I perhaps can life with it, when you can tear down addorns an auction them sepreatly..... well it is a cheap fix from SoE, but it could solve it..... well get rid of pre adorned would or perhaps could be better.... anyhow.
Remove the Adornments from Raiddrops and let it drop separately. Why ? Thats an unnecessary Timesink. If any Dev finds this a good Idea, please, for one evening, try to distribute Loot in our RF. Before: Item Drops, gets auctioned for DKP. Rune drops, gets auctioned for DKP. Now: Item drops with Rune on it. Tank Item with Healspell-only-proc-rune on it. It's either: Tank rolls, destroys healrune. Healer rolls, destroys tankitem. Raidforcebank pays for Dislodgers, auctions every item separately. = Unnecessary timesink. Now add in if you have guests and (in our case) Raidtwinks, which are played very often and get the same care as mains... Yeah. Roll for Item... roll for Rune... use dislodgers (who has to pay?) dkp item.... dkp rune.... ... what the... ? Just remove that and be gone with it.
The update for today 1-17-13 with the new dislodge toys is plain unsatisfactory. It is a bodge job, yes its obvious you are introducing irritating plat sinks simply for the sake of making plat sinks. If plat is an issue turn it into some kind of high score thing that has no meaning beyond that this was player X's grand total back when plat was stupid easy and then delete everyone's plat, hard reset, remove all plat/gold drops be it body or chest, set all quest/item drop values to 1 gold be it lvl 1 or lvl 100 item/quest, set all writ rewards to 1 gold, make fuel cost cost copper to silver for crafting the full item, reduce one item repair from 0% to 100% to one gold regardless if it is handcrafted or fabled/mythical lvl 1 or lvl 100 and adjust everything else accordingly, i.e. nothing is worth more than one gold when vendor selling it, nothing costs more than 1 gold from a vendor merchant, put an account wide plat cap of 100 plat and be done with it, you might need to tweak down the costs of guild halls but they should still be in the plat range so they mean something, but that should be easy to do because being harsh like this is easy to come up with a reasonable formula for upkeep costs. Stop doing silly stuff like this that are half measures. Come out with a bland blanket statement and just say, the risk/reward mechanic for money is completely warped and we are doing something long term about it, one shot deal, massive pain in one go, this chipping away at it method is just forcing you to come up with ever increasingly lame and unfun mechanics to achieve the same end which is to drain excessive plat out of the economy. If you don't actually want to be bold and make those sorts of changes then make the runes drop separately, put them on a merchant and flag the guild with the drops rather than the player, just make sure the runes cost 15 to 20 plat or something like that. As far as longevity goes there are three kinds of raider out there, the come kill it all see it be done with it in one month or less type, the oh I am bored of the content type but I'll stick around for two to six months, and then you have the addicts who stick around for years and move guilds as and when they fold. By far the first two types will not stay any longer no matter what you do, the more important people are the ones that stay for years with a game, you are making it not fun for those people who are in it for the long term by doing this if those people go, then so does your long term community, you won't have an mmo any more, just some weird turn style at the abandoned amusement park with museum like displays of mementos of yesteryear when the game was awesome. If you want to be nice, put in a guild raid loot depot that is flagged to the guild by a raid leader, if the raid force is an alliance and the master looters for other guilds need access the raid leader can set it on the box so their guilds can utilize it, allow people to dump raid dropped loot into the box straight from the zone so as to allow uninterrupted game play, bidding for loot and dkp checks etc take time out of the game same deal with loot councils better to do the admin at the end of the raid, remove the must be present and 48 hrs restriction and allow the guild to keep it in the coffer for as long as they want and to give out to who ever they want in guild when ever they need to or want to. It's not a big deal, it is not hard to implement.Yeah I am sure people will cry and bleat about loosing their massive plats, but really those people are beyond silly, what are you doing with that stock pile of 100K or 1 million plat or what ever you have, basically nothing just amassing more for the sake of it so its already worthless really, destroy it. There is next to nothing to buy on the broker these days either so game currency is mostly a by product of a mechanic that died several years ago. Even stuff sold via SLR is worthless almost everything I seen in auction is easily available if people are bothered to actually play the content, save for hard mode content stuff since it is obvious a good percentage of people are not capable of doing that content. If you want people to stick around in your game put in more content to do, keep it fresh, keep it varied, keep it interesting, experiment explore do something fun, but don't go around locking people into sub par RNG virtual slot machines.
You can still do that. Nothing is stopping you from running old zones and going to buy the adorns. The random ones are only slightly better, which being as they are random they should be. Also, re crit mit. It was by no means a bad mechanic. When it became a bad mechanic was in Drunder and PoW when the requirement was so high that you couldn't meet it.
Everyone already knows this and no one indicated otherwise so not sure why you brought that up. Obviously we are talking about the new ones. The issue is, as has been laid out several times, is that we are at the complete mercy of the RNG to acquire them. This is bad since it can be, and often is, discouraging for people to run content when they are basically hoping against hope they are going to get the thing they actually want and not wasting their time. Personally I don't even bother running heroic content. The content itself is boring so I can't even enjoy it on some 'lets just have fun' level. Heroic content is reduced to 'hey run this boring stuff and maybe you might hopefully get one thing to upgrade a bit.' And yes I would extend my problem with RNG to other loot as well. Luckily other loot is more generic and you don't need to 6~ of the exact same piece to get where you want when everyone else needs roughly that many as well. Crit mit was a terrible mechanic in just about every way. It was boring and unimaginative as well as being a blunt instrument in terms of progression and balance. Furthermore it was a veiled attempt to implement 'gear score' resulting in a system much worse than gearscore as it couldn't be bypassed or compensated for. You could literally play mad-libs with it. "Running suchandsuch, need high gearscore crit mit.' No surprise it was introduced with the archetype debuffs which share many of these terrible traits. I am apparently in good company with this assessment as the devs have NO PROBLEM being stubborn when they think something is right, so they would have happily left it in if they wholly disagreed with me/many of the players.
My two cents worth: In terms of prolonging content, I think SOE has done a pretty good job of making sure the content stays viable for longer with this expac. I also applaud the efforts to make tinkering more useful. Frankly, I very much disliked the Velious multi-faction system with the insanely high faction requirements to be able to purchase adornments. A much better system would have been one where the cost scaled down as your faction score increased. I don't mind so much the gear dropping adorned already, but what I do mind is that the adornments are totally random -- ammo conservation on shammy gear was a combination we saw far too often. Having one random table for all adornments was probably the easiest approach, but the easiest approach to solving a problem is seldom the best one. A lot of the grief arising from this system could be relieved if there were separate random adornment tables for each type of gear, as opposed to one table that gets applied randomly to all armor drops resulting in shammy gear with ammo conservation or fighter gear with negative hate gain.... Certainly some adornments would occur on multiple tables (crit bonus, potency, multiattack, crit chance, etc), but the adornments that are very much geared to particular subsets would occur on only one or (at most) two of the tables. Another step that could be taken for alleviating some of the concerns with the current system would be to allow adorners to craft some common red adornments (crit bonus, potency, multiattack, crit chance, negative/positive hate, etc) or perhaps slightly less powerful versions of them to help bridge the gap between Velious and Chains adornments. Add a new recipe book and voila! Certainly the recipes would need to have appropriate components included, but it might be effective in reducing some of the complaints. Another effective method for resolving some of the gripes might be adding occasional random adornments as name drops, along with masters and armor pieces. The suggestion made earlier in this thread of dropping yellow adorns in heroic zones and red adorns in raid zones made sense to me. I am by no means suggesting that every named mob should drop an adorn in it's box, but that an occasional drop might not be a bad thing. That's what I got. Ymarik
I don't recall EVER going through content in EQ2 as fast as I did with CoE. the only expansion I really missed was DoF so unless people cleared that out in less than 2 months this has been the fastest one I have ever seen. Which is kind of funny because those xpacs lasted longer YET they didn't have to resort to all these annoying loot speed bumps we have now.
The Devs removed CM becasue they HAD to not becasue they agree that slow progression players were being gated. They didn't have to remeoved it for the few guilds in POW at the time which simply couldn't get enough CM to survive (those guilds would eventually find a way to circumvent CM anyway), they HAD to remove it because people with too much CM were strolling thru lower CM zones by-passing Boss scripts and taking zero damage in the process. So, even though the Devs removed CM and you agree with them, it sould like it is from two completely and opposite points of view... You=CM is too hard (to get) .. Dev = CM is too easy (to By-Pass) .. You+Dev = Remove CM.
That could have been easily remedied if it was even seen as a problem which it wasn't seeing as those same players were STILL steamrolling those lower CM zones with it gone. So I seriously doubt that is why they removed it unless a dev straight up said that's why since it solved exactly nothing in regards to high level players steamrolling lower end dungeons. With CM = high end players destroying low end zones. Without CM = high end players destroying low end zones. Apparently dungeons being 'too easy' isn't a problem for them since that is the entire theme of CoE.
My guess is they removed CM because it was to hard to balance things around it. As was the case when Drunder and PoW first came out. They learned it was easier and better to use Crit Chance as a gating tool. With CC its possible for people to try and learn mobs without having a full raid that meets the threshold. Lowered DPS from player non crits can be handled by a raid force. Additionally even the players that are under the CC number still have a chance to crit just not at a 100% rate. Where as with CM anyone that didn't meet the threshold would be dead and there was nothing you could do about it. PS ~ Please make adornments drop seperate or allow mobs to drop adornments in addition to items.
This first part I typed out a day or two ago and just realized I didn't hit post I guess no zones should drop any loot what so ever then, and all we should get is tokens. I mean, it isn't like loot has worked the same way and been completely random since the day the game launched. The adorns are effectively permanent. They need to be random, and you need to have to try to get them. Or else what is the point? Like I said, you can vendor buy ones almost as good, there is absolutely zero problem with ones you have to actually try to farm being better and more rare (especially when you only need it once per slot ever). The devs thought it would make people group more if they took out crit mit. Did it? Seems like not to me. I think it was more a reaction to the problems with Dungeon Finder, which has since been completely abandoned. KoS had a myriad of issues like mobs being broken and being blocked on access. EoF had horrendous lag issues that stopped you from doing anything, along with problems with having the leaf thing to pull Mayong and EH being a mess of encounters that could randomly halt your progression based on luck. When TNT got added it was cleared right away RoK was cleared entirely the first time in except for Trakanon was abhorrently broken. SoH on add was cleared right away. TSO had a delay because you needed crit mit, and basically all of Ykesha's needed changes to make mobs killable. Miraguls killed almost immedately and Munzok needed changes SF was probably the best expansion. Crit mit values where right and barring a few things most stuff didn't need changes. The only delay was finding time to pull stuff because there was actually a lot to raid. Most things if they didn't need to be nerfed/fixed have ALWAYS been killed right way. If things are killable they are going to die.
If they did that in addition to loot dropping randomly I would ecstatic. Like I said when they did something similar in TSO I loved it. RNG alone does not make for good loot systems when you want to make things 'rare' or the the loot table is considerably larger than the amount of items they can drop. And no, loot hasn't worked like this since launch because adorns never worked liked this before. Pieces of equipment having a random chance to drop is nothing like the way adornments randomly drop. Need to farm and rarity I agree with completely and could be maintained even with a token system. My problem is with SoE's idea of 'random.' Any time they leave something completely up to randomness it results in abnormal loot drop rates to say the least. Most of PoW loot drop rates can prove this point. If not tokens then use some sort of smart loot. Heck put it on a set rotation. 'this is the tenth time we are killing it so suchandsuch is gonna drop.' But just the same old RNG? Nuh-uh, ain't gettin it done. My grievances could easily be rolled into a 'Why SoE needs to change their terrible RNG' argument.. The problems with grouping are....numerous. A properly working DF would have at least helped. I mean the biggest counter argument I ever saw against a DF working in practice were some zones needed very specific setups and were particularly hard for PUG's. Definitely not the case right now. Advanced Solo isn't helping matter either imo.
Most Raiders are, even non-raiders though want to get the best... just some want it for nothing and others want to earn theirs. I honestly forgot what I was going to type... the 1st sentence has meaning though so; posted I guess. I hate mind-blanks XD they ruin thought patterns.
Hah. We all want. I also want a ferrari. Doesn't mean I'm not going to drive a Toyota or something until I get lucky on the lotto. Same with adorns. Plus anyone who has actually played the last xpac (whether it's raid or heroic content), should have enough adorns to dislodge and put on their new gear until they get the new adorns.
