Obviously having an easier time socketing gems must be rewarding and less stressfull, but I am thinking long term effects on the game due to the change in mechanics around the gems and honor, also I think it is a big acomplishment to get all the gems or even 3 gems in but it wont be much later on if there is no risk.
Everyone here is thinking about the long term effects on the game. What most of us are trying to prevent is the subsequent death of the server due to inactivity because no one can progress through the RNG system. This is the problem I'm not sure you understand. The honor gem system has an upward cap based on the grade of your gear. Empty slots in gear is potential power that is still laying on the table.
Those who have fully gemmed their gear are at the cap. Most of the server are nowhere near the cap due to RNG. Most of the server will never be fully gemmed because they'll stop trying or quit out of frustration.
When you have a system that is so cancerous as to make people leave in droves, something needs to be done. This system was fixed by the original developer years later, after they allowed this and a few other things to nearly kill their game off. It's because they didn't listen to the players, the people who actually play the game.
Thought many love to pvp for the sake of it we have to admit that one important reason to pvp is getting honor so we can have a try to get that extra gem and get that extra pvp edge, we will be removing that need to farm honor through pvp if the gems are made too easy, I think that will actually mean less pvp, some coudl say that people with more gems will go out and pvp more because they have more gems, I dont think that will be the case.
People don't need a currency incentive to pvp. Look at shooter games. Battlefield series, Call of Duty series, Quake, and others. These are very popular without the need of a convoluted RNG progression system, and they have shown year after year that pvp itself is reason enough to play for long periods of time.
ArcheAge is an MMO so progression systems are expected if not desired, but needing a currency isn't a prerequisite for players to want to pvp. In fact, requiring people to break pvp operations in order to do honor events to see if they can beat the RNG machine for one more gem is hurting pvp more than it is helping it. I don't mind the events and I'm glad that they're double honor, but feeling obligated to go every time because you are pretty sure the RNG is going to fuck you next time you try to progress shouldn't be the feeling you get from going to events. It should be, "cool, I have a good chance if I try one more time to progress, and if I don't succeed, it doesn't totally destroy my soul."
Is it punishing? yes, but so it is easy to farm honor and the gems socketing is not that extreme just to be mean, but to sustain the flow of honor in the game that otherwise would flood it, already said it but consumables wont make up for all the honor saved, but that is just my thought, maybe someone can prove that in the end players wont be sitting on stockpiles of honor, consumables and mounts.
They'll still break. It just won't break everything, if we go with the idea that seems to have the most traction. Someone quoted 40-50k honor to fully gem something, on average. Pants, shirt, weapon, at the minimum, would be about 120k honor unless you got lucky. You get 2k honor for your faction events per day. Someone who can make all of the events like clockwork would be able to, on average, fully gem those 3 pieces after about 2 months of play. It's not guaranteed, but that's what the average works out to, roughly.
So what do they do after that? Well, there are several other pieces that you can add gems to. To be honest, it would take someone not swiping a better part of a year to gear up enough in the first place to have something worth gemming. So there's that.
If you're afraid that people won't still go to GR and CR, well, that's one of the easiest sources of boss kills in the game. It comes around like clockwork, and everyone needs boss kills for their dailies. These events could easily survive on that virtue alone without the honor system.
As far as mounts, gliders, and such are concerned, 625 loyalty is ridiculous for this stuff. You get 3 a day, and you get a bonus of 2 every few days. We've already played Trion servers to grind that hard for everything.
Aside from that, who does it hurt more? The player who wants an item and can't get it or the player who has the item and doesn't want others to have it? The ones who have these things and don't want others to get them, well, fuck them, to be honest. My having a pegasus doesn't hurt their enjoyment of the game one bit. And if someone is butthurt that they're not the only ones who get to ride the pegasus around Marianople, I really don't care.
The honor system is much the same. People who are struggling to achieve their goals, whether they're honor gems, mounts, companions, or whatever, will become frustrated. Failing to progress or achieve for a long enough period of time will cause them to quit. I'd rather see honor because abundant and less valuable because people are achieving their goals than to see it rise in value solely because goals are impossible to achieve. Because the latter means you're losing players, and MMOs require a substantial playerbase to function.
Look at Trion's servers. The extreme pay to win and RNG systems killed a vast majority of the playerbase. The company handling it poorly and ignoring the players caused the problems to get worse. Now, it's pretty much a ghost town on my old server. I logged in to liquidate my account and sell all of the gold and items. Mirage had one other player there while I was there during prime time. You check prime time on ArcheRage, and there are people everywhere.
But it won't stay like that forever if people have the constant frustrations that you experience on Trion's servers toward the end-game.
Edit: Also, what constitutes proper gems is subjective, we could also argue that proper gear will be full mythic ayanad and that this should be added as drops in coinspurses so we are not punished having to... play the game to get it, also new players would ahve a better chance at pvp, prove me wrong.
Because that's realistic and well-reasoned. Because everyone here thus far has screamed at the top of their lungs that everything should be easy and free? Is that all you got from this thread? If so, there's no helping you understand.
I would ask how much honor gemming you've actually done. Because the way you talk, you haven't barely scratched the surface of how frustrating it can be. If you haven't considered quitting (or actually quit) because of honor gems, you haven't done it enough.
