The Platinum/Opus Problem

Tevinter

Dalayan Pious Diety
SoD has been a game that has rewarded anti-social play for quite a long time. One of the biggest bottlenecks to character progression has always been platinum. Currently, the best way to earn platinum is to either 2-box or play with 1 other real person, with both of you boxing. Adding more characters after that has a diminishing return on the amount of relative clearspeed/power.

The introduction of opus to exp group mobs has more or less the same issue. It de-incentivizes you from adding more people to your group. The more people you add to your group, it actually becomes a detriment. You earn exp at a faster rate, but the rate at which you get opus is greatly reduced (assuming you're sharing the opus with your group members). This leads to you running out of things to exp even quicker, making you feel even more starved of opus.

Some possible solutions to this would be to boost the raw plat/cash drops and the number of cash loots from cash named based on the number of character on a mobs hate list when it dies. Same thing could go for opus as well. Because right now, it feels like more often than not it is detrimental to invite your friends to play with you.

There is also a large number of monsters and activities in the game that reward experience at a high rate, but with little to no platinum/opus drops. However, there isn't a flip-side to this coin, where you can kill monsters with very high platinum reward but with minimal exp in return.

I'm curious to see if people in other guilds have had a similar experience to mine, and how the community at large feels. Do the developers recognize this as a problem or are they happy with how the current system promotes playing alone (or with only 1 other person)? Thanks for reading.
 
If there was incentive to create a full group of people then that would just make it so all the people who leech all day long no longer have a spot. Not everyone can play all day or with the best characters available like you. Some people wouldn't even be able to progress their character if duos or pairs of duos were not as common place because finding people to fill groups and actively play is incredibly hard when theres only 10 to 20 people on at a time.

edit: a lot of these problems stem from the fact that there has not been any increase in reward for doing more difficult content that would require less boxing or more characters. So the best bang for your buck is simply mowing down trivial content and excluding others. The tunnels in OG would be a perfect example of something that had potential but now is only pass through content for people who have very little else to do. Sadly, that is the only spot I can think of that even comes close to challenging for typical group style content however it is very underwhelming exp and money.
 
have not really ever had a problem grouping here in dk. I cannot recall any major instances were folks would rather duo then group to farm xp/opus/tomes but the box duo plat farm issue has been a festering boil on the nose of SoD for a long time. Pretty much focused on obtaining charms and even more so nowadays when the boe economy is a shattered remains of its former self (probably mostly due to the high tier nature of the server in general now) If something should be done I think it should be on how charms are obtained.
 
Make a turn in for four refuge tokens to become one scholastic token so you can turn junk tomes into opus at a slower rate.

This barely addresses the issue but it does revitalize the junk tome market a bit as people with supremes can throw some money around to get the opus they want faster.
 
From every great idea, a thread is born.

The tome and BoE market are absolutely dead, and used to be the reason none of this was ever an issue. On top of cash drops, people were selling tomes and BoE's for upwards of like 30-40k at times depending on what dropped. In today's world you're lucky to find someone even buying the most desirable tomes for over 10k. While I do still try and put EXP groups together from time to time, the focus of these groups isn't cash or opus; it's usually just bringing 8 wizards to Kaesora for absurd raw EXP.

If I were looking for cash, the changes would have to be pretty substantial in order to change my ways from solo cash farming to group cash farming. However I would love to be able to have a group go places and pull out a reasonable amount of Opus for everyone in the group, and not have a bloodbath for the one opus that drops after RNG dunks on us.

I wished for this for Christmas btw.

Oh also, lava spirits in First Ruins should absolutely be a 4b group for Opus. I can see a reasonable explanation for them being in group 3 if it was based on hitpoints, but they're T12 6-man trash with pretty difficult mechanics. Putting them in the same group as HmalB is pretty absurd.
 
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How is the opus drop rate in OG Tunnels these days? It most certainly is underwhelming xp and money for the difficulty involved but the opus drop rate was decent. Maybe increase the opus drop rate to offset the xp and money being terrible?
 
I sat in tunnels for quite a while recently farming 4 Sela shoulders and a Caretaker ring and it wasn't anything special for the requirements needed. It relates closely to the topic of the thread; you need to bring a solid group with you to kill most of this stuff, and if the reward isn't worth it for everyone there then what's the point of going there solely for opus compared to destroying a lower group, but at a much higher rate?

I may come across as super complainey, and thinking drop rates need a buff everywhere. Idk it's just very solo-friendly to farm ur own cash and opus right now in the current state =/.
 
How is the opus drop rate in OG Tunnels these days? It most certainly is underwhelming xp and money for the difficulty involved but the opus drop rate was decent. Maybe increase the opus drop rate to offset the xp and money being terrible?

It's decent you get a pH get off every big mob plus two off wardens. But that's still only like an opus an hour. And with needing 4+ actual people that's kinda butts
 
You could script mobs to drop more plat and give more experience for additional players with different ip addresses within a defined radius. Enough to make it a loss to not group this way (dragging new players or anyone you can find into your group)
 
You could script mobs to drop more plat and give more experience for additional players with different ip addresses within a defined radius. Enough to make it a loss to not group this way (dragging new players or anyone you can find into your group)

Would that be doable without having to go in and change every individual mob? It would be a great way to handle the xp/plat problems (keeping in mind the plat amount needs to be fairly decent as most of the plat in a group setting comes from books/boes sold to the merchant after the fact.)
 
How is the opus drop rate in OG Tunnels these days? It most certainly is underwhelming xp and money for the difficulty involved but the opus drop rate was decent. Maybe increase the opus drop rate to offset the xp and money being terrible?

They already drop at least one ph and two from wardens as mentioned, a better option would be to make the XP and cash not so awful for the effort involved. Even mostly unboxed tunnels is kind of a slog unless you bring a tunnels designed group (bard, cleric, warrior, necro, monk, some form of dps). It doesn't help there's been fairly vehement opposition to higher tier XP with higher rewards but hey things can change I guess.
 
You could script mobs to drop more plat and give more experience for additional players with different ip addresses within a defined radius. Enough to make it a loss to not group this way (dragging new players or anyone you can find into your group)
I don’t mean to be *that guy* but people would just use a vpn at that point, probably better just to be per character or in increments of 2 characters.
 
You could script mobs to drop more plat and give more experience for additional players with different ip addresses within a defined radius. Enough to make it a loss to not group this way (dragging new players or anyone you can find into your group)
Looking for 4 leeches must pay attention and be on mobs aggro list or not leech PST. #modernsolutions
 
I had actually forgotten that leeching was looked down upon very much back in the day. A lot of people still feel negative towards one of the first notorious leecher, Glorax.
 
The more people you add to your group, it actually becomes a detriment. You earn exp at a faster rate, but the rate at which you get opus is greatly reduced (assuming you're sharing the opus with your group members).
I agree that this is a problem and it is a sad state when adding people to your group becomes a detriment. I have had an idea for a hatelist based exp modifier conceptualized for a bit now that also penalizes leeching. For loot drops however, scaling based on how many are on the hatelist is a bit tricky to do globally and would require non-trivial core changes unless, but I will look into it eventually.
 
I agree that this is a problem and it is a sad state when adding people to your group becomes a detriment. I have had an idea for a hatelist based exp modifier conceptualized for a bit now that also penalizes leeching. For loot drops however, scaling based on how many are on the hatelist is a bit tricky to do globally and would require non-trivial core changes unless, but I will look into it eventually.
maybe i'm not following, but increasing exp rates in an actively killing group would only exacerbate the problem even further (unless this exp change was put in at the same time as some kind of opus-drop rate boost).
 
You're right in that the statement about exp I wasn't directly addressing the issue you brought up. I was just bringing it up because it was somewhat relevant to the thought process of making anti-social playing less appealing. And while that would benefit gaining experience, it wouldn't help the opus issue. What I noted before is the most relevant response to your question: It would require some big core changes to adjust item drops globally to benefit a full group.
 
You're right in that the statement about exp I wasn't directly addressing the issue you brought up. I was just bringing it up because it was somewhat relevant to the thought process of making anti-social playing less appealing. And while that would benefit gaining experience, it wouldn't help the opus issue. What I noted before is the most relevant response to your question: It would require some big core changes to adjust item drops globally to benefit a full group.
Even just having content that was rewarding and actually fun would be a great start. As it stands the only high tier group content that actually drops books at a reasonable rate is the tunnels in the back of overgrowth which are pretty unrewarding and pretty unfun to boot.
 
You're right in that the statement about exp I wasn't directly addressing the issue you brought up. I was just bringing it up because it was somewhat relevant to the thought process of making anti-social playing less appealing. And while that would benefit gaining experience, it wouldn't help the opus issue. What I noted before is the most relevant response to your question: It would require some big core changes to adjust item drops globally to benefit a full group.
but anti-social play stays equally appealing, im not really sure i'm following the thought process here.
 
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