Time-gating mutator orbs is a mistake and will lead to toxicity and gate-keeping

[Ninjacat]

Currently on the PTR, players are limited to 2 mutator orbs per week: 1 craft and 1 purchase from the faction vendor. The mutators themselves have 10 levels of difficulty total and each tier of difficulty is only unlocked by completing the previous difficulty with a rating of silver or higher. Additionally, once you start an expedition with a mutator orb, there is no option to reset the expedition without completely leaving and consuming the orb. This will be devastating for the health of the player base and here’s why:

We can already see these issues prevalent in the exact system that AGS is copying: WoW’s Mythic+ dungeon system. In WoW, Mythic+ can be run as often as you want, but the catch is that you must have a “Mythic Keystone” to enter the timed dungeon and your key is only for a single specific dungeon at a time. If the players are successful in timing the key, the key upgrades in level to a harder version and will change to one of the other available dungeons. If the players don’t complete the dungeon in time, the key lowers in level.

Since the rewards from the dungeon in WoW are directly tied to the “level” of the key you completed, it’s crucial that groups complete their keys on time in order to get the key pushed to the threshold that rewards them the best loot. While this sounds good on paper, the adverse effect is that ALL the risk of failing the dungeon falls upon the person who brought the key. This leads to gate-keeping as the hosting party only wants to bring players overqualified for the difficulty to guarantee success and not waste time by having the key level lowered and having to run more dungeons to get the key back up to the desired level.

It gets even worse once the dungeon begins. Now, the players enter an environment where they are punished with reductions in scores if they’re too slow for completion or die during the run. This means that any individual’s mistake reduces the rewards for ALL players in the group, either costing them their tier advancement for the week or potential umbral shards to upgrade their gear. As someone who has extensive time playing Mythic+ (I’ve held the top Mythic+ rank for my class on my server multiple times), I’ve seen time and time again the hate that gets thrown towards the players that make mistakes and turn a key from an upgrade into a downgrade. At the high level, the play becomes so precise that any small amount of time lost anywhere such as an accidental pull of an extra enemy can be the difference between a successful clear or a key depletion.

But at the very least with WoW, you can run Mythic+ as many times as you’d like. Your only limitation is the key you or your group currently has. This game doesn’t have that. You have limited tries each week and if you scuff your run, you’re SoL. I expect to see the toxic elements present in WoW’s Mythic+ to be significantly amplified in NW due to the time-gated nature of this. If you mess up a player’s orb, you’re actively taking away progression for the week from that player. This needs to change before live if AGS wants to avoid turning PUG’ing mutators into a toxic cesspool of hate.

I’ve already tested mutators on PTR myself and they are no joke. You need to bring a strong group of coordinated players if you want to succeed and get upgraded to these higher difficulties. We plan to run dedicated groups in my company to guarantee success and will be unable to bring our lesser experienced players to these expeditions due to the time-gated cost risk associated with them. The gate-keeping is already beginning…

TLDR: Time-gating is a tactic to arbitrarily extend the amount of time needed to achieve an end goal. With the current iteration of mutations, players are locked out of difficulty advancement if they make mistakes and don’t complete the dungeon with enough score. People will refuse to bring players who have not already proven themselves and will foster an environment of toxicity towards any players who make mistakes in these dungeons, costing the group the difficulty bump as well as umbral shard rewards. The time-gating on mutators needs to be removed to foster a healthy environment for player engagement and interaction.

[Indignation]

@Ninjacat

While this sounds good on paper, the adverse effect is that ALL the risk of failing the dungeon falls upon the person who brought the key.

The game is already like that, you. Consume your key and hope the people you got with you doesn’t just jump ship mid run or if you’re selling your key you hope when you open the dungeon the person actually pays you.

There’s zero protection for orb holders.

@Ninjacat

This leads to gate-keeping as the hosting party only wants to bring players overqualified for the difficulty to guarantee success and not waste time by having the key level lowered and having to run more dungeons to get the key back up to the desired level.

Every game with something at stake will do this or the players will find a way to. Personally I wouldn’t bring some fresh 60 into genesis with my key. If they are a guildie then yeah sure I know we will get through it but I definitely wouldn’t bring some pugs or first timers. I wouldn’t say I’d bring “overqualified” people but I’d bring capable people to do it as painless and fast as possible.

@Ninjacat

It gets even worse once the dungeon begins. Now, the players enter an environment where they are punished with reductions in scores if they’re too slow for completion or die during the run.

That’s the nature of mythic style dungeons, they need some way to weed out people that aren’t fit for the challenge. There’s really no shame or harm at capping out at 3 or 4 mutation. The time limit is just a layer of challenge. If time wasn’t a factor people would slow roll easily to max mutation.

@Ninjacat

This means that any individual’s mistake reduces the rewards for ALL players in the group,

It should, it’s a team game and a team objective. If as a team yall fail it should reflect.

@Ninjacat

But at the very least with WoW, you can run Mythic+ as many times as you’d like. Your only limitation is the key you or your group currently has. This game doesn’t have that. You have limited tries each week and if you scuff your run, you’re SoL

This is a concern I agree with. We should be able to push to our max and if we fail we regress in level but keep our key.

[BRADLEY]

If you make mutated dungeon keys more widely available or even free and repeatable, they have to significantly reduce the rewards though.

From a PvP players perspective, our only repeatable content is OPR, which has terrible rewards besides the gold and the azoth. The items we get in the cashes are getting salvaged 99,99% of the time and aren’t worth playing OPR for in the first place. In comparison expeditions are significantly more rewarding, but they also have an entry barrier, which balances it (kinda).

Theoretically speaking, if expeditions would be repeatable infinitely without any cost, it would be extremely unbalanced in terms of rewards for a certain time investment with other activities in the game. Obviously mutated dungeons are not necessarily guaranteed to be finished easily, atleast at the beginning, so it would be warranted that their rewards are slightly higher than the baseline set for regular expeditions and OPR.

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That being said, the reward structure for PvP players needs to be improved no matter what, since there is no valid progression path at all at the moment. But I hope you see where I’m going with this.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it would be an amazing change for the PvE players to get rid of tuning orbs, that (in my opinion) create a scenario where you grind unfun content to be able to play the fun content, which is just terrible game design. I just wanted to highlight that a change to a free entry would have to have some kind of drawback included or other reward systems that are already free and repeatable (like OPR) need to be significantly improved aswell.

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In general I totally agree though. Time-gating systems makes the game feel more like a job than a fun game to play, especially when it’s poorly executed like it currently is in game with a million different cooldowns that aren’t even displayed to the player in any shape or form. If I have to create a spreadsheet with timers for daily cooldowns, there is something seriously wrong.

Overall the game needs to do a much better job at enabling players to play the content they like AS MUCH AS THEY LIKE and get rewarded for it, both for PvE and PvP players.

[Artur351]

No, time gating is excellent, because the rewards are so good. I don’t want expeditions to be the whole game, I want to get good rewards and go back to pvping.

Stop giving terrible feedback to Devs, especially based on WoW, the most basic and terrible MMO of all time.

[nomadweller]

Easy solution, introduce practice runs where you can run a mutation of any level but it doesn’t give any rewards at all, and allow people to freely clear it if they want, and prove they can clear certain difficulties or be able to try the next difficulty before throwing away their orb.

[Artur351]

You want Devs to devote time and testing resources to a practice environment? How could you ever think that is a good idea??? Seriously if your opinion isn’t well thought out, don’t share on these forums.

[nomadweller]

you’re an idiot, you literally just need to create an if statement that checks if it’s a practice run or not on loot drops. This isn’t something that takes more than a day or two for a person to code.