[Azzo]

I'm quoting Loki from a different thread, not wanting to derail it any further. There has been a lot of talk from staff recently about what they're thinking of doing for armour, and I don't know if what is being hinted at is that great an idea.

Raz, in reply to your earlier post you can expect significant changes to metal armours soon as well. We want more armour use and armour trading in the economy, part of that is reducing the top end gear a little and making it cheaper and easier to get. Note, before anyone gets upset, this does not mean top end gear will suck, the best gear will always be the best gear and it will always give some (reasonable) advantages.

So we aren't just going after ruining leather for no reason ya see...

By high armour, do you mean the top 3? Top 6? Top 9? As someone who is selling a lot of armour people are buying the low stuff, a few buy the mid and you get the odd sale of the really top stuff. To break it up, I'd say Old Copper -> Bloodrock is low (2k-10k), Aqua -> Blackrock is mid (15k-50k), and Oceanic+ is high(75k-400k).

I wouldn't touch the high stuff, as much sells of that as you see mined up from the ground at the current price points.

The low stuff you could probably remove a couple of ingots types, mainly the duplicate AR value ingots, e.g. silver/verite, amethyst/gold, rose/something else.

What needs 'fixing' is the medium ingots, but that's not a supply thing. I (I am speaking as a semi-recently gm'd blacksmith who mined his ingots) have more than enough supply of the Aqua -> Blackrock (7k aqua + 16 sets available to 1k Blackrock + 16 sets available) and people aren't buying them, or barely.

Prices are already so low that if I dropped the mid any further nobody would buy the lower end stuff. The high end stuff I'm happy with, you go for the long sale on them at a high price, you shouldn't expect to see everyone running around in daemon steel plus..

But the mid, there is no reason to buy the mid. I've held off pricing the mid at the supply I have because it will destroy the market for low, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who could do that. To clarify, if I priced mid at the supply I have, it would be 8k~ for a full suit of Mytheril. At that point, why would anyone even bother buying anything lower, especially when people are making so much money from hunting.

So I think armours might need reworking more than the tweaking suggested. Different bonuses, or maybe change how AR works so that 1-2 points difference actually matters. You could instead reduce the amount of ingot types to shorten the ranges, as seems to be the plan, but unless you drop it to like 7 or 8 types, you aren't going to solve the problem. And if you drop rarity of the top even with a smaller range it'll just be the same problem.

If you increase supply of higher end you'll just end up with everyone in the top 3 armours, and no market for the smaller stuff. If that's your goal, then ok, fine. But I lament turning blacksmithing and mining into professions which produce disposable goods.

EDIT: Also Loki, I used your quote cos it had all the relevant info in it but it is more representative of all the info we seem to be getting from staff than targeted at you.

EDIT2: Some clarifications.

[Elia]

Agreed. Not only dropping it to 7 or 8 types, but maybe adding some resisting bonuses, or something else. I see no reason in ores lower Aqua, because they are not wearable at all [unless you like the colour], and if people even don't buy Aqua -> Black Diamond stuff, then finally something must be done with the variety of ore types.

[Azzo]

I'm against dropping to 7 or 8 though, I like the diversity. I think keeping it is good, just make it actually diverse and not 'fake' diverse. Fake as in not useful.

[Ramza]

Armor would be much more useful in the mid range if it was usable in PvM. Right now mid level monsters like dragons hit so hard that no matter what armor you have you cant stand toe to toe with them. So you might as well wear little to no armor so you have little risk of losing anything.

Personally I get tiny lag spikes sometimes and I dont want to risk a 50 or 75k gold armor set to lag. Im sure that mid level armor would help melee against monsters, but I just bring a bow and EV scrolls and go to town. Same problem in PvP, I won't risk losing that much gold since it's very easy to get ganked and lose it all.

[Loki]

The changes are planned to achieve the following things:

1) Ensure that top end AR is not overpoweringly good or expensive, the reason for this is that having a high-cost way of buying a big advantage in PvP tends to be a bad idea, c.f. HFs, SoVs and so on from IN1. Furthermore, the going rate for exceptional sapphire appears to be about 800k: this is quite simply too high.

2) Redistribute the range of ARs such that there are less duplicated/1-AR-difference armours.

3) Improve the economics of wearing mid to high level armour for PvP and PvM, this means bringing the prices down and increasing turnover in the economy.

To achieve this we are looking at some or all of the following measures. Although I cannot stress this enough: Discussions are still ongoing on the staff forum and we promise nothing specific at this stage.

a) Removal of some of the less popular/aesthetic ore types such that a better distribution of ARs can be achieved and better drop rates on remaining ores should increase their presence in the market.

b) Reduction of AR on top end gear but a proportional increase on their drop rates, the top gear will still have a reasonable amount of additional AR and will still comparatively rare, but the distribution will be more logical and the drop rate will aim to produce a price that is a little more realistic on the top AR types.

c) We have already cut the amount of AR from exceptional to 4, we may also improve the chance for exceptional crafting, this is such that less ingots are "wasted" by failing to get the (extremely significant) 8AR bonus we used to have.

d) Low end armour will inevitably see less use among experienced or wealthy players, but it is that way on every server I've ever played and that is OK. It is better than having prohibitively rare and expensive mid and high range AR. To give low AR colours a use we may introduce a crafting system more like IN1/default sphere whereby you can craft plate out of low end ingots at a much lower skill and with much better success rate making them the staple training/cheap and accessible option for new and low skilled players.

As usual I ask that players try to look beyond their own business/personal interests and see the problems the staff are trying to solve:
- Low use of armour in PvP and even in hunting
- Ridiculous prices on suits of exceptional high end AR
- Uneven distribution of AR in the current system
- PvP and other types of damage are balanced around either average-AR (say 40) or invul (53) keeping top gear at AR around 68 is likely to cause problems when/if those armours see common use in hunting, duels or tournaments.

[Venos]

Armor - 10k
Weapon - 10k
Scrolls, pots, reagents etc - 5k

Gold earned from hunting for 1 hour - 50k+

If anyone complains about how hard it is to get gear then please tell them to go play WoW.

[Loki]

Venos, even if we take your prices as correct then 25k/death for a new/weak PvPer makes actual participation in the PvP system in order to improve, learn and have fun somewhat difficult.

However, as a separate point, one can simply observe that armour is not in wide use right now and that alone indicates a problem, both in the economics of armour and also in how well it serves its purpose.

[Azzo]

Everything I hear supports Venos' numbers. People have claimed 500k for an afternoon/evening's hunting. Obviously take it with a grain of salt but even being super conservative and saying 100k, I don't think a week and a bit's worth of hunting is unreasonable for the best armour in the game. At 800k cost you're not going to see it used in hunting trips or open world pvp because of the opportunity cost of losing it, but that was a part of IN1 back in the day and behind my reasoning. Obviously I don't think it should be that way for all armour, only the super top end, hence my focus on changing the mid tier.

So I agree there is a problem I don't necessarily agree with the defintion of the problem (that all sets should be used more in all activities) or the methods suggested to fix it (the rest of your post). I think what I was saying still stands, by reducing the numbers of ingots in the low, mid and high tier, reducing the quality they provide, and also reducing the rarity of the higher tiers will just bring all armours to be significantly less cost than what you gain hunting in an evening, at which point why bother being a crafter?

But what is clear now is what is being sought to be achieved, and that's ok, I'll adapt accordingly.

[Siren]

I like all of the different hues... heh makes me sad to see them go if it comes to that!

[Ramza]

500k for an afteroon/evening? I need to find your hunting spots! I have noticed just hunting last night that the gold drops seemed to have been lowered. Dragons dropping about 1-1.1k, drakes dropping 5-600gp. Those obviously aren't the big money kills, but they are easily tackled.

That's 500 dragons in an evening. If we say 5 hours that's 100 dragons per hour or almost 2 per minute. I'm dumbing that down of course, there is leather and gems and random drops to consider also that increase the per monster drop. I would typically chug mana potions to keep killing, but if the dragons only drop 1k, the opportunity cost for using a mana potion (250ish) is really too high at that point.

[Azzo]

Last person I remember claiming it off the top of my head was Xerxes in public chat a few days ago. But as I said even if you drop it 5x to 100k as it was probably exaggerated, or even an order of magnitude to 50k for an entire afternoon/evening my point still stands.

Regarding your edit, if you run the numbers on 100 or 50k, as I've said from the beginning I think that's a more conservative estimate, then it is more feasible.

[Ramza]

Well there are (or were) PvM enemies like the named vampires or Vampire lords that drop 4-6k and are relatively easy to kill with poison + several EVs simultaneously. I don't think 100k per night is exaggerating though. I still can't see myself spending over a week farming to get an armor set that is useless due to it's cost. Hopefully the upcoming changes will make the higher end armor more usable.