I honestly don't even know where to start with everything wrong with this newest update so this'll probably be fairly unorganized, I apologize.
I guess I'll start off on my biggest gripe. The freakin trade pack material hike. Since 3.5 we've seen a 3x to 4x increase in the processed materials needed for just about every trade pack. I don't think anyone is too bothered by the secondary material for everything getting reduced because it's not a processed mat, you harvest it and it's done. The mat they're increasing we have to first harvest and then process it making it cost double the labor. Gweonid specialties which were 50 chopped produce went up to 100 and are now 180, that's 3.6x the materials, no one in their right mind would touch those packs with a 10 ft pole making the same 14g. Karkasse specialty was 45 meat originally, went up to 100 and now it's 180, that's a 4x increase and meat is a much more expensive processed mat than grain or produce. I'm looking down my folio at the ridiculous processed material hike on every specialty and I can't see a single one that I'd actually run after this update. I might as well drag and delete my freighter at this point. It's THREE TIMES the material for the SAME VALUE that we were all making previously only a few patches ago. That wouldn't be much of a problem if the prices for everything wasn't ever increasing. Regrades are more gold than ever before, there's hiram synthesis, erenor synthesis, cape synthesis that now costs labor, cargo costs more gold than ever before. It's a constant increase in the games bottom line but trade packs get harder and harder to make and yield the same amount of gold.
Now, not only did specialties get nuked into the ground to the point where I can't even see the gold sellers running them to feed their families, but they drastically increased the amount of specialties needed to generate cargo. Before it was 14 specialties per 2 cargo and now it's 50 per 5 cargo, so one cargo was 7 specialties before and 10 specialties now. That's got me really dumbfounded, you make specialties cost 3x the processed mat which makes no one want to run them, and then make cargo need even more of them. I'm just at a loss for words with that....moving on.
I agree that ferts should have gotten the material increase, totally with you on that one, they cost too little for what they sold for, although I think it's a tad bit too expensive right now, XL went a little overboard with the increase. I'd say something like 40 of every mat would probably be good as opposed to the 25 of everything it used to be.
And larders....oh lord the larders, this has me really tilted. Material cost for making the larders increased, cool, larders were pretty high profit, so no issue there, they needed a bit of nerfing. It's not the larders specifically that have me upset, it's the freakin royal seeds that are the issue, oh lord. I used to single plant and farm all my royal seeds to do about 100-150 larders a week, I've never bought a royal seed for gold nor vocation in my entire Archeage career. I'd single plant 3 gazebos every 2-3 days for seeds. Now royal seeds drop exclusively from bundles and I'm going to struggle making even 10 larders a week at this rate. I've done 2 rotations of bundles on 6 gazebos, I think that's like 26 bundles a gazebo? I've gotten 1 royal seed so far and my farming proficiency is 230k.
Now I know people have been asking for royal seeds to drop from bundles since the day I started playing this game and it's a welcome change to just about anyone. The thing is, I don't understand why it has to come at the cost of royals no longer dropping from single planting. When I read that royals drop from bundles in the Korean patch notes I thought it was going to be an additional way to get them, not removing the single harvest chance. That's stupid. Royal seeds should drop from bundles AND single planting, giving people the option of doing both.
There were so many changes I was looking forwards to this update like the farming grid update which was going to make my single planting for royal seeds a million times easier only to have it completely invalidated by the fact that there's no reason to single plant anymore. It's 1 step forwards 2 steps back.
I've never really liked sunken ships, I have a chrome sub and everything, but it's just too much clicking for me. Click to ID the cargo, click the cargo to pick it up, swim to my merch, click the cargo hold to put it in, rinse and repeat 15 times, then get to the relic trader, a million more clicks all for 200-280g, not worth the carpal tunnel. Now despite my hatred towards them, sunkens got nerfed too hard. WAAAYYYY too much labor, I agree it was in need of a nerf when the turn-in labor cost was removed, but now the cost of raising the ship is too much for the gold it's worth. You can use 1 whole days worth of patron labor on 2 ships and make only a little more gold than they were worth prior. I've seen a single sunken raised since the update and I asked the person who raised it if it was better with the new update cuz I didn't really look too much into it since I hate sunkens and their response was "I'm saving 100k vocation for a proficiency decrease" since they were at 230k exploration which is a complete and utter waste now. That's another source of income beat to death with the nerf bat.
Those are all my biggest issues with the update so far, might have more I dunno, gotta play more and see.
Is this bob ross haircut actually in the game ?
