For Cinco - The Current State of Gold

[Xyzther]

Recently the enchantments that allow bonus gold from drops were added to amulets. I like the idea a lot, but it also concerns me because of some effects it may bring. There are only two issues I see with these enchantments: bots & the gold farming maps.

So bots have always been a problem ever since PL could be played on chrome. Every day there are people botting alien oasis etc to get gold for doing nothing. Now with these enchantments, they can be making 3x the gold without putting any more effort than they already were (zero!). Previously, sts has made it where we had to manually pick up gold drops to combat bots. I think this is a good idea, but it can also be extremely annoying for legit players to have to walk all over the place to pick gold up. We will go into my possible solution for all of this later.

Another issue will be the gold farming maps from events, which I assume will be returning. Before the gold enchantment update, gold tier could consistently make 3m+ an hour farming the gold map. This is nice, but now with the enchantments, 10m+ an hour is possible. That much gold entering the game just doesn’t seem healthy for me, and it devalues gold tremendously.

This brings up my idea I’ve had for a while now: increasing gold given from item liquidation at a cost of making gold drops 1/3 of what they previously were. Because items are not automatically looted, bots have a hard time gathering them. If we were to increase liquidation price for items by 5x, or even 10x, this could benefit legit players a lot while putting a huge nerf on bots. An item that was 250 gold for liquidation before is now 2,500 and it is fairly easy to rack those up while farming. Also, by making gold dropped 1/3 of what it was before, bots aren’t making any more money than they were, even with gold enchantments. On top of that, farming the gold farming event maps will result in money gained per hour very similarly to that gained before the gold enchants (assuming the people farming are using ~200% gold enchantments).

This is just a rough solution I came up with, and it can definitely be tweaked. I hope you seriously take this into consideration Cinco, because I and many others do not like how bots are easily making money. If anyone else has some cool ideas or additions/changes to my solution feel free to post them here!