Add a money sink to deal with inflation, everyone has fewer plats to buy items with, price of expensive items drops. But hang on, everyone has fewer plats to buy with - so what's the point in that?

The best thing for Mythic to do is to keep it fairly easy to obtain items. Ever since they added dragon scales and afrit energies, it's kept the price of dragon items low along with various other ToA items. They should just extend this and include ML10 and other ToA items which aren't part of ML10 raids (Kraken/Leviathan).

Adding a merchant where people can choose to buy things for plat doesn't mean that everyone has less plat.

Please tell me why you are going to have less plat?

It doesn't matter what kind of money sinks are in the game, you can still go out and farm plat at the same rate, assuming you have a metalcrafter that can salvage stuff. Everyone can still make plat at the same rate, but if there are more things to spend the money on in game then less plat in the economy should mean lower prices on the expensive items. These things sell for 200 plat because people have 200 plat sitting around.

Even if they tripled the cost of all crafting, which might be a reasonable money sink given for today's game (with essentially 2-3x coin bonuses), it still wouldn't cost you much more to template.

 

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Don't kid yourselves, there has been massive inflation in this game. For those of you who have played all along and now apparently have hundreds of plat built up this may not matter much of course.

Speaking as someone who has recently returned, the cost of templating a character is a massive barrier to participating in the game. I returned to the game with most of my characters having something around 100g or less on them. I have been slowly trying to template them one by one so I can try them out. Every opponent I face is likely thoroughly templated, and the game is somewhat balanced around my characters being templated, so the difference is very noticeable. I am forced to try to get a character reasonably well equipped just to find out if I like playing them or not. I have ignored my shadowblade so far entirely because it became rapidly apparent that it would cost me around 200p or more to get him set up.

Why does this matter? Because the game's population has dwindled and the servers have been merged. If you want that situation to ever reverse itself to any degree, then templating a character needs to be a lot easier and cheaper, otherwise everyone who returns and wants to try the game out is going to be in the same boat as me. I figure its going to take me another 6 months or so to get the majority of my characters templated and set up with their MLs (and then leveled to CL10 of course), at the least. Not everyone has my patience and willingness to grind. I expect a lot of returning players are being driven off by this huge barrier to entry.

If the prices all were lowered, this would be less of a barrier to those returning players. If it means you lose the value of some items you have acquired and are trying to sell, that is rough, but for the benefit of the game overall. If it means you have a ton of spare plat, then at least when an old comrade returns it won't be so painful for you to help them out getting set up, and maybe they will return. If you have more plat than you can possibly spend, then use it to help others out please.

 

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WTB plat donation & surprise box. Similar to trifecta, you buy tickets for cool random prizes but the money collected goes to returning players - the longer the account re-opened was inactive the more plats you get.

 

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This method of ROG generation already exists, though not for straight cash. You trade cash for afrits on the CM, and exchange afrits for ROG. If you know what mobs to pick on each realm, you can control how many drops & what item slots you receive for each handin. All slots are available, though some will cost you dearly (i.e. are only available for handins of 3 or even 5 afrits.)

There are certain drawbacks:
- no transparency (you have to know which mobs can drop what you want)
- no ability to choose the level range (the item levels are random across a broad range, from ~20 all the way up to 50)
- no money sink factor (someone has to farm those afrits)

 

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I don't think it shouhld be nearly that expensive to template anymore. You should be able to template a character reasonably well using mainly just dragon items and artifacts, and these cost close to nothing. Well you might require 5-6 dragon items which could be close to 5 plat each, but its not necessary to buy Astral items for 100+p or some of the very rare jewelry. You can have some toys and still cap all of your stats/hits/resists with just dragon items.

In time I think people will start to do more ML10's and hopefully the prices of those items will drop a bit, but in my opinion dragon items and artifacts have already been made too easy to get.

 

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