Focused Feedback: Reward Merits

[Arcadio]

42 minutes ago, Stormwalker said:

 

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.

I know, but as it stands now on the live servers you can get a good amount by doing pretty much any content because it just depends on leveling up. This implementation doesn’t preserve that flexibility at all is my problem.

[Redletter]

I mean...  I don't really know how this is a good thing. I personally choose Emp merits a lot as my rewards for things like Hamidon specifically because I can use them either as Incarnate fuel, or, merit fuel. I don't really do things like farm to fund alts, I only have a few 50s to my name, and I suspect there's a lot of people like me, who use empyrean in this way even if you get them from the level ups.

 

I dunno. Im not an expert. I know that the only reason I have any inf to spend at all is because of empryean merit conversion, and i'd be kinda mad if it was removed, which seems more like a direct response to farmers doing the farm thing, much as people in this whole thread want to say "don't bring up farming it's not relevant to this conversation 😡"

[Aeolus]

I admit, the change is a little bit of a surprise, but it's something I (and hopefully the rest of the player base) will adapt to.  I fully admit, I would cash in my Emps for Merits (here and there) to help the next generation of toons I was going to make.  It wasn't until I wanted to get the T4 gear that I stopped doing that cos of how hard they are to come by.

 

I have time to adjust to this, because I like to surf the boards here and there (I'm not a big commenter).  However, there are a lot of people who don't even look at the forums.  I do TINPEX daily, and the few people I've talked to were surprised (and annoyed) that they couldn't do trade in their Emps anymore.  Had I not told them, they might've logged into the game and experienced this large change.  And got angry.

 

Big changes are hard to adapt to.  I would recommend some sort of grace period to tell the player base before it happens.  Maybe one week after Page 4 goes live?

 

"To whom it may concern: you have one week after Page 4 goes live to cash out your Emps before the change."  Or something along those lines.  This way, you can ease the players into the change rather than a harsh 180 turn.  Our player base is so small as is, we need to do everything in our power to keep the rest around.

 

Honey over vinegar, I always say.

[BrandX]

6 hours ago, Redletter said:

I mean...  I don't really know how this is a good thing. I personally choose Emp merits a lot as my rewards for things like Hamidon specifically because I can use them either as Incarnate fuel, or, merit fuel. I don't really do things like farm to fund alts, I only have a few 50s to my name, and I suspect there's a lot of people like me, who use empyrean in this way even if you get them from the level ups.

 

I dunno. Im not an expert. I know that the only reason I have any inf to spend at all is because of empryean merit conversion, and i'd be kinda mad if it was removed, which seems more like a direct response to farmers doing the farm thing, much as people in this whole thread want to say "don't bring up farming it's not relevant to this conversation 😡"

 

Really, this doesn't change Hamidon rewards as all this remains the same.

 

80 Reward Merits or 4 Emp Merits (which as of now, equals 40 Reward Merits).  Hamidon taking the Reward Merits the second time, is 40 Reward Merits.  And at least on Everlasting, each raid tends to be 2 runs back to back.

[ShardWarrior]

12 hours ago, America's Angel said:

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.)

 

I would think the folks here could set up some sort of monitoring to look for accounts doing this (if they do not have it already) or any of the other activities you mentioned.  Seems to me this is similar to monitoring for gold farmers on a commercial game.  We know there used to be code to monitor how fast people were leveling to 50.  Find the people doing this edge case activities and deal with them accordingly.

[Linea]

19 hours ago, Booper said:

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

Or even make it like the server transfer tokens, 5 per week.   I rarely convert more than 5 when building a new character.  

However, this could still be exploited by having multiple accounts.

 

[Bionic_Flea]

15 minutes ago, Linea said:

Or even make it like the server transfer tokens, 5 per week.   I rarely convert more than 5 when building a new character.  

However, this could still be exploited by having multiple accounts.

 

It's still fairly limiting and a slow down to have to log in each one of your accounts/characters/farmers to claim your 5 emp to merit conversions per week.  You could email them all to one character, but still limited to 5 per week.  And even after the conversion of emps to reward merits, you still need one more conversion to something to be able to sell or transfer to other accounts.

 

I think this may be a good limiter.

[Stormwalker]

15 minutes ago, Bionic_Flea said:

It's still fairly limiting and a slow down to have to log in each one of your accounts/characters/farmers to claim your 5 emp to merit conversions per week.  You could email them all to one character, but still limited to 5 per week.  And even after the conversion of emps to reward merits, you still need one more conversion to something to be able to sell or transfer to other accounts.

 

I think this may be a good limiter.

 

Yeah, this was what I was just thinking.   It doesn't completely stop someone from exploiting the system, but at some point exploiting the system becomes more work than it's worth, and this is a step in that direction, while still allowing regular players to convert some of their emps to reward merits.

[DarknessEternal]

It seems like we're never going to get an explanation, so onto my actual feedback.

 

This change is overly punitive to solo players and new players/characters.

 

Solo players aren't doing these trials and are losing access to their form of empyrean to reward exchange.  You've replaced that with nothing.

 

New players/characters will not have the ability to generate these resources at the rate you've allowed people to for 3 years.  The old guard retains all the wealth, and the new aren't given equal access.

 

These changes only benefit old players who are part of exlusive grouping end game tasks and punish and alienate every one else.

 

Please do not make these changes.

[Hardship]

On 7/20/2022 at 2:36 PM, Booper said:

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

Is 18 hours the only cool down available? And does it have to be one conversion triggers the cooldown?  How about something like 10 conversions / 24 hour period.  Or 1 Emp to Reward Merit conversion and a 20 minute cooldown?

 

[Marbing]

56 minutes ago, Hardship said:

Is 18 hours the only cool down available? And does it have to be one conversion triggers the cooldown?  How about something like 10 conversions / 24 hour period.  Or 1 Emp to Reward Merit conversion and a 20 minute cooldown?

 

I’d say 10 per day would be very reasonable. That gives you 1 ATO per day (for example) if you have the extra emps and want to go that route. This doesn’t seem game breaking, to me.

Edited July 21, 2022 by Marbing

[DarknessEternal]

15 minutes ago, Marbing said:

I’d say 10 per day would be very reasonable. That gives you 1 ATO per day (for example) if you have the extra emps and want to go that route. This doesn’t seem game breaking, to me.

That's a good idea.

[ShardWarrior]

19 minutes ago, Marbing said:

I’d say 10 per day would be very reasonable. That gives you 1 ATO per day (for example) if you have the extra emps and want to go that route. This doesn’t seem game breaking, to me.

 

That is not really balanced with merit gains from normal content though.

[Jaxman100]

If you are so inclined to run 2 Hami Raids a day on an alt that is 120 merits. And you aren't probably gaining a vet level doing that. I would say converting 5 to 10 Emp merits a day isn't out of line from other ways of accessing merits. 

Perhaps once per day you could convert 5 Emp Merits to 1 Hero merit, so it would be limited to 1 transaction. Could add a 500k inf price to it possibly.

[Ice Ember]

I am hoping there is plenty of time before this goes live so i can convert to merits on my various toons. 

 

I hate this idea because I sit on emps until I decide to convert to something I think is too expensive on the market. 

 

 

I already started to tier 4 some incarnates just to use them so i know how many i have to get converted.  what a pain.

[BrandX]

1 hour ago, Ice Ember said:

I am hoping there is plenty of time before this goes live so i can convert to merits on my various toons. 

 

I hate this idea because I sit on emps until I decide to convert to something I think is too expensive on the market. 

 

 

I already started to tier 4 some incarnates just to use them so i know how many i have to get converted.  what a pain.

 

Convert and they sit there as Reward Merits.  Can transfer the Emps to one character if you want before converting them as the Reward Merit Bank. 🙂

[Marshal_General]

If farming is the reason for the merit change and the AE changes, then it seems the simple answer is to prevent AFK farming.

[Bionic_Flea]

2 minutes ago, Marshal_General said:

If farming is the reason for the merit change and the AE changes, then it seems the simple answer is to prevent AFK farming.

How do you do that?

 

How do you know if someone is AFK farming or just stepped away because their kid needed a diaper change or they got a work call or the dog needed to be let out?  And How do you enforce it?  Do you have the GMs looking in on players to see if they are moving and kick them if they aren't?  Do you ban accounts only to have them register under a new name or new IP?

 

I agree with your simple answer but the way to get there is very complicated.

[Marshal_General]

59 minutes ago, Bionic_Flea said:

How do you do that?

 

How do you know if someone is AFK farming or just stepped away because their kid needed a diaper change or they got a work call or the dog needed to be let out?  And How do you enforce it?  Do you have the GMs looking in on players to see if they are moving and kick them if they aren't?  Do you ban accounts only to have them register under a new name or new IP?

 

I agree with your simple answer but the way to get there is very complicated.

Yeah, I figured that while the answer is simple, the execution would be horrendous to actually do. I have not been in an AE mission on Homecoming to know how afk farming is set up.

 

I don't really see the point of farming much less afk farming. You run the same mission over and over until you are 50 and have all your vet levels and then what? There is no point in playing that character in the actual game and I would rather play my other the way the game is set up instead of giving them everything they will ever need at level 1.

[Coyotedancer]

18 hours ago, Marbing said:

I’d say 10 per day would be very reasonable. That gives you 1 ATO per day (for example) if you have the extra emps and want to go that route. This doesn’t seem game breaking, to me.

 

That seems like a reasonable compromise.

[SeraphimKensai]

I'm pretty hesitant on this change.

 

I'm wondering if the show fits the foot so to speak.

 

If excessive afk farming on a toon in a tf mode is a problem why not implement a 30 minute timer before disconnect if they are legitimately afk from their computer and not pressing keys? Eliminating the conversion of currencies to other more useful currencies in the game is a much bigger hit to more casual gamers.

 

For someone like me locking it behind a time sink to one convert a day or something is just more annoying than I'd personally like as like most of you have a lot more demands on my time than to dedicate as much time as I did to this game say 18 years ago when it wasnt a pirated MMO.

[Dokam]

Getting reward merits alone isn't really hard or a big deal, but Im not really a fan of making Emp and astral merits  as useless as Shards and threads are down the line.

[Ironblade]

21 hours ago, Hardship said:

Is 18 hours the only cool down available? And does it have to be one conversion triggers the cooldown?  How about something like 10 conversions / 24 hour period.  Or 1 Emp to Reward Merit conversion and a 20 minute cooldown?

I think the cooldowns are all or nothing so they might be able to code '10 per day'.  So it would probably have to be something like a 90-minute cooldown or 2-hours cooldown.  That does seem like a reasonable middle ground, though.

 

I think there needs to be more effort in identifying a middle ground or compromises.  We went from 'No vet levels in AE' to 'Vet levels are back but no conversion to Reward Merits'.  Neither of these options has been well-received.  We need to look for an option that blocks the problematic outliers without harming the average player.

 

 

6 hours ago, Marshal_General said:

If farming is the reason for the merit change and the AE changes, then it seems the simple answer is to prevent AFK farming.

They can't.  One of the devs said that if they had a reliable way to stop AFK farming without penalizing active farmers, they would have already done it.

[Astralock]

16 minutes ago, Ironblade said:

I think there needs to be more effort in identifying a middle ground or compromises.  We went from 'No vet levels in AE' to 'Vet levels are back but no conversion to Reward Merits'.  Neither of these options has been well-received.  We need to look for an option that blocks the problematic outliers without harming the average player.

 

 

Removing veteran levels from Mission Architect, in and of itself, was a fine compromise considering that the issue is the convergence of Empyrean merits via veteran levels and Mission Architect, considering that veteran levels should never have granted Empyrean merits in the first place.

[brattycommissar2]

1 hour ago, Ironblade said:

I think the cooldowns are all or nothing so they might be able to code '10 per day'.  So it would probably have to be something like a 90-minute cooldown or 2-hours cooldown.  That does seem like a reasonable middle ground, though.

 

I think there needs to be more effort in identifying a middle ground or compromises.  We went from 'No vet levels in AE' to 'Vet levels are back but no conversion to Reward Merits'.  Neither of these options has been well-received.  We need to look for an option that blocks the problematic outliers without harming the average player.

 

 

They can't.  One of the devs said that if they had a reliable way to stop AFK farming without penalizing active farmers, they would have already done it.

yeah when i talked about this change in one of the discord servers for coh i'm in the amount of people who were like 'what, no!' about the no emp-> rm thing surprised me ( because, as previously mentioned, i didn't even know that was a thing people could do or did! ) i think having some sorta cooldown for conversions would be a good way to address the people who say that the cooldown inherent in earning rms where earning emps was a thing before is apparently too strict as an alternative to emp earn and conversion? or maybe have an inf cost associated with conversions? or both?

 

or could have a restriction by making it take more emps being converted at once before you can do a conversion? so you can't even do it for every lil emp, you have to do it in bulk? actually that'd probably just hurt people who get them in small bits more than people who can apparently farm infini-emps since they'd always have them in bulk...

 

yeah, think that some sorta character based lockout cooldown may be the way to go? this means that if you ABSOLUTELY NEED TO you can still get around it by trading it to yourself which is inconvenient. maybe let you do so many before the cooldown instead of just one? idk what a good number would be. could alternatively have small bulk conversions be possible and that is just once per cooldown? like 'okay you can convert 10 and now you gotta wait before you can do that again' if that'd be a simpler way to do it- i would imagine something like doing it as all part of one transaction would be easier than having to keep track of multiple smaller ones...