Toldain Takes a Vacation

It's been a while since my last post. Let's try to catch up on some of what's been going on.

The new guild tool was released. The ability to make notes about characters is valuable, and it's puzzling why it was left out. More on that in its own post.

There's been more discussion about "an alternate form of combat" which will be used to implement arena-style PVP. After my last post about this, it looked as though it was an April Fool's joke. It wasn't.

The most recent live update had a lot of quality problems, there were notes about it, and it seemed to break most quests

Many more mobs are solo-rated now, even within dungeons. In particular, many of the mobs needed for writs are solo-rated, which is both a boon and a failure. The failure is in cooperation between players. Server populations seem down, or at least more spread out, and most players, when they find themselves needing the same mob as others, leave or start competing, ignoring the fact that the game facilitates and rewards cooperation.

Prices are doing some very strange things. Tier 1 harvestables can demand a premium, because so very few new toons are joining the game, and consequently the supply is low. But certain high-level quests require tier 1 items, and the folks doing them would rather pay a gold piece than go do it themselves.

In addition, the price of rares still seems to be climbing. Palladium clusters have nearly doubled in price during the last two weeks, as more folks on our server level up, have more money, and really want to finish the heritage quest involved. But the price of other rares is up as well. What's really surprising is that the price of Tier 1 Adept 1 spells seems to be around 1 gp. This seems like really bad news for new players, and I would expect some intervention on the part of SOE in this arena.

On the other hand, you can only get these drops in tier 1 zones from chests. So maybe this also represents opportunity for these players. The main problem is that the tier 1 market isn't very liquid at all, and the tier 2 market is headed that direction.

Those are the major things I can think of for now.