Controversy of Refractive Crystal acquisition

[Pantafernando]

Honestly, surprises me some actions taken by SE. This one in particular, i just can see harmful potential, not a single benefit.

And im not saying about the advent of refractive crystals, but inserting it in unity content as well as an option to purchase it with accolades.

The correct way to implement those items would be adding them as coffer drop from incursion itself. Doing this, instead reducing the interest in incursion, would in fact increase, as incursion, besides capes, would be a gil farming place, and would incentivate high lv incursion (more hq coffer, more crystals, more cash).

Instead, adding it in unity not just drop interest of incursion, but also drop interest in unity (instead doing nms for maybe cash drops like mats, some vould prefer burning in fast, garanteed cash from crystals). Finally, its a change that totally favor... Botters, yeah. Casual player would nebver go out of his way to farm accolades, and the accolades gain rate is stupid, there is just no point in burning in crystals if you farm it like normal people, you will need them to do nms. Only people that can profit with such crystals that are stupdly overpriced (accolade-wise) are botters that swin in accolades/sparks/cp.

Seriously.

[Hoshi]

It may favor botters but SE has gone out of its way to ban botters lately. I feel like the biggest impact is on the cost of the refractive crystal. If people are going to not do unity NMs and use their accolades on crystals instead then the crystal has to fetch a high price because a stack of upgrade materials from unity NMs is usually 400k+ and you tend to get a stack and a half of upgrade mats from 50k accolades. That might be incentive to do incursion though. My linkshell can do a gramk run in about 10 minutes and at the level we are on now gramk drops 10-11 coffers or hq coffers. No guarantee on what job cape you'll get but a lot of capes for sure.

[Stompa]

I'm glad they made these crystals available with unity accolades. Not everybody has a linkshell that spams incursion, not everybody is online when there are incursion shouts.

During double-accolade event, it wasn't difficult to get 15k accolades while just farming Jobpoints in an evening, and doing a couple of the Unity-specific ROEs.

I was exchanging accolades for keys, to try and get lucky treasure from the goblin, but I kept getting onions and stuff. So I'm glad I can now spend my 15k accolades on augment re-rolls for my Jse capes instead of just getting onions from the goblin lol.

[Alhanelem]

Since this lets you add augments to unaugmented capes (in addition to redoing them) that can be obtained outside of incursion, I think it makes plenty of sense for them to have a non-incursion aquisition method.

[Olor]

Yeah I like this change. Since crystals drop from unity boxes (I hear) it also gives incentive for people to do unity even if they are meh on the equipment or have it already. No one was really doing pick up group incursion on my server when I was playing so I've only done it once...

[Pantafernando]

Just for the record, i did the bird in cape terigan lots of times to get marin. I opened about 50 coffers and just one crystal poped, so, dont get your hopes too high that you can reasonably get them by nms.

And thats exactly the point: why people wasnt doing incursion? Because the reward isnt attractive to majority of players: capes, cp, not impressive gear and random cash, aside incursion is the hardest event nowaday, and most players just decided to skip it.

If every lv130+ incursion could have chance for 2 crystals or 800k profit, most people would go to incursion. Instead, they prefer to skip it.

Incursion is a fine event just lame now there is so little reason to spam it.

[Artharian]

As Stompa says:

Not everybody has a linkshell that spams incursion, not everybody is online when there are incursion shouts.

This is giving me the chance to keep trying, at my own pace, for the SMN cape I want :-)

Art.

[Shirai]

Incursion is a fine event just lame now there is so little reason to spam it.

Incursion did a fine job as filler, nothing more. The idea is nice, but the execution was terrible.
Incursion exclusive drops are about as abundant as crystals on exp mobs and everyone is able to get almost everything from there in a mere hand full of runs.
The only reason to keep doing Incursion is augmented capes or Job Points, and the first gets boring and frustrating really fast.
Especially since the reward quality doesn't scale up with the levels, you just end up with more coffers of mainly NPCable crap and disappointment.

It would have been nice to see higher level Incursions guarantee a minimum value on augments, but no; After beating a level 135 Gramk you finally see a Conveyance cape drop from a coffer, excitedly you check the augments and you see...

...

....

......

Summoning Magic skill +1
/toss

[dasva]

This is why they also upped cape droprates in incursion but gave people who aren't able to do that all the time a way to farm them. Though really it's not all that effect. Takes forever to farm up 15k accolades and as mentioned droprate from wanted kind of sucks. This more just gives people another option and a reason to use accolades. Most people I know often find themselves capped and staying capped most the time just because so few wanted battles and the only gil converter takes so long to do you might as well go farm something else for gil than convert the accolades you already have

[Monchat]

I didnt see any difference on cape drop rates honestly lol.