It is a lot easier to sweat now than ever.
...
Back in my day you had a jester D1 and you could hunt exo or daikiba and you had to walk everywhere.. uphill...
Kids don't know how good they have it these days
Ok, I understand that sweating is just a phase most people went through (if at all), and that memories are different because the sweating has changed many times. BUT a statement such as "easier now than ever"? Have I gone to pre-noob skill or something in my old age and for some crazy reason think it is harder now?
When I started.... I think the era of standing somehow out of hit range but within sweating range was already over (officially). I don't remember standing on the side of a spaceship or anything like that, but I do remember trapped mobs would take a bit of time to realise they were trapped and some people exploited this. There was also an issue on server borders at one point where the mobs refused to cross over, so they weren't technically trapped. MA responded.
Anyway, when I joined we already had the free tool and the "sweat beams". You could get up to 22? or 23? sweat per success. I forget when exactly mobs went dry but it wasn't originally the hp of the mob I think. I don't see not remembering exactly as a big problem - if someone can fill in my gaps, then fine. Some things you do remember reasonably well, however - and I know I had a time when I settled on something like 650 sweat per hour as one benchmark. It may have been sweating ambus at Nea's, so no walking backwards hoping for fruit to pop up, and no evade skill increases and such from often being hit. As my evade increased I lost focus less, so it became easier/faster to solo sweat. I sometimes chose to swunt and sometimes to drown my dried mob.
Over time the market price dropped and MA introduced the new success amounts tied to the mob hp. I still remember 80 hp from combibo young as an easy counter in my inventory. Sometimes I would pull even the last 1 sweat to keep my counter clean, other times I would kill/drown the combibo at 78 or so, a bit like in blackjack.
Fast forward to now. YES, it is possible to find mobs so slow you can back away from them without being hit or you can sweat in 'circles', but the rate per hour and the price per 1k are nothing like they used to be.
Thank you for reading if you have done. Maybe some find it interesting as "the way the game used to be". Anyway, sweating was something done solo and in groups - and there were buyers, some of whom paid a bit above average, some who wanted it cheaper. As far as I know it could never be auctioned, so no option of converting to crates like now, and there were no other planets where the sweat price varied.
(Also, not everything was uphill
. Once you had the tp the mobs were often really close, although the mobs at PA were further away than the swamp is now, ok. Also, five minutes of running was not much if you wished to sweat for say 2 hours or more... and back then you could actually outrun mobs once you had agility up a bit. I shouldn't forget that bit...)
Memories aside, what sort of system do we think MA should go for in a
revamp of the FREE-TO-PLAY concept?