“We’ve also heard player concerns about the effect these bots may have on the in-game economy when it comes to gold buying and selling, and we are closely monitoring this situation. We have changed the gold reward to silver for some Rapport and Guide Quest rewards in order to prevent the abuse of these systems by botters and gold farmers.”
So to thwart bots, which is entirely AGS issue due to lack of moderation be it in automated tools or ingame moderators, regular players are being affected and having early gold sources removed in a game state where gold sources are already missing. If these bots start running abyss dungeons are you going to remove the gold rewards from those too?
And not having detailed which Rapport rewards and Guide quests had their gold removed and what amount of gold this is exactly kinda points in this being more of a incentivization for people to buy yellow crystals and convert them into gold. And depending on the amount of gold this is it could force some players to sell their materials to be able to hone thus slowing down their progress and incentivizing players to spend even more.
If this truly was to thwart bots running around in early stages of the game this gold would have been REALLOCATED to be obtainable later on, be it in quests or latter stages of rapport rewards, rather than being fully REMOVED. One example of this gold removal in rapport reward I could find is the gold Thirain gives on amicable level. 200 gold and 20000 has been replaced with 40000 silver. And Ealyn had 200 gold replaced with 20000 silver. 40k silver is 160 chaos stones to put this in perspective and 200 gold at 15gold avg is 13 hone attempts. Why wasn’t there a warning that this is going to happen? Because legitimate players would have been able to capitalize on this, IF it truly was to stop bots obtaining gold. RU/KR players are aware of changes sometimes months in advance but EU/NA month after release still doesn’t have a roadmap which was promised in beta or even heads up about upcoming changes. Why are our release notes a friendly news article with little to no details? Are players expected to find out these small changes on their own or disassemble and datamine the game?
What this gold change is going to do is either not affect bots at all or just shift them onto some other methods of obtaining gold, while just punishing players and pushing them to RMT either in ingame shop or in 3rd party websites, which will just incentivize more bots.
Also I’ve read in a post by @Roxx the other day that decisions are made together with Smilegate but there is no Smilegate representatives on discord or forums. Yeah there’s a language barrier but would it be such an expense to have posts by Smilegate representative translated?
I love this game and the way it plays and all of this, but AGS management of it so far has been subpar, and the greed and predatory practices seem worse than a notoriously bad publisher like mailru or a region like KR. And once again;
Why are regular players being punished for AGS incompetency?
I am gear i980 and broke. I have 159 gold. I have not bought much. When it was time to upgrade to Tier 2, I bought some of the cheapest garbage gear for about 5-10g each. My stronghold is barely upgraded. Not sure how other people are making gold, but I am having real trouble with it.
Run T2 chaos gates and run maps with a group afterwards if you manage to get a map. Then sell those mats. You get decent gold for them still I think. Its not gonna make you rich but it is consistent.
Ah yes let’s thwart and slow down the progress of players through extended tutorial to make gold which is a material you need just as much as shards and stones when honing.
And there is even horizontal content that requires you to have gold such as the secret quest on Gesbroy. Or just things that you kinda need like more card slots if you do this horizontal content which if you are fully free to play player can get by trading gold for crystals.
And what about tier 1? On my region blue stones are 1g per 10 and red stones 2g per 10. You need to sell 4000 blue stones to get enough gold to hone into t2. With 4 alts it takes around 3 days to get this many blue stones. So if you are playing one character you gonna spend 10 days in tutorial getting gold to hone? And previously you could feed 2 npcs with 2 rapport items which you can get from tome and have enough to hone through half of t2 even.
And in these 7 days amount of bots didn’t decrease that much even after the ban waves and the detection is still broken because there’s a bot for 2 days now spamming 3 random letters every 2 minutes and 30 seconds. And maybe the price of blue shards is 1 gold because these same bots are now inside instances where they are less likely to be reported and the automated detection obviously is not the greatest.
And iirc the recent update notes article says “We will continue to take a hard stance against the remaining bots to make them inefficient, while ensuring active players can access gold, to create a better experience for all.” Access gold in cashshop or on g2g? And what is meant by active players here? Main + 4 alts doing 2chaos + 2 guard takes 2-3 hours maybe longer even. So casual players are not active enough to be allowed access to gold, especially early on? And worst thing is all the “content creators” that were telling people oh yeah do your rapport this is how you get gold early on with their little tips and tricks, none of them are even mentioning it being removed. Yes bots suck but is this really the only way? Instead of better detection, captcha system when repetitive common bot behavior is detected (putting a captcha if a player is detected on 2-3 common bot xyz in prideholm would kill 90% of bots), ingame moderators. So many things that could have been done instead of hurting regular players.
I don’t know if bots started gathering already but is AGS going to nerf gathering bar or place it behind aura if they start doing that? Or make crafting materials bound like farm materials? Or nerf materials from chaos dungeons or raw gold from abyss dungeons if they run those? Removing this gold isn’t THAT big of an issue but it sets a very shitty precedent and I feel like there’s a lot of other things that can be done to mitigate and fix these issues.
No, you do your dailies and get the 500 coins reward which gets you at least 1000 gold.
On top of that you can sell flowers which go for 70g on my server. Also there are adventure tome items you can sell for a good amount.
And lastly, start playing the game and stop complaining on the forum would probably also help.
I don’t know about anyone else but late game i need more silver than gold lmfao. Not that i disagree with you but more silver options is nice to some extent.
Just play more!!!1! And count on welcome challenge which gives gold from coins literally called “Launch coins” that its going to be same in 6-12 months!!1111!!! Oh you can waste your time to gather flowers for 80-120gold per stack of hundred even though there is limited amount of flowers you can get!!1! Sell your horizontal progression items that are going to devalue in 2 months to 1 gold!!! If you are homeless just buy a house!!!1!
I have 0 issues with gold, I bought 4 ships skins, 4 character skins, 4 cat pets and 4 pinata mounts bunch of card and roster storage expansions on 4 different servers and gotten 6 months of aura with casual mari shop use, without putting a cent into the game on EU/NA, because I was able to exploit early economy and I can put in 10+ hours per day into the game.
The complaints aren’t about me they are about people who aren’t able to do this. And new players in 6, 12, 18 months from now on. It plays into same core issue as releasing argos this early on, even tho its pointless content, it creates this optic of inaccessibility unless you spend. And even this Argos has nerfed gold from it lol
