@haltzo5045
-
You definitely didn't say anything about gold hoarders in this thread. So regardless whether you did in other threads or not, it's a bit of moving the goalposts in this thread.
-
yes, my first sentence mentioned gold hoarders. But I also said, in that first sentence, it was just one example from multiple nights. You chose to ignore that.
My crew were all 75GH/75OOS/75MA/75RB/30A so we've been spreading the love around various evenings. I chose an example that was most fresh in my mind. But examples aside, jy premise stands. All gold output, with a marginal exception of MA, is higher, not just GH.
Now l if you want to deep dive the MA situation, here ya go. Regarding MA:
Only two voyages in the entire game (not counting emissary quests) could go from raise to grade 5 in a single run. Lost shipments, and veils. Veils came with risk and took time. Lost shipments were too fast and, to be honest, too easy to reach grade 5.
Proof? It was worth it to collect a GH or Ops emissary voyage. Lower, reraise. And run the emissary to "loop" grade 5 continuously. Less commonly, people still did Athena's emissary voyages. I'd still fairly regularly see a ship sell their recently completed veil and do a more discreet emissary... And we'd use their athena keg to steal their chest of legends. Because... Fun.
But merchants? Nope. Faster to lower, skip the emissary, and rerun a lost shipment. Yes, that voyage made merchants significantly more fun for a lot of players. But there was a fairly reached consensus in various forums that the voyage was OP for the risk/reward. If reapers hadn't gotten their grade 5 merchant flags by the time lost shipments dropped, they likely weren't going to. The nature of the voyage made it virtually impossible to catch a grade 5 in open water. It was....for lack of a better word...Broken.
Now you have to do multiple voyages to reach grade 5. Just like every other faction worked in S10. And there is still new high tier loot that pays darn well. So it's nerfed, but not obliterated.
So MA is a mixed bag. I don't deny that. For short sessions, gold output will be lower than season 10 lost shipment voyages were. But stack a couple of lost shipments to get to 5, do the high end cargo runs, messages in a bottle, shipwreck higher tier loot, it swings back to higher output. But you do have to put time into it.
Sprint = less gold for time invested compared to S10.
Marathon = more gold for time invested compared to S10.
And I suspect but haven't yet proven that output can probably be further tweaked if one uses diving to raids to start a grade 5 climb. The Uber loot is a chunk of change!
The other old meta that I rarely hear used anymore, but maybe niche players still did it, was the Noah's ark method of putting down animal runs, collecting cages, then canceling the voyage, rinse-repeat until you had a mad stack of cages. Then just mass-collecting gold animals. This was clearly never intended, and while it fell under "tools, not rules" was always on that edge of where a nerf could be expected. And you can STILL do it if you want to sail to a new island to collect cages. Much slower, likely the juice is not worth the squeeze, but still doable if you'd rather collect dozens of gold animals instead of completing small animal runs.
I'm conclusion, yeah, the game changed. But dang I'm an old curmudgeon (both in the game and in real life) and I adjusted. I'm surprised so many people are doom and gloom. I'm not saying people need to be a cheerleader or love this update. But facts are facts (potential gold output is measurable, not a random opinion) and some of the hate is definitely misguided on inaccurate information.
