I know how to solve (chinese) farmer hackers and mastery book issues

Buyable scrolls can screw many people over, but making Mastery Books purchaseable and act as a meso sink would be a very lovely idea because the most unprofitable skill books tend to get thrown away, make it near impossible to level up some skills (such as Marksmen/Bucc/AM books). Maybe to keep too many people from getting mad, they should have it so Maple Warrior 20/30 still drop from the designated monsters because that is how most legit bossers make their money.

I like Stereo's idea. Having the prices fluxuate every day would be nice, but that would be a lot of work. Maybe every server check/channel maintenance, they could change the prices.

Also, a good idea with the scroll NPC would be to make the items in very limited quantity, say 50 scrolls per item ID every 12 hours or more, to make them not TOO easy to get, but kind of like how the free market is now anyway.

Remember, the point of this is more to give the Chinese hackers absolutely nothing to make money on, rather than giving merchants something to do. If you're only playing the game to buy and sell items in the free market, that's not really playing, is it? ;X Sure, I get it's nice to make money, but that's not really the point of the game.

I like Stereo's idea. Having the prices fluxuate every day would be nice, but that would be a lot of work. Maybe every server check/channel maintenance, they could change the prices.

Also, a good idea with the scroll NPC would be to make the items in very limited quantity, say 50 scrolls per item ID every 12 hours or more, to make them not TOO easy to get, but kind of like how the free market is now anyway.

Remember, the point of this is more to give the Chinese hackers absolutely nothing to make money on, rather than giving merchants something to do. If you're only playing the game to buy and sell items in the free market, that's not really playing, is it? ;X Sure, I get it's nice to make money, but that's not really the point of the game.

If the NPC sells limited quantity, then rich players would just buy up all the available ones all the time and force demand/inflation.

This would cause inflation in everything that isn't mastery books or scrolls, I think.

I'm ok w/ a Mastery Book shop, but I think that's rather irrelevant since mystery mastery books are coming out soon.

As far as a scroll shop, I don't support that. Just doesn't seem like a plausible idea. That makes grinding even more tedious than it already is, with the only reward being exp.

If the NPC sells limited quantity, then rich players would just buy up all the available ones all the time and force demand/inflation.

It depends on how you limit it. If you limit it a certain # per account and make those scrolls untradeable, or something like that, it would work. These are just ideas and I'm definitely not the brightest crayon in the box, so I can't make this perfect by myself.

This would cause inflation in everything that isn't mastery books or scrolls, I think.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. The items in the free market that are non-scrolls/mastery books are all unscrolled equipment for 100k more than NPC price or insanely scrolled equipment for no less than $500 each. At least there would be a happy medium introduced.

MORE MESO SINKS FOR JMS AWESOME.

>_>

It depends on how you limit it. If you limit it a certain # per account and make those scrolls untradeable, or something like that, it would work. These are just ideas and I'm definitely not the brightest crayon in the box, so I can't make this perfect by myself.

More than likely, they won't limit it per account. And even if they did, there's no stopping players from logging onto other accounts with mesos and buying them out either. A more plausible idea in my opinion would be to include more repeatable quests that reward scrolls as awards rather than straight out mesos to acquire scrolls. That or insert alternative ideas for acquiring scrolls.

As for mastery books, I say drop the whole mastery book system period. It's inconsistent with what players deal with 1st through 3rd job and throughout 4th job, all it does is cause players grief.

More than likely, they won't limit it per account. And even if they did, there's no stopping players from logging onto other accounts with mesos and buying them out either. A more plausible idea in my opinion would be to include more repeatable quests that reward scrolls as awards rather than straight out mesos to acquire scrolls. That or insert alternative ideas for acquiring scrolls.

As for mastery books, I say drop the whole mastery book system period. It's inconsistent with what players deal with 1st through 3rd job and throughout 4th job, all it does is cause players grief.

They could just do the same with both systems.

-Delete all scrolls
-Make an NPC that enhances items that gives the same product that scrolls give, depending on how much you pay for quality. The chances of success, booming, and failure would stay the same as the scrolls it would replace.

It, again, would screw over merchants, but it would get rid of farm-hackers.



As for the skill mastery thing, I've always liked the having to do tedious quests for mastery level. They should get rid of all skill books and mastery books and require more of those quests. :|

This would cause inflation in everything that isn't mastery books or scrolls, I think.

How so? With all the mesos disappearing from the economy by buying them from NPC shops, there would be less mesos circulating the economy. Yes there's less stuff to spend the mesos on since there wouldn't be people selling scrolls and/or mastery books anymore, but there is still the fact there would be overall less mesos in the economy. Inflation is not that likely; prices of all other items would either remain stable or even deflate if enough mesos get taken out of the game with the NPC scrolls/book shops.

Having prices change every hour depending on how many sell seems like it would create another boring part of the game. Wait by the npc for days, hoping to be the first one to get the red light special discount.

For skillbooks, I wish they would return skillbook quests to the game. Go through different quests to unlock the next ten levels of your skills, and the quests for each get progressively more intricate, challenging, and fun. Those quests gave the game more backbone.

Scrolls would be better off as untradeable items sold from NPCs at reasonably not cheap, not expensive prices.

It does seem like a nice idea to hit the gold farmers, but they will find another way to generate their gold. If there's a tradeable item everybody wants but everbody can't afford because they're ingame-poor or have no time, they'll farm it and sell it. Then their supply of mesos for sale comes right back.

Side note; I thought this article was interesting. An antibotting system wouldn't stop farmers if they're not using a bot, but real people. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may...aming-scam

[SIZE="1"]Maybe the real way to stop gold farmers is to stop people from supporting them. "Gold is murder."[/SIZE]

Botters will find other high value tradeable items to farm. If you take all of those out, then you leave normal players without a source of mesos from their training which is also bad.

For skillbooks, I wish they would return skillbook quests to the game. Go through different quests to unlock the next ten levels of your skills, and the quests for each get progressively more intricate, challenging, and fun. Those quests gave the game more backbone.

I like this, as long as those quests aren't like, spend 40 hours farming Tauro's on 4x to try and get rush.

Having prices change every hour depending on how many sell seems like it would create another boring part of the game. Wait by the npc for days, hoping to be the first one to get the red light special discount.

I don't see how the FM is any different.

Except for limited quantity.

I would agree with skill questing. makes sense AND you get some sort of story line

Though i think scrolls are fine the way they are. Only problem is that there's gach limited scrolls out there meaning it's for a certain sector of the community that has a monopoly on the prices for it due to the fact that only the NX hoes can get them. This would be easily fixed if they let the 30%/50%/100% special scrolls drop from monsters at say a chaos scroll drop rate.

If they can't stop people from botting to farm mastery books, how do you expect shifting the problem to mesos to solve things? Botters can farm mesos just as easily.

Besides, your idea goes against the whole MapleStory design philosophy of forcing excessive farming and retarded levels of RNG luck to get anything good to happen.

A few people earlier in this thread mentioned about having a mesos sink
How about raising the price of magnifying glasses and having events like Suni donation event regularly to sink mesos like MSEA?
For those who do not know what the event is:

 Spoiler

Suni Donation Event!

Cute little Suni is back again and she is asking Maplers to help her out by donating what they can to her. She will show her gratitude by giving away her prized possessions, based on how much has been donated to her, and she does have some really good items!

You may donate 1 meso to 1 billion mesos, once every hour. Of course, the more you donate, the higher the chances to get something really good. We have peeked at what Suni has to give away, and here is what we managed to get a glimpse at. There are plenty more of items we couldn’t see though!



Repeatable every 1 hour. Minimum level to donate is level 30.

More than likely, they won't limit it per account. And even if they did, there's no stopping players from logging onto other accounts with mesos and buying them out either. A more plausible idea in my opinion would be to include more repeatable quests that reward scrolls as awards rather than straight out mesos to acquire scrolls. That or insert alternative ideas for acquiring scrolls.

As for mastery books, I say drop the whole mastery book system period. It's inconsistent with what players deal with 1st through 3rd job and throughout 4th job, all it does is cause players grief.

I'm on this. Doing quest for scrolls sounds like a good idea to me, they can even do that for mastery books too. Get a skill by doing quests so that every player have a chance to get their skill, equally(maybe I'm too optimistic with this). Botters don't do quests, right?
If you want a meso sink that badly, do what MSEA did, change the magnifying glass price to a HELLUVA-SKY-HIGH price, our nx:meso rate drop from 15~20m per 1k cash to 10~11m per k in 2 weeks or so and looks like it's not going up much till now(MSEA revised the price long ago to a much lower one). Also the great Suni(who is forever poor although players contribute billions or even trillions across the server) event which makes players keep spending meso w/o nice outcome most of the time.

Edit: Typed halfway and went for a breakfast, posted it, just to found out i got ninja'd. 咳咳。。。

A scroll NPC would not only get rid of hundreds of millions, even billions of mesos from the game,

Try hundreds of billions on the lowest of low estimates. And the meso centralization flows towards the rich, making them comparatively richer, as locked stated.

So what you need to do is let the scroll prices fluctuate to match demand. A simple way to do that is to have the price depend how long it's been since someone bought it, and then update the 'natural' price every day. So, say you buy it within 1 hour of the previous buyer - then it's sold for 100% of the day's price. If nobody buys it after 1 hour, it cuts to 50% - but you can only get 1 scroll at the discount price, then it's back to full price until another hour later. Wait 2 hours with no buyers, it cuts again, to 25%.
At the end of the day, the average price paid for the scroll is gonna be somewhere between 100% and 25%. If it's way less than 100% (say 80% or lower) then make tomorrow's 'base' price lower. If it's at 100%, indicating people bought them steadily, then raise the price tomorrow. This means def scrolls and other less valuable stuff drops hugely in price, while things people actually use (gfa, armor luk/str/dex/int) stay worth something.

Yeah and put the guild style merchanting on auto-pilot. To any affluent group of people who have a damn clue or ounce of foresight, this is free money unless scrolls bought are untradeable. There needs to be limits on how many one can buy for this to work at all that or the untradeable solution which is also terrible.

Teachendemeconomics.

A more plausible idea in my opinion would be to include more repeatable quests that reward scrolls as awards rather than straight out mesos to acquire scrolls. That or insert alternative ideas for acquiring scrolls.

Best idea in the thread especially if the quests take a pretty consistent amount of time to complete which means the rewards will not come from drops but tasks and including truthcheckers. Doing this as an addition to drops of course. Doesnt elimate merchability but also stops botters. For an extra step to preserve merching, scrolls acquired this way could be untradeable.

Try hundreds of billions on the lowest of low estimates. And the meso centralization flows towards the rich, making them comparatively richer, as locked stated.

>Implying that's any different than what happens every day anyway.

The more NX someone pours into the game, the richer they get. Dennis (TKWizard), just put $25 or so worth into the game and he's going to have at the minimum 10 billion mesos by the end of next week due to the current event, which makes people who put real life money into the game 100x richer than the people who can't put any money into the game at all, like me.

At least the scroll NPC gives people who can't put real life money into the game a chance to get richer, instead of always poorer in comparison.