Yaliskah wrote: ↑Tue Jun 09, 2020 1:35 pm
Foofmonger wrote: ↑Tue Jun 09, 2020 1:16 pm
The real solution to this issue is what Mythic did and what the devs here philosophically do not want to do.
You need to disjoint the end game currency from the cities, and allow for other avenues for obtaining the end game gear. It's that simple, and this is the way (they've started to move in this direction, but it's not sufficient yet).
There is no solution to cities that will work outside of re-doing the entire system. It was poorly designed by Mythic and little tweaks will never solve the main issue.
This point has been discussed multiple time afaik. If we go this way, we can just as well, remove city, fort, pairings, -even T1- and just keep Praag area in free fight mode without any objective: a sandbox.
And if i push logic to the extreme (I exaggerate voluntarily), make new character insta max all (why bother with lower gear and levels ?) and GM shop for free.
In the end of the day, why would you play this game more than 30 mins?
To answer your direct question for myself: Because I enjoy the game, that's it. I played my Marauder on live when I was 80/full sov and 100/full tyrant for countless hours. For me, personally, the grind is not the fun on the game, the fun of the game is after the grind. Now that's not to say that my personal opinion is reflective of the playerbase at large, but if I had to wager I'd guess that my take is the more common one. People like to progress and start weak and gain power, but they most of all like to actually play the game once they are done grinding. The grind is not the game, and conflating the fun of WAR with grinding for more gear is a philosophical issue here. The fun of WAR is the combat, the fights, the battles, and not a sense of "endless progression" (another thing Mythic failed at with Tyrant gear/TOVL/pocket items and something you guys have handled wonderfully by the way).
Regardless of hyperbole, I'm not saying you should remove the city, nor am I saying that you should make non-cities the "primary" method of obtaining the currency. There is nuance here and there is a balance to be had. It's not just "give all the royals away to everyone", nor is it "stick with the system that Mythic designed to fail", there are ways in which this could be done intelligently to be able to allow for some basic linear gear progression (such as, allowing royals from X activity that is capped and Y rate per day/week).
I'm not suggesting "removing progression", or "making it so everyone can farm their end game set in 2 weeks", but there is a reason Mythic decided to disjoint the currency (in numerous instances, if we remember the initial gear system, crests didn't exist), because their design was poor and didn't work out well in reality. I don't really want to get into FOMO and why the city has the problem it has (I did this in another post on the topic a few weeks back), but the reality is the reality.
Now, you've already made steps to dis-joint the currency. You've allowed for royals in purple/gold ORVR bags and this hasn't led to some kind of massive downfall in the purpose of the game/server. As you can see from direct experience of your own choices, there has been effectively no negative consequences to the server or playerbase by allowing for people to obtain royals via ORVR (aka disjointed from cities). The main problem is that the system you currently have here is so stingy (1 royal per bag, when you need hundreds and hundreds of them for a single set), that it's just not a viable method for obtaining currency in it's current implementation. A simple tweak could be: 3-gold, 2-purp, 1-blue for players who qualify for royals in the bags. Then you could use the system you've already implemented, tweak the numbers to allow for more progression, and see/tests the results (my hypothesis?: your playerbase will be much happier). To give an anecdotal example on this topic, last Saturday I was 1 royal short of buying my Warlord Boots after an early morning 1 star IC. I decided to grind ORVR to try and get my 1 royal crest. It took roughly (I don't remember the exact time), 12-14 hours to obtain the 1 crest of playing ORVR all day long. It's a system that technically works, but it's incredibly inefficient to the point of effectively not existing.
The key point is not the remove City as the "primary" method for gaining royals. It should allow for the most royals (by far) in the least amount of time, "when" the event happens. That's what Mythic did and it worked, the players still wanted to do cities because of their efficiency, even when they weren't the only method to obtain the currency. Allowing other avenues for progression doesn't remove the purpose of the city structure if it's done properly, you simply need to make the other methods efficient enough to not frustrate players but not so efficient that it destroys the purpose of the fort/city content constructs.
Often times, these things are not about objective reality but personal "feelings". In a game with progression systems, people want to "feel" like they are progressing, even if it's slowly, and locking the end game content/progression behind FOMO random timed events isn't a system that has ever worked in any MMO, and never will. It just causes player attrition and burn out because individuals can play this game for countless hours, and get absolutely 0 progression unless their playtime randomly matches up with the FOMO event, they manage to get into the FOMO event, and then they manage to win/win RNG bags in that FOMO event to progress. It's a poor system, and it was a poor system in 2008. It's not your guys fault that Mythic screwed up how cities work and how they impact the health of the playerbase and the endgame. What is odd is the unwillingness to see what Mythic did to course correct on their mistakes, why make the same mistakes twice and not learn from what happened to the live economy and ecosystem?
Now, please don't take my post as being combative or dissenting, that's not what I'm trying to do, and I don't want to argue with you guys about this. I have a viewpoint/opinion, I'm happy to discuss and debate it further, but only if it's wanted. I'll still play ROR regardless of if further changes are made to the end game currency system, I'm just trying to look out for the overall health of the server/playerbase, as if there is nobody to fight then I won't play ROR anymore. So I don't have this opinion because "I want end game gear" or selfish reasons, I've been able to progress slowly and frankly I only need a little more gear anyway at this point. I have this opinion because I don't want the server to have a population of 100 people in primetime.
), but believe it or not, we are not satisfied -as many of you are- about this "end game" content/mechanics/triggering, and we are much more concerned about how to make the experience and the mechanics more clever before thinking about the way it has to be rewarded, explaining why changes may take time. Add to this, the billion thing you don't think about/you are not concerned and then you can quit my shoes.