Syndicate Shops and Tokens: Details for Live Patch 3
Greetings Nians!
Live patch 3 brings many changes, most notably the Robot Painting System.
Because this is a big addition to the Syndicate Shop’s selection of goods, we also took this opportunity to reconsider and re-balance some existing item pricing and provide new, improved, ways for players to access more and different content.
Token Sources
Because of the way the world is structured, the way Tokens from assignments work, the potential sources for Tokens follows this model:
Essentially, faction tokens are a PVP-good, which gives them a little more value than what one could achieve running alpha assignments, because of the inherent risk on Beta. Many have found lucrative ways to stealthily run assignments, and that’s great! A player does not need to conquer an island, or event an outpost to access these goods. However, to allow Alpha-players to get factional-tokens for goods sold at the Public Beta Terminals, and for Beta-runners to still have some reasonable way to get universal tokens. We have introduced the Token Exchanges!
Token Exchanges
Instead of these sources being completely exclusive, and relying purely on sandbox economic forces to get tokens flowing across borders, the Token Exchange provides a way for players to access this content.
An important point to remember is that using the Token Exchange, there is inherent loss. One would be more efficient using trading, the market, or running the assignments, to get the other Token-type. As a baseline, we introduce these Exchanges to allow players to have reasonably balanced access to goods, where the trade-off is increased cost to balance against the removal of risk.
The Token Exchanges are located on alpha-only. Hershfield Main, and Thruhold-Markson Alpha (TMA) Terminals host the Universal-to-factional exchanges. The 3 outposts on New Virginia, Bellicha, Lenworth, and Cadavaria host each of the factional-to-the-rest exchanges. We had to disperse these orders among different shops because of a technical detail in the client that prevented the same item to be bought with two different pricing models or orders. However, it follows nicely with the local NPC’s that have invaded those corners of New Virginia. We hope this may give New Virginian residents hints to where they may find different NPC-factions to shoot.
New and Updated Syndicate Shop orders
Furthermore we reduced the pricing of ALL AMMO on syndicates shops by half on the NIC price. These “PVP” ammos were underutilized through Syndicate Shop purchases. Players often opted to use what they obtain through SAP loot, artifact loot, high-end NPC loot etc. This includes the “advanced” scanner charges.
Also to further spice up the Robot Paint idea. The Paint items are seeded on the Syndicate Shops for NIC-only on Alpha, and for Tokens-only on Beta. The mixture of the factional Tokens required for a paint is determined by the RGB ratio of the color, using each of the faction-Tokens to represent amounts of Red, Green and Blue. So if you find yourself with a surplus of Tokens but need the NIC, one may opt to purchase their paints using this method instead!
Providing players more choice, and multiple ways to access and explore the content in the game, while maintaining a health economy is a tricky balance, but we hope these changes will move all of this in the right direction, and help us prepare for even more changes down the road.
We are excited to deliver these changes in the next patch today, and hope to see all of you enjoying the new content!
Thank you again for all of your support!
Many of these changes and features were direct requests from the community. Your support and feedback is a vital component to improving the game and helping it grow. We can not thank you all enough for the thoughtful suggestions and requests.
Here is to today’s patch, and many more to come!
-The OP Team