It all started with the 20th of August 2013 update and the following line:
“The amount of karma granted from consumable karma items has been increased. Karma boosts no longer affect the amount of karma gained from consumable items.”
It was weird because Arenanet had been following a very clear policy of communicating and explaining any changes to currency changes and its effects in the game economy.
Colin Johanson, the game director, immediately assumed Arenanet lack of communication and measures were swiftly implemented to not only revert the changes for a few days but also to reimburse players that used their karma the moment they saw the changes.
Awesome communication and reaction by Arenanet.
Interestingly a few days later the Karma rewards for daily and monthlies were reduced considerably, again with no warning.
Players were expecting the over 9000 karma per daily to be reduced to 6000 Karma per daily. But over 9000 (or 4200 pre buffed) to 600! That is 6% (buffed) and 14% (pre buffed) of the previous amount. The monthly was changed likewise. Dungeons also had their karma gains removed.
To this date (as far as I’m aware) no explanation or comment was made on this change.
But lets look at the story of Karma in the game.
Karma started as a currency that couldn’t be traded, representing personal time investment of the players in the game.
It also allowed players to gear up as they leveled and completed Dynamic Events – with no quests (aside the personal story) to give rewards, Karma/Heart/Renown vendors stepped in and exchanged the players Karma for useful rewards.
Then the first players arrived to Orr and found out the Exotic Armor vendors sold that armor for 42K a piece, while players that hoarded all the Karma they gained would be lucky to have enough for 1 or 2 pieces.
So to fully equip a single character, players would have to complete over 700 dynamic events in Orr.
This was during the first couple of weeks of the game and players complained about the grind required to reach max equipment.
So Arenanet introduced the jugs of liquid karma as part of the dailies and monthlies reward – this cut the time required to purchase an exotic armor piece considerably – now doing a monthly and the 30 dailies would give a player enough to buy 4 pieces, probably the 6 if he used boosts that could then increase the gain by up to 70% (karma booster, karma banner, +15% guild bonus). Note stuff like ice creams, karmic infusion and +10% banners were only introduced later.
This also had the benefit of allowing players to distribute their karma to alts or using alts to help main characters.
By this time getting exotic armor was fairly easy and many players were starting to leave the game due to “having nothing to work for and who cares about legendary weapons since there are already a few out” and so Arenanet released ascended items.
Karma became quite useless unless you wanted a legendary, so Arenanet released the Lost Orrian Jewelry Box.
This allowed players to effectively convert Karma into Gold and some rare drop materials.
More karma modifiers were introduced and with the achievement karma bonus it was possible to reach 104% Karma gain and pretty much get a never ending amount of money from Lost Orrian Jewelry boxes.
This explain why the boosts had to stop working. It doesn’t explain why Arenanet decided to include drips of liquid karma in boss boxes just before nerfing the karma and then removing them once the karma was nerfed.
It also doesn’t explain why the karma gain from dailies, monthlies and dungeons were severely reduced.
In fact, with the new wallet that made Karma account wide, what is the point of having karma containers in the first place, other than wearing the mouse button?
Especially because now there are even more ascended items to “bridge the gap between exotic and legendary items”.
There is no explanation why increasing the cost or reducing the amount of karma lost orrian jewelry boxes isn’t a better measure than affecting new players or casual players with several alts.
It is true that it is possible to acquire more ectos, coin and tier6 materials today, so crafting the armor is easier, but the question remains why this change was given so little attention by Arenanet communication, leaving the player base free to all kind of speculations.
(edited by Swoo.5079)