Continuing the discussion from Letter to AGS Regarding Bug Fix Philosophy:
Due to the ongoing issues I’m seeing I wanted to once again discuss these issues I previously flagged regarding extreme responses to exploits. I’m all in favor of bans, I wish you were more heavy handed with them honestly, but I do have some issues with your temporary measures (e.g. freezing wealth transfer, disabling portals from dropping chests (historical), etc.)
At the moment, disabling wealth transfer is the big one, so I’ll focus on that.
Periodically disabling wealth transfer for all players due to a few bad actors engaging in duplication should not be a “go to” method of dealing with duplication. It disrupts gameplay experience for all players on a scale that I’m not sure you truly appreciate based on your repeated decision to freeze all forms of wealth transfer.
Examples of ways gameplay experience is affected:
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There’s the obvious one that you cannot buy and sell on the market, which affects money making, the ability to get weapons and armor with stats and perks that you like, etc. I suspect this is what you are thinking of when you decide to freeze wealth transfer.
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There’s the less obvious effect on expeditions: when wealth transfer is frozen it is that much more cost/time prohibitive to engage in expeditions as you need to personally farm all the materials, earn the coin for the chisel from outpost rush or side quests, earn the faction tokens from faction quests, craft the orb yourself as you cannot trade those items to another person so your stonecutting must be at the appropriate level. That may require more time invested to gather those materials and refining reagents needed to push your stonecutting to the required level. Each individual player will then have to prepare their consumables such as health potions, honing stones, weapon coatings, resistance potions, and food. All of that again will require additional time spent resource gathering as you cannot purchase any of the materials for those, and you cannot trade with another player who has those skills maxed already.
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War: the same effect that it has on expeditions it also has on war, due to the fact that way more consumables need to be prepared for wars as it is a 50 person team not a 5 person team. Each player has to gather the materials required and craft the consumables.
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Crafting: rare material drops are exactly that: rare. One person cannot reliably farm trophy crafting materials, for example, as it is purely RNG based. The trading post was a way of countering that RNG, as you could purchase the items from others who received a drop they didn’t want or need, or who were really lucky and got a second drop. Top tier crafting requires top tier trophies. It also requires additional top tier resources such as asmodeum, phoenixweave, etc. Those are timegated resources, you can only refine 10 per day, and each requires rare drops from gathering. Without the trading post, players need to spend a great deal of time gathering in order to get their dailies achieved.
The combined effect is that when wealth transfer is disabled players have to spend most if not all of their time in game gathering unless they are someone who just doesn’t care about any aspect of the game besides Outpost Rush or Open World content such as quests. That in turn makes gathering that much more difficult as everyone and their mother (pardon the colloquialism) is competing for the resources, which in turn means that much more time spent on gathering before players can get to the other forms of end game content. Some players enjoy gathering. Some do not. Many do not enjoy contested gathering where there are people camping on the resource spawn nodes, holding them hostage, bringing enemy mobs into them, PVPing on them, etc., especially when it takes up the majority of their time spent in game, and they cannot even sell the materials they get or the items they craft from the materials, resulting in their storages becoming full.
All of this is to help make clear one point: It is NOT a minor thing to turn off wealth transfers. Please work on developing alternative responses to duplication that do not disrupt gameplay to this extent.