Tuesday, October 30, 2012

WAR's Single Currency Detailed

Intrepid developer Keaven freeman took to the forums and laid out their plans for unifying all of Warhammer Online's RvR currency into a single version called a War Crest.   There are at least 25 different RvR currencies, so unifying them seems like a great improvement.  On to the details!


The new War Crests:

* cover both Scenarios and ORvR 
* stack to 250, allowing you to carry 4k in your currency bag before they spill over into your main backpack 
* are bankable and destroyable, but cannot be traded or sold 
There will be money changer vendors to help convert any old currency you have into War Crests. There will, of course, be a conversation ratio you will have to keep in mind. Before I list those ratios, let me first give a little background on how we came up with them. 
Warpforged, though the highest valued coin in terms of the power level of what you can buy with it, down converts at 1-to-1 all the way to Officer. From there, you jump immediately to Recruit, changing each single Officer coin into 125 Recruits. We’ve taken the same philosophy with converting all coin to War Crests

He's got some nice charts showing the changes as well.  I'll leave those on the thread.

There is a big BUT with all of this.  The vendor pricing is being increased, in some cases by 5x.  Players were obviously concerned.  Keaven did start to address them in reply.

The goal for this was not to make it more difficult to get things, but to make the system less confusing. The vendor adjustments represent the intrinsic value of the old coin, in terms of difficulty in acquiring it. Since the new War Crest would be given out everywhere, it would have been irresponsible not to adjust the vendor prices to accommodate that new fact.

I can certainly understand why some players would be against the 5x price increase.  If they spend their spare currency on things like potions  it seems just like a flat out price increase since they only have the currency they need saved up.  On the other hand, a player like myself has a lot of lower level currency stored up and the price increase is not a big deal.

There is a middle ground here somewhere, as overall a single currency is a great change.  It just shouldn't punish players who spend their tokens as they get them.

There was also a concern over drop rates of War Crests, since the rates are pretty low for high end currencies at the moment.  Keaven addressed those concerns:


RvR currency given out as rewards will be swapped to the new War Crest. Currency drops off player kills will be scaled by your Tier – at least, this is the leading suggestion at this time. 
* T1 kills have a 5% chance to drop a War Crest 
* T2 kills have a 10% chance to drop a War Crest 
* T3 kills have a 15% chance to drop a War Crest 
* T4 kills have a 20% chance to drop a War Crest 
Keep in mind, you still need to win the loot roll in order to claim the dropped War Crest. Also, these numbers are just a starting point for conversation. I’m interested in hearing how you all feel about these figures, and what suggestions you may have.


I'm still pretty excited about this change.  Moving to a single currency makes things so much simpler and allows for some interesting additions to the game.

To help with the transition, I made a calculator:  http://www.arsenalofwar.com/warcalc