Bank slots are too expensive
A few things I'd like to get out of the way first:
- Looking at the pricetag of 2K bank space and then coming to the conclusion that bank slots are way too expensive is nonsensical. No one is going to get anywhere near 2K bank slots. There's absolutely no point to it. We could have just as easily capped bank space at 1.2K or 1.4K because in practice that's all anyone will ever have use for. We only made it possible to go up to 2K because that's the technical maximum now. If there is a player out there who is sitting on 30T with no idea what to spend it on and wants to use some of that to get the ridiculous 2K bank slots, why not. I would be grateful for it, because now their in-game wealth flex will help keep PkHonor running that much longer for all of us.
- Large bank space increases are intended as an optional thing targeted at the richest players, much in the same way ultra rares are. It was not our goal that every player should be able to get hundreds of extra bank slots. No one really needs this and as many have pointed out regular players can still just use alts for storage, although we wanted the initial stages to be feasible for most players (considering that's more than enough for most).
- 850 slots = 20-25B. This is not a lot of money in this day and age, and is easily affordable for virtually any player.
- 900 slots = 60-75B. Still well within reach for most players at this stage of the game, and 100 extra slots is already a significant increase.
- 950 slots = 120-150B.
- 1000 slots = 200-250B. Now we've pretty much reached the point where it's no longer within the price range of every average late-game player and starts being more for the rich. Still, 200 more slots is a lot of extra space and will be more than enough for most people.
- 1100 slots = 420-525B.
- 1200 slots = 560-700B. At this point it's definitely only for the rich. I wouldn't say ultra rich considering there's about 100 players who have 2T+ wealth, and that's not even taking into account the fact that a lot of rich players have their wealth spread across multiple accounts. At 150% of the normal bank space this is a huge increase and I don't imagine anyone would have use for anything more than this.
- 1300 slots = 1100-1375B. We're now more or less at the price point of a single Legends cape.
- 1400 slots = 1560-1950B. I can scarcely imagine anyone being able to use this much space. Maybe there is someone who wants to be able to have every single item in their bank and will make it their goal to grind this out. Pretty sure this is as high as anyone will ever go, even the richest collectors.
I do realize that it is more "expensive" for ironman accounts to obtain this, or at least requires more effort. On the other hand, having that increased space is also a lot more valuable to an ironman. I think that offsets the increased difficulty somewhat, but perhaps this has more to do with the profitability of ironman than the pricing of the bank slots. More on that later in this post.
Lowering alch values ruins moneymaking for ironman
This, I feel, is "the big one".
To be clear, this was not intended as a nerf for irons specifically. Though I would like to say a few words about that, because it also ties into the aforementioned bank slot upgrades and the custom whip changes further on in this post.
Something I have heard time and time again since ironman was released is that money is pretty much useless on an ironman. There's almost nothing you can spend it on. In the past the only things you could spend money were:
- Donator & Premium status (2B each)
- Unlocking curses (3B)
- Transformation scrolls (6B)
- Quests (8B)
- Max capes (2B each)
- Completionist capes (5B each)
- Construction (24.5B for 200M XP / 236B for 2B XP)
We were hoping the bank slot upgrades would give irons another thing they could optionally spend their money on so it's not quite as useless. The custom whip changes were also partially intended to add another thing ironmen can optionally do with their money.
In the past, ironman profitability has always been pretty close to that of regular players. I'd say an ironman could make money about 70-80% as fast as a regular account. In some ways it was even easier for irons since they have access to instances. For an ironman to fully complete their financial goals (as in, make enough money to buy everything they could possibly buy) was certainly a lot faster than it is for a regular player, since there's so much less they can actually buy.
But back to alching.
As Mike already said this change was made purely to address the situation where everyone just alchs/junks items instead of trying to sell them. This was especially problematic in cases where the item prices are kept artificially high due to low supply on the market, so that everyone can keep alching them for a ton of money.
One recent example that comes to mind are the rev caves. In the weeks and months after its release the prices for that loot remained high, even though the people who were doing rev caves were junking or alching lots of that loot. What should've happened is that supply and demand took over and the prices came down. But it didn't happen. People didn't try to sell those items because they didn't have to. They could just keep doing the easy thing and keep making loads of money as a result. This is why we felt it was necessary for alch values to be decoupled from player trading prices and in most cases be significantly reduced.
But I must stress: this needs further tweaking. We did it this way because there are thousands of items in the game and only a handful of them are meant to alch/junk for a lot of money. It made more sense to decrease values across the board and then buff the ones where it's appropriate than to do it the other way around. We do understand that the combo of extra things for irons to spend money on + reduced income is a major blow. Something needs to be done.
Right now there are still a number of options we could take to solve this and I encourage everyone to take part in that discussion. To name just a few obvious ones:
- Rebalance the drop tables of the affected NPC's (more cash drops to compensate, or maybe more item drops as well)
- Increase alch values of a select few items back to their original values (e.g. crystal / dragon'hai / royal pieces etc). Here I would like to point out that this is one of the big reasons why we wanted to decouple alch values. It's not just so we can nerf where needed but also so we can buff where needed. If items are meant to be true alchables then their alch value will likely be nearly identical to their player trading value.
- Increase alch values back to what they were before but keep junk store prices low. This would solve a lot of the problems with both profitability and useful supplies being junked but it wouldn't be a perfect solution. Some more expensive items would likely still be alched even when they should be sold, other stackable supplies would become worth a lot less (like dumping dark crabs or pure essence into the junk store).
In particular among the items that don't normally get traded alch values don't make much sense. Like how you could alch a dragon chainmail for 4M while a platebody gets you 62.5M and a pair of claws gets you 200M. but the boots on the other hand only give you 750K. None of this is the result of the alch value changes since they were all lowered proportionally, the alch values for these items have always been out of proportion.
I know it will take some time and work and it'll probably be a bit annoying in the meantime but I think before long everything will be better than it was before. If we go this route I hope everyone will chip in and let us know which items need to have their alch value adjusted. We can start with the main moneymaking ones and work our way down to the less important stuff, that way it should hopefully not take too long for the annoyances to be gone.
Custom whips for ironman accounts
A number of people are of the opinion that the custom whip changes have eliminated the major late-game goal for irons, so I'd like to elaborate on that a bit more.
Our main reason for changing it was that it was just too RNG based. Now RNG does have its place in this game, but with everything else it averages out in the long run. Custom whips for ironman accounts were the exception because it was RNG stacked on RNG stacked on RNG. The odds of getting an elite are common enough that they average out quickly. The chances of getting a custom whip, while uncommon, also even out eventually. But on top of that you had the RNG of which whip you'd get, and at that point the results were all over the place.
Some ironmen got lucky and got their Whip of Chaos within 50 hours timeplayed. Others would spend 1000+ hours doing elites and still not get one. Personally I don't think that is good game mechanic design. Having custom whips in clues was actually meant to be a temporary solution, supposed to be replaced once we figured out a better way to give irons access to those items. But after so long people got used to it which makes it all the more difficult to change.
We have gone for the new approach as a kind of middle-of-the-road solution. You still need to grind elites to get the whips, no one can just donate to get one. What we tried to do was narrow the huge gap between those who get lucky and those who are extremely unlucky, without changing the method of obtaining them too much.
Although people can donate to convert one custom whip into another, we expect the vast majority will do this using in-game money. This also ties into our goal of adding new things which an ironman can )optionally) spend money on and in doing so, try to make cash not completely useless on an ironman account.
Of course the other reason for doing it this way is so that ironmen can contribute to the survival of the server, which relies on donations. Ironman players constitute a large portion of the playerbase. Until now ironman players did virtually nothing to help the server out in that regard. That's not their fault of course, there was just very little they could do. The main thing an ironman could do to support the server was donate for donator/premium but that rarely happened since it was so cheap to buy those statuses for in-game money. For some reason those things were made way cheaper for irons to get than they are even for regular players. Personally I really cannot fathom why it should be like that. With the new custom whip approach there is at least more our ironman players can do to support us either directly or indirectly, should they choose to.
After all is said and done though, the time required to reach that end-game custom whip goal has indeed been reduced. You could argue that it's bad to have nothing left to work towards past that point. But then we also introduced the bank slot upgrades, which add another big long-term thing to work towards. It's not quite the same of course. Maybe some players prefer grinding out elites over grinding out money, and I have no doubt that a gear upgrade is more exciting to work towards than a bigger bank. Still, it does add something ironmen can work towards in the long run.
You've killed the refund box (especially for UIM)
I guess a lot of you probably already know where I stand on this. The refund box was never meant to be used as makeshift bank space, and frankly I consider the way people have been using it as an abuse of game mechanics that simply needs to be fixed. But I do understand that after so long you've all gotten used to it and started thinking of it as a kind of bank. If you ask me this change should have happened a long time ago. Instead we chose to put it off until we could combine it with an increase in bank space, so that there is at least an alternative (except for UIM of course).
I do understand that there are a bunch of smaller storage options missing from PkHonor, like STASH units and such. Things like these need to be added, there's no way around it. I guess you could argue that until those things are implemented UIM should get a bank that holds 50-100 items as a way of compensation. Personally I am not a fan of that. Nevertheless we are open to considering all options for making UIM more playable. The refund box won't go back to being an infinite bank for whatever items you can get into it through various tricks, but maybe there are other temporary solutions we can add until the proper mechanics are implemented.
Sorry for the bigass post and thank you for your patience.
