Impossible to get Aurumns by Mark of Favours (MOF)

Secret World Legends General Discussion
21

It’s pretty evident how it works - very poorly. I think it was more of a reflection on a generally sorry state of the entire thing. With the evergrowing backlog it already takes several months of wait to get your Au order, which is realistically more than a random new player who checks out the game and even plays through the entire plotline will stay for.

Thankfully the RNG ripoff and scalping prices are combined with absolutely asinine premium itemisation that makes sure there’s absolutely nothing of value to spend Au on to make sure you don’t actually need any of that premium currency anyway.

22

It works like clockwork. You put in request and it gets fulfilled a number of weeks later. People do this on 8 alts all year long. Some people are sadly under the misapprehension that aurum needs to be listed on the left side of screen to be available.

The Aurum market is entirely player/community driven which will make it saturated and working slower when there is nothing new for a small playerbase to spend money; Yes.

The scalping prices some players try to sell items for is also a problem for people outside the community that does not have any friends that can provide them with sanely priced items. But also might create a false image of the availability and value of an item. There is a reason some items dont hit the market for years, Because people spit on the scalpers. They trade in other ways.

coincidently the scalpers are usually the same people I see complaining about aurum. The have the audacity to ask other people to spend real life money on the game so they dont have to spend real life money in the game.

Problem is for them that they have to play the game to get mof and then spend time to wait to convert to aurum. They dont play at all, just expect others to play the game and then stand around complaining about market speed

23

It works like a clockwork that runs 24 hours in 365 days instead. I look at it very plainly - can I get Au from exchange in reasonable time like I used to be able to 2 years ago when I could just log in and buy it immediately? No. Therefore system works poorly. Can it work better given it’s design? No. Does it matter to new people who want to buy Au for MoF? No. They have to wait.

As for scalping prices and RNG ripoff, I referred Au-only things like selling purifying catalysts, weapon page unlocks and AP/SP, agent boosters and weapon RNG lootboxes for Au by Funcom, so I’m not sure what all that tirade is all about.

The actual problem with the system is that there is not enough players to fuel the brainless Au demand system because there is nothing worthwhile to buy with either Au or MoF.

24

Do new players want to buy aurum for MoF? In my experience it’s usually the other way around.

The current market is great for a new player who wants to chip in a couple of coins in exchange for a bunch of Marks.

To an old player sitting on millions of Marks it makes very little difference if it takes two weeks or two months to exchange some of those for aurum.

I think we can all agree that there could be more to spend either currency on. But I disagree that the exchange is broken.

25

Aurum = Real money.

The complaint about aurum going slowly boils down to people complaining that “other players” do not spend real money on the game (because reason nothing to buy they dont already have) so that they; the person whining about aurum going slowly DO NOT have to spend real money in the game.

I as a player have no reason to feed into the players who want me to spend money so they dont have to. As I said above: What is awful is some peoples understanding of how the market works.

Its still common idea to believe that there need to be aurum available on left side for it to be moving. Yet at current slow 7 week turnaround its still 5300~ ish aurum moving every day for the people patient enough to just wait.

26

You touch on a very good point and I want to answer that.

First of all, I never claimed that the exchange was broken or any similar thing, and in a somewhat recent reddit thread that made a dubious claim that Funcom promised to sell Au on exchange for 300 mof from “developer supply” I very clearly stated that it 1) was never claimed by developers anywhere and 2) would be a pretty terrible idea for economy.

However. I disagree with the notion that current state of exchange is good for new players. It is, factually, very bad for new players vs the state of the exchange 2 years ago when we still had playerbase to have no PO backlog on AU at max price. A new player would be able to start playing the game and by the end of 1st month get a sprint upgrade fairly easily. Whereas now with the backlog it will take them a significant amount of time to get necessary Au.

There is an inherent problem with Exchange (or rather AU as currency) in that there is absolutely no reason to not convert all of the MoF you have into AU as soon as you can. Sure, I think that both of those currencies hold little value in endgame for anything other than cosmetics, but regardless, AU is a more liquid currency than MoF, you can buy anything in the game for AU and MoF has limited variety of goods.

Now it really becomes a problem when you have no reason not to put 12k AU PO all the time and “people who do it on 8 alts all year long” bloating the PO queue to high heaven, giving people who are already sitting on combined thousands of AU and billions of MoF even more AU on top of that before new people who just joined the game and can only put like 1k AU MoF PO.

The question then becomes “can the PO bloat be reduced?” Well, yes.

AU PO cap can be lowered
AU PO cap can be made account wide
AU total that you can obtain from exchange can be capped (so that you have to spend it before you can buy more)
AU PO’s on exchange that haven’t been fulfilled in a timeframe can be automatically cleared (so that people who are new or just have less characters have more windows of opportunity to place PO over people that “do this on 8 alts all year long”)

Am I asking for any of these changes or saying that these things should have been there from the very beginning? No. Funcom designed a system that worked decently well with big enough playerbase and once that dwindled they just never bothered to adjust the exchange to not screw over new players, in the same fashion they haven’t released any fixes to any of the bugs in 2 years.

Current sad state of exchange is not a result of malice or ill intent, but rather simple indifference.

27

Its not indifference its deliberately created this way so they can make money on a free to play game in the first place.

And think about this; if Funcom decides to interfere with artificially altering the value of already spent money from real players they would be lynched and probably sued or taken to court at the very least.

Its a player driven economy. thats it. They will not touch it. Simple as that.

There is also very specific ways aurum is “needed” to be spent in game.
bigger inventories that makes the game run slower for everyone the more people have big inventories.
Making Funcom have good reasons for trying to stop game from turning into a slideshow like TSW was.
There is only the 5th and 6th sprint speed that is needed Aurum for which hardly is necessary for the fist month of playing and is literally gamebreaking as you can just sprint from any enemy + will break any mission audio triggers with overlapping cuts when you run trough an area too quickly.
Creation of new characters that they naturally want some kind of brake for and some vanity.
its all stuff that the endgame player cares or should care about. NOT a new player trying to actually enjoy the game.
And if you are arguing that spending money in the item store purchasing cache keys and item upgrades to speedrun your character to E17 is a thing that people or Funcom wants you would be very wrong. Hence the login rewards at every event rewarding you to play. Its a way of cheating your way to the top and Funcom rightly put brakes on it. Only whales that spend absurd amount of money on game get anything out of it as it should be. Take their money if they dont want to play.
they did the same in TSW. There is a cap on MOP every week to avoid people speed-leveling their gear.

Everything in game gearwise can be purchased for mof or shards. you will be rewarded extra if you decide to play the game with third age fragments you can spend on vanity and if you decide to be patron for 3 months or more you get enough to finish museum if you so wish.
(In TSW they rewarded 3 month membership with a teleport we get free in this game btw)

Its not about bothering to do something. Its deliberately created this way.

28

How is any of that relevant to Au PO bloat and new players being at a distinct disadvantage over people with fat stacks of MoF when buying Au from exchange? I myself said that when the system was designed it worked fine as long as there was a playerbase to support it’s timely operation. Which is clearly no longer the case.

As for the intent with the monetization system in general - well, it evidently failed at it’s main goal - to make the game profitable, we could argue until cows come home whether selling the ingame equivalent of tapwater for a dozen of $/€ is a sound monetization strategy, the fact of it is that it failed miserably.

I find the fact that Funcom couldn’t design an inventory system that wouldn’t break the game’s UI performance and so they decided to monetize cap it to disincentivize people from having large inventories to be lowkey the most hilarious thing. I wasn’t even aware that was the case.

Just to be clear - I don’t think Au is needed for anything in the game at all. I spent around 2 thousand hours in game at sprint 4 just fine, and atm I’m sitting at thousands of AU with nothing to spend them on, so I hardly think that exchange, monetization or whatever is what they should be focusing on if there’s any kind of development time being put in at all.

29

How is any of that relevant to Au PO bloat and new players being at a distinct disadvantage over people with fat stacks of MoF when buying Au from exchange?

What are you talking about? The market is first come first person served. If a new person puts a tiny amount of mof on the market asking for aurum they get served exactly the same speed as any person putting a lot of mof on the market.

BUT WHY would a new person need aurum? And How is it a problem to understand that they wanna reward people that wants to spend money?

Again you do not get to mess with the value of the money I spent on the exchange just because YOU are cheap and dont want to spend money. We cant argue about it because there is nothing to argue about. The market works exactly as it was designed wether you like it or not does not change that . Its just a slow whine at this point and a few people that refuses to understand how it works.

the fact that some redditor thinks that funcom manipulates market is stupid af. I hear this from time to time despite the fact that people playing the game probably can tell you the name of the person that spent money that exact week.

30

Firstly, Wire suggested on discord not so long ago that “first come first serve” might not be the way the PO queue operates because they posted 2 POs on different characters back to back and had them fulfilled with a huge time gap, and to my knowledge there was no official dev word that it does indeed work that way.

Additionally, if we take your suggested number of 5k AU fulfilment per day and current backlog of around 280k AU, it shouldn’t be possible for my PO to be up for longer than 2 months, which it now definitely is.

But regadless of any of that, even if it works as you describe, having more characters and having more MoF will allow you to get AU faster from the exchange, that’s just how math works. You will get more AU because you can put higher PO. And high volume of already existing POs either pushes new player’s PO back if it’s live queue or diminishes their chances of getting it filled if it’s RNG

New players would need aurum for the same reason anyone else would need aurum? I have no idea why there’s any kind of difference between new and old players in needing AU.

Again, I’m not talking about buying AU for real money, I’m not saying they should add AU supply or do anything to AU supply at all.

All I’m talking about is spending MoF. Nobody’s arguing over changing value of AU. Existing exchange favours people with multiple alts and fat stacks of MoF that further hoard AU supply from people who could actually need it more. I’ve listed multiple ways that exchange could be made fairer without ever touching AU supply or price at all.

I feel like this conversation is starting to circle back, so I’ll just end it here. Thanks for sharing your opinion.

31

I’ve got 9 characters. I use the exchange on all of them. From what I can tell there definitely does seem to be a queue (or RNG just favours all of the ones that places on the same day or within a couple of days of each other randomly within a very short time frame which seems unlikely). I write down exactly what my listing is, on which characters, on which dates and which date they get fulfilled. The last order to get fulfilled was placed on the 8th of October and I claimed it on the 20th of November.
I had 2 other characters who placed orders on the 8th October and I also claimed their orders on the 20th of November.
This is the longest time span I have had to wait for any aurum order to get fulfilled since I started writing it down, which I started doing in April.

32

Oh and about the amount of aurum. Those 3 orders were 200-300 aurum each.

33

1: it Is first come first serve
2: Current wait time is around 7 weeks.

If you dont get your aurum in more then 2 months you did not leave it alone or you put in for less then 300 mof per aurum

Edit: I just realised you said backlog is 280k and its 255k for 300 aurum. If I add for 300+299+298 and 297 its 280k ish… If you think you can get cheaper aurum then 300 you are currently mistaken and there lies your entire problem

34

I’ve had as long as 6 months for transactions to pass through, and we even discussed the topic not long ago with Aeryl on discord… it seems pretty random though, especially that “first come first serve” theory of rifla_
Around that time of the chat I did a test, which comes to fruition recently:
Char. A, offer for 300 on the 29th of October
Char. B, offer for 300 on the 30th of October

The 7 weeks of wait time seems more or less accurate, it was actually 6 weeks in this case. The order however…
Char. B, sold edit: I mean bought yesterday, fully
Char. A (in theory, higher up in the queue) still has some of the offer, only a small amount was bought

Don’t have an explanation, just thought I throw in the wrench :slight_smile:

35

the 6-7 week wait is only for 300. 299 or less you can pretty much expect to be waiting forever. And I still see people listing for 295…sigh…so I expect people to be continually complaining about this for eternity

36

I don’t know why a newer buy order would be fulfilled over an older one, assuming that the offer price was the same.

Perhaps having a buy order partially fulfilled causes the rest of it to be bumped to the bottom of the queue (i.e. treating it like a new listing)? :woman_shrugging:

37

You must talk about buying aurum for cash, because people want aurum to spend it on features and items. If the market exists for a few trolls to hoard aurum then it is indeed pointless. New aurum must be minted with cash for the spice to flow. It’s never been a complicated problem.

“BUY AURUM!” — TRON

38

Update: second one is went through fully by today, which could indicate the pacing of the exchange
(maybe even more so if I were to log in more and longer, not just hop in and out for a check :smiley: )

So, now there’s two more offers up, again with 1 day between, just this time Char. B is ahead in the queue - will see in January if the order will hiccup again or it was just some disturbance in the Force. the Dream. The Song?

39

As others have said, it’s easy to get MoF by playing the game.

MoF is the currency for buying things from other players. There aren’t as many players now selling stuff in the AH. Probably because selling them to vendors for Anima Shards is of more benefit to them.

So there is no point in buying Aurums for the purpose of exchanging them for MoF. I am willing to buy Aurums, but not for MoF, because there is no reason for me to do so.