09-01-2003, 10:52 AM
Quote:Seems to me you would need a *lot* of regular gems, so the trade economy in them ought to be brisk For example, I'd probably consider one roll--3 gems--to be at least at valuable cashwise as blowing 63000 on an amulet gamble, so that suggests a price of at least 21000 per regular gem. By this reckoning, my experimental trials ought to have set me back 6.3 million gold. This doesn't seem out of line to me, even though I wasn't overly thrilled with the Cruel rolled. Think I'm wildly off-base here?
Your results are about comparabel the case of using the 1.09 sword+chipped gem formula in terms of the number of iterations you will be typically looking at. Even though the chance of getting a 'cruel' has been increased some, some of the other non-dmg% affixes have also had some increase in their frequencies also. There is a net increase in the chance of getting a 'cruel', but it is not as great as some might believe from just looking at the chnge to the 'Cruel' frequency itself.
This also ties in with my comment about the accumulating the skulls for the rare re-rolling. With the amount of gems you are going through to try to get a decent result, i can be practical to siphon off the skulls for using only for the rare rerolling as that will only reduce the amount gems availble for this formula by about 1/13 of the gems that come by.
On rushing, orginal concern was for what is currently happening in the 'normal open' games. Yo enter a game (even one labeled "NO Rushing") and shortly thereafter some player comes in and starts rushing all the players through the game. Then 15-30 min later all primary quest for act advancement are done and the buld of the players leave. Then when you get to Hell didfficulty all that is available to join are games of "UberArea run XXX" games that have all act advancement quests completed and many of the others also. These games also usually only last about 10-15 before they depopulate. The only thing that I think of as lacking right now in the v1.10 beta games is knowledge of an area in hell to be the next "UberArea" this do this in. It took a few weeks to recognise the Bloody Foothills as the first recognised spot a couple of months after that before doing 'cows' was recognised as being an even better place for this. Once a spot for this and a character build that can obsenely exploit the area is worked out, I expect that the rushing of this form will have an opportunity to resume. This would be for the detriment of the all those that would prefer a more normal pace of play.
Crystalion's take on what it will be doing for the 'economy' (especially from the rune availablity perspective) is just another gloomy aspect to consider. The technique that I had used will really only require 2 people to use and could potentially be used for up to 6 others (these can be just extra logged in accounts). This makes it something that the ones doing item selling for $$ will want to exploit in private. But it will distort the availability of some of the "rarer runes" if used in the ways described by Crystalion.