The only reason I can see them time-gating orbs is not to slow progress. They could easily raise the level cap to 70 and throw in some 65-75 mobs to keep people busy. So they time-gate orbs because they want to sell them in the cash shop. The big problem is that it’s the only content right now, so if they put them in the cash shop, players have a viable complaint and reason to quite if they can’t play the game they already paid for. Cash shop items shouldn’t prevent access to content.
Once shards are available in other areas of the game’s content, I’m pretty sure orbs will show up in the cash shop. I don’t have a problem with this, but I wish they would just put them in there right now. Sure, there will be a lot of backlash, but put them in the cash shop and put shards in all areas of the gaming experience. I want to run dungeons, but I don’t want to struggle to find a group, get left behind because my gs is too low, or run with a toxic group who will blast someone for them not being able to finish a dungeon run and wasting an orb.
tl;dr: Put the orbs in the cash shop and shards in all other areas of the game.
Your problem can easily be solved. But only you can solve it.
Form your own group.
Form your own company with players who fit your play style.
It’s like saying that you want Silk threads, but you don’t want to go harvest them or buy them off the trade post.
It makes no sense.
Look at how far people have progressed already with them in the game. They are time gated otherwise people will grind through the content and be 625 in 7 days then come on the forums and bitch they have nothing to do.
I think time gate exists generaly only to not have a too large rift between neckbeards and casuals. But well that backfired so they might as well remove the timegate
The idea of paying money to suffer through a 200th run of laz or gen is beyond laughable. I won’t even pay in game gold anymore. I’m expecting the tables to turn any day now. Soon it will be “LFG Laz paying 1k for healer and tank please help”.
The orb scarcity problem is slowly disappearing, the new issue is player scarcity.
It’s really restrictive to require people to play the game with a pre-made 5 man. Additionally, once you form your pre-made it’s still very restrictive because you have to wait for everyone to be online. It is not fun. It’s a bad design.
Form your own company? That’s technically your third sentence. The company I’m already in barely has enough people online. The reason chat is spammed with people looking to run orb content is because it’s hard to find people to run these dungeons. It’s harder when you have a GS restriction. It’s harder when there’s a GS deviation between members. It’s harder when there’s limited orbs.
If you meant Form your own group to be your third sentence, you should take out the unneeded conjunction at the beginning, or add a comma and lowercase conjunction. Forming my own group fixes none of the problems I listed. I also didn’t say adding orbs to the cash shop was a good idea. I said that if that’s what they are planning on doing, then do it, but add shards to other areas at the same time.
Anyway, my post was about AGS already planning on selling the orbs in the cash shop. It said nothing about wanting them to or how it would definitely make the game better. My post was the stated speculation that selling orbs in the cash shop was what the intended to do in the first place. I don’t mind waiting for groups to run dungeons, if that’s what I have to do, but it looks like that’s the only part of my post you read and even got that incorrect.
I dont think they are going to put orbs in the cash shop, they are time gating because of the lack of content.
However, i can easily see a better version of umbral being put into the store, instead of costing around 9k to go from 600-625 this one you will only need 2500, marketing them very dirty microtransaction blocks that make u buy more than you should.
Cause this isnt going anywhere, so when gs is 700 and new players feel like they’re falling behind, they can just turn to the cash shop.
Form your own company that fits your play style? That is not realistic for tens of thousands of players. People have other commitments in life. I personally can play games all day, but I know most people cannot.
There is not justification for making the game difficult to play. The content can be difficult. I wouldn’t mind if only 1% of the player population are “good” enough to beat a level 10 mutation. But making it logistically difficult to advance through the mutation system is not fun for tens of thousands of players. There is no reason to defend a broken system.