This was a reply to another thread, but I felt that it deserved its own topic since there are a lot of other RO vets here besides me, so yeah~
I played RO for many, many years. Without a doubt, one of its aspects that was absolutely terrible that made the game extremely unappealing for many new players was how terrible the market was for long stretches of time. You pretty much had to farm 1/10,000 drop rate cards, not any card mind you, you’d have to research the market as a new player… Then after farming that particular monster, with starting gear, you’d then have to spend a fair time trying to sell said card…yeah, pretty bad. Later on you could farm consumbles used for certain skills of other classes, but even that was kind of iffy and negated a huge chunk of the game’s drop system. For reference, this is someone who made a lot of her money from farming about 30 Teddy Bear Cards when Nameless Island came out (I played on Loki of iRO).
Look, I liked many things about RO, but there are a LOT of areas that were very poor about the game. In-fact, RO was an incomplete game and remained so. During release, it was attacked by hackers early on and it caused a lot of strife within the company and many core staff had to quit. The game was barely a shadow of what they had intended and it really did and does show. RO has a lot of good points that made it through though (the longest mmo I was involved with, 7+ years of active play), but the market? Absolutely not one of them.
With this recent change, I understand that they likely want to lower silver generation, but, 1/10th of prices is very radical any way you look at it. I would of at least moved gradually and examined the effect with each gradual shift. Right now the marketplace is pretty much destroyed at the momment and will likely remain so for a good while. Not exactly the smartest move for a beta test. I’m really not sure what test data they can get from crashing a market that is of practical value. Shifting prices to 1/10th their profit value after a market has already been established on previous prices has little to no relataibility to if the prices were 1/10th their value from the beginning. So yeah, extremely poor choice no matter how you look at it in my opinion.
Looking at the prices though, I’m not sure how someone can reasonably make use of upgrading items and attributes and such at 1/10th of their previous sell value. Seeing as the Beta Test rates are 3x value for exp, even spending more time grinding compared to now, I don’t see enough money coming in with the new prices to make use of all the game’s features to build your character up. Opting to use pots alone seems like it would take up all your funds. I think 1/2 their previous value would of been a more worthwhile thing to test, and if inflation looked to still be kind of high with what they had in mind, to then try 1/3rd. But yeah, that’s my feedback on it. o/
Edit: To add a bit of clarity, I bring up RO because an extremely low return on drops via npc is a model RO used. I see some RO fans instantly defending this when it was one of the poorest features of RO. Which let me give you some context, botting was INSANE on RO and remained a constant problem for the game which brought inflation to ridiculous levels. Bot farmers love a game where making money is extremely tedious because the demand for in-game currency from players becomes extremely high. If people buy from botters, they will keep botting. If people have huge demand for silver with tedious complicated hurdles in-game making it difficult for them to gain, a large portion of those players will turn to buying silver from botters.
Now, this can be mitigated some by allowing players to sell Cash Shop items on market, but for Cash Shop items to compete with Bot Rates, they typically have to be on the pay to win side of things which is a whole other slew of problems. Long story short, it isn’t a pretty road to go down if you look at RO’s (or MMOs in general) history.
