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A small tweak
ANNOUNCE NEWS #4520 (03/04/2016 at 18:42)
From : Tecton the Terraformer
To : Everyone
Subject: Seamonster tweaks
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A small tweak to seamonsters has just gone live: We've increased the (per-ship) time between seamonster spawning in the low-level areas. The rest of the more challenging zones remain unchanged.
Penned by My hand on the 1st of Ero, in the year 707 AF.
I am really not happy with this change.
As a dragon i can make easily between 25-35k in an hour hunting.
Before this 'small' change, I received 35k in an hour from monsters in the 'kiddie pool'(5 monsters in a hour).The difference is, I still need to subtract the cost of ammo.
For wardiscs its 275 gold per disc.20 per discs per monster, is equal to 5500 gold cost.You get 7000 per monster, making 1500 gold in profit.
For darts is 400 gold per dart.20 per monster is equal to 8000 per monster.You get 7000 per monster, losing 1000 gold per kill.
(If you dont have a 200cr rack or friends that can give you free ammo)
After this change, the spawn time is now double. That mean 1 monster every 20 minutes.
3 monsters in an hour(If you strike the spawn perfectly)A profit of 4500 in an hour, or if you get ammo for free..21 000 gold in an hour.
Not very rewarding for non bashers that loves and prefers the sea.
Yes , some will remark that some captains only sit there and keep the area empty,wrong..cause monsters spawn PER ship..I did some hunting with other ships, we still made our gold each.
Guess I'll go back to hunting in dragon for now
Comments
There's already a significant number of people who have hundreds (and some have thousands) or credits worth of gold just sitting in their bank/pack. I'm sitting on 900k, after buying close to 250 credits. And that'd be considered 'poor' by some people's standards, these days.
And you won't understand the cause of your grief...
...But you'll always follow the voices beneath.
Can I sell it for gold?
Fun doesn't refill health vials. Or buys ammo.
And you won't understand the cause of your grief...
...But you'll always follow the voices beneath.
There aren't enough people that hunt sea-monsters regularly to kick out the "it's almost good enough gold" crowd. All of these seafaring changes were to get more involvement into the seas, so any change that could potentially revert that influx should be viewed and thought about carefully. Gamden isn't asking to make insane gold per kill, he's just asking that it still be made to be worth the time put into it.
Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
Annwyn.
Underworld.
Delos guards, even Seragorn dies to there every so often.
Azdun Catacombs (the very lower part)
Prin? One of those islands with painful as f- mobs. Probably Prin.
Even Istarion can be deadly, as evident by deathsight.
Also depends on how artifacted / careless you're being. Run into Rakwor when there's 4 guards sitting there. Shit is gonna hurt. Klendathu's comparison is pretty spot-on.
PS edit: Tenwat isn't a dragon-level area, it's like 75-85+ it just happens to give very nice gold, so dragons hunt it all the time.
Trans Seafaring: 1736 lessons / 290 credits at current market price: 2,030,000
Sea Strider: 5,000,000
Ballista: 295,000
Onager: 495,000
Arm: 180,000
Figurehead: 20,000
Bait Tank: 100,000
Beacon: 50,000
Captain's Trunk: 25,000
Desk(without maps): 75,000
Bell: 100,000
Crane: 100,000
Mariner's Sextant: 35,000
Flag: 500
Emblazon: 2,500
Boggle of Champgne: 100
Ship's Axe: 1,210
Lead Line: 1,785
Spyglass: 500
Buckets and Rope: *Variable
Deep Sea Fishing Pole: 1,000
250 Deep Sea Bait from Denizen Shop: 68,750
40 Shipmates: 120,000
60 Cremates: 30,000
6 Swashbucklers: 30,000
50 Crates of 1000 Fine Provisions: 17,000
106 Token Stores: 26,500
Ship Strongbox: 25,000* (suggested starting amount, obviously highly variable)
Recommended Bank Account to cover Salvage: 100,000 (debatable, you can get by with a bit less)
500 Ballista Darts: 218,000
500 Wardiscs: 137,500
50 Flares (any colour): 11,100
50 Spider Shot: 26,000
50 Star Shot: 19,850
* OPTIONAL PACKAGE #1: [Ammunition Cost Offsets]
Dart Rack for +14% estimated profits: 200 credits at current market value: 1,400,000
Wardisc Rack for +7% estimated profits: 200 credits at current market value: 1,400,000
** OPTIONAL PACKAGE #2: [Better Fishing Between Kills]
Bait Bucket Talisman: 250 credits (*variable) at current market value: 1,750,000
Bait Bucket Customization to Deep Sea Bait: 250 credits at current market value: 1,750,000
Trans Survival: 290 credits at current market value: 2,030,000
*** OPTIONAL PACKAGE #3: [Improved Surviveability vs Player Threats]
Trans Vision for longer distance shipwarning, eyesight at night, and hearing yells: 290 credits: 2,030,000
Trans Fitness to offset Endurance drain from shipwarning: 116 credits: 812,000
Trans Galvanism to offset Willpower drain from figurehead link: 116 credits: 812,000
GRAND TOTAL: 9,347,295
*GRANT TOTAL: 12,147,295
**GRAND TOTAL: 17,677,295
***GRANT TOTAL: 21,331,295
Obviously these figures do not count things like costs for weapon maintenance, port fees, crew pay after initial 25k, or any other miscellaneous on-going expenses. These figures are subject to debate. Obviously you don't need a salvage crane to hunt seamonsters, but that isn't the point. The point is...
THESIS:
When you are talking about this level of personal investment... YES the seas should absolutely generate an income on par with dragon bashing with at least a semi-comparable difficulty and risk factor.
And even at the old spawn rate, the XP gain for time spent was pathetic compared to... any other method of getting XP the game offers including questing. 0.2-0.3% at level 90 per twenty minutes if you had the run of an area or longer if you did not. It is more like 30 minutes or more now.
I really feel like the design team of Achaea hit a hole in one with seamonsters. I understand tweaking them for economic reasons but this change hovers on the edge of making the activity economically inviable and a novelty which will be quickly forgotten. It is vastly more fun (or was) to hunt the smaller monsters because you don't have to rely on other people sharing your hours, but it is also supremely fun to get a hunting group together once in awhile to hunt the big ones. It was very much win/win for all involved, and it has seen the seas come alive with conflict and treasure once again. I reeeeeealy don't want to go back to the old days of 12 hours of straight fishing and nobody on the water.
I'm not saying the design team killed the activity by any means, as obviously I'm still doing it and others are as well. But the overall feeling of satisfaction and gain derived from it feels much too low now for how much work it took to get here and I understand how people are feeling a more than little cheated. Especially those of us who invested in weapon racks.
With that being said, perhaps there is a middle ground somewhere? Obviously I don't have access to the numbers the design team does and as the #1 seamonster killer everyone is going to scream that I'm bias but that's just how much I loved the activity as a means of character progression and how much I loathe regular bashing. The seas are my niche on Achaea. I'm bias. Fair enough.
So what do the rest of you think?
Again, though, the only thing nerfed here was the extremely easy ones that you can basically afk-fight.
Also, counting the cost of ships is pretty deceptive, really. Most people these days can grab a ship from someone else/their city without paying for it themselves, and you don't need trans seafaring to be competent at sea.
As for the "extremely easy ones" that is also deceptive. I have had more ship to ship fights in seamonster zones since I started than I've seen happen in my whole time playing Achaea. The risk is substantially higher in harder zones because if an enemy appears when your ship is at 50% with sails and figurehead down, that is not a happy position to be in. Especially since another won't spawn and engage the new comer. The bigger monsters are never going to be as frequent and popular an activity for exactly that reason even at double their current reward. Although I can name some people who would be super happy if the Tapoa reward was jacked up since those can be solo'ed as well and are currently untouched.
10 hours on the seas is 10 hours where you can be attacked by anyone and sunk. 10 hours bashing is 10 hours of bashing. A comparison is absolutely necessary in this case to address the economics, but its still apples and oranges.
Dragon is, roughly, ~300 hours of playtime. That's a lot more investment than asking your city 'hey can I borrow a ship'.
Also... they are extremely easy. That other ships can come and shoot at you doesn't change that. You're not going to be at 50% hp from fighting the ones that are basically no more dangerous than an anchovy. It's also pretty hard to be sunk in the first place if you know what you're doing and are prepared (though it's not as hard as it was a while ago.
Again, I did say I'd be fine with upping medium/hard monster rewards since they're pretty meh for just money/xp. But, once more, the ones they nerfed here were essentially gnolls. No one demands gnolls give the same gold as annwyn, as I said.
The kiddie pool is designed to be just that, something to get you a basic idea of what may happen. It should be to seamonster hunting what ratting is to normal hunting.
Also, @Gamden 's estimate doesn't take into account you do recoup a fair amount of the ammo you spend and you can buy them off other people with racks. You always buying it from the denizen shops is like always getting your refills from Seasone.
After a trip hunting seamonsters with @Antonius and @Sarflus, I think the mid tier monsters are a bit undervalued from the additional time required to hunt them as you cannot simply drop anchor and slug it out against them with a strider. I think they present an interesting challenge and requires me to put enough work into maneuvering that I do need to stop eventually.
However, I don't think throwing money at it is necessarily the best carrot that can be can offered. The biggest carrot would be item(s) exclusively gained via seamonster hunting.
Ideas:
A unique to seamonster hunting figurehead
Something to recharge/make more efficient your figurehead
A treatment that can enhance a ship's weapon so it instantly is in position for firing again
A special harpoon which is a 1 use item that can be thrown at a seamonster
If you guys want to discuss those ideas, we can open a thread on the Dias for it.
I would be happy to help design the descriptions of these if the Garden takes any interest in them.
An item that gives you rank 5 in a specialization for a month.
The gold earned by someone engaged in mining is earned from other players, it isn't generated by the game. The gold costs involved in mining remove gold from the economy (when you pay the costs, gold is just getting deleted), but the gold earned by someone engaged in mining doesn't change the amount of gold in the economy (no gold is actually generated anywhere in the mining system).
The point of a gold sink is to remove gold from the economy. Mining may make the miner rich, but it makes them rich by redistributing existing gold (by making other players poorer), not by creating more gold and injecting it into the economy. And all of the costs of mining actually do remove gold from the economy, not just rearrange it (when you become poorer by paying upkeep, no other player becomes commensurately richer).
Regarding sea monsters, I'm not sure why the "kiddie pool" should have a similar return to dragon bashing.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding since I haven't done any sea monster hunting since it was added, but it seems to me like if you want a greater return, you should be expecting to have to hunt more difficult prey, no? If the more difficult monsters aren't providing significant returns, that seems like a problem. But if just grinding out the easiest monsters isn't providing huge, dragon-bashing-like returns, that doesn't seem like a problem.
The change is pretty obviously intended to stop people from grinding the tiny monsters that present no danger to a seastrider for hours on end. If you want to make money hunting monsters, you can, you just have to actually go fight real monsters instead of anchoring in the kiddie pools.