Ah ha, I thought he meant noticeable-noticeable, not nice-noticeable.

Will these changed be implemented before the weakening on sunday? *hope*

it's 16 essence a focus from what I've seen. That's mostly irrelevant. The particles gained from focusing is godlike. Kind of like Morgfyre but more droolworthy.

16 essence a focus? Are you kidding? Sheesh.

Both ground and aetherways.

I wonder if they can be sold on market. I'm betting that orgs will start banning the sales of it, if so.

Magnagora already banned it and puts them in a city owned ship after every weakening. I would also like to note that that we get way to many particles. Magnagora got nearly 3000 this weakening.

Are the prices particles are sold for really supposed to be this high? Celest has made around 1 million gold pre-distribution to people/city per weakening. Gnome ships were selling for 600ish per.

Yeah, as much as I like a pile of gold coming to each participant, and how this attracts people to participate in the weakenings, it seems much. Half, third or even a quarter would be more appropriate. Otherwise, particles from weakenings alone will drive credit market prices through the roof.

If a total of 300-500k were made from weakenings rather than 1-1.5m, I think it would still nicely compensate those involved. That might still be too much. As is, every 15 RL hours ~1-1.5m gold plops into circulation. Double that with the communes getting into them as well. It smells like inflation to me.

I don't mind if it gets nerfed or not, but let's consider for a moment the kind of scale it's on. I got 37,000 gold - that's slightly more than I can get hunting illithoids for quite a while. I wasn't focused the whole time (beating people up) but that's irrelevant if you distributed it fairly. Now I think that's a pretty good deal, but unlike bashing illithoids the risk of death is much higher since you're often going to be PKing for a good portion of that time. And it doesn't come up -all-that much.

Then again, Eldanien's inflation comment rings true given that miniweakenings are not that infrequent. I wouldn't think it'd be worthwhile cutting it by more than 1/4-1/3 though.

Inflation is a real concern here. I am thinking that system was balanced around a couple of factors that aren't proving true. One, that there would be more of a fight in these things. Right now, in Celest's case anyway, it's just free gold every 15 hours. Two, that people would use a fair number of particles to purchases spheres. Unfortunately you can't purchase spheres in any fashion that we've tried. We submitted a bug but eh.

On the plus side, I've never seen people so excited about nexus battles I would say rather than just cutting it down, it should be a case of diminishing returns in terms of how many particles are put out by a construct. Let's say particles are like a build-up on constructs. Like barnacles on a ship bottom. They need time to accumulate. So we could say that they have some maximum number on them. 2,000 or something. And they re-accumulate 500 every rl day. However many you get from focusing is subtracted from how many particles that construct has to give.

With these arbitrary numbers, you'd get 1,000 off it the first mini-weakening. 1,000 the next if you go to the very next one you can. 500 the next if you go to the very next one. 0 the next as it hasn't had time to replenish. 500 the next. 0 the next. Etc. If you left it alone for a couple of days, it'd be back up to maximum and you could go drain it again.

This would reduce the number of particles being introduced into the system as well as reduce the number of mini-weakenings an org chooses to participate in if particles are a factor in their decision making process. It would also introduce some degree of strategy in terms of picking which construct to focus on and when to focus on it.

Good idea.

(Tempted to do a spammy seal of approval, but nah.)

I think it would balance out if there was actully defenders, defending then the returns wouldnt be this big.

And if you make a dimishing system like the above, i think the majority of the attackers/defenders will slump down, cause then only the real combatants would participate and particles would only end up for people on certain timezones.

I think its a good thing, the way celest got it now, half for you, half for city, but it would become a problem if someone is 'stashing up' for themself when they could have given it to the city.

Yet you can't actually count on defenders being able to defend...

See: The fact that returns this big are happening.

Then the issue is not of the returns, its the defence?

If you lower the return total, it would become another grinding momentum in the game, instead of improving the defence and make it a hotspot of action.

An idea is lower the total amount of people that can focus on construct, perhaps to five ? so you have to spread out more to be rewarding and which makes it easier and more exciting for attackers/defenders to engage eachother.

Or what about dimish the returns the more people that focus on one construct? so if you want higher reward, you have to spread out your group more which makes it more prone for attacks.

Because it's so easy to raise the defense when there's nobody around?

If the things are happening at times when people can't defend, or when there are limited numbers in comparison to a much stronger raiding crew... then the raiders are going to win, and handily. Thus, they get all the time they want with the constructs, where the issue is... tada... the returns.

Doesn't help when the two biggest orgs band together to pick on Magnagora. And you wonder there isn't much defence?

Absolute rubbish. 3 Seren plus Celestians vs. a group of Magnagorans that still gave us difficulties. This after Thoros jumped on a bandwagon of Glooms twice the size of the Seren defence (and THEY had the demesne/maelstrom, though no choke) that we still managed to beat handily.

EDIT: And we still got those really high returns. Therefore if anything is a problem, that is. If there actually -were- no defenders we'd've gained even more, though not an awful lot.

The issue is the defence not the return, if you decrease the return 50% of all the raiders will drop out and go back to grind whatever they grind best. Better to maybe implant "waves" of npcs that rush for defence, if there are no defenders about.

*Random idea for the event*

I think it can still be a hotspot of action without it being quite to the extreme it is now. There's a difference between having defenders and defenders actually having some effect on the accumulation of particles. In this situation the defenders need to actually succeed in killing off the attackers. If they can, then they can focus postively on the construct and get some particles of their own, not to mention whatever the defenders drop.

However, this isn't really something we're seeing happening. (And no, I don't really think Seren joining in with Celest actually makes any difference whatsoever as the same situation applied when it was just Celest) So the question is should it be possible for a strong organization to earn over 1 million gold every 15 hours. I think in the interests of inflation (which we have already seen with the credit market with the nouveau rich of Celest snapping up the cheaper credits quickly) and keeping the game at a point where an org falling behind does not create a situation where they're likely to stay behind, the answer to that should be no.

In my opinion if an organization cannot defend their constructs then they should not have them. However, given the difficulty in actually destroying a construct and the apparent unwillingness to take down constructs, we cannot count on this bit of common sense in order to keep the system in check. Which is why I suggested what I did. An org should have the *opportunity* to participate in a mini-weakening every 15 hours. Not a mandate to because it's a free million gold. The incentive is there to encourage this participation but do we really need the incentive to be present and the exact same for every mini-weakening? I don't know. I don't think so.

I don't think defenders can focus positive and get their own particles. Is this how it's supposed to be? There was some confusion earlier. Even after Glom knocked our jolts down to like 7k we couldn't focus it back positive at all, let alone get particles out of it - it severed it automatically.