Fill your arti keg from the alembic, use this alias to restore the old functionality:

Lendren is probably right. It's ridiculously easy to do, though.

Because it works like almost every other trade artifact and is priced the same as them. If they want to change that, fine, but I want my money back and will continue to use it for the purpose it was purchased for until that happens.

This is kind of like saying a cube rune may give 2000 charges, but it requires 15 charges to recharge a ring.

I want to see how people would react if spatulas only made double food for the owner, and if you gave it to someone else it magically halved again. Or the gloves let you pick double herbs but you could only sell half. That's what the keg is good for now.

Well... not really. The ring is the end target of the recharges, just as vials are for potions. The unique thing about runed kegs is that they can be poured into other kegs; cubes don't have such a functionality (I don't think, at least). So there's really no comparison between runed kegs and runed cubes in this scenario.

Or if forging mallets couldn't be loaned out. -grumble-

While I agree that Sylphas should get his refund, I'd be worried about using -- and posting! -- an exploit that intentionally restores an outcome that was deemed to be a bug. Sylphas, we don't need any more shrubs about the place.

This!

If what you're saying is what it sounds like, and there's a bug, and you're willfully exploiting it, knowing it's a bug, you will very likely be shrubbed. Particularly if it goes unreported. This is pretty simple. This is pretty much 'bottom line'. You're welcome to e-mail support if you've a problem with this, or if you want a full refund for your artifact (though I'm under the impression from your posts you've already done this).

I'll go ahead and lock this thread if it maintains its current topic (as we are not rolling back a bug fix).

It's not a bug. You can call exploiting if you want, but unless you want to remove the ability to pour vials into kegs (and in the process nerf the crap out of fountains and such) it's not a bug you can fix.

I understand you're not rolling back a "bug fix". Is there a possibility we'll see a viable alchemist artifact, at least? The Gloves are worthless; it would be nice if the admin would at least admit that and go from there.

Sylphas isn't threatening to exploit a bug, he's going to use an emergent property of existing mechanics to fill two kegs from one enhanced one: by using vials as an intermediary, you can dispense 200 units from the artifact keg and pour them, one by one, into two individual kegs. This is not a bug and can only be fixed by changing a mechanic (pouring from vials to kegs) or issuing an administrative decree.

To slightly divert the thread topic, I am personally just fine with not having a super-awesome alchemy artifact, as they tend to lower prices an unreasonable amount. Alchemy already has very small profit margins for the average merchant as it is, and the existence of a double-volume artifact threatens to push the average prices down to unprofitability. Let's say that a health fill costs the average alchemist 96 gold to make, and sells for 150, netting 54 gold in profit. Someone with a double-volume artifact, who spends 48 gold per fill, could make the same 54-gold profit and attract every customer in the game by charging 102 gold per fill, or worse, make an equivalent 56% profit by charging 75 per. With the ability to cut prices so low and still make a profit, an artifact-having alchemist could easily drive all of the non-artifact alchemists out of business if they so desired.

If health potions still sold for 300 per fill like they did back in the Good Old Days where I could make 500% profit off of every fill, I'd be more okay with this, but the already slim profit margin of the business means that any significant materials-cost reduction can and will obliterate the market for anyone who can't get that reduction.

Sylphas debated it for a while, but in the end really doesn't feel like being shrubbed to prove a point and/or force them to remove a really handy feature, but yeah, what he said.

I believe the admins want you to use Unlocked Potential kegs this way:

• Fill UP Keg with Potion
• Use UP Keg to sell refills in shop
• UP Keg gives customers 50 sips of Potion per fill
• UP Keg actually loses only 25 sips of Potion per fill

Therefore, your material costs are halved... but only for that one type of potion, in that singular keg. Whereas before this "bug fix," you were filtering all of your potions through that single Unlocked Potential keg, doubling their quantity and halving the material costs of all your potions. This "doubled" potion is then sold in mundane kegs.

I guess this "bug fix" is understandable, but then an Unlocked Potential rune is most probably not worth 300 credits. By the time it had finally paid for itself, you'd be making pure profit... but it would be a tiny little trickle.

Frankly, I think it all needs a revamp. It was overpowered before, it's underpowered now, and the bug fix is easily circumvented using normal game mechanics.

This makes me sick and angry. I guess in Lusternia, like RL, I care more about the average person trying to make ends meet than I do about 'big business' and rich people rolling around in money after taking advantage of average people. Lusternia's decision-making admins, however, seem to have the opposite priority. That also makes me sick and angry.




Exactly. Eventru, I'm sorry, but it will not pay for itself in a couple weeks. I don't know what reality that happens in, but not this one. How can it pay for itself when it's no longer a trade artifact?

And that's the whole point. That's why people bought it, because they thought - unlike that 75cr rune of expansion - this one was actually meant as the alchemist's trade arti. Not because every single one of them is a devious, greedy little monster trying to exploit Lusternia for mind-boggling profit, as you seem to think. They simply thought, "If I just wanted the double-capacity rune, that's what I'd get. I'd rather pay over 3x as much to get the one I can use for trade." That made sense. I think these people who are saying, "I don't know how you could not know this was a bug" are confusing this rune with the 75cr one. Which is what this one is now worth. In fact Sylphas originally got that smaller one, then realized he couldn't really help the guild shop with it, it was just good for his own use, so he went ahead and upgraded it to this one, so that we could use it to refill the shop's regular kegs. It never occurred to him or me that this wasn't exactly how the rune was meant to be used.

Now, I'm not saying Lusternia was out to rip anyone off. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that they honestly didn't know how misleading this arti was when it first came out. But even so, they let it go on for this long, which just further gave the impression that it worked like it was supposed to (if you're going to take something back, you do it as soon as you realize the bug exists, not wait this long, and for God's sake you give people a refund). To have the audacity to outright accuse these customers of trickery and refuse to refund them is absolutely appalling customer service on Lusternia's part. You could even just take this arti away and give them a 300 credit toward a different purchase, so they're not losing anything and you're not losing anything. Why would that be so hard?

Personally I'm considering canceling my membership and not paying more to this company, considering they might take away the benefit of things I buy later and say "too bad." Sending the legal disclaimer "We reserve the right to change anything we want at any time with or without notice" as a response to a refund request is shameful. Another IRE game went down this path and it led to the game becoming a complete craphole. When I finally crawled out of it and found Lusternia, I was relieved that it hadn't happened to all of IRE. So much for that.

Sorry, I hate to rant, but that just had to be said.

P.S. A few days ago I issued myself asking a question about an arti I was interested in, because the help file was vague. I still haven't gotten an answer. You can't expect the customer to ask every obscure possibility about something before buying it. They buy it based on how it appears to them, and if you weren't clear in presenting it, that places the burden on you, not them.

To be honest, I immediately thought it was just staff correcting a bug when I saw the announce. I also say that as someone who has purchased 2 of the runes of spatial expansion for my own use.

Looking at the help file now, the runes are listed under general trade artifacts rather than tradeskill artifacts. I also am somewhat influenced by Eventru's point that the runes were never marketed as an alchemist artifact. In fact, it seems alchemists came up with this as a workaround. I just don't see very much merit to the argument that they are getting screwed given the returns they received for however long they had the artifact and were using it in a manner that was not intended. I think the whole thing was pretty clear given the way transferring from an artifact vial to a regular vial worked.

That being said, I do believe that an alchemy artifact should be offered. It seems that this artifact should either decrease herb cost or increase output.

What he said.

I understand feeling like you've lost something, but that's way too harsh, Aubrey. The administration didn't intentionally seek to screw anyone over with this change. It wasn't reported as a bug until recently, and thus it wasn't even known to them that people were using the kegs in this manner.

Personally, I don't really blame Aubrey for being frustrated. The administration has a history of going off on some odd tangent. Things suddenly becoming "bugs" and needing to be changed, completely off-based solution to an envoy report that no one suggested/approved. Really, it's pretty disrespectful to your playerbase on a whole to try to pull a fast one on us, especially when we then call you out on it (Which is what Aubrey is doing).

As I said, I understand the frustration, but I don't see it as nearly so bad as all this. And, I'm pretty sure the administration isn't pulling a fast one here. If it had been marketed for this purpose, you'd have a valid complaint.

Making demands and threats is certainly not the best way to get what you want, either. Express your opinions, ask for some reasonable concessions, and wait patiently for a response.

Step back and wake up. Getting this angry over 300 sovereign health refills is utterly silly, especially given the context. There were fewer sources of gold then, but there were also far fewer things to spend gold on. Do you have any idea what the average price of herbs was? That, too, has changed, and makes a strong reflection on price changes over that period of time.

No one ever had much trouble keeping up gold to buy refills back then. Not any more than they do now. If anything, it was harder to find healing potion in stock because there were far fewer alchemists to do the work and serve a disproportionately higher number of people. This has had a greater influence on availability (and price) than anything else thus done in the game.

It makes no sense to believe that making every player-made object as cheap as possible is doing novices a favour, because the people with the most gold will still have it via the credit market. When everything else is devalued unnecessarily, the value of the credit can only go up. So in the end, the only people that are "hurt" by the keg artifacts working the way they did before were the druids and similar classes that can't gold bash effectively at whatever level they are at, or simply would rather make gold through means other than bashing. "Big business" didn't care, and could play that game too.

If you want to help people out on their start, you give specific discounts, as opposed to trying to crash the global price ceiling.

Putting that aside, I'd be for something that directly affects the number of fills created when the alembic amalgamates, with the option of having a no-loss trade-in for those with level 3 keg runes at current, so they can reclaim that ability if that's all they wanted.

Well, expressing opinions and asking for reasonable concessions doesn't really work either. Very few instances I can think of that players have impacted the change behind something that was viewed by the playerbase as wrongly changed. It's like Estarra has said in the past that she's supreme honcho and whatever she wants goes. Which, to me, I feel is a little unjust considering we invest our money and time into this game so that it can exist period. I can understand Aubrey being upset, but there are worse things that have happened mechanics wise.