Thoughts about new players' well-being

coins at that time was still 3.25. ask her if she would buy your coins for 3.3

 

Experienced players can anticipate and take advantage of opportunities far quicker than new players, if the new players even notice at all. They efficiently spend their resources to provide the best cost-to-power ratio, enabling them to progress quickly through the slower stages of the game. This efficiency allows them to reach a stage where they can generate meso more efficiently, effectively using meso to generate even more meso, leading to exponential growth. Meanwhile, new players are still learning the ropes and figuring things out.

However, players will reach a point where progress slows down drastically, and each minor upgrade demands a much higher investment than the previous ones. Most players eventually find themselves gathered at this stage, where newer players would also catch up to eventually.

The drop in mid-game item prices can be attributed to a shift in the player base toward the endgame. With a larger group of players contesting for higher-tier items, and many low- to mid-tier items are byproducts of attempts to create high-tier items.

Cheaper INT items could also stem from players having a mistaken perception of their value, leading them to create more than what the market demands.

 

To further add on, the cost of scrolls is often tied to the potential of creating high-tier items. If these scrolls were used to craft low- to mid-tier items instead, the relationship between the cost of the scrolls and the value of the completed items might not always align logically.

 

there's still a certain speculative element to coins but remember those cpi numbers are in mesos - i'm just trying to claim that a large part of the game exist outside of fm merchants and when coins go down, prices for everything denominated also falls.

btw go check out the constituents of ML's cpi (on google sheet) and you can ask yourself who buys gloves for dex 10% or black emerald earrings

 

Mutlimagers/multi DKs AKA the supersweats end up making things seem to be too OP which leads to nerfs that just end up hurting a lot more people AKA casual players / new players

Such nerfs include drop rate nerfs and NLC potion cost increase.
There's also more indirect systems that are affected such as the expensive costs of Pieces of Time even though the relative value of Reverse Weapons is worth much much MUCH less the effort it takes to craft one if you are playing one client or not a mage.

 

i thought pot price went up specifically because they stopped multimaging at tot

 

INT and magic attack are the same, both added together become Total Magic Attack or TMA.

HP washing sort of got removed, you can do HP challenges which recently got added into the game, afaik they're still testing some stuff but this is the alternative so buying INT equips to HP wash isn't that much of a hassle anymore.

 

If end-game players stop buying coins from market with the mesos they earn through bossing, the mesos don't flow back into the economy and just sit in banks. People have become coin rich and meso poor because the most popular strategy to progress is through bossing. Bossing = +coins, +splits in coins or mesos, -mesos in pots, so there's a positive stream of coin income from bossing. For these players, they can sit on meso reserves and reinvest into pots for more bossing that will generate even more coins and mesos. With access to coins through bossing, they're less incentivized to buy them at high prices from the lower/mid-game players in market who also don't need them. The only time prices go up is when there's an immediate need for coin and we see the prices spike for a short while.

That's my theory as to why coin prices are dropping. It's a long-winded way of saying there might be less quantity demanded for coins through the market because a larger percentage of the player-base can produce it themselves these days.

I think midgame players are in a good spot right now if they're willing to do things like leech to earn mesos and gain exp. Lower level bossing content isn't very good money-wise because usually, splits get divided into larger group sizes. However, it serves its purpose as an introduction to bossing, and it's decent exp at those levels. IMO, the best way these players can progress in game is not through purchasing gear but through leveling up so that they can tap into better bossing content.

In the past, midgame players had no choice but to grind their characters up at 7f -- or skip that entire phase through leeching -- because midgame bosses like Zakum and Krex were considered a waste of time. With the implementation of bossing pouches, these bosses were made a little more comparable to the alternative of grinding, so there are multiple paths out of this midgame phase.

New players may have it the worst with the pot increase changes and ghost town feeling, but this phase is also the shortest. The problem is that it may be the most impactful phase for player retention, so hopefully we can find a solution to improve the new player experience.

For the poll, I voted kind of disagree because I think you're diminishing the amount of work current end game players had to put to get to where they are. If a new player is trying to catch up to end game players, they're trying to sprint the length older players have been walking/sprinting for years. However, if you measure the distance a new player can cover in a year and measure it to the distance older players covered within a year - 3 years ago - I think you'd be surprised that it doesn't seem all too different.

 

Multifarming had and has a direct impact on the price of the following items:
Piece of time
Helmet for dex 30
Helmet for dex 60
Helmet for INT 60
Shield for ma 60
Shield for ma 30
Earring for INT 30
Overall for dex 30
And honestly every single scroll from gacha

if you prefer those items being cheap then you’re implicitly pro-multifarming as it brings down the cost of those items significantly

 

I was at drakes from 45 to 50, and not a single 60% scroll dropped. Either it doesn't exist, or drop rate's been severely nerfed.

 

the drop rate has always been very low, hence the fm price

 

I got a helm 60 at drakes in the 10 minutes I was there card hunting last week. The drop rate must have been significantly increased.

 

I would also like to add the main detriment to progression from new players is just pure misinformation that sow confusion onto new players such as the CPI. I've also been asked by multiple people about why their washing doesn't work, and I can only tell them to ignore guides and even formulae on the forums. Plan ahead to where you want to be relative to your peers makes for better advice.

An easy washing example from formula compilation:

Minimum mp formula for thief is 14*level + 148 because that's the lowest MP you can have and still use ap resets - 14*level+135 is impossible if you job advance conventionally.


Minimum mp formula for magician is partially based on total int

 

Do you think that is supposed to be a gotcha?

Expensive scrolls or materials made only widely available at the behest of multi-magers (not single magers, but multi-magers) is NOT good balance for a server.

Should scrolls be SO RARE that their supply is supplied predominantly by multi-magers?
Should those scrolls be so RARE and price deflated that it not viable for non multi-magers to never want to bother to farm these?

This is EXACTLY what i mean by multi-magers being bad because then we start justifying poor rates because of mutlti-magers.

Before the multi-mage reduced AFK nerf, Pieces of Time were like 300k each. A price justified given how WEAK/poorly designed Reverse Weapons are given they are level 150 items and not BiS.

Nerf the multi-mages, now those pieces of time are 1mil each, still rare, and no sane person is going to single-client farm 45 pieces of time on a non-mage or even a single mage.

In neither case should it be considered "fine". It's like the abysmally low-cost efficient state of Reverse Weapons are justified by multi-maging.

The moment you say "supply is good and price is low because Multi-magers" is literally the exact same thing as saying that Multi-magers dictate the economy, and impact other peoples' means of money making, which directly impacts new players/casual players in negative aspects.

 

squeeze one side of the balloon right

 

The drop rate of these items has nothing to do with multimagers. Piece of time has had terrible drop rate even before the multimaging meta. It’s not supposed to be a gotcha it’s a demonstration of how the effects of multimaging on the server economy are complicated and not strictly one dimensional.

 

Right, so when reverse items had their level requirement increased to 150, we accepted it because PoT supply was kept high due to the existence of multi-maging when the actual solution to the problem was to increase the drop rate of PoT or make Reverse items more accessible. But we dont really get to have that conversation because of the existence of multi-maging even though said conversation would most definitely have an impact on new players.

And this is just one facet out of many where the ultimate conclusion is that multi-maging negatively affects new players.

Kind of like how the accepted practice of just multi-clienting ensured that for the entire conjoined existence of CWKPQ and multi-clienting could sweep under the rug how unfriendly CWKPQ's 2 class sign requirement was for new players and it took only *2023* for Maplelegends to join every other server in having 1 class sign requirement for CWKPQ.

 

it's easy to pin blame on multimagers but actually before it was popularized progression was much slower across the board and everything was more expensive. Multimaging made the rich run far above the rest, but it's not sound to argue that it came at expense of the early/mid game players. Kiwi was right in the post above and to compare one's progress to that of the top 30 or 50 players is a surefire recipe for depression.

 

Reverse items are accessible through craft and through farming methods. People used to pay like 25m for NT crafts or run lots and lots of NT content to farm the NT coins themselves. Idk why you're complaining about 45m for PoT.

People used to grind at ToT with their friends, and I know some people that still do.

The only valid argument is that new players can't multimage there as efficiently as before, but AFAIK, you can still multimage there on a smaller scale.