AGS said the Mutation limit would slow/prevent a greater divide between the Top-Tier players and the casual players. The Mutation limit greatly increases the divide, doing the opposite of what it was intended to do. See these bullet points on the why.
How are Top-Tier players doing with the Mutated Limit?
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Well, us top-tier players clear 20-25 Gold M10s every single week.
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We also get to sell M10 Openings on our servers; On Castle of Steel, M10 Barnacles (and other mutations most players don’t have open) Openings sell for 25,000 - 35,000 gold.
This is important, because unlike with the orb system, it costs absolutely nothing to open a dungeon for someone, so it’s all profit! -
Some of the top-tier players still sell shards on top of openings, so it’s like double-dipping your chocolate cone!
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On average, I do about 20 Golds a week and collect 120,000+ shards.
I don’t need shards, and neither do most of the top-tier players. -
Chance at a lot of legos and BiS drops!
Don’t forget they nerfed the drop rate and quality of all drops with the release of the Orbless system.
I’ve personally made about 500k off of items this week, even if I always manage to find something to spend the gold on, it’s still a steady gold-income stream for my character.
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So… How’re the Casuals that this new system was meant to protect doing with the Mutation Limit?
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Here on Castle of Steel, a lot of groups are struggling to fill for lower mutations. People spam LFG < m6 groups ALL DAY to no avail.
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There are, quite often, groups looking for people to join after someone disconnected, often just crying into the void because no one’s interested in joining a botched run, especially a botched low-level run with no chance at good loot.
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Most casuals are falling even further behind in this new system because top-tier players are alienated from helping them.
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Would love to hear some feedback from other top-tier players and also casuals, about this new system. This isn’t a “INCREASE MUTATION CAP!!!” post, because we have a ton of those and already know that placing a limit on mutations has resulted in the top-tier players moving even further ahead than the casual players, both in terms of BiS gear and general gold wealth.
I’ve been joining groups to try to help them, because I’m sitting on nearly 900 625 Items and 100s of BiS items, including BiS refreshing (and refreshing evasion) sets for every single dungeon as well as around 20 BiS’d out PvP pieces.
My solution, personally, is to cap the # of shards a player can receive a week, not the # of runs they can do, or simply don’t count M1 - M6 towards your Weekly Mutation Limit. Due to the new Gypsum changes, as well as getting a guaranteed 400 Shards (via Gypsum Orb) from several dungeons, a change like this would both be:
- Easy to implement
- Be a huge quality of life change for casual players.
Alternatively, you could make it so lower-level mutations only take one of your weekly mutation runs if you do not have Gold for that mutation level; this would obviously not apply to M7 - M10.
This would allow the top-tier players to join lower-level or struggling players and help them clear their lower-level mutations, without punishing the top-tier players.
You should want the top-tier players to be able to play with the lower-tier / casual players, not alienate them from doing so. As long as a cap exists that punishes players for doing lower-level mutations, this divide will simply continue to grow.