I really like a lot about the seasonal model so far. I just think it could use some changes to make it a bit better.
First, things I think are great/good:
- Get extra stuff for just doing things you like (always a good thing this)
- I like the idea of the activity card and it can be sort of fun filling it out (good azoth sink too)
- The questline and stories are good, fun enough to do and so on
- Boosts are sort of a nice idea
Ok, onto the reason I’m actually posting…
- The activity card feels unrewarding a lot of the time because you complete activities (often without trying to) and yet you often cannot use them and they feel wasted. I currently have 5 completed tasks that I know will be wasted. This is demotivating if I’m honest. It’s not got a good feel to it.
- The activities are a bit too limited. It tends to be the same few that you end up doing every time. Like, I’ve killed a named Varangian knight so many times already I’ve lost count.
- The offered activities don’t always reflect what is on the card. This is yet another example of you thinking RNG is fun when it just isn’t. These are utterly useless activities and they just clutter the UI and lead to problem number one above.
- Some of the activities aren’t very well weighted. For example, gaining a flawless 3v3 victory is nowhere near as easy as completing PVP quests. Yet, it rewards you in exactly the same way.
- RNG, RNG, RNG! Why do you persist with the concept that RNG is fun?
- The refining materials activities (0/50) are a bit broken. If you craft 50 items in one go, it only counts once. So you literally need to sit there crafting one after another after another… 50 times. I don’t think I need to suggest how to fix this one
- Why have you added flame cores to the trophy crafting recipes? This is a bit sadistic, don’t you think? It’s a huge amount required too (over 150 for three major trophies). Please, give us things that are fun to use these on. Don’t make them into another grind resource. And what happens when players can’t get these via seasonal rewards too?
- The core casts are… underwhelming considering how much they cost.
What I suggest could improve the system:
- Just let us carry over completed activities if we complete the card, please.
- If you have completed activities and you re-roll activities (and so lose completed activities) then give a small amount of seasonal experience for these unused ones. Maybe 25 per. At least then they don’t feel wasted and then we can still complete tasks and make some progress, it’s just not as efficient as using it on the card for lines.
- Keep the card itself RNG but let us see the “next card” in advance (a bit like knowing what block is coming next in Tetris). This can allow us to strategise what to do if we have tasks left but nothing to use them on.
- Don’t add activities unless you can actually use them on the current card or the next card.
- Add more tasks for each category and remove RNG. Maybe apply them as “sets” where you have to pick a set of activities that ramp up in difficulty as you complete them (so you can do all the “easy” ones but if you want to complete a full card then you need to progress up the list to the harder ones). Still allow us to reset activities using azoth (so players can just do the easy ones if they like, at a cost and, of course, not nearly as efficiently as using up all the available and more difficult activities).
That’s about it. Just as an aside, this patch included some annoying bugs, one of which is one you guys always do every time we get a major patch:
- No diamond gypsum in the world. I guess you turn this off but forget that you’ve not actually started any event. So the extra gypsum we will get from the corrupted bunny event? Well, it just replaces all the diamond gypsum we currently cannot get now. This is something you do so often! Please, please remember to not patch out diamond gypsums every time you release a major patch
- Weird, glitchy lag in various locations in the world. If you want to recreate this, just go to Canary Mine in EF.
- One bugbear of mine you haven’t fixed since forever is the weird coloured outline around faction/company logos. Please revert this to black. It’s very confusing to see yellow or purple around green and so on.
- When are you going to re-introduce the corrupted breaches to WW/MB? You deleted them with the revamp to those regions last year. Not having them is a negative to the game for a number of reasons but the main one is it makes building faction repution in those two regions very difficult. And, it doesn’t make sense anyway. I think you just forgot to rebuild their locations or something? Why would WW and MB even have invasions if there’s zero corruption there ever?