First off I want to say I am in favor of the old Tarlok Assault system of portals. I felt that STG could of tweaked that old system to increase there platinum revenue very effectively. But i digress. I have a feeling this energy ball system is here to stay so I rather try to address a way to improve it instead of fighting a losing battle.
STGs idea of the energy ball system is that they based it off of the now tradable elixirs. What they found was that tradable elixirs forced plat and non-plat users to create a platinum sink either directly or indirectly. The platinum spenders directly spent platinum by buying these elixirs for consumption or auction house sale. While the non-plat spenders indirectly spent platinum by buying these kits off of the auction house. STG figured this might be the case with the energy ball system.
However, there is two fundamental problems. First problem is this event is a test event that did not truly test the full capacity of the real event which will have much more sought after items which will drive people to enter these portals. So because these items in the test goblin event are not worth much there is little incentive to buy expensive energy balls (14 to 17 k per energy ball) or with platinum (unless you are selling them on AH). The bullk of the players that are buying these energy balls like mad are people trying to reach leaderboards. Therefore, if STG wants to keep this energy ball system they have to somehow decrease the platinum price of these energy balls so that when its sold in the auction house it is cheap enough for normal players to be willing to buy them (maybe in the range of 3 to 4 k). Also the new event that is coming must have high enough incentive in terms of rare items to justify spending3 to 4 k on an energy ball for a chance at these items.
The second fundamental issue with the energy ball system is stagnation of game play. People want to farm for hours on end which cannot happen with the current system. The more time you have players logged on and playing continuously the more money you will make STG. With this current system, players are only playing at 20 to 30 minute spurts and logging off which is a very bad thing for a game. Therefore, if STG want to keep this energy ball system they gotta find a balance of cool-down and price of the energy balls to keep game play continuous. The ideas presented by the original poster was great especially the idea of energy balls dropping from bosses is a good start but I think we need more tweaks to the system to make it run smoothly and not stagnate the non-plat spender and non-wealthy gamers (in-game wise) game play.
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