Would it kill you--just once!--to have no coin cost attached at all? Why this overwhelming desire for everything to have a price tag stuck on it? A case in point: After we lost the ability to change our appearance freely, and "A Shave and a Haircut" was placed on the SC store, a patch changed our appearance. The "Shave" was placed on a vendor so we could change our appearance back without having to pay SC to do so, but it was given a sales price of 10 silver. Now granted, 10 silver is not much, but the point still stands. Why did it cost us any coin at all? Why should this? I can see no reason why "there has to be some cost." Why must there be a cost? Please explain what makes this necessary.
A patch is coming to test which will fix a problem with corpses persisting through server resets. It's patching down now. Edit - To clarify, the problem before was that they didn't persist through server resets. It's now been fixed.
Is this a joke? Seriously just spent like an hour just getting fresh toon to CoW, have to leave to get abilities. As a ranger now I have to do quest for cripple/crippling shot? Go back, now that you have enhancement ability, spend more time looking at augs and putting 50ish augs, just to see two other people standing. If you want people to test this stuff you need to make it easier to get to testing. I'm done! Let me know when we have /charactercopy back since you deleted the one I had with my crafting macros. Seriously just considering retirement. /facepalm
Agreed! My hubby and I both stopped last week when we had to start over each time we logged on. It give a whole new meaning to the movie Ground Hog Day!
I feel like entire raid forces swapping augs out to suit each single fight would be a bit exploitative and should come with some cost associated with it. Maybe one fight has heavy ae output and we can just stack on like 8 mit augs or something and another fight you dont take much ae so you stack glass cannon type builds. I am not saying that this should not be a possibility, but there should be some downside to doing so in my opinion aside from the time involved in changing the augs. They should just charge 100 station cash for a sealer and 200 station cash for a dissolvent.....(sarcasm)
It wouldn't be more exploitative than swapping gear for a fight and that's something that most players do. The only reason I see for adding costs to sealers and dissolvers would be using them as money sinks… and in my opinion there are better places to put money sinks than gear that everybody needs. Money sinks should be optional and highly rewarding and not mandatory.
I don't really agree with you about that because if that were true there would be no cost to socket and unsocket rune/infuse/eth/imbued/primal etc. The system in CoW with some kind of sealer cost would be no different really than the system we have now of being able to swap gear pieces for certain fights. There is nothing preventing a player from getting 2 chest items in CoW and socketing one defensively and one offensively. It doesn't make sense to me to allow players to change one piece of gear into many things without penalty under a new system if we currently have a similar system that does not allow such. I guess my thought would be to make the sealer cost little or even nothing. Then to make the dissolvents have some kind of cost associated with them that would address the problem of a forever morphing item that changes with each situation.
Why does it have to have a monetary cost? There are other ways to achieve this also. Additionally, what is the difference from having 4 gear sets vs. one base item and a load if enhancements for swapping? One merely takes more time (higher quantity of enhancements required for each additional set) and more inventory space. The whole system is "neat," but ultimately unsustainable. The base gear will never be replaced unless they add an "upgrade" with more slots. Adding an "upgrade" with simply one more core slot means a potential myriad of power increases. Upgrading the enhancements does the same. If they add +55 core enhancement, you go from 40, 30, 20 to 45,40,30. It could increase a single stat by 25, add 15 across the board, or one of MANY other combinations. (Sorry if my numbers are a bit off) There are better ways to have achieved this "type" of gear implementation. This will ultimately be more destructive to the game and cumbersome to the developers, than I feel they had foreseen. The cost issue is still ridiculous. If there is a cost associated, I will dig up the remarks about not having raid gear include a monetary cost. If there was group content which can bolster the power (as many current enhancements), I would not contest a cost tied to that. I will not... Will not PAY for raid gear. As I posted before, I've spent 100+ on PoTA alone. I'll not invest in another. Especially after seeing the massive cost reduction in PoTA gear AFTER having acquired it... No refund. No compensation in any way. They dumb it down and we get told to deal with it. They then obsolete the entire system for the past 7 years and we are supposed to just deal with it. No... I will not go through this again. $OE is full of lies and misdirection. To us. To their employees. To their former employees. To their investors. Not to say anything bad about our current team.. but I have 0 confidence in the longevity of these changes and this gear. This company threw a major event, lied to the faces of EVERY attendee, and for what? A press release for another game. Every dev team made exciting promises and plans. Every one ended up being a lie. Thank you $OE. Keep at it. I'm sure they can eventually get enough people to quit so they can justify shutting down and getting rid of more programmers and developers too.
there may be people wondering why the cost element is even being brought up here given that everything from rifting , to equipment repair has a cost associated with it. The answer is fairly simple, the general outrage is because exorbitant price tags were placed on anything linked to POTA and specialty items in KDQ and then reduced back down to only expensive levels after most players had already paid the high price. The body slam to the economy was theoretically to offset the "livegamer" effect where people had large amounts of plat from real money transactions to spend on things. After the aug giveaway, very few items were selling for high plat in game and there were very few ways to earn a lot of plat . So, market prices dropped, but that doesn't take money out of the economy, only money sinks do. As such, there will always be money sinks and costs in game. The need for tons of plat to gear up when most players only have gold just creates a further separation between high end and more casual players. Given the trend to poke the high end players with a stick, and trying to help the more casual players along, I suspect this round of gear, sealers, and solvents will be very cheap indeed.
How mch was the money sink for APW armor? For that matter.... Any armor except PoTA? Why does it NEED a cost? I will post the dev comments from the archives, when I have better access. Raid gear should have NO coin cost.
everything about POTA was a huge departure moneywise for the players. 10p for epic, really, making enhancement seals for socketing only available in POTA even though augs are globally acquired and usable on KDQ gear . All strangely out of touch with how much cash players actually had other than a few high end farmers. Although some of these costs were eventually lowered substantially, it only confirms how seriously wrong they were. Hopefully the team has learned from these mistakes. You cant have a game that is f2p and casual with almost no income streams and then suck the life out the players financially for things they need to progress. What value comes of it other than pointing to the SC store and saying looook you can get the same things here without plat.
Whatever happened I'm personally nearly broke out of game. I could farm for gold in a few places. I'm already missing raids due to busy work schedule. I almost had to ask guildies for gold to rift before a raid before I found some change in the bank. If what they wanted was a money sink, they succeeded because my wallet is damn near sunk. It isn't Vanguard's fault I don't make much money in game due to my playtime, but this this really puts a hurt on casual players. The game should be for everyone.
I agree that there doesn't necessarily need to be a monetary cost. Some kind of repeatable group or raid quest that allows you to change the sockets of a piece of gear would be fine to me, or a number of other methods that don't have a coin cost associated with them. I am not for paying money for raid armor. The thing I am personally against is the ability to unsocket all augs inside of one item and being able to change them without penalty at any point. The difference for me between having 4 gear sets or having one item that can play the role of 4 gear sets is that in the past this was not allowed and for good reason imo. How much easier would the game have been if we could resocket our runes and infuses for free as we learned the encounters present in todays game? Imo a lot easier, we could "tank up" for karax, and then go full glass cannon on iwg and probably shendu as a dps character etc. Another problem for me is that it seems to ruin any sense of customization. You then become whatever the encounter is, there will likely always be a best way to be socketed for each encounter, and if you have the augs to change your setup you can then become whatever is needed. Additional gear pieces have always been a bonus that allows you to alter your stats to suit an encounter and I don't think that should change. Some might say that being able to change augs on the fly is the ultimate sense of customization but I would argue that you aren't truly customizing your character, you are just changing it based on circumstance to what is best for that moment in time. Gone would be the days of building a balanced type character that is just generally strong against the majority of the encounters, perhaps you would be strong against encounter x but a bit worse off against encounter y. Instead you would just be whatever the encounter dictates you are assuming you have the augs to make that change, and I personally don't think that should be possible without possessing multiple pieces of the same slot or paying some sort of penalty in the form of a time sink type quest or monetary investment or any other reasonable sounding deterrent.
Honestly, the simplest solution that seems to settle most people (No money sink, don't make it easy) is to make it require a crafted expendable item. The crafted part itself might need some kind of rare material, that a player can buy if they choose to, or harvest if they don't want to pay. And then get a crafter to make it. Rare enough that it will make players think before switching out their augs, but not so rare that players can't get it made either. (Something like getting those COB harvested seeds might do the trick.)
Well, sorry, but I disagree, I think the original costs to the whole of pota were spot on, yes it was a money sink, yes it was a time sink, but there was raid quality gear without raiding, which justified the cost. now everyone and their mothers alts have pota raid quality gear. Its a different story when it comes to raid gear involving raiding, there should be a reward worthy of the challenge. I'm perfectly fine with some upgrade costs or whatever, but the initial reward from the mob reflect the challenge, right now it doesn't. As for swapping augs, that gets old really really fast, personally im looking forward to actually have 3 armor sets highly customized, I have that now too but my options are more limited. perhaps make it such that augs cant be socketed in combat.
many of us have situational gear sets. Meat gear, Counterspelling gear, Healing gear,. I know that my specialty gear often does not contain the best aug combos simply because it is too costly to have multiples of augs sitting idle most of the time. I also have to carefully consider swapping out pieces because of the impact on set bonuses. I foresee more of this going forward with the COW gear. Because the gear itself is very generic I see the focus of situational sets shifting from gear pieces to aug sets. So at this point the real questions revolve around how we get the augs and the costs of switching and swapping vs having multiple gear pieces with different sets. sure wish we knew more.
This initial conception has been an epic fail. Lack of HPs/Energy aside... lack of EEs aside... nerfing of character power base aside... cost of raid armor aside... exchanging hard caps for near cap-like diminishing returns aside... You can only set so many things aside before there's really nothing left. It looks like the project began and maybe had a direction or goal, but then was strayed from. New ideas, thoughts that "This might be cool!" or "This will be scalable!" dragged the path of the project far off from it's forethought. Either that or there was no set goal to begin with other than "We need to trash this capping system, so write one where there's no caps." Whatever the case was, we're not at all where you as the developers imagined we would be - obviously. Sometimes your stone soup simply turns into mud stew. You may wish to revisit the initial reasoning behind this entire undertaking, keep your player base in mind, stay focused on the goal, and accept constructive criticism when you ask for opinions on the forums instead of just tossing everyone who's not a yes-man out on their heads. Swallow your pride, and head back to the bean counter to let him know you need more time. Most of us will wait in favor of trying to force this square peg into the round hole. P.S.: I can't even begin to test my version of a Disciple in this system because of a lack of /copychar coupled with a lack of an epic aug or weapon available on the test server. Some classes are entirely redefined by their epics, such as the disciple's spirit link.
This is mainly where I sit. I create a new character that is not the one I'm used to playing. Even going through the tedious process of typing /highadv @50 times, leaving to get class buffs, clearly not all of them because some are learned through quests or otherwise. Post 51+ abilities, all in one buffs, as mentioned epics, classes like warriors with dropped spells. I feel like I'm playing someone else's character. To top it off, you have to spend all that time socketing augs in all the gear just to test. Going to be honest the whole augment system is overwhelming, while I have not written off playing CoW, something about collecting 100 or so augs plus the gear and crafting just makes me feel I've wasted 7 years while switching to a new platform because I REALLY don't like this new inventory system.
Just want to add, if you can't get the people who wanted this new end game content more than anything to like this. Complaining year after year about no new content. If you can't sell the Vanguard Veteran's on this new approach you are not going to reach the masses, the numbers for this game to start are too low in my opinion to gamble away the soul of the game. The vets just may leave and there would be too big of a gap to fill. You could then just nerf everything I suppose, you have to go back and look at what do you think your going to gain from this from the looks of things, not subscriptions.
