This is a message that I had spent a few days drafting, because to be honest, I do not know the real solution to this. I have considered all the possible options to assist my friends who have started the game (slightly after the Argos patch), but all in all, I concluded that there are so many problems that are underlying within the game that makes the progression of a fresh character today difficult. As they are reaching 960 now, I noticed that there is a huge problem. They are running out of gold needed to hone and progress. This is after I suggested every single gold method I know that can be done in a reasonable time. I suggested alts, but even with 2 additional alts at T1, the amount of gold that is gained is pitiful to say the least. I have actively avoided RMT, but I won’t be surprised if my friends just gave up on trying to make gold in the game and resort to illegal methods to get such gold.
Which comes to a really big problem. Firstly, we have bots. While they have inflated the economy, what they have also done is increased the price of materials way above the gold honing price. This made the sale of unbound mats for a bit a viable option for making gold needed for extra honing attempts. This was quickly resolved and easy gold access is essentially eliminated from the game. But what the devs also forgot is that the regular players also get affected by this change. The amount of weekly gold you can get in this game is abyssmal in T1 and T2. Abyssal dungeons barely pay enough for the amount of effort done, and guardian raids is literally not worth the bombs at all right now, which makes it feel like you are spending gold to get very minor profits. Moreover, the amount of gold you get for grinding out life skills is horrible thanks to bots essentially pushing prices down as well as the general lack of gold by everyone. Heck, even crafts are only profitable if you manage to crit the craft, doubling your reward. All-in-all, literally nothing feels rewarding, and it feels discouraging to see my friends struggling like that.
My friends are only one case study, but I believe there are other players, who start even earlier but are still affected by this change. I was kinda lucky I got to 1360 recently, and I at least had slightly better gold resources than my peers, and will attempt to get out of the deadzone once mats drop to a point where I can comfortably spend my gold on them. As ironic as it is, I am also technically stuck in this loop, with the exception that at least my bottleneck is not on raw gold, and to be honest that is fine by me, since I do not always grind on a daily basis (I do take break days off because irl more important). On the other hand, my friends are at a much worse spot than I am. They aren’t even close to T3, where they could at least get more supplies of actual gold. They don’t even have that many Blue Crystals, because realistically speaking they don’t really get the luxury to buy them considering the income.
My conclusion is, at the expense of trying to prevent bots from wrecking our economy (they still are, and I know the devs are doing their best to actually do something about it), but it is kinda cursed if you realise that the average player is getting cucked at T2 right now because the market is completely crashed but raw gold is insufficient to actually get people through the honing process. What I think is that, there needs to be ways to improve the situation. I have some suggestions, you do not need to take them exactly:
- Reduce gold costs for honing in T2.
Gold from abyssal dungeons in the earlier stages have been nerfed. In fact even T3 ones are nerfed. This would be fine if the game is trying to actually access to gate T3, but it is super obvious with 1370 content around, T3 is meant to be a little easier to bridge everyone towards the end game. Reducing the gold costs per hone will help a lot in this regard. This will also help players with alts too, since we need multiple alts to get gold for post 1370 anyway.
- Reward More Gold in the 2 Tier 2 Abyssal Dungeons.
Especially the 8 man ones, which as of the current day use much more effort than any of the Tier 3 Abyssal Dungeons and yet rewards a fraction of the actual gold. I do not expect the game to handout enough gold to get the ilvl to 1100 immediately. What I do expect is that after mats are accounted for, players actually feel like they have earned some gold to use for their honing, and probably will give some thought to doing tier 2 content. Even if only the 8 man abyssal dungeons get buffed, it will be a boon to the players attempting to push to 1100.
- Untradable gold (or perhaps honing chance ticket to remove all the non stone costs?)
Sounds crazy, I know. But it makes sense if you think about it. Shards and Gold are both bottlenecks now. If there is a system or a ticket (even if limited and character bound) that offsets the cost of a hone, (whether it passes or fails is another problem in itself, it isn’t meant to be a guaranteed chance), you give players a way to save gold. However, I personally don’t really like this idea as players may be incentivised to just wait for these tickets to come out, but it is an idea so here goes.
All in all, my friends will most likely be able to power through this, but the thing is that we cannot ignore that gold is a legitimate problem in the lower tiers. We want to avoid botting of such gold, but at the same time we cannot do it at the expense of making the quality of life of newer players worse. This will be moot once we get T3 power passes, but we aren’t there yet, and will never be there until much later.