Itemization Cross-Feedback #2: Microcosm ("Spear" Week)

This post is for Devs to see exactly what it looks like when my group interacts about game changes. A mini-reminder about levels of engagement, analytics, etc.

We were going to make this for Ashes (and still might) but it didn't work out due to the state of the Phase I play loops. The Phase 2 won't be as visceral because of the holidays creating too much of a gap between points of engagement. So you get TL, which is much more compressed.

tl;dr my group is putting their discussion/reaction to the TL patch here instead of the usual place (and relating to Ashes whenever possible because there's usually some cross-game discussion). It's in this section because the thing we 'wanted' the most out of this patch is something that relates to Artisanship or future Artisanship-like things in both games. This is a raw reaction with no prior knowledge of what we actually got, only what we wanted.

Analytic Data First Pass
Rune Chance Bundles may not be working, GrandSerpent got a glitched item of some kind too, so validation might not be too far along, so I'm checking the Material Transformation.

Love the UI, makes me think of Grand Kingdom. Got a lot of random hats and such yesterday in preparation.

Unfortunately it looks like there's no complexity here, it's just a lootbox based on the total value of the thing you throw in, and not even a particularly good lootbox. I put in a Blue Staff and it just 'gave points (437)' toward the outcome, and the outcome isn't related in any way to Staves. RIP.

Purple Greatsword gives way more but it's still lootbox nonsense with more points. I can put in two purples to get to a higher conversion tier, but still, lootbox.

As things go, I guess we're still going to just hope that this is the precursor to an eventual better system with tighter conversions, maybe a stopgap to deal with the eventual glut of stuff people don't need in the meantime. It's definitely lacking in every way though.

You can at least target the transmutation a little, by clicking the thing on the bottom, so you can make it so you only get Weapon, Armor, or Accessory 'lootbox', which is a sign that they're not opposed to it being more targeted. Doesn't look like it took too much work, thankfully, someone could push the drops through a script and pop this out, because there's no real difference between things that have wildly different acquisition methods. Elusive Hexweaver Hats are the same chance of drop as Soul Mirror Trousers. I guess that makes it more Gacha, but I have to put two Purples in here just to get 1 Blue Armor and 3 blue mats, which I don't control, so it's not desynth-like at all.

It is, however, a feasible UI for any future advancement in that department, should be able to handle anything they throw at it. Verdict - Still not a thing we care about interacting with, but hopefully it'll affect the economy since more people will probably use it to burn through more gear.

I won't bother checking if it 'accepts Extracts' because that would be stupid even if just from the perspective of 'letting players make unnecessary mistakes' at this point. Unfortunately that means there will probably be a design pressure against using it that way in future, so cross your fingers for that. I think I'd still prefer to have the Extract->Special Materials on this menu if they eventually go with that.

Also, it does accept Materlals themselves, and gemstones, so this gives us a straight 'Amitoi drops->Lootbox' conversion.

tl;dr this definitely could be used for the type of crafting we eventually hope for, but as of now, not worth poking, especially not with that processing cost. Too inventory-intensive either way to stack up, and economically I'm confident it's a waste because it takes like 12 Blues to get to Tier 2 for a chance at Green Magic Powder. No change to behaviour, no point in interacting with this system as-is, for us.

I like the presentation of the menu but the actual engagement with the system is deeply confusing. Why are purple mats (Pure Gold, Manasteel, etc) worth only 5, but a Rare Marind is worth 12? What exactly are these values and why do you need such a gigantic amount to do anything? If it's totally random then I don't really care about tossing a weapon or armor in here versus dissolving it to get more magic powder to level up my skills. So far it feels deeply disconnected from anything else other than as a sink to toss lots and lots of excess Marind from Abyss dungeons into. What I want from this is a reason to not just dissolve equipment with traits I don't need and won't sell, and my lithograph book already has. So far I don't have any, but I think they might get there with some tweaks.

As a random aside, I feel mixed on the new fishing codex (or "Illustrated Book of Fish" as the UI calls it, which I love). I do like having rewards and records for specific fish, I feel like this was their aim, but it gives too much of a look behind the curtain of the system. I didn't realize that the reason I wasn't getting starfish ever was because they don't unlock until level 16, and that's a little sad/weird but not unexpected. That said, there does still seem to be variety between different fishing spots in terms of the RATE of all the fish even if the set of fish is only tied to freshwater/seawater, so that's not too bad. I look forward to filling out this book just doing normal fishing things.

I feel like many of TL's crafting/economic systems work decently well, but have a discoverability problem. It's not immediately apparent, for example, what the criteria are for an item to be sellable on the Auction House, why you'd want to create a lithograph from a gear piece, or why you'd want to extract a trait from an item, despite these all being relatively important concepts.

This patch is giving me similar feelings overall. The new rune system looks cool, but I can't find clear information in-game about how a player acquires runes, or how synergies between them work.

Similarly, I feel like it's not immediately apparent what the point of the material transmutation system is. From the comms leading up to the patch, I'd originally assumed this was a system for converting between different types of crafting material, but it seems to moreso be an alternative way to dissolving unwanted gear drops? Very confusing.

I think that overall, TL provides players with information on how to take particular economic actions, but not why they might want to, meaning it's hard to build a clear mental model.

I'm sure that you could just look up someone's guide on YouTube for a lot of this stuff, but I don't feel that's a great solution to problems with UX/discoverability.

Other random stuff, looks like we beat Junobote 'one day early', since the only spear drop I see that would matter at that level comes from there. Our other expectations were subverted too, the only OW Purple Spear drop I see is, in fact, off Dark Wizards in Crypt, so gj to whoever it was that foresaw that.

I guess the Spear Master would be in tune with the likely trolling, but I don't remember if it was actually him that said it.

Glad to hear the Fishing Codex is good, I haven't gotten to my spot just yet, making sure I didn't misinterpret these Spear sources. I don't have any additional economic instructions based on anything so far though. I'm not expecting much since Orc Spearmasters in Akidu don't even drop Blue spears (but they had time to add Chewy Meat drops to them... I feel like this was a mistake/misunderstanding of something, but in a way it makes sense because there aren't still aren't any Sheep/Goats added to the Ecosystem there and it probably wouldn't be done until later.

More importantly, no change to Skeleton Lancers in the Ruins, and my usual expectation for exactly HOW to check Avolos Trackers and Reptilian Lancers isn't working right, maybe they changed how to look at those, someone should check for me to verify I'm not just blanking on how I ever checked what they dropped.

I'm not expecting much since there's nothing on AH, so they're just getting started, and they probably need to do a rebalance since they finally added that 'missing' 5th stat but also therefore bumped everyone's damage by 10 automatically, I think.

I guess farming in Crypt is going to work after all.

To be clearer also, the rewards of the Fishing Codex give you Nature's Jade for getting a wide variety of fish, so it helps the "fishing grind" feeling for better rods feel like less of one by giving you more Jade sources. Overall I like the system a lot, it's clear they have limitations of the fishing system but they're working pretty well within it.

For the Orcs, stealing Food Caches is one of the main contracts that you can get for Fonos Basin, so it's not a terrible idea to say that you're stealing food supplies from both kinds of Orc. It's a little odd but not terrible.

It is a bit irritating though that the most obvious things that "should" drop spears don't. I know they have per-enemy gear tuned pretty well for the early stuff, so it's weird to hear that it's unconsidered on the enemies that actually have spears.

Obviously I haven't had time to log in yet, but this "dissolve, but lootbox" sounds... useless? I don't really understand from the provided descriptions why it's even in the game or what purpose it serves. I guess I'm on @GrandSerpent 's team with that...

I feel like I got Chewy Meat from orcs in my last Talisman Delivery though, so don't quote me, but it might not be this patch when that happened. (It made me go "huh?", but I didn't really focus on it further to check or remember details.)

As the self-styled Spear Master that I am, the specific thing I predicted was that the aesthetically themed 'cursed spears' will be in Crypt, yeah.

Anyway, my first problem with this patch is actually that I've been saving up rare food ingredient baskets for a week now, in preparation for what we predicted, that I could make money off people that are too busy grinding for Spear drops to feed themselves. I looked around and as far as I can tell, the devs haven't added anything which lets players transfer weapon mastery levels from old weapons to Spear, which implies players will want to buy weapon mastery food. But this could also just be me missing something, it's not like the system excels at being transparent/easy to understand at first glance.

My second problem is that I only get 6 days to buy certain cosmetic stuff and I want a LOT of it. 1500 lucent worth that I need to scrounge up within a week and I only have 350, to get 1 spear skin and the new costume. This is BEFORE I start looking at spear lithographs I might want to buy for myself. This isn't good in my book. Even if I want to throw money at the game like before, it's not a good time for me for real life reasons, not 1500 worth. So if you're going to put me on a 6 day timer, warn me ahead of time.
This also doesn't count the battle pass I want to buy because thankfully it lets me buy it at any later point for the cool stuff in it.

My third problem is that after reading all the Spear skills and masteries, I still cannot tell if moving forward I will be playing Spear/Dagger or Spear/Wand. They gave me an AoE blood leech aura which is the sustain I was waiting for to switch away from Wand, but I suspect it isn't actually enough. I might be wrong. Or this might be the kind of situation where I need Wand sub for solo content and Dagger sub for group content (because I'd be relying on my white mage).

My fourth problem is that the material transmutation system isn't... looking interesting at all. But that was already covered above.

Probably didn't have time yet, same thing happens to us and seemingly to Intrepid, you know how it is.

Other random stuff:
Rune System looks clean enough.

I really hope they have a system/script for this because the amount of work that goes into the standard gear chase to come up with all the boosts just to unbalance everything else is a waste otherwise. It doesn't look like basic unbalance, it's just the standard long term up-grind imbalance.

So before anyone does a mental pre-calc and starts 'worrying' about that, it's not large, Runes are for weapons and accessories only. Should help pad the mid-gap where they most likely don't want to release new tiers of weapon.

Overall, a good player control sequence, I doubt we need it, and it won't change the PvP outcomes too much. based on the Stuff I see, most of this gets shunted to our Summoner unless there's some sign that I need more Health for stuff.

Check Necklaces first.

SunScript wrote: »

As the self-styled Spear Master that I am, the specific thing I predicted was that the aesthetically themed 'cursed spears' will be in Crypt, yeah.

Anyway, my first problem with this patch is actually that I've been saving up rare food ingredient baskets for a week now, in preparation for what we predicted, that I could make money off people that are too busy grinding for Spear drops to feed themselves. I looked around and as far as I can tell, the devs haven't added anything which lets players transfer weapon mastery levels from old weapons to Spear, which implies players will want to buy weapon mastery food. But this could also just be me missing something, it's not like the system excels at being transparent/easy to understand at first glance.

My second problem is that I only get 6 days to buy certain cosmetic stuff and I want a LOT of it. 1500 lucent worth that I need to scrounge up within a week and I only have 350, to get 1 spear skin and the new costume. This is BEFORE I start looking at spear lithographs I might want to buy for myself. This isn't good in my book. Even if I want to throw money at the game like before, it's not a good time for me for real life reasons, not 1500 worth. So if you're going to put me on a 6 day timer, warn me ahead of time.
This also doesn't count the battle pass I want to buy because thankfully it lets me buy it at any later point for the cool stuff in it.

My third problem is that after reading all the Spear skills and masteries, I still cannot tell if moving forward I will be playing Spear/Dagger or Spear/Wand. They gave me an AoE blood leech aura which is the sustain I was waiting for to switch away from Wand, but I suspect it isn't actually enough. I might be wrong. Or this might be the kind of situation where I need Wand sub for solo content and Dagger sub for group content (because I'd be relying on my white mage).

My fourth problem is that the material transmutation system isn't... looking interesting at all. But that was already covered above.

I mean, that's moreso my fault for assuming that they were going to be a specific type of 'less competent' and 'more pushed by greedy corporate overlords'.

We got the exact opposite. Way too much competence, and they either tricked/appeased/don't have the corporate overlords I was expecting.

If they're going to drip us, or if they have to drip us the way Ashes A2 will be, then this was the most correct/competent way to do it for both sides. They get whales to throw money at the problem without any real balance issues, and somehow, don't cause an econ shakeup that makes everything 'stupid'.

So that's effectively my bad for hedging our bets so hard relative to our faith in their dev process. The years of trauma coming back at us hard.

I have a pivot, it's pretty easy, so just continuing with the original plan of feeding the masses is fine, since as you mentioned there's no sign of Mastery Transfer.

The Crab Meat Pie flow is within the initial expectation range, it was predictable enough that enough other people hit on it. The Golden Apple Pie is in the wildcard state, so hodl and wait for the drought, which should still come even with the more competent design, once the whales push through.

I'll reorg the other priorities in a bit. Let's hope this competence reflects in other things going forward too, and I'll change models accordingly if we see more signs of it. For now, Heroic Spear purchase and test on Tower Contracts if you haven't already. I don't think you're gonna need any Lithographs, but we're not gonna get another chance at Junobote like yesterday, so might as well commit to base Purple Polearm.

Skill Conversion Books from new Seasonal Battle Pass should be enough for the rest of it once you decide, if you even end up needing them (probably for currently Purple/Omni skills).

Loot boxes. Ugh. When I saw that I was super disappointed. I think this game has been a real learning experience for me irt my preferences. I can tolerate and even appreciate certain layers of abstraction that are there more out of convenience, like having an 'activator' or 'fuel' category of items for crafting and nothing super specific, but the way TL gives rewards in SOME parts of the game (in others it isn't like this and is fairly good) as 'choice or chance boxes' or 'substitute one thing for another in a way that divorces the original input to the output' I just.... Bleh.

It's very demotivating for my personal psychology when it comes to interacting with the game's over world content. This is partially why I ended up preferentially being an 'Abyss Diver'. It takes it out of the realm of 'an abstraction of various things that could be happening' to making the process feeling 'video gamey' and like it 'disrespect's my intelligence level (although it's more accurate to say that they are 'respecting' the 'average level of intelligence' of casual players'.)

I hate this in AoC Alpha 2 slightly less because they at least have distinctive categories for things like fuel. But when your crafting is so 'menu only' heavy, I kind of require that you make the itemization itself the 'thing that grants me immersion' instead. Both games currently fail that test for me. Either invest in good animations and interactive processes, or make your items tied to the actual world or product. Please?

I think the way I'd solve this issue in TL and you can tell me if this wouldn't work out, but I really think a system that made the 'choice boxes' style reward less prevalent but also made the likelihood of a quantity multiplier on the synth increase (while also allowing for 'just any item as 'trade to the guild to perform the service' to still perform the synth.) Yeah it will make people 'optimize' and pattern match, but I'd argue they do that now and WORSE.

I've been saving up about 10/11 Skill Conversion Books since I started the game (only ever used one), because I'm a paranoid little gremlin, so I get to cash in now. Gotta love it when a plan comes together.





I was kind of hoping apple pies would be selling harder right off the bat, but that's just because I'd rather bake sweets, obviously there's no mechanical difference like the Patissier specialization in ffxi. So I'll proceed hard on the crab pies for now I guess.

On the subject of being a paranoid little gremlin, it's only by luck that I have the 40 medals for Heroic Spear (I believe that one requires medals, have to check), so I have to be more careful in the future so I don't need luck.

I can't help but think about all the people like me who don't have a (competent) Treasurer in their guild, though. I know you specifically store some boss drops so we can arrange Lucent transfers when needs like this arrive, so my Lucent need will probably get covered. But what about the people who want to buy things and the 6 day timer caught them at a bad time? I'm considering talking about this in their feedback survey on December 12, but maybe it's a waste of space or not an actual general concern.

SunScript wrote: »

I've been saving up about 10/11 Skill Conversion Books since I started the game (only ever used one), because I'm a paranoid little gremlin, so I get to cash in now. Gotta love it when a plan comes together.

I was kind of hoping apple pies would be selling harder right off the bat, but that's just because I'd rather bake sweets, obviously there's no mechanical difference like the Patissier specialization in ffxi. So I'll proceed hard on the crab pies for now I guess.

On the subject of being a paranoid little gremlin, it's only by luck that I have the 40 medals for Heroic Spear (I believe that one requires medals, have to check), so I have to be more careful in the future so I don't need luck.

I can't help but think about all the people like me who don't have a (competent) Treasurer in their guild, though. I know you specifically store some boss drops so we can arrange Lucent transfers when needs like this arrive, so my Lucent need will probably get covered. But what about the people who want to buy things and the 6 day timer caught them at a bad time? I'm considering talking about this in their feedback survey on December 12, but maybe it's a waste of space or not an actual general concern.

Nah, you're forgetting a source, buy your Epic Weapon Selection Chest Box from the Contract Coin merchant for 1500.

(for Intrepid, this is a good indicator of why it's important to have specific mental connections between how something works in game and the mechanical part, TL actually does a good enough job, I think, we're just traumatized as hell from all the other low quality Korean MMOs).

"The Resistance provides those who complete contracts with weapons to continue their work."

You can burn through to get some extra traits too, and then trait up from the Guild Blue selection chest weapons.

Base experience data
It's good that they're at least trying to make the connections between one thing and another, but I'm now definitely thinking about how counterintuitive/trolling it was to put the main Spear Drops on Shaikal/Junobote/Dark Wizards. It's not like we're going to see less of the clumping problem because they put them over there. This goes back to the Discoverability problem. Why is it that the three (four?) obvious sources of spears, even if they were Blue, don't actually seem to drop them?

I still can't fully confirm this because all my paths to 'checking what drops from what' are either buggy (Lithograph book, which somehow actually has something for Spears) or I forgot how to use them? (dungeon enemy drop checks).

The key point here is that one can't have both these things true at once, if you aren't going to have the obvious spear wielding enemies drop Spears, you can't also have such large discoverability issues, for us, right?

I wouldn't care if I couldn't instacheck in game 'Do Reptilian Lancers drop Spears?' if it was likely/obvious that they did or would, but if they don't, then I'm just poking and not 'playing'. Please avoid this sort of thing, Intrepid, wherever possible, it can seriously affect people, I think.

Not gonna go into the details of this since it doesn't help Intrepid but overall, Blue Spears DO drop in open world, just partial-unintuitively. "Razorsteel' from Mitrans (tree people, WHAT?). At least Resistance (both Purple and Blue) drop from Shattered Temple, but it's the Knights that drop the Purple which again, makes no sense (at least the Soldiers drop the blue).

If this is intentional obfuscation, the goal's unclear. I always assume that first and just 'relative incompetence' second, though. The backlash when I realize that it is just 'incompetence' is usually pretty bad.

JustVine wrote: »

Loot boxes. Ugh. When I saw that I was super disappointed. I think this game has been a real learning experience for me irt my preferences. I can tolerate and even appreciate certain layers of abstraction that are there more out of convenience, like having an 'activator' or 'fuel' category of items for crafting and nothing super specific, but the way TL gives rewards in SOME parts of the game (in others it isn't like this and is fairly good) as 'choice or chance boxes' or 'substitute one thing for another in a way that divorces the original input to the output' I just.... Bleh.

It's very demotivating for my personal psychology when it comes to interacting with the game's over world content. This is partially why I ended up preferentially being an 'Abyss Diver'. It takes it out of the realm of 'an abstraction of various things that could be happening' to making the process feeling 'video gamey' and like it 'disrespect's my intelligence level (although it's more accurate to say that they are 'respecting' the 'average level of intelligence' of casual players'.)

I hate this in AoC Alpha 2 slightly less because they at least have distinctive categories for things like fuel. But when your crafting is so 'menu only' heavy, I kind of require that you make the itemization itself the 'thing that grants me immersion' instead. Both games currently fail that test for me. Either invest in good animations and interactive processes, or make your items tied to the actual world or product. Please?

I think the way I'd solve this issue in TL and you can tell me if this wouldn't work out, but I really think a system that made the 'choice boxes' style reward less prevalent but also made the likelihood of a quantity multiplier on the synth increase (while also allowing for 'just any item as 'trade to the guild to perform the service' to still perform the synth.) Yeah it will make people 'optimize' and pattern match, but I'd argue they do that now and WORSE.

Personally, I just wouldn't do 'choice boxes' OUTSIDE of the very specific case of receiving food ingredients as a reward for dynamic events (because for those it's easier to imagine you're asking for your reward in a specific way at the end of it). Keep it old school. Plant enemies drop plant loot, which you use to make plant themed gear or wood materials or whatever. We already figured out crafting immersion decades ago, but as I recall they approach things this way with TL in order to not force their players to memorize crafting ingredients or have to plan ahead too much? Might be wrong. Very hand hold-y of them, but at this point we've been so starved for a decent MMORPG that I can let it slide. Not how I'd design it though.

JustVine wrote: »

I hate this in AoC Alpha 2 slightly less because they at least have distinctive categories for things like fuel. But when your crafting is so 'menu only' heavy, I kind of require that you make the itemization itself the 'thing that grants me immersion' instead. Both games currently fail that test for me. Either invest in good animations and interactive processes, or make your items tied to the actual world or product. Please?

I think you did that thing where you 'summoned' sensibility/competence into something where it doesn't yet exist, again.

A2 doesn't actually have distinctive categories for 'fuel', I don't even know what you're talking about except maybe that period where we had that 'wood oil' that you could buy from Vendors that was almost universally a waste/bad idea to get that way as compared to chopping a single tree?

That was moreso a noob trap than anything.

(this, Intrepid, is why when you put half-baked systems into even your Alpha, we still get wary and comment on it. It doesn't matter if it is temporary when we've gone through years of being sure something would be temporary only to learn that Devs think it's fine for release)

I might be misunderstanding what you mean here, since it is true that you can't just burn everything as fuel, but unless you're talking about the bare minimum stuff, it's really not better.

Of course, since 'bare minimum' is about all we can consistently expect these days, just ignore me if that's what you meant.

Fishing update, since I didn't get to check it out with some Actual Fishing since I kept getting sacks instead of fish for a bit. Suffering from success and all that.

I really like that it not only records your fish size (which is nice as this wasn't shown before) but also that you don't get points from catching fish, but catching fish in a specific *habitat*. So you need to pay attention to what the fish encyclopedia tells you when you catch a fish about its possible habitats, and then explore the world to go fish in that specific habitat. That makes me very happy, and I'm about to go look for some of the weirder habitats (like that pond at the bottom of Purelight Tower) to see how the Illustrated Book of Fish deals with that.

Huge fan of the Fishdex. I didn't remotely expect them to do something like this in their system but it makes me happy.

I'm so surprised that they didn't put spear drops on more of the spear-using enemies. I believe up until now, they've been relatively consistent with putting green/blue drops on enemies with a matching weapon type, so it's an odd oversight (?). It doesn't seem like it would have been too disruptive to toss some lower-tier spears onto the drop table for e.g. Reptilian Lancers.

I find games more immersive when enemies drop gear they could plausibly have been using, even if it's not specifically strong or useful. You can always sell or desynth it.

I figure they must have had some reason for omitting this, but I can't quite figure out what it might have been.

Azherae wrote: »

JustVine wrote: »

I hate this in AoC Alpha 2 slightly less because they at least have distinctive categories for things like fuel. But when your crafting is so 'menu only' heavy, I kind of require that you make the itemization itself the 'thing that grants me immersion' instead. Both games currently fail that test for me. Either invest in good animations and interactive processes, or make your items tied to the actual world or product. Please?

I think you did that thing where you 'summoned' sensibility/competence into something where it doesn't yet exist, again.

A2 doesn't actually have distinctive categories for 'fuel', I don't even know what you're talking about except maybe that period where we had that 'wood oil' that you could buy from Vendors that was almost universally a waste/bad idea to get that way as compared to chopping a single tree?

That was moreso a noob trap than anything.

(this, Intrepid, is why when you put half-baked systems into even your Alpha, we still get wary and comment on it. It doesn't matter if it is temporary when we've gone through years of being sure something would be temporary only to learn that Devs think it's fine for release)

I might be misunderstanding what you mean here, since it is true that you can't just burn everything as fuel, but unless you're talking about the bare minimum stuff, it's really not better.

Of course, since 'bare minimum' is about all we can consistently expect these days, just ignore me if that's what you meant.

Nah I just meant the 'fuel' you need to do for farming synths. Nothing more complicated than that. I don't think it's an actual systematized thing the way magic dust is in TL but idk I haven't really tried keeping track of it for A2. Too busy focusing on other friction points.

GrandSerpent wrote: »

I'm so surprised that they didn't put spear drops on more of the spear-using enemies. I believe up until now, they've been relatively consistent with putting green/blue drops on enemies with a matching weapon type, so it's an odd oversight (?). It doesn't seem like it would have been too disruptive to toss some lower-tier spears onto the drop table for e.g. Reptilian Lancers.

I find games more immersive when enemies drop gear they could plausibly have been using, even if it's not specifically strong or useful. You can always sell or desynth it.

I figure they must have had some reason for omitting this, but I can't quite figure out what it might have been.

They don't even really have a fully fleshed out set of purples yet (for spear). And I think I only saw one new armor set when they introduced fortitude which I found kinda weird since the synergy space for that stat and the weapon that comes along with it is at least (in my opinion) like 2-3 gear sets in purple and 4 for blue minimum. I assume it's just an active development thing and they are behind due to underestimating other parts of their intended plans (e.g. the housing update still doesnt have a due date even though they've repeatedly said that they both are working on it and have been struggling with it.) Honestly that's just optimism though.

GrandSerpent wrote: »

I'm so surprised that they didn't put spear drops on more of the spear-using enemies. I believe up until now, they've been relatively consistent with putting green/blue drops on enemies with a matching weapon type, so it's an odd oversight (?). It doesn't seem like it would have been too disruptive to toss some lower-tier spears onto the drop table for e.g. Reptilian Lancers.

I find games more immersive when enemies drop gear they could plausibly have been using, even if it's not specifically strong or useful. You can always sell or desynth it.

I figure they must have had some reason for omitting this, but I can't quite figure out what it might have been.

Someone might just have been very busy, remember that thing I told you about the New World devs not realizing that you couldn't make Flour from Wheat and that it had been that way for months?

The Orc one is super surprising though, because they even made the new Spear-using Orc Guardian and were relatively hype about that in the video, and yet...

No Orcish Spearmaster spear drops.

I suppose we can desperately hope for a future where the reason the Razorsteel Pike drops from Mitran Chiefs is because we are supposed to imagine that the Chiefs in particular have special wood for the handles that are particularly good for Spears?

They do drop a lot of other reasonable things. Might be a bit unfair to fixate on the Spearmasters since they would have the equivalent of 'technical debt' there, it being a change in player expectation from those who know them to drop Blade of the Resistance, if it was swapped .

I just can't imagine the sort of person who complains 'these Spearmasters stopped dropping Swords and switched to dropping Spears and my immersion/play loops are ruined!'
They could at least have added Green spears to them.

Just move the Blades to the Gallu instead...

Anyway, we probably should not assume that there was actually a reason, remember the Windurstian Taco fiasco?

(yes, Intrepid, we will genuinely fixate on stuff like this, for this long, just naturally)

GrilledCheeseMojito wrote: »

Fishing update, since I didn't get to check it out with some Actual Fishing since I kept getting sacks instead of fish for a bit. Suffering from success and all that.

I really like that it not only records your fish size (which is nice as this wasn't shown before) but also that you don't get points from catching fish, but catching fish in a specific *habitat*. So you need to pay attention to what the fish encyclopedia tells you when you catch a fish about its possible habitats, and then explore the world to go fish in that specific habitat. That makes me very happy, and I'm about to go look for some of the weirder habitats (like that pond at the bottom of Purelight Tower) to see how the Illustrated Book of Fish deals with that.

Huge fan of the Fishdex. I didn't remotely expect them to do something like this in their system but it makes me happy.

Oh, that's actually great. I'm looking forward to this now.

As an unrelated side note: I'm happy I finally have an excuse to give NCSoft some money (the latest cosmetics). Gonna be buying my 2 months of "subscription" at once, but I think this brings me more or less up to date.

Azherae wrote: »

Someone might just have been very busy, remember that thing I told you about the New World devs not realizing that you couldn't make Flour from Wheat and that it had been that way for months?

True. It's easily possible that it was just an oversight, or that the JIRA ticket for updating the loot tables got assigned to the wrong person or something. We'll probably have to see how this changes in the next patch.

I imagine the dev team is working extremely hard on player housing and the new region. Coordinating that alongside all the other ongoing content updates must be a challenge.

On the subject of "poor discoverability", I'm having a look at the new Rune system now, and it feels like, while the basic functionality of how to slot runes into items is pretty clear, there are some details I can't figure out.

It's not immediately clear whether it's possible to remove runes and put them into another item, overwrite them, or change which slot types an item has. Since I don't know whether certain decisions are irrevocable, and risk messing up my expensive purple gear, I'm a little discouraged from experimenting with the system.

It's also not super obvious which types of in-game activity result in rune drops, which makes it a little harder to engage with the system proactively.

Overall, I think that TL tutorializes a lot of basic systems very well in the earlygame, but doesn't seem to have the same level of attention put into systems which are applicable to higher-level characters, or which were added post-launch (e.g. runes, traits, cooking, the auction house). The systems themselves aren't bad, but the onboard process is a little rough.

So anyway, now that I've taken a break to fight Grand Aelon, I've gotten a rune! I actually think I mostly understand what to do with it. Reading the patch notes helped, but the 'tutorial' was almost sufficient. It felt a little rushed, but then, they have been trained to avoid excess detail in their information because it would be "too complicated" for... well anyway.

This looks like its' gonna be a hell of a grind to get the runes up to reasonable numbers, but also... possibly a relatively passive one? In game, they didn't mention anything like what the patch notes(?) told us about the guaranteed "you will never get a worse version of this rune" drop rates. I'd really like to know if it only applies to the dungeons mentioned, or if it would also apply to all rune sources like world bosses?

I guess we'll see what I get over the next week or two...

The UI seems okay enough, but there seems to be no obvious way to look at a weapon in that UI without being currently in the process of 'trying to add a rune to it'. That said, I haven't done so yet. Gotta get more to see the spectrum and consider. Also probably burn a cheap one on something worthless so I can see the costs and requirements of replacing or upgrading a slot... which was also in no way clear from the (absolutely bare minimum) tutorial?

Got my outfit, though! Gonna need so many dyes...

EDIT: The synergy combination list really seems like the most basic combinatoric method possible? Is it? I didn't look too hard, but it seems "very basic and mostly just to force you to commit-mostly in advance, to what combo you want". I suppose that's fine, but am I missing anything?

EDIT 2: Nice way of making people feel like they got something from the world boss though, I suppose. No more "consolation prize only".

Looks like @SunScript at least gets a useful/suitable Infinity dungeon target for soloing and testing Spear Defensive.

Never underestimate the usefulness of actual challenging solo PvE content for times like this, I guess.

Tax influx for our server will be at 800k Lucent soon, so I'll start counting from there, to get the econ velocity. Golden Apple Pie prices already rising, but the sales numbers and timers are a little sus.

Seems like a lot of people expecting/believing in 90 Lucent per pie. Before deciding anything, check the difference between 4362 and whatever number the sales are at when you get around to it.

Amazingly, the Kastler Salad market is still flat, but their restriction makes this make sense. You can't buy them until you're level 40, at which point most of their purpose, particularly for the Spear boosting, is gone. It's also really likely that this is another noob trappy system for most people.

We probably shouldn't expect too much from that, but at least that's overall good for the joy of cooking. Maintaining our usual specializations seems fine for now.

(This probably concludes whatever usefulness can be achieved from the 'microcosmic window', since the system is still flat and didn't add anything significant of depth or interest. A perfectly normal drip-feed update with a system that has potential to be interesting but is currently not, for me).

'sign off' if you're done, people, I'll handle the rest if there is any 'rest' to handle, once you do.

SongRune wrote: »

This looks like its' gonna be a hell of a grind to get the runes up to reasonable numbers, but also... possibly a relatively passive one?

I've been thinking about this a lot lately due to studying PoE economy for the upcoming EA release and the way TL handles some stuff. I think there is definitely merit to passive grinds. If you really think about it the trait system in TL is already like that. I have come to the conclusion that I am fine with it and it adds to my gameplay, but I need some point of like 'action' every once and awhile to connect a specific activity with it. Bonus points for there being multiple specific activities I could do to raise it in slightly different ways to achieve progression (still not sure if I /need/ that or not honestly and I've been playing mmo's for nearly 2 decades. It's a really close call.)

For TL the trait extraction combined with abyss contract bag quest completion feeds into this feeling well. I have to interact with the bag, I have to consciously decide what gear from my grind to 'make available to players' vs not. Stuff like that is small but I've come to realize is really impactful. I don't see anything in the current rune system indicating if that is going to happen or not though. So far it seems like no....

I think that's all I have to note about the current update. (Besides the fact that I'd really like to understand what's going on with this random glitched item in my inventory. Its missing a name, has a weird category, and the icon changes based on whatever I last moused over. The icon in the tooltip also doesn't match the one in the inventory screen.)

Azherae wrote: »

SunScript wrote: »

I've been saving up about 10/11 Skill Conversion Books since I started the game (only ever used one), because I'm a paranoid little gremlin, so I get to cash in now. Gotta love it when a plan comes together.

I was kind of hoping apple pies would be selling harder right off the bat, but that's just because I'd rather bake sweets, obviously there's no mechanical difference like the Patissier specialization in ffxi. So I'll proceed hard on the crab pies for now I guess.

On the subject of being a paranoid little gremlin, it's only by luck that I have the 40 medals for Heroic Spear (I believe that one requires medals, have to check), so I have to be more careful in the future so I don't need luck.

I can't help but think about all the people like me who don't have a (competent) Treasurer in their guild, though. I know you specifically store some boss drops so we can arrange Lucent transfers when needs like this arrive, so my Lucent need will probably get covered. But what about the people who want to buy things and the 6 day timer caught them at a bad time? I'm considering talking about this in their feedback survey on December 12, but maybe it's a waste of space or not an actual general concern.

Nah, you're forgetting a source, buy your Epic Weapon Selection Chest Box from the Contract Coin merchant for 1500.

(for Intrepid, this is a good indicator of why it's important to have specific mental connections between how something works in game and the mechanical part, TL actually does a good enough job, I think, we're just traumatized as hell from all the other low quality Korean MMOs).

"The Resistance provides those who complete contracts with weapons to continue their work."

You can burn through to get some extra traits too, and then trait up from the Guild Blue selection chest weapons.

That's good design and I totally forgot about that source. Just as well, since it seems I cannot use Resistance Medals from world bosses for it. That said, I'm short on overworld contracts, so going to have to go dungeon diving either way.

On a separate note, I noticed world bosses drop random runes now. I have no particularly strong opinion about this, but my kneejerk reaction is that it's kind of pointless to add a new thing for engame players to chase and then make it a part of the exact same gameplay loop as before. Acceptable as a stopgap until the new expansion but otherwise a bit weird to me.

Also, I don't know if any of you noticed but the sundries merchant now sells upgrades for that pvp cc cleanse orb, they let you choose what aftereffect buff to have after CC cleansing. I suppose it's good to give pvp players something to chase, too.

______
Anyway yes, Kastler Salad continues to be a little weird to me, but so it goes for victims of anti-RMT restrictions, I guess.

That's about it for me, lots of experimenting to do.

GrandSerpent wrote: »

(Besides the fact that I'd really like to understand what's going on with this random glitched item in my inventory.

Sell it to me!

/wave @all .

Time to go play the game, rather than typing about the game. Well... once I'm done trying to fix a particular bug. *sigh*

I think the final thought all of this provokes me into thinking about personally is that ultimately the reason I 'harp' on the 'specialization' and 'differentiation' thing is actually a core mmo principle that I am pretty confident is a core mmo principle now. Basically, the entire point of game design is to make engaging and fun gameplay loops. However, if everyone participates in the SAME gameplay loop, the experience is kind of flat. This is ok in a single player game, however, the more social a game is intended to be, the more differentiated experience with a shared context becomes pivotal as it leads to a part of the gameplay loop that is inherently social 'validated sharing'.

What I mean by that is if you and your friends fight the same boss with the same weapon there is less to talk about than if you are all different weapons. You gain a sense of identity that relates to others more clearly and 'validatingly' in the case where a weapon differentiation occurs. Scale that up, if you all have to collect some ingredient for an anti cc potion, then you are going to all do that in a game that is purely pvp and cc matters. There is nothing to share. It's in a way, adding 'single player' style content to a design space, in an mmo's case, that is inherently NOT single player.

So that is why I personally care and why I find flat systems like this really disappointing. But as a result there is not much else to talk about. So I think that is all I got to say for now.

I do actually have one more thing I forgot to mention. I'm not a Fisher/Angler by any means, but the new fishing codex makes it sound more attractive because it basically creates a checklist of mini goals for me to take on. It puts me in the unfamiliar position of possibly being wrong, because I tend to think fishing should be it's own reward yet here I am feeling envious/interested in a checklist.

Anyway, gotta catch em all.