DenialOfTruth

That can be done a maximum of 14 times. 9 is enough to reach Gilded Pentagonal, but progressing any further then that is basically impossible.

In Hard Mode dungeons there is a VERY small chance for a Octagonal Obsidian to drop. Three of those can be combined to get a Gilded Triangular Obsidian, but across over a hundred Hard Mode runs, I've seen...one. Not great odds.

Green Storm addressed this in another topic, but it sounds like the patch notes are longer then usual this time so the preview posts are a bit sparse in details. We'll get the details sometime early next week (I'm going to guess Monday myself), but it's not looking too promising for Kaebi being the saving grace we were hoping for. 35g a day does make it so you could BARELY, if doing everything else, do a single upgrade attempt on Skystealer stuff a day, but that's not much improvement.

Longer patch notes strikes me as a potentially good sign of the content we can expect this time around. Looking forward to reading them when they go up...I think I speak for many when I say fingers are crossed that it helps reduce the complaints about gold income.

No problem!

Conquest Tokens are ONLY given when the season ends, and for Soul Arena seasons end every two weeks.

And to think it was fairly alt friendly at first when 500 people could get at least a small prize from doing Demonsbane. Even gearing up wasn't too much of a concern, but it was a driving force to get a greater prize. Now you must exert five times the effort for that small prize...becoming immensely alt unfriendly in the process. Battle Pass might have driven a bit more alt activity lately, but that will wane with the introduction of new content later this month.

Today's deals are effectively the same as the 29th's offers, just with soul and moonstones instead. As such the same feedback applies.

Another day, another set of specials. I think I'll keep up this posting theme for awhile, supplying current thoughts on the deals of the day for one chief reason: Green Storm has indicated that they have been playing the game, but being so new still, they are very likely unaware of the value of items. By being more in depth, I'm hoping to point out the pricing oddities and teach about the game. Today is...not terrible but not great either. Sacred Vials are quite important for your Soul Upgrade but I am not certain it is worth that much for three. It's probably pretty close though factoring in current exchange rates for NCoin on F9. The Pristine Oil on the other hand...no. It is not worth that. You can simply create one out of one of the vials you purchase if needed, or out of vials attained from events. The Pet Pack offer for 160 for 3 though? That I will support, that's a very nice value in my opinion, and with two things to upgrade with that (Pet Aura and Talisman), more at a good price like that is something I can actually get behind. This leaves the gem related items for today. Both the Gem Fragment Pouch and the Gem Powders are not worth it anymore. A bit of luck at Chaos Supply Chain Stage 4 or higher, and you can simply Salvage a Pet Gem from that and get way more effective value. In addition, the price of both powders and fragments is down on the player market (F5), meaning simple play could outweigh the value of both rather rapidly. These two should be repriced or removed for certain, adding to the list of items that simply need to go. As for the two vouchers...no. These are not worth in most capacities either. We recently had bundles in the Hongmoon Store that provided Hexagonal gems at much better cost to what you get ratios even compared to the older Pentagonal bundles of the past. These are not a good purchase unless you have two pentagonals of a given color and really, really need to Transmute them together. Older tiered items should be reduced in price significantly, perhaps even half. At half their values (750 for the elite and 500 for the non-elite), I can see some value there. I'd love to upgrade my Diamond but I am not shelling out 3000 NCoin to do so. That's it for this post, see you all tomorrow.

I'd also like to call for the removal of the Mastery Bundle and Starter Bundle II. Both are obsoleted instantly by even partial Soul Boost progression and are not even close to being worth it. The Starter Pack is actually fine, but the others are not.

The main problem with the Today's Specials is more often then not, the offers are basically nearly pointless or overpriced. Lets take the various Skystealer Crystals for example...even playing casually like I do on my alts, I have amassed thousands upon thousands of them. There's no reason to spend 400 NCoin (or 5 USD effectively) on them when a couple days of effort would suffice. They could be removed from Today's Specials and nothing changes for 99% of the playerbase. Things like the Secret Safe also are a really, really bad deal for a different reason: 100g is not worth 400 NCoin. Neither is 300g or even 1000g, when you could achieve better cost effectiveness with F9's Currency Exchange. The current going rate seems to be averaging around 1g to 0.3 NCoin, meaning 10g is 3 NCoin, 100g is 30, and 1000 is worth 300 NCoin. It is more cost effective to simply buy the gold off of F9, though this may shift in the future if the exchange rate reaches 1:0.4 or higher. I will provide more feedback over the coming days as I cannot recall all of the Today Special rotations, but those two things I feel are horrible deals currently. But to balance out the negative feedback, here is some at minimum neutral feedback... While I haven't purchased them, 400 NCoin for 500,000 Unity Rep is...maybe okay? It could be better, but that is an entire day of maximum possible effort right there, and the classic argument of time vs money can apply here. Likewise, 10 million Hongmoon Experience being worth 300 does not strike me as immensely horrific either and tends to be just shy of what I'd get in a single day if I do 'everything': dailies, 3x spectral shrine runs, login bonuses, ect.

Truthfully? I'm not sure how AWS works, if there is multiple tiers, if they can go up or down tiers, what hardware Amazon uses, ect ect. But the general performance was improved when they did swap, just Koldrak really stands out to the point I suspect it is a configuration error for how Koldrak works rather then server power. This is getting a bit off track though from gold feedback. I guess until May we won't have much feedback to say that hasn't already been said...though given Green Storm mentioned a bundle, I suspect some sort of gold or high value item(s) will be in it.

A few zones have it enabled, but though terms of service violating means players have found means to enable it anywhere. Naturally modifying the game client in any way is against the rules and may get your account terminated.

I thought I noticed something abnormal about that fusing requirement when using the guild option...as for servers, strictly speaking while you only see one server for each region, each region is actually multiple linked together servers. It's unclear if Koldrak already has its own, but given you can't faction chat in it, it likely operates like F8 does (which also is a separate server). The Koldrak lag problems are likely due to their budget servers being overwhelmed, but they can't decide the hardware in them because they use Amazon's services now for the game. Also staff gotta sleep too. They probably couldn't find anyone willing to be up at like midnight EST to flip switches for maint. I do agree the length and start time is stupid (I'm a bit of a NA morning bird myself, so I like it when the game is up early which typical maints do not allow), but it could be logistically impossible to improve upon.

I do love messing with botters so I wish you well in your efforts.

And I've noticed a trend of some players using their faction uniforms and wearing the mask to conceal their identity. Not as effective, but if you're on the opposite faction you can't see who they are, making reporting far more difficult. Not that anything is done...

I must stress that while the gold from Demonsbane ranking was in fact a welcome change, the utter butchering of Venture Token rewards was not and made it pointless for a vast majority of people to even consider running. As for the Battle and Master Passes, while that gold (and the other prizes in it, it's very much improved over the last Battle Pass) is also welcome, not everyone wants to or can put down what is equal to 30 USD for each pass. In fact, the Master Pass is not worth that much money in my opinion, though it does have a value. What we truly desire as players is more options that are freely accessible yet must still be earned...which I freely admit would be a design challenge. Make it too easy, and you destroy the economy. Make it too hard or annoying, and no one will bother and continue to complain about the lack of gold. If Kaebi Village truly is returning however, this will reduce a lot of complaints...IF, and only IF...its rewards are left completely unchanged from KR.

I'm surprised people are botting it at all given the subpar rewards, but I suppose if someone was doing it 24/7 it would add up to be potentially okay over time.

I've noticed input abnormalities too depending on ping, but after thinking about it, I have somewhat less when my ping is reading at 60-70 then I do at the average of 50-55 I normally have. Perhaps this is the source of people seeing better input registration, having closer to 100ms ingame ping? This would require extensive testing and I'll keep a closer eye on what inputs seem to be failing to register in the future. As for macros, while the terms of service do not specify macros as forbidden, they do forbid 'third party programs' that give an advantage or automate gameplay, which would be a requirement of creating a macro in the first place. Check out entry 2.1.3 of the User Agreement. In theory if NCSoft ever provided a in game means of creating a macro, that would be permitted and technically Simple Mode is a (usually bad) macro.

Or SS, which for me is more like SSSSSSSSSSSSSS to get it to trigger...except when you don't want it to go off then sometimes just pressing lightly on S makes you jump backwards.

The lower the FPS, the more likely the game will fail to register a given input. It is very unlikely game performance will be improved in any meaningful way.

They're not going to revert a patch, I'm not even sure that's possible for them to do, no matter how crappy a patch is.

Not only was that changed, but gem boxes are a tier under what KR has too for no reason ever given by NCSoft.

I find it hard to believe you have ran even close to a thousand runs in either and have not seen any accessory drops. The RNG is bad, but it's not that bad. I have multiple questions, including: -Did you document the drops of each run? What dropped in them? -Did anyone else in the party get accessory drops? Those seeking to prove the drop chance should back them up with proper documentation. Even at Stage 21, you surely would have seen something within a thousand runs.

True enough. No staff, support or otherwise, actually plays the game. If they did, virtually all of them would be appalled at how it works. And given the message you sent me, that proves even more so that they don't know anything meaningful about BNS.