Tree of Savior Forum

Make Arch Stone fragments local drops in episode 13 fields

If only the content gave other rewards when you don’t get archstones so you can buy them- oh wait.

Seriously having come back in December none of this is as insurmountable as people make it out to be. Is it a slow process? Sure but you build to it. Even if they gave you 4 arch stones right now you’d be running your sole hunt weekly + merc badge voucher for a minimum of 18 weeks. People just like to spend their time complaining instead of working. Hard moth is not very difficult anymore. With the package we just got, Ep12-1 gear, and vaivoras, the only thing stopping people from getting 7 talc powder each week with a chance for archstone fragment, full stone, violettin crystal, or full kara piece is people’s attitudes.

WW also not terribly difficult anymore and having killed Pbeta this past week it should trivialize the fight a bit for struggling parties.

This is the content you can run that gives frags/stones

Klai Prices

  • Lepi Solo (16M)
  • hMoth (12M)
  • WWH (24M)
  • Singu (28M+mats)
  • CM (44M+mats)

That is 124M worth of loot each week guaranteed from silver, hearts, and talc powder. Sell all of the excess mats and a bad week should still come out around 150M. So why can’t people complete their Kaira/Luci in the 18 weeks as previously established as necessary for all your tel harsha loot? This doesn’t include the mats from auto lepi/ww and their chance at arch stone (rarity won’t’ effect you if you opt to ignore the content cause it’s too low to bother)

If the issue is finding a party, join a guild that likes to help its players because there is no entry limit on anything I mentioned except singu/cm. All the raids can be run again and I’m sure some folks have downtime.

2 Likes

you assume that everyone plays on a highly populated server and has time to do all that stuff during the mean times of frequenting. You assume that enough items are sold on the market that everyone can get all his endgame gear. Every player has the need to get enough Arch Stones,regardless when or how often he plays. The current options do not cover the possibility of people playing at odd times, taking breaks or having social obligations.

It also considers not the fact that one might need the materials for his equipment. You cannot sell excess you do not have.

You’re mainly stuck at around 70m worth of silver + some cash on the side from loot you can actually sell (excess magic stones & practoniums mostly). Sorry I’m not playing on Klaipeda, but that amount of money cannot buy me an Arch Stone Fragment. Even if it could, if everyone would buy them, the price would rise and the market was just empty again or filled with 100+m Arch Stone fragments.

All I want is a reliable source of arch stone fragments everyone has unlimited access to 24/7 so progress is possible regardless of being able to fulfill equipment tiers for auto-matching or raid clearing. Being in a guild & getting carried by geared people cannot be the solution to reaching endgame in this game. The fields are the best option because they are dead while always accessible, allowing grinding your equipment whenever you feel like it, while not punishing people too harshly for not doing IMCs 20 contents that aren’t fun but just draining the fun of playing the game from you.

3 Likes

nonono … i got those hats from infro easily now … they’re not rare anymore XDDD

如月: Make archstone farmable at field!
IMC: Granted!
Botter: Infest all 5 channel of all ep 13 maps!

如月: Add more channel!
IMC: Granted!
Botter: Call reinforcement!

如月: Make the archstone frag untradable!
IMC: Granted!
Botter: Make full archstone then sell at market!

如月: Make the full archstone untradable too!
IMC: Granted!
Botter: Incoming an army of ark&karaliene equipped botters!

如月: Kill all bot!
IMC: Err… how?
如月: Give me authority to kick any bot that i encounter
IMC: Granted!

Some days later out of nowhere a gravestone appeared inside Bokor master’s house
Here lies a patriot who quit out of exhaustion fighting endless bot instead of farming arch stone frag

1 Like

Dropping archstone on field will likely invite an army of bots, harm server stability, and overall game experience. Farming shinobi quest mats or battle bracelet on the same map where a ton of bots farm the same thing in front of my face, only to sell to me in market when I give up competing with them, feels really bad.

There are many ways to meet the demand of archstones (or frags) besides dropping them on normal field maps. For example, IMC can provide untradable archstone (or frags) through events, quest reward, login reward, AJ reward, gimmick reward, etc. IMC can also create alternative path of gears, or alternative ways to craft the same gears we have that doesn’t involve archstone, which will in turn reduce the dependency of our gear progression on archstones.

Being the game developer and the game master, IMC has the absolute power to alter things in many aspects and dimensions. Dropping archstones on field, and potentially risking bot attacks and spinning up additional servers to deal with them, should really be their very last option, if not out of their idea pool.

1 Like

They can make arch stone fragments gained by field farming untradeable by default and make them tradeable against a high amount of money (like 50% of market price or so, 30-40m) so bots cannot abuse them.
You cannot justify not dropping Arch stone frags in the field simply by the possibility of bots obtaining them. Bots can only really abuse drops when they are left alone, and IMC already put so many restrictions in place.
The problem is simply that they do not fight bots aggressively enough in an active way by sending GMs around to ban them on sight.

Players need reasonable sources to obtain endgame equipment status. IMC decided that you need at least 6 full Arch Stones, so the sources need to be there, not just via entry count-gated content that on top of it has a very very low chance of dropping that item you’re looking for.

One recent Korean user on the official KTOS board also wrote about it fittingly, you need all these items and materials but they are nowhere to be found as a new player, especially the golden ichor extraction kits (they don’t even sell them via TP packages if I remember correctly) and the Arch Stones.
What profit is it to a newbie that White Witch Hard or Moringponia hard can drop Arch Stones when you cannot participate other than by “taking the bus” (a Korean colloquial term for getting carried by stronger players)?

This game design is faulty by default, high tier contents(White witch forest&moringponia normal/hard,res sacrae dungeon,Dimensional collapse stage 10+,Tel Harsha, giltine raid) should drop res sacrae gems/materials,blessed transmutors (for goddess/demon sets lv 2 &3) and the similar items for vaivora lv 3&4 + lucifieri materials, mid tier content (episode 13 fields, CMs,Singularity,Unique raids,Misrus, Dimensional collapse stage 9 and below) arch stone fragments and arch stones as well as goddess/demon sets,vaivoras and other legend equip materials, and low tier contents (level dungeon, old legend raids, episode 11&12 fields) crafting materials for all the ichors in spe, the mystic tomes, item awakening, enchanting, etc.

2 Likes

In the end they’ll probably decide to fill the demand by putting archstone fragments in gacha or archstones in “ark” TP packages. We’re at the same spot as 4 years ago where you could get one Practonium per character and each endgame piece of equipment to craft required two of them.

as long as the cost of a single Arch stone does not exceed 100 TP I’m not against this form of monetization. The current way to get to endgame status is RNG-grind combined with relying on the luck of other players who sell their progress in return.
At this point even arch stone fragments sold by bots would not hurt the economy but help it instead because more people would come to endgame status faster, increasing the demand for vaivoras, goddess and demon sets, glacia hearts (trying to get +21), legendary cards, nucle powder, sierra dust, mystic tome pages,etc.

Instead of selling materials that do not hurt the market like arch stones, they rather feed the whales tome pages, magic stones, blessed gems, blessed transmutors,etc. that actually affect the market much much more if they’re batch-released in the hundreds cheaply.

People will still abuse them. Besides, what should be the drop rate and price ratio? What if people completes their gears, get bored, and quit?

If you think X% drop rate and Y% price will probably work, and people are probably gonna be happy like you, you are putting many people’s jobs at risk on those “probably”. Will you be responsible for their lives if TOS imploded?

Any design decision comes with subtle parameters that may have profound impact on the game. You and I do not bear responsibility for those decisions, so we do not get to make them either. People who spend a ton of time to force “opinions” upon others online while being completely free from the consequences of their “opinions” are commonly known as keyboard worriers.

A lot of people on the forum say: IMC could just do X, IMC could just do Y. Sometimes I thought the same way and agreed with them.

But I won’t come to forum to make it a big deal and type long replies to everyone who disagree with me, cause it’s not our business to make the game better. I simply play the Korean MMO that is expected to be time- and RNG-gated. When I am trolling happily with friends in guild, I continue. When I am bored, I quit. Simple as that.

But you did tho…?
That is literally sanctuary guardian meme worthy

No he is right about that- if that where to get implemented as lazily as other field drops are in the game; it would only be abused by bots and IMC doesn’t have the man power to monitor every server 24/7.
However there are a ton of other ways to make Arkstones a lot more accessible but they all would go against the philosophy of what I’ve been able to deduce from all Korean MMOs.

Just from spitballing of the top:
A better Ackstone system

  • A player can either field farm or do CM for a guaranteed ticket to partake on a Grand quest (only 3 tickets can be gained per day, account wide)

  • The player gives these tickets in to an NPC in a major town and depending on how many you give the difficulty and end rewards will scale 1 to 3.

  • the quest require you to complete 3(1 ticket) to 9(3 tickets) tasks that range from any location pre ep13 to either kill a multitude of mobs, collect set respawnable meterials and/or complete puzzles by traveling from coordinate to coordinate on a map

+++
The main point of these tasks are that they are completely 100% random thus non-macroable; a player will find these tasks easy but they will need to actually play through them to complete them.
Im even sure a lot of the people reading this can come up with even more random tasks from other games that also have quests or tasks like these but I digress.
+++

  • After a player finishes the quest, they are rewarded with 1 to 3 (difficulty dependent) any colored Arkstone shard out of 6 colors which are all tradable on the market. The same NPC can be used to exchange shards to new colors at a 1:2 ratio and a silver cost.

  • When a player collects 30(this number could be lower or higher, idk) shards of the same color, they can create an untradable Arkstone depending on the combined color.

  • To keep this content relevant after a player has the Arkstone they need, the ticket at the beginning could be used as a trade-in for other useful character progression items like anvils, blessed shards, Brikinite, attribute points- and since you can only obtain 3 tickets per day account wide, its non-mass farmable.


Just something to note that this probably has some plot hole in the design but I’ve only been thanking about it for less then half an hour, with the criteria that its non-bot abusable and all player progression friendly.

Inc rant:
If I came up with this half-assed suggestion, what in the **** do all the people who get paid working on this game do to come up with the current dog system we have at the moment instead. The only answer is that it would probably go against some maximum profit criteria spreadsheet rule that all current Nexon games follow. If the game feels more like a game then a gambling simulator it isnt doing something right in their case.

1 Like

The problem with the value of the arch stone fragments is in the quantity
of end-game items that need it to be manufactured.

  • Demon / Goddess Set (lv1 ~ lv3)
  • Karaliene
  • Ark

SOLUTION:
Remove the arch stone fragment of the recipe from the sets.
Pass the value of the arch stone fragment to the manufacture of the arquenium in the NPC (Currently costing 10m).

drop rate would be 0.02% as stated in the original post, which is the same drop rate as skill gems. It’s low enough that you still take quite some time to get one but it makes sense.
If you set the price ratio at 40m, for the servers with the most bot activity it would no longer be viable for botters to attempt selling these fragments as they would be above market price value.

About the getting bored and quit issue:

  1. People get bored and quit because they are walled by the Arch Stone issue. They also quit by the fact that there is no access to the golden ichor kits that is always available (only events and leticias cubes, which are not always there, so the prices of golden ichor kits are too high for the demand that new players have due to the very low potential of vaivora weapons, goddess/demon items and level 440 primus equipment in general), so they are stuck at rerolling savinose dysnai with magnifiers (which are also quite costly in acquisition).

  2. People still have the progress of creating lucifieri accessories (which requires transcending their karaliene accessories to T10) and upgrading res sacrae as well as upgrading their legendary cards as progress left once they have their karaliene set crafted.
    Lots of people also have the ark left to boost up to stage 10.
    There is still plenty to do once you’ve reached karaliene status, so why would you quit suddenly after finishing this?

Their lives will certainly implode at the current rate. KTOS is losing more and more players, people have enough of the monetization of the game and the lack of a future perspective for the development.
So far there has been no developer roadmap for 2021, feedback from the developer board that addressed serious issues has been deliberately ignored and left unanswered, there is yet no sign of the internet protocol change that has been promised.

KTOS is now showing signs of a stronger decline and that trend will probably continue.
IMC didn’t monetize where they could’ve done so easily (selling golden ichor kits, golden anvils, art tomes, maybe even arch stones for low amounts), they wasted too many resources on new content patches introducing new systems that they then abandon quickly, they do not seem to recognize the abilities of the already introduced features (treasure hunting mechanics in the old field dungeons, collections, field gimmicks, party quests, etc.) that could be easily revived with little effort and introduced to new maps as low-cost content patches and they didn’t continue stable monetization via TP shop costumes for certain classes.

It seems IMC has been clueless that the original plan of monetization drew in all the people that opposed loot boxes and gambling and when TOS then went straight to loot boxes and gambling as the original monetization plan no longer worked because their incompetence led to a massive player loss, they lost more players in the progress who could no longer compete without spending lots of money monthly and chase the top tier meta builds.

Rather than having a simple annoyance removed for the enjoyment of the people, you think that the current policy of no transparency which agitates the established players and at the same time drives away all the new players who are not willing to invest 40-50$ right off the bat without ever having seen endgame is the solution?
IMCs management has driven their employees into a corner, there is no communication with the real developers through the KTOS board, just the management, who double down on their stance while throwing the players a bone every now and then.
They even reduced the answered questions maximum from 5 per month to 1 per week so they don’t have to deal with all the issues, which led to people reposting their entries every week.

If you want to blame someone for the situation and the insecure future, it sure is not a player who just wants to share an idea about what could lead to a better situation of the people stuck in midgame.
The whole reason why you even have the ability to pull this card against my argument is because IMC drove the game against the wall already, which is why one could argue that such a small subtle change has a chance of tipping the game into chaos.

Fear not!
Tree of Visual Bug to the rescue!

Jokes aside, archstones type sys where only rich and geared people have more access to them is just bad.

The most absurd thing about archstone fragments: on Fedi, I bought an Overload ichor for 95 mil recently to complete my set… and the only archstone fragment on sale in the market was at – you guessed it – 95 mil.

This would be easily fixed by making the event kits permanent and not expire at the end of the event. Last time I got 50 of those expiring on me, that was heartbreaking…

i once saw a dina bee botter storage full of honeymeli skill gems with 0.02% drop rate

hahahahahahahaha! How naive you are!
I dislike botter, but i despise more someone who is all talk no action. Go on then, fly to korea, apply job at ktos and change tos as you theorize above, and prove your words to us!

Even if you are right, CEO of IMC will be responsible for their bad decision in the form of required compensation when they have to layoff the TOS team. You, on the other hand, despite being very correct, still hold no stake and accountability for any decision.

(and if you are wrong, you don’t need to pay them a cent… oof feels good to be keyboard warriors)

And of course you must be correct and people who explained why they disagreed with you are all idiots, cause you are the center of this universe and the almighty online God. Shoot me an email when you are leading a company and releasing a better MMO.

1 Like

Off I go, this chat isn’t what I should have joined.

Satou: has left the chat.

It’s actually kind of fascinating reading this thread. To be so blind in your own progression that you defend such a sorry, ridiculous, and fundamentally broken unrewarding system. Wild.

I can’t say I entirely agree with field-dropped fragments, but I think weekly fragments via quests is a better alternative. Either of the two is a good step in the right direction.

That way (for my idea of weekly rewarded stones specifically), there’s a bare minimum per week you can progress without spending all your money earned on mb fragments, and giving the whales that already have plenty of money even more they don’t need.

This should have been a system long-since implemented the moment they decided to place a weekly cap on CMs, Sing, and instance-based content in general, especially since their entire reasoning for that change was to draw more emphasis on daily-play and daily-progression.

6 Likes

Bring back Goddess Zemyna on top of ET, give her a hard quest which rewards with one archstone fragment every week. Problem solved.