The title says it all. We continue to see efforts by AGS to increase accessibility to BiS, or near-BiS, items to those who don’t have access to insane amounts of wealth (6m+ for a single great axe. Yes, this happens.). This has come in many forms, the most notable being items from Gypsum casts, OPR caches, Holiday patterns, and, in the coming update, golden scarabs.
To have a wider, more competitive market, why not link ALL trading posts across ALL servers? Currently, there are discords that attempt to do this. They have “mule services” where someone will hop to the server that has the item you’re after, buy it, and then hop to your server to sell it (for a fee). This becomes a viable solution until… servers get locked. Currently, the unlocked servers have access to this luxury of a muling service, but those that are locked can only trade within their own server, or, if the item is good enough, transfer completely to a server that is unlocked.
I get that there is cash value incentive for AGS to keep the current system in place (it’s a no-brainer that more server hopping for item sales means more server transfer token purchases), but a majority of the muling services being offered use Turkish steam accounts to get the absolute cheapest price. Considering this cross-server trading already exists, I would just like to see AGS add an official channel for it, rather than the current system. There would still be the saved-tax advantage that comes with trading internally with your own server, but this would massively increase accessibility to good gear for the masses.
There are some economic issues with this as well well as potentially huge amounts of work. If one server has people who are more gold rich then anotr that server will ultimately soak up all the economies gold from other servers.
Setting up cross realm features is also destructive to individual server identity, and requires huge amounts of development costs.
Imo, I am strongly against it.
I am more interested in dropping the amount of resources on a node (tree, rock, etc) then this.
I totally get why people would be against this, but what I’m trying to explain is that IT IS ALREADY HAPPENING. For players that want a bis item, they can go to a discord, search an item by perks (across all servers, so long as it has been posted to the bot), and then find a mule (in that same discord server) to fetch it for them.
Options:
1.) Open this up to all players by linking TPs across all servers
2.) Increase the cooldown on server hopping to like 2-4 weeks to prevent this from being so easy to do with Turkish mule accounts
What players do out side of the mechanics of the game is one thing. These sorts of issues, if they become common enough will likely get some sort of fix. It’s not smart on your behalf to be making it more known, it will likely speed up a fix.
As i mentioned the over all economies are at play here and its extremely important to protect them. Imagine if gold farmers can access all the gold in the game from one server. Its extremely destructive.
If you are unable to find the items you need, you may be better off supporting the concept i have been advocating for, namely, a “reforging” system for perks (costing only azoth).
Your post implies that I don’t want “a fix”. I very much desire an even-playing field for all players. My company on my second server held EF and WW for multiple months, and the gear disparity it created was insane… we got bored of the game and most of us ended up making alts for PvE and then just war logged on our mains.
I’m in support of any system that makes gear more accessible so that it doesn’t cost 12x gold cap (I keep using this example because I’ve personally witnessed a 6.2m GA sale). I like the idea of a reforge system, though I think it should be slightly more expensive than azoth… perhaps a unique drop from expeditions or mutations that allows a reforge and is consumed on use (plus azoth)
I do think that we need an increased gold cap as well however, and probably some more coin sinks, to help prevent top tier items from ever getting to this point.
Might be a dumb question but how do they even take things from one server to another? Cause if there is a way for me to get stuff off my old main I’d love to.
Someone goes to the server with the item they want. That someone buys the item (muling service), and then transfers to the server of the person who wants to make the purchase. Then they trade it to that person for the original price plus a fee for the service.
