essentially if your leadership isn't allowing GR3+ to harvest at least a fraction of the gems they create. It is time to replace your leadership.

1 uncharged gem = 1 facet per 1000 in the sphere, min of 3, max of 10.

Because gemstones can be purchased in bulk for gold, the logical response is to centralize control over the resource by forbidding guild members to harvest from the spheres individually and instead pooling the collective resources to feed up a single sphere to ~10K every year, harvest it back down and then put the resulting surplus of cheap gems into the guild shop to acquire the seed money to do it again with the next sphere in line next year, possibly doubling up on more popular gems like diamond and ruby.

If we assume the Institute purchases the uncharged cut gems at a flat rate of about 40 per, it costs ~83K gold to go from 1k to 10K for a profit of 9K charged gems. This comes out to a little over 9 gold per gem, or 90 per ten. A 10% markup to support future growth and other guild expenses is hardly unreasonable, I think.

This plan also has the advantage of not leaving the spheres bloated with gems to get destroyed when they get attacked, which is a plus.

This whole thing is probably me being butthurt(irrelevantly) about the price of credits going up and gold not being worth what it should be anymore. But thank you for clearing that up, Arel. Sorry for moaning.

I know the guild can't pour all it's funds into making gems ultra-cheap, but I would rather just harvest them myself. It would be better to have both options available, maybe through GR3 instead of 5.

Edit: Also Greleag, you have to remember that the Institute gets a large portion of these uncharged gems -absolutely free-. So I think that "10% tithe" is hardly an innocuous one.

I'm not sure where you are seeing a price differential between them buying the raw comms and converting them in the Spheres themselves and buying them from the Conclave. Casilu pointed out that at current aetherplex prices, you're actually getting them 1gp cheaper from the Conclave. Also, your typical lowbie/poor/still getting started with equipment GR1 probably isn't participating in high end combat and using the full range of gems. They are probably using a turquoise (10gp per gem) and maybe a jade (10gp per gem) for bashing or just a beryl (10gp per gem) for influencing, which they would make back in gold on the first mob gold drop or successful charity influence.

Most of the people involved in setting up the Institute did the math to make sure this worked out fairly and ensure that it would be a not-for-profit system, and then Elostian reviewed it and told us to make them even cheaper. Work out the math for yourself on what it would cost you if you added them gems and harvested them yourself at a 1:1 ratio. Now imagine that it'd probably be a 1:2 or 1:1.5 ratio for added to harvested and see who is coming out ahead.

EDIT: And your edit about getting the gems absolutely free isn't really correct. We got an initial burst for free from people adding them before the Institute came out and Arte's initial gem drive, and then we had a gem drive more recently (which three people donated for, and almost all the gems were for the less used spheres we already had a million surplus in). Occasionally we get a tithe from the city. At least half of them gems for the Institute are one's that the guild itself pays for or ones that I (or other guild leaders) add from their personal gold when we run out of things like amethyst or diamond.

By the way, I'm sure if you provided the messages, there's somebody that could provide you with a nice little script to put that in a summary format. Assuming you use a common client at least.

I factored that into my guess/estimate of 40gp per uncharged gem. Trying to find the 2K uncharged gems to take a sphere from 1K to 10L at a mean of 40 gold each would be rather difficult without there being some free ones thrown in to balance out the lack of bulk gems at reasonable prices.

I admit my first post was an overreaction fail. But making harvesting an option would be nice, below GR5.

This is actually a good (and smart idea). I just can't see anyone actually harvesting 7000 gems (from 10,000 back to 3,000) per Sphere. That would be absolutely miserable (7000 gems/sphere * 12 spheres * 2 sec/gem = 2,800 hours to harvest). Most of the time we just try not to let them get too high and then strategically add facets and harvest when needed.

1 uncut gem = 25-75 gold
1 uncut gem = 3-21 cut gems
I am fairly sure the institute, and else hallifax has at least one friendly jeweler with a hammer that will work for free/cityfavours/guildfavours
Therefor the max price they should be purchasing gems at is 25 gold per.

You only do one sphere at a time. 7000 gems at a rate of 1 per 2 seconds means a mere 4 hours of work solo, or 1 hour of work if you bring 3 friends. Make it a collective event!



This gives you random gems. You'd need about 100K to get enough uncut gems to produce 2K cut gems of a given type as you would need to impliment the above described plan. And that's a lot of money.

you can also sell the rest for double what it cost you so that is really not an issue

Holy crap, Hallifax beating on Gaudiguch gets TWICE as many spammy lines as everyone else... and multiple instances can be running at the same time. Eventru, your entrance message has been bumped down to second-most-spamming event in the game. Shame.

I've already made something like this for the powerlogs. I doubt it would take very long to adapt to whatever the Institute's got.

Speaking of which, is there interest for this sort of script for all the Power Ministers out there? It takes each line of the powerlog summary, does various math based on Hallifax's power laws, and then tells me how much more they're allowed to draw, or if they're overdrawn, by how much. Then I have an alias that checks the regular powerlog for each method of power gain (bards and scholars/nodes/spheres/polyhedrons), and tells me exactly how much power each person has put in by that method. It makes it super easy to notice people that consistently add power, and no adjustments need to be made for any sort of contest. I like any project that lets me practice coding, so let me know if I should work on adapting this for mass consumption.

I am terribly amused by the fact that Magnagora raided Gaudiguch when we had 5 people around.

That's 5 too many.

Its ok, only takes 1 person to stop entire raids... its like the new choke to counter raids!

Umm...

POWER LEVELS OVER NINE THOUSAND!!?

I know. Disparity much? Glomdoring gets 100 whenever we convert 1 Moon Avatar, and there are only 3 of those. Comparing it to the 12x750 Halli and Gaudi gets, this makes me sad, but oh wells. Lots of stuff to tweak still!

How much power do Celest/Mag get for Demon Lords/Supernals?

100 per.

Honestly, the absolute values aren't terribly important as long as there's parity and they're kept within reason.