Runes - balanced?

[Insomniac]

A fee discourages use of runes on midway eq, but not completely, as long as the fee is less, than the cost of the rune itself. There needs a balance to be found here, but without knowing about what exactly Splork is working on, I won't comment on this.

The fact that he mentioned a drachma cost and the rest of his posts suggest to me that the cost of unsocketing would be punitive to say the least, hence destroying the rune might be cheaper in the end.

You are forgetting that poprate is based on a random generator as well. For example, me calling grixathem (for my boots, earlier) or webmistress for a night or three didn't guarantee me pops on most of those.

Sure. What did happen is your mob was killed repeatedly and your chance of obtaining the item you wanted was GREATLY increased as compared to not killing those mobs (from no chance at all to about 1 in 30 per kill, depending on the mob, i.e. about 1 in 5 chance per group, assuming 6 kills are made over the evening).

This is not the case with gems, joining a group only marginally increases your chance of popping *the gem you want*, especially for a high level player who is mostly killing level 41+ mobs when soloing.

Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to call the gems we need, however.

And I said otherwise?

[Xamak]

I don't see the point of twisting players arms to make them trade runes/gems. It's a free marketplace regarding those items and IMHO should remain so. It's really no different than any other random pop in that sense. So what if certain higher level chars have tons of gems/runes vaulted... they also have better equipment overall than I do...more drachma than I do etc... following that logic lets penalize people for not spending their drachma sooner and buying more drachma equipment since its so underutilitzed overall etc.

As for the point about tanks joining for rhodo's etc, anyone is free to impose whatever position they like for joining not joining a group, and its up to the leader to make the call if they agree. We all have a limited amount of time free to play, and should work on whatever goals we feel are best for our chars.

Back to the original point about unsocketing etc, I'm just curious as to what Splork and Blackmore discussed that might be proposed. Hopefully, there would be a way to remove / destroy gems from 3x40 eq and drachma eq. As for lower level eq, just sell /trade the item with the gem and repop if necessary. Clearly no one is going to socket elite runes to mid level eq anyway...

Xamak/Elwyn