GolfLima wrote:* mag. gems never worked as a money sink
Tell that to Ssar'neys finances. And this graph from Banduk I stole from another thread. While it is not up to date, it should give a good impression of the masses of gold that are dumped onto the donation field. Over the course of this graph (roughly one irl year) about 10-15 thousand gold were donated or gathered by the 1%-tax. Personally I have spent about 80-90% of my characters income after the VBU on donations.
I'd again like to point towards the exponentially growing cost for the same increase of effectiveness, which very much smoothes the difference between highly and less gemmed characters. The difference between an obtainable set of 50% (486 gems) and a very rarely seen 70% (4374 gems) is quite small.
Back in the day I did some testing and came to the conclusion that a difference of 10% gem bonus on an armour set is barely noticeable. I needed a difference of 20-30% with the exact same loadout for clear differences. Things got more interesting when mixed armour and weapon switching were applied, but in the end it also came down to who chose the right weapon against the right combination of armour.
What really had characters stand out in test fights were attributes, not gem levels. Considering that one can also buff oneself to nigh invulnerability with correctly applied attribute and regeneration potions, gems do not play a big a role in PvP as one might think.
In short: Uber-gemmed chars lose against lesser gemmed ones if they have a bad choice of equipment for the fight. Gems play a factor in fights that would have been close without, but are not nearly close to as effective as potions.
I see the gem system in its current instance doing/being the following things in favour of the game:
- Large money sink and hard countervalue to gold.
- Never ending weekly reward for login as incentive to keep playing, for hardcore as well as casual players.
- Valuable and tradeable items which drastically become less powerful the more are applied.