So, I know that the staff said that for two weeks that the questers aren't giving out prizes as much... Well, SOME of them, that is - Maleria, Cursed, and Cinthia seemed to have been singled out, as Pete, Alexander, Carl (which not everyone has access to if they haven't completed the Omen Islands Map), and Quentin still are, though as expected, the sP amount isn't that high since they're giving out items (at least what I've seen with Pete and Alexander... Carl and Quentin seem not affected). However, my real quest is WHEN are we going to get it where EVERYONE has items back? I mean, we've had FOUR WEEKS now without items for at least three, and two of those (Cursed and Maleria) have been featured for WQ's, and they're just as paltry then as they are now!

Here and here are two examples of what I mean.

Now, don't get me wrong. Cursed and Maleria ARE giving a bit more decent amounts of sP as when they were giving items, but if I just want to play quests for sP, Saggy's got me covered. It would be nice to have items back for everyone once again, and I'm not the only one who's voiced my opinion about this, especially going back to Cursed Quests and more recently to the raffle when items for certain things skyrocketed in price previously, although for the Spells, that was kinda mitigated by the staff.

If anything, I would hope that the staff has been looking at the posts we users are making and bring back the items to the questers so that we can enjoy the quests once again.

Thanks again, Subeta Staff, and I hope things will be just as fun in the past as they will be in the future.

Maybe soon, maybe sometime, maybe never?

In the past it's taken a few weeks/months for this kind of experimentation to settle down into a final form.

It probably depends a lot on the economy, how many items are in the system/value of items/other mysterious factors we don't know about on the back end.

I wouldn't mind items back in quests, but I think I'm getting used to the lack of them.

I have somewhat as well, but it doesn't make it that it that much easier especially when one of the ones who doesn't give out items currently (bar Saggy) comes up as a WQ, like Maleria or Cursed has, because it doesn't give any more incentive to do them during the weekend because there's nothing special going on with them compared to the normal quests.

Compare this to someone like say, Alexander, where you get items, but when he's the WQ, you get not only the chance for his special items, but chances for Retired and really rare books. He does give Rare and Super Rare items while only a few mundane ones every now and then, but when he's WQ, it makes his quests more exciting because you never know if you're going to just get an item he might normally give out, or if he'll add in a retired book as well.

Basically: Quests are always changing. They're one valve that we have to change the amount of sP / items going into the system. If we see a huge shift where items are becoming less and less valuable and stocking up in user shops, we'll shift quests more towards sP and away from items.

Yeah, I also noticed the lack of extra items during WQ's in the last couple of weeks. It was hard to tell whether the sP increased or not, so it felt a little anticlimactic.

I understand that, Keith, but what if users decide to stop playing quests altogether? The only way I get items for my shop or to frag is through quests, as I'm not as good of a restocker as some others here, and that's what makes item rewards so much more exciting. It's always a luck of the draw when getting items not knowing what you'll get.

I understand that the economy sometimes gets wonky, but why not make it where there's a feature where we can turn items that are low in the system in for sP or some points? I know the Recycle Beast does this feature, but if say an item is like 100 sP and is staying like that that it would be something that this new feature would target to help stable the economy... Maybe a new NPC that's a junk collector or something like that.

That's what I mean! With Saggy last week, you could definitely tell he got an increase in sP for his WQ, and he didn't always ask for the super-expensive items like he normally does. That's something that made it fun to do last week.

With Cursed the week before Wizard, who was before Saggy, their sP rewards were about the same if maybe less than what they were giving during the week even without items, and their special items? I maybe at best got two or three items out of the ten quests I did, and things didn't get any better the other days of the WQ. It was pretty disappointing. Heck, during that SAME weekend, Pete gave me two of the new items, and Carl ended up giving me a WL 'Tique item making them the winners of that weekend.

Maleria's just as bad this weekend, with only giving one item and less sP than she gave me any day this week... So like I said, she's not worth it like she was before the change, where before the change, she was giving good items, even sometimes WL items and stat boosters (although both rare).

fragmentizer does this also, a third feature would be a bit much. I think some changes to the recycle beast are all that's needed

Yea, I agree with changing up the Beast more, since sometimes, he asks for retired items, and really, I think that he should just ask for stuff that's easily able to get, as in rarities that are anywhere between mundane to normal, so that it least helps to get more items out of the system, if that's the case for the economy.

With sP, they have plenty of sP sinks going right now, especially the Antiques Shop. I don't know how many millions I've dropped in that shop alone for the Epicon prizes.

Again, having items back would make things easier for those of us who don't restock, while allowing people the chance to get items that might be too expensive in shops. Also, if there's too many of a single item in the shops, why not have some sort of reward for people to buy up the items and then either have them take them to the beast or frag them to get them out of the system? If they had something like that, not only would it be an sP sink, but it would encourage people to get items out of the system. I know if they had something like that, I would DEFINITELY would participate in it every day.

Users will never stop playing quests (at least not enough to make a dent), it's the main source of income. Unless you only come on here for the forums, you need SP to do pretty much everything. I don't think that's really a concern. This is how economy works. If a store ordered too many of one item that isn't selling, they stop ordering it/put it on clearance. It'll eventually become rare again once they're not deadstock on the shelves.

Personally, I like getting more SP. Because right now I don't have a gold account to autoprice and that means the items coming to me are just clogging up my inventory till I bother to sort them to the shop where they'll sit unpriced.

Honestly though, I don't think this can be labeled a good or bad thing. Some users don't care to stock their shops and don't have a need for random items and would rather have sp, and some do care and would rather have the items. If it's made to change depending on the economy, then it just comes down to personal preference.

buying up items in a user shop isn't an sP sink, it spreads the sP around user to user, no sP is taken out of the system. it acts as an item sink and inflates items, but if certain changes were made to the recycle beast, that would be the avenue for the extra item sink. I think the problem with the recycle beast is just that there aren't many new items in there to entice people to bother with it, and it takes a lot of work.

Yea, I know. I don't get a GA all the time, only when it's time to put all of my pets back into the resort for another 21 days, but since I have a shop that I'll want to autoprice during that time, I'll want to get items to stock in it. Also, items that I don't put in my shop I put into a gallery that I keep ready for when there comes an item in the Crystal Shop that I want so that I can frag 'em for crystals to purchase.

If there's certain items that have too much in stock in the shops, why not just take them out of the quester's rewards and only put them in as an item to request? That'd solve the issue of to much stock in the shops and help to get them back down to manageable levels. Or the staff could put the items in as items that the Recycle Beast wants for a few days, and that can help as well, or even in the Item Drive. All of those would make much better sense than just stopping questers from giving items altogether.

If items should be stopped for quests, though, maybe only those that don't give good items out in the first place should have their item rewards stopped barring only they're the WQ. Questers like Pete, Alexander, Maleria, Quentin, and Carl all have pretty good chances for giving good items, but as I've seen before the change, Cursed and Cinthia don't.

Another option could be to rotate out Questers for giving items, or having whoever Shinwa picks (bar the Wizard and Quentin, that is, since everyone loves getting chances at Mage Amulets) be the ones that you get items from that day. It'd be pretty neat, as you never know who you would be doing that day to get items.

Those are just a few ideas of mine that could help the issue about items coming back.

I think that can be difficult to do efficiently and in a balanced way. Having the system check which items are above a certain number at a certain price point in shops can't be done too often without becoming too resource consuming for the servers. I think the recycle beast pulls items right now randomly and under a certain price. asking for more items in total or something would help with the recycle beast. even maybe having the recycle beast accept like 25 items no matter what they are each day, along with what items he asks for.

@ NoelKreiss That's fair, I'm just not very shop oriented. I like questing for money because I have a five second attention span and like immediate payout lmao. I hope that the turnover rate to items doesn't take too long for you though, because I can see why it'd be more enjoyable to get more items.

Edited: pointed out the flaws in this idea lol so ignore that. But I like the idea of the recycle beast accepting any number of items that aren't a request that day. Great way to unload stuff that's not worth putting in a shop.

That last point by is why I don't use the recycle beast. It's such a roundabout process, I feel like I'm chasing my tail for something I'm not horribly invested in.

They're "random", all right, but then again, there may be game prizes/holiday items/retired items in one day and some items that there's very few of on the site or that someone has bought up and trying to resell at a ridiculous price (the debacle of the during the Raffle comes to mind here) while sometimes there might be items that are in the shops for low prices and lots of stock in them as well.

Speaking of stock in shops, there has been times where I'll be on a quest and see maybe almost 500 of an item at a cheap price in one of the shops, which causes the price to stagnate at that price until people buy up all the stock. What I've been doing while I've been on quests is try to find a shop with low stock (min 1, but maybe as many as 10 items) of an item and buy from them rather than the high stock items. Other times, when I'm looking at the shops to find out why the items are that price or that many in stock, I'll end up finding that it's a legacy shop instead, and since we can't tell who the owners are of those shops, we can't tell if they're still around or if the account has been frozen, which makes it even worse especially if a so-called "common" item is going for hundreds of thousands or even millions of sP.

A prime example of this latter one is back during the Raffle when I was to make a scroll using as one of the ingredients. Checking the shops found that they were nearly going for for a mil a pop, and all of those shops that I clicked on were found to be legacy shops. This is what makes things hard for us users not knowing what the prices of the items are going to be or knowing if they've been artificially inflated by one or more users to make a quick buck, or if the items are just stuck in legacy shops of people who have had their accounts frozen.

Yea. While I'll still do quests to get the sP to save for WL items, I always loved to see what items I'd get to see if I needed to add them to my shop for selling when I got the GA for a week, add them to my fragging gallery for later on fragging, or checking to see if the item is a book a pet needs to read, a minion for my minion zoo, a beanbag/plushie/sticker for my collections, or an item for a special gallery or for a pet's TC. That's what made items as rewards so much fun. Plus, there was always that surprise when you realize that a quester just gave you a WL item or an item that is fetching a high price in shops because it's new or a 'Tique item.

[edit] As of now, both the and the are slowly returning to what they used to be prior to the raffle, so it's good now that the items (at least those in high demand during the baking and scroll making parts of the Raffle, that is, are returning to a much more manageable price than when they were previously.

it's easy to tell if those items are artificially inflated though, they aren't new and they're r38 and r40. it's hard to prevent someone or a group of people from buying up the majority of a single item, it's a small site and it's relatively easy to do. if the overall price on the hovers was ever fixed so it showed up on most items and was fairly accurate, that would be another way to tell if the items were inflated. those items both come from the shining crane vending machine and spells galore, so there were ways to get them without paying.

Yea, I just used those as an example of things going on during that time. The thing is, when one of the baking items was hit just as hard with being too expensive, , the staff put that item into the quest rewards, which surprised the lot of us when suddenly, we were getting items from questers who for the last four weeks hadn't been giving us any (and also those that had). Also, the staff's jester of putting the in the Crystal Shop and putting spell ingredients into the DC did help with mitigating those issues, but if the questers that hadn't been given items had been turned on to where they were giving items that people needed for the raffle, things might've went smoother. Sure, you had the option to take them all on or not to determine how many raffle entries you had, but at the same time, every time that something comes up that needs items, something like this happens. This is another reason I think items need to be reinstated back into quests.

Like I said before, if there were more incentives to help balance the economy out both in sP and items, I'd gladly help out. Give us something that is a much bigger sP sink that we WANT to dump our money in while at the same time give us something to do with the items that we get that don't need to be in the shops at that point until the amount in shops stabilizes that until enough items have been taken out of the shops to warrant more of those items being put in. That's all I'm hoping that the staff will listen to us about.

but there's no good way to know which items are necessary and to automatically move those into a list of rewards for quests to give out. the foods were programmed into the quests by Keith because they were required* for the raffle (*well not really but that's beside the point) if something isn't required for a site event and it's just the market driving the prices up, that's not something they're going to interfere with on a regular basis.

I have always been in favor of bigger sP sinks that targeted different areas of the site. personally, I would like to see more very high end wearables that go out for a lot of sP each - sorta like the delish lines. the recycle beast needs some tinkering to make it better and a more effective item sink, but items are just more tedious to get rid of. users in large quantity aren't going to take advantage of any item sink in the long term because at the end of the day, quickstocking them into a shop and selling them is a lot easier.

[edit] also I think this is just something in terms of scale. sure some items are inflated but in terms of all of the items given out during quests, a lot are worthless and will remain worthless unless something is done to limit how many are going out.

True, and I've seen that before in Carl's and Pete's quests before, but on the same point, I've sometimes gotten an item that's just been released, and being that I'm not as good as some restockers are, getting that is quite a surprise in and of itself, even if I can't price it just then.

I remember when before the shops change how I would buy up tons of useless items in the shops and stick them into a gallery to frag later, even if it's giving other users the money and helping to artificially inflate the prices of said items, but I would set a limit on which items I'd buy. If an item was under 10k, no matter its rarity, I'd buy it up until that point or until I'd run out of sP for that day (as I'd set myself on a limit of how much sP I'd spend of getting items out of the shops) because I knew I'd be able to make back the sP when I quested the next day, and that cycle would repeat each day. It helped to spread around the sP, and if I got enough items out of the shops, I'd then take 'em to be fragged after putting one copy of the items in my gallery so that I could always check the items to see if they would need to be rebought again to help fix the prices. It's a small thing, but I felt that I was helping in some small way to help stabilize Subeta's economy, and I bet there were others who did the same when an item was severely undercut as opposed to others in shops.

yeah it's nice getting the new items that way, but I think that was more luck than anything. those items eventually deflate to the same point as the rest of the items and they become fairly worthless. restocking is horribly boring though, unless new items are out, there's very little that makes it exciting, at least to me =P

if everyone did that, perhaps prices would be higher. that's the problem though, it would take a lot of people doing that to really "fix" the economy. Our economy is never going to be stable, it's far too small. I also don't see the economy as broken. flawed maybe, not going the way they want it to, but it isn't broken.

Well, like I said before, I'd be willing to do that more if there was some incentive to buying up all the low-priced items. In fact, when I'm able to autoprice my shop, as soon as I do so, I check to see if there are any items that are under a certain threshold of sP (30k in my case) and immediately remove 'em and place 'em in my gallery taking them out of circulation. I don't want to add to the problem if I can help it.

Would be nice if the staff realized some of us want to help fix the problem and would give us a way to do so...