How much gold do you have right now?

A little over 11 million at any given time right now, based on if im spending on something.

 

I have 8mill but I have all the expensive stuff including the Arena Duelist Sword plus I bought Halo of Hue & Fallen Halo of Hue both also a mill each.

 

I deem it wasteful to buy level 27 version of Arena Duelist Sword because you can just get a lower level version of it.

 

It is wasteful but it’s there to buy so why not I guess haha

 

It's your gold and you can do whatever you want it it, but I am just saying that all versions of Arena Duelist Sword look the same and it's not a great use of your gold. Level 27 version of it is a straight up rip-off and there are better weapons in that level range and much cheaper too.

 

Could be saved for future things, but of course, there aren't really any interesting expensive items in the game. Strange that they haven't come up with forms and pets that cost a ton of gold (since those tend to be uncommon item categories), or expensive and useful stat items, especially considering a lot of maxed leveled players average around 5 million gold or more, and would prefer spending that gold than doing more pointless grinding for desired items.

Gold could be revolutionized in a lot of useful ways to add balance to the game. If AE ever does some sort of enhancement system (where you can upgrade the level (including stats) of your item), they could make enhancement a way of sinking gold. But of course, the system would have to also be balanced, and that means scaling the level of the enhancement with the level of the player's character. And by scaling, I mean something like, a level 25 player may have to pay 1 gold for a level 1 enhancement, 5,000 gold for a level 15 enhancement, but 100,000 gold for a level 29 enhancement... and as you level up, the cost becomes less. So then a level 29 player pays 75,000 gold for a level 29 enhancement, 1,000 gold for a level 15 enhancement, and 1 gold for a level 1 enhancement. That way,

Enhancement Price ∝ [Base Price * (Enhancement Level / Player Level)^(n)], where n is the rate of growth... or some mathematical formula that's equivalent to that.​

It would make the game less chaotic and more balanced, considering that the game composes of mainly grind, and as you grind, you accumulate more gold than you'll ever need. And enhancement would especially remove any unnecessary grind, so then you don't have to farm for a low leveled item just to craft the next leveled item and craft a higher leveled item (e.g. Daily Boss Craft Rewards).

And at some point, they'll also need to introduce a trading system as a gold sink, which will also lessen the burden of grinding as people begin trading valued items among each other.

Considering that AQ3D is built vastly different than AQWorlds, AE really needs to adapt to a new and different approach, and gold sink features should be better utilized to mitigate the current issues that the game faces in order to actually make the game fun.​

 

AQ3D already has scaling craftable items which were introduced in yesterday's release, but they only scale to your level when you craft them, not every time your level goes up. Seasonal items with stats scale (with a level penalty) if you craft them or get them as drops. Daily Boss area craftshops have scaling now too, but items scale to your level -2 and you have to use Daily Boss Trophies to craft higher quality versions.

Enchantments would make players more invested in their equipment and while at it, wouldn't it make sense to introduce item durability as well? We don't get punished for dying so adding a gold sink in a form of fixing your equipment would help to decrease the amount of gold in the game.

 

I think item durability is a bad idea. For another form of gold sink, it doesn't sound as bad on paper, but the implementation is what makes it seem bad. For instance, does the item just get destroyed (removed from your inventory), once the durability goes away? Some people might equip an item both for stats and for appearance, so having the item go away (getting unequipped and deactivated, or worst case, destroyed) just seems like a bad idea. Also players that struggle with keeping their gold high (these would be the very casual players who may only play a subset of the game, maybe the story only) would have the most problem with durability... then they'll be forced to farm more, which is counter-intuitive for what the gold sink is supposed to serve as.

I think gold sinks should primarily serve as an optional alternative to lessen existing grind, not as a way to change the habit of how a player plays the game. If a player wants to play casually, they shouldn't be forced to pay gold to keep their gear. But if a player invests the time to grinding, they should have the optional alternative to lessen other grind-inducing tasks since they've already worked for their gold. That, to me, is a reasonable implementation for gold sinks, rather than punishing players and changing how they want to play.

 

I wasn’t being funny when I said it’s there to buy was just saying it is a item that costs a lot to own an let’s be honest how long does it take to farm half a mill I could easily have more gold if I actually tried other then dailies, I even have Ebon armor an never even wore it same for all the expensive stuff I have. When gold is needed I will actually farm for it I now have 8.5m now since my last post so just goes to show how easy it is.

 

So are many of the DC items/Collections a rip off as well.

 

Gold has been fundamentally unbalanced since Open Beta. Before then, people actually farmed gold as an enduring activity and it was difficult to reach millions, and AE even patched newly discovered methods back then when they saw that people were making more gold than intended, despite that gold has no fundamental value in the game. Nowadays, you get excess gold alongside other farming activities and dailies, and at a higher rate than before, and gold still has no fundamental value in the game. It's been hard for AE to keep up with nerfing gold that they've just let it roam, and the currency itself has become a scoring system like the scoring systems you find in post-arcade era retro video games where the numbers serve no purpose other than to make the player "feel good".

When you have millions of gold, there's no reason to farm for gold, and there's less reason to play as frequently since gold tends to correlate with the amount of playtime.

 

If AE decided to implement item durability, it wouldn't be as punishing as in most games. If that durability reaches to zero, you will just lose stats from a piece of equipment by a certain percentage the closer it gets to zero, but it won't break. It would serve the purpose of a gold sink and the cost would scale with the level of an item so it's not too much for new players. Death doesn't have any impactful consequences and introducing item durability would fix that and get more gold out of the game which there is plenty.

 

I still think it's a bad implementation of gold sinks, especially since active players will cycle out of their old items at some point anyway by buying new items with upgraded stats (particularly during every new major release) which would make durability not much of a useful feature for them, and would make durability problematic for the less active players or the players that play a lot of non-major releases.

And unless maybe every item is by default cosmetic and stats are globally applied, I just don't see the point of having durability. For instance, maybe I have a level 29 item and it has 10% durability leftover, so instead of just reapplying the durability, I might wait until there's a level 30 item instead, even if it means sitting at 0% durability with my old gear for a couple of months. This could have a negative impact on teamwork for players who choose to go that route by waiting, and the durability system really alters gameplay in a negative manner in that particular case. So the workaround to prevent players from just waiting for new gear would be to have the global durability, so if you buy a new item, it'll retain the same durability as the item you're wielding. But it still dictates how players play the game, and I'm not in favor of that.

And the other problem is that maybe I can find a loophole to not pay for durability (e.g. sell the item and repurchase the item, if the purchase price is going to cost less than the durability renewal). Or if the item is a drop, and I could farm for a duplicate drop and delete the item with the worse durability, and it might be something that takes 1 minute to farm for. But I don't seeing it being an issue with a lot of items since you do have to work for them most of the time (craft items), but there are stat items that aren't as difficult to obtain.

 

That's happens with pretty much all MMORPGs with item durabilty, it's an unavoidable situation and not really a downside. You don't need to make a feature beneficial and gold sinks generally aren't beneficial to players because that's not their purpose is it?

No need to make stats global because that would just lessen the amount of character progression which is a path AQ3D shouldn't go through and why do that to avoid inconvenience that is deserved? It's your fault that your items lost that much durability and you have to deal with it. You get soo much gold nowadays pretty easily without having to play for that long. AE wouldn't go crazy with item fixing prices, it's clearly not their style knowing their track record so it's not going a boulder that just keeps rolling in front of you and slowing you down to the point you just have to gold farm hardcore to keep playing.

You would still end up sinking gold out of the game regardless and that's the point of this feature. Items have a low sellback value and you pretty much never get your gold back in full and items with high stats generally have a low sellback value anyway and that's the case with items with low stats as well. You are making this feature look way worse than it would actually be. It would add flavor to a MMORPG experience and AE wouldn't make it demanding enough to give it the reins over your experience because they are already working on improving that new player experience.

 

Global stats wouldn't necessarily lessen the amount of character progression. Think of a feature like AQWorlds' enhancement system, for example, where you already a bunch of presets, and you can build your stats however you want by picking specific enhancements (Luck, Wizard, etc.), and then you have new enhancements upgrades whenever you level up. Except these enhancements wouldn't necessarily be dependent towards specific items, but would be more towards the overall character stats, maybe tied to your class, so then you still have balanced builds, but you also have variety. For instance, you could be a defensive warrior or an all-attacker warrior.

The problem with AQWorlds' enhancement is that there are certain enhancement variations that make a certain class OP, and people generally limit themselves to the most OP build, which takes away most of the variation, so the whole idea of making global enhancements, but still the option of choice on enhancement presets, is to maintain some balance, which is a necessity for any balanced game.

In AQ3D, you don't even have any choice on your stats build. If anything, the current stats system feels limited to one type of mostly-balanced build, and having to craft items for every new level seems less rewarding, when you're stuck with whatever stats that is offered from that item. Any you don't even get any stats from hard-earned cosmetic items, because they're cosmetic items.

I'm not comparing AQ3D to other MMORPGs with durability. All I'm saying is that durability would make AQ3D less interesting because of the way AQ3D was designed and reshaped. It's gone through many revamps when it comes to classes and stats. And if AE goes the other route of skill trees, then that could alter the purpose of how a gold sink could be used (e.g. spend gold to change your skill tree).

And the other pro to switching to a global enhancement system is that AE won't have to make decisions on what items need stats and what items don't, and how the stats should be distributed for specific items.

 

I would rather see AQ3D do it's own thing and not go the same route that AQW did. AQ3D's stat system feels plain and dull and its old stat system was something that opened up more variety (and it was easier to understand too) which the new system has moved away from.

AQ3D is trying to be different from AE's other games so introducing features which weren't present in their old games should be embraced. If skill trees were introduced, there could definitely be a gold sink attached to it, no doubt about it.

 

I think the problem with going with new ideas is that some new ideas don't work out well, and it really encourages team members to move outside of their comfort zone. It's a lot easier to set up a stats system based on an existing one, maybe modifying it a bit to make it stand out differently, rather than reinventing a new one from scratch. It's hard to say what the original vision of the stats system for AQ3D was supposed to be like, because ideas change as time progresses, but I don't think AE had envisioned gold sink for the stats system. If they plan on a gold sink, they'll need to take into consideration of the viability and purpose.

I'm not exactly opposed to durability. I think some games make a great use out of it, such as Minecraft and Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but it's really the structure of the game and its immersion that makes the feature coalesce smoothly; for instance, you're always focused on the aspect of those games by exploring and killing monsters.

In AQ3D, it always feels like items are to be crafted after completing objectives, used for some short period of time (and used mainly for looks), placed in the bank, and then replaced with a newer item, and the hard-earned items don't really hold much value. And durability wouldn't change the value as much. It's a more casual setting, and people aren't constantly adventuring and doing useful activities that would ignite the purpose of durability. You aren't really progressing much when it comes to actually adventuring... the progress is reinforced by earning things, and that generally means using old craft items to work your way through earning new craft items (by killing monsters to earn craft materials). Aside from repurposing skills, if AQ3D was more open-world with more activities outside of crafting, then I can see more viability.

 

How is AE supposed to know if such a feature would work or not without giving it a try exactly? They can't improve the game if they don't get out of that comfort zone regardless of what that new feature might be.

MMORPGs do those same things which would make item durability make sense to be present and AQ3D should take use of it.

Item durability wouldn't be casual enough for AQ3D? This game is literally about beating up monsters and getting loot, how is item durability something that doesn't fit in? The fact that there is combat should already give such a feature purpose. Nothing is set in stone, besides the story, but when it comes to introducing new features/improvements to existing features, AQ3D is still open to changes.

 

It's not exactly about knowing if a feature would work or not. It's more about having plans, and item durability and gold sinks haven't really been planned out. It would be a risk to implement any major overhaul to anything at this point too quickly, even if the game still isn't Live yet. It takes a lot of preparation and planning to devise a good solution. They could always fiddle with some ideas, but what's more important is prioritizing what's already in the work. And I think that's part of the reason why we don't see huge features implemented as often, because AE faces their own limitations.

And the thing about AQ3D is that its audience is more casual, much similar to AQWorlds' audience, not exactly the 'hardcore' gamers people typically think about for other MMORPGs. Even the mobile platform brings a different perception to what the game is supposed to feel like. Otherwise, going off tangent could alter the audience. Like we could even ask, why doesn't AQWorlds have a durability system since that game's also an MMORPG. My main point is that I don't think every single MMORPG needs to adopt a durability system, especially as a method of gold sink, just because it's an idea to throw around.

 

It's not like AE is working on item durability. They haven't said anything that would imply that and it isn't in their gameplan. If they ever decide to implement something so "casual killing", it's something that could happen after those key features are finished.

I don't think item durability is going to end it all when it comes to casual players (or literally everyone) enjoying the game. The reason AQW didn't have it because it already worked in a way it did so AE had no reason to implement something like that and the main reason most likely was that they haven't actually had such a feature at all in any of their games unless I am remembering wrong. AE is slow when it comes to introducing new features regardless if it affects the gameplay or not to their games and AQ3D is that opportunity that fiddle around because AQ3D isn't completely set in stone yet unlike AQW. All I am saying is that AE could evolve by introducing more new things they haven't tried before and keep at it as they have with AQ3D.