The Expanse

Hello there!

I was thinking about writing this for a while, today is the day! I will keep updating this because my head is usually a big mess and I forget things.

- [grab : With the recent change, [grab has become more or less useless overall, there is no reason to really [grab corpses (except if you want to gather trash items for imbuing maybe? Or gather a few regs if you don't have thousands of them already)

This is not good for several reasons: champs become a massive mess with dozens of corpses lying everywhere: visual pollution and increase server charge. You really want players to use [grab to clean the shard. I can understand why you did this (economic reason: players were gathering money/ressources too quickly) but you have to find a way to make it still interesting. I really don't want to go back to an autoloot script (buggy, crashes and visual mess) just to be able to gather enough money to buy the few priced items in the shop.

A few ideas: make [grab still take a part of the money on corpse (10%?20%?more?), make [grab give a fixed value depending on monster difficulty (still less than the money on corpse), make [grab give tokens who are basically unused here (people really bother with the trash for token bag?). Anything really, just a reason to actually use [grab.
Also the 1 tile radius is a bit short for champ spawns, 2 tiles would be a nice value.

Another route would be to keep it as it is (keep gold looted but keep ressources forbidden for example) but give players a lot of things to spend their gold on. Gold sinks work, you just need more ideas for players to use it. 10 millions for a reward scroll, 1 million for a magic jewel, 5 millions for a craft etc. The list could be very long. You could also delete all arrows from NPC vendors and just rely on bulk ressources stones and increase the actual value of arrows/bolts/regs etc. This is clearly more tricky as you would need to recalculate the value of quite a few items.

This [grab paragraph is long but one last point here: when a champ dies and there is a ton of piles of gold on the ground, it is a massive pain to walk on every single tiles to get the gold, it would be very cool if [grab could still grab gold on the ground really.

- Gold ledger: I think there is a 10 millions limit on it, it should be increase by a lot, spamming bank with checks is annoying and time consuming.
I also think it is missing a "add from backpack" button. The coolest thing would be to be able to make a hotkey that would add all the money on us to the ledger, when [grab was actually getting gold on the ground, I had to go through a lot: open [grab -t, add gold, [grab, open ledger, click on 'add gold', select gold pile, move, [grab, etc. then of course remove gold from [grab -t.
I can't think of an exploit that would allow players to loot gold on corpses if you authorise gold looted on the ground and it would save a lot of time.

I have still a lot to say but time is running short right now, I'll be back later to keep going
See you soon!

Jano, thanks for posting this, it's always nice to get feedback from the community, good, bad or neutral. That being said, let me address the issues you mentioned:

[quote=JanoLapin]This is not good for several reasons: champs become a massive mess with dozens of corpses lying everywhere: visual pollution and increase server charge. You really want players to use [grab to clean the shard. I can understand why you did this (economic reason: players were gathering money/ressources too quickly) but you have to find a way to make it still interesting. I really don't want to go back to an autoloot script (buggy, crashes and visual mess) just to be able to gather enough money to buy the few priced items in the shop.[/quote]

1. We also have corpse burial on The Expanse, you simply need the corpse shovel. There is also a grave robbing feature, which in conjunction with corpse burial, would allow you to grave rob the corpse you just buried. Champs spawns also have a quick clean-up feature, so corpses aren't lying around for long.

2. The Trash for Tokens bag and ledger actually does have several uses. Once you start gathering tokens, there are items in the Reward House in Zento that can only be purchased with those tokens. Other features will be coming in the future as well.

3. Even though grab is limited to a 1 tile radius, with the gold ledger you can still run over and sweep the gold. It is very possible to snag all the gold from a champ before it disappears. Even more so if there is more than 1 player doing that champ.

4. Gold Ledger limit is 10 million. Mog and I understand the downside to having a limit such as this on the gold ledger, however this also cuts back on the ability for players to "horde" gold. "Gold sink" ideas are being worked on, several on close to being release ready. The counterbalance to this is, once the economy balances, gold won't be rampant across The Expanse, which means "gold sink" ideas will largely go unused. So Mog and I are focusing on concepts and ideas that will continue to be useful after the fact. We do have some resource vendors outside of Trinsic that were created to address the overbalance of gold. More things like this will come along in the near future.

Again, thank you for your feedback and Mog and I would just ask that everyone be patient as things slowly come in to focus. One of the great things about The Expanse is that Mog and I also play here, so we have a fairly strong grasp on the mechanics of The Expanse and where we can tweak and adjust here and there without ruining the play-ability.

I understand about the gold looting. However my gold is auto looted by stream the new upcoming replacement log on for razor. This llots gold or any item i chooose it to, and it also scavengers for stuff on ground. However I I don't see the prices sooo high. I play when I can or off from work. I struggle to get enough moneys to just build a house at almost 220000 a floor. I woould never be able to purchase anything sooo high. The bad part about stuff disappearing so quicky is bodies, (Player Bodies) , and gone quick and take all stuff with them. I seen clothing bless deed but no item bless deed, which would be good for fast disappearing bodies, esp since reg keg and such are not blessed.

The Gold Ledger limit will likely be addressed in the future. For now consider it a stop-gap against players quickly turning into "rich Republicans" who have so much gold they can never spend it all.

Player bodies take 15 minutes to disappear. That is default time and hasn't been altered on The Expanse. The only improvement we have done to that is adding the Corpse Summoners around. Our staff members have over a decade of experience playing OSI and other free shards. As such, a lot of the changes you will find on The Expanse were made to address issues we felt OSI and other free shards did not. The nice thing about this is we are able to target specific areas in more detail to provide a better gaming experience. Some things are easier to cut back on the amount of frustration players can get and some things are harder to make them more challenging.