On my early morning walk to work, I often ponder and think about random things. This morning my mind turned towards tuning orbs. Specifically why they’re in the game, what they achieve and potential improvements.
My own feeling is that when expeditions were added, one worry was that people would constantly run them in order to obtain gear. For higher level expeditions this would also cause a character’s HWM to be levelled up much more quickly than intended. To this end, Tuning Orbs were added - not only would they give Stonecutting a second reason to exist and level, they would limit the number of runs possible and encourage players to group together (“I’ve an Orb, shall we run X?”). Orbs were given a very high creation cost, I’m guessing that somebody anticipated the group gathering resources together and passing them to one player to craft.
As anybody who’s DM’d a D&D game knows, all good ideas never survive contact with the player party. Rather than being a great group experience from Orb to expedition completion, they have instead become a bit of a bind. Players/companies with plenty of coin can purchase all of the component parts and then charge for slots on an expedition - or equally run the expedition as many times as they can make Orbs. Orbs are consumed upon entry to an expedition, so if the group aren’t able to complete it, the Orb is effectively wasted (which can cause bad feeling). The creation cost is also pretty high, so crafting Orbs off your own back isn’t a particularly enjoyable experience. The end result is that the general feeling is expeditions just feel like too much hassle to complete.
If I’m correct in my supposition (which I may not be in fairness), what can be done to improve this and make it feel a more enjoyable experience from start to finish? For me, the key part is that limiting the “loot” aspect from an expedition shouldn’t mean limiting the access to the expedition itself. Running an expedition because we fancy doing it should be a viable choice - NW is a game after all and the core reason for playing a game is enjoyment.
As a suggestion, my line of thinking is to change how Orbs actually work within the game. I’ll explain this “the wrong way round” as it’ll make more sense. Rather than being an entry cost, an Orb instead allows you to unlock each big chest after defeating each expedition boss. Rather than dropping loot, dropped items are instead added to the next chest. In a simplified form, Orbs become a personal resource that have a lower cost and can be sold/traded, but you can only hold a limited number at a time. There’s lots of variations on this too - maybe only epic/legendary items are placed in the chest for example.
Now a slightly more complicated version (bear with me on this one), is that each expedition has an Attunement Orb that’s obtained via a quest for each expedition. This Orb has a number of gem style “key” slots that corresponds to the number of boss loot chests, you fit Tuning Keys into a slot and those keys are craftable (plus tradable). Each time you open a chest, it consumes the corresponding Key. The limiting factor is that each key slot once used goes on a 12 hour cooldown before it can be filled in again. This would also open up the ability to reset the cooldown using a quest, Azoth etc.
Now there is an argument that you could move the loot into chests and simply have chests on a 12 hour cooldown. Personally I’m less keen on this because we already have far too many invisible cooldowns in the game. I also don’t think it’s unreasonable to have to do a certain amount of preparation to gain the most benefit from undertaking an expedition.
Arenas could equally use the same mechanic, although part of me says that a simple Orb/key for the entire party works OK - that said, I think the system I’ve brainstormed above prevents one issue where the number of Orbs you craft is directly linked with the amount of coin you have.
In the current system rather than my suggestion, dropping the Orb cost and increasing the availability (i.e. no 7 day timeout), would likely be enough for most people. Refunding Orbs upon completion feels like a kick in the teeth if something goes wrong along the way, it’s why I suggested removing the Orb as an entry cost and making it a reward cost - why should one player be penalised if somebody else does something like leave mid expedition.