Discussion on balance changes to sweeping.

That's the lay of the land. You need to be the pioneer of meta-shifting strategies to capitalize on it. Unfortunately, the current trend is that everything gets nerfed. When will some things eventually get a stamp of approval as a MapleLegends feature?

 

it doesn't generate mesos tho, it's a p2p transaction that's a mesos sink in the sense of raw mesos leaving the server.

But yeah, it does, to a certain extent funnel all mesos to the mage overlords.

 

It doesn't generate mesos, but it does impact the pricing of all other viable sources of income.
If Shaolin leech costs 12 mil/hr for trio-leech at 35m exp/hour, Skele leech will never be able to exceed that. Asking Skele/Petri to increase their price in relation to the meso nerf from lacking a sweeper doesn't make sense because the price of Shaolin leech sets the ceiling of Skele leech. So now mages in maps that require income from both looting and leeching now face the predicament of deciding between picking up mesos which lowers their eph (and consequentially leech prices), or ignoring mesos while still not being able to increase leech prices all that much, if at all. It's a really shitty situation for everyone besides Shaolin.

What's worse is that once the meta shifts away from Skele to 5-6, competition at 5-6 will drive leech prices further and further down. Once that happens, there's a chain-effect all the way down the pecking order.

 

You're really good at painting doomsday scenarios, bravo

 

https://forum.maplelegends.com/index.php?threads/insane-eph-5-6f-leech.40573/#post-271584

 

Good. Leechers don't deserve nice things.

 

Hi Jake

This is two samples from old data logs I pulled back when I used to sell. I think the prices are still competitive as to what they are today so it might hold relevant.
Skeles data is higher than the general public 5m trio price by just a bit.

ulu2
---
4 hours(valentine's event sesh)
20m leech
26m raw meso
13.7m event etc sales
11.3m equip npc/npcables
50 craven(5m?) and 2x 49 craven(2m)

~19.5m/hr
~16m/hr non-event


skeles
----
3 hours

Buyers
----
ac130(108) -> ac130(111) gained 61,702,606 exp = 20.5m EPH = 15,425,651 meso
vvaterslide(114) -> (117) gained 65,320,758 exp = 21.7m EPH = 16,330,189 meso
swampthing(114) -> (117) gained 65,124,350 exp = 21.7m EPH = 16,281,087 meso

46,836,003 after tax
leech rates(4xp :1 meso)
----

2x gdk (1m)
78 kc (2.5m)
green neo perf (500k)
113 PE(4k) = 452k

44 dragon scale (100k) = 4.4m
41 spirit (6000) = 246k


used
29 unagi (i just loot these i guess?)
used 432 mana bulls = -1209600

17,715,572 sweeped (5.9m~ hr)
11,961,787 npc/equips
9,098,000 sellables
46,836,003 leech after tax

84,401,762 net profit
28,133,920~ per hour

You can use this data for a starting ballpark to see how it affects these two maps. Maybe just start by taking out the raw mesos from the equation and starting from a floor? I imagine the looted mesos won't add up too much since it'll be distributed across party and generally to withhold EPH you aren't moving around map to withhold said EPH.

Ulu2 will probably net you around 10-11m and skeles 17-22m/hr depending on if you sell duo/trio in today's world assuming you still sweep.

 

So that's roughly a ~35-40% reduction to ulu2 and a ~20% reduction to skeles if you don't sweep mesos but still loot equips + etcs based off your data points.

Edit: Correction - ~20% reduction to ulu2 if you loot on your mage instead. (ty whatdatoast)

 

But you would definitely still loot mesos at ulu2...you can rotate up every 3 min and ult from the top and just miss a couple mobs. Probably just take a minor 5-10% hit on leech eph.

 

Most of the loss from ulu2 is the looted mesos getting split between the party. It should be around a 3m per hour loss just from that alone.

 

People can start advertising that they have Meso Up mules again for their leech.

 

Too low? Yeah, I thought I might be low-balling it a bit. Based Nise.

Seriously though, I think a theoretical maximum of 6 to 7 hours of farming per WS is fair. It's probably better to look at it in terms of time invested rather than mesos, as per Selquin. The maximum meso per hour can be adjusted on that basis.

 

I'm gonna quote the complete looting rework explanation in the following spoiler:

Spoiler: COMPLETE Looting rework explanation

We mentioned above that the one of the factors that we deemed to have contributed to the rise in the WS/CS price rise over the past few years was the disproportionate demand vs. supply of said scrolls. Another major factor we identified is the steadily increasing rate of inflation, which has been happening ever since the launch of the server back in 2015.

Controlled amounts of inflation is healthy and for now the mesos generated have been within a controllable amount. BUT over the past year or two, we've been seeing the birth of lots of different strategies that really pushed the rate at which mesos are generated. At the heart of all these strategies were mages and Meso Up mules.

This was a complicated matter, as unchecked rates of inflation can cause devastating effects for game-health. Things become gradually more expensive, the money you've saved previously starts to seem like it amounts to nothing, and worst of all previously solid meso-making methods (such as just grinding normally) starts to feel inadequate. To counter this, something had to be done, but changing specific maps would just lead to players searching for alternative maps - of which there seemed to be an abundance of. There were also discussions on the forums to nerf mages themselves, but we ultimately decided against this as it could significantly alter the core gameplay of the class and make the time/effort/resources invested feel redundant. We also decided against changing Meso Up for the same reason. Reflecting on changes we've done in the past, we decided that we would try our best not to make investments feel redundant unless there is no other option (aka bug fixes, like stopping Speed Infusion working on mages).

Finally, we stepped back to look at the bigger picture. What enabled the vast amount of mage-related raw meso generation strategies? What made the various meso making methods seem pointless in the face of mage meso making? And, what could we do without compromising player investment into late game characters (3rd job onwards)? The answer we ended up at were sweeper mules.

When farming on other classes you have to move around more, sacrifice EXP, and not cover as wide of an area, or as many mobs. Mages on the other hand, didn't have any of these downsides. The one inefficiency mages had was that they couldn't loot everything BECAUSE of the overwhelming number of mobs they were killing at different parts of the map. This inefficiency disappears entirely when a sweeper mule could move around in Dark Sight and have the pet pick up everything while the mage continued ulting with no interruptions at the most optimal locations.

This type of strategy dwarfs less efficient forms of meso making (usually by non-mage classes). Why would a person farm at a map with a warrior when farming with a mage requires much less effort AND much higher rewards?

By tackling sweepers, we aimed to achieve the following:

1. Bring meso making rates down to manageable rates
2. Make non-mage meso making strategies feel better (relatively)
3. Eliminate unhealthy gameplay where players were earning disproportionate amount of mesos with minimal movement
4. Discourage mule story

Wasn't it a pick your poison scenario? the alternatives were nerfing mages, nerfing MU, nerfing sweepers. Any option affects meso income and the gap is always present because multiclient is forever invulnerable. Every scenario is a lose but at least these alternatives can be rated from less ugly to ugly. By wanting sweepers back what are we willing to give up? Is the return of sweepers worth the nerf of core NL and Mage mechanics?

I'm gonna agree that I don't like it either but the other two options are way worse

 

You can't deny that sweeper mules are absolutely busted OP with near-zero investment required and minimal input debt incurred. I'm surprised they went unnerfed as long as they did.

More than half of the damn game is running around a map and killing things. Don't you think it's a little silly how mages excel in "farming" 2-3x more than any other class with almost no downside? And I don't find "mages can't boss" a particularly cogent argument when they level at least twice as quickly as, and have much greater overall utility than any other class in the game.

 

I think he might be talking about duo mage 5-6F leech trio with 10m/hr for each leecher.

 

Like seriously tho, if the reason behind this nerf is to stop the quad mage at ulu1 from abusing the map then perhaps lets do something about the map it self is there a way to lower the spawn? I mean its not actually fair cause this is part of the game ( sweepers) It takes a lot of effort to sell leech and on top of that we are being very underpaid. The only thinng we look forward to is the MU / sweeping mule to balance everything. Since the RWT leechers have been drastically lowering the leech prices I really feel that its very unfair to us mages/bish that doesnt multi client / quad mage farm cause we are the most affected ones. In fact what I heard is that quad mage still is beneficial even without sweeping mule rather than Petri/ Skele. But is that what we really want to promote rather than playing it old school with one character and just enjoying the game?

 

Why not slightly nerf all three aspects in less invasive ways to achieve the same result? As we can see clearly, completely obliterating sweeper mules is not holding up very well in community response, as would something extreme like a 50% mage pot reduction, or 200% mana spend increase, or a 50% reduction of meso up.

Why not have smaller adjustments here and there and apply them simultaneously to achieve the same effect?