Personal Loot Reward Update in Renewal of Ro [Heroic III] zones

This is like a bad mix of The Wolf of Wallstreet and Dont Look up

Ill be direct here as many of my friends in the top end raiding scene from multiple guilds have the same feeling.

If this stays we will just sunset it.

All of us probably would have been ok with another crate buff if you guys just stuck to that, we probably would have tried to get it and spent $$$ which is what im sure was needed. This system of monetizing the way we get loot is just a no go for all of us.

Get rid of this, give us another crate buff or just give us another tier of subs, don't go monetizing the way we gear.

The problem is that people will be upset and complain and say they will quit. Maybe some will. Then over time it will all settle down and it's back to business as usual. This will become the norm. This is what has always happened in the past. There is always going to be people willing to spend huge money to get the best stuff. I think DarkPaw is betting that those people spending will make up for the lost money from people quitting.

They have spend many dev hours and money putting this system in. Time and money that would have been better spent elsewhere in the game in my opinion. I don't see them dumping it after spending all the time and money putting it in there. Plus the fact they didn't ask for testing help or comments from the community and just stealth dropped it speaks volumes to me about their intentions.

Hope I'm wrong and all the bad feedback will change their minds but I don't think so. Players speaking with their wallets is the only way they are going to change. Otherwise they will just keep doing this stuff.

It is absolutely one of the worst ideas and god knows there has been a lot over the years but this is topping the list.

While we are hearing this issue is being looked into, the crates are still on the market and the only thing done was to cause some of the mechanics to not work (the treasure cache). This does not bode well for them reversing this insanity. When will there be an official response? When will the direction be settled on and communicated?

The longer you leave boxes on the market, the worse the situation grows. By not stopping the sale of the crates, instead, you clearly indicate you have no plans to listen to the feedback and make a change. This will drive many folks out of the game...and many of them will be the ones that use to spend a great deal $$. Raiders, in particular have always focused on the loot items as some of the great rewards from the game. Buying those rewards now (with this new system), will cause the vast majority to pull out of the game. No one is here to compete against someone's wallet. Especially in today's economy.

People will vote with their feet.

no transparency right now because they know once they make a statement on what they plan to do people are going to walk. This is absolute garbage.

We can't see how many people cancel their subs. Even then, some will be like me and have subs that were paid out in advance, so they won't just suddenly disappear since they already paid. (For instance, I've cancelled my subscription but it's active til August. I may or may not re-up, but the way things are now, I'm cancelled and not intending to.)

There will certainly be some people who are willing to bleed their real life income into the game, but as it stands right now...even before this disastrous 'pay for a tiny chance at a piece of loot' cash grab...casual and semi-casual players can no longer run current heroic content. Casual raiding is all but dead.

People on Maj'Dul are struggling to do pick-up groups even just for H1. That's the bare minimum of group content and it is unreachable for too many players. Even if more casual groups successfully run the H1 content, often nobody gets any upgrades that put them in a better position to have an easier time in H1 or reach H2 content. The gear isn't in the boxes and it isn't in the mission rewards either. People who are able to run H2 and H3 have a hard time helping lower geared people because it takes so ridiculously long to get through the zones if people don't have the stats. It's ugly, unfriendly, and awful. And Maj'Dul is one of the higher population servers, I can't imagine what it's like elsewhere.

I'm seeing people who used to be cooperative groupmates and raiders turn on each other, grabbing for upgrades because nobody is getting what they need. They're loot starved, panicked because their parse is stuck and they can't fill their role as they'd like to. And this is how it was designed. It's unhealthy, none of us deserve this mess. Why don't you hire a psych professional to look at what you're doing to people, because this is wrong.

A raid force needs 24 people, and now it seems it needs 24 people who can afford to buy all of their upgrades with real life cash, and also play 24 hours a day just to harvest what's needed for the plethora of required temps for raids. Where is each current raid force going to find people to replace those who are quitting over this nonsense? Where are competitive forces going to find replacements when less competitive players can't scrape their way into functional stats and parses? It seems that each raidforce is going to need to require a minimum cash investment because things you can't function without are now locked behind a paywall.

You don't get enough upgrades just for running tediously scripted heroic content...nope. It's not a reward for your skill or your time or your ability, so expect nothing from doing heroics. There's maybe one piece per H2 zone that everybody needs, and it is so rare that you can run every day and not see it one time in months of playing. If you want upgrades, you can put in the time and jump through all the hoops...but ALSO you'll need to punch in your credit card number to pay big bucks on TOP of the time you put in. On TOP of the membership fee. On TOP of the price you paid for the preorder with the good mount, merc, and familiar that cripple you if you skip them.

Basic upgrades...now behind a paywall. Just to make a toon passably functional, or maybe hope to step into a raid zone and survive a trash pull? After starving us for upgrades since this expac launched. Really?

I hope this is rolled back. I hope the path to upgrading and making a functional toon is made reasonable.

As long as the loss of people walking away is less then the money they get from this new system, nothing will change. I'm not meaning long term, this is a squeeze for the last remaining customers to milk as much as they can from their small lokal player base.

Many will also not leave cause "they still have fun".

The players who saw this coming, seen the p2w being aded and tweaked over the last 5-6 years while the game hasn't gotten much attention are already long gone and will probably never be back or recommend this ga.e to their friends.

You want a successful very profit game? Make polished content ran in a client that don't crash or lag. Even the "but I'm having fun" crowd are well aware of the shortcomings of this game so that's why they always go suck in a corner convincing themself "I'm having fun I'm having fun I'm having fun" as they frantically are blocking everyone for telling the hard truth... you are being milked, every system made the past 5 years is designed to milk you for money. The money they milk are not invested back into the game, it goes straight up to the owners.

Make a great game with fun systems and people will play and throw money at you as thanks. Or as in DBG, make a predatory system taking advantage of loyal customer and friend groups and communities. Alsooelderely players with lots of saving and many memories inbyhe game.

The only way this is ending is when the whales don't spend the ludacris amount of money.

Stay and support this predatory system exploiting the psychology of the loclyals and eldery it won't get any better, it will just get worse

I'm sure will close their eyes and pretend nothing bad is going on cause :they have so much fun" running around solo.

For me it feels like I got puked on myself and have to lick up

I will probably get banned and this message remov

Enjoy getting milked hard, or walk away and find games with zero downtime, zero lag, lots of polished content constantly released

First of all, I am appreciative of the ability to run the H3 zones every 30 minutes and not being worried about having to decline running with another group of friends because of the 18 hour lockout timer. This was a great change. Adding the ability to buy gear/additional gear chances? Not a great change.

To echo the majority of the other comments in this thread, if a big concern is controlling the amount of H3 gear entering the game with an 18 hour timer, WHY add the ability to guarantee gear from zone bosses every 30 mins as long as you spend real money? Also, from my experience running the zones and talking to others that are also running them, while the post states that Personal Treasure Unlockers and Reward Keys have a chance to drop off of H3 bosses, the drop rate on them seems ...extremely low, making pay to win the most realistic option to quickly get raid resolve gear.

While I'm not personally complaining about my bad RNG, I've killed 16 H3 names since this change and I've gotten zero pieces of gear. The insulting part is thinking about how many pieces of gear I could have gotten had I spent money on it. And no, I won't be spending money on a mechanic that allows those with the most money to be the most successful in the game.

Let me sum up: pay to win gear is bad.

I don't understand, the subscription base should be enough to handle the costs of maintaining this game with slim content provided every year and still bring in a profit, you guys learned in the past about p2w stuff with crates, and yet here we are on this road again. Why do we unlearn things every year, you know what doesn't work but it always seems to show up again!

I asked ChatGPT how to handle this situation. The original complaint (as I understand it) was that the H3 lockout was so long that you couldn't help out friends by running in a second group. The dev counterpoint was that reducing the lockout would introduce H3-quality items too quickly. The AI suggested a system of diminishing returns, where loot was earned on the first run, but alternate currency was earned on subsequent runs. When I explained the system of personal loot caches, unlockers, and keys, it expressed concern people wouldn't want to run a zone if they knew they couldn't get loot caches, and it expressed concern that the unlockers undermined the whole purpose of a zone/cache lockout timer. ChatGPT further doubled-down against this system when it was told that unlockers and keys were present in a real-money marketplace, stating that this would further increase the P2W aspects and upset the game balance.

I just want to say I did buy 1- 20 crate and also received a 20 ct as a gift. So, out of a total of 40 crates I got Mostly useless junk. I did get 3 chests. I decided to try one on a raid mob T3. Well, it didn't work or give me any loot, we killed 3, t3 mobs and I got no loot. But the chest stayed on my maintained bar. Well today I log on and the chest was gone no loot, no chest and I ended up with zero items, so beware they are truly broken.

I have my frustration message times through the translator hit, because I really run out of nerves to translate that...

Sorry DeVs- in this addon the loot system in the raid is already a real insult - parcelchest with lottery principle - only coins without further recognizable sense, a few useful coins as "tip" - and now THIS?
if I get only meaningless runes in the raid in my parcelchest, I can live with it halfway... but now also "personal treasure chest" with more garbage than usable... no thanks
I have never been so frustrated as currently in this game.

I hope that this "wonderful idea" is best undone yesterday.

I don't feel like running H3 after the change - it's not motivating to run H3 for upgrades when there are temporal adornments and the 1000th fear immunity rune or (oh a real item, but) useless pants with the clever hint - you can't equip the listed item, wrong class

the worst thing that happened to eq2 - was to introduce FTP, kronos and stationcash for game important stuff. this loot system for h3 is the result of that

just my 2 cents on the subject

The new loot system is maybe ok with the personal loot and reduced lookouts. Sure, the drop rates and such can be adjusted. However, the ptw keys/resetters need to go. Game wide maybe not a huge deal with people being able to buy more loot for the causal crowd but for competitive raiding it is death. I would be willing to bet most of your whales live in the competitive raiding guilds.

Besides ruining progression with some being able to “buy” their way to the top, PTW has the problem where content gets tuned to the anticipated stats and now drops. So, in effect regular players are in fact penalized for not spending rather than people that pay extra getting an extra boost. That extra becomes the new norm. This is a problem. I get you guys do not care about the raid progression competition, but you should since this competition keeps a lot of the high-end big spenders paying and playing.

What needs to happen is leave the stuff people have purchased but discontinue this. Remove them from the marketplace and replace them with a new mount or whatever. A new ptw mount is not ideal but we can live with that. The heritage crates are still desirable regardless of the mega ptw item, people like the time reducers alone. Tweak the drop rates on the personal crates and make the loot tradeable in zone so people can trade items to people present that can use them.

Create new appearance items, house items and whatever stuff on the marketplace that does not affect stats and gear. Exp pot’s, maybe quest completion pots, time savers not power ups. You want to sell stuff to help people catch up? Fantastic, no one is going to complain if you make it easier for people to return or start and catch up. Sell previous year stuff like pre-order buffs. No one is going to care. More people would probably come back or start if the task was not so daunting.

You want more money you need to focus on player retention. A huge step in that direction would be to address the concerns of your player base. We want better itemization and class balance and less ptw.

I concur with all the sentiments already being stated. I'll voice my opinion, here, on the official forums that pay to get gear has got to go. The only place I should be getting keys, resetters or caches are from doing the content itself. That would motivate me to run these zones more. I shouldn't be able to run a credit card and buy my way into competitive gear.

Said years ago, when they eventually monetize in-game loot, the game is done. Sad for those who still play, glad I cut the cord when I did. This is really awful.

This P2W solution is the peak of a horrible itemization. All started with the "new" gear setup after stopping reforging.
This expansion is even more worse because of removing another stat from gear.

Even if you win gear for your class, you cannot get descent stats you need.

Also we have to take into account the broken RNG. Dev's are denying this, but real world shows a different picture.
Some player are getting every good stuff right at the start, while others never see this.
With this in the backgroud most of money the ppl are spending will go into a black hole.

More over, at current state you don't play a game, it is a second job and we have to pay for this. Guess we are all crazy.
This grind feels more like a assembly-line work.

Stop playing this game after 19yrs is now an option.

I would just like to call out that this thread has been here for for a full working week. We were directed here from discord as the "official" place to discuss this and get dev interaction.

DBG set the pace of this crisis by bypassing the roadmap and the test server and brought this to live as a complete surprise to the customer base. It is therefore on DBG to manage the impact with effective communication.

In that time one red name has made two posts cherry-picking posts to respond to, and has not even answered the questions that they quoted in their posts while responding.

Effective communication has not been present. This is simply not acceptable in a paid service, even in the context of the generally poor customer and employee relations in the gaming industry.

The viability of a 20 year old video game is a precarious proposition even under normal circumstances. With regular and frequent quality-perturbations like this and the general unfinished nature of the current paid-for expansion, continued viability is placed further in jeopardy.

Do better.

Be more present. Pass the thread summary up to the stuffed suits that forced the dev team to implement this tripe, and the implied threat that yes, they will pull up a last few buckets of water from the key-buying single digit percent of the population, but that after the well is poisoned and the population that "only" spends $1000 per year or less leaves, then there's no-one left for the whales to stay ahead of via their spend.

Do better, or accept that fate and polish your resume's, and try to keep ahead of the tens of thousands of the meta, alphabet, microsoft, and amazon tech workers with more current skills against whom you will be competing for your next job.

Just remember that the people spending won't be around when all of the players that refuse to spend quit - If you are spending, you are spending to remain competitive. Can't really be competitive when everyone else moves on to other games....