Weeds festival
I envy these harvesters 
can’t play until 8pm PST. I cri
Channels are crashing and wiping seeds
Bittersweet feeling for me. Everyday uphill rip but then I have a chance to actually get gems for my alt.
So, how’s your farming so far, everyone?
IMC is prepping us for the appraisers 
double your gem sockets.
My 2 cents on the event.
After participating the event for a full 4 hours, I have mixed feelings about this event overall. Needless to say on every implementation there will always be good and bad sides to the community and economy. I’ll just highlight the important things, starting with the thing causes the community to be so divided.
In layman terms, game interactions can be broken down into 2 components, cause and effect (or input/output, action/reaction). For each action a player do, the game will register the action and deal out the appropiate reaction. But computer programs are stupid, they can’t passively wait for an action to happen all the time since they are just lines of sequential instructions running and looping over and over again. So programmers employ sections of code to “listen for specific actions” every few ticks of time and trigger the reaction whenever a player does that specific action.
So what does this pertain to the event? As you can see, the game server is actively listening for the event in which a player clicks on the Weed and return the rewards when the action is registered. The Weed animation takes 2.0 seconds and other players are able to interaction with the Weed ‘npc’ during that 2 seconds. This makes the game server receives several actions from multiple players before sending the command back to the game client to remove the Weed ‘npc’. Hence, done right, a Weed can yield several rewards to multiple players.
What is good about this?
The mixed feelings I get from this event is largely due to this event is the very 1st event in iToS which actively makes the player community interact more with each other. Unlike other events, which is largely single player based due to the nature of the event, this harvest event becomes a huge multiplayer game where players will coordinate with each other to move and act in unison.
This is something in which I find that MMOs events are generally lacking and is really happy to see the community move up to help each other to achieve the same goal.
What about the bad?
The main cause of the divide is gem abrasive. To look at how much impact it has, we have to first look at the avenues of getting such abrasives prior to the event. Not including abrasives gotten via TP means:
- Evac pendulum gimmick (twice daily per char, lv1-lv3 abrasives with chance of stamina pills)
- Uphill defense mission (twice daily per char, up to lv2 abrasives)
- PVP points exchange (160 points or 4 days worth of PVP to trade for 1)
- Map gimmicks (IIRC there are 2 locations?, up to 4 times per location daily)
As we can see, abrasives are rare and do require a fair amount of time and effort from the player to actually get them. It usually takes an average player around a couple of weeks of effort to get a lv7 gem.
After 4 hours of running around and harvesting together with the rest of the players, I got around 18 superior and 46 advanced abrasives. That is roughly around 2x lv7 gems, which takes an average player a month of work just to get it. A month’s worth of work is condensed into 4 hours of play. At a glance it does seem like it is a way to help players, what it actually does is:
It trivalize the effort and time used to farm for such abrasives using conventional means (uphill, tbl, gimmicks).
No one likes to see their hardwork and effort being marginalized, especially when the cause of it is some unintented feature which added in via an event. Players spend time and effort to get better and would like to see that their investment is well spent. Players who use to sell gems farmed painstakenly to fund for their characters suddenly face an influx of high level gems in the market which are levelled using the multi-harvest trick. This spoils the gem economy for ToS.
What can IMC do to contain this?
The worst IMC can actually do now is to force a rollback, this will kill the playbase. Players who aren’t doing the event and finally RNGed their dream item elsewhere will be collateral damage if a rollback is enforced.
There are 2 separate approaches to tackle this:
1.) Remove the 2sec animation entirely. Make it so that once a player interacts with the Weed and the server receives the trigger, give the reward, prevent further interaction and kill off the Weed.
This solves the multi-reward problem, but unfortunately also kills the event. Players will just plant, wait 1 hr and directly harvest, removing any sort of other player interaction and intervention.
2.) Tweak the Weed reward list percentages and introduce more items.
Since the plus point of this event is players working together utilising the ‘unintended feature’, it will be wise to keep it to ensure the event is a happening one. However, expand and change the ratio of the reward list. A sample list can be as follows,
- Advanced abrasive 3%
- Intermediated abrasive 5%
- Exp Tomes 10%
- DG reset vouchers 10%
- Skill reset potion 1%
- Lv1 Enchanter skill scrolls 1% for each skill
- Lv1 Pardoner skill scrolls 1% for each skill
- Other usable items such as spell rods, hammer of dismantlement, golden anvils at 1% each
Superior abrasive is removed entirely from the list. Skill scrolls are added as a drop reward as they will serve to introduce other class skills to players (hopefully enticing them to play alts) and also help merchant classes to advertise their wares by providing test samples. With this shuffle of rewards, the event will still remain attractive to the players yet not pose a problem to the economy nor trivalize the efforts of other players.
Unfortunately damage is already done for the 9 hours of event implementation at point of writing this post. What we can only do is to hope IMC can quickly resolve this and wish the market can correct itself back over time.
19 Likes
Wow, this is definately going to leave its mark on the playermarket (in a very bad way). Way to go by screwing over all those players that have been farming abrasives on a daily basis, only to find out that you can top months of grinding in a few hours 
You’re basicaly forced to join the band wagon with harvesting or you’re going to be a poor sob when the market gets inflated to sht…
Edit: and what about all those dungeon reset vouchers which will create a big silver injection into the market as well…
Sigh~
You Still have anything you worked hard to obtain, you haven’t, and since you have the exactly same chance to benefit from this event you are not being perjudicated in ANY way.
people with 2 inches of foresight know that even if the gem price crashes during the event high lvl gems are still hard to obtain so they are bound to fench REALLY high prices in the future. hell probably even more than the current ones.
If you really worked hard on your gems then congratulations you already have that part of the character development complete and you can focus on selling smartly the gems you gain from the event in orther to improve other areas like atributes or anvils. You can even attempt to get Gems than other players that are barely starting wont try to since they are just recently gearing up. you still have an advantage if that’s everything you care about right now, o at least thats the brad impresion i get from your post
.
4 Likes
You’re probably the first person here who actually knows what a “free market” is. Cheers :3
1 Like
It’s not about having an advantage over other players. This is basic economics; the event as it stands now will start a massive inflation.
1 Like
A new point that speaks for:
Game worth playing? No
huehuehue
But ah, these purple meth, though generously but unwittingly given by IMC, are STILL limited in supply. Yes, basic economics would say there would be price inflation, BUT! basic economics also say that these won’t be permanent or lasting price inflations.
No matter how massive the new supply of gems would be, it would not be able to provide an eternally growing demand. It will still, ultimately, stabilize.
The Invisible Hand of the Freemarket and all.
Also: Viva La Revolution! Viva Commune de ferme locataire!
1 Like
they could put a cap on how many abrasives you can receive from the event
this is actually a much better solution
if imc acts now “50-80” might be enough
Of course it isn’t lasting, but it will do dmg…
Even more so by all the dungeon reset vouchers.
well at least this way people can share rather than get stolen from lol. I won’t bother planting or trying to find gem abrasives, I just don’t care enough to try. have fun!
Ugh, it’s not damage. It’s called a Free Market. Prices rise and fall all the time. Of course you’d think its damage if you put all your eggs in one basket.
Plus, if your losing the value in the goods you already possess, capitalizing on the event allivates a portion of your lost assets. What is economically sound right now, whether you’re pro or against this whole thing, is to take a piece of this pie.
Staying here and complaining, and instead of going out there, makes your already bad economic situation worse.
And how do new players who join after this event react when they find out everyone else got 10* gems without effort? Well, if they even stay long enoug to notice that.
All games are dead, but some are more dead than others.
How would new players react to very high gem prices that they would never have any access to? Now with the gem prices dropping, new players can afford them.
Tadah. The only people who get hit here are the upper class, the /nobles/ per say.
And this is a REVOLUTION. Madam la Guillotine awaits.