While I usually are on the side of IMC bashing, After some consideration, I have to agree that limiting the Microphone usage to level 40 is actually a very smart value.
I have seen some people suggesting a much higher value such as level 100, or stricter condition. I think that those value is actually not effective compared to the current value.
First of all, let’s discuss about the impact of the level restriction. When you increase the level restriction, there will be increase in inconvenience on both the players and the gold seller. Let us have a value known as inconvenience time here. Inconvenience time is determined as the time you can’t use the microphone when you need it.
A good way to determine the optimal value is obtain the lowest ratio of inconvenience time of player against gold seller. (low increase in inconvenience time for player, high increase for gold seller).
For gold seller, they prefer to use the microphone asap. Creating an account and start using microphone will take around 1 minute for them previously, so their inconvenience time before change is 1 minute.
With this update, they will probably need at least 3 hours to reach level 40. So their inconvenience time is now 180 minutes, and is increased by at least 100 times.
For the players though, while you may felt like using global chat sometimes before level 40, the moment when players actually want to start using the global chat is at level 50, for instance dungeon (and question on whether Commander Load Fail is still alive), or maybe for the rank 3 advancement at around level 40 (because some advancement quest is actually hard for rank 3, which you may need the help from high level players). By setting the level requirement to 40, there is practically no inconvenience time for the player (I will assume 10 minutes as the inconvenience time to include the amount of time the player want to use the global chat but couldn’t).
Now, what if we further increase the level requirement?
For example, if the level requirement is level 100, assuming which takes around 30 hours (for me) to achieve. The inconvenience time for the gold seller is only increased by 10 times compared to 100 times as before, however, the inconvenience time for the player is increased by at least 100 times.
Level Requirement and Inconvenience time:
- Level 1. Players: 1 minute. Gold Seller: 1 minute.
- Level 40. Players: 10 minutes (increased by 10 times). Gold Seller: 3 hours (increased by 180 times).
- Level 100. Players: 30 hours (increased by 180 times). Gold Seller: 30 hours (increased by 10 times).
From here we can see that level 40 is really an optimal value. Well played IMC.
There is actually a better scientific way to prove this, but I’m too lazy to write a longer wall of text on this, so you guys will just have to accept the rough version of my explanation.
tl;dr: Any value higher than level 40 or 50 will actually cause a great increase in player’s inconvenience, while doesn’t increase the gold seller’s inconvenience by much. Therefore level 40 is a very smart move by IMC.