PLEASE turn shard drops into crest drops

[Garamore]

There's no alleviating this complaint and there never will be. Someone will always be better geared than you no matter how long it takes you to acquire gear, and it will always feel like you're playing from behind until you finish your gear, at which point you won't have a reason to play since the gear grind is all you play for, and you're rerolling to start the grind again so you can play with some sense of purpose.

The fix for this is to give you a button to push when you create a character. You don't get to acquire gear at all. None. You simply get assigned gear, it's as good as it will ever be, and you don't have to worry about the gear grind since that doesn't matter to you and you derive no satisfaction from the core power scaling inherent to this game. You might as well be playing a shooter or a moba.

I do think there should be a gear grind - just that if RvR was a little more rewarding for killing people than box running or city logging we would get more RvR. On live I think that about 2 years in they had this balance pretty well where you got some stuff from cities but you also got stuff from RvR. The current mechanic drives PVDoor - rather than actual RvR as the rewards are much better for getting contribution from box running and capping empty zones rather than kills. It also drives people to take the easiest way to get royals from city (order stack 70+ premades, destro solo q) rather than people going to city for the fight.

I also think that for the player who plays 4-8 hrs per week in prime time (no cities/few zone locks) the current grind will take them years to get the gear. Would be interested to know the balance of gear across active destro vs active order too. Most people here saying its all fine are mainly order and most people saying its not are mainly destro. The overnight/daytime PvDoor team drive a huge number of bags by giving the ability to easily run boxes and get high contribution to casual order that destro do not have at the moment and havent in the last 6 months that i've been back.

[Elemint]

I do think there should be a gear grind - just that if RvR was a little more rewarding for killing people than box running or city logging we would get more RvR.

Exactly my point!

[wargrimnir]

There's no alleviating this complaint and there never will be. Someone will always be better geared than you no matter how long it takes you to acquire gear, and it will always feel like you're playing from behind until you finish your gear, at which point you won't have a reason to play since the gear grind is all you play for, and you're rerolling to start the grind again so you can play with some sense of purpose.

The fix for this is to give you a button to push when you create a character. You don't get to acquire gear at all. None. You simply get assigned gear, it's as good as it will ever be, and you don't have to worry about the gear grind since that doesn't matter to you and you derive no satisfaction from the core power scaling inherent to this game. You might as well be playing a shooter or a moba.

I do think there should be a gear grind - just that if RvR was a little more rewarding for killing people than box running or city logging we would get more RvR. On live I think that about 2 years in they had this balance pretty well where you got some stuff from cities but you also got stuff from RvR. The current mechanic drives PVDoor - rather than actual RvR as the rewards are much better for getting contribution from box running and capping empty zones rather than kills. It also drives people to take the easiest way to get royals from city (order stack 70+ premades, destro solo q) rather than people going to city for the fight.

I also think that for the player who plays 4-8 hrs per week in prime time (no cities/few zone locks) the current grind will take them years to get the gear. Would be interested to know the balance of gear across active destro vs active order too. Most people here saying its all fine are mainly order and most people saying its not are mainly destro. The overnight/daytime PvDoor team drive a huge number of bags by giving the ability to easily run boxes and get high contribution to casual order that destro do not have at the moment and havent in the last 6 months that i've been back.

Just a little more rewarding... Like when crests were introduced in the first place? Like the dozen times that gear was reduced in cost? Like when we adjusted drop rates to be more generous depending on your level? This argument doesn't go away by pissing about with the rate of rewards. We have repeatedly in the past made things a little more rewarding, but the request stays the same. Give more faster. My time is being wasted. It's not worth it. If your primary concern with the game is how fast you're getting the gear because it doesn't feel worth it, then maybe it's not the gear and it's the content that should be worked on. I find complaints about cities and forts and RvR mechanics to be far more worthwhile to invest time in, because that actually affects whether or not you enjoy playing the game, which in turn would reduce this feeling of time being wasted.

Changing currency rates is easy, but it's not the core issue. This game is very much intended to take a long time to finish your gear sets, the carrot at the end of the long stick is a slow drip of progression to keep the lizard brain crawling forward. The core gameplay of RvR domination is the main draw, and I'm very much on the side that it could use some significant iteration on existing systems to rejuvenate more variable gameplay with an eye towards equity of realms and playtime. Tipping the scales to make kills more important than objectives would not have the desired effect, making farming kills more important than RvR mechanics means the underdog is being hunted rather than hunting the offensive team at the edges and finding ways to disrupt their progress. That's a trap that doesn't allow a realm to recover morale and would lead to worse outcomes for the underdog faction. Objectives don't fight back, and a smaller realm can dedicate more resources to a single objective to play spoiler, while the larger realm is required to control all of the objectives. The morale of the winning team will deteriorate the longer the underdog team is disrupting their progress. Capitalizing on that morale loss is how you rally your realm and make it desirable to play.

The faction bias thing you're reaching for isn't worth discussing. RvR progression is based on the involvement of the individual, contribution in a zone sticks until the zone is captured, and bags are automatically mailed to you. Just another one of those "little more rewarding" changes that we've made. Playing on the underdog realm can be just as, if not more, rewarding for coordinated groups of players making an effort to capitalize on it. Forts and cities are both instanced and tuned for equal opportunity depending on the coordination involved. Overall realm success is based on leadership, there's no bias in the actual mechanics.

[Sulorie]

It also drives people to take the easiest way to get royals from city (order stack 70+ premades, destro solo q) rather than people going to city for the fight.

That's interesting.
On order side people complain about rr90+ destro premade warbands, while most of the unwanted order solo rdps get into pug cities and lose horribly.

The truth might be in between.

[nebelwerfer]

I think you should get crest drops in cities and forts, shards in orvr

and you should limit the amount of kills farmable in every stage of city / fort

drive the focus of the game towards pvp, not zerging BO's(stage 1 fort) or camping BO's(city stage 1) it's honestly pretty boring..

I think the game is fun despite all these "mechanics" and gear grinds not because of it

[CountTalabecland]

Random cities and the dodging of no-lifer WBs has certainly killed any desire I had to get sov on a second toon. No one really seems to have fun in most cities as they are either bored rofl stomping or getting stomped and cussing each other out for losing.

Sov is too strong to try to compete against without also being in sov. Bad gear, especially on healers, is an almost guarnteed way to get rofl stomped in a city. As soon as players in sov sniff out the weak ones in Vanquisher/Invader, its over.

Sov needs a slight nerf because at its current power level it dictates too much of the gameplay. Slow drip of gear progress is fine but this constant PvDoor farming to get to the “useful” content has really made things stale.

[Garamore]

Just a little more rewarding... Like when crests were introduced in the first place? Like the dozen times that gear was reduced in cost? Like when we adjusted drop rates to be more generous depending on your level? This argument doesn't go away by pissing about with the rate of rewards. We have repeatedly in the past made things a little more rewarding, but the request stays the same. Give more faster. My time is being wasted. It's not worth it. If your primary concern with the game is how fast you're getting the gear because it doesn't feel worth it, then maybe it's not the gear and it's the content that should be worked on. I find complaints about cities and forts and RvR mechanics to be far more worthwhile to invest time in, because that actually affects whether or not you enjoy playing the game, which in turn would reduce this feeling of time being wasted.

Just to explain where im coming from I am actually ok with my gear grind as I play a lot more than I probably should and am able to make some of the random cities. I also RvR to kill order rather than anything else (gear/zone progression/city push etc are less important to me personally). Also ok with the gear grind being slow (but not too slow). Its more the focus of where those crests come from and how long it will take for average pug to be in the same gear as me that I keep posting on here.

Current crest drop drives PvDoor and city logging and avoiding fights in cities. Its also hard for the player who has limited play time who cant city log but can do 2-3 warband nights per week.

If you drop crests from kills and cross realmers truly do what they say they do and swap sides looking for fights then PvDoor would end, more RvR would take place and rewards would come from that.

[Alfa1986]

the cities were better organized on live, there, at least if you got into the initially losing mirror, you could go out and go into another. perhaps it would be better if cities were just a dungeon that is available for entry for a limited time after being captured.

[Sulorie]

Random cities and the dodging of no-lifer WBs has certainly killed any desire I had to get sov on a second toon. No one really seems to have fun in most cities as they are either bored rofl stomping or getting stomped and cussing each other out for losing.

Sov is too strong to try to compete against without also being in sov. Bad gear, especially on healers, is an almost guarnteed way to get rofl stomped in a city. As soon as players in sov sniff out the weak ones in Vanquisher/Invader, its over.

Sov needs a slight nerf because at its current power level it dictates too much of the gameplay. Slow drip of gear progress is fine but this constant PvDoor farming to get to the “useful” content has really made things stale.

It doesn't matter whether you have sov set or not, you die similarly fast if unsupported. Mixing vanq/inv gives you similar wounds numbers and stats and slightly lower stats per piece isn't the reason someone loses fights. This is like arguing that using str/int potion enables you to kill players you couldn't kill before. The gear stats are quite at the bottom of reasons why one warband loses against another one.

[K13R]

This is what happens when you have a large vertical progression in gear that is not only gate kept by your renowned rank it's also gated by crest drops and shitty I got a belt in my 10th gold bag RNG. People are not going to put up with it the old school you got to play for 8 months just to be competitive isn't really applicable anymore as the sub-model is all but disappearing(this is a free shard) as it was away to keep people on the treadmill(I've been there as a world-first no lifer in EQ1). I rather have a population and a relatively equal playing field as it stands even in EU prime time this game has a hard time getting 1k concurrent player count as a contrast SWG legends who has the worst form of that game(NGE) gets 1250 to 1500 in their prime time where a game loop is dancing in a cantina. At one point this game was getting 3k people on just after lockdown that pop has all but disappeared and I who has been here since they opened up this shard as well soon well grow tired of it again after 2 to 8 weeks and disappear to play something else as the grind and the gameplay loop gets boring. (it's not a matter of time I can play dam near 12 hours I just rather spend it doing something else most of the time than getting farmed)

So to summarise to the OP they don't want you kind here unless you put your time in and be uber elite in a uber elite guild that que dodges and lets group ranked sit empty type of competitive premade. Only then once you reach the pinnacle of ROR eliteness can you farm noobs in pre sov gear.