The Hidden Forest

We are intending to change tokens to no longer be 100% drops. It's just gotten out of hand and we have more tokens floating around then we have players. To my knowledge the price has dropped significantly (by half) in the last few months alone and tokens were not necessarily intended to be part of mainstream progression Since it's an economy based change we will give warning if and when it's decided

All this will do in the long run is bump the price of tokens back up and push guilds to plan ahead and hold a stock in bank for new recruits.

Thoughts and comments?

I can understand where this would be coming from IF and only IF there is an intent to coincide the reduction of tokens with releases of more tradable items. If its intended to change the servers economy from being driven Solely by tokens, in favor of perhaps Tradeskilled items (Please god please add these, refer to the tradeskill section and Aruun's post for my feedback there), then i feel like this is a smart move.

Tokens will always be in high demand but if u reduce the drop rate you increase the demand, without just causing a flood to the market.

When i started here tokens were 50% drops, which was a pita addmitedly when we were still trying to backflag people, so my views on the issue have certainly changed, but i do see a problem with an economy that revolves solely around one set of items (just like with distillers when u guys made them tradable). If we want to stimulate our economy though there should definately be an increase in tradable items (world boss loot isnt enough to drive the current economy)

I have to agree with your points. Although I appreciate being able to key my boxes pretty fast as a reasonably newer player to the server. Not sure how i feel yet about the % though , but I do think some sort of change is in order. Will see how the others respond n post again.

I for one would hate to see the tokens drop change. As matter of fact i would actually like to see them increased in amount dropped.
I for 1 have several toons 5 or more that are not even flagged for Tov. 1 main reason is we dont have enough people farming tokens. We get new guildies we get them geared and the token they need and move on to progress them to current lvl of guild not leaving much time to farm tokens.
you state that there is a increased amount of tokens on the market etc. Well at times i have seen a few in /ooc selling tokens but for the most part i dotn see an increase. Personally i think there is a decreased in the sells and not many people farming unless they are bored. I have tried for 5 days in a row last week trying to get tokens for my toons in /ooc and out of some 20 or so shouts a day for 4 or 5 days i got 4 replies 3 wanted ridiculous prices over 50k plat.for a tov token and one stated he take 10k for tov and 25 for st. that is roughly bout 6 or so tokens on the market that were up for sell during that time. not really an flood IMO

This is kind of what I'm talking about though, tokens are so mainstream that you don't even acknowledge that you can just go kill Emperor Ssra (or Agnarr possibly soon) and flag up to 18 characters =P Part of the change is intended to make Ssra temple an actual raid tier for the future and not an HH quest speed bump. This can't happen if it is more logical or efficient to farm up some plat and buy your way up.

Tokens were meant for the odd man or two that missed out, not for every character as part of progression.

I can understand the SSRA raid tier and yes flaging toons that way. I did that with my first 5 toons then moved on but lately there been people in SSRA doing HH or what ever and it hard to get a EMP kill. but move past TOV what about ST Killing dragaons for 6 months to flag 5 toons is not going to work. There needs to be a better way to flag if tokens are decreased

What to say, this topic has been going around and around for so long in so many forms and always comes down to progression. A token has its many uses, helps bring new members up to speed, it helps new players get invited to better guilds since being flagged, it helps boxed accounts who do not have the time to play hardcore and raid be able to see some of the higher content. These tokens are of course in high demand and are sold for plat, but what really does the plat give anyone? Stones for elemental or vp armor? Besides that plat is pretty much worthless on the server..

Progression...Sure killing emp gets you 18 people flagged but think about the time it takes for 18 people to get keyed up to emps chamber, no coh available.

Tov- Killing vulak does not give you access to ST, yet another old bottleneck of contested mobs more difficult than ST mobs themselves. No tokens = HUGE bottleneck considering epic 2.0 requires ST access

Pofire- Talked often about being converted to instanced zone due to contested poair flag and decent loot. Can COH and even run to the flag fairy after fennin dead. Many times people ninja the flag after seeing his death spam. IMO should be instanced, if someone was smart they would just ninja enough flags for poair access, raid up on powerful armor, get your air augs, and you have essentially skipped a huge portion of progression and can move on to pofear VP minus your 2.0 epic of course.

Poair- Instanced now, updated, some agree good some agree bad but before those changes the bottleneck was retarded contested mobs for a key up to kill xegony. Now its fine.

Pofear- No flag required, kind of a enter if you dare kinda zone. Doesn't matter if your flagged or not, if your not equipped your not gonna survive.

VP-Here is your flag check, to aquire this key you gotta go back through all those key zones and get groundspawns, if you dont have those flags, you dont get your groundspawn or your key to VP.


Tokens give you access to the zone they were taken from and the higher the zone the more flags you get so the higher the token the more its worth.

I realize that progression is a big issue but consider this. I always considered progression was based on the amount of people in your raid. If you had a huge raid force you could progress faster than a small group of people. On this server not so... 1 group of people can acquire flags and progress through tiers faster than a huge raid force of your 18 flags given by flag fairies due to the time it takes to acquire components gaining access to that key mob. If you actually waited for an entire guild + boxes to obtain flags naturally, half of that guild would still be keying for ST while my small group was already fully equipped and killing in Poair.

The 50/50 token drop was fine, if you wanna change tokens to only flag and not back flag thats fine too, or remove tokens all together sure, but just make sure that when you do those bottlenecks and time sinks are adjusted or you get alot of frustrated people simply giving up out of boredom.

*off-topic*
Bring back the huge raid components of live that no current guild on the server is capable of doing alone. The huge raid bosses that dropped 6 items a pop and required a well tuned 30-60 man crew to take down. The days of guilds teaming together to bring mobs down, instead of mobs being tuned down to what the gm's consider a good geared guild of that tier is capable of doing.

Taladome

Great post, and it brings to light some of the other issues that inherently promote skipping content by appeared necessity instead of choice. My focus is to make it enjoyable and logical to go through progression instead of using tokens unless you are far beyond that point and picking up a new recruit or 2

I've also been pushing for 30ish person tuned raids for world bosses ;P Nothing decided yet and would have to create them just right to make it possible and challenging for 30 T2 peeps, but impossible for 6 T6 peeps etc by tier

Allizar,

just a thought but when you talk about your 30+ raid bosses (with loot for more then just one, like most world bosses are now) could it not be made up like LDoN quest givers. When you hail them they wont let you get the quest till you have 2 people or more in your group. Could something like this be put in place for world bosses. If they up you hail a fairy to say open there gate to get in but in order to do so you must be done by raid leader with XX amount of people in it.

Off topic
but raids seem to be a thing of the past with people donored out and boxing 6-10 toons or more. But Tuesday night Progeny and Da Plunderin Pirates made a 38 man raid to do Fen. Yeah little over kill but raid worked out well and made some new friends and mended some bad blood. We need more of this content.

decreasing tokens IMO is not the answer maybe make tokens guild only that way if you wanting to flag toons in guild to join progression they are on they can help there mates out. I just hate to see Tokens decreased and a major bottle neck

Just my 2 bits.

when I started there was no tokens and ST dragons = perma dead
That sucked so much. I was unable to progress due to the respawn time and people willing to keep the mobs dead either to flag their own guild/boxs or just to block others.
This was the biggest reason that I left the server for about half a year.

Token drop rate.. Hmm I wouldnt mind seeing vulak rate 50 percent. Sleeper 75 and Xeg 100.

While for some time I have thought about how to construct a post regarding guild instanced zones and options for adding 1 or 2 zones that were public and would 100% require guild alliances; I think fire needs to be made an instance.
Sick of certain people ninja'ing flags and just how frustrating fenny is, not so for myself as I could kill it every day if I cared but it has to suck for those that really need him. (p.s. make him drop plate more often)