[imported_Rabbi Samild]

But you could.. and everyone was mining there, made loads of ingots that way.. plus there are minoc mine still, so mining is obviously safe, u dont even need to enter/leave the mine, u can recall there and from there:/

Yea, but have you seen Minoc mine? It's big enough for 1 person. If you add more than 1 person, it gets stripped because a couple people remove it faster than it respawns.

And who cares about Wind? That mine has been closed for more than a month (right around the time everyone left... HMMMMM).

The point is, there is no where where more than 1 person can mine that is safe.

[imported_Gang-Bang]

Actually you are right, on shard with 100++ people online it would be like this. I have nothing againest improving mining as soon as we'll reach 100ppl online, but atm mining is safe everywhere, u wont find anyone even at minoc mine..

[imported_Rabbi Samild]

You got that right, only 6 people on, no one mining min Minoc

[imported_Theo]

sometimes making things slightly less difficult, could actually help the playerbase.

we are not here to make the weak, weaker and the strong, stronger.

i don't see what's the problem using diff colour ingot to make iron dagger... you still need 300k+ ingots to GM bs and you still need to pay for colour ingots. most people made a new character to lock at 50-60+ bs for irons anyways...

[imported_Jiraiya]

I know the IN crowd is all "we love hard skillgains" but the reality is, this is a 10 yr old game and nearly every person playing has gm'd these skills so many times already. Making them difficult is ok, but there has to be a balance. I mean are you actually being serious rabbi about not using colored igs for smithing? When you have a skill that takes 300k igs to gm, which I personally think is completely rediculous. And then you figure the % of the iron igs you get when ur high up in mining skill. You'd end up with thousands and thousands of rare igs before you had enough to gm smith off iron. Which of course is why you're all gung ho on making exceptional rare ig shields sell for tons of cash so you can double that 30m with your hoarded igs.

I was sitting there at brit bank when noxide gm'd smithing, and right after he got that final .1% he turned to everyone and said, "I dont care that I've spent all this time on this skill. It needs to be made easier."

Its just my opinion but I think this server is catering way too much to the elitist mentality. It was like how Sony ended up alienating 95% of their playerbase after velious because they wanted to please that 5% who were the end game raiders who played 24/7.

Being realistic, you are never going to recoup the ammount you spend on gaining tradeskills here from using the tradeskill itself. The only reason people keep doing them is that there is really nothing else to do. Back on ***** there was quite a few skills I could have done easily, like BS was as simple as getting a piece of havoc/lunar armor and repairing it to gm. I never did it because I was occupied having fun playing the game.

I know this is all fairly abstract and seems like a big complaint post, but thats not really my intention. It feels to me as if there servers economy is based on inducing scarcity to give everything value, rather then making abundance and letting everything balance out based on what the players want and their playstyles.

The best example I can think of is like, wind courtyard from nos. There were always always rare mounts wandering around there. But even to a gm tamer it could still take 30 mins to get one, it was in a non guarded area. So of course it was a pvp fest. The value of the mounts didnt come from people not knowing where they were, but from being able to survive long enough to get them

If changing things around to make things more fun and appealing to new players ends up yielding a few people on the shard who have 100m in the bank. Oh well. Whether a person has 10m or 30m or 100m it doesnt really matter, these are the power players are they'll always be at the top. But catering the shard to please them rarely induces changes the average player enjoys.

It seems like the only people left on this shard are those who have invested so much freaking time into tradeskills here that they dont want to throw that away, but at the same time, theres nothing at all to do and no one to sell their wares to.

/End rant

[maka]

Reality of things, at least form out side, is not entirely what you say. When we choose to introduce something, or set the skill gain at a certain value, we do not think "What would Rabbi want?". We are trying to do some long term changes, that will be good for everyone in the end.

With the crafts for example, our idea was that not everyone would have all the crafts. We wanted people that enjoyed crafting to work on them, or people that enjoy being self supplied. We also wanted crafts to make money and one of the ways we did this was making sure not everyone felt like supplying themselves. In theory, I still find this a good idea, and that is also why we are not changing crafts.

Our plan, quite sadly, did misfire. My opinion is that its not the craft skill gain, but the lack of money to supply the crafters and harvesters. Ideally on a server, people would do what they enjoy doing, and still get money from it. PvPers would get money/supplies from PvPing, and then go to the crafters when they need resources. PvEers would gain money from hunting, and like them, also go to the crafters. Crafters would be selling items for profit, and go to the other groups when they needed protection or resources.

This leads us to change a few things of the game, such as money circulation(loots, sell prices, macro costs) and skill gains. None of them will be craft though, but skills required to aquire funds, so that you can buy stuff, so that you can be a chain in the economy.

I have no clue whether or not this is a good plan, but I and we (staff) thinks so. Also, if it wasn't beneficial for people to macro their own skills (meaning that it costs less to buy than macro), then I do not think they would do it (if they do not think its fun that is). Just by saying that, one would think that most crafters, that do it for a "living", would at least have gotten back their moneys worth Problem is that it is easier to get enough in a skill than to get the money required.


/Here be my end of rant, and back to coding

[imported_Jiraiya]

First, I never even insinuated that you guys were catering to a specific player. I was talking about making the shard appealing to everyone. This is a game remember, its supposed to be fun, and I'm sorry to say mining 300k igs and smithing 150k daggers is in NO way fun. There are the players like rab who will look at it like a business and seek to maximize their profits and put in the work to do just that.

But I'll say it again, its a game, not a job. And a very old game at that. We've all spent the time gm'ing skills on one sphere incarnation or another and had them again taken from us when that shard inevitably goes down. Thats just how it goes.
I dont recall ever hearing a player say, "Man I really miss the old days back on XXX shard when I spent a month afk while macroing that skill."
While I commonly hear people speak of the great pvp or rp or fun events of previous shards. Its the interaction and community which makes the shard fun.

I've tried to get quite a few friends from old nos a9 etc. to come play here. The reasons they wont are as follows: 1. Playercount is abysmal. 2. Skillgain is very time consuming. Not hard, not difficult, just time consuming. It took me about 3-4 weeks to get 26x gm. I did basically nothing I havnt done before as far as macro's go, other then having to use a horse to gm melee skills because none of my uo mates would even play here with me cuz the pop was so low.

The main reason I havn't logged in for a few weeks now is simple. I came across a post from about 12 months ago which detailed everything currently wrong with the shard which you guys are working on now, and a gm had posted several times on that thread saying it was being worked on, fixing it up(loot tables etc). Which of course you are right about, this will probably solve most of the economy problems with the shard.

But obviously nothing was done then, so until this stuff actually is fixed I dont see it being worth investing more of my time into the shard. When I joined there was 30 players on at peak, now its what? 10? How can I try to justify playing a game I love for its multiplayer aspect and pvp when theres no one else there? This whole post has probably come off too harsh on you staff, for that I'm sorry. I definitely have respect for ya and do appreciate you all providing your time and resources to putting this shard up. So hurling negativity about isnt my intention but Im also not going to coat my opinions in candyfloss for you.

I still think this shard has the potential to be every bit as fun as some of its predecessors. I mean the pvp system is obviously uber, and I think you did a fantastic job with it maka. But its pretty clear a lot of people have lost confidence that changes that need to be made, will be made.

From reading my posts talking about skillgain, most people would probably assume I want smithing or taming or whatever made easier for myself. But this isnt the case, I've never been the crafter type just because I dont find repetition to be fun. However I do find pvp and interaction fun, and so many people have been put off the shard because of skillgain and the scarcity of stuff like mounts.

I just think the value of things should come from the time it takes to aquire the item, not the time to aquire the skill. For a suit of blackrock I think you should be paying for the time of mining the ore to make it. Instead you have people with thousands and thousands of blackrock igs because they got them all while looking for iron to gm smith, then they keep it back from the market or they will flood the market and the value of each set will drop. This is simple economics in a monetary system.

Of course plenty of people probably disagree with me on this, but seeing as its the opposite of what you have now, and your server pop is basically zero, why not give it a shot. Its not like you could possibly lose any more players :/

J

[maka]

The way we have reasoned with harder skill gains is not really that people are dying to macro, but rather for the satisfaction of when the skill raises and when its raised. We have, like I said in the previous post, also based it on that people will be happy when they start selling their goods, while being one of few. Also, like in the previous post, we said that people are supposed to "live" on what they like, and that was our attempt with the server.

That brings me to ask you the question, do you enjoy crafting and do you normally tend to be a crafter? I might be going out on a limb here, but considering where your mates came from (and maybe you), I'd say no. That is the reason why "300k ingot" weights slightly less coming from you, than from one that enjoys smithing. We are making smithing for the people that like it, and therefore, we keep it the way they want it. Much the same like we keep PvP the way PvPers want it, and not the way the smiths want it. We do NOT want to make everyone self sufficient, that would without a doubt kill one part of our player base (by this I do not mean player count, but player demographics).

The goal with INX has always been to mix the best of two worlds, and to enable people to enjoy what they want to do. We have ****ed up, we know that. Player count is evidence to how bad we messed up, but our previous player count is also evidence to our potential. We know, or think we know, what we did wrong, and we are out to correct that, so that we can give this server another try.

Reason to why we will not lower crafts, as opposed to some other skills, is still cause we believe it benefits the server population. We do not think people left due to the crafts, but rather cause the skills they needed to start playing right away were to hard to get. The above statement also goes for resources. Also, when ever I'm talking about server population, I'm talking about when we relaunch the server. I do not think INX would survive with the current skill gains starting from 10 players, but it would from 300.

To answer your more OT questions:
The staff did actually balance loots before, but sadly we failed. We have also lowered skill gains multiple times, but obivously not the right skills and not enough.

By naming "rabbi" I wasn't saying that it was him you were referring to, but rather used him as an example for the claims you made about wealth and groups. It is common knowledge that he is one of the more wealthier people on the server, and that he has his skills.

Also, your posts are not offensive at all, for the most part at least You are expressing your opinion really well, without whining, and we thank you for that. No one blames you for having them, and I'm sure a lot of people agree, but only thing we can do is prove them wrong.

[imported_Paulie]

Hate to say it cause i know its gonna get flamed, but i know at least 80% of peopel that play uo is for the pvp I am one of them. If we dont have the playerbase with this XuO pvp style, maybe we should go to the old IN pvp style. the XuO players wont liek it, but they have it now and they dont play just a select few.I know 25+ people that would play if the pvp wasnt the way it is. I understand that there was a agreement when the 2 shards came together, but does it matter now? Maybe we need to think of whats best for the shard in that sense also.

[maka]

That is slightly like saying that +50 XUO people would play if we gave out free skills and changed skill gains a lot:/

We are not aiming for 25, nor 50, players of a specific style. We want the players to merge and we want numbers in the hundreds

[imported_Paulie]

I understand that but im saying i know personally 25+ people that would play if pvp changed. Thats not to say how many more would play that other people know. Its just a thought, and i think and im sure others would agree that it would be best for the shard. I've Pvped on both styles and in my opinion In pvp is way more balanced and forces people to use good ar and weps at all times or they get owned. It would make crafters more involved in the world and would bring prices up.

[maka]

I personally know 50 XUO players that would play too I'm not getting onto a discussion to wheter or not the INX/XUO PvP is more or less balanced than IN, we all have had that one before. What you are suggesting is essentially "splitting" our servers, and I do not think that is a good idea for the already small sphere community (I however do not know if you are referring to IN1 or IN2).

Another quite crucial point, and I'm not saying this to be a prick, is that I wouldn't work on a server that didn't have any of XUO in it. Only reason I'm helping out is cause of a vision of a server, that's not to say I can't be flexible, but PvP is the core our "ours".