Aggressively reduce price of basic enhancements

[nzer]

Just now, Wavicle said:

Is your Hypothetical noob using Double XP boosters?

 

No

[Pleonast]

The core advancement loop is

1. Talk to contacts. 

2. Do missions. 
3. Gain a new power or slots. 

New players expect to be able to fill those slots. The game is balanced around those slots being filled with DOs or SOs, depending on level. Whatever the mechanism to fill those slots, this loop should be straightforward for new players. I don’t think it currently is, and new players are hitting this pain point. 
 

Adding “you must do these other things to fill your basic gear” really breaks the core advancement loop for some players. Let them worry about once they’re max level. 
 

I think that reducing the price of DOs and SOs by 90% is simple way to let players unfunded by a max level character to access them easily with minimal disruption to the overall economy. But any other mechanism that stays within that core loop is helpful. 

[golstat2003]

7 hours ago, Pleonast said:

The core advancement loop is

1. Talk to contacts. 

2. Do missions. 
3. Gain a new power or slots. 

New players expect to be able to fill those slots. The game is balanced around those slots being filled with DOs or SOs, depending on level. Whatever the mechanism to fill those slots, this loop should be straightforward for new players. I don’t think it currently is, and new players are hitting this pain point. 
 

Adding “you must do these other things to fill your basic gear” really breaks the core advancement loop for some players. Let them worry about once they’re max level. 
 

I think that reducing the price of DOs and SOs by 90% is simple way to let players unfunded by a max level character to access them easily with minimal disruption to the overall economy. But any other mechanism that stays within that core loop is helpful. 

 

To be clear, I am not against the idea of reducing the cost of DOs and SOs costs. I'm against this idea that new players can't easily learn what they need to, to make enough inf to keep their slots up. All they need to do is ask in game. It is not at all difficult.

Edited March 2 by golstat2003

[golstat2003]

I also like the idea of having all drops match your origin, that was suggested earlier. Or automatically be converted to your origin when you click a button in yoru enhancement tray.

[Ukase]

If I had 1 inf for every hour I spent in DMs explaining to someone how to make influence in this game, well, I'd still have to market, but I'd have a token reward! 
 

In my mind, I'm divided. On one hand, nothing worthwhile comes easy, right? We get out of thing what we put into them. 

I look at DFB, and I remember clearly the first time I ran it. I was kind of excited about getting and SO at level 2. And...it was a confuse SO. At no time in my blaster's career was I going to get a confuse power. 

So, yes, I definitely agree that if Praetoria knows my origin and only drops enhancements I can use, I see no reason why the rest of the game can't figure it out. 
It still would not likely explain things to a new player the way I would, or the way Yomo or some of the other fine guides would, but it would help them quite a bit, I suspect. 

What's the downside, other than the time invested in making the change? Smarter people than me will have to answer that.

[Wavicle]

Ok, here's where I could go that might satisfy the concerns in the OP:

 

What if SOs were significantly cheaper AT LEVEL 2, and gradually scaled up to their current price at level 25?

This way low level characters could more easily outfit themselves, but you would still be encouraged to buy IOs eventually.

 

How about that?

[Random Axis]

I think it would be easier to explain to a new player that slots are for future expansion and not something that needs to be filled right away. It's so easy to blow through early levels, and once that slows down they should be at the point where a white IO is better than an equal level SO.

 

Enhancements are analogous to equipment in other MMOs, but it's not an exact one to one thing. It's perfectly viable to run around "naked" in CoX at low levels and only slot your drops and recipes you craft yourself. 

[Sunsette]

I've met new players that turn off general and help. (One of the most common questions I see in general after an unpleasant discussion is "how do i turn off this channel").

 

The consignment house works like no other auction house in any other game I've played, and less reliably, which makes it daunting to use. 

 

DOs, SOs, and IOs are a confusing set that follow different rules on a type of character building that is different from any other MMO and most closely resembles one of the crunchier tabletop games that no one but diehards play. (This isn't an insult, I play games like that, but it's true) 

 

And worst of all, the gulf between those who understand these steps and those who don't is very high. 

 

I don't think using pricing to drive people to the consignment house really incentivizes usage meaningfully, but if you have to argue to a newbie that it's okay for something unintuitive to feel bad, like not having something to fill all your slots, you've got a good chance of losing them. 

[Ukase]

4 minutes ago, Sunsette said:

I've met new players that turn off general and help. (One of the most common questions I see in general after an unpleasant discussion is "how do i turn off this channel").

When you see this, could you ask them a follow up question, "why?". 
I can understand them turning off general chat. There's no real limit to how inane some of those chats can be, it's why I turn it off myself. But the help channel? Why would anyone, particularly a newer player turn that off? 

There are dozens of ways to solve the growing pains of the newer player, but opinions are going to vary wildly from don't help them at all, to give them 1 million at level 10 to get them on their way. 
I personally think the defeated npcs dropping enhancements and salvage they can use is the proper path. It always annoyed me to be in DFB and get some lame SO like a confuse when I didn't have a power that could use it. Or worse, be in The Hollows, really needing an end mod enhancement, and getting one, only it's the wrong origin. 

[Sunsette]

I generally don't ask people who are currently annoyed to justify why they are annoyed. Especially not if I don't already know them. It's a further irritation. 

 

Fortunately, I am friends with several newer players who wonder why I spend as much time as I do answering questions in Help. It comes down to the fact that in other MMOs (and even some HC servers) all global channels are equally or near equally prone to spillover backbiting, spam, bigoted statements, political arguments, etc. that are actively unpleasant. Help is usually not as bad as general can be imx and neither are the sewer that such chats can be in other games, but most people don't care to find out what kind of skunk they just smelled. 

 

I think salvage is an incredibly confusing system for one of the most superficially byzantine crafting systems in an MMO, and I don't think IOs clearly beat SOs to be worth the time and hassle for anyone who hasn't deeply planned their build out until the 40s. At the very least, 25 is the generally agreed on point.

 

I don't think you can remove salvage from the game at the lower levels, that's a minor pain point that will just have to be lived with, too intertwined with the game's economy. But it's not helping the new player experience. 

Edited March 5 by Sunsette

[Pleonast]

Note to all, I’m not talking about slotting enhancements at lower levels, I’m talking about slotting enhancements by new players; players who do not have a high-level character who can fund new alts. It’s next to impossible to earn enough influence through your contacts’ missions to keep all your slots filled with valid DOs or SOs. 
 

The game is balanced around having your slots filled. It’s doable, especially for experienced players, but this topic is about players who are leveling up their first character. It’s unfair to expect them to have that expertise. They have extra friction that every one of us avoids on our alts, unless we’re doing some personal challenge. 

[Pleonast]

The idea of having all enhancement drops being a usable origin for the character receiving it would also greatly improve quality of life for new players. Long gone are the days when we were expected to grind particular groups in order to get the right kind of drops. 

[Mr. Apocalypse]

The word that seems to be missed in this discussion is enhancement. The power we choose do not need to be enhanced. Enhancement of the power is what is wanted by the player, but not needed. I have played more than my fair share of toons well beyond level 20 relying only on drops and it is not that big of a deal.  Sometimes I get a good one, sometimes I cant slot them because of origin, but it really isn't a game breaker and I just keep on playing.

 

The best fix IMO,  would be to just remove origin requirements from DOs and just make them usable by all. That way the odds of having useful DO's increases

[nzer]

On 3/1/2024 at 11:52 PM, golstat2003 said:

I'm against this idea that new players can't easily learn what they need to, to make enough inf to keep their slots up. All they need to do is ask in game. It is not at all difficult.

 

Players shouldn't need to ask other players for money making strategies to be able to use basic game features. We're not talking about affording full builds of IO sets here, just keeping your slots filled with enhancements of any kind.

 

On 3/1/2024 at 11:55 PM, golstat2003 said:

I also like the idea of having all drops match your origin, that was suggested earlier.

 

I like this idea as well.

  

7 minutes ago, Mr. Apocalypse said:

The word that seems to be missed in this discussion is enhancement. The power we choose do not need to be enhanced.

 

Yes, they do. They might not need to be enhanced just to play the game, but enhancement is a fundamental game feature, and players should be able to make use of it. It is poor design to give the player tons of slots that they can't use without reading forum guides about how to make inf. Again, if the goal is to have a sliding scale of power, the right solution is to have several tiers of enhancements. And there's no reason why players should not be able to fill all their slots with the lowest tier with just the inf they make from leveling.

Edited March 5 by nzer

[Yomo Kimyata]

9 minutes ago, Mr. Apocalypse said:

The best fix IMO,  would be to just remove origin requirements from DOs and just make them usable by all. That way the odds of having useful DO's increases

I like this.  It’s basically bringing back training origin enhancements without having people scream about how useless they are.

 

if you are learning to play, learn.  It’s not the devs responsibility to give you free access to powerful enhancements all the time.  Remember that SOs at level 2 are not your god given right.

[Rudra]

1 hour ago, Pleonast said:

Note to all, I’m not talking about slotting enhancements at lower levels, I’m talking about slotting enhancements by new players; players who do not have a high-level character who can fund new alts. It’s next to impossible to earn enough influence through your contacts’ missions to keep all your slots filled with valid DOs or SOs. 
 

The game is balanced around having your slots filled. It’s doable, especially for experienced players, but this topic is about players who are leveling up their first character. It’s unfair to expect them to have that expertise. They have extra friction that every one of us avoids on our alts, unless we’re doing some personal challenge. 

And the response being given is that the game is not balanced around having your slots filled. Even at high levels, most ATs can do just fine without any enhancements at all. The ones that can't can still complete the missions, but it is more difficult/dangerous. The expectation is that players will slot something to improve their capabilities, but not that they will slot everything. And it is the mindset that the player needs to slot everything that we are trying to explain to you is what needs to be explained to new players as being unnecessary while also explaining how they can get more enhancements for their slots.

 

55 minutes ago, Pleonast said:

The idea of having all enhancement drops being a usable origin for the character receiving it would also greatly improve quality of life for new players. Long gone are the days when we were expected to grind particular groups in order to get the right kind of drops. 

Correct, because we are expected to make use of the AH to get what we want and we have IOs we can craft/buy to bypass that concern.

 

15 minutes ago, nzer said:

Players shouldn't need to ask other players for money making strategies to be able to use basic game features. We're not talking about affording full builds of IO sets here, just keeping your slots filled with enhancements of any kind.

Which isn't even necessary as already stated. Until you hit the end game and start tackling things like Hard Mode, you're perfectly fine running around with empty enhancement slots.

 

15 minutes ago, nzer said:

They might not need to be enhanced just to play the game, but enhancement is a fundamental game feature, and players should be able to make use of it. It is poor design to give the player tons of slots that they can't use without reading forum guides about how to make inf. Again, if the goal is to have a sliding scale of power, the right solution is to have several tiers of enhancements. And there's no reason why players should not be able to fill all their slots with the lowest tier with just the inf they make from leveling.

SOs aren't the lowest tier. DOs are. And if you just go for DOs, slotting SOs as they become available through drops, it is far easier to keep your character slotted. Which you don't even need to do until late game. (Edit: Especially if they make use of the free enhancements from START.)

Edited March 5 by Rudra

[nzer]

5 minutes ago, Rudra said:

Until you hit the end game and start tackling things like Hard Mode, you're perfectly fine running around with empty enhancement slots.

 

Irrelevant, as the concern here is not about balance. It's a poor player experience to award things the player is not intended to use.

 

7 minutes ago, Rudra said:

SOs aren't the lowest tier. DOs are. And if you just go for DOs, slotting SOs as they become available through drops, it is far easier to keep your character slotted.

 

This has already been brought up and addressed. Even with DOs, it's not feasible for a player to fill their slots without special knowledge about inf-making and the AH.

 

8 minutes ago, Rudra said:

we are expected to make use of the AH

 

If this is true, the expectation is ill-conceived and should be reevaluated. Players should not have to make use of an auction house to make use of basic game features.

[Rudra]

10 minutes ago, nzer said:

Irrelevant, as the concern here is not about balance. It's a poor player experience to award things the player is not intended to use.

I'm not following since the player experience I'm aware of is how the game itself is played, not if I can keep all my enhancement slots filled. Even in WoW I would run around without all my equipment slots filled because I couldn't get equipment to fill them. So I'm not understanding how empty enhancement slots are such a big deal in driving off new players.

 

Edit: Here's another thing. I keep hearing that new players expect to be able to fully slot their powers because that is what they do in other MMORPGs. And yet, when I was playing WoW, you couldn't even afford to buy your next power or power upgrade just using drops and sales. I remember every time I leveled up in WoW, it would cost easily 100x more money than I had just to upgrade my powers. For instance, I remember one power cost 5 gold to get, but the mobs were only dropping coppers and the occasional silver. In a game where it took 100 copper to get a silver and 100 silver to get a gold. So if they are coming from other games and thinking they should be able to keep all their enhancement slots filled, my question is why?

Edited March 5 by Rudra

[UltraAlt]

On 2/28/2024 at 9:19 PM, Pleonast said:

So what would happen if the cost of TOs, DOs, and SOs were reduced to one tenth their current price? Then new players would have enough influence to buy and experiment with these basic enhancements. With minimal impact on established players, since these enhancements play almost no part in the end game except as an unneeded influence source. 
 

Thoughts? 

 

What if we make TOs, DOs, and SOs free to level 10?

Reduce the cost starting a level 15 and then gradually move it to 100% of the current rate by level 30?

 

I do think some level of "gain vs use" of currency is an important part of MMORPG player level/achievement/progression.

It's just like any other kind of target to defeat. You want to have some challenge there to build up for the excitement of reaching the goal/"dinging"

it is much easier to accumulate influence by simply playing now than it was in the early years.

 

This would allow players to experiment with enhancements all they want through level 10 and then save up some influence as they progress past that - if they aren't using x2 XP that is.

 

I'm not sure what "minimal impact on established players" means, or more at what do you mean by "established players"?

 

I am a player that has been on Homecoming for a couple of not several years now, and I don't play the end-game.

I have well over 100 characters that I generally log-in within 40-50 days.

My average character level across all characters and servers is 25, and I have level-locked some characters at levels below that because they were created for certain content or I feel that the character wouldn't fit their character conception of they advanced further.

[nzer]

3 minutes ago, Rudra said:

I'm not following since the player experience I'm aware of is how the game itself is played, not if I can keep all my enhancement slots filled.

 

Then you don't have a correct understanding of what the term "player experience" means, and I suggest you look it up.

 

6 minutes ago, Rudra said:

Even in WoW I would run around without all my equipment slots filled because I couldn't get equipment to fill them.

 

Equipment slots in WoW are inherent, you have all of them at level one. A better comparison would be if WoW required an exorbitant amount of gold to slot each talent point, far in excess of what you could actually afford by the level the talent point was earned.

[Rudra]

5 minutes ago, nzer said:

 

Then you don't have a correct understanding of what the term "player experience" means, and I suggest you look it up.

https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2019/9/10/the-player-experience

http://www.digra.org/digital-library/publications/spectrum-exploring-the-effects-of-player-experience-on-game-design/

 

5 minutes ago, nzer said:

A better comparison would be if WoW required an exorbitant amount of gold to slot each talent point, far in excess of what you could actually afford by the level the talent point was earned.

 

14 minutes ago, Rudra said:

Edit: Here's another thing. I keep hearing that new players expect to be able to fully slot their powers because that is what they do in other MMORPGs. And yet, when I was playing WoW, you couldn't even afford to buy your next power or power upgrade just using drops and sales. I remember every time I leveled up in WoW, it would cost easily 100x more money than I had just to upgrade my powers. For instance, I remember one power cost 5 gold to get, but the mobs were only dropping coppers and the occasional silver. In a game where it took 100 copper to get a silver and 100 silver to get a gold. So if they are coming from other games and thinking they should be able to keep all their enhancement slots filled, my question is why?

Edit: So lets compare apples to apples then. Enhancements are upgrades to our powers. And in WoW, it cost a preposterous amount to upgrade the character's powers. Or even buy new ones. While CoX gives new powers for free, but not the upgrades.

Edited March 5 by Rudra

[nzer]

10 minutes ago, Rudra said:

https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2019/9/10/the-player-experience

http://www.digra.org/digital-library/publications/spectrum-exploring-the-effects-of-player-experience-on-game-design/

 

You have to realize it's obvious you couldn't have had time to actually read those articles in the 30 seconds between our posts, right? Take a few minutes and try actually doing that, and you'll see that misalignment between the player's perception of a mechanic and the design intent of the mechanic is a textbook player experience issue.

 

Not that this is even relevant, since the point I'm making is obvious even if you don't know exactly what the term "player experience" means, but clearly you need something to be contrarian about.

 

10 minutes ago, Rudra said:

Edit: Here's another thing. I keep hearing that new players expect to be able to fully slot their powers because that is what they do in other MMORPGs. And yet, when I was playing WoW, you couldn't even afford to buy your next power or power upgrade just using drops and sales. I remember every time I leveled up in WoW, it would cost easily 100x more money than I had just to upgrade my powers. For instance, I remember one power cost 5 gold to get, but the mobs were only dropping coppers and the occasional silver. In a game where it took 100 copper to get a silver and 100 silver to get a gold. So if they are coming from other games and thinking they should be able to keep all their enhancement slots filled, my question is why?

 

Yes, exactly. This kind of thing is poor design, which is why, more than a decade ago, spells in WoW were changed to be automatically unlocked at no charge when you reached the required level. And prior to that they were changed to not have multiple ranks, which made unlocking them immediately feasible with just the gold acquired from leveling.

Edited March 5 by nzer

[Rudra]

3 minutes ago, nzer said:

You have to realize it's obvious you couldn't have had time to actually read those articles in the 30 seconds between our posts, right? Take a few minutes and try actually doing that, and you'll see that misalignment between the player's perception of a mechanic and the design intent of the mechanic is a textbook player experience issue.

I actually skimmed them before posting. So correct, I didn't do an in-depth reading, but I did check to see what they said.

 

4 minutes ago, nzer said:

Not that this is even relevant, since the point I'm making is obvious even if you don't know exactly what the term "player experience" means, but clearly you need something to be contrarian about.

I explained what player experience meant to me. You said to look it up. So I did. And neither of those say anything about players being at max effectiveness to have a good player experience. And my personal experience says you don't have to be at max effectiveness to have a good player experience.

[nzer]

1 minute ago, Rudra said:

And neither of those say anything about players being at max effectiveness to have a good player experience.

 

That's irrelevant, because, as I've said multiple times now, this is not about effectiveness. It's about the player experience.

[Lockely]

TOs, while being 'useless' were still useful in terms of being affordable on a "I'm new and just doing contacts" Inf income.

DOs are not. SOs are right out.

Since TOs have been removed, DOs really do need a reduction in cost. SOs can stay as a means to throw a bit of an oompf into some powers if you got a little extra cash lying around.

 

Folks who have been playing this game for a long time and have optimized strats need to realize that the grand majority of new players aren't going to dive into Fire Farms and MSRs and TFs to level quickly. They're going to level the same way you normally do in other MMOs, i.e. the quest grind. It is going to take them significantly longer to level their first character, and they will have significantly lower amounts of Inf to spend until they break into the end-game content and realize "Oh heck, this applies to the whole game, I could have been doing this the whole time."

 

That first character is where we will lose new blood on the journey.

No one is asking to give them free LotGs. Well, almost no one. They just want basic competency from playing the game normally. The converter-based economy didn't even exist on Live and the game itself doesn't make reference to it or support knowledge of it in any way, so it's not justifiable to assume every new player is going to figure it out before they hit critical burnout or frustration.