The Pheons effects on game economy and player experience

[vasi86le]

1400 gold for 95 blue crystals on Eu central servers…

[ilovewater]

Can you imagine no pheon cost on rocks. They would be 20x the price.

[BlackHeart1793]

@ilovewater

Can you imagine no pheon cost on rocks. They would be 20x the price.

“Things will happen this way trust me my crystal ball told me so.”

[pekopekoramiko]

If thing are getting expensive like this i wonder whether Arkesia deserve to be save.

[Oriental]

@wuzaa2012

or cannot justify spending what it takes either in-game or in real money to accomplish this.

Maybe in near future kids within families have also to pay if they want to play games.

Gaming nowadays became a big piece of shieet

[ilovewater]

Has nothing to do with “crystal ball”…it just makes sense. If people could spam stones infinitely without pheon cost the prices would be nuts.

[vasi86le]

If nobody buy it because is to espensive, they will lower the price… Another thing, i prefer to pay 1k instead 500 gold if i know the gold go to seller and not for a stupid extra mega tax…

[rwbergstrom]

I love it when people cite themselves.

[Xaolinzim]

Today 09/01 the crystal reach 3k…

[vasi86le]

And still exist ppl who defend pheons…

[WhizBang]

Pheons at their core are just tax… and nobody likes paying taxes ever…

[DQO07]

For sure, because there isn’t a problem with the system. Just because YOU have a problem with it, doesn’t mean there IS a problem. Tomorrow I will buy GvG gear for my main, it is going to cost close to 15k gold in pheons to do so. The total cost of the build without Pheons? 6k gold. Do I have a problem with that? No. Why would I? It is a part of the game, a part of the game that isn’t going anywhere. The sooner people stop whining about it and just accept the reality that it will continue to be a system in the game, the better cleaned forums can be.

[WhizBang]

Your ability to give into a broken system depresses me where is your fight your courage man! Courage!

[vasi86le]

A stupid part of system… If you have tone of gold and for you is not a problem to gear 100 alts, dont mean all have your gold and your time. This game start lose many players, new players are going to give up because they cant make accesories, stones, can`t gear alts and never get closer to the end content… Pheon stop your progress, make you to think why a tax is bigger than product price with 1000% 1500%? is this normal? no, is not but who have to much gold, dont care about other ppl… When this game will have only 50k players, maybe they will change something and they will stop punish f2p players and new f2p players.

[Ayuuki]

tbh. I would like to see 1 change about pheons… and in my opinion would actually help alot… amazon should make our aura give some daily rewards on top like on russia with some minor rewards ( on russia best reward is prolly 3 pheons daily for free… thats like 90 pheons from full aura )… so russian aura gives next stuff on daily basis: 5 green potions, 1 res feather, 1 purple rapport, 3 pheons, 1 una task fast completion and box with some materials to chose ( choose between solar protection, normal honor leapstones and small things like that )

and for me this would be great deal… and im sure majority of people gonna like this change because it makes aura more worth to buy for gold nowadays in blue crystal inflation

[WhizBang]

What about a decrease of pheons needed to purchase? When it was 15 gear, 5 stone that wasn’t that terrible but 25 / 15 is toxic.

[TiddyMcgee]

New players keeps games going. Imagine being a new player rn. No way they’re happy unless they start swiping

[yarita]

Please don’t take for gold everything that people is posting here on the forums. I don’t know, maybe I’m bias, but I feel like this forum creates a image of the game that is not the reality. Yes, probably nobody likes pheons at the core concept, but saying that pheons are a problem to the game is disingenuous. People can farm gold, if you farm gold you can convert into blue crystals and buy your pheons. And remember, buying accessories is a one time deal for a very long time, till ancient accessories come out. If people are switching accessories like are nothing, well sad to say, it’s on you and you are playing knowing you are wasting money. Pheons are a cheap way to solve some market problems, we all know which ones. They could do other solutions possibly but at the core this game is free to play, and somehow they need to make money, more than just skins btw. That being said, if you ever feel the need to swipe your credit card JUST for pheons you are making a fool of yourself when you literally can farm them.

[vasi86le]

You know, price of blue crystal rise and rise again, when i post first time about pheon problem, blue crystal was 950 gold, today is 1600 gold, the price of pheon rise with price of blue crystal, i dont want to pay extra gold for useless items like pheons, i dont farm gold to pay extra mega tax, if the product cost 250 gold, i want to pay 250 gold, not 250 gold for product and 4500 gold for a stupid tax… I feel i pay gold for nothing, for a shit tax… I play this game from first day of release, but i sold only 4-5 accesories, in last 3 months i dont sell 1 item, even in put it with low price, why you think i cant sell? because nobody will pay 4500 gold for 1 item wich in AH cost 250 gold. I talk about one solution, make item bound after you purchease from AH, and if you want to sell again, pay pheons to put it on sale. and dont understand wrong, i dont want items to be bound on character when drop, only after you buy it from AH. For example, if i drop 1 ability stone in chaos, good stats, stone is unbound. i registered for sale, someone buy my stone and want to sell it again with higher price, if he want to register again for sale in AH, he must pay pheon tax to unbound again the stone(number of trades remain how is now). I that way, they can prevent flipping and will protect players who want only make their accesories, ability stones for their chars, alts etc. Can find another solutions if they want, for example they can make an option when you buy your accesories, stone. Make 2 options, when you buy an item, you can chose 2 option. 1. Pay pheon tax and item will not be bound to char. 2.Dont pay pheon tax but item will be bound to your char and you cant unbound or if you want to unbound, pay pheon tax. Solutions can be found, but they must want that.

[CaptainSpacemonkey]

@wuzaa2012

So, this has probably already been said a bunch. But with rising prices to convert in game gold to crystals this becomes even more prominent.

There are a few key drawbacks that I believe make pheons a very large hindrance to the game. For the purposes of this post I will focus on only two major aspects that cause game disruption.

But before we get into the argument lets calculate just how much pheons cost a player in-game.

I am currently playing on the Ladon server, and the current cost of crystals is 950g per 95 crystals. If we then want to make the most efficient purchase of pheons possible then we need to make this exchange 9x, that means we are spending 8,550g to purchase crystals and buying 100 pheons, leaving only 5 crystals remaining. So that comes out to 85.5g per pheon.

Now that we have established what the gold per pheon value is, lets take a look at what this does both to the game economy and to player experience.

In terms of game economy this affects a players willingness to purchase low cost accessories from the auction house. Lets examine additional cost when it comes to relic accessories, which currently require 25 pheons per purchase. At 25 Pheons per that comes out to a staggering additional cost per accessory to 2,137.5g! This means that if you want to purchase a single set of relic accessories that are “cheap” on the market, before you purchase anything you are already planning to spend 10,687.5g and this is before you actually even purchase a single accessory! I would argue that this hinders a players willingness to experiment with build options, or to change to another build due to the high cost of pheons. In addition it also hinders a players ability to effectively earn gold by selling low cost accessories, as they are never actually low cost since by default, since they are at least 2,137g each as we’ve learned above. This makes an accessory only valued at 100g by a player actually cost more than 20x its player decided value.

Now lets take a moment to see how the cost of pheons can directly affect player experience. This is a situation I come across very often in-game. You’re on an alternate character and you’re going to do a guardian raid, you hit matchmaking and when you get inside you’re paired with 3 other players that have the proper item level, but little to no activated engravings. This leads to either an extremely long fight, in some cases 12m+ or even an outright failure of the raid itself. I would argue the main reason most characters have terrible accessories equipped is directly related to how pheons inflate the cost of accessories that should otherwise be easily attainable for a reasonable amount of gold. This leads to a poor player experience, especially for newer players who are just getting into tier 3 raiding and cannot afford to purchase accessories, or are trying to save those precious pheons for later purchases.

For these reasons I would suggest either a change in how pheons function or an outright removal of them from the game entirely.

Some ideas when it comes to not removing them entirely is to give players a way to earn them in game at a regular rate, that way players who have dedicated time and effort can have more purchasing power when it comes to accessories and ability stones.

An additional way to provide the “flipping” protection could be as follows. Instead of using the pheon as an additional cost for purchasing things, make it an additional cost for selling things, but only on items that are not the initial sale. For example you get an accessory drop in a raid and immediately list it on the auction, it should cost you 0 pheons to list at that point, however if a player purchases this accessory and it loses a “trade” attempt, the next listing costs a certain amount of pheons which can go up with each additional sale. This accomplishes what is being advertised as the pheons main function without limiting the players ability to purchase low cost accessories they intend to use.

I really hope someone from Amazon staff reads this post as it makes logical arguments against an in-game system that results in driving players away from what I think is an awesome game, that with making solid decisions when concerning in-game systems can remain an awesome game for years to come.

Thanks,

Players have terrible accessories because the game has the worst loot system in the history of video games. In a normal video game, the player would engage with content, and after a few runs, get the loot they needed to progress. Not in bot ark. Oh no baby. No way in hell theyd make something as simple as that. Naw. They gotta add 3 completely useless stats to the RNG pool of accessories, the pool that already has horrible rates on which engravings you actually get, and turn it into a pretty much 99.999999% impossible task to complete without spending on the auction house. Players cannot simply just do a bunch of chaos dungeons to farm their sets. Nope. The odds of them ever even seeing 1 piece of usable gear is, like i said, .0000001%. Ive been playing since launch and ive never even once seen a piece of truely BIS for my level drop.

So what do you get? Every single player depending entirely on the auction house, thus drastically inflating the demand for gold, And guess who comes in to fill that need? Bots. So now your game is completely overtaken with bots, and when a ban wave happens, the auction house becomes empty, the cost of everything soars to the moon, and add in the trash as fuck pheon system, you end up with the vast majority of your playerbase being severely undergeared and too broke to bypass the system(plus lets be real, its not worth the insane amount of gold to gear a 1370 now, when the gear is just going to get replaced at 1415). Especially with the powerpasses rocketing them to an item level bracket where engravings are actually important.

SOLUTION:

• -remove Endurace, Expertise, and Domination from the game. This drastically increases the odds of a player finding a usable gear combination in a chaos dungon, chest, abyss, or guardian raid, instead of having to be at the mercy of the auction house to progress. Noone should ever HAVE to use an auction house to progress in a game.
• Drastically raise the drop rate of orange books so that people can actually get their class book without having to spend 200k+(which also pushes people to RMT).