Ever since the initial launch, OrbusVR has been a small community. As of late, the community has been growing larger as more people get locked into their houses and revert to VR for socializing. Before this occurrence, the community was small enough that everything was at least stable. However, growing communities consume many more resources. Due to the increase in players, resources such as obsidian have become nearly impossible to obtain from the cave. This is not only because of a large surge of players, but also because of overpowered players exploiting the economy. With everyone locked indoors, people have been able to commit countless hours of time to the game. Some of these players even go as far as working to harvest each and every piece of obsidian from the mines to pawn it off to Mishka who has been employing people to ransack the mines dry all day long. Since obsidian takes so long to respawn and only spawns in small quantities, his 4+ players have been able to harvest so much that nobody can get some during the active hours. From watching a surveillance account that I streamed to my phone, I have watched players pass through the mines about every 7 minutes on average.
Before you say, “you can just camp it yourself,” you actually can’t unless you want to spend a many hours standing in the same cave. This is because there’s less than 8 veins of obsidian and each one takes about 20+ minutes to respawn. With the constant flow of other people camping it, it is near impossible to harvest enough for quests like Luxury Mount III (LM3). As for new players trying to complete the Essence Miner quest line (EMQ), obtaining obsidian for the single quest will take hours of persistent camping for the single quest.
Some people have argued that you can just buy it from Mishka as he resells it for even more than he buys it. First off, I don’t support monopolies and neither should anyone else. Second off, he sells them for 1000 dram a piece. That’s 2 of your daily quests spent on a single piece of a resource that you should’ve been able to harvest yourself. Considering these quests take quite a few pieces of obsidian, with the LM3 quest requiring 60, that’s more dram than your dailies will cover for the EMQ and a couple weeks worth of dram for the LM3 all going to the same multimillionaire who is monopolizing on hard to obtain resources. Players shouldn’t have to spend all their hard earned savings from weeks of work on a single resource. And with how much other quest items cost, with the most expensive being Salmon Accent Dye at 10.000 dram a piece, most players can’t afford to blow 60.000 on obsidian.
Fixing this problem shouldn’t be too hard and most likely won’t take too much time to resolve itself once enacted. The first and easiest solution I can see is making obsidian spawn much faster. From my surveillance that I’ve been watching for over an hour, I’ve only seen the same vein spawn twice, so my assumption is it takes closer to 30 minutes for a single piece of obsidian to respawn, though others have said they estimate 20 minutes. Speeding this time up to 7-10 minutes (3 times the respawn rate) should make it abundant enough that players can obtain obsidian despite Mishka’s minions hogging all the obsidian. A second alternative is adding more veins; although, this does not seem like it’d be as effective as the minions would just be harvesting more per respawn period while new players would just have to get lucky and walk in on that period.
On another note, anyone opposing Mishka has a chance to be killed by his minions. While surveying the caves, one of his minions was using other monsters to attack me despite me not being in pvp. He then proceeded to block my shots, so I couldn’t defend myself. I’ll touch up on this in a later report.
