While I understand the fundamental need in an mmo for some time gating, the current implementation is a shackle, of sorts, that limits the expression of freedom that makes playing games fun. That is, to not have a 2nd or 3rd job. To come online, enjoy the game with your friends, and keep the developers focused on their actual job - create exciting new content.
Understanding that dev resources are scarce, here are three (3) suggestions that I’d love to see in the game yesterday.
Global timer. There’s talks of fancy UIs to track stuff. That’s all fine and good but does not address the fundamental problem of complexity and cognitive overload to the customer. To that end, I’d suggest a global timer that resets every day at the server’s 11pm est, like in other games. Said timer can be tracked through a simple /command, and/or a few added words next to the server name in esc menu.
Having a global timer makes everything simpler. It’s a single thing to track. Same for everyone.
Tradable orbs. The title says it all to be honest. There’s just way too much complexity in the whole orb business that makes enjoying the game a full time job of buying orbs and opening mutations etc. There’s no enjoyment in this. It’s busy work. Just make the orbs tradable. Respect peoples time.
Craftable orbs - all of them - should reset with daily cooldown. Having a weekly cooldown for mutations is a giant shackle around peoples schedules. Let people login, craft their orbs, and go enjoy content with their friends. This whole system makes it so that you have to have a whole logistic system to be in rotations, have a fixed group, et al, if you want to maximize umbral shards. Top players can still do all that, but you don’t need to drag everyone else down along with it. Again respect peoples time and give people a way to just enjoy the game at their pace.
Many more things could be said here. Sadly, I’d settle for these 3 things as a hot fix to the current hot mess that’s this system.
Remove most of time gating, orb gating, port gating, and simplify the mechanics of getting to where we play against the environment or other players. Fighting the game is no fun.
I would echo this, although I really don’t have much hope that the devs are listening nor care what we have to say on this matter.
For some reason, it seems that the AGS absolutely hate players who god forbid only have 4 hours on the average evening.
For example:
Last night I literally had time for my box run, 1 invasion, and 2 (failed) attempts at winning OPR (no gypsum). In that time I went from 520 average Expertise to 525. At this rate, it would take me 2 weeks to hit 600, provided I don’t skip a single day and that I am not “unlucky” (I have had days where I may get 2-3 average Expertise bumps).
And that is just so I can begin a much steeper mutator grind from 600 to 625.
That being said. If they were to remove all forms of Gypsum gating at least, I could “veg out” on a weekend day and get caught up by running lots of OPR for ruby gypsum.
So yeah. The game has definitely become a second job to me, and I am finding it so hard to want to log in anymore for my “shift” where I get paid nothing.
I was very excited about the Gypsum system at first, because it sounded like you could play whatever content you enjoy and improve your Expertise. Instead they gated the hell out of everything, forcing box runs to still be a thing (which takes up 30-50% of my nightly playtime in an activity that is not fun in the slightest.
They could just remove orbs and have a system with diminishing returns. After X amount of mutators you get significantly decreased rewards. This is a rewarding system for those who can’t put in unlimited hours, but those who can can farm for marginal increases, and practice dungeon mechanics. Then when you do this, don’t “gate” your game with gearscore checks. Instead introduce exciting, difficult, mutator mechanics and encourage people to work toward an achievement, rather than the next gearscore check. Add rated pvp to do the same for pvp content.
The problem with orbs is it doesn’t gate anything effectively. It only gates poor players that can’t afford to buy unlimited runs on recruitment chat. Players that own territories can farm as much as they want. All orbs do is ensure people don’t get to play the content they want to actually play.