No more ingots

[trgeorge]

from http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=414556

Note from Game Director: Removing Ingots

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There has for a length of time been an increasing problem with a strong inflation in the games economy. We have previously taken various actions to reduce this problem but have unfortunately not achieved a satisfactory outcome. We have decided that further actions to ensure a stable economy has to be taken.

We have evaluated various solutions to this issue actively seeking the one that will improve the games economical balance without reducing the player’s enjoyment factor. In the end we agreed to remove the one source introducing by far the largest sum of money to the game. This option was a superior solution to alternatives of implementing an assortment of systems to siphon money out of the game. It is never ‘fun’ to remove rewards from players that they have already earned in some arbitrary fashion and that’s not a road I wanted to go down.

This is why we during Thursday’s downtime we will be removing all ingots as loot from all Shadowlands monsters. All existing ingots in the game have not been changed in any way and can still be sold as normal. All ingots used for tradeskill items found on Rubi-Ka have not been affected by this change.

This change was initially scheduled for a later patch. It was pushed forward due to the recently increasing problem with external parties looking for financial gain performing unwanted activities in Shadowlands. Their actions have lessened the normal player’s experience and enjoyment of Anarchy Online. We do not tolerate this behavior and we will actively fight their negative influence on the game experience.

We will keep a very close eye on the situations and will make any further adjustments if this is deemed necessary. We may provide other means of acquiring credits in a later content upgrade.

-Znore
__________________
Game Director
Anarchy Online

[iNstabil]

doh!

At least you might be able to LvL decently now without being killed by a Heckler-NT-Kite'd stampeed in Elysium...or whaddayasay Lucefer?

However, loosing the best source of income is a blow...glad I finished my T1 before this goes into effect.

Any suggestions on an alternative source of income? Farming complete patterns to sell might be an idea...sold 2 Complete 'Screetch' Patterns for 1M each the other day. (By accident mind you, mean to set the price at 10M).

[Iambubba]

Monster parts + biocommutator thingy + trader shop = $$$

If anyone needs em converted I can do ql200 monster parts with the help of the quantum thingy in guild hq

[Microscan]

Hehe this had to come.
With the Chinese farmers lately it just had to come,
and i dun mind at all




Micro

[iNstabil]

I kind of heard the phrase "F00kin chineese farmers" before but didn't really reflect over the meaning of that, anyone care to explain?
Of course I undertand that they were going for the ingot eg gaining shitloads of money, but I don't see how this could be abused in such a way that they remove ingots all together..must have been something really foked in order for Funcom to react like this.

[iNstabil]

I get it now...

Cheap Anarchy Online AO Atlantean - RK1 50m credits

Perhaps buying 10 of them now will pay off in a couple of months when inflation settled a bit

But on the other hand, I'd never sponsor shit like that.

[Jpegg]

Well ingot farming has always overlapped heckler bashing for XP/SK.

So we have powerlevellers and money makers. One of these catagories has a level limit, the other doesn’t so the balance has never been correct. There’s this for starters.

As far as economy is concerned, ingots used to be very very valuable and probably the main income for most players where selling a bag of Elysium Heckler ingots could fetch around 30-40 million creds, maybe even more if you landed platinum and higher Q’s. So this obviously has a major effect on the economy.

The value of these babies was nerfed considerably as a result but corrct me if I’m wrong, still valuable hence having to take them out completely? I left ingots well alone after the value nerf so I’m not expert.

[Jpegg]

Woot for cheating

[trgeorge]

Yes, ingots were nerfed. But make script that makes your char run around Ely, kill hecks and loot ingots is easy. Even with nerfed value of ingots Ebay farmers got enough to sell credits. Of course that was on expense of players that wanted to level there. Not only did farmers take away mobs, but actually OD whole teams or train them.

There are other good ways of making money, like blitzing missions or just looting everything inside mission and selling it. That won't change. But it's harder to write script that would support that.

[iNstabil]

Yeah, with these facts in hand I'd say removing the ingots isn't a bad thing by the looks of it. There is like 9 pages on E-bay all offering credits for sale with 24/7 delivery, looking at the transfer logs it also looks like people are buying it.

Personally I'd say that the easy solution would have been to remove the farmers all together. Can't be that hard to flush them out by looking at the character transaction logs...must be there... any transaction between player to player over 10M (or more) flags the "Seller"... then if this is repeated enough you'll just reset the account or ban it.... *poof* go buy a new AO... or even better... Set the whole account to instant one sided PvP with full loot rights and a big fucking red arrow hovering over his head...