The game prints gold, but crystals only come into existence when money is spent. It’s easy not to think about it when you can trade gold for crystals, but a crystal sink is a dollar sink.
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its actually a core part of the gold exchange. without pheons people have no real reason too buy blue crystals.
in Kr, blue crystals are used for mari’s shop, pheons and pet “stat” rerolling. in the western release, we use it for mari’s shop, crystal aura and pheons. all in all there really isnt alot of options for blue crystals so pheons are there as a consistent thing people need. the fact its a tax and such is great and all, but its done for the gold exchange.
Pheon system is trash and just hurts regular players while the gaslighting indicates it is to help them. The fact you get charged pheons when sending your other characters stuff in the mail shows the system is trash and isn’t about protecting the poor average folk playing the game from the big bad whales. Or how about being charged pheons to get ability stones that you can’t even trade more than once and are a massive rng issue so you will most likely need more than one to get a good facet on them. I mean this crap that it is there to help players is some next level politician level gaslighting. Scary some buy into it.
That anyone actually defends this system is mind boggling to me and makes me think they are suffering from serious Stockholm Syndrome issues.
So many people I don’t think have any idea what is going to happen to the player base when more get to t3 and see all the predatory BS that exists in this tier with pheons, the big silver and gold sink on honing and tripod level transferring, the lousy honing rates which create an excess mats sink It’s going to be the main thing that gets most non diehards to quit the game. I guess the diehards will be pleased by that though since I get the feeling they don’t like all the “filthy casuals” playing this game.
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Wish they werent attached to blue crystal price and had their own fixed cost in gold. Basically you can only gear if whales are flooding the market with Crystals. For example in SA we are running around 700-800ish gold per bundle. so if you wanna buy accs its gonna cost upfront 1200g + the acc price per.
If you wanna test something new, its not worth to spend 1200gs like that per.
I think pheons could be fixed in the NA/EU version by adding a few as a reward for abyssal dungeon completion at the appropriate skill level, similar to gold rewards.
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Pheons are the wrong way to stop people from ruining the games economy
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It simply taxes players who buy from the AH or market. People here dont understand what mentality SMG has. These guys are not making games so you can have fun. There is no passion or vision behind Lost Ark. Its a Gacha. Its here for your money.
The most popular sentence in Lost Ark dev meeting must be “We should add “X” feature to increase revenues”.
Thats it. They will tax you at each corner. They bound items so u cant share them between your own characters dammt!
When are you guys gonna wake up and realize that there is no “game”?
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the 3 trade limit on accessories and skins already stop flipping in a lot of ways.
I see pheons as necessary evil. They’re good for the game but feels bad to the player
Remember pheons isn’t an outdated system that existed from the start. They had to implement pheons to solve an issue. It’s not perfect, but it’s 10x better than not being there
-Pheons are baked into the accessory price, so if they removed the pheons, the same accessories would just go for more gold. You wouldn’t be richer / save gold if they removed them
-They give out free pheons, but they can’t give out free gold (inflation, bots, etc). Non-whales would be hurt by it. In a way, we’re getting free gold that doesn’t impact the economy
-Helps prevent item flipping which would drive up price
If you are careful about how you spend pheons, you can get 3/3/3 gear on your character for like less than 1k. That’s crazy.
I think the system is fine if you are doing content and using the AH to fill in gaps here and there and we get a set amount of free ones each month. I’m talking for our main class here.
One issue is T1 and T2 items shouldn’t have any sort of cost. I get they cost 1 each time you use it but the only reason I’m buying accessories or stones is so I can get to T3 faster and Korea has it so you just start at T3 now, so why do I need to waste such a precious item on lower tier stuff?
Another issue is alts. The expectation is you will have T3 alts and unless your alts are all the same class, how are they getting good accessories? This is a big elephant in the room. I haven’t gotten my T3 alts T3 accessories yet through the AH, but for my main it cost me 15 pheons for each item…let’s not talk about stones and you need to try A LOT of times due to absolutely trash RNG on getting stones that aren’t junk.
Im fine with them honestly. They work to help curb bots on the market.
I’m probably not a good person to ask but I haven’t have any problem with them yet. The game has given me over 400 and I’ve only used 3. I think in higher tiers & with relics the peon cost is higher so we may see more complaints/problems then.
phons are a SACAM, is the most disgusting thing on this game by far. worst thing is they wont ever take it away, i bet this is probably the most profitable item they sell. is why they dont care about bots or anything like this. more items, mote gold in the market = more phones sales
if you so much to even trade/mail items to an alt you get charged.
this is a dirty tactic typical of greedy companies like this who dont care about anything other than selling something with no regard of how or what they sell.
i really liked this game until i had to experience first hand the reality of this SCAM.
they should be ashamed of even doing this but that imply they have some shame to begin with.
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you are dumb
pheons exist so that you don’t waste your gold buying accessories you don’t need.
It makes you THINK before buying.
If pheons didn’t exist you would waste more gold buying accessories you don’t need than buying pheons and the accessory combined like now.
right or wrong?
I don’t care about pheons at all the price of pheons compared to the prices of the accessorioes worth buying are irrelevant.
The single thing I hate about Pheons is that you can’t put gear for your alts in your roster storage, you have to mail it to your alt and then pay pheons for YOUR OWN GEAR is so lame.
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Pheons are fine. Them being tied to crystals is fine.
There’s however 2 problems with them:
- If and when they’re tied to crystals, botting can’t be a massive issue in the game, which it is, because it’ll inflate their prices alongside the economy and skyrocket their prices
- Their pricing is already skewed up, especially when it comes to skill stones that are pure gambling
And with these 2 things put together the first problem causes the prices to hike around 30% and the latter could use 30% reductions or even more drastic measures. Overall it’s a horrible system right now thanks to their inability to put in the proper verification processes for players to gain access into the game that would bottleneck bots drastically and free the economy of the game, while perma banning or putting RMT’ers into massive debts. If we had proper verifications and RMT’ers would go into the negatives or in drastic cases get permanently banned, Pheons would only be slightly disliked.
At lower crystal price points it would be very easy to fix the problems around them by:
- Lowering the amount of pheons you have to spend on legendary and relic accessories; and ability stones
- Giving us more ways of earning pheons from in-game events and other forms of grinds without paying for them directly
We should naturally have enough pheons to buy 5 legendary and 2 relic full accessory sets and gamble for 5 6/6 stones, without having to buy any of them. As of right now, that’s not the case
Im okay with pheon’s as long as they remove/significantly reduce the pheon cost for ability stones and tripod gear. Im okay with spending pheons on accesories, you know what your getting and can equip it right away, should always be an upgrade. When you spend pheons for stones/tripod upgrades your essentially spending pheons for a chance at an upgrade. This is predatory, but otherwise im okay with pheons on everything else
I just dont use Auction house to buy anything but once every month at most for my main when new stuff comes out.
I will not purchase any items on AH as i dont want to pay the 3-4k gold worth of blue crystals to buy pheons… just to buy 1k gold in accessories for an alt.
There needs to be a better way to get pheons. Until then no AH for me most of the time.
Also issue #2.
Relic ring selling for 200k gold is 25 pheons.
Relic ring selling for 20 gold is 25 pheons.
No reason to get anything for an alt due to that.
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Pheon prices for lower tier accessories are absolutely not fine.
Even the most expensive legendary stuff is like 5k at the most now and it’s 15 pheons per accessory. Stuff that everyone buys on alts for 333 is like 50g per accessory. And the pheon tax is like 6k gold.
Epic stuff for 9 pheons? Matchmaking in 1300-1340 range becomes harder than doing Valtan because noone’s an idiot to spend pheons on their low level alts.
There’s absolutely no reason for stuff to cost so many pheons on lower level.
KR has had years to build up their pheon stacks and they have hundreds of thousands of gold, all of them. So pheon tax isn’t much even though their crystals price is like 2.5k gold per.
But when pheon tax for legendary stuff is literall 1000% from the accessory cost, then we have a fucking problem.
Tripods are also a huge gold sink, but it’s stomachable because only whales gamble on +4 stuff, you just buy it and sell it back.
Ability stones are cancer.
Not to mention how for example I as a paladin simply must have two sets of gear or solo content is literally unplayable and that pleasure costs me 300 pheons total for two sets and couple attempts on stones before I get lucky enough.
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