Sigmartag Feedback

[nocturnalguest]

The final point I'd like to make, which is a much larger issue, affecting more than just Sigmartag - The Rewards.
I know it sounds silly to mention rewards as an issue, during an event that can give players a stacking Renown Bonus up to +125%, isn't it? I thought so as well, until I talked with a lot of players.

Most of them told me that they don't care about Renown, as Renown is not the main bottleneck when it comes to the progression of your characters, but War Crests - and so while it's cool to get the Renown bonuses, you don't really get any closer to being able to buy your BIS.

I find that I have the opposite issue (outside of 2x events) where renown ends up being my bottleneck, not crests. My slayer and sorceress had BiS in bags at 70/72RR respectively. I think the main issue is that some people play a lot more than the reward system intends. Because of this they start to reach a harsh diminishing return on crest gain vs renown gain.

The largest portion of good crests vs time spent will be gained from weekly or bi-weekly sources; orvr influence, weekend SC event, city, lotd. There's a heavy weighting on rewards from weekly and bi-weekly activities. If you play an extra amount outside of these things you tend to notice that your crest gains feel bad because you are running out of large crest drops. First couples days of a week with everything reset you can easily make 700-800 crests per day from capping weekly and winning a city but after all your bonus activities are exhausted and you go to orvr blobville your crest gain falls off the map comparatively.

What I do is play 3-4 alts concurrently, because my teams always need a different role/class for their group comp anyway, and end up finishing the weeklies on each of them but only playing a few hours per character. Most weeks 10-15 hours max with all combined. What most do is play the same character relentlessly 40+ hours a week, get burnt out and end up with poorly skewed renown vs crest ratios.

All that being said I do think there needs to be a reward structure rework. Whether it be game-wide renown/crest increases or war crest cost reduction on the gear itself. It's unfortunate that many cannot experience the game fully on any given class due to the fact some classes require in excess of 50-60k crests to be able to play every single build available to them at endgame bis. It's a much better option for virtually any player to get 1-2 additional characters to 80RR than to spend the time grinding 20-40k additional crests on a single character. High costs, steep grinds and other barriers of entry to gearing severely hampers the community overall in many categories; skill growth, theorycrafting/buildcrafting, playing alts, etc.

Proposal: Allow gear on the same ward (or ToK unlock for warlord/sov) to be purchased for a reduced price. Imo 50% is the sweet spot here, not too much and not too little. Example: I have full Vanquisher and the ward/ToK associated with it fully unlocked. I can now visit the Oppressor merchant (Vanquisher offset) and purchase Oppressor pieces at a 50% discount. The same would work for all purchased war crest sets in the game. This means that when looking to buy the offset for Sovereign, it would only cost 5167 crests instead of 10333. Same should apply to Ranked Rings as well - if you have purchased the Triumphant Ring for 9999 then the Victorious would be available for discount at 5000. This should be able to be achieved fairly easily using ToK system as we have with the live event cloak vendor - simply create some new npcs with locked items and only allow players purchase the items if they have the appropriate ToK associated with a full ward/set unlock.

Literally this. After long hiatus finish BiS on 3 alt chars and now wanna try different things on them to test out some interesting comps but when i think of a grind of ~20k+ crests on each it just makes me wanna go and do another BG3 playthru...

[Gorezog]

The final point I'd like to make, which is a much larger issue, affecting more than just Sigmartag - The Rewards.
I know it sounds silly to mention rewards as an issue, during an event that can give players a stacking Renown Bonus up to +125%, isn't it? I thought so as well, until I talked with a lot of players.

Most of them told me that they don't care about Renown, as Renown is not the main bottleneck when it comes to the progression of your characters, but War Crests - and so while it's cool to get the Renown bonuses, you don't really get any closer to being able to buy your BIS.

I find that I have the opposite issue (outside of 2x events) where renown ends up being my bottleneck, not crests. My slayer and sorceress had BiS in bags at 70/72RR respectively. I think the main issue is that some people play a lot more than the reward system intends. Because of this they start to reach a harsh diminishing return on crest gain vs renown gain.

The largest portion of good crests vs time spent will be gained from weekly or bi-weekly sources; orvr influence, weekend SC event, city, lotd. There's a heavy weighting on rewards from weekly and bi-weekly activities. If you play an extra amount outside of these things you tend to notice that your crest gains feel bad because you are running out of large crest drops. First couples days of a week with everything reset you can easily make 700-800 crests per day from capping weekly and winning a city but after all your bonus activities are exhausted and you go to orvr blobville your crest gain falls off the map comparatively.

What I do is play 3-4 alts concurrently, because my teams always need a different role/class for their group comp anyway, and end up finishing the weeklies on each of them but only playing a few hours per character. Most weeks 10-15 hours max with all combined. What most do is play the same character relentlessly 40+ hours a week, get burnt out and end up with poorly skewed renown vs crest ratios.

All that being said I do think there needs to be a reward structure rework. Whether it be game-wide renown/crest increases or war crest cost reduction on the gear itself. It's unfortunate that many cannot experience the game fully on any given class due to the fact some classes require in excess of 50-60k crests to be able to play every single build available to them at endgame bis. It's a much better option for virtually any player to get 1-2 additional characters to 80RR than to spend the time grinding 20-40k additional crests on a single character. High costs, steep grinds and other barriers of entry to gearing severely hampers the community overall in many categories; skill growth, theorycrafting/buildcrafting, playing alts, etc.

Proposal: Allow gear on the same ward (or ToK unlock for warlord/sov) to be purchased for a reduced price. Imo 50% is the sweet spot here, not too much and not too little. Example: I have full Vanquisher and the ward/ToK associated with it fully unlocked. I can now visit the Oppressor merchant (Vanquisher offset) and purchase Oppressor pieces at a 50% discount. The same would work for all purchased war crest sets in the game. This means that when looking to buy the offset for Sovereign, it would only cost 5167 crests instead of 10333. Same should apply to Ranked Rings as well - if you have purchased the Triumphant Ring for 9999 then the Victorious would be available for discount at 5000. This should be able to be achieved fairly easily using ToK system as we have with the live event cloak vendor - simply create some new npcs with locked items and only allow players purchase the items if they have the appropriate ToK associated with a full ward/set unlock.

Literally this. After long hiatus finish BiS on 3 alt chars and now wanna try different things on them to test out some interesting comps but when i think of a grind of ~20k+ crests on each it just makes me wanna go and do another BG3 playthru...

I mean scarabs are set to account bound I see, one could make a case for crests I guess

[nocturnalguest]

I mean scarabs are set to account bound I see, one could make a case for crests I guess

Well, yes, of course. Another thing is that crests grind is a matter of perspective, in the end its not that hard to make 1k+ per week (still ~20 weeks tho, ~5 month to get 2 rings and each city set piece you'd want/need) but daaaaaaaaamn, its much more fun to just log occasionally, do some cool activity with friends and dont bother with such grind.

However such discussions are pointless as somehow RoR team is zealotly convinced that retention can be kept only thru such grinding and for years they are against such changes. I was totally surprised they even go for unified crests

[BluIzLucky]

Literally this. After long hiatus finish BiS on 3 alt chars and now wanna try different things on them to test out some interesting comps but when i think of a grind of ~20k+ crests on each it just makes me wanna go and do another BG3 playthru...

Maybe spending 15 minutes queuing for SC and getting stomped for 1 crests, despite putting up a decent yet futile fight, will change your mind?

[nocturnalguest]

Maybe spending 15 minutes queuing for SC and getting stomped for 1 crests, despite putting up a decent yet futile fight, will change your mind?

You make it sound very tempting! Almost as good as joining a pug warband, solo qing a city or pve run at midway