Well... Yes.
Only 2 things on this server matter. Killing Things Faster (KTF) and Massive Automated Healing (MAH).
Charms are a good example of this.. The sorc charms help to KTF and the oracles help you heal more efficiently via MAH to take on tougher content.
Augs are designed specifically to KTF, It's what they do. They take massive amounts of plat and SLSs and Essences to create. We know this.
Here's where it had messed up the economy:
Lower Tier players (who used to be a source of the charms via /auc) learn earlier on how important it is to KTF and heal more efficiently... Even if they buy runs thru qvic and ldon, they witness firsthand the keys to successL KTF and MAH. So they are far less likely than newer players 6 months ago to sell charms for plat... Why? because they can farm gems for plat.... They need to KTF and have MAH! If they dont have a paladin, they see one in action and immediately roll one. They sprint to PoD for Warrior Augs are start farming their tacvis and drag minors to start KTF.
And it's not entirely their fault. The market for v1s and v2s has disappeared because of Shadow. Higher Tier players can farm cash and tokens and V2s while still chasing their own v1s. And even if they accumulated their excess cash they would save it to buy augment mats to KTF, not charms which they are both already accumulating and, if needed quicker, would jump to ldon anyways to farm themselves while they generate plat + charms instead of losing plat to gain charms. Then they spawn their tokens to get their essences...
OH ALMOST FORGOT. Since the accepted math is 3 essences per 100 bosses spawned in airplane... And gearing a single paladin with 3 fire 5s requires 6 gods minor.. That's 200 bosses spawned to achieve a significant level of KTF for a single toon in a box army. Which is fine if 50 plate, chain, silk, and leather wearing newbies-with-T2-chests (NWTC) are waiting to buy them.
Which they are not. Which is where the system breaks down on a basic level. Even if there was 200 NWTC in the player base online while Uber XX is Fire V'n his paladin, the plate-heavy nature of the server woud probably break it down closer to 110/25/25/40, with silk coming in a distant second, for 200 NWTC. And an ungodly % of those plate wearers are paladins and warriors.
Which brings us to T4. Where stuff that isn't WAR/PAL is barely bothered to be placed in /auc. And ye,s Uber XX is still a mere 200 boss spawns from his one aug'd out paladin. Now he needs NWTCCT3ACATBPOT4A... (Completed T3 and can afford to blow plat on T4 Armor) to help him out when farming his gods majors.
Remember when we used to seriously ponder the merits of a rot bot in t3/t4? Now it wouldn't even matter, because like the Shadow/CompletelyEpic3.5BookRottingFCFS phenomenon.. No one would even bother to use it since it isnt in demand. Most people spawning bosses are just click deleting the armor to reduce lag anyways, or gearing up a druid just to claim they have one ready for T6.
In theory you're supposed to accumulate the essences while you gear up your toons. I get that.. That isn't whats happening.. And the need for people looking to KTF to liquify T3/T4 is trivializing another level of content for NWTC.
And that has sucked demand completely dry for t3/t4 armor. There's positively no difference between me sitting in T3/T4 farming essences and if the essences were found in the Hidden Bankquet (jesus god hunter don't do that, just an example plz
).. Except the fact that farming T3/T4 I can read a book or watch a movie or chase squirrels outside in my yard while the magic happens.
Player to player interaction in the economy outside of randoms /cheering everytime i kill a mob in public and wait for the rot call in /ooc is basically non-existant at this point. Players have little to nothing to offer other players, and certainly no reason to not just sink their plat into ore to KTF using their MAH machine in the first place.
And yeah, i'm just illustrating the problem and not offering a solution, but it is what it is. I'm up for some good ideas. T4 bosses could drop 100k pp per kill and that plat would still be dropped right back into Crafted Ore anyways and wouldnt do a thing for the economy.. unless you believed in Trickle-Down in the 80s.
