So I have been farming lv51-69 astrals for quite a bit and have been thinking about certain things in the game and have come to several conclusions.
By this thread I am hoping to reach anywhere effective in the AO developers team to make a change on this thought.
To guide you in, here is some info given on a plate:
On lv69 (the level matters), in 51-69 astral, you will get a total of ~11k gold after clearing the run. For CS players this is rather easy to do and manage to do it very fast.
The time-limit to go to another allod is only 5 mins, getting you a yield of 11k gold/5 mins.
Considering the possible END-GAME possibilities to grind/make gold, THIS IS LOADS.
Now let's compare several ingame methods for gold hoarding to see what's the most efficient way:
- End-game skirmishes (pvp): On lv75 (level matters for how much gold you get per token), you get 3.4k gold/token. These tokens cost 20 emblems.
Skirmishes take about 10-15 mins averagely, granting about 200 signs of victory (100 signs of victory = 20 emblems). Debateable with order buffs and the order vendor item to multiply the rewards, you could get 1k emblems/game, but you get nearly nothing for losing. The point on this method is that you are LIMITED to a weekly amount of getting gold out of this, on top of that it's better to spend all your skirm emblems on fate of elixers.
- Private allod: The real deal, right!? No, sadly. It'll grant you an average of about 16-17k gold/week, yes PER WEEK. Remember 51-69 astral? gets you 11k/5 minutes.
You could start making 12 reincarnations and start the grind to get the private allod on all your reincarnations and on top of that, gettng the maximum horns on all of those allods to maximize the gold gains, but is that all worth it if you can just hop on your reinc and farm some 51 69 astrals? In my opinion, no.
- 3x3 training/ranked grind: Same as pvp skirms, gets you only 3.4k gold for 100 emblems. one ranked match (lose = no rewards at all) gets you 50 emblems, at most you get (with order buffs (2x) + order vendor item (2x)) 400 emblems/WINNING match. This is possibly a good method to grind gold, if you are in a well known environment in Allods Online, well cash shopped and well pvp-experienced. Again, gold is not for the high end gamers in Allods Online. It is meant for those players that are new and want to get into the game and farm gold to get their Cash Shop level up in a reasonable timespan.
So this method is also out of sight.
- KOE farming: Based on my findings. I farm all KOE dailies in ~50mins which yields me an average of 600 tokens (raw). quests(daily - not grindable) given in alongside KOE buffs from order, and max buffs from KOE SOP's (Sites Of Power), You can get about 2k emblems/day. On top of that there's the weekly Firocious boss granting you (with buffs) about 3k (?, unsure) emblems.
The gold token from KOE costs 1200 emblems and yields 13.8k gold.
Is that worth it? Compared to a 11k gold/5mins farm? Not in my opinion.
My point here to show you, developers, is that this made me think that you devalualize the gold currency. That you might have done this on purpose so that simply cashing up and converting to gold would be the go-to choice for most high end players of your game. Gold has no meaning no more in this game. If you had given it a different name, none would even bother about it anymore.
I want to see the CS more available to the new players, the low CS'd players. I want to see gold getting it's meaning again. Either the 51-69 astral is way too buffed when it comes to rewards goldwise, or the end-game gold farming methods are waaaaaaaaaaayyyy below what it should be to reward your players with the right time/gains ratio (how much time you put in something you do/how much profit you get back out of that).
It is just not balanced. And it is really sad to see friends of you go 1 by 1, hooking off because of the same sentence everytime: "I can't afford the game anymore".
I really hope that there will be a change coming on end-game level to make gold more valuable than it is now.
Thanks for reading if you did so, Dragagon.