I see both sides of it.
I was there when D3 released with the RM Auction House… it completely negated the reason for most of the playerbase to… play. Just hit max level and buy the [legendaries] end-game gear. Completely removes the endgame progression.
But also, in a perfect economy, gear wouldn’t be so easy to buy.
Grandfathering purchased gear to 625 would defeat the purpose of raising the gear score.
And that’s fine, vocal minorities are understood to be just that assuming thats who we are, but the forum is the place where AGS personally said they collect most of their feedback. This is the way it is and the way it will continue to be. Im all for it - im grateful for the changes that were made to the expertise system and will be grateful for the complainers if they decide to change this god awful Umbral Shart implementation.
They gotta keep the proverbial carrot dangling. If they don’t give players something to chase then those with millions of gold and BiS gear will just stop playing. The gear score increase means AGS can keep those people addicted for a bit longer and hope that they shell out for those sweet cosmetics some day using the money they made selling gold on eBay.
Its sad because the game is effectively a casino gambling game if you want to have high level gear with appropriate perks. 150k on getting a BiS piece of jewelry… who has the time to farm the gold to either make or buy those rolls. Its a joke at this point. Clear as day timesink.
It’s great when you wake up from this dream and just start playing something else. It feels so incredibly liberating. I quit NW and started playing Riders Republic a while ago. I know it’s a completely different game but it was so nice to just be able to fast travel EVERYWHERE FOR FREE! Like, you know, I click on a map and I’m there. No azoth, no grinding anything just so that I’m allowed to play how I want to play.
Once you play more and more of other games you just realise how utterly depressing NW is by constantly limiting you every step of the way.
Yeah I went back to my DBD roots and started playing a bit of prophunt, the game has like nothing going on but its actually just fun. Crazy concept. Having fun in a videogame.
The motivation behind this change is to prevent the whales from leaving. Often, people who have completed all content are the ones spending most of the money in the game, so the teams objective shifts to retaining these players.
This is the strategy of mobile games, exclusively cater to the whales and ignore the majority of the player base. The hyper casual - casual players have left, now it’s the veterans, hardcores, and the whales left, and this change annoys everyone except the whales.
As well, this is incredibly short-sighted system. The expertise system is not engaging, it it just a laundry list of chores to increase your gear score. The expertise change removed build creativity, and locks people into specific roles. The new umbral system just reinforces the expertise system, with even more dailies and a tedious grind.
What happens when people reach 625GS? Will a new system take its place to grind to 650? What happens to all the new players who join? Will they have to go through the same grind that the hardcores and whales did? AGS will probably make gearscore increases easier for new incoming players, which will have backlash from the whales.
With the changes that make leveling crafting harder, changes to lower the amount of resources gained from nodes when players have the yield faction card, and nerfs to drop rates for specific resources it is clear that AGS doesn’t respect the communities time and work.
To me, this system is a grind put into place without a lot of thought, and will be made significantly easier when new content is released. The best course of action is to simply not engage with this new umbral system.
I am not going to complain and neglect to propose solutions. To me, people should not be logging on to grind, people should be logging on to have fun. Implementing rankings for PvP, duel arenas with rewards and leaderboards, dungeon speedrun leaderboards, tournments, maybe wave based arenas, and creating a server community is the best way of retaining players. Give people better methods of getting the gear they want, make nothing feel like a waste of time. Instead of a skinner box, make endgame events that are fun. The foundation of a good game are there, you can do it.
This is my issue. It’s becoming a hamster wheel; at least a treadmill tracks my klicks run’d.
This is just me doing the exact same thing day in and day out. All the early problems with the game’s stagnant presentation carried over as their updates constantly just streeetched that current content out again and again.
So they are raising the gearscore to punish those players who purchased gear? Why are we punishing players to begin with when you hid the system you wanted us to play and its numbers at launch
They’re not punishing…
That’s the whole point of this, they’re not punishing the players for buying gear up to this point. They’re waiving the loss and just extending the end game to encourage using the end-game system for gear advancement.
The people who bought gear up to this point aren’t losing any progress, they just won’t be able to use the method to progress further.
how is preventing me from progressing from 600 to 601 for weeks because im not caught up on expertise not punishing? I worked to have this 600GS grandfathered in gear let me upgrade it so i can actually play new endgame content and be competitive with my friends. It makes it feel like i played the game “wrong” for weeks after launch by focusing on money instead of an unexplained system
If you’re told more than a month in advance that the method of advancement will no longer be valid going forward, and you continue to use it as your only method of advancement…that’s brought on by your own decision.
(If a road exit is marked as closed for miles before hand, but you take it anyways and find yourself stuck at a construction dead end… is that construction’s fault, or yours?)
We’ve known that “buying gear upgrade” path was being closed since early December.
i havent bought any gear since they announced that update. Why is my previous gear in any way being affected with the upgrade path.
If your previous gearscore was bought, nothing is happening to it, it just cannot be upgraded until you use the upgrade paths laid out in this PTR, once you’ve completed the previous upgrade paths.
so i cant play new endgame content with my friends even though we have the same amount of hours because i focused on being a merchant for the first 2 months and he focused on chest runs.
and yet somehow thats not punishing. it should simply function as if i had 600 expertise on that weapon and armor
If you chose to get off the freeway at the closed exit and they did not… then no you cannot expect to drive with them, no.
They told you 4 weeks ago that the progression path was closing and you needed to use the new one… if you chose not to do it, you’ve shot yourself in the foot.
So… I guess you could say you got punished… you just punished yourself.
i have been doing that progression system everyday. There is in no way possible to get me up from 500 to 590 in even 1 full build so again im behind from other people because i didnt take part in an unexplained system at launch
Nope, in fact you’re still in 600 gear. You just won’t advance past 600 gear until you get there via the progression system.
again i cant do mutations with my friends now because i played the game “wrong” the first 2 months even though i played every day since they actually explained the system and im not caught up
For a pvp game sure a lot of new systems being put in place that draw players out of the pvp and into gear treadmills.
This game needs an identity and quick, it can’t decide if it’s a theme park or sandbox, it feels as though as devs originally were trying to merge moba combat with mmo world using a destiny/diablo loot system.
I just don’t get it. I’m playing a pvp sandbox but 90% of the rewards come from non pvp gear grinds and faction sets are 80 expertise lower than gear obtained from non pvp methods? No incentive to really open world pvp unless you belong to city ownership companies because beside lower travel costs or unless you are doing the ONE pvp kill quest you can get there is no reason to fight?
Please devs, if you want a wow style game, make one. Just figure it out so I can do other things with my time.