Printing of divination cards

Should this harvest craft still be in the game?

Personally I think that printing apothecary/doctor etc cards inflates the economy and breaks the 'joy' of farming an expensive item. This not only breaks immersion but further makes those 'chase' items even more unreachable for the average player, because they become even more tremendously expensive.

Imagine someone that spends days to get that last apothecary card and complete the item.
Then imagine someone who gets one card and then prints the other 4 by sheer luck and thus inflates with another 200-300 divines worth of cards the economy in the span of 10 seconds.

Why is this still allowed? I get it, it makes good content for streamers but it is nothing new and not even interesting anymore, it's more depressing than anything else to be honest.

You either win or lose and either play or quit the game based on a gamble. How is this healthy for the game?

If it was up to me i'd introduce a special type of divination cards - the really valuable ones that cannot be printed with the harvest craft. Eveything else can remain the old way.

GGG should really think this over.

this is mind boggling...

so how is starting with one card and getting full set any different than someone luckily dropping a headhunter, mageblood or mirror?

also you say people are printing apothecary/doctor cards and this makes those items unreachable for the average player exactly how? there has to be some reverse law of supply and demand that i dont know of. even if what youre saying is true(which is not because its a simple 50/50 so youre left with no more or less cards) the prices of those items have to drop due to higher supply.

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lolerman wrote:

Should this harvest craft still be in the game?

Personally I think that printing apothecary/doctor etc cards inflates the economy and breaks the 'joy' of farming an expensive item. This not only breaks immersion but further makes those 'chase' items even more unreachable for the average player, because they become even more tremendously expensive.

Imagine someone that spends days to get that last apothecary card and complete the item.
Then imagine someone who gets one card and then prints the other 4 by sheer luck and thus inflates with another 200-300 divines worth of cards the economy in the span of 10 seconds.

Eh? If the cards are as easy to produce as you claim it makes both the cards and the resulting items cheaper, not more expensive.

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You either win or lose and either play or quit the game based on a gamble. How is this healthy for the game?

Option 3 - you just don't gamble them in the first place.

Pro tip : don't watch youtube compilations. They aren't a good representation of reality.

As stated by others :

1. The odds are equally balanced. That means that with a large enough sample size the net effect of the gambles on the amount of cards will be 0.

2. If as you stated the supply of cards would increase due to the craft prices would be lower.

What is true however is that a div card is worth more than the resulting reward because they have a potential and perceived added value because you can gamble them. This makes no sense as the expected value should be identical. In fact buying a div card that is worth more than the fraction of the result it respresents to gamble on a 50/50 is basically throwing away currency as the expected return is negative.

I do agree that it is a stupid mechanic but the actual impact on the economy is negligable. All it really does is give players that won't ever realistically earn chase items a chance to get them.

Ok, so the lucky drop of the item is not a 50/50 outcome, which the multiplication of 1 into 2 cards supposedly is (if we ignore the option where it stays the same). You can argue that the drop of the 1st card is the lucky find, but that again is way more common than the whole item drop, and very much achievable. You don't see people farming a mageblood 'spot', because there isn't such, but you do see people farming apothecary 'spots'.

The increase of price of the mageblood for instance is a fact, cards started at 20-ish divines then were 50-ish and before i quit the league were 60-something.
This, at least in my opinion, is due to the fact that more and more currency is printed.
And bottom line is - printing cards is not only an additional way of creating mageblood but even more so an additional way of printing divines. Raw divines will always be available in any quantity you want, due to bots. So getting an additional card and selling it is essencially inflating the economy with 60 more divines which you will use to purchase other stuff and make those items in their turn even more expensive, creating a snowball effect.

To sum it up, I don't see printing cards as an incredible increase in the item supply but more as a way of priting currency when people sell those cards.

You're ignoring how much currency people delete with that craft too. The law of large numbers means that over time an equal number of cards will be created and destroyed. Unless the odds are not straight 50/50 and we dont know it.

The printing existed in previous leagues too and mageblood prices for example were stable.

The increased mb prices now are imo the result of the nerf to drop rates on the one hand and the introduction of lootgoblin currency bombs on the otherhand with the markt still trying to find its balance.

Essentially in past leagues beyond would spawn insane amounts of unique monsters that would then drop unsavory amounts of unique items, including magebloods. The highest tier of party mf'ing uniques was taken out back and shot. Simply put the amount of magebloods in the economy is just a lot lower.

The above is speculation obviously but what I can say beyond reasonable doubt is that the div craft is not the reason prices are what they are. The craft existed in 3.18 too and prices were stable and lower. The changes are linked to things that actually changed significantly from 3.18 to 3.19

Ok let's say we ignore the economy factor of printing cards.

What about the psycological one? Yes you can ignore the gambling. But a lot of people don't. And a lot of people quit/continue playing based on the outcome, which, if it did not exist, would not present such a dilemma.

My print button is broken. Everything poofs first try.

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lolerman wrote:

Ok let's say we ignore the economy factor of printing cards.

What about the psycological one? Yes you can ignore the gambling. But a lot of people don't. And a lot of people quit/continue playing based on the outcome, which, if it did not exist, would not present such a dilemma.

Well then they've learnt a valuable life lesson about not gambling with what you can't afford to lose. Who says that games can't be educational?