Aion Riftshade

Returning player after long years:

I was really excited to get a kick of Aion once again. And even ready to give GF my money if they did it right.
Well they got 30€.
Here are my 2 senses and why my friends are leaving after just 3 days:

Kinah generation:
There is no passive kinah generation through monster farming.
Possibly to avoid bots, but in essence it means that quests are at the moment the ONLY way the game generates kinah.
Non-instance item drop rates are very low so you can't sell items to vendors.

Kinah sinks:
Economy sinks are meant to prevent inflation. [that being said, giving battlepass players 400coin is a GREAT way to create coin-flation)
However they feel really bad here:
>Soul sickness is incredibly expensive to cure
>Teleports & soul binds can quickly become unafordable
>Weapon fusing costs a lot more than the weapon is even worth

Drop rates:
>Through almost non stop play and group grind, I've only seen 2 blue items drop, a few green, and that's about it
>Manastones drop once in a blue moon (I can count on one hand how many yellow manastones I've seen rolled)
>Quest items drop rates become lower as the game progresses. Which is "alright", but when you need 20 items, per person, per quest, I'm sorry but that's one hell of a time waste.

All of this isn't even touching other topics, like bad ping and bastardisation of content (where are all the elite mobs gone?). Part of me is incredibly cynical and can see all of those issues being solved by GF selling the solutions in the shop. And that feels bad.

All and all, the game's economy is the first thing that will drive people out.

https://aion.fandom.com/wiki/Thawing_Kurngalfberg

Looking at those quests, they used to give less exp, but they would inject some much needed money into the system.

Just get gut dude, buy Siel's Energy and start Craft your Kinah if you know what I mean

You can make kinah with white and green loots already through auction house and those are not really rare. Up to level 50 blue quests are the best way for kinah(even after that until you completed most). After that there will be a lot of other ways to make kinah and the kinah drops from OW monsters never were among them.

Repeatable quests, balaur mats farming, craft mats farming, reselling, ID sell, selling endgame white and green loots to NPC(for example dark poeta), selling named bosses OW drops in auction house(you see a lot of those in chat already), etc. Those are the real ways to make kinah. Biggest kinah you propably get for selling extendable weapons(IDs).

The only thing i can agree to is that manastone are still too rare. But we have to see if there are any repeatable quests for getting tradable manastone in endgame, this will change everything actually.

Quote from udontwantmegedingear

You can make kinah with white and green loots already through auction house and those are not really rare.

When we speak of kinah generation, we don't speak of a player getting kinah but the total amount of kinah available at a moment in time in the game. There are two ways to generate kinah from thin air : quests and selling to NPC.

The thing is the second one has been nerfed on several layers :

- the mob droprate is lower (haven't had an issue with white/green, but manastones are so rare...)

- the shit you get from them are supposed to be sold to the NPC, but their value has been nerfed. A white weapon was close to 1 million kinah to the npc back then.

- many mobs who use to drop a lot as elites were turned into normal mobs and don't drop anything anymore

- the money sinks haven't been nerfed. Soul sickness, craft component, teleport/flight, skillbooks have fixed prices that should be proportional to 1° and 2° but aren't.

Guess what it leads to when you ask players to farm mindnumbingly for hours to get some kinahs? Bots & RMT. If you want your server to be healthy you want to fix that.

Completely agree and to all those who defend this stupid decision with "oh but you can do xyz for kinahs!!" - Yeah right. None of you actually bothered doing the math on any of the things you write.. What good are balaur mats and other types of farming when people literally have no kinah to buy anything you farm and sell.... I'm gathering aether and it HAS to sell for like 500 kinah each because people simply don't have kinah for even the most basic needs like teleporting at some point of the game. Did you even calculate your profit margin when you craft and sell running scrolls for example? The egrasi paper and mats you buy from the NPC don't have their price reduced to match the kinah nerf so in the end you make no kinah because you HAVE to sell for under like 3k... Back in the days scrolls were selling for 6-10k each and around 5-6k was the absolute minimal you could sell in order to make your time crafting be worth a damn...

This whole situation is f*cked.

People around level 40 really start struggling I see people begging in sanctum because they have no more kinah for teleports...

Don't get me started on buying all your skills from the NPC, all your stigmas, having basic ass consumables like running scrolls and pots to do actual pvp and pve, you know - THE CORE OF THE GAME??? You guys think its fun walking around like a complete peasant not being able to afford the most basic crap there is?

Gameforge was so afraid not to do the same mistake NA did and cause hyperinflation that they ended up doing the complete opposite and it resulted in the exact same thing after all - f*cked the experience of the players.

Was it that hard just not messing with values you know nothing about? The game was perfectly designed even 13 years ago. All you have to do to make it successful is NOT MESS WITH IT. Majority of the current players will quit if this shit remains as is.

Completely agree, in my opinion this issue should get addressed as soon as possible (even if I'm extremely skeptical anything will be done, which will lead to the game slow death).

Right now there are some quests which give an influx of Kinah that allow you to barely survive, but once those run out playing the game (which has an insane amount of money sink) will become impossible.

Socketing an armor/weapon with the current prices and fail rates is almost impossible (which screws soft crit reliant classes) and the drop tables are completely broken (lv 45+ mobs dropping blue 25 items that sells for 7k or 47 white weapons that sell for 60k, when binding at an obelisk costs like 20k).

Not to mention that more than half of the time you kill a mob nothing is dropped.

And this doesn't even take into account pvp and its costs (scrolls, potions, kisks, etc.).

Completely agree.

It's time to decide, stick it out in EU, suffering until enough time goes by that the market and player base self correct by players leaving and kinah supply growing.

Or return to NA with a new patch incoming in the next 10 days that grants a new instance, skills, stigmas, class, and "ways to make kinah, manatones ect." So they say. Either way, in my view, EU is more broken than NA and that's saying a lot. @GF staff, you did not do a good job with all the time and delays you had.

Quote from blackhawkdown2

Completely agree.

It's time to decide, stick it out in EU, suffering until enough time goes by that the market and player base self correct by players leaving and kinah supply growing.

Or return to NA with a new patch incoming in the next 10 days that grants a new instance, skills, stigmas, class, and "ways to make kinah, manatones ect." So they say. Either way, in my view, EU is more broken than NA and that's saying a lot. @GF staff, you did not do a good job with all the time and delays you had.

I don't think the market CAN self correct at this point.

There are two ways to inject kinah into the game economy from thin air at this point:

1. Kinah from blue quests

2. Kinah from drops that you sell to NPC

1. The first one ends at level 50 - people stop doing blue quests because they dont need exp anymore and because it is the most boring thing you can do in the game. They also pay extremely small rewards.

2. The second one is nerfed to the ground by ~90% by Gameforge.

So you effectively remove kinah from the server. The global supply of kinah that exists in the game is FAR surpassed by the expenses people have on teleporting, soul sickness, buying skills, stigmas, consumables...

And these are BASIC things! Can you imagine SOCKETING and ENCHANTING in this current economy? If it takes you several weeks of farming to buy a basic bestial fury and focused shots stigmas for ranger (A must have skills for this class) how long will it take you to socket and enchant an abyss set? 5 years? Ridiculous.

I disagree with you guys that this will cause a slow death of classic. The death will be extremely quick at this point....

I don't know how but Gameforge managed to deliver a worse version than NA honestly. You don't need a masters in economics or being a veteran at the game to predict the outcome of this stupid decision to nerf ingame drops and NPC sell prices..

I understand that this decision basically eliminates gold sellers and bots, but guess what? If it is not worth EVEN FOR A BOT to farm and sell kinah.... Do you think its worth it for the players...??? The solution to bots and spammers has always been better policing, not nerfing content to the ground which affects ALL players.. Give me a GM account and pay me hourly I'll get rid of all bots on the server alone.. If I can hardware ban them its even easier. There is no need for this massive bastardization of the game. This is not a classic experience...

I think there could be either of these two reasons for this decision:

1. Gameforge are incredibly, absurdly, otherworldly incompetent at handling this game and nobody has thought of or tested this or has ever played the game at all...

2. Gameforge intends to sell the solution to this new "problem" directly or indirectly in the cash shop...

It's #2, the business model here is having 5-10% of players spend a lot in the shop, to sell to the other 90-95% who actually farm a little kinah here and there.