Balancing Booboo (?) Bothers Buyers

​

Years and years ago, after a particular VU, SnableSnots suddenly dropped improved 2870s. Several dropped within minutes, and the servers were quickly taken down to address the glitch.

More recently, when Next Island launched its public Beta, quite a controversy erupted when Calypsonian Colonists discovered that Blood Moss, a resource that is only available in lootable PVP on Calypso, could easily (and safely) be found on Next Island.

The same thing is now happening again after the recent VU 2011.1.1, apparently leading to a massive drop of formerly rare items like the ES500 scanner dropping off of ROCKTropia-based Street Thugs, as well as FAP-90s (apparently being looted from NI mobs like Fire Drake and Ice Drake (based on matching the name of sellers in auction to their most recent EntropiaTracker stats)), and the rare ore Pyrite dropping off of Zombies. Other items that dropped were ES200, ES300 and ES400 scanners, and a whole lot of armour that was exclusive to Calypso prior to this update (Hunter, Paladin, Pixie, Gnome, and Shogun, to be exact). The drop of the scanners was adjusted as sudden as it came, which adds fuel to the fire that this was a bug. Or was it? (See below).

Another discovery that was made was a new Limited gun, the JUELZ Mic-Killa SG-ULTRA, which boosts impressive stats:

​

As the screenshots show, it has an SIB level of 3 (!), an incredible range of 130 meters, and with 74 shots a minute with a damage between 45.0 and 90.0 (which gives it a DPS of 83), this bad boy will undoubtedly be carried by anyone who means serious business. Initial testing shows a Damage/PEC of 9.786 (Source: Entropedia), which would make this gun more efficient than an Improved Justifier MK2, or a Modified Mercenary. Undoubtedly, this is a bug, but one that led to quite a bit of panic within the uber-item owning community.

The gun was looted by "Paavo PP Pesusieni" from society "The Great Pretenders", and in a private chat, he was willing to reveal it dropped from a mob called Zombie ROCK God, which seemed to only spawn for a brief moment. Once they killed all of them they found, none respawned. He described the mob as a high HP, low damage mob, which most likely means plenty others will be trying their luck on them.

​

Initially, it was assumed all of today's anomalies was another slipup, mainly due to the drop of the scanners stopping from one minute to another, but never one to pass an opportunity to advertise, the recent ROCKTropia newsletter that was sent out seems to indicate that all of this was very much anticipated by NEVERDIE himself.

Meanwhile there is speculation in the community that Bank NEVERDIE, either within minutes before or after the VU arriving, dropped the collateral price for the ES500 to 0. Stay tuned for the whole discussion about insider knowledge to erupt once again. EntropiaPlanets contacted David Simmonds at MindArk to comment on these strange happenings, but we were told that the balancing team is the ones to talk to. We will send a mail to them, and update the thread in case we receive an answer from them.

 

So what is YOUR take on all of this? Bug? Planned advertising? Other theories?

 

I think what ticks people off about the scanner drops most is that they used to be crafted, but BPs for them were removed from the game ages ago. The rarity and (un)availability therefore made their prices really soar. By having them rain in the loot again, overnight they went from 5k+ to 1k or so? I'm fairly confident this was not supposed to happen, but that the additional hype created by it is not something any owner of ROCKTropia will be grieving over. As for the other stuff like the armour, that's just odd, considering there's armour parts that hardly ever dropped on Calypso, and now they drop en masse on other planets. It all seems extremely weird, also for the reasons stated by Dusk; Planet partners are supposed to bring in their own clientbase, but today's proceedings led to the two new planets basically canibalizing Calypso.

As for the gun, I asked whether Paavo tested the decay, but he said he did not. Therefore, the eco on it that is shown on Entropedia might just be wrong. Nevertheless, it's still a great gun :)

 

Just because an NDS employee states something does not make it a fact. I have a very hard time imaginging that someone at MindArk figured it would be a splendid idea to have numerous high-level high-value items drop within a few hours. If that's the case, they just undermined their own RCE concept.

 

Another thing that just hit me. If this is indeed a planned thing, meant as a marketing stunt, then what will it really solve? Sure, it will get some people up there in the short term, looking for the new drops. As soon as they realize the drops ceased, though, they'll leave again. The end result will be a handful of pocket change, and people even MORE reluctant to go up there.

Trying to build a customer base by promising handouts gets you one type of customer, and it never is a loyal one because as soon as another party offers something even better, they'll be gone again.

 

Well, now the proverbial doodoo really hit the rotational device.

Yesterday, someone called DAManager was the one to go public with the statement that these scanners were dropping on RT:

Followed today by:

Having never heard of Digital Abduction before, I googled it, and ended up on this:

Rocktropia


A FUTURISTIC VIRTUAL REALITY WITH STATE OF THE ART GRAPHICS AND HUNDREDS OF REALTIME STRATEGY DECISIONS.

Perhaps most telling, however, is this quote on their website:

(emphasis mine).

...

I'm not really sure what they think they are doing, but I'm afraid the damage has already been done. This is not going to end well, regardless of what the press release will state.