State of the Game Part 1: Zeny vs. Mats Farm

MadMonkey

jinbou I think making custom nerfs to illusion doping would be unfair, and is not a good solution

I think reducing its ridiculous AoE to something more contained (let's say 13x13) could very well help.

Aside of that, I'm not too sure of what exactly would be a good solution.
This is RO, give the players an option to finance their gearing/whatever else and of course they gonna capitalize on it.

jinbou

MadMonkey That would straight up make that skill completely useless, both in geffenia and outside of it.

With what I suggested I'm hoping geffenia farm with doping would remain as a viable strat, it'd just be a slight nerf to the zeny/hour, making the strat less bonkers. And it wouldn't hurt doping's utility outside of geffenia, which is no longer a problem thanks to the recent change to how @noks works.

Also I'm not a fan of major custom changes to class skills anyway.

MadMonkey

jinbou The way I see it, it's a niche (PvP?) debuff and was never meant as a farming tool.
It likely wasn't intended as a viable skill for easy mass kills in any capacity.
So I got no prob with killing it altogether.

It's not like Biolos ever needed it to be efficient farmers.

jinbou I'm not a fan of major custom changes to class skills

I somewhat agree, except when we're talking about balancing.
Leaving Doping as is is enabling bullshit strats.
The server doesn't need anymore way to generate zenys than there is already.

EvilLumi

I'm glad we're having this discussion, but this wouldn't have happened if we didn't nerf all the other areas of the game that used to be more profitable. If you want people to farm in different locations, make them more appealing, instead of killing off a choice a player has made on their own, to benefit from what systems are available.

If Geffenia nets 100m per hour, then make all those other places more enticing. Problem solved. I really don't see a reason why we punished new players by nerfing illusion drops. That was someone's grand idea, and it caused this. You pushed people in this direction.

toadspaz

Going by iro wiki and other material like that isnt illusion dopping supposed to be melee? Being able to cast on this server from far away is what breaks it for farming

frost

toadspaz cast target is melee, but the skill stills hits the whole screen

toadspaz

frost nvm it is ranged on kro

brozenwall

This problem is created by combination of varios custom stuff that the server have.

Zeny from Mobs
Easy access to Warp to Dungeons
Autoloot

I don't think that Warper or Autoloot should be touched. If the problem is the zeny from mobs and since is a custom stuff from the server it should be adjusted based on what the server needs.

Zeny from mobs can be disable on Geffenia maps and buff on high end maps that way people will move to those maps. That way more endgame mats will be available and still be a source of zeny.

Sagii

zeny per mob alr scales with mob lv tho

dadalin212

Well, on one hand we have unlimited cheap Eden vend machine items (bbg/scroll/pots) and on the other a 8.5m soft cap on bsb which is directly linked to heirloom/mat farming, it doesn't take a scientist to see why players have been transitioning to doping since it's more profitable, less hassle, less restrictive, and only require minimal investment in gears. If the server intend to keep the price of bsb low, then a nerf to this type of raw zeny farming is unavoidable. While I don't main a biolo, I'm not a fan of nerfing a official skill's mechanics, so my suggestion is to adjust the prices of Eden vend machine items to make raw zeny farming less profitable. Bbg at 30 coins and buff scroll/pots at 3 coins are way too generous when Eden coins are easy to earn and the items can still be used in endgame content. While doing this would also cause the price of bb and other items to rise as ppl are force to choose between doing more Eden quests or purchase Muh voucher/coins to buy buff items from the donation shop, but the market would readjust itself similarly to how we're experiencing a price spike for most items due to the recent increase of doping farmers. And if that's not enough to detract ppl from raw zeny farming in Geffenia, reduce the mob count or increase the respawn time are simple and less disruptive options to consider.

After submitting the above response another idea came to mind.

Why not simply reduce the drop rate of alcohol from red lantern? Afaik the server's bonus drop rate also applies to item dropping card/gears giving biolos near unlimited amount of alcohols to spam the skill in Geffenia. Take that away then ppl will have to think twice when considering to farm there.

EvilLumi

dadalin212 Everything you typed only hurts new players.

pipi

dadalin212

Why not simply reduce the drop rate of alcohol from red lantern? Afaik the server's bonus drop rate also applies to item dropping card/gears giving biolos near unlimited amount of alcohols to spam the skill in Geffenia. Take that away then ppl will have to think twice when considering to farm there.

Congratulations your stupid idea just implemented since yesterday. I am not geffenia farmer but i do farm with red lantern, with this change it is not possible to get materials for brewing and someone keep hoarding the alcohol from paramarket until out of stock.

Because of your idea you arent killing geffenia farmer but you are only making it hard to farm brewing materials.

If you want to stop people to farm from geffenia, why dont you guys just reduce the item value / sell price they got from geffenia to npc. This way all geffenia farmer will try to find better place to farm and start comparing how much they can get from geffenia instead farming in other good maps.

netheril_

The whole problem is just how the server is, a kinda low population, private server, the market is not "sensible", there is just not enough population to establish a healthy market. Also, item progression is kinda just in a weird state, guess due to the mid rate nature of the server, so there's no point in investing at wolf gear or ice gear for example. So most people just farm raw zeny and rush to endgame items. Also:
(copying from my discord comment) "Sadly right now, Gefenia doping is the only reliable way for new players to get established on the server. Before the guide, it wasn't even that popular. On top of that, nerfing it now would create a divide between low geared players and long time players. I also dislike the fact that 15 years later, we are still farming gefenia for raw zeny, just with different methods, but nerfing it right now would create more problems instead of solving the main one."
There is just no incentive to farm good places like Bioshperes, because you will need to sell the mats, which you probably won't be able to, since the market is saturated with good, cheap gear, which people can't sell.
Therefore as a new player, farming raw zeny is the best. Nerfing raw zeny farming would result in a progression where players would need to do everything themselves, and the game's current itemization (like depth 2) is not designed for that.

EvilLumi

netheril_ New players can't farm geffenia, until they properly gear for geffenia. These are not new players. New players are the ones farming geffenia using mayhemic thorns. (in regards to the qoute)

dadalin212

EvilLumi How so? New players need to have access to cheap bbg/scroll/pots for game progression? Okay, let's say that the case, instead of raising Eden vend machine item prices we can simply limit the quest to their respective levels so that a lvl200+ level character can't accept a lvl190 quest and that the items purchased are changed to character bound instead of account bound to prevent coin farming.

Also, fyi, I only started playing on this server a month ago, farming in tha9-12 with Eden gears was enough for me to start gearing up my SA. As for your remark saying my previous post only hurts new players, well, no one benefits from an inflated economy especially when it's at the expense of reducing the already limited endgame content.

netheril_

EvilLumi You are wrong, because i was new 2 months ago, and doping was exactly what i was doing to get 50-60 mil an hour. I may had to fire 2 illusion dopings to kill everything, but it worked and gave me a headstart to purchase gear, that enabled me to farm better places like biosphere. I was also buying alcohol from paramk.

EvilLumi

dadalin212 Once again, you keep asking for a nerf that people have already benefitted from, me largely for that matter.

mseifer

I find it unfair too that all those EM/AM can farm thana 12 easier than my biolo, but I dont complain about it on forum, but yeah just nerf dopping to 15x15 and peeps will be happy maybe

MadMonkey

mseifer Problem never was about Biolos farming "better".
It is about how a single (non intended for this) skill transformed a midgame map into a zeny farming spot that's trumping most endgame maps.
Which is ridiculous.
2 solutions then:
-nerfing Doping (light hitting or not, its AoE is ridiculously huge).
-upping all those endgame spot (that incidently were previously officially nerfed for some reason) to put them at least level.

kaiakaito

Some people forget that the nerfs to high end dungeons kickstartet this idea.
I remember when the notes state, that monster amount and base drops value got decrease.

We take Pit as an example. Before the Nerf, I could farm mats and sell the base loot for 1,1k each.
This alone was a nice side income to my Dim Mat farming, so I never needed extra cash grind. Even more, if I would decide to farm there and sell the mats I grinded, then I would get with the monster/zeny drops a good amount.
That made pit good.
Now it got nerfed. Sure afterwards Muh did some afterpatches for Pit to not kill the mat farming (I mean it takes super long time), but value of monster drops got halved and with less monster we get less rawr money.
Same goes to CTB.

While im a fan of "custom skill buffs", nerfen is a stupid way to handle it. Like people already told here, newer players use Gefenia to get their first big cash easy peazy. Nerfen that would make the life of new players harder. So I think we should more of focus higher dungeons again.

-Revert some of the officals/custom Nerfs to some maps
-Increase value from mob Zeny/Iteams from dungeons
-Maybe Buff Material Drop rates, so people can farm them more easy or sell them for profit.

Those could work aswell, but im not a balancing expert.

EvilLumi

kaiakaito What a lovely description of reality. Thank you for noticing the main issues. 😃

CongaLyne

kaiakaito I feel like the rate you can obtain endgame equipment is already very fast, you can get endgame gear in 2 months of joining and min/max it in another 1.

I'm not a fan of further increasing zeny & item drops per hour, as MVP Cards are already the only meaningful progression for a lot of maxed out players aside from trying another class or over-refining gear to +15.

I'm in favour of slowing progression down instead.