Better isn't always more expensive 🫰
Without being a spoilsport for what's to come, we don't plan for Tithing Amulets to be the only way to level up!
Generally, the design foresees that players can reasonably expect to go up to level 30-40 (50 in extreme cases) right now, passively gathering EXP for their artefacts before becoming too slow or tedious to continue. With new methods (including f2p methods!) we plan to both create a scenario where people can easily catch up to levels obtained earlier. This came at annoyance to some players, a fraction of the playerbase that seeks to obtain maximum power in the shortest time.
Artefact levelling, as a system, is built to last for quite a while. Subsequent nostalgia releases will include methods for gaining said EXP in accordance to the (rather steep) curve. Players often complained about the relatively small power increase from nostalgia content and this serves as a vehicle to facilitate more power from individual instances without letting power creep take too much hold.
For this reason, we deliberately chose not to have a hard cap on artefacts to let players naturally ease in and out of the system and choose whether they value the added power more than the potential monetary gains from selling the orbs to wealthier players.
Well in many situations "there will be" also comes with "in the future in maybe years" altho players where mentioning the poor system right from the start and everything players said about this system at launch apparently become true x)
We also intentionally placed tithing amulet values in instances to encourage players to run certain instances; to be concise, we found that Aspects from Necropolis of Mirrors would hold their value quite a bit too well, to a point where midgame players trying to reach up had no choice but to grind quite a bit themselves, often times more than what their time budget allowed. With a bigger focus on catching up and getting people into higher instances sooner, we chose this route to bring prices down while still providing you, as players, some power.
The concerns raised were heard, understood and found to be quite a bit more acceptable than the alternatives (namely straight cutting item requirements and therefore instantly tanking the values of these items by a huge amount). Increasing supply naturally instead of artificially cutting demand allowed the endgame playerbase to still profit from sales as the markets readjusted.
Legacy grind reduction has been a goal for quite some time, and while it might seem counterintuitive, we chose the route of tithing to create a tradeoff for power instead of flat out cutting the earning potential of endgame guilds from these instances to almost 0.
Thank you both for expressing your opinions!
Hooroo,
Brontes!
