I'll agree that etyma and blue azure coins are very much alike, but I disagree with how they are alike. The blue azure coins were a mechanic to enable crafters to get the body parts to make certain items instead of adventuring. So it was a mechanic that enabled crafters and adventurers to produce the same resources. Just like Etyma. And Etyma have the exact same potential to become irrelevant with each expansion just like Azure Reactants and Strange Blue Coins. So, what exactly is the point in updating something that is already irrelevant to something that will become irrelevant? I expect Etyma to hold some value with the next expansion because they are used to make the baseline adornments. I also expect that more dropped adornments will be added that will dilute the value of etyma. I half expect that gems will not be continued as a mechanic in the next expansion. That is based on what dev has done before with other similar mechanics. I'm not a dev. I don't work for SoE. I do have a good insight into the kinds of decisions that would go into creating and expanding a game. I also like to point out what has been done in the past because I think it is the most reliable guide for what the devs will (or won't) do. I also remember what various devs have said. While that isn't quite as reliable as remembering what they have done it can be helpful as well. I could remain silent about all that but understanding how the developers (and more importantly, the producer) come to decisions would give you a better chance to convince them to make changes if you take their position into account. Explaining how a proposed change would be better for the crafting community is a lot more convincing than saying I don't like how things are and I want them to change for me. Sure, that takes effort. Not only do you have to say how things are bad, you have to come up with an idea of how it should change and explain why its a good idea. You might even go so far as to point out the obvious drawbacks to your own idea. The big point is to point out the flaw and propose a solution. Even if a dev agrees that there is a flaw, without anything to go on they might not take any action. Also your trying to encourage people to discuss the subject. If it really is a problem other people will chime in. Maybe they will have a better idea or they will improve your solution. The main point is your trying to convince someone with limited time to do what you want. Making your idea appeal to a dev and actually taking into account things they are going to be concerned with helps. Making it sound like its just your problem isn't very convincing.
The quests are a one time thing. The main supply for crafters is the apprentice quest. I think I said this already, but the strange blue coins/azure reactants are a separate step from the one that produces potions. You get 1 reward from the blue/azure table, and 1 reward from the reactant/potion/junk table plus progress on your research as a reward for doing the apprentice quest. If you mess with the blue/azure reward it shouldn't result in any changes to the other reward. The blue coins go into the currency tab. The azure reactants stack to 200. You can vendor the azure reactants. I honestly don't see 1 inventory slot as a huge burden. It seems rather pointless to add a checkbox to a quest that says "don't give me half of the reward for this quest", though there was a separate thread that basically asked for the other half of this quest to "not reward common harvests" because people thought that getting nothing was better than getting common harvests. Instead of asking for azure reactants/strange blue coins to be removed from the game it might be more productive to remind the devs that all 95 crafters get 1-3 of them per character per day and ask for there to be a use. A conversion recipe would be one idea. Probably a better idea would be for future content to use the coins and azure reactants. I'd suggest some kind of fluff recipe, or even a mystery box style reward.
This is an especially important time to remind the devs about the azures and coins. Here we are ~5 months away from the next expansion and they need to sort out what we get from these apprentices for the next 5 levels. We can't receive the same reward and have nothing worthwhile to use it on. We can't have a reward that's going to be nearly obsolete a few months down the road when new gear is released.
Just because you are not getting colossal reactants, doesn't mean that they are not still on the loot table or that it is broken. It also doesn't mean that if suddenly the azure reactant portion of the reward went away that you would suddenly start seeing a bunch of colossal reactants. Reactants are rare rewards from the apprentice dailies. The higher the tier, the rarer they seem to be. That could just be perception though. People have been complaining about the rate at which they got colossal reactants since reactants were added to the game. There have been people from the start who've been terribly unlucky getting them. The devs DO need to address the azure reactants as well as the blue coins, but not by completely removing them from the 93-95 crafter quest rewards or putting in some checkbox. The best solutions in my mind are the ones that don't remove anything but add to the game. Add more things to vendors to purchase with the blue coins. Make special purchases that you have to buy with a combination of blue coins & Far seas coins. At one point Smokejumper had said he wanted to find some way to move some of the older Marketplace content into crafters' recipe books. This would be a good way to do it. Put up recipes somewhere that cost X amount (large) in blue coins and require a substantial number of azure reactants to make them. Same thing with some of the loyalty merchant and maybe city merchant/ city faction items. Make a recipe that has to be purchased for a large sum of blue coins + loyalty tokens and uses azure reactants as components for the recipe.
Colossals are the most rare as very few zones actually drop them. (I want to say it's just the Drunder zones.) I wouldn't hold my breath on that statement SJ made. It's probably best to simply forget it. The main reason is it was only a desire he expressed, not any kind of promise. That statement was made a couple years ago, when SOE was doing a little better. With marketplace items being a bigger part of their revenue stream, I don't see them taking the time to convert older items into recipes.
there seem to be three tables. I get 2 blue coins, 3 reactants, and then either a potion or some common or rare harvest. Yeah a conversion recipe would be very beneficial. and something good to use all those blue coins on- but i wouldn't want to spend them on tinkering supplies lol
I don't foresee them doing that, either, at least not for things on the active marketplace. However, they might be able to do that with sets that have been removed from the marketplace and placed in "Brell's Vault" (or whatever manner you choose to refer to those that aren't on the marketplace, but aren't completely removed from the game).
Oh I'm definitely not going to hang my hat on it and never considered it a promise or anything. It was stated as merely a desire he personally had to get some of the older SC content off the market and into the game through other means. Items such as the items that are completely removed for the regular marketplace and only show up during the "Vault of Serilis" silliness that they copied from Disney. I was just stating a method by which they could deal with both the azure reactant/blue coins and the items that are no longer on the marketplace in a way that could be favorable for both SOE and players.
I don't think we need to -stop- getting the azure reactants, but I do think that getting them every day is overkill. I've never quite understood why you only have a chance to get the reactant from the tier of your character's current TS level. Why not give us a chance to get any of the reactants from the previous tiers as well? Once we get to level 95, the apprentice rewards are ridiculously routine.. "Ho hum, another 2 blue coins, another 3 azure reactants, another common harvest." The only highlight is when a rare harvest is awarded. Kind of a let-down to become level 95!
Do what I do, level another crafter and "lock" them for a bit. I have one crafter stuck at level 19, they can't level unless they pick a final tradeskill and i use her for the level 10 reactants I have had some in the past at varying stages, as soon as they did pick a tradeskill, I stopped leveling them and only leveled by doing the apprentice daily. I had 2 crafters snaking up in levels that way slowy, giving me several reactants for each tier they completed.
They didn't open Vault of Serilis during Bristlebane like they had in the past. Wish they would open for a weekend soon. Need to get more Qho replicas.
I like the idea of being able to exchange azure reactants for something useful. Or better yet, make azure reactants actually useful by adding recipes that are worthwhile to make. With respect to exchanging azure reactants, I'd prefer an NPC that also allows you to exchange, or just out right sell, old currencies (shards, marks, etc.) and objects (like azure reactants) that are no longer useful or amassed in quantities that exceed your use for them. Maybe it would even incent people to do the quests that reward shards or marks if we can turn them in for obols or etymas. I'm not talking about a 1 for 1 conversion, of course, but rather say, 10 shards for one mark, 10 marks for an obol or whatever ratio works, given that a level 95 decked out in gear achieved from solo questing in TOV could probably solo SF dungeons. :/ And mostly of course, the ability to use azure reactants and even Far Seas tokens to buy the other reactants.
