(I feel like this has been discussed before but I couldn't find a recent thread specifically about this topic.)
(Please skip to the bolded bits if you don't care about WORDS. I'm the type that can't help but over-explain to forcibly get my point across as hard as possible. Sorry for text walls)
I think that some adjustments could be made to the ways we can obtain Kritias coins given the realities of GMS, especially in relation to the only item really worth getting from the coin shop (in my opinion), Tyrant Gloves.
Currently, Tyrant Gloves cost 400 Kritias coins. These can be earned in GMS in two ways as of now: daily Kritias quests, a sequence of 5 quests the last of which gives you 1 Anti-magic stone to trade for a coin; Invasions, which occur every other hour during the day from 8am-10pm UTC time, which will give 1 Anti-magic stone to any player who did damage by collecting tokens during the invasion, or 4 stones to the player who dealt the "last hit". Other regions have a third method, the massive boss fight against Hekaton, which rewards up to 10 Anti-magic stones based on damage done during the fight, but GMS does not have this due to alleged performance issues.
As things stand, for many players the daily quests are the only viable way to get coins day to day is through the quests. Invasion times remain absolutely terrible for American players most days since the server switch to UTC, as during EST-PST invasion times, they will likely either be sleeping or at work/school. For example, in my timezone, invasions happen from 4am - 6pm. On an average workday, that means your average student/worker might get one or two invasions in a day depending on their schedule. That translates to 2-3 Kritias coins per day (assuming perfect attendance, and assuming you're not the lucky 1 person to get the final hit), or 167-200 days to get a single Tyrant Glove, or 5.5 to 6.5 months. And that further assumes a populated enough server to complete the invasion. I play on Reboot so there's never a problem finishing in 5 minutes or less, but I've heard that some servers at some times of day just don't have enough people participating to finish at all. In the worst case scenario for any server, a player only does daily quests for 1 coin a day, for 400 days, or over 13 months (assuming perfect attendance) to get a glove.
Let's compare that to the other 3 tyrant items you get from dealing with Magnus. Tyrant capes are pretty much a guaranteed drop for any Hard Magnus kill, and he can be done twice a week with Kritias reset tickets. So let's say 2 capes every 7 days. Magnus drops 9 Magnus Coins with each kill, or 18 per week. In the Shadow Merchant shop, Tyrant Boots cost 70 of these coins, and Tyrant Belts cost 100 coins. So after 4 weeks (~28 days), one could buy some boots (8 kills = 72 coins), or 6 weeks (~42 days) for a belt (12 kills = 108 coins). This is a much shorter timeframe than even nearly ideal Kritias play to get some gloves. To get anywhere near that, a player would have to do their daily Kritias quests, as well as the maximum 8 daily invasions to get gloves in ~45 days, which I'd think is an impossible schedule to keep for all but the most obsessed player. 7 daily invasions would take 50 days, 6 is ~58 days, 5 is 67 days, 4 is 80, 3 is 100, 2 is ~167, 1 invasion daily is 200 days, and only doing quests is 400. And as noted with the UTC server time problem, those last few options are probably the most viable for the average GMS player assuming they even bother doing every part with perfect attendance every day. This means gloves will typically take anywhere from 2-5x longer to get than the next longest to get Tyrant item, and the worst case scenario, over a year to get! And this isn't even to mention how much easier it is to get all your weekly Magnus coins in just a couple quick runs with friends than it is to do a long series of daily quests and being online at specific times for invasions...
Why care about this at all? Well, personally, as a GMS Reboot player, Tyrant items remain top tier end-game items when star forced up high enough, and possibly transposed to Sweetwater equipment (which is another set of absurdly difficult to get gear, but is another topic of discussion). But by their nature as Superior items, Tyrant equips are prone to being destroyed while star-forcing them to end-game levels. On Reboot in particular, we have no scrolls or means to mitigate the ever-increasing odds of booming a tyrant piece as they get stronger. For the capes, this isn't so bad, you get 2 a week to work with. It's a bit more hurtful for belts and boots, as they take a month to a month and a half to get. But with the current state of Kritias in GMS, it's exceptionally risky to even bother starring your Tyrant Gloves to a decent level because it would take so very long to get them in the first place. One bad roll and upwards of a year of grinding flies out the window. That's patently absurd even for the grindiest of MMOs in my opinion.
So what's to be done?
These are several methods I can think of to ease the difficulty of getting Tyrant gloves in GMS. Any one would help, or some selection of them with tweaks. Anything to drive down the insane time commitment Kritias demands for its best rewards.
Fix the Invasion Times
There's several ways to do this. (a) revert servers back from UTC to PST. This will almost certainly not happen at this point. Nexon has been adamant about this so far. (b) Adjust the times Invasions occur from 8am-10PM server time such that it more closely resembles the original, pre-UTC times. This seems like it'd be far more doable. (c) Make invasions happen every 2 hours ALL DAY, but limit entries to some amount per day, so people don't no-life it and never sleep to get coins.
Bring us Hekaton
Hekaton, as I understand it, is a huge daily source of coins for those that can top the damage charts. However, this seems unlikely to happen because of apparent server performance issues. One would hope Hekaton would be redesigned to function better, enough that it could be brought to GMS (maybe make it work like Inferno Wolf somehow to keep the number of players on-screen low? I dunno), but as things stand, I'm not getting my hopes up.
Lower the Shop Prices
Shop prices are set right now with the assumption that enough invasions can be attended and that Hekaton is available. Tweaking the prices in the shop itself could alleviate the amount of days required to get anything from it. This however runs the risk of those who do no-life it to do as many invasions as possible getting tons of gloves to flood the market with...but then it just wouldn't be far off from being like capes, right?
Change the Rewards for the Daily Quests
Right now you have to do all five daily Kritias quests to get a single Anti-magic Stone. Perhaps instead of only the last one giving a proper stone, and the other 4 giving fragments, all five could give a stone? That would drop the time to get Tyrant Gloves by doing dailies alone from 400 days to 80. Still high, but less. Or if that's too much, have it be a chance for the first 4 quests to give a stone? If daily quests are about the only sure way people will get Stones and thereby coins everyday, it could be more viable.
Change how Bonus Anti-Magic Stones are Rewarded in Invasion
Currently, you can only get 1 Anti-Magic Stone per invasion, unless you're the one person each invasion that gets the final blow on the supply commander by snagging one final token at the last moment. What this means right now is that everyone lets a pile of those tokens stack up on the ground until there's about 1/4 of the health bar left, at which point it instantly dies because everyone loots all the tokens at once, hoping to be the lucky winner. This is a frankly stupid way to do things. Why not have it just be the more damage you do, the higher your rewards? Do a million damage, get 2 stones, 2mil get 3, 3 mil get the whole 4? This is already seen in how much anti-magic (that you use to buy the silver coins for reset ticket) you get from invasions as a secondary reward, you get more and more the more damage you dealt. Why aren't the stones like this?
Or it could be more like Hekaton where those who did the highest "damage" get more stones. This runs the risk of making invasions fly by quickly as those with high drop rate slaughter the health bar in nothing flat, but it seems like adjustments could be made to mitigate that. (Adjust token drop rate, raise invasion health, have a temporary "invulnerability" period to the health bar, have invasions be shorter and last a set time, and it's a time rush for players to see how many tokens they can gather?)
Have Anti-Magic Stones Drop from Kritias Mobs
Not commonly of course. We could be talking Arcane River Droplet, Nodestone, Arcane Symbol, Stigma Stone, Alishan coins, and other rare daily reward drop rates here. Even if it was very rare, it would still be another way to acquire Kritias coins as a more reasonable rate.
tl;dr
Please do something to make the Kritias shop not the worst grind ever to get items from. Whether it be lowering the prices, changing how coins can be obtained, or just fixing the server times to something more reasonable for the majority of players, anything (and preferably some combo of my suggestions) would be helpful in making it not absurdly long and difficult to get one piece of end-game equipment. Only normally long and difficult.
Comments
I think one potential way of making the gloves more acquirable without making it necessarily easier would be to add a 6th Kritias daily quest in, addition to the usual 5, that requires a significant amount of time (like 2k mob kill quests) for another 2 stones daily. This would still make obtaining Tyrant gloves difficult, but if you really wanted them that badly you could go through the extra hell of a daily to get more stones for the day.
The community will continue to complain about UTC because it will continue to cause problems like this. If they keep saying "We're keeping UTC", that doesn't change that using UTC in the first place is one of the worst decisions Nexon has ever made. It will become as perpetually hated as the word filter if it isn't already. UTC is the root of so many problems now. It needs to go.
I tried to get Tyrant gloves before UTC happened. 400 is a ridiculous amount of coins, so I gave up. And I don't think lowering the price by as much as I'd assume they would if they did (half) would flood the market too much. Aside from that, any of the ideas you listed would increase the amount of Tyrant gloves in the market, since it's just making them easier to get. But if anything, that's good, since they'll be more accessible to people that hate or can't do Kritias and would rather buy them, or less funded people, making progression easier.
Current nodestone droprate would be perfect for this. Symbols drop probably about 2 an hour with full drop gear and droplet stones are far worse. Sure, drop gear would boost the rate a lot, but that's just the advantages of preparation.
In any case, Tyrant gloves were ridiculous to get before UTC, and now it's several times worse. I'm hating the trend for endgame Nexon has had where instead of things straight up dropping or giving coins, you have to craft them. It makes things horribly grindy and take damn near forever.
They're one of the best gloves in game...
If you're not using marvel and such, your only other option is the 400 coins in 400 days.
If you don't have the dedication to complete the requirements, or you don't have the money to spin on marvel...
It's kind of your own fault within retrospect, you knew what you were getting into with a pay-to-progress type of game in general.
Losing 3 invasions because of the UTC time changes but participating in the other 5 and doing dailies = it takes 50% longer to obtain a pair of Tyrant gloves than before the UTC change (67->134 days). If you only did 4 invasions + dailies before and now you do 2 invasions + dailies, it goes from 80-> 134 days; a 67.5% increase in time per glove.
These numbers may just seem like numbers, so let me break it down how many Tyrant gloves you get yearly with these rates:
Before UTC:
5 invasions + dailies = a bit more than 5 gloves per year (5.48)
4 invasions + dailies = a bit more than 4 gloves per year (4.57)
After UTC:
2 invasions + dailies = 3 tyrant gloves per year
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As you can see above, there is a huge problem with the UTC time changes. It's not exactly our fault for playing Maplestory as a f2p game because it isn't really NECESSARY to pay to play this game and progress. Maplestory has always been a grind-fest with the perk of being able to pay to progress faster, sure, but you still can progress significantly (especially now) without paying a dime.
Anyway, on topic: several ideas in this thread have been suggested which would counterbalance this issue of the UTC time change to obtain the gloves, but I still stand by adding another 6th, difficult (2k mob kills) daily quest that gives 2 antimagic stones. This would make up for the invasions we're missing.
Why difficult? Why make life even harder by suggesting a difficult invasion daily. It's already difficult enough as it is. We've been wanting an easier pathway to tyrant gloves even before the time change and adding another invasion will just put us back to square one, which is still too long for something that should be on par with other tyrants. And I doubt nexon would even invest a second into it, let alone test it and pray it won't be exploited.
We should always go for the Occam's razor approach: the simplest solution is the best solution. And lowering shop prices seems just like that, all you need to do is tick the price from 400 to 200 (or less really). I don't think it 'takes way' from people who've already gotten 400. I don't think they would even care, in fact they'd welcome it since it means more chances to get 15 star (I'm sure zerobydivide is begging for it). An item that can boom easily shouldn't be that rare.
MapleStory is mostly a solo-game, that's why I stated it would take 400 days...
Also I wasn't including any invasions, just the daily quests.
Imagine if EMS merged into KMS, requiring the Koreans to use UTC, generating mass backlash and how differently Nexon would've handled it compared to GMS.
I support this notion.
I still think the NA Gateway should be PDT/EDT (EST/PST) and the EU Gateway CEST(CET) or UK Time.
But Hekaton is a very nice boss to do. With the bubbles you have to kill and work with 30 people together.
EU players would have to learn korean then, cause they are not going to make a bilingual client nor will they change to english, which is why if anything EMS would have just closed down servers and not merged with any of the asian services other than maybe SEA, as I dont recall Brazil MS, Viet MS, or Indonisa MS being merged or redirected to Korea, they just ended.
But my comment was really about how the time restrictions are due to the fact that there have been many incidents where players of online MMO's or online games actually die of sleep deprivation, because they will spend lots of time in PC Bangs/ PC cafe's/ Internet cafe's (as those are part of gaming culture in Japan, korea and China) and the time limits are to deter players from spending every free moment they have on working on getting stuff (like the tyrant gloves). In KMS they also have log in time restrictions for people under the age of 17.
Because of the culture difference and lack of PC bangs/PC cafe's/Internet Cafe's in the EU and US, we GMS players do not have those issues and just shouldn't have those restrictions, especially since the merge brought a server time change that makes it difficult for most players to do their daily routines.
I would certainly rather have the 400->200 choice over the 1k kill quest for 3 stones per day (total of 4 stones from dailies alone = 100 days per Tyrant gloves without invasions), but I still don't think Nexon would do it. Making us work extra hard, however, wouldn't eat into their profits too much but would reward those persistent enough. You shouldn't be going for Tyrant gloves unless most of your other gear is finished, anyway, so persistence at that point would just be finishing up your journey of equips.
First you said lowering the coins would be unfair to people who've done it, now you say it won't happen anyway because nexon is too greedy. Ok bud... I also don't think making it hard to get an item just so it can remain a marvel reward sits well with the majority of players, I remember tower of oz items being put into the marvel machine and how much of a controversy that caused.
For someone who would rather have the coin cost reduced, you sure seem to be against it especially when you'd want to 'make us work extra hard' for it.
Why not? It's just another piece of tyrant. Do you object to other tyrants being easier to obtain? If no, then what is different about this? You seem to be adamant to keep up the status quo for the sake of persistence. In that case, why not make it 1000 coins? or having 1 invasion per day? Surely that kind of persistence will pay off no?
Why shouldn't you be going for Tyrant gloves unless most of your gear is finished? Because AS IS it takes either 400 days of dailies or throw a bunch of invasions in (50% participation) and it will take 100 (less if you include daily quests). You take a Tyrant belt and doing Hmag 2 times weekly will take you 7 weeks. Tyrant gloves you're talking 14 weeks (100 days). Even if we were to theoretically half the coin price, that's still 7 weeks which is the same time as a Tyrant belt. Also I kind of worded my point poorly before: adding another daily does not make achieving the Tyrant gloves HARDER. It makes it easier for those persistent enough because you can literally finish twice as fast for 3 extra stones a day. It means more work but it does NOT mean harder. Effort is not the limiting factor in obtaining several sets of Tyrant gloves for most players: it's the time.
but that's the problem
I was once a member of MLC and I suggested many points to make Kritias and Kritias Invasions better. But since I am under NDA for until summer 2018, then imma just give my opinions of the TS here.
Fixing Invasion Times
On this, I think it was good to get invasions every 2 hours but since Nexon NA so obsessed with UTC time, then they should just change server invasion time for 8am-10pm either PST or PDT (since UTC has no daylight saving time), but manage to have reset time between two invasions.
Bring us Hekaton
I don't mind, but since it's been too long Kritias came out, I just think it's better to revamp our current contents and WITHOUT KMS permissions cuz no Hekaton, you will see why below.
Lower the Shop Prices
There are some items which needs to get lower price or even another coin currency, mainly cubic blades which have Kritias Coins currency, but they should cost Anheim Coins instead. But im afraid to see botters could probably camp in Kritias x.x Well, I remember there is a daily cap of antimagic points we can loot from ennemies and i can't really say the exact amount OR is it the number of times we loot these? I really don't know tbh. As for Gloves price, I would say up to 300 coins it should cost.
Change the Rewards for the Daily Quests
I really don't mind to keep getting Antimagic Stone Pieces as they are usefull to farm even more Antimagic points. You stack many of them from many days, you drink AMP Entropy potion then you are getting 50% more anti for 1 hour, these pieces are affected by this. If you change these rewards, how the hell can we farm antimagic points for Kritias Coins AND Boss reset tickets ??? If anything, then ramdomly get from 1 to 3 stones on last quest, RNG part :P Of course 3 stones should be rare to get from last quest lol.
Change how Bonus Anti-Magic Stones are Rewarded in Invasion
You are being way too generous for Stones distribution here. I agree to say the last hit system is ridiculous, but giving 1 extra stone every 1million contributions until gaining 4 stones is too much as it's easy to get 1million. So i can suggest giving additional stone for first 5millions if not clearing invasion (or first 3millions if we beat this), then another one for actually clearing invasion. Finally 2 additional stones for one person collecting the MOST contributions. Just by giving people possibility to get 1 stone from gaining 5millions contributions is more than ENOUGH so ppl can actually come doing Invasions. There is another thing which needs to be fixed, there is a cap of 1000 Antimagic pts as reward from Blundell when getting 5millions when not clearing, 3M when clearing. The cap is unnecessary unless it allows botters camping here. Maybe Nexon should camp in Kritias invasion and looking at invasion board and see who is participating and track them for their activities. It's really easy to camp there.
Have Anti-Magic Stones Drop from Kritias Mobs
Bad idea here, it would allow hackers botting here even more. If anything, 1 stone should be dropped at reasonable drop rate from the big Boss in Invasion (Von Leon, Hilla, Arkarium or Magnus).
It is not mentionned here, but just want talk about Inverse Codex (pocket item). We feed it with antimagic pts to level it, BUT it also de-level if we stop feeding it after a day. I heard we need a lot of antimagic to actually max level too.