You are basing your profit from CSS off your luck with soulcrafting. Comparing solely gold earned from npcables and souling equips, the gain after the patch is higher.- Usually the gold sellers sell the gold for a cheaper rate compared to buying IM points and buying IM items to sell for gold.
Plus when you buy pure gold, you get pure gold you don't have to worry about getting cash items and waiting days for it to sell.
- I've been doing many CSS runs, although I kill faster than b4 I have not been earning as much as b4 (eg I use to take the rings, ears and capes
and soulcraft them with aim rate which was worth something then). Plus DSS is several times harder to farm now without CL for lvls 55+
- Set hunting is definitely harder now using gada coins, which weren't required b4, plus the pieces aren't worth as much anymore.
- Insurances was only one example, almost all IM items for sale in the market need to be 1:1 or lower to actually sell.
Plus soul is still selling for a relatively higher price compared to THQ days, suggesting that ppl are still soulcrafting despite the rates.
- Before randomizers I was still struggling to sell farmed equips from THQ for relatively cheap prices, and so was many other ppl.
Randomizers only pushed the prices down a hell of alot further.
- Yesterday I saw a lvl 65 without a single set piece and a lvl 51 +0 weapon. And there's plenty of players floating around who
don't bother to upgrade their equips what so ever. Price may be a factor there or they just dont know how to farm gold without CL
Moving on...
Alot of games have the ability to purchase gold either from the game's shop, or from gold sellers. These games rely on these kinds
of sellers despite how they act so against it (especially when the sellers resort to hacking/botting to obtain the gold). Ppl buy gold the gold,
they then usually spend it in the market since they have an increased willingness to buy up. If those gold sellers are taking from other players
then sure that will only hurt the economy, but most of them use botting techniques to farm gold through killing monsters and perhaps npcing the
equips or maybe selling soul idk. Like I mentioned earlier I don't support them in any way, but the current state of the economy does need
some form of a boost. More players farming would indeed boost the economy, but it's not a very tasteful solution for many.
On the contrary, set hunting is a lot easier after the patch now that we need gadas. I've made over 8kg off set farming after the patch (around 6-8 runs of cbelkka/ckark), not including the maybe 12 or more stacks of souls from disassembling random equips, and that's taking into consideration the cost of the gadas at 2g each. Now that you get set pieces specific to your class, there is no more waste of getting pieces from other classes that cost nothing due to bad set bonuses. In addition, because we only have to run one F of a specific MM, you will often gain duplicates of previous pieces that you can sell for money, opposed to getting your own piece and moving on to the next F, resulting in no extra pieces to sell for profit.
Before saying the system is bad and that gold is difficult to obtain now, you should try it out extensively yourself instead of basing your results on maybe the 1-2 hours of CSS you did on a character that is above the recommended level of CSS.
Edited by Yurai, 29 November 2010 - 03:43 PM.