GGG: Is the Orb of Alchemy vendor recipe working as intended?

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Zinger86 wrote:

To be totally honest, I really don't understand what the problem is. I am a diamond supporter and I didn't even know about the formula (I'm really lazy and just like to smash stuff without thinking). By all accounts, its not like people are running around with 10x the orbs that other people have, because it is reasonably uncommon to get rares with the same name. If you take such a dogmatic approach to P2W, you will never see a F2P game ever have any form of serious success. It seems unfair to compare the unintended (and minor) benefits of the recipe with other P2W examples such as:

Dragon age Origins/ 2 - DLC basically provided for new areas with the best loot + you can buy weapon packs.
Battlefield 3 - full weapons unlock (why even play the game?)
and plenty of others that people have mentioned (apparently some games allow you to pay for buffed spells)

Personally I don't care wihether the recipe stays or goes (As I said, I didn't even know it existed), but if people are going to ask for anything with the slightest p2w aspect to be pulled, you will have nothing left and the game will fail. If you look deep enough you can argue plenty of things are p2w

stash tabs (even without the recipe) = more rares = > ability to sell to players for orbs
char slots = without extra stash tabs = defacto stash tabs or 'bank characters'
guild halls (don't know if planned, but I have seen requests for them) = cool guilds = more players in guilds
bad ass and rare skins/cosmetic effects = probably more friends, guild members, etc who want to hang with the 'cool crowd'. It seems stupid I know, but seriously all people want to do is talk to me about my diamond kiwi.

Whichever way you look at it, there will be unintended aspects of P2W in POE. For me personally (particularly seeing though I invested the $1000 because I want the game to succeed), I am willing to tolerate small amounts of P2W. I am by no means pointing fingers at the OP, but if people are going to boycott POE as some form of 'protest' that seems pretty juvenile to me.

^This

This is one of the biggest stretches I've heard for a 'pay2win' argument ever.

Even if I was willing to agree with it being 'pay2win', it's such a mild, inconsequential form I just don't care.

You don't need to play the 'vendor-mini-game' to succeed at this game, it's just one more thing that you can do if you feel like it.

Even if there was not this vendor system,

More stash tabs = more items to sell to players for other orbs
More stash tabs = more gear sets you can hold for different situations. Your resist set, your DPS set, your tanky set, your IIR set, your IIQ set - then multiply that by each character you have
More stash tabs = more slots so you can hold onto gear for twinks/alts and not need to find them while leveling them up

IMO, stash tabs are the perfect thing for the cash shop as they provide a great deal of convenience, with minimal/inconsequential gain in power.

The number of tabs you start with will last you awhile - and many players make due without ever purchasing more. It's not like you are hitting your stash-tab limit within the first few hours of playing and being bombard with 'buy this to do better!' messages.

In the EQ2 F2P model, within the first few hours I was having inventory space issues. If PoE was like that - I could totally agree, but the stash tabs at the start are rather forgiving for many players, atleast for the first few weeks.

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ionface wrote:

I really wish alchemy shards were more prevalent, it takes forever to find 20 of them for me.

Yes, its quite hard now to sum them up.

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pneuma wrote:

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Mr_Cee wrote:

For the issue of server load from mule accounts

This isn't the server load issue to be concerned about. The problem is instances created solely to transfer items between accounts. An offline or "mailbox" style transfer would fix this.

I'm sure this will be the case, a basic trade system is announced for one of the next patches.

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Also, I thought we'd all agree a system that incentivizes fire-and-forget mule accounts is a bad thing. All else being equal, there should be incentives to stick with one account, one big stash, and one point of contact (e-mail address) per player, not disincentives.

You (they) cant avoid having people creating more than one account in a game where the accounts are free or charge, and so they accepted this as an alternative players possibility to get more stash.

Once the trade is functional and somewhat automatic, the 'needed' stash for recipe-forced trading could be much less than expected/afraid...

An alch is worth about 8.33 alterations, or 166 alteration shards, at the current rate (which is changing, but I'll get to that later). The average rare sells to the vendor for around 8 alteration shards.

Assume an arbitrarily large number of stash tabs. Stashing every rare you find and using the matching names recipe for an alchemy orb, every two rares you find convert to an alchemy orb, or about 80 alteration shards.

The difference in value between vendoring junk rares and matching names is an order of magnitude.

A regal is worth about twice an alch right now, so technically the limit is getting 320 alteration shards for 3 rares, or 106 alteration shards per rare. I'm not counting this since the space requirement explodes relative to the small gain in value, but it exists.

As you buy more stash tabs, you gain distance on that difference between vendoring and matching names. Given the full list of rare name prefixes and suffixes, an actual curve could be drawn and you could elect to buy as many stash tabs as you want advantage on that curve. With 0 stash tabs you would be getting 8 altshards per rare, with 1 stash tab you'd be getting slightly more, and so on up to ~80.


I'm tired of people that either don't want to do the math, don't understand the math, or are putting their heads in the ground and saying "big fucking deal".

This is a design choice that exists, for better or for worse, that allows you to spend real life money to get in-game advantage. It is pay2win. There's no faith, no belief, or no hand-wavy doubt involved here.

Now that hopefully we are done posturing over whether the sky is really blue or not, we can get on to the meat of the matter which I've incessantly brought up: What level of pay2win do we want?

As for me, I vote zero. It's a nice round number, it simplifies a bunch of multiplications. Oh also, there was a promise of zero in some dev diary or something...


And one last reiteration: the problem is not with stash tabs, it's with this recipe.





EDIT: This is my last post on the matter. I don't really have anything more to add other than repeating myself, and I'm in no control over GGG's decisions.

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kaniz wrote:

You don't need to play the 'vendor-mini-game' to succeed at this game, it's just one more thing that you can do if you feel like it.

ack.

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IMO, stash tabs are the perfect thing for the cash shop as they provide a great deal of convenience, with minimal/inconsequential gain in power.

ack.

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The number of tabs you start with will last you awhile - and many players make due without ever purchasing more

undecided. Even from my experiences (as a collector) I expect the need of some space for support gear, especially jewelry, belts and flasks, and maybe some gear to handle issues with socket layouts while upgrading other parts... Then you may store gems also, basics, prevleveled, rare, auras, support gems, quality improved... my collection in default now exceeds one full page... Four pages it really not that much ^^

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And one last reiteration: the problem is not with stash tabs, it's with this recipe.

True. I want (maybe not that much as others for recipe farming) to have/keep my room to keep useful things on purpose for many different situations/stages of the game. (the recipes to stay are already in the discussion at the hq - but then we should get another source for the orbs, or new drop chances)

Your barter example has one little flaw - you constantly decrease the available rare trash. Basically, you turn two items into one - on a long term this only works if the community can steady serve with the other half. ^^
And even rares with trash mods across the whole item level and tier range can be worth keeping for their socket layout... such items may be equivalent to a whole alchemy.

How about introducing a vendor recipe where un-identified rare items sell for alchemy shards. This would be a good compromise where players who don’t buy the extra tabs can still have access to orbs of alchemy.

Some people have so many vested interests on this matter that they could start a medium sized business selling these metaphorical vests and with some government subsidies likely break even year 1.

I digress.

The fact that someone in this post said they had 43 stash tabs for effectively just this recipe surely goes a long way to emphasise just how abused this recipe can get. Yes, I am calling it "abuse" because I earnestly hope GGG wouldn't let a mechanic so in conflict with their core design philosophy intentionally exist!

So now we have 3 camps - the "this is not ethical micros" people, the "I don't care people" and the "I spent hundreds of dollars to make my character slightly better" people. I'd say there was a "this is ethical and an amazing game mechanic" camp but let's not be silly here. If people really want pay for boost options there are a whole host of other games that are far more straight about it.

I just don't see what GGG have to earn by keeping this recipe - I don't think I've encountered anyone on the forums or ingame who told me they bought a supporter pack solely to abuse this recipe. People want to support the game without being kicked in the balls by GGG should they not pay up. Personally come OB I'll have more than enough tabs to do this recipe on a reasonable scale (provided it hasn't been removed, which I very much hope it will be) but I simply do not want to.

If PoE ever goes a hairs breadth closer to being "unethical" I will drop it in a heart beat. No p2w is the biggest selling point of this game to me - pull that out and I'll just go, as I'm sure many others would. I had nearly a year of free beta without this daft recipe, I can't complain to much if I did leave.

As soon as you have one convenience item you might as well have them all (level boosting, drop rate increases..) - that's the exact thinking that Guild Wars 2 went down. Selling convenience is effectively selling ingame "time". Rather than spending hours sorting out a stash you could be out farming monsters for loot an XP - GGG might as well cut to the chase and just sell loot boosts/XP. I was in the very first beta session for GW2 when these microtransactions were revealed and I was so bloody disappointed that I've decided not to purchase the game - gaming should be an escape from real life where your buying influence doesn't impact the progression of your character.

Now please keep in mind that more bank tabs is totally fine with me, I feel it's a luxury that can be lived without. 4 pages is easily enough to do what the stash is intended for: to keep items you'd like use or sell later or items that you simply think are cool. It's when you pair it with a recipe like this that positively incites you to horde every rare and max out your stash that I'm more than a little unimpressed.

GGG should just give the option to refund your tabs for 30 points and remove this nonsense recipe - it's not like it impacts them financially after you've already bought the points. Then people with absurd 40+ stash collections wont feel hard done by and we can all get over this ridiculous debacle.

I think I've gotten more alchemy orbs from the sell a normal, magic, and rare with 20% quality recipe than the matching two names one personally. You'll get a rare with a bit of quality that you can use a bunch of scraps/whetstones on to push it to 20% as often as you'll get two rares with the same name.

Ok you guys are taking this shit to far. You know how what use an alch is? More often than not, it simply adds one more rare to your list of junk to match. I mostly use the 5 or 6 alchs I make per day to make rare jewelry, then make chaos gems with that. Sure, your chances to get a decent item go up the more you save your rares, but guesshow many alteration shards I have? 0 right now. I would probably benefit just as much from having those to reroll overpowered blues into rares.

The recipe is fine. It always has been. The only downside is alch orbs are valued a bit less because of the recipe, but I wouldn't want them being more valuable than they are now. What purpose would that serve?

Think about how the beta economy is right now. It's pretty well balanced despite this supposedly overpowered recipe. Just let it be. It's hard enough getting decent gear for your characters as it is.