Unironically making an AO economy post, what desperate times we’re in.
TLDR: Fleets are so profitable that you can rake in insane amounts of cash by just playing the game or running fleets while afk and its killing the galleon (and more).
So basically with fleets, you can set up just 4 command ships and already rake in 100k+ daily with little to no effort. It’s basically a mini idle game activity that gives you dubious amounts of cash on trade or conquest.
Market prices have yet to adjust so you can, for example, buy sunken warrior set pieces without doing any real work. An insane amount of scrolls has entered the market because of people abusing conquest to get 100-200 dark sealed daily.
Fleets are so profitable that the galleon might as well mean nothing because casuals can watch a 5 minute youtube tutorial on fleets and then walk around with 200k+ galleons. You don’t need to do dark sea anymore for scrolls or armor, just run conquest and use luck pots.
I do think fleets were an interesting concept but damn have they changed things. People who don’t invest in fleets and complete noobs are going to enter an overinflated market that only benefits veteran players with high investment in the game. This system will prove ruthless and intimidating to any new players but nerfing it too much may just kill any worth fleets have and make the feature useless.
What do you think about fleets? Should they be nerfed, should the market just adapt, what to do at all?
Fleets as a feature is simply flawed to the core. It’s trying to put a tycoon idle game into an economy that simply cannot handle such a thing.
Right now, a mediocre fleet can get upwards of 10k a day with no risk or management, if you’re actually trying to work on it, you get a lot more.
You can’t nerf them too much, because then they’ll become too exhausting to micromanage (as you likely will need to) and not worth it for the majority of players to get into, while those who already profited off of it will still utilize their wealth to keep their fleet going.
The market adapting would cause a lot of issues, as prices will be driven up from the influx of Drachmae into the economy. While this is still the most likely outcome, it will certainly harm players who cannot afford to get a proper fleet up.
It should’ve never been added in the first place, in my opinion.
The market will adapt just as it always has, but I do think there’s some issues with the rewards from fleets.
I don’t know what the intended design is, but in my mind a perfect fleet should give perhaps 20% of the resources from the task that a player would get on average if they were doing that task themselves for the same amount of time. Enough that you can have it do something you don’t want to do but want the rewards from, but it’s not dominant.
In addition, the Dark Sea task should shred fleets, with ramping damage taken, and scaling loot depending on how long the fleet has been on that task. It’s the most dangerous place in the world; ships, especially smaller ones, should be lost, and their followers as well. That would be the big choice: have your fleet stay safe and get the mundane items, or spend your fleet, followers and all, on the Dark Sea and get the big ticket items. If you made sure to get your fleet outfitted with the best boats, you can go further in and get even more and better items. Also, things like Harvesting shouldn’t give Dark Sea resources such as Tartarus tears.
like would you rather that you manually and menially grind the fuck out of arcane odyssey like a good boy pre full release or full release grind legendary chests
The game’s economy is pretty much built on insane manual grinding and adding an idle feature to the game completely crushes hours of effort, most noticeable with how stupidly good conquest is.
If I had to make a rough guess, the reason such an odd feature made it is a combination of 2 theories:
Vetex wanted new players to obtain proper builds faster so they don’t have to grind obscene amounts of hours to compete with late game players and their 2 morbilion shadow creep
Arcane Odyssey, despite all the new features, still lacks a degree of replayable content (especially content that doesn’t take insane amounts of time such as Dark Sea).
Now even if these were true, fleets didn’t really fix any problems and will likely harm casual players when it comes to obtaining any rare item you can’t get with brainless fleet afking. It’s a double-edged sword of sorts.
Dark Sea is also going to die because conquest has to be either viable or useless, no in between. If it’s viable then that means going to the Dark Sea yourself isn’t. If you need to micromanage too much to the point that it’s as tedious as the Dark Sea or even more then it’s a useless feature that takes away too much time.
well, more money comes in, everything increases in price. As such, everyone sells every item for more, regardless of the wealth they have, so the amount of goods offered doesn’t change. However, wealth doesn’t completely follow, and instead, only people with fleets can afford it, which cuts most of the customers from the economy. As such, you get an overinflated economy where a bunch of offer can only go to the restricted population that can afford it, pretty much an oligopsony
(That explanation was probably extremely confused, but it gets trickier speaking in a language that isn’t your mothertongue for more complex topics :,)
I can see how these prices would go up due to increased drachma gain, but what’s stopping players from having sufficient purchasing power of their own once they sell the items they’ve obtained?
While that might work, that would create an immense schism between natural ways to earn drachma, which already feels pathetic as a way to gain drachma to trade with, and the actual amounts of wealth being traded
This kind of split between the main game and the late game / ah seems extremely unhealthy for the game’s accessibility
Can you clarify what you mean by this? I’m guessing you’re talking about things like opening chests and selling items to vendors.
That aside, I see the distinction you made between drachma and wealth. If the average player only had access to drachma, that would be a problem, but nothing is stopping the new player from getting Atlantean essence, Powerful scrolls, spells and techniques, Acrimonies, reagents, gems, and catalysts, all things that the top end players will still want. From there, the new player has been able to gain wealth, and be able to gain the things they want.
My concern with fleets is that it will take away too much from the avenues of lower end players to gain said wealth. If I’ve had my fleet that’s getting Dark Sealed Chests twice as fast as I could normally running for months, am I really going to need to buy anything from another player?
the dark sea needs more exclusive content before it becomes worth doing it again
rn we basically just got the Omen gear and thats abt it (unless the other far reach animals have decent gear? but idk)
in the future though, we will gain some more things (Dragons, atlantean sirens, centaurs i think? idk, Satyrs as well which have spirit weapons that can give us perm effects along with size [up to 3 seperate times in either direction] and a bunch of other stuff)
but thats still a long ways away- when dragons get added that will prob be like, only a few times (for dragon unique items/gear & darkness quest)
Fleet having conquest was added too early cause there aint enough stuff in the dark sea yet
An economy where the rich remain at the top while anybody below them can only dream of reaching such levels of wealth… vetex really likes his realism huh?
yeah so not really worth going to the dark sea outside the omen for rn, gonna need to wait for things like dragons and other unique items that come from the actual enemies and not the sealed chests
Honestly, I think the game is already untenable for any new players who just started out since early access, so really this is just putting the final nail in the coffin. It’s like a gacha at this point, just without the gambling and all of the grinding pains