Advanced-Solo "trashloot" is an insult!

I agree wholeheartedly with your post. The whole SLR issue, the real life cash to kronos to plat link, and the Pay to Win reality needs to be addressed. You should copy/paste this entire post and message Holly, Dave, Dex, and Linda with it. Very well written.

(I'd do it but I am championing another battle with them right now..and winning!)

This thread just isn't the same without the OP's T-shirt pic.

Thing is... like it or not SOE is making plenty of money off those people who are buying Krono and SC... it may be wrong in game that you can spend RL$ to buy in-game Platinum to buy in-game items... it is no worse than the old Exchange servers were but really if they were to remove it now they would deny their F2P market a way to catch up for a few extra $. To "abuse" SLR which is a player defined commodity one must amass 10+K plat at the very least which is 8-12 Krnono each for $15... so one person trying to "cheat the system" just gave SOE well over $100 to do so.

Design wise... this is a serious flaw. Profit/Marketing wise this is a massive victory. I see this issue very often with game series that started out as independent studios, we will use Bioware as an example. That released amazing games.
- Baulders Gate
- Dragon Age Origins/Awakening
- Bioshock

Then a publishing company buys them out and you get semi-rushed of half-#$%# 'd feeling content like.
- Bioshock 2 (more of the same not much new)
- Dragon Age 2 (massive break from past gameplay)

However BS2 and DA2 sold decently well and made EA a fair bit of money... so over all game quality fell while profits perhaps went up... sounds like a marketing victory to me. At least you can't just directly buy Raid-Gear from SOE.

*I in no way endorse "out of game" selling such as SC for Plat for the use of SLR. I find SLR a "loophole" in that players can buy what they did not "rightly" earn in-game though achievement. Commonly Krono sellers may also be Plat-Sellers on 3rd party sites so keep that in mind before you chunk 1500-2000p on a Krono.

Edit: Wait a minute.. this is totally off topic. I would though rather see Heroic Daily quests for Obol so these people who solo have the option to group up for Steward gear and Heroic drops which both should be better than these non-fabled Solo drops.

In address to the "trash loot" well I could see the HM-Solo bosses dropping 1 Obol. Unfortunately that would mean people would really just farm WBE a lot. The mudslides and steaks though are trash, their stats are worthless when you can just buy Ambrosials from provisioners.

The very 1st solo run I made in Sleepers Tomb I had an Etheral weapon server disco drop.. I'm thinking .. great, I will never get another piece of good loot again. Guess what.. I was right. After at about 300 runs though the solo zones I've had 1 fabled
drop.. a chest for a monk.. muted.. and the rest of it pure trash.

Again, SLR is not the issue. SLR is the player reaction to developers artificially ****-blocking the IN-GAME economy by making virtually every single item no-trade or heirloom. The whole point of slaying dragons in a fantasy world is to save the world and plunder the dragon's treasure to get rich. By artificially taking it away in the more recent games, the developers took away a massive reason for people to interact with each other. So SLR is the player workaround.

If I want to make my money slaying dragons, but hate to craft I should be able to do so and still be able to buy cool crafted items. If I want to make my money crafting items, but hate to slay dragons I should still be able to do and still be able to buy cool items from dragon hoards that other adventurers have plundered. That is the entire point of having a bloody economy.

The whole idea of "if you want to earn an item you have to get it yourself" is ridiculous. Hey buddy, if you want to drive that car, you better go drill for oil and refine yourself some gas - otherwise you just haven't earned it!

Just like RL, MMOs have a variety of playstyles and a variety of in-game "jobs". Not everyone likes to do the same things. It's the in-game economy that let's people with different "jobs" interact and sell the spoils of their labour to others.

If i've spent hundreds of hours slaving at my crafting only to create a super-amazing piece of armor, why shouldn't i be able to sell that and benefit from it?

And if I've spent hundreds of hours slaving away at slaughtering bad guys and have finally slayed the dragon and got a super-amazing piece of armor, why shouldn't I be able to sell that and benefit from it?

Where the problem comes is when a person hasn't done ANY in-game job at all. If they bought a Krono or SC Card with RL cash and sold it for plat, then they haven't done ANYTHING in-game to earn money. That's the problem. Not people selling the items that they've worked very hard to make or have drop.

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And as far as DEVs being unaware of these things... really... tell me then - in your personal opinion - why did developers create and add to the game the Krono mechanic?

There was already a way for people to buy sub time with RL money (actually two different ways). So there was no need for that. The only thing Krono accomplishes is allows for an easy and SOE-supported way for people to convert $ into plat. If you don't think the developers designed it specifically for that (and therefore support the idea), why do YOU think they added the mechanic?

I agree to a point.

The issue is that with so many people farming the dungeons if it is not heirloom or no-trade then the market is flooded with bunches of the same item. The value of an item is based on it's rarity and the work/skill/talent/etc involved in obtaining it.

I see what the developers did and I can in some ways see why. However, what if the first time you got an item it was full trade and every time afterwords it was heirloom or no-trade? This means that you bust your backside through a dungeon and get that armor you plan to sell, but you can not farm it over and over. The armor or item holds it's value better because the market is not flooded with them.

Hum.... dont get it. I mean, if you run a instance, you get a vast majority of items which none in the group will touch, or already got the item. Even if they could be sold on broker, they would not do any harm, as normaly, they gona be sold to the npc.
The items, that are usefull, didn´t drop that often, to flood the broker with (at least i think so).
So i still dont fully get, why they can´t be sold. Look at the etherals.... i don´t see them flooding the market anyhow....

Becasue etherals are very rare drops and when people do get them they price them way over the top, there are pages of them on the server, just priced outrageously high for what their stats ae

Well then my server is almost empty, i only found 2-3 etheral drops on broker (yeah, way to high priced tho)

Back on the original topic.... If people are selling the Advanced Adorn recipes or other recipes for 1c, or heck, even less than 10g, BUY IT and sell it to a merchant! lol, that is instant free money right there. I will still continue to farm the hell out of these instances because it is an awesome way to get a chance at fabled gear for my alts, and the legendary stuff I salvage and can get 30-70 rares per day. I like being able to do that without harvesting a single node

I heartily agree with this. This is what economy is all about. Nine times out of ten, people buying SLR items are buying them for alts. They know how to play these alts, they just don't have that many hours in the day to gear them up the way they want to. They still want them geared, and SLR is a perfect way to do it.

The SLR seller is benefitting from my hard earned plat (however I earned it) by doing something they have time to do and I don't. That's basically the way an economy works.

No one ever addresses the issue of the person that does raid often, doing close to end-game raids, and still never gets the item they really need to drop. Finally, it does in someone else's raid, and they bid for it during an SLR sale. It's not always a bunch of 'bads' that buy loot 'because they can't get it themselves'.

Like Arieste says: This is an economy. If you want to keep an in-game economy healthy, you want to encourage lots of trading and creating of goods...however you create them; either by raiding to get them or crafting, or however.

The Krono issue really did cut down on loot farmers...which everyone also complained loudly about. There's just no way to make people happy..is there?

Solo loot from a solo zone. Imagine that.

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Top-end raid-fabled loot ... without killing a single mob in any kind of zone. Imagine that...
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That an SLR dig? haha.
The thing with SLR... -someone- actually still has to defeat the encounter to open up the loot, its not like its effort free gear.

Top-end raid fabled loot costs over 1k plat on my server. If you can make yourself 1k plat in-game without killing any mobs, you more than deserve to spend it on anything your little heart desires to have. It's your hard-earned money.

Personally, I had to kill A LOT of mobs to buy the last 1k plat item I bought for myself.

I'd also very much like to buy myself the mount from HE also, which costs 3-5k plat. But you know what, I would need to kill way too many mobs in order to make 5k plat, so I'll live without for now. And i've killed the mob that drops it something like 100 times, so it has nothing to do with my inability to play. It has to do with how i choose to spend MY time and MY plat.

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We already discussed this.

My view is that buying Krono with $,£,EU,other-currency and then buying raidloot from the plat gained, all from the comfort of your guildhall, is pathetic, and an option SOE should not have made possible.

Whether deliberate design or careless side-effect is actually not relevant - it is up to the players to give negative feedback on an aspect of the game they think is damaging, if that is what they think, and here it is.
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This is a separate issue to the RL cash issue of course.

However, I fundamentally disagree with you here as well.

Using coin for crafted goods and common tradeables is the basis of a good economy in any game.

But I would stronly prefer a game where SLR was not an option for top-end raid loot, and hence my feedback on this. I believe that this kind of top-end loot should be earned by actually doing those raids, as the design of "Heirloom" and "No Trade" tags actually is intended to imply. As a bare minimum, for someone to be even able to buy this kind of loot, they should have at least at some point killed the mob that dropped it.

And this is from a player who (a) has a ton of coin simply from being an 8 year vet with a massive tradeskill stock and (b) rarely ever raids and would benefit from buying SLR indefinitely. I simply have an issue with the subversion of the original game design, which most definitely is not for a significant mass of players to platfarm all night every night to buy raid loot from farming guilds.

SLR has to be removed as an option, in my opinion. I think it is ruining the game. I don't expect members of farming guilds to support that of course, as it will hurt them. Not that it is their fault, they are merely doing what is tacitly accepted by SOE at this time.

The fault lies with SOE - they need to remove the option. In my opinion, of course.
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Then couldn't you argue that the issue lies with those farming the old content? Who cares if you could buy VP Gear when you are level 80? It isn't like that is an issue to have Raid-Gear when you are under level cap. SLR is a player workaround and given how little people SLR on some servers... I won't matter if PoW Gear was just "Attuneable" it would go to guild alts long before server.
Heriloom was their way of stopping the boxing of raid-encounters and flooding the market with them. Again Dev enforced fix for a player problem: Mutliboxing.

For once I actually like an idea of Caethre's and that is "to buy a piece of gear you must have killed the mob" that won't stop you from gearing alts... but it will stop you from converting Krono to Raid-Gear. I would however add this stipulation.

Only apply for HM and Contested Raid encounters.

EM-Loot is dang near Heroic/Crafted gear which is already mostly tradable so just let the SLRers sell EM. Tie looting the item to the Achievement for killing it (which means that Achievements must work) or at least make it so that if you are present regardless of achievement you can loot it (though one implies the other)

Why? Why the difference?

If someone has spent 8 years slaving away at crafting to make a super-cool item, why should i be able to "simply buy it" from them without having ever even touched a crafting table and you consider that ok?

Yet, if the same person has slaved away at killing mobs for 8 years to get a super-cool item, it's somehow "wrong" for me to buy it?

Perhaps you are new to MMOs, but the heavy use of "no-trade" and "heirloom" tags is a trend mostly propagated since EQ2 and WoW launch. Most older MMOs had virtually all items tradeable between people, regardless of how they were obtained.

I mean, think of it from either an RL or a roleplaying point of view. I go to kill a dragon for it's massive treasure. Yet all of a sudden there is an artificial restriction on me being able to profit from that treasure. I get countless gold rings and bracelets and swords.. yet i can't sell them. It's just stupid.

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Well, I've only been playing online MMORPGs for just over 12 years, whether that is "new" or not depends on whether the person asking has been playing more or less time than that.

But really that is irrelevant. Other games are also irrelevant here, frankly, we are discussing EQII.

Your tradeskill comparison is invalid, as normal tradeskill items in this game have always been fully tradeable by design.

The raidloot items in this game have always been defined as No Trade/Heirloom by design, and those terms have precise meanings.

Now if SOE want to change that and make all raid loot tradeable, they should just do exactly that. Not that I agree with that either, but at least that makes consistent sense with itself!
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Or the goddes of random hates them with a passion. Heads I win, tails you lose