Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Folly]

Watching some Twitch streams, I was surprised at how much this game reminds me of classic Everquest.
The ARPG format led me to expect that, like Diablo and every other recent ARPG, it would be a game of sprinting from room to room, gathering agro on as many enemies as possible and then blasting them down with overpowered aoe skills. But Albion seems to be more about getting a balanced communicating group together, and creeping cautiously from room to room, pulling controlled groups of enemies in a manner that can be delt with safely, avoiding unnecessary fights when possible, and generally approaching everything in a calculated manner to optimize your risk and rewards. It's a much more social experience that I've found lacking in other recent MMO's, and definitely something I could see myself enjoying.

[Paul]

Yeah, the PvE - especially higher end PvE - is more like Everquest than Diablo. Too big of a pull means often means running to "leash" them (most mobs only chase you so far) or wiping. There are areas where big AoEs are good due to the presence of a bunch of trash mobs like basic skeletons or ghouls - especially undead dungeons - but for the most part dealing with more than a couple elite mobs is dangerous. And you can't solo these elite mobs.

This is only the case in group dungeons though. Solo dungeons are soloable and a group would be more like a Diablo experience of running through and wiping everything out. The rewards aren't as good, though.

I haven't done enough of the big PvE events to know if they're comparable with old EQ. The dungeon bosses are mostly easier than the mobs leading up to them, being just big damage sponges with easily avoidable attacks - although there are some exceptions that actually require coordination and some skill to kill. I haven't tried any of the big raid mobs that spawn in open world yet, I've heard they can be challenging.

Back before the latest patch you could train monsters onto people, ala Everquest haha. "Train to zone!" They changed it though, too many stealthers were exploiting it to drag mobs onto players. Aggro 10 mobs, run up to group, ambush, watch them get knocked out, step out of stealth and execute them.

[Folly]

I'm somewhat discouraged by the feedback from patch Hector. It's been a while now, and the general consensus seems to be that Hellgates are not sustainable, with the average party facing significantly higher risk than reward. Dev's have acknowledged the situation and basically stated that they have no intention of addressing the underlying issues before release, or in the foreseeable future.
In non-Hellgate gameplay, Carebears and Hardcores alike seem to agree that the current balance is not satisfying for either side.
And the shift to having one central town seems to have spawned griefing trolls at every entrance who basically spawncamp, completely preventing low level players from leaving the city.

[Folly]

Founder's Packs will stop being available on the 9th.
Still haven't gotten mine. Still kinda on the fence...

[DoomOnion]

I have the game, but I regret it somewhat. The player economy advertised here isn't what you would assume it to be. It's nothing like player economy of EVE online or Ultima Online. Equipment does not degrade overtime, so to enable constant demand, it has to be lost via death. Death to monsters does not destroy equipment, it just heavily taxes durability. You need to die to players on red zones and above to lose equipment.

The problem here is that the game has up to 8 tiers of equipment at the moment. From tier 1 to tier 4 are scattered in blue zones, tier 5 on yellow zones, tier 6 and 7 on red zones, and tier 8 on guild territories on outland. There isn't a demand for equipment up to tier 4 at all, anyone with 2 hours can grind up from scratch and make what you want. Tier 5 equipment is theoretically consumable, but it entails going out to red zones to gather tier 6 material with tier 5 gear... which isn't very common. In fact, the only people who would venture into red zones are gatherers looking to sneak in some T6 stuff in t5 equipment, so you won't be selling any arms to people, but go through a shitload of tools and gathering equipment you lose in red zones.

Player economy is superficial at best. Only thing that are in constant demand and supply are T6 and T7 gear. Both of which are usually supplied within guilds via dedicated gatherer/crafters. So... the market economy will likely crash within first 3 months unless something's done about it.

I wouldn't touch this with a 10 foot pole, if you are looking for crafting and such.

[Paul]

I still haven't had a chance to try it since the black market got added.

Did the black market help at all in demand for lower tier stuff? Supposedly it was to increase demand for low end stuff, since it would buy stuff then drop it in the wild with item sinks built in where it just destroys some of them (plus players don't always loot low end stuff, so more item sink if they leave it to rot).

[Fewah]

I also regret buying into this as well.

Feels very mobile like with a grind that fits mobile gaming.

[Paul]

I'm still planning on playing it. I had a lot of fun with it so far. I never did really see the grind as all that terrible. Definitely not on par with the grind in games like WoW. The changes to hellgates seems like of meh, but I haven't played it since then to know.

Granted I only ever got up to T6 on crafting, T5 on harvesting, and T6 on wearing most of the gear I had unlocked - but it never really felt very grindy. If I was trying to push to be the first guy to get T8 or something I could see it as being super grindy. But I've never really felt the need to be the first at everything in any game, heh.

I'm cautiously optimistic to see how the economy turns out. I'm not convinced it's going to crash so badly. I haven't played since the black market, but up until right before that I was still making good money on crafting and selling low end equipment (enchanted t4, even - very easy to craft but most people didn't bother learning). Presumably the black market would make it better since it's turning off a gear faucet (dropped high tier gear created from nothing) and adding a gear sink (black market removing a percentage of items, and stuff on the ground decaying if not looted).

My main concern is that small group and solo red zone pvp which I found entertaining will die with the increased population and the move to push everyone to Caerleon. And black zones will likely get even more zergy. Small group pvp is way more fun than zerg pvp imo. I guess maybe Hellgates will work for small group, but solo will likely be untenable.

[DoomOnion]

The black market isn't really the end all to the problems this game has. In fact, it only delays the inevitable crash. The only thing black market does is forcing a 'trade' between players. Player A creates an equipment and sells it to the black market. Player B spends his time and/or money to recover such equipment while doing PVE. See the issue here? It only mitigates only small part of the vast problem if the game economy. It basically tosses equipment between players to make it look like the market has a constant supply/demand without the items actually being used for its purpose the majority(read: 99%) of the time. Not to mention that a literal shitton of silver gets poured into the market which will cause inflation inevitably. If this was done in real life under actual market laws, it would be illegal as hell (for a good reason too).

The biggest issue is that only T6 equipment is bought and sold in markets. Anything under that tier that really sells on a regular basis are raw materials(I assume this is because of grinding crafters and for use in refining higher tier materials). T7 are labour intensive enough so that they only really get made for guild endeavors so far. As far as I can tell, T7 either doesn't get put on markets on large enough quantities, or it's usually expensive as hell(depends on what equipment you are looking for). T8? Good luck with that, because you ain't going to wear T8 unless you belong to major guilds like Red Army.

They should have honestly made all zones red zones effectively beyond T3. Seriously, just do the math in your head. Ask yourself. How are the equipments going to be used before hitting red zones? Who will buy them for what purpose? How likely is a player going to buy the same goods more than once? How many players are around in game on regular basis? If you ask me, it's looking pretty grim.

[Paul]

Well, obviously it's not a magic fix for everything. But it does sound like an improvement to the economy.

From how it was explained, the black market addition reduced overall silver drops to make up for the money going into the black market. So it really only serves as an item sink. There is going to be an endless stream of silver coming in from mob drops, but the black market didn't increase that any. So assuming they've done well enough to balance the silver faucets and sinks before the black market there isn't any concern there.

They said they would have a certain percentage of items lost in the process that goes up as the price goes down (ie, bought on black market and not dropped), plus you have at least some items that simply won't be looted by anyone and decay - I have seen people just leave gear that they don't have a use for laying about, even T6 stuff. So it does more than just force transfer of items, it actually acts as an increasing item sink as the price of something falls.

In addition to you have the other stuff they have to help prevent market crash on craftables (study and salvage), it puts an effective floor on how low crafted item values will drop. It may get to the point that you have to spend crafting focus to make any profit as a crafter, but it's not going to become totally worthless.

From what I have seen the crafted item market is very insulated against crashes. And the low end raw resource market stays afloat because they're all needed to refine the high end resources.

The market that seems very prone to crashing is that of farmables, especially lesser used stuff like chicken eggs. I witnessed some very very illogical prices for chicken eggs on several occasions. I remember at one point the price of chicken eggs was selling for 2 (and not just a few, hundreds and hundreds). I believe you get around 30 eggs, but to do that you have to feed them 10 food. And all the food was 100+. So people were feeding them food worth at least 1000,  harvesting the eggs, and selling it all for 60. Even when the price was 10 they weren't worth the feed. One problem there is that there's no way to convert the eggs back into the veggies - you can't feed the eggs to any animals or use them in place of vegetables in recipes or use any kind of salvage system to get a portion of their value back. And the other problem is everyone can have an island, yet not everyone has the economic sense to know when to produce something and when to stop producing. People grow crops and raise chickens and sell the eggs on the market on some kind of autopilot without paying attention to market prices and realizing they would be better off just to ditch the chickens and sell the crops. I don't understand it because to me the economics of not producing something if it costs you more to make it than it's worth comes naturally, but I know that for a LOT of people (including many college graduates) that just doesn't click. So they go on producing eggs at a cost of 1000 and selling them for 60 and flooding the market even more.

[kilakan]

Some of those issues and weirdness in the markets does come about from the need to grind.  Such as, correct me if I am wrong, but to be able to farm high grade products from animals don't you need to start with chickens?  Could be that people are producing them just so they can get to the next step so they are effectively worthless.  By the same merit, armor and low grade mats can be shoveled into the recycle to fast-learn crafting of that tree.  I know that when I played I put in tons of massive buy orders for really low grade mats at the starter towns just so I could shovel it into crafting exp.  Same deal is that you always need low grade basic mats to make higher grade mats (unless they removed that) so there's always the need for tier 2-5 resources to be dragged out to the blackzones where you can't farm them.  And personally it was worth paying off new players to gather it for me, then to spend the extra time gathering it myself.

As well, there's always the silver sink of buying gold, if gold bottoms out then the game creates more gold from thin air. 

A lot of my time was honestly spent shipping stuff from the mainland to the blackzone market/guilds who wanted it and then coming back again.  It made me a lot of silver/gold and even crafting exp as I used overflow to upgrade myself.  Wasn't the funnest thing but then again I flew industrial in EVE online so same difference.

[Paul]

Nah, raising chickens for eggs doesn't give any XP toward animals. Not sure if it's supposed to or not. Maybe people think it does or something, I don't know. Eggs are for sale now for 1 each and the veggies to make them are 200 lol... Granted it's end of beta and nobody cares, but still.

From what I understand, gold is only injected when players buy it. Every bit of silver you spend on the gold market goes to another player. Thus that wouldn't be a silver sink. The main silver sinks are rerolling items and paying for city plots. I know that right at the start of betas there is no gold available and no set price, it's just whatever people put it up for. This beta a bunch was sold 1-1 and 1-2 for silver in the first day as people dumped gold to rush city plots. Then at one point it spiked up above 200. I remember one day when the market was going all over the place I sold 30000 gold for 200 and bought 30000 gold back for 180 all within about half an hour. From what I've seen they don't regulate the gold market.

[kilakan]

ah I stand corrected, I must have been a few minutes short to the start of the last beta cause I had assumed that the 1 for 1 gold couldn't possibly have been someone selling all their gold that cheap.

[Paul]

I just realized they're keeping the test servers up over the coming week, so if anyone wanted to get into the game buying it today rather than next week would be ideal. It is the last day that the founder packs are on sale till they switch to the release packs that they have said will be the same price point but have less bang for your buck. Then you would have a week to give the game a test run and figure things out so you aren't totally lost on release. As complex as building a character in this game is, you need at least a week to figure out what play style you like and what you want to do. Blowing through your LP on a test character to find out what you want to do for release is better than blowing through your LP on your real character, only to find you hate your build and have to start from scratch without the benefit of the LP.

Chat mods in the game are saying the founders packs go down in 2 hours. That's 4pm CST or 9pm GMT. I guess that's the deadline to get into this last week of testing and get the perks. I may be wrong about the testing, they might open up regular packs and give them immediate access to the test server. Still, if you're buying anyway might as well do it with the perks.

-edit-
Looks like they didn't change things too awful much after all. The same packs are available, just with a little bit less goodies. Not sure if buying now gets you access to the test servers or not.

All that was changed was the gold amounts and changing up the items given.
$30 pack went from 2200 to 2000.
$60 pack went from 4950 to 4500 and lost the silver name tag and thingy around the portrait and the special decorative spyglass. Got a different bonus portrait from the founder one and slightly different bonus equipment.
$100 pack went from 13200 to 12000 and lost the gold name tag thingy and the house, and instead of a pack ox got a "hand cart."



-edit2-
They've confirmed test server pre-launch is only for founders. So if anyone still intends to play at the start with a starter pack instead of founders, I would recommend watching videos and reading up on things a bit to get an idea of what you may want to do since you won't be able to try things out until the game is live - and trying to figure everything out from scratch is kind of like trying to start Dwarf Fortress from scratch. You'll spend a lot of time screwing up or just picking things you don't end up liking until you settle on something that doesn't suck and is fun.

[Paul]

So they're releasing in 6 hours. It's a tiered release though - Legendary packs tomorrow, Epic the next day, and Veteran the next day.

For new folks coming in now, no point in buying Legendary just for the head start - you will be too behind not knowing anything to make any special profits on the first day. The folks who know what they're doing will probably set themselves up to earn years worth of premium time in gold, though. Big profit potential early on until markets stabilize because so many people with the premium currency are willing to spend it on being the first to have stuff. Give it a week and you could get the same thing really cheap.

I'm amazed at how much people are spending on this game. I know a lot of people who have bought multiple $100 legendary accounts. Others who have bought lots and lots of gold packs.  Like people who have spent over $2000 on the game. Given how much people are spending on the premium currency, it will probably remain pretty cheap to buy premium for a long while. Unless people end up hoarding a bunch of it for some reason, which is possible.