Runes of Magic US / AU

There is a problem in this game that needs to be addressed. It needs to be addressed here for everyone to see. Some might say it will run off new players. The new players will be exposed to it one day anyways, might as well catch them early. The problem is our gearing system. And it is a big big problem.

Gear itself is fairly easy to come by. UD hardmode instance gear, od crafted gear, od shell gear, od normal mode gear...pleanty of options for the pieces.

Plussing and puris are a pain, but that is a topic I do not wish to address at the moment.

There used to be a time when you could get good stats using mems. This was a long time ago, many of you probably dont even remember this. Gearing was easier, there was always new players up and coming, stats sold for less gold because they were abundant, but aleast we had a higher population. Then around when AC came out, all mem gear was made to give you a guaranteed waste stat. Gearing became a little harder. Mems certainly still do give good accessories and sometimes even good gear, but the developers made gearing massively harder for midgame players by removing the usefulness of mems.

At around the same time, poms were introduced. The gap between end game and non endgame became larger. People started to farm world bosses and use poms to get those fancy orange stats. Maybe the gap isnt huge, but its certainly noticeable. The system was set up so only a small group of players had a chance to down world bosses. Of that small group, only a few lucky players could get the poms. It was up to each group who to distribute the poms, but it was only a handful that had to be spread out over a raid of players. This made lots of competition between end game guilds for being the ones do down world bosses. It also had people fighting over who would get poms in each guild. Server drama. Guild drama. Class stratification. Poms put a serious hit on the midgame/endgame gap.

Now occasionally Game forge would do pom events. Those go a good distance in bridging that gap. They address a major issue, but dont fix it. It just hides the problem for a little while. Its not in Game Forge's power to fix, RW has to fix that issue.

And now eojs. For two brief periods, EOJ's were super useful in the stat issue. When they were first released, lots of people farmed them. Stats entered the market at a fairly steady rate. But, much like poms, EOJ farming is highly competitive. It does not benefit you to help others EOJ farm. By helping others you get less. The fewer people who EOJ farm, the more for you...The fewer people who eoj farm, the fewer stats that come into the market. Gearing becomes harder. Stats become more expensive.

This is the problem with EOJ's and POM's. It directly benefits each individual player to NOT help others to acquire eojs and poms. This ofcourse drives prices way up. The supply for each is fairly low. There is no incentive to help raise that supply. If you help others, you directly get less. Its not that the supply increases so your eojs/poms are worth less. If you help someone to get eoj's or poms you are GIVING YOURS UP.

This is the problem with statting right now. The only reasonable way to acquire stats is from farming dungeons, which only gives you a limited set of stats and is not necessarily possible for all players, or shells, which only gives you a chance at a stat every other day.

EOJS and mems were a great way for mid game players to farm and get stats and gear up. Now they dont exist, and we see a much smaller population. Getting new endagme players is very difficult and costly, not like it used to be.

My recommendation is this:
-mems need to return to dropping acceptable stats in addition to their garbage stats.
-the competitive nature of poms and eojs needs to be removed.
-to balance poms, remove them from world bosses. Introduce them to Normal mode dungeons, one drop per day from last boss in dungeons tosh+
-to balance EOJs do the following: remove the public events entirely, they add to the competitive nature that is ripping apart the game. Change the quests to once daily quests. Make the rewards for each quest EOJ's out right. Reduce the reward by 90% for each quest. So for example, once a day you could do Sacrifice in chrysalia and receive 78 eoj's (currently 780 energy). Roughly estimate, this would get you about 5k eoj's if you did EVERY eoj quest in the game each day. This is not unreasonable considering that in the current system you can achieve more than this per day. It first lowers the amount of possible EOJ's per day, but also guarantees that anyone who tries to do EOJS will get something out of it.

Now these are merely my suggestions, and others should post their own. But i do truly believe that the current system is utterly broken.

Also should point out, this needs to be retroactive changes to all instances between tosh and grotto, atleast as far as mem pulls go.

Quoted

For some reason you have a way better chance of int/mattck on easy mode than hard mode.

if i am not mistaken, it is entirely impossible to get int/ma out of hard mode dungeons. They moved where it drops from hard to easy mode. Same for protection.

Quoted

guess , to have the end game geared players to agree, ( players who run instances will totally disagree a eoj farmer have similar gear/stats than dungeons runner )

The endgame players will agree because they dont farm their own EOJ stats, they buy them off the AH. Similarly, it can be assumed that someone farming hard core EOJs wont have time to run for hard mode stats, so they will have to buy their dungeon stats from endgame players. You cant stat with just dungeon stats or just eoj stats.

Quoted from "jo7154"

Quoted from "Darwec"

The endgame players will agree because they dont farm their own EOJ stats, they buy them off the AH. Similarly, it can be assumed that someone farming hard core EOJs wont have time to run for hard mode stats, so they will have to buy their dungeon stats from endgame players. You cant stat with just dungeon stats or just eoj stats.

theorically yes, but, for some reason, i still think they wont agree
they might be thinking " i do dungeon, normal/ hard mode, u just kill small mobs or collect stuff and u have same level stats as mine? no way "

anyway, RW wont make those changes about EOJ above, they wont get money if players can play the " game way "

Ah, right, money. Lets discuss how this directly puts dollars into our lovely devs pockets:

Right now not many new players are joining the game. Basically the source of income for the dev is have a handful of players buy and sell bulk diamonds to the servers so that those handfull of players can get gold to buy stats.

On the other hand, everyone would have stats, so the bulk players would not buy as many dias to sell because they would need less gold. Except the whole server would need diamonds for all the lovely new stats they have. The lower cost of stats for gold would entice new players to stay. It balances out the in game econ. As more players join, there will be more players, like me, who are neither F2P or bulk dia sellers. I occasionally buy dias off bulk sellers, and once or twice a month ill buy a few odd dias to work on my own gear or help friends. As more players join, there will be more players like me. I could be buying more puris to sell stats. I could be buying more plussing stones since it would now be worth while to plus up gear since i could get stats for it. This directly benefits the devs by balancing the economy and not putting the strain of supporting the games diamond habits on just a small few.

Quoted from "zidlef"

For me i don't think that people should only look for the latest stats/gear etc, why? because too many are waisting their time having the latest stuff and still can't run hardmode instances. they either need to learn to play their class, learn to read aggro meter, learn strats etc, there is no point of having the latest stuff when you can't even stay alive for 20 seconds on a hardmode boss LOL. You also have people that gear up totally for PvP and wonder why they can'T do crap on a hardmode boss, DUH!!!

I think that people should go with what they can get, learn it, run it and get experience on playing your toon, not that hard after all. People think that they need to be like every endgamer they encounter on the server and don't understand that those players might have 500M TP on their toon, hundreds or thousand of hours playing it etc.

When you see 4 people clearing a hardmode instances there is two reason: 1- they learned to play their toons and are damn good at it or 2- they are hacking/exploiting/cheating.

Learn to play and use what you can get to have fun, don't go for all the gossip people

The only classes that can viably run bag stats and crafted/normal gear in grotto hard are wardens, w/wds, healers, and rogues. Other classes HAVE to run shell stats and other yellow stats to begin to be viable in grotto.

But you are correct, bag stats will get any class into beth hm. The problem is the jump from beth hm into grotto is prohibitively expensive for most classes. That is the point of these suggestions. You can get ALMOST end game easily. You can get beth hard ready very easily. Getting Grotto ready is absurd.