Crafting orbs or currency? A serious discussion of the game's direction

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wrathmar wrote:

Personally I would like to see the drop rates for alchemy and fusings increased while the rest remain unchanged.

Exalted orb does not do much, and it is so rare like it turns every white trash into 6L Lioneye's Glare.

The top tier orbs are the most unbalanced, orb of alchemy is fine. Don't know about fusings, crafting 5L doesn't make sense cause you can buy it for 10-20 chaos, and 6L is out of reach for most of the players

It's just that it feels like the "crafting" system wasn't meant for much crafting at all. You can only use orbs on incredible items to make them even more incredible, or not at all.

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VTT wrote:

It's just that it feels like the "crafting" system wasn't meant for much crafting at all. You can only use orbs on incredible items to make them even more incredible, or not at all.

I think at this point we can all agree that many online games all need economy sinks, take a read on how Wildstar does theirs:

http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/news/wildstars_economic_game.php

Sadly, GGG's sink also happens to ruin their players' crafting experience. My opinion is, is you want to have an 'economy' as one more reason to justify a game's content being online. Cool, make a currency, make sinks, manage your economy.

Don't hide money in the crafting system, then in order to manage the money, destroy a players crafting experience all for the sake of some idealistic 'No pay to win' mantra. There are people in this game using external real money transactions to acquire exalts and exalts seem to be the only way to buy decent gear in this game, and make no mistake, YOU HAVE TO BUY GEAR TO PROGRESS or you will hit an rng wall so hard that you'll be dazed farming western forest or fellshrine for days afterward.

Absolutely, you need currency sinks, but in this game it comes at the cost of the crafting mechanic. There can be a balance struck, and at the moment if feels like we're on the extreme side of the spectrum.

I started reading this thread completely against the idea of increasing orb drops, thinking it would inflate the price of great items...
I've now figured that's not such a bad thing because it then encourages people to craft/gamble their currency - something I do more than trading anyway.

All GGG needs to do is balance the cost/benefit of crafting with orbs as opposed to trading with them...

For example if it currently costs me 10 chaos for an upgrade by trade then that's probably good value to trade rather than attempt crafting with the 10.
Now if drop rates were 5x higher and it was 50 chaos to upgrade by trade then I'd probably have a crack at crafting.

Of course this doesn't take into account the fact that more crafting happens, more good rolls occur, more supply of good items, lower prices... Maybe it finds equilibrium again.. BUT, it still means that crafting is a viable alternative to trading.

Anyway, that's my $0.02

Edit: I agree with VTT above, it makes crafting the currency sink

Did any of you know the basics of economy ?

The average price or crafted item will always be less than the sum of his component. Or there will no reason to buy it, since you could create it yourself.

If it actually takes 20 chaos in average to have a good item, let's say that you can sell it for 10 chaos. If you increase the orb drops by a factor 5, the item will never sell for more than 20 chaos. Why ? Because I could take any yellow (same ilevel), spend 20 chaos and get it.

Consequence : crafting will even be more useless, but in the same time everybody will have better stuff.

And that would 100%, absolutely be the case if the threshold for creating a "good" item wasn't so high. As it stands, it takes 100+ fusings to make a 5/6L item, perhaps many more chaos to to get "good" affixes to roll and then some more orbs to make those affixes roll in high numbers.

There is a massive disparity between the sum of components used and the price - it will always be less profitable to spend your currency on crafting than for trading because the orbs are so hard to get AND have low chances to roll well. Starting a post with "did any of you know the basics of economy" isn't productive - the disparity issue has been brought up several times throughout this thread. There needs to be a proper balance between crafting risk and trading stability or the system never works except for the super rich or super lucky who can afford to actually spend their components.

Someone mentioned rising fusing and alchemy drop rate.

Im 100% after it.

Ill add only blacksmith and ArmorersScrap as they can be used now with fusing.

Right now i wanna craft 5L Unique, and its out of my reach to do it as for casual player.
Its not some imbalanced arm like Koams, but i think its great. Give us option to actually craft something useful for our builds. If you think that passing game in own created items is enough, then sorry but thats not what ARPG is about.

We wanna make gear to improve, not to finish game. Act 3 ends and there is still plenty content to do, and its not possible to make hard maps in crafted garbage ...

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VTT wrote:

And that would 100%, absolutely be the case if the threshold for creating a "good" item wasn't so high.

And with more components, the good items will be so common that nobody will buy them, an you'll start to talk about how toe toptier mods are too almost impossible to get and how we should increase orb drops, how price are high for a small increase, .....

Holu hell, WHY DO YOU WANT GEAR ? To play the game ? The bext players are already level 80 withing a week. 1K characters are already almost 60. No, you DON'T NEED godtier items to play the game. All you're wanting is an easier game, face it.

I feel you've come to this thread to fight or poke fun and not discuss things. Maybe you should continue to post after you've taken some time to read the thread and compose yourself. This game is fantastic, but it isn't perfect. I don't want an easier game, I want a better game.