EZ Server

...and Hate recently added another zone to create another source for essences/charm prisms (and ultimately berries, with said charm prisms).  

In the meantime, people are discussing a change to augs, RoA, UWs, etc, and it got me thinking:  PoFire is relatively worthless now in its current incarnation.  So I had an idea to make it worthwhile, along with a few other zones, to be used mostly for players of lower levels.

My idea is to reduce plat drops (as Hate did in qvic) and change PoFire to have plat bag drops and maybe add a very small chance of dropping ores for strike augs/mana necks.  In addition to this, you would have to remove GSOA from all of the lower tiers as well so that you can funnel people into a different source for plat gain.  Coupling these changes with some changes to RoA mentioned in the other thread, this would give players advancing through the lower tiers another type of farm/grind.  Instead of just doing progression, TOFS, GLS and essence farming of previous tiers for UW, now they could also farm AAs with a fair, but not overpowering, plat/monetary value return.  You could even increase the costs of strike augs and essence of platinum to compensate for its effects on the economy. 

As a part of this change, I would also reduce the rate of AAs in all tiers and encourage higher level players to use these zones for AAs for their rings/earrings as well, with the scaled rates (adjustments would be necessary of course, so that players are getting higher rates of AAs at higher levels, so that they aren't discouraged to level up and find themselves reducing their overall AA xp rate).  

In addition to something along these lines, I'm not sure how hard it would then be to copy it over to some of our favorite exp'ing zones, such as Frostcrypt, Riftseekers and other zones.  As it currently stands, I think AA gain is way too passive.  Nobody "grinds" AAs for any particularly good reason since the grind isn't really necessary to advance.  By combining AAs with plat, by reducing plat gains elsewhere, you add an additional daily task for players to dig into and maybe there's some other ways to use AAs to give players more options.  Plat sinks would be great, too.

Kathina

in general i think most people collect the gsoa from lower tiers... if remove gsoa, lets remove roa,soa,uw for lower tiers too.

This would cause a problem because ores are crafter guild only...people need to get flagged to make these (on at least one toon)...and I think that item needs to stay available ONLY for folks flagged for the crafters guild...just my opinion though.

I've been away a little while, but I'm not entirely sure what the benefit of an exp zone would be.  Yes, you could pump a couple levels on your ring, but at the end of the day that isn't what is letting you zone pull.  The reason people grind lowbie zones is to amass essences for more UW's, or flag alts.  Other than UC2's or the like, I can't see a reason to dump time into a zone that isn't giving you essences toward endgame gear.

The purpose of PoFire in my mind (or any zone designed specifically for AA grinding) was more for getting your AA's bought for new(ish) characters. Also, those first 100 levels on the RoA are critical to your tank.

After a while, the RoA seems to effectively kinda plateau (in terms of the tangible benefits each new level brings), so that time spent "grinding" AA's for the RoA would be better spent doing other things