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At the current rate, aethersparks were quickly losing value. This was due to the amount being earned was much higher than the amount being used.
The plan for aethersparkes was for them to be an optional premium currency purchase. The goal was to make sure that players could always progress, but if they wanted to speed up the process, they could. At the rate the economy was going, they would have been meaningless before long.
As with all f2p games, we'll always have avenues for players to spend if they so desire, but it's our goal to make sure that it's never mandatory and always fair.
I hope this adds some clarity :D
They don't mean that it is optional for progression but that paying for it is optional. Clearly it is a system that only has the purpose to add a layer of annoyance that for some people will be enough to want to skip with money, it has no real value to the gameplay or reforging loop other than that. So of course it is about getting more players to fork out cash just like with the poorly designed rumor quests.
Sorry, edited to clarify. The purchase is the optional part!
Just to chime in here and give more context around the decision to reduce Aethersparks. The main reason we made this change was because we noticed that overall, the amount of Aethersparks in the economy was growing over time, and many players had thousands of extra sparks (even before the Frostfall event) . That is not a sustainable state for our economy. All our currencies should have a healthy balance between the rate that you acquire them and the rate that you want to spend them. This is something we will monitor every patch, and we can make changes as often as we need to until we find the right balance. I will add, however, that it's also healthy for a game to distribute different rewards in different activities. We give Aethersparks in Hunting Grounds, Legendary materials in Escalation, Marks in Trials. We're not opposed to making changes to this model down the line if needed, but this kind of distribution encourages everyone to vary their activities, which keeps the game fresh and prevents boredom where a single activity is the most efficient way to play and players just farm that.
This new currency just went out a few weeks ago, and it'll take some time for things to settle and for us to find the right balance, so please bear with us while we tune it over time. If you are short on sparks, we encourage you to play more in the Hunting Grounds. We realize that a lot of you don't like playing with random players who may be low level, and that's something we are looking at and we've talked about adding level gating to all our activities, and we've also committed to bringing back private hunts in the near future. Unfortunately, we don't feel like we can wait for all these pieces to come in before modifying Aethersparks, since we'll be in a really bad economic state by then, so we decided to take this first step now. Please give the next patch a shot, and let us know what you think.