I have to say, Krin.... I am definitely disappointed with the caps. It seems that the amounts are too low. Yes, I like to try and save some of the materials for the next level. Right now... especially materials for reforging. It is understandable that you are trying to slow down some of the hoarding, but it feels like more a punishment to people who spend lots of time grinding in the Grove.

What are the Tier 4 items? Does this include smelted ore? And Tier 3? I mean does it include items we can hardly use yet? Like the enigmatic shards?

This cap just put a level of frustration that I don't think we deserved. I am fine working hard to get levels and rankings up as we get farther in the game.... but I don't know, I just feel this was too much, taking away something that didn't need to be.

What... what was even the point of me grinding out hundreds or thousands of materials if the cap is so low for everything except branches. I stockpile stuff like bottles/traps in case of a post-butt-whooping or particularly stubborn pet ._. And now I'm forced to spend all my excess instead, and am stuck with bare-bones "backup materials." With a new, lower cap, I feel like that's just punishing the amount of time players have spent getting these materials and wasting their efforts. My issue isn't that the cap for tier 2+ isn't also 9999, it's that the higher tier materials' cap is barely 10% of the previous tier, and that feels unnecessarily low.

What would you all want the caps to be set to then?

I did not want the caps to be infinite/9999 because when the exchange is eventually added... if you all have tens of thousands of junk mats - it'd either make the exchange incredibly broken OP or I'd have to make it incredibly daunting to use. I figured the easiest and best way to address this would be to prevent massive stockpiles of the 'junk' mats.

I am not trying to make things difficult or frustrating and am sorry if the change made it appear as such. I am just trying to prevent the more prestigious things from becoming trivial.

As a quick example that I ran through in my head...

Say the exchange is eventually added and you can turn... idk, 100 bottles into a Crystal. If the cap is at 1,000, then a player can at most save up to get 10 Crystals just through bottles alone. However, if the cap is 9,999, then they could get 100 Crystals just through bottles alone. Spread this across all the Tier 2 mats (Sylesti stuff, Nets, etc), you'd basically have infinite of whatever you wanted if you hoarded all your mats just for the exchange. This is literally exactly what I don't want any player doing.

Item limits are absolutely nothing new to gaming and, quite honestly, we are incredibly lenient with stack caps. But they serve a very important purpose in any game no matter what the item is. As developers, we want you to use your items - not hoard them until the end of time for when we add something new to use them on and you have so much hoarded you essentially just break that new feature we just added with your hoards. And that is what I am trying to avoid w/ the stack caps.

I want you to be using the Worn Tomes, the Sylesti items, the Bottles, etc on the features available. I don't want everyone just hoarding waiting for some feature to be added down the road that gives an alternate use for them. I don't want to incentivize item hoarding - it's not good for the game.


So to just ask again, which items are the concern here? Just bottles and nets? And what would be a good cap for them with my above concern taken into consideration?

To reiterate, I'm not upset that there is a cap, just that the cap is very low. If it were even 50% (not 10%) of the previous tier, I'd be much happier. Or even taking the user(s) with the highest material count for that tier, rounding up to the nearest thousand, and making that the cap (not sure what that is, though).

My main concern for materials at this time are bottles and traps, but mostly because I've gone far past the cap of 1k and am being forced to spend them on potions/traps that I'll likely not use, as I'm waiting for the next tier of them to become available. There was mention of an item exchange, which sounds great, but combined with the prices on, say, high-tier grove elixirs (whatever they turn out to be), I worry about a shortage or extra frustration with buying + trading, then having to go out and grind for hours to be able to afford things again. Just preliminary thoughts, may add more later.

I mean, atm, 1,000 bottles/nets would yield you 125 Exceptional Elixirs and 83 Exceptional Traps. Even with the cap at 1,000, that's a lot to start off with on just pure free (0 gold cost) consumables. A player would essentially be set for a decent amount of time with that stockpile alone without having spent a single gold coin.

The Bottles and Nets are meant to be solid crutch for Grove consumables - but they are not meant to be the only way players obtain their consumables.

At this point in time, only 5 players are at or above 1,000 Bottles and 4 more players at or above 800.


Let me put it in a different way maybe.

The free 125 Exceptional Elixirs come out to 2,000,000 Gold worth for free. The 83 Exceptional Traps also come out to 2,000,000 Gold worth for free. That is 4,000,000 Gold those who capped out will save. That's a very significant amount of Gold to save.

I don't think that a cap of 1,000 is by any means insignificant.


Edit: I will raise the cap for Bottles, Nets, Iron Ore, and Mountain's Heart to 1,500. That would allow for 6,000,000 Gold worth of 100% free consumables to be hoarded. I think that is extremely valuable.

"The free 125 Exceptional Elixirs come out to 2,000,000 Gold worth for free. The 83 Exceptional Traps also come out to 2,000,000 Gold worth for free. That is 4,000,000 Gold those who capped out will save. That's a very significant amount of Gold to save."

How did you get this figure, by chance?

An Exceptional Grove Elixir is not tradeable to so we can only sell it to the site for 750 gold. 750 x 125 = 93750 which is way below 2 mil. Exceptional Traps you cannot even sell.

You cannot make gold from these... at least not in any significant way. As far as I'm concerned, buying them at such exorbitant prices with gold from the trading post is a shortcut and a gold sink. I'd rather buy them using my time. My gold all goes elsewhere.

p.s. Putting effort in =/= free

I used their price from the Trading Post that you save by getting them for free via Bottles/Nets. In any other area of Sylestia, any consumable costs Gold. The Lost Grove lets you get them for free by dropping Bottles/Nets that can be exchanged for free consumables with a one time price of building the Trading Post/upgrading it to unlock the higher tier consumables.

I could have just let it function the same and force everyone to either pay Gold or go without consumables but I wanted to give players who spend time going about TLG doing battles a way to turn that time into free consumables - amongst other things.