Competition Gold Rush 2015 - Hunting Division

It was good in the beginning, but then receded considerably. Even in the lowest category this is very palpable. Additionally, markups for bread-and-butter materials such as muscle oil have taken a nose-dive probably due to overabundance. It is not worth any longer to ship to Calypso, nor is it possible within a budget to stack up and hold everything over the entire event hoping it might get better again. So you are forced to tt nearly everything.

 

It seems to be as though the event needs to be reworked to be more favorable for everyone. I understand it cannot be a win every time. At the same time how can so many players be having such negative feedback about it and the owners still expect it to do well? Isn't this universe built on the 90% natural return rate + the 10% MU from sales and crafting? "Supposedly?!" So how will just giving basic items and flooding the market with them make the return worth it?

It just seems counter productive.

 

It's a lot closer to 95%+ but people who are doing well don't post.

 

It is better in the instance than outside. Intensity is higher and the motivation to not quit or wait out a downswing, hence the cost to play increases. This was expected, I am not unhappy. The market effects were not expected to be so strong, and it can only be beneficial to point it out for future consideration.

 

I haven't been tracking my returns in Cat 4 since I hunt for fun, reserving tracking and analysis for my crafting business. I can say I've been enjoying myself and been getting lots of globals and hofs. So yay for the gold rush experience.

Given I know my dps and how long I will need to hunt for I have a pretty good idea of how much Peds I will need to cycle. I am able to sell the oils at some MU but of course I am looting faster than I can sell so I need to be able to cope with paying for my hunt up front and recouping costs later. This is hardly a surprise as that's the way event loot always work. Everyone should have been able to work out their budget and choose a category to fit that budget or choose not to compete.

Apart from the oils I've also looted:
- one small esi that I will sell on caly later
- an arsonistic chip that I used
- L scopes and sights that I use to build on the awesome skilling within the instance
- a small number of high level axes that I TT'd as very few people have high level melee skills so there is no market for them.

I would have liked to have seen some pirons drop but it was not to be.

For the biggest benefit from the instances apart from the fun factor, is the skilling. I am gaining A10 5mg (100% skill for 5 hours) pills faster than I can use them, and the impact on my skill gain is immense. I've gained a level in my main profession, 2 hitpoints and a couple of thousand skill points. And I am at the point where skill gain is normally quite slow. My goal to get to 300k skills this year has become very achievable thanks to these pills. And the evade missions are nice too. Have finished cat 4 mission once so far, to get to lvl 45 evade and I expect to finish it once more before I complete the minimum hours requirement. I think the evade missions are a nice touch.

Realistically its going to require those rare 5k tokens to have a chance at a prize but there are other reason to do the instance. And if you don't care about the prize then you don't need to do the full 65 hours. Just hunt for as long as you have budget and are enjoying yourself.

 

Loot downswings do happen , i am down 1k after last nights hunt , just have to keep going and hope you will bounce back until the ped card is dry

 

I love the skillpills and a nice mission reward in the evade given, really nice additions for all competitors!

As a constructive critiscism Id like some change, 2 hours is a nice size of instance but no bosses or change in anything just flat sand and same mobs becomes sligtly "booring".

Great event and best of luck to all participants!!

 

So came out to Ark to check out what Gold Rush is all about. After couple hours and loot being damn heavy started using Pitbull inside a Cat3 instance to store loot. I noticed there was no storage in the instance and when you clicked recall vehicle the pitbull would just go back to my inventory instead of storage on the planet, i thought ok no biggie ill just leave it spawned. Exited the instance, clicked recall vehicles. Pitbull is NOWHERE to be found. I relogged, checked storage, checked underground storage, its gone along with alot of loot that was in it. Checked the Website to see where the pitbull is, it is NOT even shown unde my items anymore. The instance ate my damn pitbull and close to 1000ped of loot. This has got to be a joke. Has any1 else tried leaving vehicles in an instance just to store loot to recall later and the vehicle dissapeared?

Im going to bed now maybe give the system sometime to figure itself out otherwise tomorrow morning ill be opening a support ticket for ARK Gold Rush instance category 3 literally eating my pitbull along with loot left in it. Sure hope i wont have to do that when i wake up.

"Correction" so now i dont see the pitbull still under items, however stuff that was in pitbull is showing in my items, but it does not have anything listed under "container" as usuaully will say storage/vehicle/what planet etc).

 

Your Pitbull has been sacrificed to lootius , shall never be forgoten

 

Please forgive the silly question, but the time within the instances, if I leave early, is only the time I spent counted? Or is this notched up to the 2 hours mark for each instance?

Cheers,
{aB;}

 

Well its a great suggestion but if someone is trying to max dps in an instance that is 2 HOURS long, has NO storage and drops tons of heavy loot such as hides. One would think using a vehicle as storage is pretty much the only thing that makes sense, since vehicle are made spawnable inside the instance, which i found odd but at the same a welcoming surprise when i saw that. Little did i know

The fear of not getting my vehicle back after exiting the instance SHOULD NOT be an issue, if the vehicle is allowed to be spawned in there, thats simply a coding mistake am i not correct to assume this? Sorry if i sound frustrated but im missing aproximately 840ped of loot and a pitbull still, thats my lovely first impression of gold rush The loot shows under my items on the webside however under "container" it is blank when it would say storage/vehicle/planet/etc. So it says i have that loot but i actually dont.

Good times, support ticket here i come. Whats frustrating is it seems my support tickets can go on for months w/o a reply.

I guess my biggest dissapointment is that this kind of thing wasnt tested before launching an event of this large scale. If vehicles are allowed in an instance, shouldnt it be checked where a vehicle ends up if one crashes or exits w/o recalling a vehicle on accident first?

Now i will likely not see this loot and a vehicle for weeks if not months

 

Hope everything works out. I usually just stagger around the instance when I am fully encumbered as I don't actually need to move much to target the mobs. When I am shooting a mob I check to see if any others are close enough to be in range next. If not then i start backing towards the nearest group while I am shooting the current mob. Once I get out of the instance I pull out my refiner and take care of the oodles of hides and wool so that I can run to storage and offload.

 

Well ofcourse i can do the same now that i know one shouldnt dare to store loot in a vehicle inside an instance. I was just trying to store heavy loot in a vehicle and continue hunting not being overweight as i often do with heavy loot, using a pitbull as storage. This seemed to be an efficient and simple way, until this happened.

 

I've been doing fine with TT returns, better than the 90% I expected with the size of the mob in category 4... even if I don't count the big hof I had at the start. I'm getting a lot of armor and fap decay, which is completely expected at my evader level and relatively low dps, but the 2x skilling is worth it.

 

I thought i should try it out a bit atleast, so i entered the cat 4 instance and started shooting after a few mobs maybe 5-6 i ctd and now i cant ewen logg in to the game lol ;p
Owell i se if i can manage to solve it somehow hehe

 

I'm just about breaking even in cat 1 which is fine for me as 38 hours in I have picked up 11k in skill points, the only problem is not being able to sell the loot fast enough as people have said, loot has been bad the last couple of day and I bet this weekend is more of the same.

Hopefully it will pick up again....

 

After i lowered my graphic settings i managed to stay in and finnish my first run in cat 4, and i did actually profit a bit to so all good now

 

Haven't you been around long enough to know MA is in control of the loot balance and not the planet partner?

And stolen?? please.......

 

Two times out of all incidents when I got disconnected I was taken back right inside the instance after logging in again, and even the mob counter was still correct after finishing. So there was no reset. At first I thought it might work if you're fast enough coming back so the system thinks you're still logged in, but then this would cause an error upon logging in and you're forced to wait. There definitely must be a window where you can end up in an undefined or unintended state.

Also with the vehicle, it must be an oversight that it can end up with no defined container in inventory upon getting interrupted. It is counterintuitive to recommend not using them when spawning is enabled, and the described usage is perfectly plausible and would be a loss if taken away. It seems to me that these things belong in a bug report to MA rather than the planet partner, but I have no comparable experience with other planets' instance events (meaning I just never played them long enough).

Returns have picked up again somewhat after the previous report when I had doubts if I had the financial stamina to make the qualifying number of hours at all. As noted, it is definitely better inside the instance than outside. It would have been more expensive to continue grinding everyday missions through the downswing, the difference is that there is no deadline pressure. I have my 65 hours now and it ended up costing roughly what has been suggested since long, i.e. on average you pay about $1 an hour for the privilege to participate here.

At any rate (@ helena et al), accusations such as stealing or racketeering are unfounded and don't do justice to those who create this complex virtual world for you. It is your free choice to enter or not, to spend as much or as little as you want in it. If you have no control over your playing habits, then you probably should not hold a credit card at all. We can grief over the cost sometimes (I do), but there is a line. (If you can find me a lawyer for $56 an hour, I might like to talk to you.)