Upcoming Overseer Changes

Discussion in 'News and Announcements' started by dreamweaver, Mar 16, 2020.

  1. dreamweaver Community Manager

    We eagerly launched the Overseer feature last week, and the response has been incredible. It’s an ambitious project for us of a scale we haven’t done in quite some time and because we were so eager to get this feature in your hands, there have been some unexpected issues that require changes and fixes. We wanted to review the upcoming changes and explain what they mean and why we are making them.

    We also wanted to take this opportunity to offer our apologies that so many changes are needed right after launching this feature, but we feel they are necessary to protect the integrity of not just the Overseer system but EQ itself.

    But, before we launch into an explanation of why we turned off the Finish Early button and what changes you can expect in the upcoming patch, we wanted to be clear that we will be refunding a portion of the DBC spent on immediate quest completion through the system due to a bug.

    Also, as a thank you for your patience and all the reports that helped us track and tackle Overseer issues, we will be granting an Overseer pack to all accounts that have logged in within the past month on servers that can use Overseer. The pack grants and refunds will be happening after this patch as we need to work out all the logistics, but we expect all affected accounts to see them in about 3-5 weeks.

    Now, let’s dive in.

    Quest Success had a bug
    It was a pretty big bug. A miscalculation in the way we determined if a quest should critically succeed resulted in a notable drop in its overall success chance. We are sorry for that, and we will be fixing it this week. The good news is that this fix will also result in the chances of critical success on all quests increasing by a significant factor.

    Temporarily removing the ability to purchase immediate quest completion
    Due to the issue with quest success, we felt it was best to temporarily remove the ability to spend Daybreak Cash to complete quests. We will enable the ability to purchase instant completion when the bug is fixed and, as mentioned above, will be refunding a portion the DBC spent on immediate quest completion

    Reward Changes
    Unfortunately, we made several miscalculations with what and how much was offered. We believe it is important that this system is supplemental to gameplay and that it does not replace it. Some of the rewards offered were either too easily attained or greatly devalued items that are granted through gameplay. To repair that we will be making the following changes:

    Overseer merchant price changes
    We will be increasing the Tetradrachm cost of most items on the merchant (as a side note from Absor, “I also want to apologize for the name of those coins...” as a side note from Ngreth, “I'm not.”). The most notable change will be a significant increase in the price of McKenzie's Brews to align with their actual value. These are the new Tetradrachm prices for the items sold:

    •The unique clockwork armor pieces: 70,000
    •The unique clockwork robe: 175,000
    •Spitegems: 87,500
    •Crystallized Luck: 35,000
    •Essences: 4,375
    •McKenzie's Special Brew: 26,250
    •Token of Resurrection: 43,750
    •Urthron's Ulitimate Unattuner: 175,000

    Tetradrachm will no longer be tradeable
    Frankly, these were never meant to be tradeable. The intent was that rewards be earned by using the Overseer system, not by purchasing or trading for those rewards. Please take a moment to move your existing Tetradrachm to the character/account that you wish them to be on before the update this week.

    Lowering the number of collectible items rewarded
    We will be reducing the number of collectible items obtained on success. Because you can choose specifically what item you receive, introducing these items into the economy too rapidly will reduce the value of the rarest collectible items. So now collectible rewards will almost always only give you only one item. Also, you will usually not be guaranteed to get that item. The new rewards will offer you two options: either some number of Tetradrachm, or fewer Tetradrachm and a percentage chance to also gain a collectible of your choice. As a pretend example: succeeding on a Quest might offer you 200 Tetradrachm OR 150 Tetradrachm and a 25% chance to get a collectible item of your choice.

    Other reward restrictions
    Because we want to maintain the value of doing current content when it is current, we will no longer be rewarding collection or tradeskill items from the current expansion as rewards. Items from older expansions will obviously still be available.

    We are restricting the ability to obtain collectible and tradeskill items as rewards to Gold members only. Free accounts will be offered a Tetradrachm reward for successful quests rather than a collectible or tradeskill item. This is to prevent abuse of the free to play system to gather these items, especially with the potential of upcoming free Heroic Characters (shh... it's a poorly kept secret!). As mentioned above, we do not want to undervalue the effort of playing the game through Overseer, we want it to be a way to enhance gameplay.

    We will likely be making other changes and improvements to the system in the future, so please keep offering us feedback (scrollbars would be nice). Your ideas are always welcome.

    Again, we would like to apologize for the need to make such dramatic changes to a system that we only just launched, but we felt they were necessary to protect the integrity of EverQuest and the Overseer system itself.

    - Dreamweaver, on behalf of the EverQuest Team
    Duder and Veltio like this.
  2. Bobbybick Only Banned Twice

    You guys swung way too far in the other direction with these new prices, I can't see anyone actually choosing Tetradrachms as the reward. If you are going through with this they should ALWAYS be granted with quest completion and you choose from the others so they passively build up.

    Take for example the Staff of Forbidden Rites, a desireable clicky from Old Man Mckenzie which costs 63 brews. With these new costs thats a total of 1,653,750 Tetradrachms if you don't run any OMM missions to earn brews the old fashioned way. I don't know how many you THINK these Overseer quests reward, but I've been getting mostly 275 and 500, or around 3k a day.

    Yeah Brews shouldn't cost 170 or whatever it currently is, but at least be realistic with these prices.
    FaloverC, Emarra, Rickoshay and 14 others like this.
  3. Swiss Augur

    Some change is ok but these changes will just make the system near useless.
    Emarra, Rickoshay, Truthfire and 6 others like this.
  4. Benito EQ player since 2001.

    Please don't change Ultron's Ultimate Unattuner to 175,000 coin. It will probably take me like 3 months or more to save that much coin.
  5. Pikollo Augur

    It was fun while it lasted. I actually spent money on it. These changes basically make doing it worthless. Especially for Selo folk.
    Winnowyl, Rickoshay, Skuz and 2 others like this.
  6. yober Elder

    So what about agent pack refunds? You've nerfed this into complete uselessness and I want my store points back.
  7. Mazame Augur

    Can you please consider adding Raid coin from older content to the rewards.
    It would be nice to be able to get some of the hero forage set and some of the old chase drops from raids.
  8. Sobmre Augur

    same old thing once again.........nerf to ruin

    actually had something nice and well rewarding. but now its a waste of time really.
    Rickoshay and Allayna like this.
  9. yerm Augur

    5k tetradrachms per day is a high daily average. This is obtained from taking 500 per 12h missions at 5 missions at a time = 10x 500tetra missions per day. Getting slightly more from rarer missions will be offset by failure rates, I expect the average daily output will be lower than 5k.

    Your current prices mean that running overseers on cooldown will reward roughly one crystallized luck per week. Is this a reasonable expectation?

    Likewise, your prices mean a single omm brew per 5 days. For simple reference, the items dropped by doing vox or naggy omm raids cost 62 brews if purchasing instead of awaiting the drop, so we are talking about over a year of running overseers on cooldown for one vox/naggy omm drop.




    Your new prices make overseer worthless. Are you going to ban my account if I chargeback my agent purchases?
    Rickoshay, Fanra, Truthfire and 8 others like this.
  10. Beardsy Elder

    ... Sorry, you go from 167 per Tetra to TWENTY SIX THOUSAND and you had already put an obscenely overpriced robe (60k? IIRC) and tripled that? HAHAHAHA.
    I promise you, you do this no one will play this overseer trash. It was already hot garbage to begin with.

    Whoever is making the financial decisions for your company needs to be fired, literally asap. I really mean, Immediately asap. As in, tomorrow morning asap.
    Allayna likes this.
  11. Ibadan Kun'Tirel Augur

    The collection items was literally the only reason for me to do this.... Can you add the collection item to the merchant as well as an exchange for tetradrachms?
    Wait, no new collection items or tradeskill items from latest expansion? Nevermind, no reason for me to use this at all now.

    Also, any compensation for the overactive fail rate? Lost several agents due to this, as well as a bunch of potential items.
    Rickoshay, enclee, Elyssanda and 3 others like this.
  12. ZenMaster formless, shapeless

    I totally understand the changes to the Collectibles and even TS items. Changes to the ornament price sound OK for chase.

    However, hardly anyone runs OMM raids anymore. It's impossible to box.

    The prices for Token of Resurrection and Ultron's Ultimate Unattuner are out of whack.
    Rickoshay and Elyssanda like this.
  13. Zobek New Member

    This is all redicous. The only thing that needed done was fix the damn %'s. After so many already have nearly full suits of OMM gear, even if it wasnt intended for a TLP server that in 45 days the gear will be an afterthought, the damage is already done. I'm livid to think brews will go from 167 to 26k, others who caught on fast, reap the benefits then screw the rest. Just wow.
    Emarra, Rickoshay, Skuz and 1 other person like this.
  14. Hellowhatsyourname Augur

    Forget the TLP exploiters... for everyone else, this just pushes a good, fun idea into completely worthless. Thanks for helping me make a decision regarding whether to pay attention to the Overseer "feature."

    Time to ignore this. Cheers.
    Rickoshay and Skuz like this.
  15. Seear New Member

    I really hope you do not roll out these changes immediately and take a moment to listen to the community. This is the wrong direction.

    I agree that the amount of brews was insane but it was only a benefit to the Selo server. The brew abuse only really effects servers on SoD and Underfoot.

    Selo is a one month progression server and those who do not raid daily are starting to fall behind on gear and this gave us a chance to catch up. 167 Tetra was INSANELY cheap and the price needs to go up, but you are making it impossible for it to be beneficial for us to even do.

    I implore you to take a real look at the numbers and come to a reasonable number that can benefit the community as well as the company. I was one of the people who purchased several agent packs, as well as use the auto complete feature and if these are the changes you are going to implement i will not be spending daybreak cash on it as i was.

    If you are looking for a number, i think keeping Brews costing under 2k Tetra's is more than reasonable and people will still be using that feature as well as slowing down the rate that people are getting brews.

    Thank you,
    Seear
    Rickoshay and Skuz like this.
  16. Swiss Augur

    Part of the problem seems to be TLP needing higher prices than normal servers, the brews being somewhat cheap and not taking forever is a great thing for newer players trying to catch up.
    Rickoshay and Skuz like this.
  17. Scornfire The Nimbus Prince

    The price on the rez token made me legit lol
  18. Karhar Dream Crusher

    For a 115 character, the buy-able items is pretty crap... Give me something useful to spend coin on.
    eqgamer and Elyssanda like this.
  19. vylo Augur

    Wow, talk about going from valuable to never being worth bothering opening again. You are making the brews cost over ONE HUNDRED times their previous cost. That's an insane over nerf. You had people willing to literally hand you money to get some value in the Selo's era for gear. now it is completely worthless. You would have to grind overseer like some kind of maniac to even get 6 weeks or so it will retain some value. It would take 1.1 MILLION tetras just to get that single item. That is 2,200 12 hour missions currently. In my BEST run I could get 14k tetras from overseer. that's every 12 hours. Best case scenario would be 28k tetras a day if I was insanely diligent and lucky. That would still take me 39 days for ONE item.

    That's madness. In one fell swoop you took a system that people enjoyed and that made you money into a worthless afterthought no one will even bother opening.

    And many of us did spend money on more than completion but on agents. Agents we haven't been able to use, and we won't be able to. Frankly I would like either for you to scrap these cost changes, or to refund me my DBC for the agents, because I certainly won't be using them after this patch goes through.
    Rickoshay and Skuz like this.
  20. Ulrin New Member

    Yikes. I was enjoying Overseer up to this point, have spent my accumulated SC on agents, and considering buying more SC because the system was a lot of fun once I got into it, some of my guildies and I were getting deep into the mechanics in a Discord channel, too.

    This "fix" will wreck all of the fun of the system unless a similar bump in currency rewards is also put in. Were the rezz tokens and unattuner a little cheap? Sure. I wouldn't have complained (much) to see the rezz token bump to 10k. However, 44k tokens that I can no longer buy if I'm 30 short before a raid? Reducing the collectible rewards (which was a *great* reward) and entirely cutting out the single in-era tradeskill component that would be rewarded after a six-hour-minimum-duration mission?

    What sort of augmentation does it provide to my gameplay when I'd be looking at years of clicking through the Overseer window 2-4x per day, every day, getting zero quest failures for weeks on end in order to buy single items from Old Man Mckenzie? At 3k tetras per day max, it would be two weeks of 100% success missions for a single rezz token. Three weeks for a single dose of Luck. The "Ultimate Unattuner" is on the Loyalty vendor for 400 crowns, which I earn in 4 weeks even when I don't log into the game. If I tried to buy it from the Overseer system, it would take just a hair under 60 days of straight missions - never missing a mission changeover time and never failing a mission.

    This idea is laughable - I wouldn't even spend the 500 monthly SC on agents since it'd be such a waste of my time. 175k for a unique robe ornamentation is equally laughable if it doesn't provide phenomenal cosmic powers and a large plot of land immediately after equipping it. If you've actually designed these changes to protect the integrity of EverQuest, you're on track to fail and I request that you reconsider.

    I agree with previous posters - if you actually implement these changes, you should refund all the SC that people have spent on this to date. The mechanics have changed so significantly since what amounted to your actual "beta test" on the live servers that what we were getting and what we are now going to be getting is no longer remotely similar. If the above summary is an accurate representation of what the final product will be, Darkpaw has wasted a good number of man hours creating what could have been an excellent system, only to ruin it during implementation - and for spurious reasons.
    Rickoshay, enclee, Skuz and 3 others like this.