Fractal/open world Legendary armor

[STIHL.2489]

> @"Tyson.5160" said:

> I just think that giving people another choice on whether they want to get the Legendary Armor from Raids or from Fractals, is a good thing. Unique skin like Envoy from Raids and a unique skin like Fractal armor from Fractals.

 

I have to agree with @"Ohoni.6057" that putting Legendary Armor behind yet another instance based content would be redundant. While they might do it as a move to boost up participation of Fractals, but, truth be told, it would just end up requiring T4 content, which would result in just giving more loot to the same demographic that already does Raids and T4 fractals, and thus would not boost their fractal population, and in the end, most likely serve to alienate the vast casual population this game has even further.

 

Unless of course their goal is to lessen that casual population and try to cater to more a serious gamer demographic, if that is the objective, I hope and wish them good fortune.

[Ohoni.6057]

> @"Feanor.2358" said:

> So, like... the ultimate achievement in sports isn't winning an Olympic medal, it's drinking beer. Because, you know, it is more *convenient*? :lol:

 

Sports are competitive. GW2 is not a sport, it's a game. The "ultimate achievement" in GW2 is doing whatever *you* find to be most fun. For *you* that might be raiding, but that doesn't make it the "ultimate achievement" for everyone else.

 

 

[Teamkiller.4315]

> @"Ohoni.6057" said:

> > @"Feanor.2358" said:

> > So, like... the ultimate achievement in sports isn't winning an Olympic medal, it's drinking beer. Because, you know, it is more *convenient*? :lol:

>

> Sports are competitive. GW2 is not a sport, it's a game. The "ultimate achievement" in GW2 is doing whatever *you* find to be most fun. For *you* that might be raiding, but that doesn't make it the "ultimate achievement" for everyone else.

>

>

 

I can tell where this conversation is going to start going because I spent an afternoon reading threads about the easy mode raid debates. You're quite notorious.

 

You could say I'm poisoning the well right now, but it's too funny not to xD.

[STIHL.2489]

> @"Ohoni.6057" said:

> > @"Feanor.2358" said:

> > So, like... the ultimate achievement in sports isn't winning an Olympic medal, it's drinking beer. Because, you know, it is more *convenient*? :lol:

>

> Sports are competitive. GW2 is not a sport, it's a game. The "ultimate achievement" in GW2 is doing whatever *you* find to be most fun. For *you* that might be raiding, but that doesn't make it the "ultimate achievement" for everyone else.

>

>

 

To be fair, they have obviously never been in professional drinking competition, or else they would know better then to think it was any level of convenient.

 

But yah.. PvE is not competitive, it's routine, memorization, and repetition, in short, it's a grind.

 

However PvP is competitive, so, it stands sPvP and WvW should have the absolute best rewards in the game.. and yet.. they don't.

 

So much for that whole mantra of skill/challenge thing should offer better rewards..

[Hyper Cutter.9376]

There's no reason not to just let you craft legendary armor the same way you craft legendary weapons. _Literally none._ That's how every other tier of gear works.

[Ze Dos Cavalos.6132]

> @"STIHL.2489" said:

> > @"Ohoni.6057" said:

> > > @"Feanor.2358" said:

> > > So, like... the ultimate achievement in sports isn't winning an Olympic medal, it's drinking beer. Because, you know, it is more *convenient*? :lol:

> >

> > Sports are competitive. GW2 is not a sport, it's a game. The "ultimate achievement" in GW2 is doing whatever *you* find to be most fun. For *you* that might be raiding, but that doesn't make it the "ultimate achievement" for everyone else.

> >

> >

>

> To be fair, they have obviously never been in professional drinking competition, or else they would know better then to think it was any level of convenient.

>

> But yah.. PvE is not competitive, it's routine, memorization, and repetition, in short, it's a grind.

>

> However PvP is competitive, so, it stands sPvP and WvW should have the absolute best rewards in the game.. and yet.. they don't.

>

> So much for that whole mantra of skill/challenge thing should offer better rewards..

 

The problem with the current pvp and wvw is that their rewards are the easiest to get, a 6 years old can get the pvp and wvw rewards but cant get the raids or high end fractals ones.

You don't need any skill at all to farm pips in ranked pvp and no skill at all to farm wvw pips, only patience xD.

PvE you need some gaming skill to do raid and high end fractal, you cant leech the same way you can leech in pvp and wvw.

You can say wvw and pvp are harder than raids but that's not the point, the point is the way players are rewarded even when they lose in pvp or when they afk pip farm in wvw, you really think losing and afking should give the best rewards in the game?

 

 

[maddoctor.2738]

> @"STIHL.2489" said:

> To be fair, they have obviously never been in professional drinking competition, or else they would know better then to think it was any level of convenient.

>

> But yah.. PvE is not competitive, it's routine, memorization, and repetition, in short, it's a grind.

>

> However PvP is competitive, so, it stands sPvP and WvW should have the absolute best rewards in the game.. and yet.. they don't.

>

> So much for that whole mantra of skill/challenge thing should offer better rewards..

 

You can get the PVP and WVW rewards without ever killing one enemy player, it's just a mindless grind, ever heard of PvDoor? The PVP and WVW reward system needs a mass overhaul to move their respective rewards towards skill and -actual competition- because right now there is nothing competitive about most of the PVP and WVW rewards. The PVP backpack was a step towards a good direction, as it required some competence in fighting other players in order to get, especially when it was time limited and you absolutely had to reach a high enough division to get it. Now even that part was removed and you can simply grind it and cross enough divisions over many seasons, making that requirement a simple grind again. Fortunately you still need lots of rated wins, on multiple professions.

 

PVP Tournaments could get the absolute best rewards in the game, yes I agree with that, those take actual skill to compete in. From what I recall those that performed well in the PVP tournaments always got Legendary Weapons or Legendary Weapon precursors as rewards, or lots of GEMS, something you can't get in other parts of the game. Heck when the game was released they had automated PVP tournaments, the best teams moved to monthly tournaments and the reward for winning there was actual GEMS. It was all removed because it was also easily abused.

[Feanor.2358]

> @"Ohoni.6057" said:

> > @"Feanor.2358" said:

> > So, like... the ultimate achievement in sports isn't winning an Olympic medal, it's drinking beer. Because, you know, it is more *convenient*? :lol:

>

> Sports are competitive. GW2 is not a sport, it's a game. The "ultimate achievement" in GW2 is doing whatever *you* find to be most fun. For *you* that might be raiding, but that doesn't make it the "ultimate achievement" for everyone else.

>

>

 

And neither does your own subjective feeling. So what exactly do you propose? Asking every single player what's the "ultimate" gameplay for them, what's the "ultimate" reward to them and then tying one to the other on an per-player basis? This strikes me as *ultimately* impractical.

[Ohoni.6057]

> @"Feanor.2358" said:

> > @"Ohoni.6057" said:

> > > @"Feanor.2358" said:

> > > So, like... the ultimate achievement in sports isn't winning an Olympic medal, it's drinking beer. Because, you know, it is more *convenient*? :lol:

> >

> > Sports are competitive. GW2 is not a sport, it's a game. The "ultimate achievement" in GW2 is doing whatever *you* find to be most fun. For *you* that might be raiding, but that doesn't make it the "ultimate achievement" for everyone else.

> >

> >

>

> And neither does your own subjective feeling. So what exactly do you propose? Asking every single player what's the "ultimate" gameplay for them, what's the "ultimate" reward to them and then tying one to the other on an per-player basis? This strikes me as *ultimately* impractical.

 

That is impractical. I'm not sure how you would get there. No, obviously not.

 

The way you'd do it is see where *most* players spend their time, what *most* players enjoy most about the game. *that* is the "ultimate mode" of the game. Other content would be niche content.

[maddoctor.2738]

> @"Ohoni.6057" said:

> The way you'd do it is see where *most* players spend their time, what *most* players enjoy most about the game. *that* is the "ultimate mode" of the game. Other content would be niche content.

 

So the ultimate rewards of the game should've been in Auric Basin ML (when it was active) like give a small RNG chance after each Octovine kill to get Legendary Armor.

Or, after that was nerfed, let's add Legendary Armor to the next part that "most players enjoy", like Palawadan, when it was the king of content.

Or, Silverwastes chest farming when it was the content the vast majority of players was doing. Add a chance on each chest in SW chest farming to get Legendary Armor pieces.

 

The game would've been so much fun if the content *most* players spend their time on also got the best rewards, all the more reason to never leave that content and let the rest of the game die a slow death.

[Feanor.2358]

> @"Ohoni.6057" said:

> > @"Feanor.2358" said:

> > > @"Ohoni.6057" said:

> > > > @"Feanor.2358" said:

> > > > So, like... the ultimate achievement in sports isn't winning an Olympic medal, it's drinking beer. Because, you know, it is more *convenient*? :lol:

> > >

> > > Sports are competitive. GW2 is not a sport, it's a game. The "ultimate achievement" in GW2 is doing whatever *you* find to be most fun. For *you* that might be raiding, but that doesn't make it the "ultimate achievement" for everyone else.

> > >

> > >

> >

> > And neither does your own subjective feeling. So what exactly do you propose? Asking every single player what's the "ultimate" gameplay for them, what's the "ultimate" reward to them and then tying one to the other on an per-player basis? This strikes me as *ultimately* impractical.

>

> That is impractical. I'm not sure how you would get there. No, obviously not.

>

> The way you'd do it is see where *most* players spend their time, what *most* players enjoy most about the game. *that* is the "ultimate mode" of the game. Other content would be niche content.

 

Then we're back to McDonald's being the ultimate food. I fail to see why would I ever agree to such a random interpretation of "ultimate". I'm pretty sure the *vast* majority of players would rather agree with the far more sensible interpretation - the ultimate gameplay mode is the most challenging one. It will be niche by definition. But then again, the ultimate anything is niche. Be it property, art or experience. The pinnacle of each isn't for the mass audience. It's usually extremely expensive and it caters to the tastes of very specific, *committed* people. Exotic cars aren't meant for everyone. Symphonic blackmetal isn't meant for everyone. Base jumping isn't meant for everyone. Yet each of those can be regarded as "ultimate" in a specific respect. What you describe is rather mass production - an average, cheap option that satisfies the average user.

[Ohoni.6057]

> @"maddoctor.2738" said:

>So the ultimate rewards of the game should've been in Auric Basin ML (when it was active) like give a small RNG chance after each Octovine kill to get Legendary Armor.

 

Is that genuinely the content most players enjoyed, or just where they most felt bribed to be? That's why things like heatmaps are not a great indication of player interest. Still, we can at least agree that Auric Basin would be a better route to Legendary armor than raids.

 

> @"Feanor.2358" said:

>Then we're back to McDonald's being the ultimate food.

 

What's your argument for it *not* being the ultimate food? Still, I think if you asked around, most people would prefer something else to McDonalds, it's just McDonalds is also very cheap and everywhere.

 

> I'm pretty sure the vast majority of players would rather agree with the far more sensible interpretation - the ultimate gameplay mode is the most challenging one.

 

No, that's silly. Most players don't care about challenge, or raids would be much more populated.

 

>But then again, the ultimate anything is niche.

 

Lol, not even close.

 

>It's usually extremely expensive and it caters to the tastes of very specific, committed people.

 

You're talking about real world stuff, which is limited by scarcity. If everyone were *able* to have a luxury car, then most people wouldn't, that's why it's "ultimate," not *because* it's an exclusive thing. If you had a car that costs $20m but was really hideous and poorly constructed, that wouldn't make it "ultimate" just because almost no one could afford it. Correlation isn't causation.

[maddoctor.2738]

> @"Ohoni.6057" said:

> Is that genuinely the content most players enjoyed, or just where they most felt bribed to be? That's why things like heatmaps are not a great indication of player interest. Still, we can at least agree that Auric Basin would be a better route to Legendary armor than raids.

>

 

No we can't agree with that, putting Legendary Armor to Auric Basin would be a dumb idea. The content the majority goes to play is chosen because it's the fastest, effortless, efficient way of getting liquid rewards. The only chance for another type to exist is to have unique/exclusive rewards. There is a reason they add a new currency and new exclusive rewards with each living world release instead of putting those rewards in the drop tables of the previous content. And that reason is that otherwise the newer content would die a slow death.

 

I'm sure that if you remove the afk people around LA, HoTM, Raid lobby and guild halls, then exclude all the players from the best farm available, which as you say they were bribed to be there and not enjoy it, you'd find that the raiding population, and the T4 fractal population isn't a tiny minority anymore. Because those farms get the vast majority of the population, by a huge margin,.

 

I'm curious, how do you figure which content most players actually enjoy? So which content is this ultimate one of yours.

[nia.4725]

Hey guys. This is the fractal/open world armor thread, so if we want to continue discussing things about raids we should move somewhere else and leave this thread to discuss the topic -fractal/OW armor.

[Ohoni.6057]

> @"maddoctor.2738" said:

>The content the majority goes to play is chosen because it's the fastest, effortless, efficient way of getting liquid rewards. The only chance for another type to exist is to have unique/exclusive rewards.

 

Not quite.

 

The better way to do it is "weighted, but balanced."

 

Perfect balance is impossible, sure. You can't have ten different places to go, and have each of them be *exactly* worth the same in terms of reward/effort. You can get it fairly close though. So far, GW2 hasn't really tried very hard to balance these out, they just allow farms to exist forever, until they decide to add a new one, rather than making any significant effort to nerf the most popular farms. That's step one, get it close *enough.*

 

Step 2 then, is to have *weighted* rewards, items that are in no way *exclusive* to that area, but are much *easier* to get there. That way, if people want those rewards, they have a strong incentive to go there and do that, rather than farming them elsewhere. It might take ten hours of farming in content A, or thirty hours of farming in content B to get a specific reward, and then the opposite is true to get some other reward. If you wanted both rewards, would you stay in content A or B for 40 total hours, or would you do each for only 20 total hours? Up to you, depends on how much you enjoy one over the other. Player choice, with consequences.

 

>There is a reason they add a new currency and new exclusive rewards with each living world release instead of putting those rewards in the drop tables of the previous content. And that reason is that otherwise the newer content would die a slow death.

 

Sure, lure people into trying new content, but also, over time, allow more flexibility in how they get most of those things. Allow a lossy exchange rate in currencies so that players who prefer something else can do that instead.

 

>I'm sure that if you remove the afk people around LA, HoTM, Raid lobby and guild halls, then exclude all the players from the best farm available, which as you say they were bribed to be there and not enjoy it, you'd find that the raiding population, and the T4 fractal population isn't a tiny minority anymore. Because those farms get the vast majority of the population, by a huge margin,.

 

Again, you keep talking in terms of "heatmaps," where people are, rather than what they *enjoy.* Sure, if you excluded the players from the best farms it might reduce the overall open world population, but that doesn't mean that if you destroyed all the best farms they would suddenly flood into the raids, they would just find some other farm, because open world farming is how they enjoy playing. You have to ask people *why* they do things, not just record the data of *where* they do things.

[Raizel.8175]

> @"Ohoni.6057" said:

> > @"Feanor.2358" said:

> > So, like... the ultimate achievement in sports isn't winning an Olympic medal, it's drinking beer. Because, you know, it is more *convenient*? :lol:

>

> Sports are competitive. GW2 is not a sport, it's a game. The "ultimate achievement" in GW2 is doing whatever *you* find to be most fun. For *you* that might be raiding, but that doesn't make it the "ultimate achievement" for everyone else.

>

>

 

You know that there's an eSports-scene out there that's actually already bigger than stuff like soccer?

 

PvE can be quite competitive too. In the MMORPG I've played before starting with GW2, we had a public PvE-Ranks-website; a database of every uploaded dps-meter-log where you could see top-players, their rotations, the party-setup, the time needed to clear the boss (speedrunners could show off that way), etc. While it probably sounds overly toxic for you, it was quite a blessing since it was a far better skill-indicator than the stupid LI/KP-system of GW2.

[Ohoni.6057]

> @"Raizel.8175" said:

>You know that there's an eSports-scene out there that's actually already bigger than stuff like soccer?

 

Yes, but GW2 is not and will never be a part of that. It's just not that sort of game. Even if it was, it would have nothing to do with raids.

 

>PvE can be quite competitive too. In the MMORPG I've played before starting with GW2, we had a public PvE-Ranks-website; a database of every uploaded dps-meter-log where you could see top-players, their rotations, the party-setup, the time needed to clear the boss (speedrunners could show off that way), etc.

 

:anguished:

 

[maddoctor.2738]

> @"Ohoni.6057" said:

> Perfect balance is impossible, sure. You can't have ten different places to go, and have each of them be *exactly* worth the same in terms of reward/effort. You can get it fairly close though. So far, GW2 hasn't really tried very hard to balance these out, they just allow farms to exist forever, until they decide to add a new one, rather than making any significant effort to nerf the most popular farms. That's step one, get it close *enough.*

 

That's not something that can really work otherwise I guess they would've done it by now. Either they don't care about it and are happy with how things are, or the effort required to do such a thing isn't worth it. I really doubt they've never thought of it and simply passed it.

 

> Sure, lure people into trying new content, but also, over time, allow more flexibility in how they get most of those things. Allow a lossy exchange rate in currencies so that players who prefer something else can do that instead.

 

If they added an exchange rate for currency then the not-as-efficient content would simply die. If they allowed Sandswept Isles rewards to be available in Palawadan then Sandswept Isles would be a waste land (even with a lossy exchange). It's already struggling, although it's a very new map. Plus, the amount of work needed to adjust every single currency with each other is insane, given their seer number. And not only that, but every single currency they add in the future would have to be given exchange rates with every other currency already available. That does sound like too much effort.

 

Take a look at the map rewards system, a good "lossy exchange system", which is a great (in theory) reward system that was supposed to make the entire open world more rewarding. I think that system failed, instead of getting what you want, you farm another content, sell the rewards and buy what you want. Instead of playing in Lornar's Pass to get Intricate Totems (map reward), you play in Frostgorge Sound to get Powerful Blood, sell it and buy your Intricate Totems. If they added an exchange rate between Airship Parts and Ley Line Crystals, and the effort needed to get Parts was much lower than the Crystals, then Tangled Depths would be a barren wasteland. Unfortunately fun isn't what drives the majority of the population, but convenience.

 

> Again, you keep talking in terms of "heatmaps," where people are, rather than what they *enjoy.* Sure, if you excluded the players from the best farms it might reduce the overall open world population, but that doesn't mean that if you destroyed all the best farms they would suddenly flood into the raids, they would just find some other farm, because open world farming is how they enjoy playing. You have to ask people *why* they do things, not just record the data of *where* they do things.

 

Heat maps are the only objective way of knowing what the population is doing at any given time. Why they do it is an impossible question to answer. There is no way to gauge enjoyment, there is no fun-meter available.

[Feanor.2358]

> @"Ohoni.6057" said:

> > I'm pretty sure the vast majority of players would rather agree with the far more sensible interpretation - the ultimate gameplay mode is the most challenging one.

>

> No, that's silly. Most players don't care about challenge, or raids would be much more populated.

 

And who authorized you to speak on behalf of most players? :lol:

 

It has nothing to do about what players care, or do. It's a matter of perception. See the definition of the word again.

[Ohoni.6057]

> @"maddoctor.2738" said:

>That's not something that can really work otherwise I guess they would've done it by now. Either they don't care about it and are happy with how things are, or the effort required to do such a thing isn't worth it. I really doubt they've never thought of it and simply passed it.

 

It has to be the former, they're just content with the players moving from farm to farm. I'm just pointing out, that's ANet's choice, it's not an inevitability, as you seemed to imply.

 

>If they added an exchange rate for currency then the not-as-efficient content would simply die.

 

Again, not if it's lossy. If you can trade currency X for currency Y 1:1 then players will obviously only do the easiest thing. If, on the other hand, you can only trade them 10:1, or even 100:1, then players who don't have a particular favorite will go with the currency they actually want, because the other one would be terribly inefficient. The only ones that would farm the currency they *don't* want are the ones who actively hate the content it's native to, and that's a problem with the content itself, not the reward balancing. The problem with the current model is that the main rewards are all generic, what you get from Auric Basin is mostly the same as what you get in Istan, gold and rares, so it boils down purely to quantity. If people are more focused on chasing the unique currencies, then the balance would shift.

 

>If they allowed Sandswept Isles rewards to be available in Palawadan then Sandswept Isles would be a waste land (even with a lossy exchange). It's already struggling, although it's a very new map.

 

Then it's worth examining why that is, why people don't *want* to be there. Not every map can be a winner. You can lead a horse to water.

 

>Take a look at the map rewards system, a good "lossy exchange system", which is a great (in theory) reward system that was supposed to make the entire open world more rewarding.

 

The map rewards system has nothing to do with what I was talking about. The rewards from those were unique to each map, which is basically the opposite of what I was saying.

 

> Instead of playing in Lornar's Pass to get Intricate Totems (map reward), you play in Frostgorge Sound to get Powerful Blood, sell it and buy your Intricate Totems.

 

Those are just generic materials.

 

>If they added an exchange rate between Airship Parts and Ley Line Crystals, and the effort needed to get Parts was much lower than the Crystals, then Tangled Depths would be a barren wasteland.

 

Again, that relies on a reasonable level of balance. If it's twice as easy to get Parts than Crystals, but it costs ten Parts per Crystal, then you'd have to be a fool to farm Parts for efficiency's sake, because you'd be about five times slower overall. If, on the other hand, you just really hated Tangled Depths, you'd have alternatives.

 

>Heat maps are the only objective way of knowing what the population is doing at any given time.

 

Which is why they're useless. They're an objective measure of a subjective phenomenon. You need to know the why, not just the where.

 

>There is no way to gauge enjoyment, there is no fun-meter available.

 

Of course there is, they had it in beta. They just took it out.

 

 

 

> @"Feanor.2358" said:

>And who authorized you to speak on behalf of most players? :lol:

 

"Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?"

[Feanor.2358]

> @"Ohoni.6057" said:

 

> > @"Feanor.2358" said:

> >And who authorized you to speak on behalf of most players? :lol:

>

> "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?"

 

If only generic sayings were valid arguments. But I guess one has to resort to something when they run out of these.

[Linken.6345]

> @"Tyson.5160" said:

> > @"maddoctor.2738" said:

> > > @"STIHL.2489" said:

> > > Nope.. You need to do Fractals to complete Legendary Weapons, as such weapons already require Instance based Content, which is what makes them **Legendary**, I personally think they should put back in requiring WvW map completion to get Legendary Anything.

> > >

> >

> > A tiny bit of Fractals, not even high levels, just solo T1 and a bit of WvW to get one gift of Battle which you can get really fast, is all you need to craft a Legendary Weapon outside the Open World. There is also the dungeon tokens but you can get those faster from WVW/PVP semi-afking than from running actual dungeons. Is requiring a tiny bit of instanced content (the easiest part of it) and a tiny bit of WVW/PVP (again the easiest parts) what makes them **Legendary**?

> >

> > If making a legendary weapon required at least playing T4 Fractals (not CMs), doing at least a reasonable fraction of what is required for either of the WvW or PvP backpacks (or both) then yes, they'd be "legendary" in terms of requiring enough of each type of content in order to craft. Now they are 99.9999% Open World PVE and an afterthought of anything else.

> >

> > If a Legendary Weapon was supposed to show how experienced someone is with every type of content in the game, it failed miserably, because in reality it's not showing anything.

>

> I think when they originally designed the content way back near release you had to do a good amount of WvW. The gift of battle required badges that you got over time and gift exploration required all the WvW maps to be explored as well, which required you to play a significant amount of WvW, obviously they changed it.

 

You got those badges out of the 5k ap chests so you could buy gift of battle without steping foot in wvw witch is why they changed it to reward track.

[maddoctor.2738]

> @"Ohoni.6057" said:

> Of course there is, they had it in beta. They just took it out.

 

You mean they should add questionnaires/surveys constantly to the game so as to figure out what the players enjoy doing? And then what? Nerf the big farms and buff what players say they enjoy? Wouldn't that put the game in constant development hell?

 

> The problem with the current model is that the main rewards are all generic, what you get from Auric Basin is mostly the same as what you get in Istan, gold and rares, so it boils down purely to quantity. If people are more focused on chasing the unique currencies, then the balance would shift.

 

We agree here. However, both Auric Basin and Istan have their own unique/exclusive rewards, and that's why both can be populated at the same time.

One major problem with your re-balance idea is that the income of any currency isn't stable, so if the ratio of this "lossy exchange" is stable it will reach a point where it's meaningless. For example, they tried to balance the dungeon gold rewards, while for some time it might've been a reasonable way to balance, after a while it became inefficient and broken. Same with any kind of material reward, while the balance between silk and mithril might seem fine at some point in time, changes in what the game's population does changes the values of the materials drastically.

 

In a similar way, airship parts and ley line crystals do not have a constant/stable ratio either. One week more people will go to TD, the other more will go to VB and so on. The number of players available in a zone, directly affects how much of each currency you are getting even as a solo player. If there aren't enough players playing in TD then you won't finish the meta, meaning a huge chunk of the ley line crystal rewards will be unavailable to you. This means that a 10:1 ratio might be good this week, but next week it's no longer the case. Balancing each currency with all the others would need constant tampering it's not a fire and forget thing, otherwise we go back to square one eventually.

[Ohoni.6057]

> @"maddoctor.2738" said:

> You mean they should add questionnaires/surveys constantly to the game so as to figure out what the players enjoy doing? And then what? Nerf the big farms and buff what players say they enjoy? Wouldn't that put the game in constant development hell?

 

It really shouldn't be that hard. Just figure out what players want to be doing, if that doesn't sync up with what they *are* doing then you just tweak down some of the rewards in the "farms." Like I said, there's no reason whatsoever that they were *unable* to "fix" the Auric Basin farm, they just clearly saw it as a sustainable place to store players, so they left it be. My point is, if they ever *wanted* to shift players elsewhere, they have the tools to do it. Your argument was that players will always sink to the lowest level, and that is true, it is true of the current game, and would be true of the game if they made changes. My point was just that the changes I suggested would not make that process any worse, and likely would make it considerably better, since it would give players more reasons to spread out.

 

>We agree here. However, both Auric Basin and Istan have their own unique/exclusive rewards, and that's why both can be populated at the same time.

 

I doubt anyone is still in Auric Basin after anything unique to that map. And as I said, new content can maintain exclusivity for a little while to drive new players there. They don't need to *remain* exclusive though. Simply having them be more efficient is plenty.

 

>Same with any kind of material reward, while the balance between silk and mithril might seem fine at some point in time, changes in what the game's population does changes the values of the materials drastically.

 

The problem there is in allowing market speculation to determine pricing. The types of systems I'm talking about would be purely accountbound, so you could not harm "the market" of anything, "worse case scenario" you make some things easier for yourself. If they wanted to moderate that further, two factors that could help would be to 1. not allow currency conversion into the new thing for a matter of weeks/months, to allow the new currencies to find their level, and then set an exchange rate accordingly, and 2. have a daily/weekly limit on how much you could convert one currency to another, enough that you could get work done, but slow enough that it would be less time efficient to stockpile a fortune in one currency and then trickle it out into something else, rather than doing the new content for the new currency. Again, the goal is to always have the conversion be a "plan B."

 

>The number of players available in a zone, directly affects how much of each currency you are getting even as a solo player. If there aren't enough players playing in TD then you won't finish the meta, meaning a huge chunk of the ley line crystal rewards will be unavailable to you.

 

I see this as a flaw in the design that they should have fixed years ago, but even that aside, so what? Even if you earn less this week than the last, it would still likely be more efficient than converting currencies, and their overarcing balancing mechanisms would be more based on long trends than short term spikes. If you can earn ten times as much in one map then another, then the game has issues to fix, with or without my system.

 

 

[maddoctor.2738]

> @"Ohoni.6057" said:

> The problem there is in allowing market speculation to determine pricing.

 

The map currencies also have a market value, most of them at least, but yes this is probably the major "problem" with the reward system in the first place. I can only imagine how amazing the map rewards would be if those materials didn't have a trade value. You'd pick the zone that drops what you want, do events there and get the material you need, instead of farming on other zones, selling what you got and then buying what you actually need.

 

> The types of systems I'm talking about would be purely accountbound, so you could not harm "the market" of anything

 

There is one flaw here though, playing in VB and playing in TD doesn't only give account bound rewards (airship parts and ley line crystals) but also gold and material rewards. You can balance the currencies to have an appropriate ratio based on how much you can earn (exchange at a loss) but what about liquid rewards? If playing in VB gives better liquid rewards than playing in TD then even if Airship Parts are exchange at a huge loss with Ley Line Crystals, players would still prefer VB. Unless this account bound system you envision lowers, or even removes the common rewards from the equation, that's a different story.

 

The reason Silverwastes, Palawadan and AB ML were popular wasn't because of the map tokens you got there. In a sense adding a way to trade currency from an already super popular liquid reward map for currencies of other maps, even at a huge loss, would still not make the less popular maps any better. Only reduce even further the amount of players playing there. Because together with the best farm, now you can get tokens that you can spend on all other zones too.