re Bookbinders Discount

[maryam1]

Oh dear.....yet again you have shot yourselves in the foot BB. Come ON!!! Have you ever bothered to look in the trade office?

I know gem sales support the continuation of the game and I think its a real pity you took such an awful step to try and boost them with this, well, I cant call it anything other than it is...useless 'offer'.

Any player who can come up with a better way of boosting gem sales -please post here!

And since I put the challenge, I'd better be the first to respond to it.

1) a 200% Happy Hour. Which I understand they have on other servers.
2) Purchase of codex for gems. Say 900 per codex. And a special buff for the Bookbinder costing 250 gems lasting 8 hrs at 400%
3) Rare Commodities Discount. A special pack of Granite, Grout, Titan ore, or Bean Stalks. I leave the cost to be decided by BB after they have had a close look at the TO!

[sparkz]

I know gem sales support the continuation of the game and I think its a real pity you took such an awful step to try and boost them with this, well, I cant call it anything other than it is...useless 'offer'.

Remember this is the company that set up the gem prices of majority of the goods like granite years ago when those were almost unobtainable, and didnt bother ever reviewing them when the situation changed (so ie. the granite prices was the same when adventures were first introduced and remains the same 2 years after you can mine thousands of it on your home island).

Its very clear that in this game anything number-based doesnt have to make even a tiny bit of sense, its just being pushed through for the sake of it.

[Kotugo]

It would be funny to see if any of these kind of items ever actually sold for gems. The prices are so bad, it's almost like BB is scamming the players that might buy them by accident

The old retail packs were similar, they were advertised with "over £35 worth of in-game items!!!?!" The problem was these items were pinewood planks and tools with the wholesale gem price and only if you kept buying the gems in the smallest amount without a sale. So you had a retail pack worth "£35" selling for £20 and was actually only worth ~£10. At least the retail packs were amazing when you could bulk buy them for £2 each in a sale.

My way to boost sales would be a crisis quest where you can unlock a higher personal gem sale the further you progress.

[lordloocan]

all the prices in the resources tab make no sense at all, who for instance will pay 350 gems for 100 coins, or 150 gems for 100 sausages....nuff said

[Madorosu]

It's not just the Resources tab. Instead of having someone spending time coding these ridiculously priced offers, they should have them spend the time re-evaluating just about every gem price listed in the Resources, Wholesale, Adventure, Deposits and Decorations sections of the Merchant. But this is not new. Players have been singing that particular song for years and no-one at Blue Byte pays any attention, even though I firmly believe it would significantly increase gem sales in the long run, if actually done correctly.

I can only conclude that either their business model is broken or there are enough gullible people out there actually paying these ridiculous prices. The scary thing is that I am not really sure which of those possibilities is the most likely. Regardless, I do find it somewhat irritating that there is now another useless (albeit temporary) tab in the Merchant that I need to scroll past to get to the Guild Market or Epic Items tabs, in order to find something actually worth paying the cost for.

[Xibor]

I can't understand the prices either. Completely out of line with the Trade Office normal ranges and the 'regular' priced items in other categories. The values seem to have some commonality with the decision to put both Watermills and Improved Watermills in the guild vote (along with the other items on the list to vote for). It just doesn't make sense to anyone that has spent any time at all playing.

[maryam1]

I think thats just it Zibor, they clearly DONT spend any time playing, or this would not have happened.

[qawpaw]

I think prices are fair, i play several online games where buying is an option, believe me When i say, sevrel of them are 10 times more expensive than in tso

[MonkeyDooD]

1) The perception that the prices under the wholesale tab or pretty much in any other tab are out of touch with reality is meaningless for BB. They're there for people to buy if they haven't bothered to look at the TO. BB either doesn't have the time to review them or, what's closer to the truth imo, simply doesn't care. It's up to the player to look somewhere else, i.e. the TO, for resources they want with better prices 9 times out 10. If they don't, they've been suckered into a bad deal and they have to deal with the consequences of their lazyness.

2) while not directly related, it's been asked by a BB moderator in another thread about ways to solve the "conundrum" (read: Removed) that is the Bookbinder without a queue. The simplest fix of all is this: make all of them tradeable and let the market operate to reduce the bottleneck that is the bookbinder. The top reason this will, in all likelihood, never be implemented, is this: they probably earn more money due to gems spent to autocomplete those books than for any other thing in the entire game. Scarcity of these books is extremely profitable for BB, they don't want one of the best cash cows they've got to suddenly vanish. Even though that's poor economic reasoning (BB would get more money if the books were tradeable).* There's also the pontential for additional cash to be earned by BB as they have you glued to your screen just to make sure you don't miss a single minute of your buff.

But, if you really want to solve the issue... let the market operate, this would have the bonus of making you guys more money, and you get to keep the playerbase happy at the same time. If not, well... just be honest and say plainly that you will not be making any changes in the bookbinder system, ever. It's working as you intend so the players have to adjust to it.

So the real point is actually this for BB: how far are you willing to make your current/potential customers dissatisfied with the artificially coded scarcity of the bookbinder? How much scarcity is "good" (i.e. the player will spend cash to get gems and have the books autocomplete) and how much of it is "bad" - the player doesn't bother and spends his money elsewhere?

In other words, how much can you afford to royally infuriate us to the point where we don't find it worthwhile to spend cash on you? Find the answer to this question, and you'll have the answer for the bookbinder issue.

* = this is pure conjecture on my part as I have no access to their logs. But I'd be surprised if that isn't the case.

Please watch the language on the forums

[Xibor]

Books of course can now also be created in the rarity provision house (albeit at a very inflamed cost) so the bookbinder is not the only source. And I've always said that a queue is a little more involved since the books 'feed' the other books and especially because at first the costs change depending on the number created. So if the queue was stacked with books that ended up increasing the costs of the next book in the stack, and then one of those books was moved to the last position or cancelled then the entire queue could be out of count. It would be very difficult to keep it all straight from a programming point of view until the costs of the books was fixed. I suspect this as the main reason there is no queue.

Regardless of 'why', books (i.e. skills) are not that important to the playing of the game, sorry. It's a great bonus and many things become much easier or more cost effective but the skills don't create things that you otherwise cannot do (one exception being the Lucky Find skill for - what was it, an achievement or part of a quest? - it's been so long now...) still not something that 'cuts you off' from moving forward. So personally I'm not worried about it. I make a book when I can, collect it when I can, plan my timing and buffs somewhat around when I'll be awake and go from there.

As far as trading them, geez I hope not. It would come close to being able to load up another player with troops. Heck, if doing that why not just give them pure exp? It would save people so much time...