Resisting the urge to use replays on content

I would love to have more solo content. I do enjoy running raids and alerts but more of a solo and duo type player. You can say im playing the wrong game, but i dont care. My cr is 154 and i havent ran a raid since amazon fury 2 and that raid was lols and i ran it once and only that raid, no raid since then.

The alerts ive done since wotl 1 is dc once and dp once. Everything else has been solos and duos. Im sure i fall into a minority on how people like to run things but i would love to see elite versions of solos and duos where you can get elite gear. Even if there more rare to obtain, i would spend the replays on them just to get that elite gear.

I think if they had elite versions of solos and duos people would really spend replays on them but i dont know if they would ever happen. Duo and solo reset is 12 replay badges vs 87 for a raid so devs might see that as a drop in profit, but maybe if there was elite solos and duos, maybe people would spend more. I know i would.

Speaking personally and more on the note of spending replay's I find I'm even more reluctant to use them since the shift to monthly releases because I'm now feeling pressured to use them and that makes me dig in my heels and say no even if there isn't a strong reason to do so. When for example if prison break came out (and yes I know it didn't this is an EXAMPLE and the point is not the content name) with a 3 month cycle there was a "I have 12 weeks to play this content for its gear" so I might spend replays here or there to get an extra shot while in a group going for a feat.

Now since its got both a normal/elite version and a 1 month window before its old content I feel like the Dev's are breathing down my neck going "Replay replay, replay . . . no we're not presuring you the game is balanced round vendor drops . . . replay, replay, replay". Since normal and elite share the same loot lock and many people (lets be honest here) are going to spam replay badges to get the best ELITE gear in the first few days. I'm left feeling very much I'm being told "spam replay badges or get out of our game."
I admit this is partly a community attitutde issue with people only wanting 200+ SP or max CR or OP DPS or EXP role (on the first day) or some other option before they'll let you join and if you don't like that "Get your league to help, your leagues mostly dead? Get a better one you noob."
However I don't think its helped by developer decisions to do things like have raids on a week long shared loot lock for normal/elite. Especially given how right now elite is really only affinity mods (Which I gave up on because I could never get enough elite gear to activate the C/D ones and the A/B are really only equivilent to a normal mod) and a different style. However if you want that style how many times if your not resetting are you able to play that content before you can no longer find people interested in it? If you want the normal one same issue and how likely are you to find someone playing the NORMAL version on the second week when the elite is unlocked?

I don't know what the solution is but for me its making me less willing to spend money/use replay badges than I was before.

And to those who say that the Elite content isn't "Elite"?

I say - "To Each his / her Own?"

I was in Elite for almost 3 hours on Sunday, with a good group that communicated well and were good at their roles.

We could not get past 2nd boss to save our lives. We tried several different theories. We got smarter about the mechanics involved, though. I plan on trying those mechanics next time I try Elite PB.

How "Difficult" or "Easy" content is can be a different point of view for anyone.

I have to ask, how will some open world content make this game so much better? Because imo it wont. It wont be replayed by the majority because it wont have the best gear and i hope it never does. So it ends up being just 1 more quick think to do daily for 1 or 2 marks that people eventually stop running because marks dont mean much.

And monthly content being rushed and not as good? I agree. But maybe when the devs announce this kind of stuff people on here should wait b4 they judge it and give their opinion saying its great. The monthly content, cr relevancy, 1 mark and loot picker basically all came at same time. Go back and look at the announcement thread for that. 75 pages of people saying "this is awesome." Theres 1 person who says "i dont understand the changes but this is great i love the idea." See the problem? Too many people on here praise any announcement as being great b4 they even understand how it works or will affect the game overall. The devs take this feedback as "they love this." Then a few months later the same people saying how "awesome" things were say they cant stand these changes and want something different. Again, see the problem? Maybe just maybe most people on here should be smarter, wait to give their feedback when they truly understand whats happening and understand how changes affect the game long term.

I dont blame the devs. I blame the people who rush to judgement and are shortsighted and only think of themselves and how changes benefit them instead of all players. Its the like the people who praise gu36 and gu47. How did those work out? Tons of players left over WM. And half of gu47 was reversed, mainly in older content. And more players left. Yet on here u had people saying the population was "fine." But clearly anyone truly objectively looking at it could see it wasnt. I saw 6 of top 10 leagues on uspc hero side fold because of gu47. There are threads on here where the topic has people on both sides but in some its very clear the feedback is overwhelmingly for 1 side and people will say its not. As a community we need to be smarter. Saying u love something b4 u understand it or have experienced it is just ignorant.

This is so true. I dont pug much these days because i have an active league. But even just running with my friends(league) i feel like i dont wanna be left behind. Now if im 152 and they are all 156 it wont matter because in our league we all run together no matter. But ive grown crazy bored of this gear chase. I play 6 toons. Withing 48rs of ep21 going live 3 were 155 and other 3 are 154. I reset 1 raid on 1 toon. But if im unlucky it might take weeks b4 i get the gear and i feel behind and if u pug u ARE behind. Theres no in between. Its either spam replay or wait it out. And every month its the same except the feats and content gets easier. The reason i have so many end game toons is i was so bored. If i played only one i would of unsubbed 3 months ago. By the time midsummer hits if there isnt some big change to how this game works im gone. Devs if u read this please understand that spamming 1 piece of meaningful content every month is not engaging or fun.

At least with the 3 months dlcs like AF2 we got 3 raids to run at the same time to get geared. People say its the same amount of content. It is. But when u get gear from the next month the previous month becomes trivial. And a blind monkey with no fingers can complete the content because your so op for it now. Again not very fun. That part is not the same as b4.

I actually think it comes back to the same old thing.

Gear in the vendor needs to be made more expensive, the marks need to be given across all content, best gear needs to be in the vendor and/or be crafted.

rare drops from content should be "close" to vendor gear but not best.

that would encourage people to run all content they can, not be restricted to the crappy RNG and just make the drops styles, they could even increase the rareness.

People will run it and reset it for the styles and feats.

This whole system only changed in T5, so I guess my question to the devs is what changed after T4?

In fact i remember there were 4 T4 styles to collect, so it was by no means done just because you had 1 set.

I guess to answer my own question, it is replay badges.

is the game in truly such a bad state that it can't support itself through subscriptions and if it can't get people to subscribe, does that indicate there's a problem also with the "subscription model" maybe its time for fresh/more perks to make it more enticing.

While I still use them from time to time, it's not like they are a huge expense. I have to say I don't care much about the gear race anymore. Pretty much everything is pointless when it comes to a player's actions. Even tetris gives more control to the player over the possible outcomes.

HAHAHA.. no seriously hahahahhaha.

A glorified alert with no mechanics of ANY consequence. An elite version in which you don't even need a tank to beat the last boss. All this in reused environments with reused bosses with reused mechanics.

A raid style that looks sh*t on most body types.
A duo that the only new thing about it is the turrets that do nothing cool anyway.

The ability to get max CR simply by having 1 raid drop and 3 vendor pieces.
The desperation behind another OP item.. 3rd in a row by the way. Oh and lets see how OP the OP hands are when next episode comes.
Even the feats/skill points of this episode are rushed and badly made. 1.7 (?) SP instead of 2ish and a No Death feat per boss! Long live Deathproof!

But yes.. this episode just screams lots of good quality work.

If it's truly Elite it's not easy for anyone.

Again (and please don't interpret my tone here as antagonistic because I don't intend it that way) -

Interpretation with difficulty of content in this game can be based off of POV.

Yours (or anyone else's) run through PB elite, BD elite or any other elite content could have had an almost infinite amount of circumstances attached to it.

How I interpret content is how "I" interpret it. How "you" do, is for you.

As long as we're having fun we'll continue to play. As for me, I will be here until they shut the servers down.

I think the point is that "elite" is meant to be "elite" or exceptionally difficult.

when you've got almost everyone, their dog, the fly on their dog and the very air around the person and dog having a full set of elite gear, i'm sorry to say it, but it's not hard enough, for anyone.

It's not just about POV because the difficulty is set by the majority and the evidence in itself shows the content is not hard enough, given the very definition of the word elite.

I have come to a rather silly realization. I have been viewing this game through the same lens as READING a novel... Not being the character in it. It may not sound like much but the way you view content is radically different if you view it from an outside third party position of the reader or the viewer.

If you are still wondering why that means its this. As I read the book or watch the movie or TV show... It does not get more and more difficult to watch or read. The situations become more dramatic and the challenge is occurring but not to you. You are only an observer unaffected by any difficulty affordable free upon the characters. Same would be for those who engage like actors in a play. Of course you will win and there will be little challenge since you are just following the script.

Wow... Fundamental view shift. Maybe a little off topic related some in regards to me te and difficulty.

I guess I don't want storylines that require much effort because I view them as stories to be told not challenges to face in the end unless I entered into the story with that understanding to begin with.

Much thinking to be had on my part.

I agree. I can hit 156 with vendor gear alone.. since everything is cr based what's the point? I can just run the raid once a wk and replace the vendor gear eventually. I stopped caring about the c/d affinity bonus because I honestly don't notice a big difference. I still t7 mod, but the money I save on replays I spend less on full recovery kits.

Are you keeping up with how MMO's are shaping up on consoles?

I very rarely use replay badges as its not worth the burn out I get from re-running content. I learned my lesson from Paradox Wave where I spent countless replays re-running that damn piece of content trying to get the Traces of Time for my roles and then a little while later 2 easy alerts come out BIA and FAM and invalidated all the replaying I did.

If players want to be re-play warriors and want to spend their money to get max CR a day after the new content comes out, God bless them its their money, but its not going to be me...lol

I suspect it is about to get worse. Step back to the big picture and the devs have began to monatise progression. In the process however lost revenue in items like total recovery kits because of how popular betas are, and ofcourse synthetics. Then I cant speak fir everyone but I have noticed alot of people who simply will not buy skill points for alts because we dont "need" them. I know I can get by with 146 so why crank an alt up over 200?

Add in the loss of players and revenue and now the new progression mkdel and I suspect mods, skill points and gear all will be monatised. Dropped plans gives u 2 cr synthetics 1 cr and betas nothing as an example. Now every three monthss we need to replace modds with very little recovery kits droppin so u gotta buy total recovery kits.


I suspect our rewards will still lack, our quality of gameplay will remain watered down easy yet our cost to maintain will increase.


Simply because the devs look for the die hard sub carriers to pay extra vs offering huge gains for premiums to pay extra. I tell u a $4 a month escrow unlock if u buy an episode would do wonders. I almost would end content skipping or require 2 of 3 episodes to progress. As cool as sharing gear and new progression can be I am scared to see where it takes us

Oh the painful truth... It hurts!

By work I mean cutscenes and overall dialogue. You cant deny that episode 21 had more cutscenes than episode 20.

That is true, however I have been against monthly content since day 1. And the only compromise I gained out of arguing against monthly content was the R&D crafting system.

And I do believe gu47 is still hurting the game to this day making the monthly concept only worse than what it appears to be.

After gu47 population was "fine" in a sense. That definition of "fine" was the game is not at a critical point due to crossplay being able to save the population eventually.

I think people jumped on the bandwagon of monthly content before it started was because they expected the same quality of content that they received in AF2 to be broken down into monthly pieces. Nobody expected it to be like the way it is now. And at the same time many players are saying the quality of content is suffering because they are using extra resources to complete XB1 launch and fix the tutorial and early stages of the game.

True enough. But I am not prepared to give them any praise because they didn't do their worse. It's like praising the dog for peeing on the carpet instead of the couch.

I don't know....if I had my, I woulda called into work, and,be spending my whole day resetting PB and PBE