Loot cap/saved posts

Category: Combat, Magic, and Character Mechanics
Topic: Developer's Corner
Message #: 1944
Author: Senior GameMaster Estild
Date: 12/04/2020 07:11 PM CST
Subject: Treasure Update

On January 1st, 2021, we'll be making a significant update to treasure gain, specifically in reference to farming. Over the past several months, we've been monitoring treasure gain across all characters and accounts to gather some metrics. We noticed some very specific issues where the top 5% treasure generating characters are earning significantly more than the bottom 95% of characters. As an even more significant example of the problem, one character earned more than the bottom 60% of all characters combined. This activity is detrimental to the gaming environment and causes problems for players who are otherwise not trying to abuse the system for personal gain. It's also a significant issue that causes silver value to be pointless for some characters while others are barely earning any. When we try to price items and services to be worthwhile, we have to factor in both groups and as shown with the raffle prices at the last Ebon Gate, it often causes us to have to unfairly penalize the players that are not making 100s of million silver each month. As such, we will be implementing a system that has soft and hard caps to the amount of treasure an account can earn. Because of the metrics we gathered, we are able to precisely implement this update so that it doesn't affect 95% of players. For the 5% that are affected, when the soft cap is reached, it will apply a penalty to treasure gain that increases as more and more treasure is gained, until the hard cap is reached. We do not plan to share many details of this system, other than what's already stated, to avoid potential abuse of it. We realize this update may be unpopular with some players, but we feel the remaining 95% of players are better served with these restrictions in place.

GameMaster Estild

Category: Combat, Magic, and Character Mechanics
Topic: Developer's Corner
Message #: 2160
Author: Senior GameMaster Estild
Date: 01/16/2021 02:01 PM CST
Subject: Re: Treasure Update

Two points of clarification:

Paid event and quest areas are exempt. They're already restricted by access.

It was discussed and we do agree, there's no potential for abuse to tell you when the penalties start. The soft cap doesn't start until 16m and even then, the penalty starts so low, it's pretty much impossible to notice. The hard cap is 35m. You can definitely go higher than that, since we don't attribute all treasure to the total (some players are already at 40m for this month).

GameMaster Estild