Test Discussion GU94: Episodes 27-31 Currency Conversion

The source marks have been confirmed as cr relevant, so we will no longer get episode specific currency as rewards for running and grinding older content, as we always have been, if we are now cr irrelevant.

Source marks are planned to be treated like marks of victory rewards, and thats what people are speaking against.

Its one thing to only not get marks of victory past a certain cr, but the episode specific currencys gave us a glimmer of rewards for running older content, that made many customers at least happier, and gave us something of value in game to work for.

Thats being taken away now. Now, with all the gear styles, collections, or resellable items they added to episodes with their respective currencys we were always able to draw from, have access to, we will no longer have a revenue stream for, except running the latest episodes of content. Its going too far.

I spend a lot of time online in game. I do this to first work on current content, then there are my current content dailys. I finish these under an hour.

After that hour, if I want to continue to grind past episodes for their rewards, and episode currency for that episodes items, rewards, and profit, that gives me much more to do. This is the bulk of many player's activity throughout the week. I dont think the Devs are understanding what this plan will do, and how much less this gives us players to do.

This will not promote replay sales. This will cause many of us to log right off when we are done with our dailys and initial weeklys and go play and pay our money into another game. Period. Cant get my head around a Dev team idea that wants to reward their players less from content they are paying for with their membership, or that have purchased individually.

Why would they want us to have less rewards from this content, a perk for being a customer, and want us less active?

Its like writers selling us a comic, wanting us to buy it, but we can never read. Its pages inside are blank. Nothing will be left to do but remember, and spend my cash on other books. At some point, I certainly wont be buying one of their books again, thats for da#m sure.

To me, These ideas are disconnected from the rest of this game's player base. Im not sure if whoever came up with this idea even understands why we are active in the game as customers and as comic fans, or if they even play the game themselves anymore.

Many of us pay for these individual episodes outright, or purchase access to them, and their specific currencys and rewards, through our monthly memberships. This is literal money we spend to have access to these perks.

I dont want to see that taken away. This is not what the majority of us want. Many players are still unhappy about cr relevancy. Its not right, since we pay to have access to these rewards in the first place. Episode specific currencys made that a little better, made the pill a little less hard to swallow, but now, yeah, they want to actually take the glass of water too?

This is not a well thought out idea. So Devs, do not strangle our rewards for being active further. In fact, please see how many players are against cr relevancy in the first place. As an MMO, wouldnt you want incentive for your customers to want to be present, in game, and active for as long as you can keep them logged in?

This is bad for newer players who are close to max CR but still need the styles/feats from those 5 episodes, because now their sources of currency income is greatly reduced. On top of that they need that same currency to complete rare vendor styles as well as buy catalysts, mainframe upgrades etc. So yes its a terrible idea that slows down feat progression for many new/returning players, which is why they will proceed with the implementation of it lol. Im sure the idea to consolidate the currencies comes from a good place, but as usual the implementation is bad because no one considers all the implications of the changes they make.

Confirmed: I ran Deluge with a CR 270 character; I only got quicklime/loot/money. The Deluge Vendor uses Source Marks for purchases. So, if you are past the CR relevancy of the content, you only get loot and cash. This includes running the regular daily/weekly missions for the content.

So, if you want/need style/gear/items from previous content and your character is above the content level, you must get those source marks from elsewhere and then go back to those vendors and make your purchases. The players who will not be affected are content feat hunters, in my opinion, because they are only looking to complete alert/raid feats and the like. Style feat hunters, however, may see a problem with this because they will have to be careful not to level too quickly above the content level to get those styles before moving on.

My thoughts on this:

I think the devs are using source marks as a way to slow down players who like to get through content very quickly and to *nudge* players to use their other lower CR alts and/or create new ones.

Players who have characters that are at max level will feel the hurt the worse; they will be confined to only doing the recent content and alerts/raids + Vault. Players who have characters that are at or below the level of the latest content will greatly benefit from this because they will still have content to farm source marks from.

At this point, the devs should seriously consider making source marks account bound, like replay badges are. This would ensure people would still keep playing the game and allow players to farm source marks with their lowest characters while maintaining the needs of their highest characters. An almost infinite amount of source marks will be hard for one account to obtain, let alone one character.

Hey, developers? Remember how the last time you did this exact same thing you basically killed the PC server? Well don’t worry, I’m sure it will be much better received this time, because... because... ummmm... well... errr... you know what? Let me get back to you.

noticed you can no longer buy style feats with replays does this mean that every alt will have to earn every style feat
and when running the latest dlc does this mean that every alt will now have to pay full price for a full set of gear to receive a discounted set of gear.

i have also noticed that vendor 00 has significantly less styles on it now

This will not work unless you remove CR relevancy.

What an absolutely mind-boggling decision. Ulterior motives aside, this is really poor form. (Also, nice of the devs to drop this bomb then go silent for the holiday weekend.)

have you tried to unlock feats before? bc I've tried to unlock feats I've done on other characters on test and never been able to, not just style feats, any kind of feats, can't even use replays to unlock school of hard knocks feats, basic feats. think it's something in the server's settings. so I wouldn't take that as something that's going to the live server. I had to get every style from the vendors on every character I wanted the feats on in the test server as that's the easiest way to get more sp there.
and this has been a thing since when we were testing AF3 dlc

No Player Wants Further CR
Irrelevancy

We are not joking here. This is a sad asf excuse of an idea!!!

Devs, if you remove CR relevancy and make account bound all marks you will see a lot of players comming back and nothing will change in terms of monetization.

You are literally strangling a game's episode rewards we already pay monthly membership for. This is getting ridiculous.

This is a terrible change. We can only play new content to get old rewards now ? Absolutely stupid. Stop making these massive, sweeping changes without input from the community.

Disappointing game update would be an understatement. I’m pretty annoyed that I bought a year long sub.

Show us that you're listening -- CANCEL THIS.

I think source marks is a good idea as long as you remove cr relevance, that way you can run whatever content you want and or like and use those rewards to complete feats and styles for OLD episodes. Dear developers remember that this is not a free to play game, you are already getting money from our monthly subscriptions, don't get too greedy. Here is and advice for free, instead of trying to squish every penny off your already paying costumer base why don't just get more costumers, invest on advertising.

So a couple of thoughts and observations about the changes:
observations:
1. Prices in the new "currency" are lower than they were in the old one. This is a plus.
2. Tasks in open zones become useless if you have outgrown a zone (you still had a sense in them before, if you wanted to finish old styles, now this is just a small bonus to the development of augmentation (again, they are useless if you have them at the maximum This is a minus.
3. Earlier if you have a lot of time you could collect "currency" from different episodes in parallel, now despite the fact that prices are lower, you have only one "currency" and more products to buy (catalysts for artifacts, mainframe and old styles are paid in the new "currency"). this is a minus.
4. Since it’s "One currency” you don’t have to farm uninteresting episodes and tasks to get styles, you can simply limit yourself to the newest episodes and still be able to buy old styles. this is a plus.
5. You may have a lot more new currency than the old one (there were 200 and 999, for a new one there are many, many thousands). this is a plus.
Thoughts:
2. Add alternative loot for tasks in open areas.
3. Reduce prices for mainframes, add additional alternate weekly and monthly loot for solo, duos, alert and raid.

Sorry for bad english, not native.

sorry if these source marks based on cr relevance i will quit the game.. and spend the hundered $ i spend each month on something else... enough said this will be last forum post depending what gets changed with this stupid update . give us some source marks outside the cr relevance.. or these old content will be even more dead..
over and out geoforcee100

There's much bigger issues in the game to raise pitchforks and march to Texas to picket the Daybreak offices than these Source Mark conversions. When they got rid of Marks of Triumph and all the other stupid episode specific currency like Symbols of Light etc it was just an inevitable change that the community dealt with at the time.

The only legitimate argument is that the OP collection prices have not been adjusted so its a much larger source mark commitment to get those now as apposed to previously but even then:

• AFIII was 29 months ago
• AoJ was 22 months
• RWC was 19 months ago
• Earth 3 was 17 months ago
• Deluge was 13 months ago

you would have already had plenty of time to get episode specific rewards even if you weren't using any replay badges by now as dcuo has has double mark weekends for all past currencies and all the 2x and 3x mark weekends during the actual episodes when they were current. Players will still run GCZE and PANOE for chances at the rare item at the end to sell, the source marks don't impact those drops. Besides that there was literally NO REASON to run the old content anyways, the exobytes you got from salvages were drastically less XP then anything current, plenty of opportunity to already have the style feats or vendor purchases. If you are queing old content to help a friend or leaguemate its not like you are just going to say no cause I don't get anything from it, you are still going to help that player.
MoV were a useless currency anyways which was only used to purchase base amenities, rare style vendor and catalyst caches now that generator mod plans have been removed. It makes it even easier to purchase the rare style vendor items now because instead of being capped at 200 which is only 2 whole styles (70 MoV each) you can now purchase alot more as the marks from 27-31 are now source marks so the ultrabucks etc you've been sitting on can now be used to get any rare styles on the vendor for feats much easier.

The argument that old content would be dead is ASININE because it's already dead, no one was doing old content for marks they were doing it for the loot caches to try and get OP collections to sell like the RWC weekly boxes which you can still do, no one who just qued up a Spindrift or TTB because they were bored were doing it because they wanted marks they were doing it because they were bored or helping someone. There is still 9 months worth of episode content to run daily/weekly to get source marks to purchase anything players are missing. Also the argument that it makes it harder to purchase vendor items for sell for ingame cash is ASININE as well because those have always been low dollar value items unless they are brand new on the vendor, you'll always have much better sales getting OP collections which you can still do, and base items or the multitude of other options to make cash in game.
Some players are just blowing this change completely out of proportion.

Why is it so hard to make two currencies? Two. Not twelve. Two.

One for current episode rewards, and another for everywhere else.

The way to get current episode rewards is to run the current episode. This means everything from gear to OP collections to style items and current crafting breakthrough items, etc.

The second currency is for everything else. EVERYTHING IN PAST PARTS OF THE GAME. This currency is a reward for running any and all old content. Lower tier content obviously rewards less amounts of this currency than higher tier content, but it rewards it.

Benefits:
1. Players receive an incentive to be rewarded by running anything in the game.
2. Players have a reason to keep playing rather than playing your game for 20 minutes a day and logging off (what did you think, that you would get them to magically spend replay badges, stuffing even more repetitive grind and actually paying for it?)
3. Players are less likely to become thoroughly burnt out and sick of your game 1 month after new content drops.
4. There is absolutely no risk of putting replay badge sales in danger, since current episode rewards are still obtainable from only the current source.

Cons:
Hmm. Not seeing any. Maybe that you would have to use mathematical calculations to define a sliding scale for secondary currency rewards (and adjust gear/reward costs per tier to match). Fortunately, now we have currency that stacks to 999,999 so it's not a problem!!!

For example:

T1 content (base rewards)

Open world daily mission - 1 mark.
Duo - 2 marks.
Alert - 4 marks.
Raid - 8 marks.

T2 content

Open world daily mission - 1 mark
Duo - 3 marks
Alert - 6 marks
Raid - 12 marks

T3: (2, 4, 9, 18)
T4: (3, 6, 13, 27)
T5: (4, 9, 20, 41)
T6: (6, 13, 30, 60)
T7: (9, 20, 45, 90)
T8: (13, 30, 67, 135)
T9 (eventually) (20, 45, 100, 200)

Price for a full T1 gear set, collection piece, cosmetic reward (just for example): 50-60 currency (takes approximately 2-4 weeks to obtain grinding at T1, progressively less when running later content.

Full Tier 5 gear set, collection piece, cosmetic reward: 253 currency, takes approximately 2-4 weeks at tier 1, progressively less with later content).

Tier 8 gear set, collection piece, cosmetic reward: 855 currency, same time as past tiers. Of course, if the devs want to make it even easier to obtain earlier items and more difficult to get later rewards, this involves a simple, gradual increase as tiers continue. Bottom line, there doesn't need to be any risk to current content to reward your players appropriately for time invested in both older and very recent content.

It's interesting to watch this game go full circle it really is. I've been playing since the very start, so what 9 years and I've been through all the previous mark changes and consoldations, triumph, distinction, momentum, war, reality you name it, been there done it.

I'm curious as to what your motive really is, is it to consolidate the marks, make it less complex? Is it to push 'perceivable' OP players out of old content and into 'relevant content', is it a bit of both?

My concerns primarily revolves around the shrinking relevancy window or source of "source marks" you've dropped the pricing on gear, sure, which helps the "up and coming" players get things done, but you've actually penalised your veterans or more complete players by remaining static in terms of the ability to only farm within relevancy but increased the cost of getting what we need by consoldating gear and other rewards previously purchased using marks of victory.

i.e. - currently we purchase mainframe perks and catalyst caches with marks of victory (if we're end game, which is my concern)
- currently we purchase tradeable cosmetics using episodic specific marks

with the change we'll be purchasing both of the above but the relevancy window won't change, we'll still only have the same number of marks obtainable but more potential purchases.

I notice in the vendors as well the "tradeable cosmetics or even account or character bound desirable cosmetics" haven't altered in price, neither have the op collections. Why aren't these being decreased? You've actually made those harder to now obtain or go back to get because again the availabilty of source marks hasn't actually increased and you're also having to choose where to spend them, where as before you weren't having to make that choice.

You're also pushing players in to a time frame, basically farm all this stuff out while the marks are episodic or risk getting screwed by the "source mark relevancy window".

My proposal would actually be to drop the prices on the other items as well to accommodate and I'd also encourage you to extend relevancy to 3 episodes instead of 2 episodes, or perhaps just permanently keep the "death of superman" content in relevancy as a permanent third source and continue to scale it upwards so it's always relevant to the player.