Why did you take away the AD for invokes?

sirkus1313 · August 2016

I know I'm just a casual player, but why did you completely take away the AD from invoking? Not that it was a whole lot to begin with, but it was something. Now it seems you are making it harder to get AD unless you grind the heck outta dungeons. I really don't have time to do that on 5 toons. I really like this game, or did when I first started, but it seems you are punishing the "casual" player and making it hard to enjoy anymore. It's really sad. This is a cool world and it's fun, for the most part. Just wonder why you seem to be making it harder/unejoyable/more PAY to play. The FREE to play is what attracted me. Now it seems to get anything good I HAVE to spend money. I guess you only want certain people to play now. I will try to keep gringing along, but it is getting really boring. Do you all even get that? Do you all play? I guess is you do play you have the BEST gear, etc. Nice for you.

zebular · August 2016

sirkus1313 said:
...but why did you completely take away the AD from invoking?

Here's some clarification from the Devs regarding the Invocation changes:

Some clarifications about the Invocation changes:

There is no ""expiration"" of the bonus. It won't ever go away. As long as you are actively playing the character, the new system should not leave you any worse off.
In fact, the new system leaves you better off (again, if you are playing the character) by about +20%, because it just gives you that much more AD (at L70 -- slight variations at lower levels, just due to rounding).
There is supposed to be a UI treatment that makes this all clear. Looks like that isn't in yet . But it basically looks like a glory boost, if you've ever used one of those. It's a buff icon that tells you how many more points of +50% earn rate you have left.
There is a cap on the total boost value you can get (all numerics in any game need some kind of cap, computers don't like infinities), but it's super-big. It's set to 100,000 AD, which is about a month's worth of boost. So you could invoke all day every day for a month (ok, 27 days to be precise) and still not lose a thing (again, in fact you get +20%). Past a month, and you'd hit the cap if you invoked the full amount every day that month but never played anything that earned you AD.
Characters that you never play with -- only invoke -- are the only ones that lose out. Which was the intention: more rewards for playing, less for characters you don't play.

The reason we made this change was because was saw that Invocation was the largest source of AD that could be generated by not actually playing the game, this is not good. It was very apparent when comparing the PC numbers with what was happening on Xbox, VERY different playstyles but the vast difference between the two groups suggested this was a problem area.

The change we made will actually increase the amount of AD you would earn if combined with actual gameplay. You can even bank it for a week and play all on the weekend, you just have to do something to actually earn that AD now instead of having a bot army.

Just to confirm, there is not reset time on the bonus AD, there is a limit that can be stored which should not be able to be hit with a week of only invoking or more. Again, if you play ""normally"" you should be able to claim more AD from this than you would have previously. It really should only affect characters who ONLY invoked and did nothing else. There will be an minor UI update to make this change more transparent to the user later on and planned for the Module 10 launch.

brun2000 · August 2016

Well, basically they wanted to get rid of the botters that have 50 toons doing invokes and getting 2Mil ad/month or more just for invoking. Problem with this is that they didn't JUST remove the ad from invoking and making it a bonus, they also nerfed the HAMSTER out of salvages, which is something that players have to put effort into to drop items to salvage. Really, all they want is that zen gets really hard to get from AD for casuals like us and make us spend money. Have you seen the new mod? You can't even access the dungeon without spending money on zen...

elminster · August 2016

You know I gotta say I kind of like the new system setup now that I know how it works. I quit playing back pre-mod 4 due to a number of reasons that I won't go into here and I'm coming back now because I've read and heard from other current players that the game overall has gotten better than it was before. A lot has changed and I'm still catching up, but this is one change I'm happy for. There's no more having to run to Zhim to get the damn quest. No more having to do the same damn foundry quests ad nauseam. You run a dungeon, you get a reward. You only have time to fight one PvP match? Before you were SoL unless you did two; now you get a reward.

So we lost the AD from invoking. You still get the bonus AD which if you do the before mentioned tasks gets you all the AD you would've received from invoking anyway, you just have to work for it now. As it should be. The loss of AD from Leadership definitely sucks, but I understand why they took it out and am only upset by the fact that I wasted 18 levels on it when I could've been working on something else.

I do regret that the loss of AD from Foundry quests seems to have stagnated the incentive for creative DMs to craft their own foundry quest lines, but hopefully somebody reading this will think of an incentive to resurrect that community. If nothing else at least reward the creators if their work reaches a certain popularity. Good artists should be recognized and rewarded for their contributions to a community such as this.

carl103 · August 2016

Basically they really, really, really don't like people earning zen without having to actually go play the game.

And honestly i can agree with that, yes it was nice to get free AD from all those characters, but it's removed the incentive to invoke every single alt which has actually made the game feel less grindy.

Equally, does the salvage hurt me as a returning player who need to gear up his character, hell yeah. But here's the thing, even a T1 ring now is 40% the value of a dungeon run. It's nearly the same as a skirmish run. So it's still quite good rewards, and T2 loot is a lot more valuable still. So someone using some of their AD to get VIP can quite trivially even after VIP deductions make 1.5 Mil a month or more for not a lot of playtime.

Thats not to say it's perfect, whilst i have a longer list of tweaks i'd like to see to AD beyond this a couple of changes need to happen IMO:

1. A more reliable source of T1 loot for fresh 70's and anyone else not good enough to do T2's yet. Currently farming the Dread Ring HE's seems to be the best time to returns atm.

2. Actual people running T2 need a reliable source of epic dungeon keys that isn't VIP.

wylonus · August 2016

players with 5 alts or less wont get to see C-wards from coffers in several months while those who got more than +20 plus alts get them almost every week.

oldbaldyone · August 2016

To the poster a couple above, you dont need to spend zen to get into fbi. It just makes it easier.

gothclaw1 · August 2016

If you all want to make astral diamonds fair for everyone that plays put them in the rewards at the end of every mission. That was if someone decides they want to work on finishing Tyranny of dragons, or one of the other story lines, they can still build up their astrals while they are doing it. This also makes sure that the characters only get astals if they are actively being played.

vjarl · August 2016

Just out of curiosity, I have not checked yet, but does this bonus apply to the AD we get from the weekly tasks in the various campaigns? If we are getting the bonus for playing then I think that it should apply there as well. How about the rare level up reward of 30K AD, does the bonus apply there? Both of those are legitimate play actions that need an active player to occur.

If not then just as the OP said, we are not being rewarded for simply playing the game, we are being rewarded from running the dungeons, over and over and over again.

I am a casual PLAYER, who PLAYS the game regularly, but I often don't have enough PLAY time to run a dungeon when I get on. If the only way to get the bonus is via salvaging, then that severely limits the sources that I will have to use up this bonus. If they are truly rewarding us for PLAYING the game then AD needs to be tied to many more tasks in the game. I thought they were headed down the right road when they made the Mantol Dereth daily reward AD, but that appears to be the only one.

I understand that they are trying to get rid of bots that are taking advantage of the system and that if they make anything too brain numbingly easy that a bot will be able to exploit it, but geez, there is such a thing as a legitimate casual player who does not grind dungeons all day. One who takes part in ALL of the content, HEs in the SH, running Shar, DR, IWD, WoD, Mantol Dereth and now Bryn and LW. Sure we do the occasional dungeon, skirmish, event but that is not the main focus of our play.

So start rewarding folks for playing. 50AD for completing a daily. 50AD for completing 5 man HE, 100 for a 10 man, 200 for a 15+. Now we can start to use those bonuses that we get for playing!!!

Sorry for the rant.

V

canthro · August 2016

How about this? Put the astal diamonds back into the invocation gifts and make it so you can not invoke until after you finish your first mission of the day. That way we have to actually play the character before we can invoke with it. Also; if you want to take something out of yhe invocation rewards, get rid of the free experience. I know people that leveled a character from 20 to 60 just by invoking. That's rediculous.

silverkelt · August 2016

it takes months and months and months to get a toon from 1-70.. Its not exactly a barn burner.. you can get to lvl 70 now in say around 12-15 hours anyways just playing.

I would not fret about a few small exp points, it drastically lines down as you continue to go up, by 61+ its barely a pittance of advancement.

The bonus ad works for any AD you make in game.. weeklies, salvage, dungeon, skirm AD rewards.. any of them.

reposterz · August 2016

Zebular gave the reasons, stop arguing with him...

sneak · August 2016

zebular said:

sirkus1313 said:
...but why did you completely take away the AD from invoking?
Here's some clarification from the Devs regarding the Invocation changes:
Some clarifications about the Invocation changes:
There is no ""expiration"" of the bonus. It won't ever go away. As long as you are actively playing the character, the new system should not leave you any worse off.
In fact, the new system leaves you better off (again, if you are playing the character) by about +20%, because it just gives you that much more AD (at L70 -- slight variations at lower levels, just due to rounding).
There is supposed to be a UI treatment that makes this all clear. Looks like that isn't in yet . But it basically looks like a glory boost, if you've ever used one of those. It's a buff icon that tells you how many more points of +50% earn rate you have left.
There is a cap on the total boost value you can get (all numerics in any game need some kind of cap, computers don't like infinities), but it's super-big. It's set to 100,000 AD, which is about a month's worth of boost. So you could invoke all day every day for a month (ok, 27 days to be precise) and still not lose a thing (again, in fact you get +20%). Past a month, and you'd hit the cap if you invoked the full amount every day that month but never played anything that earned you AD.
Characters that you never play with -- only invoke -- are the only ones that lose out. Which was the intention: more rewards for playing, less for characters you don't play.
The reason we made this change was because was saw that Invocation was the largest source of AD that could be generated by not actually playing the game, this is not good. It was very apparent when comparing the PC numbers with what was happening on Xbox, VERY different playstyles but the vast difference between the two groups suggested this was a problem area.

The change we made will actually increase the amount of AD you would earn if combined with actual gameplay. You can even bank it for a week and play all on the weekend, you just have to do something to actually earn that AD now instead of having a bot army.

Just to confirm, there is not reset time on the bonus AD, there is a limit that can be stored which should not be able to be hit with a week of only invoking or more. Again, if you play ""normally"" you should be able to claim more AD from this than you would have previously. It really should only affect characters who ONLY invoked and did nothing else. There will be an minor UI update to make this change more transparent to the user later on and planned for the Module 10 launch.

I never read this before today but I've been explaining this to people for a while now. It seemed obvious to me the change was due to the massive army of people who are just botting invokes on a bunch of characters. I'm very happy for the change and people who aren't just want the game to be unfair in their own favor. It's a clear difference that you make MORE AD now than before (that is, if you actually earn it like I do). I'm happy that my work actually means something now instead of people who aren't doing anything gaining tons of free AD while I work like a slave to make money. I'm happy to have an advantage over lazy botters now, which is how it should be.

It's amazing that people are actually complaining that the company wanted to fix an issue of people cheating to get tons of free AD and screw over everyone who actually earns AD.

And please stop automatically blaming everything on "they just want to make more money!". It's a game hosted in the US, with a ".com" domain and the website is in English. It's a free to play MMORPG. How many hints does one need to realize it's a capitalist system and making money is to be expected? How do people not realize that the employees deserve money for their work? Stop your whining and get a job or become more dedicated in the game. Not everything is about greed and money and companies aren't automatically just "out to rip off players".

brun2000 · August 2016

zebular said:

sirkus1313 said:
...but why did you completely take away the AD from invoking?
Here's some clarification from the Devs regarding the Invocation changes:

In fact, the new system leaves you better off (again, if you are playing the character) by about +20%, because it just gives you that much more AD (at L70 -- slight variations at lower levels, just due to rounding).

That part is absolute kittens! You make way less ad from it, but not because of the invoke change, its because of the salvage nerf to acomudate the invoke bonus. I used to make 12k ad out of 1200 blue seals, now I make 7.5k if my bonus is already out! Keep in mind how many seals this is and how much work it takes to get them... 7.5k seems fair to you? It really doesn't for me. Now you may say "omg you dont have 1200 seals daily" no I dont, but all I need to fully empty my bonus is a skirmish run and a salvage. That's nothing! If I really wanted to make ad, I'd run skirmishes all day, run dungeons all day! The ad income is now cut in half by doing those things, so don't to me with that kittens of "you get 20% more" because you don't at all, everyone comes out losing here, botters and casuals! Stop being to money greedy and revert the salvage nerf, it was nerfed beyond where it should have been already, its about the 3rd nerf in salvage we have and just proves that you don't even care that casuals can't make ad, you want people to have a hard time making ad so they buy zen. Fluffy that!

Please don't circumvent the profanity filter. Thanks!

gphxgphx · August 2016

People aren't listening. Over the past several days I finished leveling a character to 70 then have done some more quests since. Days ago the character had 208 AD. Today it still has 208 AD. Despite several days of questing and invoking the character's income was ZERO AD. This is the problem people are talking about. If we do exactly what the devs want us to do perhaps the AD situation hasn't changed much. If we do what we want to do that particular day the AD income falls by as much as 100%! Marking the post as 'Answered' or telling people to play in a different way won't change that.

gphxgphx · August 2016

reposterz said:
Zebular gave the reasons, stop arguing with him...

All the boilerplate in the world won't change whether players balance of AD is increasing or not based upon their own personal style of gameplay. Telling them to shut up or to play the way someone else wants them to won't help a bit either. All it will do is encourage them to leave.

beckylunatic · August 2016

vjarl said:
Just out of curiosity, I have not checked yet, but does this bonus apply to the AD we get from the weekly tasks in the various campaigns? If we are getting the bonus for playing then I think that it should apply there as well. How about the rare level up reward of 30K AD, does the bonus apply there? Both of those are legitimate play actions that need an active player to occur.

Yes.

It applies every time you get rough AD, provided you have sufficient bonus.

Anyone calling it a "salvaging bonus" is misinformed.

wylonus · August 2016

ok, now i see why that how it works.
please let me know if correct, this is only example, not actual number figures, just concept.

the more we invoke, bonus get higher up to 100k cap, then we do any weekly for 4.5k but we get extra ADs to go with AD earned from rewards?
kinda like getting 4.5k with extra amount of ADs that was holding in bonus we pull from?

geez, that is lot of ADs, but the lower level characters get screwed until they reach 70 levels when they need items from auction house during 25-60 levels for upgrades.

beckylunatic · August 2016

Provided you have 2250 of invoke bonus saved up (less than one days' worth), you will get 6750 for your weekly quest instead of 4500.

sockmunkey · August 2016

With bonus, I was getting 6000 AD per weekly quest. Not bad for one mission but not nearly enough for an entire week.

minotaur2857 · August 2016

oldbaldyone said:
To the poster a couple above, you dont need to spend zen to get into fbi. It just makes it easier.

How do you do it without ? getting 29% resists seems to require tradebar store only items, hence lockboxes, hence Zen.

cosettediego · August 2016

They need to add astral diamonds to the chests at the end of every mission so no matter what a persons playing preferences are they still get astral diamonds when they play. This stuff of if you want to make astral diamonds, you have to play the stuff we want you to play is for the birds.

sandukutupu · August 2016

Yesterday I ran dry on dungeons for my TR. So I waited in que for skirmish... after 15 or 20 minutes I decided, ugh que PvP. I got kicked from PvP when we started losing the match. Just love the "group activities".

So how is my TR suppose to suck up these growing BAD (bonus astral diamond) points? He has accumulated over 25,000 since the change. Tomorrow he can run DR red wizards, Portal, and AR. But that is only 13.5 K RAD which only removes 6,750 BAD points. Then 2 dungeons 10 K RAD/5 K BAD and my day is shot on just one character out of six, I just won't have the time, unless I start playing the game more hours and ignore housework and cooking meals.

One word sums it all up RIDICULOUS. The supporters of this new system are going to wave the Cryptic banner no matter what the rest of us say. But mark my words, some day they will be coming to stop you from enjoying the game too. It is only a game I play a few hours a day at most, it is not suppose to be a full time job.

gomok72 · September 2016

Well, once this is fixed, hopefully they will make it where you can actually play the game and make decent AD by selling new sets. I expect to see other issues pop up once they do put all of the new "old" dungeons back in the game (It's always something exploited in this game). People enjoyed the game based on the fact you could AFK make enough AD, then selling it making enough real world $$$ to put your kids through college, buy a new car/house and pay your bills, etc, etc.

akanaro · September 2016

I've said this before and I'll say it again - Some people are seemingly always surprised whenever PW changes the economics of their games to favor cash transactions. The only income PW gets is from cash shop transactions and the fact that you as a free player can actually use game currency to purchase from the cash shop is a bonus. In fact (as far as I know) PW is the only company that allows this.

The thing is, time is money. So either you'll spend your life playing the game to get all the goodies for free or you'll have a job and spend real money because you can't play often. You can't have it both ways so pick one and live with it.

sneak · September 2016

sandukutupu said:
Yesterday I ran dry on dungeons for my TR. So I waited in que for skirmish... after 15 or 20 minutes I decided, ugh que PvP. I got kicked from PvP when we started losing the match. Just love the "group activities".

And the obvious trade-off for people who don't want to spend a lot of time playing is to spend money or not progress as fast. This is how free to play games work.. it's normal and expected.

So either spend money or stop being lazy.

carl103 · September 2016

Allright a fair few posts and a fair few people to reply to, i'm only going to quote one however to specifically reply to:

1. Guildies: Actually my own guild is so small we're not focusing too hard on the guildhall, where never gonna get anywhere so why get worked up about it. That said you seemed to have missed my complaints about mote farming e.t.c. Doing the guild HE's is group content as far as i'm concerned, but if it has the same problem as most pre T2 dungeon content. I.E like the EE HE's it gives sweet FA in the way of stuff that can be salvaged or traded in for salvage. Then it's an issue, and one cryptic really needs to address. I'll outline the T2 rewards later and as i'm going to show their wildly greater than T1.

2.

So how is my TR suppose to suck up these growing BAD (bonus astral diamond) points? He has accumulated over 25,000 since the change. Tomorrow he can run DR red wizards, Portal, and AR. But that is only 13.5 K RAD which only removes 6,750 BAD points. Then 2 dungeons 10 K RAD/5 K BAD and my day is shot on just one character out of six, I just won't have the time, unless I start playing the game more hours and ignore housework and cooking meals.

One word sums it all up RIDICULOUS. T

Play time. Like somone else said, this is F2P, it's time vs money. You have the time to play 8+ hours a day you'll have an easy time getting lots of AD. Can't play that long, then your not going to and are not supposed to be able to earn great gobs of rough AD. I should point out however you can work off your entire daily bonus of invoking by running cloak tower or NToS twice each day.

3. This bring me onto T2 rewards. Running 3 T2 dungeons every day guarantees a measly sounding 12k RAD. However if your a VIP R6 or higher you get 3 free epic dungeon keys, every day. Each of those keys guarantees a piece of small T2 salvage worth 4k base. SO another 12k there for 24k base. But wait, VIP, 20% bonus, so no just shy of 29k, add on your invokes and you can cap your refining without ever doing a weekly. Throw those on and you can earn 86k beyond your refining cap a month. But wait, doing those 3 runs will net you enough seals of the protector every month to buy 10 medium T2 pieces to salvage worth another 60k with VIP bonus. But wait, downing 9 T2 bosses is 9 chances at a salvage drop from them, Not into 2 myself but i'd bet you'd average at least 1 piece of small T2 salvage a day from them. SO thats another 144k a month. So your earning just shy of 300k AD a month above your cap. Thats 300k AD a month you can pass down to alts. Spread that amongst 2 als who are both getting full VIP boosted invoke bonus every day and you can raise that to roughly 430k AD a month more without having to do a single thing on those characters. Thats just shy of 1.5 million AD a month, even with VIP costs thats nearly a million AD profit a month, from 1 character doing 3 dungeon runs a day and weeklies.

Doing non-T2 content, even as a VIP nets you nothing like as much for your time, You have to do roughly all 5 campaign T1 dungeons, plus Ndemo + EDemo, plus enough demonic HE's to run the AD task and get the keys, all of which will take most of an 8 hour day to sort out to get the same rewards with the VIP bonuses.

People still farming EE HE's for weapon sets or still gearing up for Edemo, or still grinding campaigns are completly up a creek without a paddle, or even a boat.

vjarl · September 2016

I am not disagreeing with removing the AD from invocation. I don't think you should be able to login, stand in one place and make valuable game currency. I agree with the philosophy that people who play the game should be rewarded for playing. By play the game, I mean participate actively in the content.

In my mind this means that you are running dungeons, running dailies, running weeklies, running skirmishes, participating in the events, participating in PvP matches. If you login and run around killing things randomly or login and list a bunch of stuff on the AH or login and chat with your buddies in the SH and nothing else, then to me that is not actively participating in the content. Nor is running the quests that are used to level and get through the content (i.e. the yellow text quests).

So, if the players are to be rewarded for playing, in my mind there should be some reward for playing the game. Now I understand that Cryptics definition of this and my definition of this may differ, but I am thinking that the player base will be a whole lot happier if there is the opportunity to login for a couple of hours, run a couple of dailies, maybe a weekly and then log out and make a few AD for the effort. Yes, there will be the diehards who have 19 hours a day to play that will eventually run out of opportunities to make AD on one character, but that is why they allow you to get mote character slots.

I am not talking about HUGE 1000's of AD for each run, but a little something would be nice. Like I said in my previous post, maybe throw a couple hundred AD for each daily. There are approximately 34 dailies available. If you do them all at 15 mins apiece, you are still talking 8+ hours (Not including travel time) a day of AD making opportunities. This is a potential of 6800 AD (10200 w/ bonus) for those.

Then consider HEs. The rewards here should be lower since they can be completed multiple times a day. If they reward them in the same way they reward dungeons and skirmishes then they can make the rewards larger. Say 1000 AD for the first HE and 500AD for the second each day. Or they could reward based on the size of the HE as I said in my previous post. Or some combination of the 2.

I know that they want to make money, so here are a couple of money making ideas to go along with this:

Sell the ability to buy for zen, bonus AD. Say for 500 Zen, I can buy 50K bonus AD. Now for 1000 Z, I have a full bonus...WHAT NOW you ask. Sell an increase the max bonus marker that is temporary that raises your max bonus to 200K AD. Only one of them can be applied at a time and when player falls below 100K AD in bonus or say 7 days elapses, the bonus runs out and you are reset to 100K. Any bonus you have over that is lost. How about selling me a temporary marker that boosts me to 100%, 200% bonus AD? This way if I know I am going to have a week of vacation where I will be burning through bonus AD like a fat kid eating fair food, I can beef myself up!

I really enjoy this game and I think that a LOT of perception is that all they ever do is take away from us. How about giving us something back?

Just some ideas.

Thanks,

V

psyb3rtr011 · September 2016

They have a much easier fix. Limit each account to "X" number of AD a week, regardless of how they are earned.

You can still collect equipment and other things to sell on the AH, to make more, which requires playing the game.

canthro · September 2016

vjarl said:
Nor is running the quests that are used to level and get through the content (i.e. the yellow text quests).

Running the yellow text quests is just as much playing as doing the dungeons and such is, just because you don't like doing them doesn't mean that people that do run them are not playing.

canthro · September 2016

canthro said:
How about this? Put the astal diamonds back into the invocation gifts and make it so you can not invoke until after you finish your first mission of the day. That way we have to actually play the character before we can invoke with it. Also; if you want to take something out of yhe invocation rewards, get rid of the free experience. I know people that leveled a character from 20 to 60 just by invoking. That's rediculous.

Carrying this same idea a step further, instead of making it so they can only invoke after completing one mission, make it so they have to complete another mission before they can invoke again. That way the can't just do one mission, then just log back in to invoke for the rest of the day.

Why did you take away the AD for invokes?

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