with while hunting SoS. 😄

[bright pasture]

oh haha yes, i see that messaging a lot 😄

[royal epoch]

Hmmm.

[rough summit]

Has the staff ever addressed if once a player/account hits loot cap does this affect the chances for locks/keys to drop as well?

[remote egret]

Yes they have addressed it.

[rough summit]

Since i cant find anything on the wiki care to share if loot cap affects lock/key drops?

[warm agate]

I found a few locks on my secondary account (which generally does not hit lootcap) since the changes were implemented. Nothing for Brigit. Totally ancedotal though 🙂

[chilly tulip]

#1343619624398225539 message

[royal epoch]

Hm.

[civic niche]

I’m trying to figure out if these random gm posts in the loot cap thread have something to do with lootcap or are just trolling me.

[royal epoch]

Other options exist.

[civic niche]

Great thanks, good to know that. Still waiting to hear what the changes in response to the loot data might be though, you know, the ones we were going to hear about in "weeks".

[warped escarp]

it's been 3 1/2 months since this post was made. i want to echo the frustration that there have been numerous constructive suggestions by players to fix this, that we've been told repeatedly it's going to be addressed on a short timeline, and that, in fact, nothing has changed. it's starting to feel like this thread is being left up as a place for players to vent about the changes until we give up and accept it. i think this has been a net negative change for the game, particularly almost universally for the most active and dedicated players, has not met its stated objectives, and represents a core facet of the game which thus merits a prompter and more serious response.

[royal epoch]

I understand your concerns. Wyrom's been engaging with this thread with some regularity, but we're also in the depths of Rumor Woods, so he's undoubtedly busy.

This isn't just a lootcap thread; it's about the overall loot and treasure experience.

With that, I will return to my cryptic posting.

[remote egret]

Gemstone bugs would also appreciate some attention! (not as fun as cryptic posts I imagine though)

[royal epoch]

Having cleared out some 100+ bugs over March, I would agree that it's not as fun. 😛

But yes, cryptic posts:

[fresh turret]

I needed to come up with another dumb idea for Hapenlok to ridicule me over he's running out of stuff to gripe about.

Not a huge silver sink I realize but what if there was an NPC like say the lumnis pilgrim who would for a fee change your green orb into a blue orb, blue into indigo, and indigo into violet ... for a fee or maybe just added verb trap to the items that you could clench it with silver on you to change it?

[fierce lynx]

How many new bugs did you create in the process? :p

[royal epoch]

Hopefully 0.

Realistically, have you played Starcraft?

[crimson pond]

POWER OVERWHELMING

[frozen tusk]

Feelin some Charlie Sheen winning tiger blood energy in here

[royal epoch]

I may just keep posting cryptic things.

[frozen tusk]

https://tenor.com/view/clapping-emilio-estevez-charlie-sheen-applause-gif-11077207230183806308

[civic niche]

With all due respect, your attitude here comes off as flippant and disrespectful to the people who have legitimate concerns with loot cap.

[royal epoch]

I'd prefer you not take it that way. I can't address your loot cap concerns specifically and they're kind of separate from my focus today.

[civic niche]

I will endeavor to not see it as such.

[warped escarp]

i'm inclined to agree that it's a little tone-deaf towards exactly how much this has alienated the player base. i know several players (whom i liked a great deal and miss) who have completely stopped playing, some who previously had multiple premium accounts, over this. it's really made the game a difference experience which is significantly less fun for a great portion of play time. this thread must have more posts than any other thread, ever, in the discord, and it's almost entirely either negative feedback or suggestions to fix it, with the occasional positive comment sprinkled in. the absence of any apparent pressure to meaningfully address it is not going over well. i appreciate all the work being done behind the scenes and the efforts to communicate with us, but i think that it's not enough, and i suspect many others feel similarly.

[royal epoch]

I'm sure you're aware that I've communicated pretty thoroughly about loot cap issues where I can and have gone to some pretty extraordinary lengths to gather player thoughts on it. Nothing has changed there, though we've talked some internally about it.

However, this thread is also about other loot changes.

Hopefully what I'm teasing will be enjoyable.

[warped escarp]

i look forward to seeing it, as i do to all of your creations, auchand!

[royal epoch]

I can understand being frustrated that we're not responding to your core concern, but if there's silence, it's just because there's nothing to relay at this time.

I spent the better part of a day scraping this entire thread from Discord, running it through AI, and creating a full spreadsheet of all the player suggestions ranked by frequency of suggestion.

[remote egret]

I just don't like being teased, personally (not that I think it is mean what you're doing or anything). I do like/miss when we were brought into the thought process to provide feedback though!

[civic niche]

Ok, the fact that puzzles/teasers do nothing but make me angry probably didn't help with my reception.

[warped escarp]

i appreciate hearing that very much -- it's nice to know our suggestions are being chronicled and reviewed. i think that with such a sweeping change to the game which affects so many systems, a slightly more frequent "hey we're actively working on this" would go a long way towards quenching the torches in here

[spring crow]

You'd think so.

[frozen tusk]

This thread is the biggest echo chamber ever, number of posts doesn't mean squat.

[warm agate]

Dumbassary. Already down to basic on 1. Let's go for 2

[warm agate]

My last response is thinking what I want to say to you. I don't need to run my thoughts through AI. I am AI. GS mentality is wrong per usual I''ll just downgrade. You don't want me to play full time I won't pay full time. Problem solved. Oh and how about fixing the bugs I paid for IE loose leash

[royal epoch]

While I'm happy to engage with you over your concerns, I'm not here to be a punching bag.

[warm agate]

Fair

[royal epoch]

Please keep in line with our Discord rules.