Focused Feedback: Reward Merits

[lemming]

6 minutes ago, ShardWarrior said:

Your second bullet point is made meaningless by what you are able to do on Brainstorm.  Think about it objectively - it does not matter if a character is wiped if anyone can just recreate them with everything they had before within a few minutes.  Also, when was the last time Brainstorm was wiped?

 

While it's true you can load a character fully formed onto brainstorm with some handy tools, it's still a bit of a pain.  You also lose out on any base, etc... thing and we've got people complaining about needing to login low level characters to keep names after 30 days.

 

My opinion is Brainstorm is great for testing out stuff, not for actual play.  I copy characters all the time to test concepts, but it's not for long term.

[GM Kal]

This thread is about the adjusting of rewards for specific content.
Please focus on that instead of farming method conversation.

If you have input on how these can be better adjusted for fairness vs difficulty and time, it is most welcome!

Edit:
Seriously folks. Dev team need input on these things, and do not have spare time to read through your personal chats on other topics.

Edit edit:
Further off topic posts will be deleted.
This thread is 
Focused Feedback: Reward Merits

Edited July 20, 2022 by GM Kal

[lemming]

Looking at a lot of this thread:

People farming for Emp merits for conversion to inf will be negatively affected.

More casual players will miss out on the conversion to reward merits when they need a few reward merits to purchase something via them.  (Anniversary badges, or some other vended item)

People like me who spend a lot of time playing, but not much on maximizing profit will benefit from extra reward merits.  I've only recently been going on daily Hami raids and that's boosted the amount of reward merits more than anything else lately for that character.

 

Speculation:

Vet Rewards were initially put in so that the character getting the rewards would then kit out their incarnate abilities quicker than having to do every trial.   Not to have a character PL'd up to Vet 50 and then stripped for parts in a farm.   This patch seems to crimp the farmer ability a bit while not having as negative of an impact on the non-farmer.   And the extra reward merits from itrials will offset that a bit.   (Hopefully the DA and other arcs will get a 2-4 reward merit bonus as well.  I'd probably go with 1 reward for Heather, up to six maybe for Beltrano (sp) and Number 6, but no cooldown, so not sure.)

[golstat2003]

On 7/19/2022 at 11:58 AM, Cobalt Arachne said:

This is getting a bit off-topic, so this will be my last reply on it here, but our original stance, was, and still is: You'll never be forced to do Advanced Difficulty content in order to get rewards required to increase your power. The new rewards are purely vanity rewards and somebody who ignores Advanced Difficulty content loses out on nothing of functional value.

If Advanced Difficulty modes were to be worth the development time to design and create, they needed to have a little more broad-appeal and provide something lucrative to get people to try them, but not in a way that made them feel forced to do so.

 

While I agree it makes me question just how popular "more difficulty" is if you're finding the content not being run. Shouldn't that tell us something?

I mean the Aeon SF is on FARM on one of the hardest difficulties with some teams having it down to a science. And yet still not enough people are running it?

[Cobalt Arachne]

1 minute ago, golstat2003 said:

 

While I agree it makes me question just how popular "more difficulty" is if you're finding the content not being run. Shouldn't that tell us something?

I mean the Aeon SF is on FARM on one of the hardest difficulties with some teams having it down to a science. And yet still not enough people are running it?

Speed ASF runs are on farm, maybe even at +4/x8, but that is absolutely not the same thing as the ASF on 4*/Relentless advanced difficulty, which is quite different.

[DarknessEternal]

Still waiting for the explanation of why this change needs to happen.

 

Why is the occasional exchange of empyrian to reward so game breaking that it needs removal?

[ShardWarrior]

On 7/18/2022 at 8:20 PM, Booper said:

The Reward Merits listed above are subject to the standard 18 hour cooldown on the same character, per trial.

 

Is it not possible to have the EMP to Reward Merit conversion have a similar cooldown instead of outright removing it?

[Booper]

5 minutes ago, ShardWarrior said:

 

Is it not possible to have the EMP to Reward Merit conversion have a similar cooldown instead of outright removing it?

Your request is to allow an EMP to 10 Reward Merits conversion once every 18 hours per character?

[Vanden]

I would rather not wait a month to get a merit payout every 3 vet levels on a new 50.

[ShardWarrior]

Just now, Booper said:

Your request is to allow an EMP to 10 Reward Merits conversion once every 18 hours per character?

 

Yes, if that is a way to keep the conversion around.  I personally think it is better than completely losing the ability to convert them.   I am sure others will feel differently.  

 

Outside of Incarnate crafting, I personally liked converting them to fill in IO sets where I was missing a recipe or two or to purchase ATOs or Purple IO recipes if I was low on inf.  I do not know if having the conversion limited by cooldown achieves what you are all after though.  Was just a thought and would be interested to hear your thoughts on it.

[arcane]

1 minute ago, ShardWarrior said:

 

 I personally think it is better than completely losing the ability to convert them.   I am sure others will feel differently.  

Considering some is objectively better than none, the “others” mentioned here would be both wrong and quite petulant. 🙂 

[DarknessEternal]

21 minutes ago, Booper said:

Your request is to allow an EMP to 10 Reward Merits conversion once every 18 hours per character?

Why would it need a cooldown?  It currently has no cooldown and you've provided no explanation for why the change needs to be made.

 

Perhaps if you explain your logic, we might know what to suggest.

[arcane]

21 minutes ago, DarknessEternal said:

Why would it need a cooldown?  It currently has no cooldown and you've provided no explanation for why the change needs to be made.

 

Perhaps if you explain your logic, we might know what to suggest.

With all the demands for explanation, I take it you’re prepared to *accept* the explanation?

[Bionic_Flea]

39 minutes ago, arcane said:

the “others” mentioned here would be both wrong and quite petulant

That's never stopped us before!  We're not quitters . . . until we quit the game . . . but that's a protest!

9 minutes ago, arcane said:

With all the demands for explanation, I take it you’re prepared to *accept* the explanation?

 

I remember the frustrating reason my dad would give me when I would ask why?  Because, yes.  (Porque si.  It sounds better in Spanish)

[DarknessEternal]

16 minutes ago, arcane said:

With all the demands for explanation, I take it you’re prepared to *accept* the explanation?

Not blindly, no.  There's no good faith suggestion anyone can make without understanding what the problem is. 

 

No one can. 

 

No problem = no solution.

 

Conversion on cooldown is at least less punitive, but currently we have no idea why the devs want this except to punish the existing and future players.

Edited July 20, 2022 by DarknessEternal

[Bionic_Flea]

2 hours ago, GM Kal said:

This thread is about the adjusting of rewards for specific content.
Please focus on that instead of farming method conversation.

If you have input on how these can be better adjusted for fairness vs difficulty and time, it is most welcome!

Edit:
Seriously folks. Dev team need input on these things, and do not have spare time to read through your personal chats on other topics.

Edit edit:
Further off topic posts will be deleted.
This thread is 
Focused Feedback: Reward Merits

 

Unless someone wants to organize a group to go run the I-trials on test, it's hard for me to get a good feel for it.

 

Does anyone know, or do we have data mining, that shows the average completion time of the various trials?  That's the only measurement I can think of.

[Vanden]

3 minutes ago, DarknessEternal said:

Conversion on cooldown is at least less punitive, but currently we have no idea why the devs want this except to punish the existing and future players.

 

Seriously? The first beta build had vet experience removed from AE, the second build restored that but removed Empyrean/Astral Merit conversion to reward merits. Vet levels give free Empyreans. Surely you must be able to hazard a guess at what they're getting at.

[DarknessEternal]

6 minutes ago, Vanden said:

 

Seriously? The first beta build had vet experience removed from AE, the second build restored that but removed Empyrean/Astral Merit conversion to reward merits. Vet levels give free Empyreans. Surely you must be able to hazard a guess at what they're getting at.

Yes, they want Empyrean merits to do nothing except exchange into Incarnate Salvage.

 

But why?  Why now?  What's it breaking?

Edited July 20, 2022 by DarknessEternal

[arcane]

21 minutes ago, DarknessEternal said:

Not blindly, no.  There's no good faith suggestion anyone can make without understanding what the problem is. 

 

No one can. 

 

No problem = no solution.

 

Conversion on cooldown is at least less punitive, but currently we have no idea why the devs want this except to punish the existing and future players.

Reasonable enough. Just observing that in past focused feedback threads, devs providing explanations has never seemed to do anything to mitigate complaints. At which point it feels disingenuous to even bother asking for the explanation but oh well.

[Booper]

2 hours ago, ShardWarrior said:

 

Yes, if that is a way to keep the conversion around.  I personally think it is better than completely losing the ability to convert them.   I am sure others will feel differently.  

 

Outside of Incarnate crafting, I personally liked converting them to fill in IO sets where I was missing a recipe or two or to purchase ATOs or Purple IO recipes if I was low on inf.  I do not know if having the conversion limited by cooldown achieves what you are all after though.  Was just a thought and would be interested to hear your thoughts on it.

I will pass the suggestion along. I understand the desire for preserving the option with limits over not having any option at all. Those limits may not be an 18 hour lockout, per se. Perhaps the lockout is only 8 or 12 hours, perhaps the character also needs to be level 50 to do the conversion. It may also result in a re-evaluation of providing extra reward merits for iTrials (those rewards were calculated from the Emp Merits that are awarded but no longer had a convertable Reward Merit value). Either way, this is still in beta and is still being worked on and discussed internally. 

 

And before I get quoted again, I will let folks know I just write patch notes and feedback threads, otherwise the only development I get involved with is powers development. I probably can't answer any of the questions regarding this change. Everyone, feel free to make alternative suggestions but remember to be kind to each other. Don't argue with eachother over suggestions made by others. Constructive criticism is ok, but abuse will not be tolerated.

[America's Angel]

41 minutes ago, DarknessEternal said:

Yes, they want Empyrean merits to do nothing except exchange into Incarnate Salvage.

 

But why?  Why now?  What's it breaking?

 

AFK farmers can earn 91 billion inf a week. This is pretty bad.

 

On top of this, they can also theoretically earn enough emp merits to convert into 430,500 reward merits. (Which is worth roughly 90bil inf.)

 

Of course, no-one is actually doing this with emp merits. Starting a new level 50 farmer every day involves slotting IOs/incarnates. This is a huge timesink. It's much more likely that they earn the 61,500 emp merits on their farmers on day 1, and then just dual-box with a second 50 and "only" pull in an extra ~62bil worth of merits a week through emp merits. (Although this number will be closer to ~25bil if they want to play by the rules.)

 

Important to point out the "worth of" words in the paragraph above. These farmers aren't earning raw influence per week via emp merits. If they tried to "cash out" their emps then they'd clean out the AH of buyers and crash prices due to the scale of how much they'd be selling, whilst also massively decreasing how much merits are worth. As you can see from looking at the market, converter/booster/purple prices have not crashed, so no-one is currently doing this. (Likely because converting of emps>merits>converters, and then listing in in groups of 10, takes such a long time. Time that would eat into afk farming raw influence. Which the numbers above show to be the main money earner for AFK farmers.) 

 

So, while it's not being done right now because it's not PROFITABLE. That doesn't mean it's not POSSIBLE.

This means that a single player, if they wanted to, could crash the value of merits for everyone in the game.

 

Yes, the emp merits>reward merits conversion being removed absolutely sucks. (But not as much as removing vet levels from the AE, so it is the lesser of two evils.) And once AFK Farming is blocked I imagine this removal will get reversed. But right now it needs to be implemented to stop the above from being possible.

That's my take on it anyway. And I'm just a player with no inside knowledge.

[Arcadio]

10 minutes ago, America's Angel said:

But not as much as removing vet levels from the AE, so it is the lesser of two evils.

Hard disagree with that, but I do respect that there could be this economic time bomb ready to go off.

 

What I don’t like about this change the way it is is that I’m forced to ‘farm’ this content to make up the lost converted merits, and I really don’t want to farm any content in particular. Something I would be fine with is if conversion were gated behind completing an iTrial as one of the rewards. Maybe directly as a reward or maybe it can grant tokens you need for a conversion, is something like that possible?

[Mythical Creature]

37 minutes ago, America's Angel said:

AFK farmers can earn 91 billion inf a week. This is pretty bad.

 

I have farmed every moment I could since this patch was first announced and have barely earned close to 1 billion. Granted I also had an alt at my side. How are afk farmers making more in a week then I am active farming? Am I losing that much influence by sticking to one farmer instead of rerolling at vet 50 and selling all the merits? Your numbers don't seem believable unless I am doing something horribly wrong...

[Stormwalker]

18 minutes ago, Arcadio said:

Hard disagree with that, but I do respect that there could be this economic time bomb ready to go off.

 

What I don’t like about this change the way it is is that I’m forced to ‘farm’ this content to make up the lost converted merits, and I really don’t want to farm any content in particular. Something I would be fine with is if conversion were gated behind completing an iTrial as one of the rewards. Maybe directly as a reward or maybe it can grant tokens you need for a conversion, is something like that possible?

 

It's not as though getting Reward Merits is gated behind any particular content, though.  There are lots of ways to get Reward Merits.  The reason they added Reward Merits to the Incarnate Trials is to make up for not being able to exchange the Empyrean Merits from those trials for Reward Merits now.

[DarknessEternal]

1 hour ago, America's Angel said:

 

AFK farmers can earn 91 billion inf a week. This is pretty bad.

 

 

We were asked not to discuss other topics.

 

AFK farming has no bearing on these reward changes.  If it did, this thread wouldn't exist and we'd be talking about ways to remove afk farming.

Edited July 21, 2022 by DarknessEternal