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Refinement. Is it just me or...
rortie
Member Posts: 178 Bounty Hunter
... is the new Enchants and Refinement system one step forwards, two back? Easier, but I still need Wards and it costs plenty of AD for another ingredient anyway.
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"Young people....." - Erik Lehnsherr
"Young people....." - Erik Lehnsherr
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Enchantments levels 5-7 are far more expensive than before. I've never found a blue mark of potence anywhere in the game and I've seen 2 purple marks from boss drops in epic dungeons (2 in 60 bosses or so). It's here where the problem lies, imo.
Levels 8+ are usually less expensive than before, specially weapon enhancements.
To sum up: things got harder for new players and easier for hardcore players that already had level 7 enchantments.
yes its much more expensive especially for the higher ranks and i feel like the chances for upgrading (like 25% chance for succes from r7 to r8) are bugged or just incorrect...one guy was once complaining to me that he used 40 preservation wards to upgrade r7 and wothout any succes ...and i almost always use more wards to upgrade as that probablity says
No its not, its cheaper. I have made several Perfect Barkshield/Vorpal/Bilethorn, and many Rank 9/10. I would not be doing this if it was more expensive. However, its because there are so many people that still believe that its move expensive that i continue to profit.
I tired so hard to explain this to everyone, but my efforts were just shot down. So now, I will just take their money.
People cant get past the Rank 6 cost, but what they fail to see is that it doesnt matter (unless of course you are just happy settling on rank 7, in which case you are screwed.) Its the savings you get from 7-10 or normal to perfect.
People forget that Preservation Wards are typically 4200+ AD. It doesnt matter if you farm them or whatever, the fact remains the same. Before you needed combmine 4 7's to 1 r8, so 16 rank 7 combines for one rank 9. Do you realize how many preservation wards you are going to lose going to a rank 10? The new system requires you to only feed those cheap rank 5's into the higher level enchants, and only a few combines for minimal ward loss.
Thats fine, I wont argue that. However, for those people, it is now much easier to obtain a Rank 8/9/10.
You have it completely backwards buddy.
The new system is way more expensive from levels 1-5.
Levels 6-10 are far, far cheaper.
But the cost decrease from level 6-10 exponentially trumps the minute cost increase for low level enchantments.
And *new players* won't have issues. The issue which plagues this new system is and always has been that we have several months worth of enchantments saved up but a very short amount of marks. That's not to say I don't feel the mark drop rates should be slightly increased but claiming the system is unfriendly to *new players* because leveling is hard due to mark rarity doesn't equate when you have a drastic disparity in the enchantment to mark ratio from day one.
It takes more because it is a real chance. If it's say 25% people think that 1 out of 4 should upgrade. It doesn't work that way. If you fail one it doesn't magically go to being 1 out of 3 at that point, it's still 1 out of 4. So fail and you have a 25% chance of upgrading. Fail again and you still have a 25% chance of upgrading, etc, etc.
-interesting calcualtions,but still many opponents with their own nubers are there...
so if i understand this good its better to save your low lvl ranks and later feed the r7 and higher ranks with them,than upgrading them progresively from your begining when you have "nothing" and earn some AD to purchase things needed for rank7 atleast
thx for explanation
This is a perfect example of how much better the new system is.
In the old system you needed to make Four Rank 5's to make a Rank 6. Four Rank 6's to make a Rank 7. Four Rank 7's to make a Rank 8.
This means there were 65 upgrade points from Rank 4 to Rank 8. 65 points where the upgrades could fail. 65 Points where enchantments or preservation wards would be lost.
In the new system there are seven upgrade points from Rank 4 to Rank 8 due to needing another Rank 7 as a Reagent.
That is the bulk of the savings right there.
But most people just tend to not look at savings and equate it to money in their pocket in video games for whatever reason. I guess people lose sight of how things really work in video games and try to justify...less than rational...points of view on how their items are not actually worth something because they gathered it themselves or something along those lines. For some reason equating time to money in video games is something the average gamer seems to actively try not to do.
But take this example:
In real life you have to gather apples from a tree by going up and down a ladder. You need to pick 64 apples.
You have two options: carry 2 at a time and go up and down the ladder 32 times or you can use a bucket and carry 8 at a time and go up and down 8 times.
Also each time you go up and down the ladder you have a chance to drop the apples. Apples that fall directly on the ground will get damaged but apples within the bucket remain safe even when falling. And of course the longer you work the more trired you get thus increasing the chances of dropping apples.
Now if this was the real life situation you were faced with, which would you choose.
The bucket of course!
But because this is in a video game and players disregard time or cost due to product loss (because items gathered on their own time is free in some irrational world) it ends up being a much more complicated situation than it should be. What is common sense in life turns into rocket science when players don't apply the same rules of practicality to video games.
The perfect example to disapprove this is recently opened Russian server.
You're saying, that new players wouldn't have any issues with the new system if there were no enchantments on the AH gotten before M2. The server I mentioned is opened with the new system (refinement + coffer). Here are some costs to compare: Rank7 enchantment costs 300k+ AD, Preservation Ward is 7k+ AD, Coalescent Ward is 240k+ AD. AD-ZEN exchange rate is 380-400. So you can see that things became more expansive with the new system. But market is flooded with R4's that cost almost nothing.
inb4 "it takes time to those things to become cheaper" "there are not so many bots" "there are not so many people" etc.
1. insane cost to unslot them.
2. the need for C wards to make the higher level enchants.
Both of which thy basically fixed with making unslotting use gold (and far cheaper) and by making it so you needed less enchants in total which of course means you needed less C wards. But then for reasons I cannot even begin to understand they turned around and reduced the drop rate of C wards and added the need for these stupid reagents. Why? It just doesn't make any sense. Sure, reagents for upgrading artifacts makes sense since getting 3 or 4 of the same artifacts would be crazy but why add them into the enchantment process?
Its like going though all the steps to repair your flat tire and then at the end you're like "hey, now I have this extra nail, guess I'll stick it in a different tire".
Old way I needed 768 R4's plus my current R8. Now you need 640 (with bonus even less). At going rates that's about a 64K savings.
But at the same time you need to make 1 R8 that requires 3 blue reagents 75K and a purple 100K for 175K. Then another 2 purple to make the R9 another 200K for a grand total of 375K.
The net result at this point is 311K more under the new system. But there is the saving from less preservation wards (and/or extra enchants when those are cheaper). The number crunching here gets a bit more complex but I'm bored at work so:
Making R5's = old 71 extra R4's at 35.5K : new 500 (in lost reagent costs) 35K gain with new
Making R6's = old 52 extra R5's at 130K : new 6K in lost wards 124K gain with new
Making R7's = old 25 wards at 105K : new 9K in lost wards 96K gain with new
Making R8's = old 37k in lost wards : new 12K in lost wards 25K gain with new
Total savings 280K in wards
So grand total is a 31K increase for each R9 with the new system. Assuming I didn't screw up the math in there.
That is not what I said.
It has nothing to do with the AH price and everything to do with the number of enchantments within the game. All of my characters as well as most other people's characters are stuck staring at mark requirements and have been from day one simply because all of the enchantments I had were enough to upgrade all of my enchantments and more.
The mark drops aren't balanced for this short term surge. They are balanced for the standard game with consideration to how often enchantments drop for each person. It should be self explanbatory that if you buy enchantments from the shop you will likely have to buy marks too.
More or less it's something additional to shoot for and hold you back from just power grinding straight through.
I myself don't particularly care for the means they did so but it was a needed function. They greatly reduced the challenge of acquiring everything needed to get Rank 10 Enchantments. Again the lost product cost is greatly diminished and that is what you are missing in your equation.
Marks from Rank 5-10 will cost you, from the Bazaar, ~1M AD. That number is far less than the loss of materials in the old system.
And in time as marks are not in extremely high demand the price of them will reduce below the bazaar price when purchased from other players.
It's a bit hard to follow your post but I am fairly certain you messed up your math somewhere.
New Cost in Marks:
Rank 10: 100K + Rank 9 -
Rank 9: 100K + Rank 8 - 250
Rank 8: 100K + Rank 7 - 150
Rank 7: 25K
Rank 6: 25K
So that is (100K + 100K + 100K + 25K + 25K) + (100K + 100K + 25K + 25K) + (100K + 25K + 25K) + 25K + 25K.
Grand Total 800K in marks to make a rank 10 from Rank 5.
Now the actual number of enchantments needed is actually about the same between the two systems. The new one is slightly more but it's only a few hundred more.
So we'll stick to the loss factor.
Let's assume P-Wards are 3K.
In order to spend less in P-Wards in the old System compared to the marks you can only lose 266 P-Wards (798K in value).
Here's the breakdown for the number of upgrades:
Rank 10: 1
Rank 9: 4
Rank 8: 16
Rank 7: 64
Rank 6: 256
Total of 341 Failure Points.
Compared to the new System:
(6 7 8 9 10) + (6 7 8 9) + (6 7 8) + (6 7) + (6)
[Those are simply ranks. Unlike the previous system it's actually easier to just count on fingers how many upgrades are needed]
Total of 15 Upgrades.
Now ideally we should calculate the failure chances out for each level but I'm going to be lazy and just say that you have a 50% chance to fail straight through.
Old: 341 (upgrade points) x .5 (50% fail chance) x 3000 (cost of wards) = 3,170,500 AD in Preservation Wards.
New: 15 (upgrades Points) x .5 (50% fail chance) x 3000 (cost of wards) = 22,500 AD in Preservation Wards.
Wowee. What a difference.
Let's up the stakes. Let's say the failure chance with the new system is 100x less likely to succeed.
New (100x Lower Sucess Rate): 15 (upgrade points) x .005 (0.5% fail chance) x 3000 (cost of wards) = 2,250,000 AD in Preservation Wards.
It's still one million AD cheaper. It is 100x more likely to fail and it is still costing you less in Marks from the Bazaar than it did in preservation wards. There's no way to justify that the old system as cheaper. None. If you feel it is that is because it's a *feeling* without breaking down the math. The new system is cumbersome. It's annoying. It's irritating. But it's cheaper.
You could. In a round about way that was my point.
People have this habbit of saying because they gathered items in the game they are free. They are worthless. They don't care how much the products are valued at because they didn't have to pay for it.
Blech.
That's not the way the world works. That apple is worth whatever an apple is worth regardless of how you got it.
You can choose not to care but in choosing not to care you really do throw away any pretense of trying to argue the cost aspects of...well...anything.
If you try to say the old system was cheap because you spent a year invoking to get free wards or that you gathered all of your supplies it doesn't make it cheaper. Because you choose to spend a ton of time gathering stuff instead of directly purchasing it doesn't mean that the economic values defined by the community doesn't come into play.
In fact it's the opposite.
The only value which truly matters when considering cost is the actual player economy.
If you choose not to be a part of it then that is your choice. You are not part of the economy thus you really can't define what is more or less expensive as everything is free.
If you hired a person to go and gather apples for you then you have to equate how long it takes him to gather those apples and, most importantly, how many he damaged by dropping to the ground. Because all of those apples on the tree are worth what an apple is worth. Every one damaged is lost income.
And that is how a business looks at their products and their labor.
That is how developers have to balance an in game economy.
They have to balance the economy. Whether you particpate in it or not is up to you but the economy is balanced for the community and not the individual.
Edit: It's compounded by reduced avenues of obtaining AD; If they would of kept the AD deslotting cost with this new system, it would of been the biggest mistake they could of made. I am glad they came to their senses on the deslot cost; or they could of potentially lost 1000s of customers from that compounding of AD sinks.
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I will agree once you hit rank 7 the cost for rank 8 is definitely better. They should cut the prices of the marks by half and that would be justifiable because the drop rates are so bad you end up paying the bazaar for them and I believe 75k for a rank 7 just to make them on top of everything else is a little high for new comers especially when you need 12 enchants for all your gear to be enchanted. Also ad is definitely not as easy to acquire since the dev's are fixing all exploits and gear prices are through the roof. Just seems like a huge wall for a new comer that doesn't have any other characters.
But yes, I did make a mistake (probably more than one). I forgot the rank 7 needed to make the rank 8 so the new cost is slightly higher for wards.
As for my math I calculated what it would cost to upgrade my R8's to R9's by farming R4's. When combining I only use wards when cost effective (R4's sell for 500AD, R5's sell for 2500AD so I used those prices as the failure cost when combining 5's and 6's)
I also calculated that failures can fail again. I.E. if you need 100 at 50% you will get 50 failures. Recombining you will get 25 failures. Then 12.5, then 6.25, etc.
A couple notes on your calculations. R9 and R10's require 2 greater each and R7's require 2 normal. So it's 1.2 mil not 800K for reagents.
R9 and R10 require less enchants than the old system. In the new system you need 2 R8's and 103,680 RP. A tier 4 gives 270RP so you need 384 (not counting crits). In the old system if you had two R8's you would need 2 more R8's, it took 256 R4's to make a R8 so 512 total to make two. This is really where the savings comes in with the new system as rank 10's are much less needed enchants.
I'm not sure what you did on your ward calculation but you wouldn't use over a 1000 wards on 341 upgrade points at 50%.
Conveniently at 50% it basically equals your number of tries. I can show this with a smaller number. Let's say you need 16. First time 8 succeed, 8 fail. so 8 wards used. 2nd 4 fail. 12 total wards used. 3rd 2 fail. 14 wards. 4th 1 fail 15 wards. 5th .5 15.5, 6th .25 15.75, etc. (I would write an impressive calculus limit equation here if I remembered any thing from calculus)
But yes, the new system requires a lot less wards. This is largely offset with the reagent costs. 1.2 mil for a rank 10 (not 800). As a result rank 9's are slightly more and rank 10's (by virtue of much less enchants) are cheaper.
Of course these calculations change with enchant costs. I did a similar calculation when this was in beta and at the time R9's were cheaper in the new system. But enchant prices were much higher.
The new system would be much better if the reagent drop rate was high enough that it brought down those costs.
As you said, you still have chances to fail again and again and again.
More points of failure simply throw that issue through the roof.
Everything I said was with the utmost advantage towards the old system, including the way over-beneficial 50% fail chance, and it still fails to deliver.
If you take the time to do wthe actual math it will simply make it even worse.
P.S. I did calculate the multiple regeants required in my math.
Technically it is cheaper and there is less frustration with losing enchants, and if all you are doing is upgrading already socketed Enchants (a fantastic addition I might add) it save a huge amount of storage space and is much easier to just "feed" all those random drop enchants to your socketed one ... However, because of the ridiculously low drop rate of MoP you end up giving in and spending AD to buy the marks form the Bazaar and the C wards from the Z-Store or AH ... That, IMHO is problem with the new system, but you have to ask, does Cryptic/PWE see us players spending more AD and Z as a problem? ...
Bingo.
If most people are less grumpy than me and happy to play and pay, no, of course not.
"Young people....." - Erik Lehnsherr
it's human nature to reject change. but i don't see cryptic ever going back to the old system.
I did the actual math, thanks. Even went as far as writing software to simulate thousands of combines back when this was in test.
As I said, this as been beaten to death already. So moving on, thanks for the discussion.
The new system has a steep cost from r5 upwards, that also makes preservation wards mandatory. I could care less about the cost reduction in r8-r9-r10 when I have to pay millions to upgrade from r5 to r7 to my 3 toons, while under the old system that step was almost free. Being stuck in r5 for a large amount of game time is extremely harsh especially for newer, inexperienced players.
Ultimately the most important thing is that making weapon enchants is less expensive. This is great because weapon enchants make the biggest difference in gameplay.
The cost of leveling up the other enchants is somewhat similar only using pres wards instead of coals. Ultimately the extra 115 stat points you get by going from 7 to 10 is not worth the few million difference in price.
Things worked out really well for me post patch. Maybe I will upgrade the enchants later but ultimately it's not efficient. Might be better to get good pet bonuses for PvE or maybe I pvp level enchants simply because there is nothing else to do.
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I would like to hear some arguments about the extra 900.000 ad cost of upgrading from r5 to r7 under the new system (3 marks of potency for 12 enchantment slots total, not counting potential augment companion slots). Since some seem to be positively inclined to the new system, maybe I'm missing something? Using r4 for refinement is a given since that is the most effective way now. Multiplying that cost by the number of alts one has...the numbers get huge very quickly. The old system didn't have a mandatory ad cost, which is a steep obstacle now.
I haven't seen any math model that takes into account all the free resources someone puts in towards making an enchantment. Of course it would require info that could be almost impossible to get, and in any case it would be personalized.
I.e. how many wards someone would get for free and use in the refining process (variables: # of logins, # of alts, % drop rate before/after module 2, etc). How many r3/r4 he would get free and use in the refining process (variables: average # of skill nodes looted daily, % drop chance from skill nodes, # of alts, # of enchantments gained from Leadership, effectiveness of Fey Blessing enchantments, etc). As a disclaimer, I'm not suggesting anyone should try and create this mathematical model...let's be reasonable.
The calculations I've seen put a cost in all assets, then use it as its value. This might as well be a very close and accurate approximation with the "free resources" model...or not. Another problem with using the cost as a value is, each asset has a different cost of selling in the AH, and for buying from the AH. So, this is another approximation, if you assume selling the excess assets and buying the missing ones. If you use the same values, you are cheating in favor of the new system, because the value of selling is 10% lower than the value of buying (AH tax).
But in any case, most of the costs assigned to the steps below r7, were close to zero under the old system.