Well noted Animus87,
Development team in general gets pressure for the quick revenue generating things like random boxes to recoupe the development cost. Once again, it is the publisher's role to let them hear your voice clear eoungh to relize what is best for longevity of game. We will continue our discussion with studio including your suggestion to make changes.
Thank you.
Jay Choi
Mr. Choi,
I thank and applaud you for having the manticular appendages to address this particular problem openly without address to the developer.
I know that I, and I'm beginning to see, quite a large number of people are leaning toward the camp that the current marketing model that this game is headed down is going to kill any chance this game has at staying power. We cannot stress this enough. Please do not simply offer us lip service here. We are the community. We know what we want. We don't want stat boosts that cost real money. We want a viable game that can be played for free in addition to paid services that will allow us to support the game using a method that doesn't quicken the death of it.
I'm sure you may have discussed this at some point, but simply cheapening the cost of the items, or making them non-random isn't going to fix the item mall issue. We need a proper account-based subscription model that has non-balance-affecting benefits. As it stands now, we're dangerously close to the point of no return, and the longer we have the current profit-model, the harder it is going to be to change it back without massive backlash.
I'd be more than happy to pay a $15 a month subscription to have access to shared storage space between my characters, access to the 80-slot character bank across all characters (I'm sorry, but $60 a character is outrageous!), as well as access to rested experience bonuses or even bonus movement speed on mounts (by definition, not balance affecting as mounts can only be used out of combat). The increased 10% HP/SP really doesn't interest me, and the additional items thrown out feel like free samples intended to get me hooked on spending money, rather than a real benefit for my money.
I want to demonstrate something to you though, that makes this item mall aggrivate me more than anything else.
I'm a numbers guy. I like to crunch the odds of things, and come out with reasonable results for things. I'd like to run you through the thing that ruined the item mall for me. It was running the numbers looking at whether I'd be able to upgrade a set of gear to +10 at endgame.
1) Karnium can be purchased in the item mall. It has a fair chance to drop.
2) Items can be refined up to +10
3) Purples break unless you use Karnium.
The cumulative chance to upgrade an item to level 10:
(Example is the Dolorous Heroic Long Sword)
1: 95%
2: 85%
3: 74%
4: 64%
5: 53%
6: 25.6%
7: 16.8%
8: 7.2%
9: 0.6%
10: 0.6%
A player without any Karnium would need to grind out 442,573 +/- 50% of these items to upgrade it to plus 10 on average.
The total vendor value of those items would be 931,600 Zeny.
You would need on average, 13 Oridecon per item.
That's over 5,750,000 +/- 50% Oridecon,
Which carries a value of 828,500 Zeny.
Assuming 30 minutes per weapon, and 1 minute per Oridecon (generous), this would require a total of 317,120 hours of game time. That's 13,213 days. That's 1887 Weeks. That's ~440 months. That's 36 years (including leap days!). And we're not even figuring in time to sleep, eat, or anything else.
If a player were to use Karnium, his chances would increase from 1 in 442,573 to 1 in 14,578. (all +/- 50%)
1: 100%
2: 97%
3: 87%
4: 76%
5: 66%
6: 38.8%
7: 30%
8: 21.2%
9: 13.2%
10: 10.6%
This means, in order to pull it off, he'd need only one item (as, to my understanding, the item will never break with Karnium)
He'd need a larger average oridecon per attempt, however, resting at 33 per attempt.
That's a whopping 481,074 oridecon at a total value of 69,274 Zeny
With the need to only get the item once, that's 30 minutes + 481,074 minutes, plus, we'll convert the value of Karnium into zenny. (Let's say 100z each?)
That's about 1.4 million zeny worth of Karnium, and 334 days of farming.
Now, at an average of 6 Zeny per item, both will also cost even more. 2.4 million without karnite, and approximately 87,468z with karnite.
On the one hand, we can spend 36 years trying to get a chance at a single +10 purple, or we can spend 334 days and several million Zeny to get one.
Obviously neither of these are attainable, but what, if I may ask, is the point of this system? If it's completely and utterly pointless to go up to level 10, if it's borderline impossible to do so, why even have it in the game other than to frustrate, annoy, and alienate your playerbase?
You don't stack your deck against your players like this and expect them to pay you for it.
If anything, crunching these numbers has made me vow to never spend money on this game at all, and see how far I can get on raw skill alone. The fact that I can do something in this game with a 1 in 450K chance of success, or i can choose to increase those odds to 1 in 15K makes this particular problem a no-brainer: "If you can only lose: Don't play."
Perhaps your publishers are just a little bit more than out of touch with the community, and they need to start actually listening before they don't have the ability to recuperate their costs.
