Allods Online Forum

So, I've been playing since just before the "Game of Gods" patch came out, back when Mining and Disassembling were separate professions not included in Blacksmithing, Tailoring, and Leatherworking. I've been through slow patches, but picked it up again somewhere in the middle of last year. By no means am I a hardcore gamer - especially when measured in hours-per-day of play - so I'm prepared to contribute a bit of real money in the boutique to make up the difference, but only a small amount.

So I made 55 somewhere near the beginning of 2014, and worked the "beginner" merc captain astral runs to build my gear up to mostly legendary (midday sun / black moon on a summoner) with the second-slot earring limited to blue because I could only afford to pick up a blue-slot token from the AH.

Then 5.0 came out, and there were no more free-merc astral runs, but OK, I churned my way around Umoira to get up to 60. I've finally started to work the 5.X upgrader cycle, and I'm not impressed at all...

4.X: I could go on a free-merc run, sell the junk (e.g. plate armour, swords, bows bound on a summoner) for 300-350 gold, maybe more if I had a big enough bag. The total cost of doing this was 0. If the loot included usable upgraders, each one cost one amalgam and, IIRC, around 80(*) gold to use. Amalgam itself was a reasonable price, enough that I wouldn't want to have to buy more than two or three per run, but not much more than that.

(*) I'm willing to be corrected on this, please.

5.X: No free-merc runs, but 5.0.1 restored the other merc-captain runs. These are annoying, because:
* Does anybody much do them? Not last night (Sunday), around 10pm, no. So I was solo. This was a good thing in the 4.X days because there was no way that other players would (...) up the run. Now it's bad because I have to hire mercs, at 296 gold *EACH*. So the run costs nearly 1500 gold with a full crew.
* I have to fart around solo-sailing a borrowed ship, which isn't fun at all.
* The loot last night was one upgrader at the first boss (I got the one with the path through the poppy fields where there are bees and mites, the saw mill and the toy soldiers). The second boss got the better of me, then I ran out of IRL time (partly because I had to fart around sailing in the Astral), so gave up.

So what else is wrong here? That one upgrader cost me 1700+ gold for amalgam in the AH (I''m lazy, I know), and 478 gold in the upgrader machine, and upgraded my green item from 0 to 33.33%. For reference, blue 4.X upgraders would upgrade blue items by 25%, for a lot less money.

Do I have time to farm that sort of money on a regular basis? No. Not noticeably. Yes, I realise that gold farming is reasonably effective (although I've noticed statements that 5.0.1 reduced its effectiveness), but I don't have all day available to do that.

It seems to me that, if I want to continue playing, gearing up is important. My guild is, if not actually dead, then certainly comatose (no other member has been on in the last 2.5 weeks, and if I quit, the max level in the guild will drop from 60 to 57, and that 57 is the leader), but it seems a bit ungrateful to just wander off. So I can't get help from them for gearing up. My experience of PUGs leaves me with not much good to say about them. But anyway, even if a friendly active PvE guild takes me in and helps me with astral runs and/or Wellebell hijinks, I'm still stuck hunting funds for the upgrader machine, and I don't really have time for that and gathering the upgraders, not if I want to finish the process at a sane rate. (For reference, my runes are stuck at 555/555. No, paying the price of upgrading them is not going to happen any time soon.)

So what to do? In my sort of half-retired mode of Allodsing, I've been having fun running around Tatooine, Hoth, Belsavis, etc. Do I just keep Allods ticking over and concentrate as much as possible on that other game? Or do I bite the bullet, pick up the pace in Sarnaut, find a new guild and gear up that way? Or, indeed, do I just drop Allods altogether, keeping an eye on what's happening here, and pick it up later if ever the situation improves?

Sorry, I should have said at the beginning:

* I generally prefer PvE activities to PvP. I've tried (briefly) a few PvP activities back when I played GW(1). Random Arena (automated randomly-selected PuG 4-on-4 arena battles) was fine, but there were too many highly stressed title-grinders playing it, and they were wildly unpleasant toward people they thought were noobs that might make it hard for them to get title points (hello, that's me, just someone who hasn't done this before! and we were winning, too...). Opportunistic open-world PvP is fun sometimes, although my most memorable instance of that was on Alderaan, and therefore wasn't in Allods. In Allods I have a grand total of 5 kills in OWPvP.

* My current coma-guild is also afflicted with alt-and-reinc disease - there are in essence three players involved: leader (MIA since 8 July, three weeks today), treasurer (MIA for even longer), and one senior officer (me), and twelve others who are mostly alts and reincs of the two MIA players aside from couple of people who haven't played in many months. Both the others were long-standing lvl 55s when I joined, but haven't put more than just a little bit of energy into levelling up since 5.0 came out.

* Yes, I have recruiting rights for the guild, but I cannot in good conscience recruit people into a guild where the leader and treasurer are both mostly MIA, since they are the ones with the rights to award tabard privileges and such-like. Notably, I don't have those rights, and it isn't fair to new members for them to be unable to be granted the rights that the guild's internal rules say they should be granted.

* In between work, guitar practice, climbing, and assorted other oddments, I can manage an hour or so each weekday, maybe up to three hours in 1-1.5 hour blocks on Sat and Sun. This is the primary driver for a dislike of grinding - it isn't so much that I dislike grinding as such as that I want to have time to do something non-grindy as well. And I don't mean working another alt or reinc through the same quest list as before. (That's a strong fault in this game - there are only two sets of interesting quests. A certain current MMO - one that features adventures on planets like Tatooine - has eight different main stories that you can play, so playing alts will give some variety. Also, of course, I'm still levelling up in that game, so the need to fall back on just grinding is less compelling.)

* On large-fraction playing, the worst I ever ran across was a guy on one of the French GW2 servers, eight days after Early Access opened. I'd been on at various times right from T minus three hours (they opened the servers three hours earlier than originally advertised, and I was in there immediately after they opened), but this dude, 200 hours after the game opened, was wandering in one of the racial capitals, already at the level cap (80). Someone asked the inevitable question, and he said he had been on for 100 hours since the game opened. That's 100 hours of gameplay out of 200 hours elapsed time... (The other 100 hours presumably included sleeping, eating, answering calls of nature, and other trivia.)