People who care about creating gates do put the minerals where they want them.
And as I said, lower the boosting cost so more can boost!

As of now I have only seen about four boostings.

I fail to see how that would make any difference. If you want a beast gate and I want a slime gate, we're both just going to cancel each other out. Each individual person is not enough to make any kind of influence on gate creation and it's not like removing autosell is going to stop people from selling all of their minerals to the same stratum anyway, so...

Making boosting more cost effective is really the only solution that would have an impact on how gates are created.

Alternatively, if minerals are tradable, [are they?] you can control flow that way; instead of offering a +1 for ALL of a mineral in that type, you could just offer somebody an extra +.1 each. Of, if you want to pay me to NOT dump certain minerals in a certain gate, I'm more than willing to listen to that too.

Skype... your posts (first in the thread vs the one immediately above) confuse me utterly.

You want people to specifically control gate content.... but that requires knowing what gates are made of. And at the same time, you don't want people to know what gates are made of, because then they'd try to control gate content.

This thread started out as as just another rehash of the same tired "down with autosell" posts, but I have to admit, it just took a turn for the strange. Instead of just demonizing features that make the game more playable, I think that you should focus on positive, productive changes that would improve gate creation for all. That would make this thread something new and interesting, without the risk of self-contradiction.

Even if you removed auto-sell and shift click to transfer all minerals at once, a lot of players are just gonna sit there and spam click on all their minerals because they don't care.

Removing the ability to sell minerals quickly and for the best price just won't make players care about what they deposit where. They need an 'in your face' incentive that says "deposit these minerals for this reason that is totally worth your while".

Either that or, as so many other people have already said, boosting needs to be more affordable so that the players that DO care can more easily manipulate the outcome of the strata. That way, the players that care get the levels they want and the players that don't care... don't have to care.

It'd be much easier to make the current system more affordable than it would be to force people to care. In fact you'd probably get more non-carers trying to "anti" gates if you attempt to force them to care because people generally don't like being told what to do.

I know I'm a new player, but I have knowledge in MMOGs. Getting rid of the autosell will not help the situation of gate direction...and the price of boosting is way too costly, that no one practically does it. However, I do see both sides of the coin....

- 3R is giving "free crowns" based on the current system, so if you boost a specific mineral, than you have to make up the difference in those crown transfer...otherwise you would have crown inflation
- Players cannot afford hundreds of thousands of crowns required to boost by just +1

A solution, charge for an alteration in the pricing, rather than straight modifying. This will allow 3R to gain a crown sink and allow players to afford the cost.

Example, let's pretend we have a stratum that has 0/400,000 minerals and currently priced at (5,5,5,5,5). Currently it would cost 400,000 crowns to move any price by 1, and statistically speaking, the game is to create 2,000,000 crowns for the players in collection with an average being evenly weighted to 80,000 of each mineral. But in our pretend situation, we will use a boost cost of 10,000 crowns:

Player1 decides to boost Crimsonite (red), costing him 10,000 crowns
the prices would then be changed to (6,5,5,5,4)
boost Crimsonite again for 10,000 to make it (7,5,5,5,3)
boost Valestone (green) for 10,000 to make it (6,6,5,5,3)
Player1 has spent 30,000 crowns to lean the gate toward Beast instead of 800,000 crowns and still have a possibility of the anti-mineral working against them.

Pricing changes based on which one you choose as follows:
(+1,0,0,0,-1)
(-1,+1,0,0,0)
(0,-1,+1,0,0)
(0,0,-1,+1,0)
(0,0,0,-1,+1)
These values determined by a stargraph used in gate design, best maps to anti-minerals.

Other players may join in and effect the pricing, and each time, more crowns are taken out of the game and avert inflation.

Another idea is to increase the price of the change for EACH change that is made...making it exponentially costly in order to ruin the plans of other players (so first change could be 1,000...second 2,000..third 3,000, etc.), but would be more difficult to control synchronous purchases.

I think I actually bolded that part myself when I typed it out but apparently I used the wrong tags.

You seemed to be implying in your first post that removing auto-sell and the ability to shift click would make people care. At least your more recent post appears to acknowledge that this wouldn't be the case and that some other method needs to be found.

I don't think it's integral for a majority to care, nor do I think a majority ever will. But if the control of gates was made slightly easier for whoever does care, as suggested already, then that would suffice.

on top of my last idea....what if players were allowed to "buy back" the crystals that were placed into a stratum? The thought is that a stratum is allowed to go over the required amount (so a gate could be 438,000/400,000, meaning 38,000 minerals over). Players could then purchase the overage amount from the gate at the "buy back" price (which could be 1 more than the boost cost), as well as put other minerals back into it. That would allow the player to change the stratum without destroying the economy....and the player can just walk over to another gate and sell the bought minerals there (to get back _some_ of his losses, but not all, since the cost to buy-back was 1 more than boost cost at that given time).

Don't worry too much about autosell.

If you take a look at the gates, they're not filling up. A lot of players are already quitting, so that's really good for gate construction.

This thread remains bizarre. Last week when I logged on, there were 12 Haven instances open. This weekend I saw 23. With that in mind, Magnus' doomsday pronouncement of declining player counts seems hard to rationalize.

In *any* new game, there will be a rush of players who try it. Many will only play once, but some will stick around. (This is sometimes referred to as the "user acquisition funnel") At the moment, we have a boom in the number of players, but unless magnus has access to secret server data, we can't make any conclusions about whether player retention is unusually low or not. The fact that gates aren't filling is probably due to the way that stratum size depends on player activity; my guess is that the scaling code is having trouble keeping up with changes in the number of players.

And Skype- you're right that something needs to be done. The difference between a rant and a really good suggestion thread is being more specific than the word "something". A good boosting system would:
- Provide a way to control gate creation
- Be easy to understand
- Be accessible to reasonably sized groups of players (the current boost costs are ludicrous)
- Not be exploitable (if I boost payouts by +5, then I or my friends should not get back more crowns than we put in. That becomes a "free money" button)

So, what ideas can you come up with?

Sabriath had a pretty good suggestion I think, but the general suggestion to make boosting easier/more cost effective is also valid. Most new players and some experienced players aren't going to care what goes into gates. What the boosting system should do is allow the experienced players to influence the ignorant player's decision as to which gate to dump their items in. If more gates were boosted in different ways players would be more inclined to dump their minerals into the boosted slots. Experienced players who understand the gating system direct this activity by adding boosts for certain minerals. This way ignorant players can be controlled and directed while players who actually care can make the gates they want. I'm not sure how to change the boosting system to make this a reality, but I believe that this was what the devs were going for when they made the boosting system. Ignorant players who one day want to make a gate a certain type will then learn how they can take advantage of the other ignorant players and become a knowledgeable player themselves able to perpetuate the cycle.

Forcing people to do something isn't as effective as making them do it on their own. However, we can't get people to learn and memorize the gating system on their own so instead we embrace their ignorance and turn it around for our benefit. It's the most elegant way to control the system which does not rely on educating the ignorant players about something they're never going to retain. Making boosting a viable control structure is the best solution to the gate variety problem that I can see.

We almost had Coral Phantom to have Undead for Stratum 3 and I kept trying to educate players on dumping purple/yellow and no blue, and when I left and came back later in the day the stratum was now Poison.

>remove autosell
>I'm still going to click every single crystal one by one and sell them all

I do, Pauling.

It's called 'looking at the stratum fill requirements.'

People might just not be picking up minerals anymore, since gates aren't filling up at all, but it's much more likely a lot of quitting.

Either way, less people, better game, easier to control gates. How the system is set up encourages less overall players.

The only way you're going to influence the gates is if you run a large guild. People will want different things and so the things they want are going to conflict with what other people want. I personally would like to have some more fire gates, but I'm sure there are people out there that want more undead gates. Usually I just end up trying to grab more red and light crystals when I'm doing my solo runs and hope for the best.

Cheaper boosting would be good solution. Removing auto-sell is not.

Besides, I've already seen the GMs throwing some alloys into the gates whenever a new gate being constructed starts looking pretty boring.

There's a small problem with removing auto-sell. You have people that use the minerals to influence gates, and you have people that collect the minerals and just want to turn them into crowns. I am of group 2 by the way.

Personally, I think the reducing the boost cost is the best idea I've heard in this thread. If you want to influence the gates then make them pay more for the minerals. That aside... lets say you remove the auto-sell feature. That just means people like me are going to just drop them where ever they'll make us the most crowns. Kind of like what happens with auto-sell already.

Another idea that sounds good is making minerals tradable. I normally collect a few dozen minerals before I bother to sell them off and make only about 300-400 crowns. So I never make a lot off them... if they're tradable then you could pay more to buy them then the collectors (read: gates) and then put them wherever you want for would amount to a trivial amount of crowns lost.