Absent Elementals
Printed From: Illyriad
Category: The World
Forum Name: Elgea
Forum Description: For everything related to the Elgea Continent
URL: http://forum.illyriad.co.uk/forum_posts.asp?TID=6015
Printed Date: 17 Apr 2022 at 08:34
Software Version: Web Wiz Forums 12.03 - http://www.webwizforums.com
Topic: Absent Elementals
Posted By: Brandmeister
Subject: Absent Elementals
Date Posted: 07 Dec 2014 at 20:58
|
A few of us were just discussing how it has been quite a while since we had any elementals appear near our towns in Laoshin and Taomist. There do seem to be elementals in other regions like Zanpur. Has anyone else noticed that elementals aren't re-spawning in their area? Possible causes:
Any other thoughts on this phenomenon? |
Replies:
Posted By: Angrim
Date Posted: 07 Dec 2014 at 21:10
| i blame the Circle of Five. or Nikon. probably Nikon. |
Posted By: Rill
Date Posted: 07 Dec 2014 at 21:38
|
Given that elementals were already relatively rare in Laoshin and Taomist, it's also possible that they have been hunted to "extinction" there. (Through overzealous players hunting the few they could find.) The elementals have not seemed to work in the same way that other animals do; for example they don't grow in number after their initial appearance and they don't move from their standing stones. GM ThunderCat made a comment in chat to the effect that players have plenty of elemental salts in their inventories, so the developers do not seem to be concerned by the "developments" in elemental locations. This of course ignores the fact that the players with salts in their inventories may be largely or even completely inactive or even abandoned and that they are little help to the other active players. If the markets were efficient, then increasing prices for elemental salts would induce people to release them from their inventories. However, the markets are not efficient, and there is no special reason for people not to hoard these items. The amount of silversteel in player inventories must be truly astounding by now; have the developers compared the amount of silversteel in player inventories with the number of elemental salts? This is relevant because making pretty much anything with silversteel requires elemental salts. The "there is already plenty in player inventories" logic also falls on its face when you consider things like the spawning of basic resources, food and gold on the map. Players have plenty of those in their inventories; have the developers considered stopping this resource spawning? Hopefully not, since the players who are interested in collecting them are generally different than the people who already have loads in their inventories. As it is, basically the game is penalizing people who actually use elemental salts in favor of the people who hoard them. Without regard to how people think the game should theoretically be run, my question is: How much fun is that? Theory falls flat when it does not serve fun.
|
Posted By: Brandmeister
Date Posted: 07 Dec 2014 at 23:01
| I've killed lots of elementals in my area of Taomist. Earth elementals, on the same circles, repeatedly. But a couple months ago, they just stopped re-spawning. I don't know if that was related to the types getting mixed in circles, or what. But I have a pile of elemental salts from elementals I hunted in Laoshin and Taomist. |
Posted By: Brandmeister
Date Posted: 18 Jan 2015 at 21:54
| Week after week, I search the surrounding 100 squares for elementals. Still nothing. Is anyone else noticing this in Laoshin? |
Posted By: Count Rupert
Date Posted: 19 Jan 2015 at 01:12
I have noticed. It's been months since I've seen elementals in Laoshin.
|
Brandmeister wrote:Posted By: Aurordan
Date Posted: 19 Jan 2015 at 10:56
| Might be out of season. Elementals go in and out. I don't thing they can be hunted to extinction, they don't behave "organically" like animal NPCs. |
Posted By: Brandmeister
Date Posted: 19 Jan 2015 at 13:50
| Perhaps. This has been going on for months though. They are re-spawning in many other regions on a constant basis. |
Posted By: Morgweneth
Date Posted: 02 Feb 2015 at 16:24
|
From what I have seen they seem to appear in a new area for a considerable time but then decline, probably appearing in a new location, certainly they dissapeared from near one of my Cities but have appeared in numbers near another. It will be interesting to see if and or when they reappear in one of their old haunts. Also they are no longer area type specific. I believe it was said that the advent if BL messed with the algorithm, be nice if they do eventually appear in BL or even better, something "new" |
Posted By: ajqtrz
Date Posted: 03 Feb 2015 at 02:50
|
I've never seen an Elemental in the Broken Lands. Not one. Haven't heard of anybody else finding one either...though they may have. So count yourself lucky if you have any. But here is the real point: market liquidity. The markets for elementals are not flowing as their is little incentive to sell them at a price which makes economic sense to the buyer. The value of an item is a product of the perception of the seller and the buyer. Items which can be used to create profit or which will gain in value over time, are liquid because the seller and the buyer are exchanging something that each values differently. The seller values the thing being sold at less than the buyer. With Elementals the only value is in holding the item because no body can make a profit using them so there is not point in buying them. Thus, for the most part, nobody does. The devs apparently are thinking in terms of "supply and demand" and they should be. They see a large stockpile of elementals and think, "high supply" And they are right. But there is no real demand for elementals because they can't be used to make anything. Thus, there is a high supply without a high demand...and thus the market has become stuck. To "unstick" a market you either saturate the market with product to the point that the price of the item will fall until it becomes cheap enough to use up....starting the cycle of harvest and use, or you increase demand by raising the value of the items that use the product. Ultimately, in Illy, the reason things are stuck is that the equipment made using elementals has little to no practical value compared with it's competitive replacement. The competitive replacement in this case being more troops. If you want to equip an army with something made from elementals you currently will spend a fortune to do so with at best a moderate increase in the effectiveness of the army. And if you lose the battle away from your city, the equipment is lost. So the cost is quite high. On the other hand, the competitive replacement costs a lot less. The cost of troops as a product of what they add to your fighting level is a lot less. What does a T2 fighter cost? When you add it up, you get a rough average of 2k plus the hourly gold to support that troop. If you equip that troop with something made from elementals it costs well over 200k. And the bonus you get for that piece of equipment is only 24% max. So, instead of purchasing the equipment or the stuff to make the equipment, it's better to spend 2k on another soldier, put the remainin 198k into a fund to pay that solder and reap a doubling or your effective strength. Which is one reason elementals are not being bought and sold. The other reason has to do with the psychology of scarcity. If you have a one-of-a-kind postage stamp, even if nobody wants it, it's still perceived as valuable. The more rare the item the more it's value is perceived to be. Elementals are valuable because even though nobody wants to buy them, they are perceived to be valuable do to the difficulty of getting them. And since the market is not liquid, they appear to be, in spite of the devs view, rare. In the end players hoard things because they feel the things they are holding have a greater value in their stockpile than in the markets. I hold a few elementals myself. I intended to make some equipment out of them and did use a few, but once I determined the equipment wasn't worth the cost, I just stockpiled the remaining elementals. They are more valuable to me psychologically than pragmatically. And there is, again, why the elementals market is not liquid. To summarize: elementals are not moving because the demand for them resides in the psychology of hoarding rather in the practical use of them. As long as Illyites perceive owning elementals as more valuable than using them, they will go into the hubs and rest peacefully. And if you want to change that you have to change the practical value of them by greatly raising the benefits of using them Aj AJ |
Posted By: Brandmeister
Date Posted: 03 Feb 2015 at 03:02
|
There are no elementals in the Broken Lands. You seem to have confused Elementals (monster) with the Elemental Salts they drop when killed. We are not critiquing the market for elemental salts. I and others are literally saying that there seems to be a bug that caused elementals to stop spawning in stone circles. Some regions like Zanpur keep spawning new elementals like usual. Others like Laoshin appear to have been devoid of elementals for several months. This is annoying because we want to kill elementals and harvest the salts for crafting. |
Posted By: Samalander
Date Posted: 03 Feb 2015 at 05:55
| In keppen nobody seems to harvestt them but me. They spawn a couple of times a week. |
Posted By: ajqtrz
Date Posted: 04 Feb 2015 at 17:13
|
I stand corrected then. Being a rather new player I was not aware that there were monsters called "elementals" I guess they are rather scarce? Still, my "elemental salt" comments, while inappropriately placed, do have something to say. Thanks for the correction. AJ |
Posted By: Stukahh
Date Posted: 04 Feb 2015 at 18:29
Elemental salts are used in many of the crafting formulas. I think the fundamental issue is that they are a major bottleneck in SilverSteel weaponry production and most "warriors" have abandoned the idea of using crafted weapons in large quantities due to the cost/benefit relationship. What is the use of harvesting 300 SS a day from a mine when you cant get salts? Especially in the Broken Lands. Devs really need to rethink this dynamic.
|
Posted By: ajqtrz
Date Posted: 04 Feb 2015 at 18:53
Which is what my observation was -- because the cost/benefit relationship of the equipment that uses salts is out of whack, nobody uses the equipment...so nobody uses the salts...but they are viewed as valuable...which leads to the hoarding, which keeps their cost high. The only real viable solution is to either make the equipment more useful -- say the crafted stuff is automatically returned to the city from which it came -- or make it more useful in battle (say it doubles or triples the attack or defense of the troop using it). Either way changes the cost/benefit ratio and thus encourages the use of the salts and breaks the hoarding instinct...at least on paper. |
Posted By: Lotharblack
Date Posted: 04 Feb 2015 at 19:03
| Perhaps the time of elements is coming to an end and the rise of dragons is coming... |
Posted By: Brandmeister
Date Posted: 04 Feb 2015 at 19:24
| Somewhere on these forums we did the traditional marketing calculations for elemental salts (the old "How many barber shops are in the United States?" exercise). Long story short, if we killed every single elemental that spawned in Elgea, that might supply enough salts to craft all the Silversteel getting mined into swords and armor. Which is why the price of Silversteel crashed. I find it unbelievable that it sells at all, given the relative utility cost of an item relative to the cost of salts. |
Posted By: Brandmeister
Date Posted: 04 Feb 2015 at 19:50
| As an example, there is currently volume of 1600 for Earth elemental salts in Centrum. The total volume for the most useful salt type at the main trading location in Elgea wouldn't run my crafting queue for a week. You couldn't even equip a real army with the resulting gear. |
Posted By: Jejune
Date Posted: 04 Feb 2015 at 22:57
I blame Nixon. Richard M. Nixon. ------------- https://elgea.illyriad.co.uk/a/p/394156" rel="nofollow">  |
Posted By: Kalculas
Date Posted: 03 Mar 2015 at 06:50
| When I moved to Lan Larosh, I used to see Fire Elementals. I haven't seen any there in a long time. I haven't seen any elementals in The Broken Lands either. Long ago I also painstakingly recorded areas of sighted Air Elementals to determine their territory, and recently I saw them far out of their normal area. |
Posted By: Albatross
Date Posted: 03 Mar 2015 at 12:19
|
Speculation: is elemental spawning tied to any game stats? e.g. battle casualties? -------------  |
Posted By: Hora
Date Posted: 03 Mar 2015 at 13:03
|
...if that was the case, then extra battlestats would have to be calculated for each region, else there wouldn't be such big differences. In Turalia are some water elementals standing around, nor sure, if those are new, or just neglected...
|
Posted By: ajqtrz
Date Posted: 03 Mar 2015 at 23:52
|
Brandmeister is correct in my opinion. The relative cost of salts to the utility of what they can produce simply means that it is more expensive to use them than to keep them....so people keep them and don't use them. You can only change this equation if using them becomes more beneficial. Aj |
Posted By: Brandmeister
Date Posted: 04 Mar 2015 at 03:11
| Are people hoarding salts? I hadn't heard of that. |
Posted By: Albatross
Date Posted: 04 Mar 2015 at 09:37
|
I kept a couple of hundred back, in case of scarcity later. I was only thinking in terms of equipping commanders for me and my allies at that point. Now that amount looks small, as it has now become useful to equip ordinary units. ------------- |
Posted By: ajqtrz
Date Posted: 05 Mar 2015 at 21:06
|
Hoarding implies that they are keeping them for the sake of keeping them. Some may be doing so, but I think generally speaking, most aren't selling them because few are buying them because there is nor way to use them that makes economical sense. With the changes instituted lately this may change. AJ |
Posted By: Gon_
Date Posted: 05 Mar 2015 at 22:24
|
I think there is an issue with how they are respawning. My cities in Kumala see zero elemental spawns where they once spawned often. However 240 squares away in Azura my single city over there may kill 6-10 groups of elementals each week. |
Posted By: Brandmeister
Date Posted: 05 Mar 2015 at 23:48
| I think most people aren't selling them because they use the salts for their own crafting. |
Posted By: Epidemic
Date Posted: 06 Mar 2015 at 02:35
|
Earth elementals used to constantly spawns near half my cities in Ragallon. I haven't been active in quite awhile, but whenever I do check the maps I don't see them anymore. What did the devs do to them! Elementals went missing around the same time the fog encircled several cities, coincidence? |
Posted By: Count Rupert
Date Posted: 06 Mar 2015 at 03:07
| Coincidence. The elementals in Laoshin have been missing well before the fog. |
Posted By: Llannedd
Date Posted: 06 Mar 2015 at 03:58
| They are all migrating to Broken Lands. |
Posted By: Gon_
Date Posted: 06 Mar 2015 at 04:21
| Water, Earth, and Air elementals will probably make it over there fine, but I don't think the Fire ones are very good swimmers. |
Posted By: Aurordan
Date Posted: 06 Mar 2015 at 05:07
| Season just changed, so it might be worth watching them for a bit. |
Posted By: Stukahh
Date Posted: 06 Mar 2015 at 16:29
|
When I was Sir Bradly, there use to be only water elementals in Arran. After the big war and the launch of BL there was a massive shift in their distribution patterns. Now, Arran is loaded with all 4 types of Elementals. If you scan the map you will see the southern areas seem to have an abundance of them. The locations where the biggest pvp battles were fought seem to be the highest concentration of Elementals. Is it possible they are spawning where the largest battles were in the war? Could explain why Arran, Tallimar and Azura are loaded while the northern regions seem to have nothing. Just a theory... ------------- I don't always drink. But when I do, I prefer the blood of my enemies. |
Posted By: Aurordan
Date Posted: 06 Mar 2015 at 18:28
|
That would make a lot of sense, actually. They did spawn on "battle sites" for the first tournament with elementals. For reference: http://forum.illyriad.co.uk/main-elementals-rise-from-main-battle-sites_topic2038.html
|
Posted By: Brandmeister
Date Posted: 06 Mar 2015 at 19:21
| I would suspect that it has more to do with the frequency with which they are hunted in each region, or even each circle. |
Posted By: abstractdream
Date Posted: 06 Mar 2015 at 20:20
|
DISCLAIMER: I'm not good with this stuff and I'm lazy, so... Anyway, seems like someone could make a Google doc for players to log elemental sightings, and then after a few months, turn it into a map. If there was a new map, say...every 60 days, the migrations could be tracked. Honestly, I've no clue how much work that'd be but the part about entering the coordinates shouldn't be too much trouble, so participation could be good. If someone already suggested this, nevermind... ------------- |
Posted By: Count Rupert
Date Posted: 06 Mar 2015 at 21:28
Elementals don't migrate though. Once they spawn, they remain in the same tile until they die. It what has made them easy to hunt from even hundreds of squares away.
|