60LikesSo in this case you are actually talking about the autolooting then, because you're talking about farming vs leveling. Killing off Genie completely hurts newcomers too.Originally Posted by Ching
This is a discussion on Apex Forever | LIGHT-FARM | UNIQUE CONCEPT within the Private Servers forums, part of the Knight Online (ko4life.com) category; Originally Posted by Ching
It wasnt the genie or the autoloot persay, it was the fact that people were abusing ...
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So in this case you are actually talking about the autolooting then, because you're talking about farming vs leveling. Killing off Genie completely hurts newcomers too.
From my perspective, the AFK genie farmers outside CZ are a major issue, I'm sure many people won't agree with me because they're making bank, effortlessly.
I'd like to propose a couple of things:
- Disable autoloot only if you're using genie (EMC/Luferson/Moradon) do you want to farm? Do it manually, this game is supposed to be played.
- Genie + autoloot in CZ should be fine.
- CR rewards are fine being non tradeable, but why can't you store them? Yesterday I've got a genie pack as a reward, on my support mage... what am I suppose to do with that :| (they also take away inventory slots).
- Kill the GM event Wednesdays and Sundays (Did you see how packed the server was last Sunday?) make the tattoo last until the next event (so people is encouraged to log again and again for it).
- Undo the change that made the respawn time of mobs random. This is only beneficial for those AFK farmer dicks that go to a spot (taken or not) and get the full drops for themselves.
- Be more active (you, or your GMs, seriously) this is important. AFK players in events, people luring mobs, etc. Players expect these issues to be taken care of asap and only GMs can do it.
Generally I think that's something along the lines of what we were considering, so I think we're on the same page here.
This particular case sounds odd. I suspect that's unintentional, with stuff applying the untradeable flag for an entire group unintentionally, rather than for specific items within that group. It definitely needs checking.
I don't think this was ever specifically reported, otherwise it would've definitely been checked sooner.
This is definitely something we can consider.
This one is probably pretty situational, but to be honest I'm not sure I understand what your reasoning is for reverting this. Can you elaborate?
This always confuses me, to be honest. I feel like this is a timezone thing, because I can personally attest to how active our GMs are on this front. We monitor a lot of in-game activity in our Discord; for example, GM actions, and that's pretty active for most of the day. It may be that there's a deadzone we need to fill which is what you're seeing... which I'm guessing is maybe afternoon-ish my time (which is also generally the least active time?). For reference, when specifically do you feel our GMs are "inactive"? I'd be surprised if it was any other time.
With regards to events in particular, we have new event-specific bans in place for this stuff now which so far I've personally seen about 20 of those bans enforced (probably more than that by now). Once we work out the kinks with the IP stuff, it should also help keep things under control more.
Part 1/3, because:
I'll be honest, it's somewhat insulting to hear you say that people aren't willing to talk about the issues, when those issues have been spoken of for a very long time in detail within the ApexKO Discord, but it's whatever.The text that you have entered is too long (20215 characters). Please shorten it to 15000 characters long.
The server's first issue was a lack of events, which was eventually fixed. I would say that collection races are still lackluster and they weren't implemented properly, but it was fine at the time. In the beginning of the server people hadn't realized just how broken coin farming was, which is why the economy was still healthy and then eventually we got to the point where coin drops were heavily nerfed and changes to auto-loot were made. Hyper Noah was also removed, which was a good idea. Funny enough, none of this would've been an issue if auto loot didn't exist in conjunction with genie. The reason why I mention the events is because there was nothing else to do besides go to events and genie farm coins/items/bus. We wanted events because it would give us a reason to actually play the game, which we eventually got. Unfortunately, events always loose their charm over time and even the most packed action in CZ can be boring if it becomes repetitive.
The second issue was poor communication, which "we" tried to fix by having community managers communicate about updates and help with feedback between the administrators and community members. It's a story for another time though. I guess I'll also quickly mention that ApexKO had a very mixed bag of players in it's community, which meant that gathering actually valuable feedback was extremely difficult. From the very beginning I knew that players had very different expectations from the server and it was very apparent that there was a communication issue, since nobody knew what the real plan for the server was. It resembled a light-farm PK server with some random extremely hard-farm elements, while being extremely casual and somehow incredibly grindy. It somehow managed to please nobody, while being a rather fun, yet frustrating experience overall.
The first big patch came with Bifrost, which was a big deal, since before that we had nothing to manually farm. Day 1 I heard our melee players complain about the drop rates, because they were shocked at how high the drop rate of items from monsters was. The amount of raptors and shards we dropped from regular monsters was insane and it actually took us a long time to even realize that EWs were dropping an insane amount of exceptional weapons. I had half an inventory of stuff before I even bothered to look at the AP of the items and realized that they're dropping exceptional shards and raptors like crazy. Just by exping, we dropped 14 exceptional shards in a couple hours. So, I started to wonder if drop rates in Eslant were as good as they were in CZ. Well, considering that you can use transformation scrolls in Eslant, it was actually even faster to solo EWs in Eslant with a mage and it was amazing solo farm that required basically no gear, just a level 62 mage. If you were melee, then tough luck, since there was absolutely nothing for melee players to farm that was actually worthwhile, because it would've been smarter to just farm coins in the abyss or in luferson/emc with an archer or a mage.
The main reason why solo farming on a mage was the best farm in the server is because of the time it took for EW to respawn. Adding more members wouldn't really increase the amount of drops/hour, at least not substantially enough to make it worth partying up. Once you started partying up, the efficiency dropped drastically and it would've been just smarter to split up and farm coins. 8 people farming coins in 8 different slots is far more profitable than 8 people farming the same slot of monsters. Even if DMs are 50m/h, then if coin farming is 10m/h, it is still more efficient to farm coins with 8 characters than farm DMs with 8. Basically, grouping up has to either be the only way of obtaining something, or it has to be nearly 8 times more efficient than splitting up. In CZ grouping up is often worth it just because of the safety it provides, but it still has to be more efficient than just going to the safe zones and splitting up to farm 8 different slots. There's always the argument of making your own items to be made, but the way items dropped in the server made that point moot. The best weapons were dropping with en extremely high drop rate and shells were given by daily quests, making shell farming pointless as well. Logically it was the smartest thing to do to just farm coins and buy the weapon you want, while doing daily quests to make the best armor set +6.
Part 2/3:
To sum up why there was nothing to do:
1. Shell farming didn't make sense, because in the beginning a +5/+6 shell set would be by far the best armor you could obtain and it was basically free. You would have a +5/+6 set in 2 days of playing. Daily quests for shells shouldn't have ever existed. The best way to obtain the best items should be either by grouping up to farm hard content, or be bought from the farmers. Solo players can still go to daily events for free stuff and there are still methods to make solo farming and casual play possible without cannibalizing content from the active players. I get the idea that if you don't have time to play, then having daily quests is an easy way of helping people with less time to play to catch up, but the rewards were way too good and they ruined everything for people that actually wanted to play the game. It simply wasn't worth the time investment to try go for a +7 set, when you could easily get a +6/+7 set by doing other activities while doing daily quests. Farming shells just wasn't a thing.
2. Farming weapons only made sense in the very beginning, but that's just because we didn't know how insanely easy it would've been to farm coins and basically buy a full +7 set with the early item prices. In hindsight, there was never a reason to farm weapons, because genie farming coins was infinitely better. On top of that, the market was flooded with +1 weapons already due to the extremely high drop rate of high class weapons, so the value of +1 weapons was really low already. It took a while for people to realize, but the drop rate of raptors and shards in Eslant was really good and if you just had a couple people genie overnight/in between events at DK, you would end up with a ridiculous amount of raptors +1 to upgrade. Even if the drop rate of raptors was higher in CZ, the drop rates were too high in general and the drop rate of weapons in eslant should've been way lower than what it was.
3. Drop list was a complete mess. The easiest monsters were dropping the best items. Dark Knights and Evil Wizards were the best monsters to farm, because they are easy to kill and they also just happened to have the best drops and they rewarded the most XP on top of that. Not to mention that these monsters were also really easy to solo farm on a mage, while would've been either too slow or too difficult to farm on a melee character, if just because of the potion costs alone. A mage can aoe clear 20-30 monsters, while a warrior would struggle to kill 10 monsters in the same amount of time. The harder monsters like balrog, booroo and titan didn't have an advantage over EW, which meant that there was no reason for a melee player to farm those monsters. Especially when it would take a bigger party to farm those monsters efficiently, but like I've already established, the efficiency of farming would always decrease for each member added to the group. So farming balrogs with an 8 man party would be extremely inefficient, but even if it was profitable, then it would've been very RNG dependent and would result in frustrations due to the RNG nature of the drops. Sometimes you could farm EW for 3 hours and have 5-10 raptors/shards, but sometimes you might run dry for 12h. In comparison, you could've made nearly the same amount of money in coins (or even more if you had a couple laptops.....) if you just went to the abyss or luf/emc.
4. Untradeable rewards. Account bound items make sense if they're very easy to obtain. The problem with account bound items is that if you cannot use them and if they're not worth upgrading, then they're kind of just junk. That's why PK chests were never worth exchanging, because you would never get a useful item from them. The untradeable nature of PK chests makes sense, but the untradeable loot from the chests doesn't. Same with mining, although it somewhat makes sense with mining, because it's an AFK activity (just like genie), so it shouldn't be super rewarding. Mining was actually pretty balanced, since the gems of life were very useful. I wish it was expanded upon in some form.
5. Lack of reward for difficult content. This is a more complicated balance issue between hyper active players and casuals, because if the gap is too wide, then it causes casual players to quit, which damages the server. One contributing factor was the old unique system that was introduced in official servers, but it made sense in official servers at the time, because official servers already had a plethora of +2 +3 uniques, so it functioned more like a catch-up mechanic, rather than the obvious choice for all players. Uniques and upgrades were capped to +7/+0, which made it difficult for any active player to get a substantial advantage, if we're not taking into account stuff like iron sets/CS. Old uniques shouldn't have the same stats are regular uniques, or the possibility to upgrade regular uniques to +1 should've existed since the beginning to give players incentive to do difficult content and camp bosses. Another contributing factor was the lack of purpose for killing bosses in bowl for unlocking skills, which makes sense in some servers, but I feel like there was a better middle ground available than what we were presented with. Especially since the items were incredibly rare and served basically no purpose until 80 cap was released, and even then they weren't important, but just something babashoppers or rich players could waste their money on. There was no Isiloon to kill for organized groups either, which made it even less motivating to organize and play as a clan. CSW rewards were laughable, considering how easy it was to print money by genieing with a couple laptops and how much work it took to control the castle. Oh and let's not forget the first iteration of the bifrost event that people called unrewarding. I loved getting 30-40gbs worth of frags every single event, because people didn't realize how insanely high the drop rates were. Just so people know, we were getting 40-50 fragments of avarice from every single bifrost we attended, which was 3 times a day. It was the best money in the server by far, but it was obviously broken and needed to be nerfed (which it did, but the nerf was far too hard, killing the event) and the drop rates for other fragments should've been adjusted, since the drop rate of frags from the easier monsters remained awful until the end.
6. Artificial progress restrictions. In other words, preventing players from getting too far ahead by capping upgrades to +7 and +0. I will never understand why people think this is a good thing. It's absolutely a fucking trash system that doesn't actually do anything. The active players will just hoard items and once the cap is raised, they will be ahead once again. All it does is cause frustration and prevent people that spend time and money to progress from doing so. It also devalues items and causes other economical issues by introducing a power level cap, which means that it demotivates players from trying to obtain better gear. Why bother with a +7 set, when a +6 set is probably good enough? If +8 was open and nobody had +8 sets, then you would likely still go for a +7 set, because there's the chance that somebody shows up with a +8 set. Also, with the upgrade rates we had, the chances of somebody getting extremely lucky and making +8 or even +9 items in the beginning of the server (especially if drop rates were addressed) would've been so slim. Besides, one guy with a +9 weapon doesn't do anything. It doesn't prevent you from playing the game and it also doesn't mean that he's automatically the best player in the server. Having goals that are almost unreachable are fun, because it creates a feeling of progress, even if it's unlikely that you will ever reach your goal. Even in a server filled with +8 items, you can still get a +8 weapon and a +7 set and have fun. As long as the population is great enough, the gear gaps don't actually matter that much.
Part 3/3:
So how to fix these issues? Without damaging the casual nature of private servers, there were multiple fixes suggested, which were never even referenced or addressed:
1. Shell/Weapon farming: Remove daily quests that reward players with the best items in the game. Casual farming can exist for items that aren't the best in slot, such as chitins, glaves and MDs. Reduce drop rates for the best items in the game from monsters that are meant for EXP, especially outside CZ.
2. Grouping: For example, I suggested that we remove the daily quests for shells and replace those quests with repeatable kill quests, which will allow you to either get a random piece of shell or the ability to choose the drop you want from said monsters drop table. Let's say you have to kill 150 Booroo for an exceptional weapon +3 and you can pick the one you prefer. This would've meant that by grouping up, you would've increased the value of every booroo 8-fold. Naturally you would still receive random drops on top of that, but it would've made grouping up so much better than solo farming. There are ways of abusing such a system of course, but there are ways of limiting the abuse. Buff the drop rates of BiS items from monsters that require grouping up and aren't easily soloable with paper mages with no gear or levels. It's okay for mages to aoe harpies and stone golems for money, but it would be extremely broken if mages could solo aoe DMs in a MYKO server for example. See the problem? Also, why are Titans like 3 times as hard to kill as EW, while dropping only regular high class weapons and less EXP? It just didn't make any sense.
3. Genie farming: While I didn't directly address it, it was pretty much the core problem for a lot of things. Basically my example of doing something that is 50m/h in a group, versus doing something 10m/h with 8 characters is the core issue. Normally people wouldn't be willing to do 12 hours of abyss farming every day for 3 months, because it's just tedious as hell and people play games to have fun. The fix to this is quite simple, remove auto-loot. Auto-loot enabled various forms of farming (that would've still existed even without auto-loot) that players would've normally avoided. It's very boring to just nova on stuff and click boxes for coins. It's also very boring to do the same thing even if you don't have to loot yourself. The point is that genie and auto-loot together rewarded inactive gameplay, which isn't good for players. It directly devalues the efforts of active players and makes their time investment worth less. By enabling casual players to get things for "free", you are taking away the active players initiative to actually play the game. Even if doing something manually is twice as profitable as automating it, then I could just run 2 computers simultaneously and thus, receive the same results while doing other things, like watching a movie or playing other games.
4a. Lack of reward for difficult content: The fix for this is quite simple. Create a gap between organized groups and solo players. It sounds kind of bad if you're a solo player, but it's just a sad fact that people should come in terms with. Organized players with a lot of time in their hands will and should have an advantage over you. The advantages in KO aren't that massive either, but for some reason KO players have gotten it in their heads that the slightest difference in stats will somehow make it impossible to PK, and therefore there should be no difference in gear. Come on, the difference between +6 and +7 and +0 and +1 isn't that big of a deal. In ApexKO, every player had the same items, because the best items were available for everybody. Old uniques had the same stats as regular uniques, which meant that even after people were camping Isiloon/Ultima, there weren't too many items to be excited about. I personally think old unique should have 50-60% the stats of regular uniques.
4b. Lack of reward for difficult content: There is a cave that belongs to the delos owners, which is usually filled with monsters that the delos castle owners and farm. One of my clannies even said that all they wanted was solid bins in there and they would've been happy. Imagine having the best farm in the game, which is completely AFK and has variance or risk involved, completely KS free and without a risk of getting killed? It sounds stupid, but solid bins were so broken for so long, that it made sense at the time. Of course we were hoping for more, but anything would've been better than nothing. Bosses that normally require bigger groups to kill should also reward players with items that aren't normally available. In old KO servers Isiloon existed in delos, which meant that it was pretty much only killed by the castle owner, because they could prevent players from entering delos when she spawned. But since old uniques existed, the boss killing was devalued anyway, but that's something I already addressed. I wish there was more of a reward for the biggest organized activity in the game and I also wish the other events that require organized grouping were more rewarding. Bifrost is a good event, but it does kind of suck if the drop rates aren't perfect. Also, old flame/imir/shio rings should've never existed in the first place, because they're BiS items for mages and thus made bifrost farming even less incentivized. Granted, flame rings were still extremely expensive later on.
5. Untradeable rewards: No untradeable weapons or shells, because receiving class restricted items that aren't for your class aren't fun rewards. If you want to introduce untradeable rewards that don't directly mess up the economy, then you can consider less used stuff from the PUS, 3-day valks, duration pots, monster stones, gems of life etc. I'm pretty sure those were among the list of suggested item rewards for various events. It also helps if you don't make boss drops entirely worthless, because you can add master items to event rewards and find a use for those items later on.
Since that is such a wall of text and information to process, I'll try and sum it up a little. In a normal farm server, grouping up and actively playing is the best way of obtaining the best items. Whether it's the best way of getting rich or not is another topic, but it's usually the only way of obtaining those items. The market will balance itself around this fact. So, killing DMs in a MYKO server is usually pretty rewarding for groups of 2-3 players and it always starts by being rewarding for groups of 8 as well, but the key point is that it requires actively playing the game. This type of farming was nonexistent, because the best ways of obtaining items didn't involve actively playing the game. It was more rewarding to setup genie with auto-loot and wait until the next event to actually do something (or you know, wait 24h for the daily quests to reset, yay free stuff!). Outside of PK, there wasn't really a reason to manually control your character. On top of that the reason why people would manually farm in the beginning was to gain an advantage, but their ability to do so was removed by introducing upgrade caps and preventing them from progressing their characters by being active.
P.S Funny enough, this is an issue that I didn't even think of while playing, but it is something to think about in these 20XX servers. For some reason, NP gain is balanced around group play, which meant that playing in a 8-man team will always grant you more NPs than playing in a small party. I feel like NP gain should be rebalanced for solo players and smaller groups and people should be a bit more incentivized to stay alive, rather than just suicide bomb into groups, but it's a much bigger design change and not easily addressed. Honestly, the 64/50 np per kill/death system from days of old seemed pretty balanced to me, I wonder why we strayed away from that.
P.S2 Reading this ramble is probably a mess, because writing 20,000 characters takes a time and remembering stuff that took place over 3 months requires quite a lot of thinking. It's probably not a very coherent read, but I hope I managed to touch on every point that I wanted to address. So, keep that in mind if you have an issue with something I said.
tldr ; 10 chars
These guys didn't give a shit when we played Kallop so what makes you think something will change now lol...
Please have a look, dark mythril fragments, spirit of genies, are a couple of items I can recall getting as CR reward and not being able to store.
Being honest I was just making echo of what others were saying (and seeing the posts in Apex forums) I, myself, know how to deal with this stuff, and rarely need GM assistance.
It is quite situational now that you mention it, but a bit annoying, let me give you an example.
Before, all the mobs within a spot respawned at the same time. What this allowed was for a person farming in a spot to continue there all along.
Sometimes you'll get the eventual KSer coming to the spot to try and take it, but finding themselves unable to kill all the mobs (thus not so profitable) they end up quitting eventually.
This also allows the eventual players just wanting to complete a quest (tag some of the mobs) do it before they're all wiped (treant/ancient at CZ for example, common daily Q).
With the current implementation, once you wipe an spot entirely, mobs will respawn one by one.
What this allows is for KSers to eventually take the spot for them, this also hurt AoE classes (and AoE genie as well, single target skill must be used)
This also prevent people doing quests from tagging mobs (check CZ treant/ancient and you'll find only single damage DPsers there nowadays) because the classes with casting time can't do anything, by the time you cast the skill, the mob is dead already.
Before, when the mobs respawned at the same time ksers could only get a % of all the mobs (now they get all if they out dps the other player in the spot) and people can't tag for quests fast enough, be done and be gone.
I'm mentioning this because night after night I go to a spot, start farming there, just to see how 20 minutes later an archer comes along pm me "rpr 5 mins max, my spot" and take the spot I had like if I was never there (and these are the nice ones, other just set their genies without a word). Quite frustrating.
Holy shit people are writing essays ranting about KO private servers in 2020.
Just play something else buddy, this is very unhealthy.
Odd take.
In case you're wondering, I haven't played for the past month. I was procrastinating and the wall of text was kind of a product of that. It didn't take me that long to write though.
I was gonna read but noticed it was aslong as the harry potter books
Agreed with everything kallop said.
And ye the pk system itself and np gains are really unbalanced and bias toward full parties which is killing the server and cz activity in the long run.
(CRs kill counts metters, monthly 1000 kill, 200 daily kills etc. Smaller parties and solo should grant more kill there. Like killing 1 in solo should worth like 4-5 kills in these quests. Also NP gains are kinda messed up aswell getting ~50 np in full parties and only like 100 in solo. Solo / small parties should get way more NP / kill compared to full parties.
(On top of the retarded mentallity of the playerbase, making video of everything , posting every kill and making fun of eachother instead of playing)
And because of said reasons people tend to rather wait 1-2 hours in cz town doing nothing , waiting for the perfect setup (full mage pt , or 2 priest 1 mage 5 warriors etc)
And pking only 30-60 mins, cuz at the end of the day , they are making more np, more kills , and completing the quests faster this way, than trying to start pking in small groups until they have the full team.
And while it isn's such a big problem around server releases when the server is PACKED with tons of ppl, it becomes a huge issue when the server is less crowded, and ppl trying to pk either has no enemies to play against at all, or having a way too strong party which they can't do shit against as a 3-6 men group.
This is definitely something aswell you should fix asap if you wanna keep cz healthy with the slimmer community aswell.
Do I have to remain banned on Discord for absolutely nothing TwoStars?
Posted here then got banned an hour later on discord despite not typing anything on there... ?
Are you sure u didn't flame the most famous almighty xHomieDogDLiveStreamer?
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