Crowns of the Obsidian observation

I don't see the problem with coto's for crafters, I think the durability change is what hurt crafters. The biggest problem I think for me is the cost and durability that enchantments put on equipment, in order for it to be worth it for me to buy the durability must be good, if you don't get lucky with the extra durability enchantment the item is worthless to me because I don't want to use a coto to fix it and I don't want to pay outrageous prices constantly in gold to repurchase new equipment, and on top of that the cost to crafters is enormous, not only with losses from failures, but for materials if they don't gather themselves, so they have to charge outrageous prices.

I can go through a basic suit in about a little more than a week the way I play and the 2 handed weapon about 1 per week with just 100 durability. If I were to buy enchanted gear with a lot less durability, it'd all be broken within a week and I'm out a lot of gold or having to buy coto's to fix it. So the basic set of equipment, with no enchantments or very little with higher durability is more appealing to me, and I can just gather and craft that myself. The durability change changed everything for me, before I would have happily bought from others, but with the changes, it just changed me into blacksmithing and crafting the items myself for basic equipment with no enchants. If it changes to where I just have to have enchantments I have my alchemy to high levels now and plan to gm it too so that if need be I can just enchant my own stuff too. I'd really rather have not been a crafter as I never do it except for cooking and alchemy in most games, but with the changes, now I'm a crafter(working on gm'ing everything), gatherer, fighter.

 

So because Portalarium is in control we should all just have faith not discuss our concerns??

I am sorry friend, but your opinion is backwards. The point of the forums is to have a civil discussion about everything concerning this game. If you want to disagree with me, that is perfectly acceptable but going forward please do not attempt to derail my threads with your anti discussion mantra.

 

So, I can't voice my opinion because you disagree with me? That's pretty hypocritical. BTW, not once did I say that you couldn't express your concerns. I only think we should wait a bit too see how the economy plays out.

BTW, I'm engaging in discussion and you're the one trying to shut me down.

 

Interesting, I have indeed noticed significant durability loss regarding my weapon, but virtually nothing in regards to my armour.

I have had to replace my hammer and shield once already, but the armour itself I have only replaced with better versions (the rest I put on my vendor at a "used" discount).

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As for the prices of equipment : Yes, the insane 1000% markup on resource prices is frankly just dumb and unsustainable in the long run. You have proven it yourself by cutting out the middle-man and doing it yourself.

Personally, I sell my equipment at considerably more affordable prices, with the expectation that not everyone has 100k to burn on a new outfit. I personally don't need the money, and can offset living expenses while hunting for supplies.

I expect other low-priced crafters will pop up as well, however I suspect they will all be out in out-of-the-way locations (such as myself who lives out of POTs exclusively).

 

What's really funny is the hangout when the guy was explaining why they weren't doing durability loss and then the chat blows up with we need durability loss than a day or so later hey we're gonna make durability loss now. I just didn't get the reasoning for such a quick change when they explained why they weren't doing it then poof hey gonna do it, lol.

Here's the link to that discussion. Starts at 40 mins 40 seconds.

 

I have noticed the same thing. I have completely burned through the max durability of 2 two handed swords, but have not even applied one repair kit to any of my armor.

 

Since there's a huge chance that you'll destroy the item, I think the durability hit should be significantly reduced.

 

There have been a number of times in the past 2-3 years where people said Portalarium lied to them and I rushed to defend Portalarium. I said these are honest people. I know how much they value integrity. It is a fairly transparent process. Some things change over time simply as the nature of development.

I must say I was shocked and disappointed after hearing so many times that SotA will avoid P2W, and seeing Chris object to the Tools of Prosperity because they were P2W, only later to be told the intent was ALWAYS to have some P2W and that P2W isn't bad because Guild Wars 2 does it.

This is the only time where I feel like Portalarium really went back on something they promised in a big way.

I empathize with their need to make money. I fear that this could back-fire and they end up losing money because it drives away existing backers as well as future sales.

We capitulated to people who said that unless items break you'll never have crafters or an economy, despite the fact that most every single online game in existence has a working economy and rich crafters even without items breaking. There were also potential compromises of moving repair costs to crafters instead of NPCs we ignored. We went to the worst possible solution. It hurts crafters. It hurts players. And COTOs are P2W in their current implementation.

 

Not from what I've seen; they seem to be dropping. When I first saw them come on public vendors, they seemed to be around 3,500 and higher prices on player owned vendors, sometimes around 5,000. Now many are sold for below 2,000 on public vendors and I've seen a lot of player owned vendors drop to 2,500. Of course, you could always get better deals if you asked around. But I've seen vendor prices dropping.

 

My observation is anecdotal, it's possible that when I'm looking at public vendors the lowest prices have already been purchased.

I'm also talking about a two week period of time where "change" happens very quickly. What I've seen specifically is that on day one the public vendor had a lot of "9000 per crown" offers, but that quickly went down to 6 to 3k. The lowest I've seen is 1000 per Crown by Dreamo, but he quickly ran out of inventory (at least on public servers) and the price went back up to 2500. On player vendors that price as sometimes doubled, as I believe some players have purchased at that price though probably sparingly.

I just looked at the Owl's Head public vendor earlier today and the price continues to inch towards 3000 and away from 2500 although you can still find 2500 in some places.

 

That's why I'm going to sit on mine for a while.

 

That only sets a lower limit on their value, not an upper limit. If they cost 250 gold then you might as well pay your rent with them. It quickly becomes (as in it already happened) a really dumb idea to use them to pay rent when you can sell them to pay three or four times as much rent.

 

That is possibly because the player economy hasn't taken off yet. It has been only two weeks, and many people haven't been able to place lots (and thus private vendors) yet. (When people were able to place lots immediately, it took a week to start up; the land "rush" could add two or three weeks to that as people hunker down to live out of a bank.) Right after a wipe there is no cash gold in the economy until people start selling junk to NPCs (and some gold from doing quests), and as people use their first gold for skills training.

 

Yes, and the price has lowered, from my observation, because people want to compete with all the other COTO sellers.

I think we have to wait to see what happens when the economy takes off. But I'm just saying that currently I've seen it in an opposite trend.

 

Yep, I've seen some for 1500, some for 5000, I woudn't say they are dropping yet, I saw these prices all on the same day! The economy is much to young to see a stabilized price of GCOTO's.

 

That's because we're still in the early economy cash crunch, and they have all these freebies that they don't really understand and would rather turn into cash gold right now, rather than wait for them to become more valuable.

 

I wish I had gold to buy some COTOs just to get those concept art paintings. I've barely had time to login, play, level or earn gold. Hopefully COTOs won't be too expensive down the road. I'd open my wallet and buy COTOs with real world cash to buy concept art paintings, but I don't want to buy COTOs with cash while they are selling the P2W Obsidian Elixirs.

I'm trying to hold onto my pledge COTOs in case I need them for repairs later.

 

Port admitted that COTO drops ingame wasn't working, but said that the issue was fixed like 3 days ago.

A bunch of us went to Vauban Pass last night for 2-3 hours and did a LOT of killing.
Not one single COTO.....

They said "not to worry about PtW" since COTO's would be ingame drops....

We'll see.... so far, the drop rate is less than abysmal ....

I farm a LOT and expect to be able to get what I need for repairs - ingame - I have no plans to buy them from the store.

 

Don't forget: the price that something is listed at is not it's value. The value any one person places on something is not exactly the same as anyone else. There are variables like convenience and cash on hand. The closest you can come to actually learning somethings value is looking at a list of what people were actually willing to hand over for it over time.

 

I don't know much about repairing, what is the difference between using COTOs ( and how? ) vs repair kits?