Aggressively reduce price of basic enhancements

[Sunsette]

3 minutes ago, Rudra said:

Something that those of you asking for the prices to come down keep overlooking is what, I think @Luminara, pointed out

 

No one here is pushing for the price to come down particularly hard vs acknowledgement of the problem and attempts at a solution. We have commented positively on the drop table solution several times. At this point, unless someone comes in with a new suggestion of note or a significant contribution of math and probabilities,¹ the thread seems to have run its course. 

 

¹ Not me. I'm a humanities nerd. It's footnotes and charts here.

Edited March 6 by Sunsette

[Super Atom]

9 minutes ago, Rudra said:

Something that those of you asking for the prices to come down keep overlooking is what, I think @Luminara, pointed out. The sale price versus the purchase price is a ratio. And if you reduce the purchase price, the sale price also goes down. So at best the situation stays as is, and at worse the situation gets worse because now it becomes even harder to afford things like IOs.

 

I'm pretty sure a consensus can be reached by improving how often an enhancement of the correct origin drops for the character, though how high that rate should be will again find disagreement. Though if you want to focus on costs, maybe instead ask for the gap between sale price and purchase price to be narrowed.

 

Though again, I still maintain that there is no need or game expectation for characters to be fully slotted until after they reach level 50.

 

If the buy price and the sale price were identical, it would likely have the same outcome as making all drops be your origin. They don't /need/ to be identical but they could be. I also think you can lower the purchase without lowering the sale, as the sale price is low.

 

For clarity

 

Buy

Sell

 

Now if the buy was say, 25k and the sale is still 15k that is a much more reasonable gap, as currently you'd need to sell 4 to get 1.

 

Prices at 25 for further clarity

Buy

Sell

 

Edited March 6 by Super Atom

[Rudra]

1 minute ago, Super Atom said:

 

If the buy price and the sale price were identical, it would likely have the same outcome as making all drops be your origin. They don't /need/ to be identical but they could be. I also think you can lower the purchase without lowering the sale, as the sale price is low.

 

For clarity

 

Buy

Sell

 

Now if the buy was say, 25k and the sale is still 15k that is a much more reasonable gap, as currently you'd need to sell 4 to get 1.

 

Not same price. That will never happen. However, maybe a 2.5x rate can find acceptance instead of the 3.846285x your pic shows.

[biostem]

I hear some of these arguments and it makes me think to practically every fantasy MMO, and trying to imagine players arguing that every drop should be a longsword because that's what their character uses.  Don't get me wrong - having to grovel at the feet of RNGesus stinks, and I'm much more in favor direct currency awards instead.  That's why my general advice is to slot generic IOs that are good enough, as they'll never expire and are origin-independent.  I just don't see why we need to mess around with this aspect of the game, when it'd be much more productive to direct players to use the AH and/or sell what they don't need need and use whatever resources they do have to slot enh's in those areas/powers that are most critical...

[Rudra]

I just had a weird thought. What if enhancement converters also worked on SOs and DOs? For 1 converter, you can change your SO or DO to a random equal level SO or Do depending on whether you are converting a SO or DO. And for 3 converters, you keep what the enhancement is, but you get a different origin.

[PoptartsNinja]

Honestly, my wish for SOs would be to make them evergreen. Levelless. Reduce or remove their drop rate, keep them purchasable, remove their scaling (So no more +1/+2/+3; or require boosters to scale them). You get an SO and you slot it for a 33% benefit, but if you want better you have to look into sets or acquire boosters.

 

The problem with this is it removes value from the basic crafted IOs, so we need to think of something else to do with those. Like merging all the IOs below level 50 into SOs, which gives another venue for acquiring SOs instead of drops. So you can buy or craft SOs that provide decent benefits while leveling; and keep the worse-scaling but stronger at level 50 basic IOs for people who want to make endgame builds and the like.

 

It'll never happen, but SOs are an investment and a newbie trap if they don't realize they can just craft IOs at level 25 that will see them through to 50. The level 10-22 gap where the OG devs expected everyone to basically never have enhancements was always weird.

Edited March 6 by PoptartsNinja

[Super Atom]

For further clarity sakes

 

A level 25 killing a level 25 minion produced 

I had patrol XP (sorry rudra) but i don't think that effects inf?

 

So for a level 25 to buy ONE SO they would need to defeat 447 minions to buy a single SO. or 2682 for one power full of SO's

 

or for lue, which is 64 per SO.  Which is 384 per power, if you -only- killed lues which be honest, at 25 you aren't killing 5-6 per group you're killing 1-2 per group.

 

This to me, is no good.

 

By the time you could afford to even slot 4 abilities, you would have leveled twice and those SO's are about to be obsolete.

Edited March 6 by Super Atom

[Wolfboy1]

I wouldn't be opposed to also upping the inf that they do trickle down to us in missions and such.  It always was surprising that the end of mission reward for a full team quest/mission never gave anything that surpassed the 100k influence mark even at level 50...or at least I personally have never seen it.

 

The influence reward is...honestly anemic in my opinion.  Not sure if anyone else feels that way but again, thats my opinion.

Edited March 6 by Wolfboy1

[Sunsette]

10 minutes ago, biostem said:

I hear some of these arguments and it makes me think to practically every fantasy MMO, and trying to imagine players arguing that every drop should be a longsword because that's what their character uses.

 

That is a bad comparison. Most MMOs I have played have genericized equipment or created variable rewards or both such that most pieces of gear are to some degree usable by every class, with very specialized gear only showing up in the max levels, comparable to IOs. As it is, enhancements even if they're all of your origin are very likely to be something you don't need at all unless they are accuracy, endurance, damage, or recharge.

 

10 minutes ago, biostem said:

I just don't see why we need to mess around with this aspect of the game, when it'd be much more productive to direct players to use the AH and/or sell what they don't need need and use whatever resources they do have to slot enh's in those areas/powers that are most critical...

 

This has been explained several times throughout this thread. You do not have to find the argument convincing. The basic answers are:

• The AH is daunting to use. This is generally true, but CoH has an especially confusing one.
• The enhancement system is daunting to use.
• What powers do is rarely explained in a clear and concise way.

Newbies even in games that are much more clearly explained will often avoid the auction house unless guided to it by friends or mentoring players; this game is much more hostile as a game to a newbie, and presents immense cognitive load.

 

If you don't find these answers convincing, that's fine. But that's why.

 

8 minutes ago, Rudra said:

I just had a weird thought. What if enhancement converters also worked on SOs and DOs? For 1 converter, you can change your SO or DO to a random equal level SO or Do depending on whether you are converting a SO or DO. And for 3 converters, you keep what the enhancement is, but you get a different origin.

 

The people who are going to understand how to make use of that are not the people we're hoping to facilitate. Complexity is a negative here.

 

7 minutes ago, PoptartsNinja said:

Honestly, my wish for SOs would be to make them evergreen. Levelless. Reduce or remove their drop rate, keep them purchasable, remove their scaling (So no more +1/+2/+3; or require boosters). You get an SO and you slot it for a 33% benefit, but if you want better

 

The problem with this is it removes value from the basic crafted IOs, so we need to think of something else to do with those. Like merging all the IOs below level 50 into SOs, which gives another venue for acquiring SOs instead of drops. So you can buy or craft SOs that provide decent benefits while leveling; and keep the worse-scaling but stronger at level 50 basic IOs for people who want to make endgame builds and the like.

 

It'll never happen, but SOs are an investment and a newbie trap if they don't realize they can just craft IOs at level 25 that will see them through to 50. The level 10-22 gap where the OG devs expected everyone to basically never have enhancements was always weird.

 

I had similar thoughts -- at the end of the day, that'd be a hell of a revamp that I think is asking too much to occur, but would have been a better system to come in from the get-go. I won't hold my breath anymore than you.

 

3 minutes ago, Wolfboy1 said:

I wouldn't be opposed to also upping the inf that they do trickle down to us in missions and such.  It always was surprising that the end of mission reward for a full team quest/mission never gave anything that surpassed the 100k influence mark even at level 50...or at least I personally have never seen it.

 

It would be nice but this risks exploitation with how quickly some ouro arcs can be run. Since rewards can be set per-arc, it is more likely for future arcs to be made more rewarding and less focused on defeat XP than for old arcs to be revamped, I think.

Edited March 6 by Sunsette

[Rudra]

4 minutes ago, Super Atom said:

A level 25 killing a level 25 minion produced 

I had patrol XP (sorry rudra) but i don't think that effects inf?

Correct, patrol xp only affects the xp you gain, not the inf' you get. So if you have patrol xp, you wind up getting a smaller ratio of inf' to xp.

[biostem]

5 minutes ago, PoptartsNinja said:

Honestly, my wish for SOs would be to make them evergreen. Levelless.

Well, we have generic IOs for that.  What I would like to see would be a sort of "floor", where enh's would never provide less than a certain bonus.  Maybe not as good as said generic IOs, but beeter than losing everything...

[Rudra]

Just now, biostem said:

Well, we have generic IOs for that.  What I would like to see would be a sort of "floor", where enh's would never provide less than a certain bonus.  Maybe not as good as said generic IOs, but beeter than losing everything...

I could probably get behind that. For SOs and DOs to stop degrading when they reach -3.

[biostem]

1 minute ago, Sunsette said:

This has been explained several times throughout this thread. You do not have to find the argument convincing. The basic answers are:

• The AH is daunting to use. This is generally true, but CoH has an especially confusing one.
• The enhancement system is daunting to use.
• What powers do is rarely explained in a clear and concise way.

Newbies even in games that are much more clearly explained will often avoid the auction house unless guided to it by friends or mentoring players; this game is much more hostile as a game to a newbie, and presents immense cognitive load.

 

If you don't find these answers convincing, that's fine. But that's why.

I don't necessarily disagree with your points, but learning a game's systems is, well, part of the game.  Not everyone is going to like every aspect of the game, and that's fine, but refusing to do so is at your own detriment and shouldn't be catered to.

[Lockely]

17 minutes ago, Super Atom said:

For further clarity sakes

 

A level 25 killing a level 25 minion produced 

I had patrol XP (sorry rudra) but i don't think that effects inf?

 

So for a level 25 to buy ONE SO they would need to defeat 447 minions to buy a single SO. or 2682 for one power full of SO's

 

or for lue, which is 64 per SO.  Which is 384 per power, if you -only- killed lues which be honest, at 25 you aren't killing 5-6 per group you're killing 1-2 per group.

 

This to me, is no good.

 

Hold on this is good data.

 

A minion kill at 25, per the Live XP table is supposed to be 69xp. Patrol XP is 1.5x so you should have gotten 104 XP (103.5 rounded up). You got 144. That means the real XP/minion is 96. You will gain enough XP to level up with 888 minion kills, which would net you exactly two SOs. On live it would have taken 1235 minion kills for the same thing. Players are losing out on ~24k Inf at this level juncture.

A Lieutenant should be 320 per kill, or 480 with Patrol and you got 576. That makes the real XP/lieut 384.

The XP rates are higher than they were on Live, and thus this problem compounds because you are outleveling your standard expected Inf gain.

Edited March 6 by Lockely
Maths breakdown

[Excraft]

6 minutes ago, Super Atom said:

For further clarity sakes

 

A level 25 killing a level 25 minion produced 

I had patrol XP (sorry rudra) but i don't think that effects inf?

 

So for a level 25 to buy ONE SO they would need to defeat 447 minions to buy a single SO. or 2682 for one power full of SO's

 

or for lue, which is 64 per SO.  Which is 384 per power, if you -only- killed lues which be honest, at 25 you aren't killing 5-6 per group you're killing 1-2 per group.

 

This to me, is no good.

 

By the time you could afford to even slot 4 abilities, you would have leveled twice and those SO's are about to be obsolete.

 

Excellent points.  This makes more sense for a live retail game where the objective is to get players to play (and thereby pay) longer.  The longer you it takes for them to afford anything, the longer they were paying a sub fee or longer they were in the game to buy something in the store.  I agree this isn't good and doesn't make sense to me for a non-commercial game. 

[Sunsette]

And most people will choose to simply not play a game they have to spend extra time to learn to participate at what intuitively feels like a basic level. I experienced this a lot when I was living in Korea with friends who struggled to play the game when I was sleeping or at work due to timezones. I gave them money to help, but there is still a lot of game to learn, and many ultimately decided to stick with games they already played. Not simple games, either. "Easy to learn, hard to master" is the sweet spot for any activity to gain a healthy and active community.

 

"My steam backlog" is a meme these days among gamers -- we have more games than we could ever hope to play. Why play the ones that are not immediately rewarding in some sense?

Edited March 6 by Sunsette

[Pleonast]

8 minutes ago, biostem said:

I just don't see why we need to mess around with this aspect of the game, when it'd be much more productive to direct players to use the AH and/or sell what they don't need need and use whatever resources they do have to slot enh's in those areas/powers that are most critical...

Pithy answer: because it’d require players to PvP. The auction house is a competition against other players.
 

But a better answer is it adds more complexity to the advancement loop of missions from contacts and leveling up. I keep talking about this loop because it (along with the combat loop) is what makes this game fun. Other game systems are fine, but shouldn’t be required. 

 

[PoptartsNinja]

10 minutes ago, biostem said:

Well, we have generic IOs for that.  What I would like to see would be a sort of "floor", where enh's would never provide less than a certain bonus.  Maybe not as good as said generic IOs, but beeter than losing everything...

 

We do, but the idea is: making SOs levelless with a flat 33% bonus reduces some of the overall complexity that's built up over the years. I feel that makes SOs kinder to new players, because the situation changes from:
"Get enhancement, put it in power--immediately level and enhancement gets worse (or stops working), making it harder to tell if it's giving much benefit or if enhancing is even worthwhile."
to:
"Get enhancement, put it in power. Is it any good? Well, even if it isn't, it's not making things worse."

 

 

Edit: SOs losing their effect also makes them feel like a complete waste of time and whatever currency used to buy one. This is especially bad since you can spend merits on SOs. If SOs were levelless, that inf/merit expenditure wouldn't be the total newbie trap it is currently.

Edited March 6 by PoptartsNinja

[Rudra]

9 minutes ago, Lockely said:

 

Hold on this is good data.

 

A minion kill at 25, per the Live XP table is supposed to be 69xp. Patrol XP is 1.5x so you should have gotten 104 XP (103.5 rounded up). You got 144. That means the real XP/minion is 96. You will gain enough XP to level up with 888 minion kills, which would net you exactly two SOs.

A Lieutenant should be 320 per kill, or 480 with Patrol and you got 576. That makes the real XP/lieut 384.

The XP rates are higher than they were on Live, and thus this problem compounds because you are outleveling your standard expected Inf gain.

This was already known. When HC was a private server, they increased the xp and inf' awarded by mobs so the people on the private server could get back up to where they were on Live.

[biostem]

6 minutes ago, PoptartsNinja said:

We do, but the idea is: making SOs levelless with a flat 33% bonus reduces some of the overall complexity that's built up over the years. I feel that makes SOs kinder to new players, because the situation changes from:
"Get enhancement, put it in power--immediately level and enhancement gets worse (or stops working), making it harder to tell if it's giving much benefit or if enhancing is even worthwhile."
to:
"Get enhancement, put it in power. Is it any good? Well, even if it isn't, it's not making things worse."

 

 

Edit: SOs losing their effect also makes them feel like a complete waste of time and whatever currency used to buy one. This is especially bad since you can spend merits on SOs. If SOs were levelless, that inf/merit expenditure wouldn't be the total newbie trap it is currently.

The only issue is that generic IOs don't provide as good a bonus as same-level SOs until around level 30 or so, which is why I think @Rudra's suggestion of them bottoming-out at -3 levels would probably be best.  That would still incentivize using better generic IOs or keeping your enh's even level or higher, while not fully penalizing having some old ones.

[Lockely]

1 minute ago, Rudra said:

This was already known. When HC was a private server, they increased the xp and inf' awarded by mobs so the people on the private server could get back up to where they were on Live.

 

There are several pages of this thread where we discussed if it was a thing or not with multiple people reporting inconsistencies in their experience leveling on Live and HC, and no one had an answer. I even asked "Was this maybe a SCORE change?" to no response.

So, the XP rates are different, which means the scale of everything is off and I don't recall the HC devs making any price adjustments for vendor Enhancements to match. So, we're back to square one of this entire thread:

Can we get those adjusted so new players have a way to keep their basic slots full with vendor enhancements/drops as they level their first character? Other solutions, such as ensuring enemies always drop something usable by the character, i.e. DOs/SOs of their origin, would also do well to mitigate it. The expectation of filling a gear slot with usable gear is a core tenant of not only this game, but every other game to ever exist, so we should be working towards ensuring that's doable.

[biostem]

12 minutes ago, Pleonast said:

Pithy answer: because it’d require players to PvP. The auction house is a competition against other players.

Well, one can simply sell stuff on the AH and buy elsewhere with the inf they gained - no need to compete for buys.

 

13 minutes ago, Pleonast said:

But a better answer is it adds more complexity to the advancement loop of missions from contacts and leveling up. I keep talking about this loop because it (along with the combat loop) is what makes this game fun. Other game systems are fine, but shouldn’t be required. 

Maybe have story arcs and such grant generic IOs that never expire anyway, instead of TOs/DOs/SOs, or grant a piece of orange salvage which sells for a good chunk of inf.

[Super Atom]

With the above data we have proven a couple things here

 

1) The current system is either an oversight or it wasn't considered a problem as an influx of new players wasn't that high until recently.

2) Even maintaing semi-slotted status is not really feasible even if you pretend a new player WOULDN'T constantly be messing with costume.

 

The suggested solutions have been (i skimmed so i might have missed one or two)

 

1) Lower the cost to buy SO's to a more reasonable price

2) Make it so either all or more of your SO drops are your origin specific

3) put a cap on SO's so they don't lose all value just some.

4) Remove SO/DO entirely and just add base IO's or something akin to them to a vendor with cost adjustment which basically combined multiple ideas.

 

I personally like Option 1 or 2 but would also be ok with 3, though i don't think it's ideal.

[biostem]

If the SCORE devs upped the XP and inf rates, but didn't raise the price of SOs, then it should be easier to afford them.

[Sunsette]

4 minutes ago, Super Atom said:

With the above data we have proven a couple things here

 

1) The current system is either an oversight or it wasn't considered a problem as an influx of new players wasn't that high until recently.

2) Even maintaing semi-slotted status is not really feasible even if you pretend a new player WOULDN'T constantly be messing with costume.

 

The suggested solutions have been (i skimmed so i might have missed one or two)

 

1) Lower the cost to buy SO's to a more reasonable price

2) Make it so either all or more of your SO drops are your origin specific

3) put a cap on SO's so they don't lose all value just some.

4) Remove SO/DO entirely and just add base IO's or something akin to them to a vendor with cost adjustment which basically combined multiple ideas.

 

I personally like Option 1 or 2 but would also be ok with 3, though i don't think it's ideal.

 

One thing I would like to add that keeps getting overlooked in conjunction with your costume point:

 

Players need a budget to make mistakes with. 

• "Golly, my sniper attack takes a long time. What if I slot interrupt? ... Oh. It doesn't affect animation speed."
• "I SIX SLOTTED RECHARGE WHY ISN'T IT GOING ANY FASTER"
• "I got all this accuracy but I still keep missing against these guys"
• "I didn't get enough endurance"
• "What do you mean there's endurance modification and endurance reduction? What's the difference?"
• etc... etc... etc...

Forgiveness to make mistakes is one of the most essential ways to facilitate people learning and experimenting.

Edited March 6 by Sunsette