Friday, December 12, 2008

Trickle-down economics: Scrapper's to Taint

If you recall, a while ago I had made a post about my disappointment at the change that allowed spellbooks to be disarmed and my belief that it will adversely impact the market for Scrapper's Compendium. Since then we have had the facet driven trammel invasions which drop the rather powerful spell books with mods like sdi 30% lrc 10% mr 3. The aforementioned change coupled with the new drop has adversely impacted the market for Scrappers. This in turn has hit the market for taint; When I wrote my original post you had to pay 90-110K gold for one taint. Today, you can find Luna vendors stacked with taint at 70k per and you can find it for as low as 60k per at bank - This is a significant change when you adjust for the general inflation.

Scrappers were the driving force behind the demand for taint and now that has been largely removed from the game - My scrappers vendor has not sold a single book even though I have significantly dropped their prices. So, I have stopped buying taint which means my usual suppliers from guilds like RK have to find a new buyer and probably drop their prices. Taint is the bread and butter for people who do ML boss spawns as it had a decent drop rate and good value. However, the destruction of the scrappers market has started a chain reaction which will impact people who depend on ML spawns to make money.

I hope that in the future we will get more changes that encourage the ingredient based crafting like scrappers instead of the BOD route. The recent gardening change where hunters are required to collect ingredients for gardeners is a step in the right direction and we need more of it in all domains of the game. I think that the ML ingredients need some loving - some newer craftables based on these ingredients would be rather nice.

On a site note, I wonder if this will have an impact on the value of crimsons. If the reward for doing ML spawns is going down then, in short term, less people will be doing them which could mean fewer crimsons on the market. Hard to say because there are a lot of other factors involved and I hear you can get cinctures from the invasion too.

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