FC.31.20160729.8 - Recognition Stores and Rewards Feedback

kaiserin

Please post feedback relating to the recent changes and additions to the Recognition stores here.

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Please format any bugs you find in the following format:
Bug
Where it happens
What happens

Please format any suggestions you have in the following format:
Suggestion
Your suggestion

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Please stay on topic in this PTS thread. We use bug reports from this thread to decide whether a PTS build is ready to go live, and so we need to make sure we're seeing everything in it. Please do discuss the changes, but if you find yourself writing about something that isn't specific to what's on PTS, then that should probably go here: http://forum.arcgames.com/championsonline/categories/gameplay-bugs1.
Posts that do not specifically pertain to the current PTS patch will be removed.

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deadman20

Bug:
Equipment Boxes will always give Equipment that is scaled as if it is a Lv0 Item. This bug is old, but I am bringing it up so that this can be taken care of to improve the Recognition Vendor Changes.

Suggestion:
Currently, there is no difference in what the T1, T2, and T3 Primary Equipment Caches will provide due to the above bug. I would like to recommend that each Tier of box give a different quality of random equipment, which will properly scale to the player opening them after the bug has been fixed. T1 giving Green Quality (Single Core Slot), T2 giving Blue Quality (Single Core Slot, Single Stat-mod Slot), and T3 giving Purple Quality Non-Heroic Primaries (Single Core Slot, Single Stat-mod Slot).

For Price Compensation, use 25 UNTIL Recognition for T1, 75 UNTIL Recognition for T2, and 150 UNTIL Recognition for T3 or something of the like.

Bug:
The new Shadow Destroyer's Contempt mod (Currently available in the Champion Recognition Vendor) states that it boosts Might Offense in its description, but Ice Damage in its Effects Tooltip. These were both meant to be Darkness, I believe.​​

soulforger

deadman20 said:

Suggestion:

Currently, there is no difference in what the T1, T2, and T3 Primary Equipment Caches will provide due to the above bug. I would like to recommend that each Tier of box give a different quality of random equipment, which will properly scale to the player opening them after the bug has been fixed. T1 giving Green Quality (Single Core Slot), T2 giving Blue Quality (Single Core Slot, Single Stat-mod Slot), and T3 giving Purple Quality Non-Heroic Primaries (Single Core Slot, Single Stat-mod Slot).



For Price Compensation, use 25 UNTIL Recognition for T1, 75 UNTIL Recognition for T2, and 150 UNTIL Recognition for T3 or something of the like.​​

I like this idea. Makes those that get enough UNTIL Recog something to buy. And yeah, that bug needs to be fixed.

sigmaseven0

I think there should be a "teleport to Q warzone device" in the store.

soulforger

Only gripe I have about the recog stores revision is that most of the costumes that people could buy before are now gated behind perks. People should only have to grind mobs for the recog, not the perks for the costumes. Plus, I think its to late as most players most likely have all the costumes they want from the recog.

Also, would it be possible to add to a store a free unlock for the superconductor torso for females for those that already have it unlocked for males, like you guys did for the avian set when you fixed it? Its rather annoying that I have to reacquire the costume unlock even though I already bought it.

epelesker

Just for clarification, are the old recogs getting rolled into UNTIL or UNITY credits? Because the former sounds like it would make a lot more sense to me.

soulforger

epelesker said:

Just for clarification, are the old recogs getting rolled into UNTIL or UNITY credits? Because the former sounds like it would make a lot more sense to me.

Old recog will be transferable to the new UNTIL recog at the token conversion person. Though on the pts the MCPD recog transfer is currently bug showing the cost to be Primus recog instead of MCPD.

ealford1985

Unless the price and the perk part has lowered and removed, it really doesn't matter, I think this was clear when the change were originally made. It should not take me weeks to just achieve a simple device for 1 toon. This and some of the events are making people not want to play...Isn't that the opposite of what you want in a game?

We are losing vets left and right and not replacing them with many new players.

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theravenforce

Mind Drain and Shadow Eruption's costs are pretty absurd. They are not much different mechanically to already existing powers.

Mind Drain = Lifedrain

Shadow Eruption = TK Eruption / TK Maelstrom

They should both be free powers or have their costs severely reduced.

draogn

The prices in the recog and event stores are still absurd

theravenforce

draogn said:

The prices in the recog and event stores are still absurd

Yup, the cost to reward is out of balance. It is okay to want players to want new things and to work for them, but when you consider the reward sources, how much effort is put into obtaining them, I wouldn't be surprised if many simply figured out it was not worth the time investment.

draogn

theravenforce said:

draogn said:

The prices in the recog and event stores are still absurd

Yup, the cost to reward is out of balance. It is okay to want players to want new things and to work for them, but when you consider the reward sources, how much effort is put into obtaining them, I wouldn't be surprised if many simply figured out it was not worth the time investment.

Eventually something will have to give. First they made heroic gear grindier to get, and now they're making justice gear grindier (I didn't think that was possible) to get. They've nerfed the drop rate for legion gear crates. So the only options to improve a character via gear is grind, grind, or more grind.

The travel powers in those vendors were hardly worth their original price, let alone 975.

theravenforce

draogn said:

theravenforce said:

draogn said:

The prices in the recog and event stores are still absurd

Yup, the cost to reward is out of balance. It is okay to want players to want new things and to work for them, but when you consider the reward sources, how much effort is put into obtaining them, I wouldn't be surprised if many simply figured out it was not worth the time investment.

Eventually something will have to give. First they made heroic gear grindier to get, and now they're making justice gear grindier (I didn't think that was possible) to get. They've nerfed the drop rate for legion gear crates. So the only options to improve a character via gear is grind, grind, or more grind.

The travel powers in those vendors were hardly worth their original price, let alone 975.

Mhm, I think players are just going to give up eventually once they realize how grindy everything is becoming. This of course means that great content and hours of development are going to go unseen by the majority of the player base because the method to obtain them is unreasonable (understatement).

I don't know who was back there making the price list but they must have severely overestimated how much SCR and GCR players get from things.

Its not like both currencies are account bound either, even then it would be ridiculously priced.

If you think about it, grinding mercilessly on one character to obtain rewards...which are mostly bound to CHARACTER instead of ACCOUNT is very counterproductive because there is very little incentive to continue striving after this one thing and invest that much time on the "correct" character.

It sort of discourages the use of alts, at least for me. Personally I would be much more inclined to invest even MORE time into stuff if I knew I could pass it on to the correct character on my roster and get what I want or if I knew that the rewards were not Bind on Pickup or Bound to Character.

jaazaniah1

I hope they are listening to this feedback. This is so much the problem now a days.

theravenforce said:

Its not like both currencies are account bound either, even then it would be ridiculously priced.

If you think about it, grinding mercilessly on one character to obtain rewards...which are mostly bound to CHARACTER instead of ACCOUNT is very counterproductive because there is very little incentive to continue striving after this one thing and invest that much time on the "correct" character.

It sort of discourages the use of alts, at least for me. Personally I would be much more inclined to invest even MORE time into stuff if I knew I could pass it on to the correct character on my roster and get what I want or if I knew that the rewards were not Bind on Pickup or Bound to Character.

sterga

I take it that currencies aren't all magically account bound then? Doesn't encouraging alts keep people around? Isn't that normally a good thing for a game? You know, having people actually playing it? People who don't play don't spend money. New people that see a ghost town don't stick around and never even have a chance to be paying players.

jaazaniah1

Moreover, if you are trying to gear one character through GCR the current bound to character system discourages a flexible approach to cosmics. I.e. If I want to equip 1 dps character with GCR gear I can only play that 1 character to do it. However, if a group needs a tank to start a battle I am discouraged from bringing my tank (who doesn't want/need gcr) because the gcr is needed on the dps character. The simple change of allowing gcr and scr to go into a common account would undoubtedly speed up the start time of cosmic battles.

xacchaeus

i think the problem is the devs listening to the voices of a few who brag about how easy content is, how much gcr/scr/globals they have in reserves, etc and assume that is the norm

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pantagruel01

So, I'd like to propose an alt-friendly option: add some means where part of the cost of GCR/SCR gear can be paid for by alts. I don't think it should be possible to completely gear an alt by playing your main, but having it utterly unusable isn't good either.

Easy way of doing this might be adding bind to acct tokens that can be bought with GCR/SCR, and then adding tokens to the cost. For example, if a token costs 25 gcr/50 scr (seems like a good minimum granularity), rather than justice gear being 225 gcr/450 scr, it could be 125 gcr, 250 scr, and 4 tokens.

morigosa

Problem: the token conversion store only offers exchanges of one recog at a time. I have, across all of my characters, several thousand recognition that I'd like to convert. I have no interest, however, in clicking thousands of times.

Suggestion

We either need a buy multiple at once option, or (if there is such a way already) something explaining how to do that. Or, worst case, do the same thing that was done with the onslaught tokens and add in an option to buy ten at a time and 100 at a time.

riverocean

A simple solution to the gear issue. Why not make a purchasable "discount coupon" available. The coupon would cost x-amount of SCR/GRC -- but once purchased it would cut the cost of gear by a certain % for every toon on the same account.

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aesica

pantagruel01 said:

So, I'd like to propose an alt-friendly option: add some means where part of the cost of GCR/SCR gear can be paid for by alts. I don't think it should be possible to completely gear an alt by playing your main, but having it utterly unusable isn't good either.

Easy way of doing this might be adding bind to acct tokens that can be bought with GCR/SCR, and then adding tokens to the cost. For example, if a token costs 25 gcr/50 scr (seems like a good minimum granularity), rather than justice gear being 225 gcr/450 scr, it could be 125 gcr, 250 scr, and 4 tokens.

They might be hesitant to do that because it would clutter up the now-nicely-organized shop with additional copies of an item--one buyable for the standard price, one buyable for the token price.

gradii said:

riverocean said:

A simple solution to the gear issue. Why not make a purchasable "discount coupon" available. The coupon would cost x-amount of SCR/GRC -- but once purchased it would cut the cost of gear by a certain % for every toon on the same account.

STO does something similar with rep sponsor tokens, it cuts the amount of work needed to level rep on alts in half.

a 50% purchaseable account discount token would be amazing. even if it cost 500 GCR and 500 SCR.

The problem though is that this doesn't actually cut the cost of the items a player is trying to acquire--you still need say, 500 Iconian marks and 2 datacores to buy a piece of the Iconian ground set. This just speeds up the rate at which alts progress through the reputation tiers. I think what people are after is some way to, on a more continual basis, use their heavily-geared alts to farm GCR/SCR for their undergeared alts. The discount coupon would just be one-shot, then done forever.

Short of making either GCR/SCR account-wide, or GCR gear account-bound, there's no elegant way to allow mains to farm for alts. Besides, maybe I've just played too much wow, but I kinda feel like people should be earning gear by using the alt they intend to gear up rather than relying on an overgeared main. Heroic gear already allows mains to gear up alts to a degree, though.

pantagruel01

aesica said:

pantagruel01 said:

So, I'd like to propose an alt-friendly option: add some means where part of the cost of GCR/SCR gear can be paid for by alts. I don't think it should be possible to completely gear an alt by playing your main, but having it utterly unusable isn't good either.

Easy way of doing this might be adding bind to acct tokens that can be bought with GCR/SCR, and then adding tokens to the cost. For example, if a token costs 25 gcr/50 scr (seems like a good minimum granularity), rather than justice gear being 225 gcr/450 scr, it could be 125 gcr, 250 scr, and 4 tokens.

They might be hesitant to do that because it would clutter up the now-nicely-organized shop with additional copies of an item--one buyable for the standard price, one buyable for the token price.

Well, you don't actually need a standard price at all; you can always buy tokens with the same character as will be spending them. The basic idea is that part but not all of the price can be paid by other characters.

thelastsonofzod

I looked through the store changes, and it doesn't seem like that bad of an overhaul overall. Trimming down the currencies available in game is definitely appreciated. Of course, I already own pretty much all of the non GCR items...but its still a nice concept. I do wish we had some people to occupy the now vacant spots at the Recognition tent though.

A minor suggestion:

I think Dark Speed should be available as a GCR/SCR Travel power. I know plenty of people get by fine with it as a device, but I personally would like to see some more darkness themed travel powers. A shadow teleport would also be nice.

aesica

pantagruel01 said:

Well, you don't actually need a standard price at all; you can always buy tokens with the same character as will be spending them. The basic idea is that part but not all of the price can be paid by other characters.

That's fair, although it might be kind of awkward to buy a token, then buy the gear using that token from the same shop. Overall, I think I'm pretty conflicted about this, actually. On one hand, I totally get what it's like to have a favorite character which one's poured a lot of time and effort into, and that the desire to use this character for something meaningful exists. However, as a long-time wow player, I also think the character who wants the gear should be the one to earn it. I suppose that, as long as the token is only about, say, 25% of the total GCR/SCR price, and that the rest would have to be covered by the alt one's gearing up, that'd be fair.

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aesica

gradii said:

STO still does this better than CO becuase of reasonable prices for rep items. to get enouguh iconian datacores I need for a piece of gear, I need to do 5 runs maximum of a 20 minute piece of content, maybe 8 runs if I need more marks.

Yup, and the best part is there's multiple ways to get them. If I don't like queued content, there's always the last 2 open missions in the battlezone.

Although to play Devil's advocate here, in STO, just getting a piece of gear doesn't make it endgame-worthy. There's still the upgrade process to contend with. Of course, one could say the same thing about mods in CO, so...there's that, too.

soulforger

aesica said:

Yup, and the best part is there's multiple ways to get them. If I don't like queued content, there's always the last 2 open missions in the battlezone.

Although to play Devil's advocate here, in STO, just getting a piece of gear doesn't make it endgame-worthy. There's still the upgrade process to contend with. Of course, one could say the same thing about mods in CO, so...there's that, too.

Indeed, more often than not, the item you get in STO is Tier 12, Tier 13 and 14 typically must be upgraded to. Here in CO we got mods...

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aesica

^ Yeah, that's because STO is smart about how players acquire what could be seen as starter-level endgame gear. It's not very hard to get that mark 12 purple gear (which I'd say is roughly around Heroic gear in terms of strength) and that gets people into the current endgame content rather than expecting them to grind through "the miserable tier" first, which CO seems to do.

Well, unless the idea is to just do TA/cosmics in blue/green merc/misc trash gear while skipping the Heroic tier entirely.

kyastral

gradii said:

xacchaeus said:

i think the problem is the devs listening to the voices of a few who brag about how easy content is, how much gcr/scr/globals they have in reserves, etc and assume that is the norm

Then the devs have to stop smoking whatever they're smoking and listen to the actual whole playerbase.

Hmm.. good points here and I cant deny them. However, I think that the devs have done this to require players to play more of the game content and less of the alerts. The perk requirements are specific to each gear type; to buy Maniac gear you have to do Maniac Missions to get the perk required. Some players abandon content at level 10 and just rely mainly on alerts to quickly level up, which has obviously caught the attention of the devs.

In my opinion, it would have been easier to lower the amount of XP/Burst/Resource and replace it with SCR/GCR/Unity packs and questionite than to require almost everything purchased in the Recognition a perk. Besides, what can be done with perk points at this time? Nothing.

Suggestion: Please consider a way to use/spend perk points before launching the revamped recognition vendors. This will give at least one valid reason to grind for perks. Besides, we have a Perk Vendor with nothing to sell or trade.

soulforger

Perk points is basically your way of showing off how much you've done. They are not there for anything else.

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kyastral

gradii said:

kyastral said:

gradii said:

xacchaeus said:

i think the problem is the devs listening to the voices of a few who brag about how easy content is, how much gcr/scr/globals they have in reserves, etc and assume that is the norm

Then the devs have to stop smoking whatever they're smoking and listen to the actual whole playerbase.

Hmm.. good points here and I cant deny them. However, I think that the devs have done this to require players to play more of the game content and less of the alerts. The perk requirements are specific to each gear type; to buy Maniac gear you have to do Maniac Missions to get the perk required. Some players abandon content at level 10 and just rely mainly on alerts to quickly level up, which has obviously caught the attention of the devs.

The perk requirements dont bother me as much as the RIDICULOUS GCR and SCR costs. I understand the devs want us to play the content, but unrealistic costs are unrealistic.

No argument there. The perk requirements dont bother me much either; I was just giving my opinion about why the perk points were put there. As others have said before me, we need currency to be allowed for the shared bank, ESPECIALLY GCR/SCR.

gemini2099

Lower the costs for heroic gear, devices, and costumes and we are in good shape.

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jonsills

gradii wrote: »

Actually I can run elite queues in mark XII gear just fine. Rep gear starts at XII purple.

You don't even need to "buy" rep gear as such. My AoY toon got a bundle of 250 rep points for each faction as a reward for - something or other (I think it was for hitting 50 as a Temporal Agent), and he's picked up a bunch of Temporal Rep points from other rewards; he's now Tier 2 with every Rep faction except Temporal, where he's Tier 3, and nearing 4. The reward boxes from the daily "missions" (which, for those who don't play STO, consist of clicking to indicate you're spending the requisite number of Energy Credits, Rep Points, and Commendation XP (IIRC)) have provided my entire away team with purple Mk XII or XIII weapons, as well as getting an assortment of purple Mk XII ship gear (I'm not ashamed to run a rainbow boat - every weapon on her is designed to deliver as much damage as possible, as quickly as possible, while my consoles are mostly from temporal ships and the Kobali Samsar cruiser in order to increase my survivability).

No need to grind away like a madman in the hopes of getting something useful - it's literally handed to you there. On the other tentacle, it is character-bound, so there's a fair bit of stuff I wind up just tossing into the replicator to turn it into EC. (Really, most of you would laugh out loud at what STO players call a "grind". My favorite example is in the summer event on Risa, where you can get a top-tier ship for the price of flying through a series of aerial courses every day for 25 days. It's not even a race - you can fly through them in a nice, leisurely fashion, following the clearly-glowing path in the air. It takes like ten minutes, tops, out of each day, and if you're of a mind to you can then beam off Risa and go run missions for a while. And at the end of the time, you get a nice new ship for every toon on your account. Last time was a Tier 6 Vorgon heavy escort - one of the Tac officers on my secondary account will be greatly enjoying that ship one day.)​​

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tkitteh

BUG Random T4/T5/T6 SCR Mod Crates are missing! from SCR/GCR PTS store

The left side of the gui could use a scroll bar. The organization is nice (hurray for separated secondaries), but all in one npc the interface is overloaded. Gear/Power/Vanity Vendors?

chaelk

morigosa wrote: »

Problem: the token conversion store only offers exchanges of one recog at a time. I have, across all of my characters, several thousand recognition that I'd like to convert. I have no interest, however, in clicking thousands of times.

Suggestion

We either need a buy multiple at once option, or (if there is such a way already) something explaining how to do that. Or, worst case, do the same thing that was done with the onslaught tokens and add in an option to buy ten at a time and 100 at a time.

ditto, I have about 130 character son my main acct, even my silver acct is up to 20. They all got levelled doing missions and all have a pile of recognition.
currently YKYGPW has 210 primus and 274 UNTIL at 34.
I don't want to be pushing the button 1 recog at a time, like fusing.

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Jonsills, my engineer with mostly science skills, is using the Vorlon(it looks like the B5 ships) ship. working quite well so far.​​

kaiserin

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deadman20

kaizerin wrote: »

Changed the Teleios genetic gear to bind on equip (from bind to account on pickup). Existing versions will not change.

I see this as a problem, as we are now purchasing temporary character-specific equipment for a hefty sum of Silver Champions Recognition. While the equipment can be transferred to whichever character may need it, that equipment is now only usable by that one character and deemed expendable once they are Lv40. For a total of 300 SCR, that is a rather huge sink to level a single alt on.

While I understand that there needs to be plenty of ways we can spend SCR, for something so expensive and temporary I feel that we need to give it some sort of return policy. Perhaps allow it to give a discount or small return on SCR?

Suggestion:

For the Genetic Heirloom Set, allow it to be returnable to the Champions Recognition Vendor for a small return of 25 SCR per piece of the set. In addition, allow the character to return bound pieces with an additional 75 SCR to trade for an unbound version of that piece of the set. This will only be available only if the character is at Lv40.

To prevent "Hoarding", make Genetic Heirloom a Unique Set.​​

aesica

• Changed the Teleios genetic gear to bind on equip (from bind to account on pickup). Existing versions will not change.

If you're going to change them in the store, the existing versions need to change as well. Otherwise, that's just blatantly unfair, as it grandfathers in a set of something extremely useful for people who have it now, but anyone who doesn't have it after this patch is out of luck. I realize saying "unfair" might sound childish, but somebody had to say it. I'm okay with being that someone.

• Increased Armadillo, Samurai and Cyber Augmented primary gear to 35,000 Questionite (from 11,000).
• Increased Armadillo, Samurai and Cyber Augmented secondary gear to 20,000 Questionite (from 11,000).

35k for primaries, 20k for secondaries? It's now going to cost more for 2 primaries than it does now for the entire set. WTF? This is disposable leveling gear we're talking about here, not Justice/Distinguished gear.

Devs. Stop it. Please.

I feel like my alt-loving ways are being hunted to the ends of the earth here.

These sets were ideal starter set goals for players just getting into the game. These new prices (assuming anyone is going to be stupid enough to pay them) are now being moved to only be realistically accessible by veteran players--the bind on equip vs bind on pickup change only further facilitates that.

What is the point of doing this?

Oh well, guess I'd better get to getting this gear to my alts now before this crap goes live and yet another goalpost gets unnecessarily moved out of reasonable range. Ugh.

pantagruel01

aesica said:

35k for primaries, 20k for secondaries? It's now going to cost more for 2 primaries than it does now for the entire set. WTF? This is disposable leveling gear we're talking about here, not Justice/Distinguished gear.

Armadillo secondaries are solidly useful at level 40. The primaries...I never bought at the old price, let alone new?

guyhumual

I like one currency, hate the pricing. conversion of currencies should be quick and simple.

aiqa

I don't really like the new threat mod. The only tanks that have trouble keeping agro are the low damage tanks. And since this mod scales of damage it's exactly those that don't get anything out of it, and we have more than enough "tanks need high damage" things in CO already. I would like it far better if it improved Challenge by a certain amount, or make it it's own separate version of how Challenge works (meaning a threat over time that can't be stacked).

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sterga

Can these items now be sold on the AH? Being BoE and all.

riverocean

thelastsonofzod said:

A minor suggestion:

I think Dark Speed should be available as a GCR/SCR Travel power. I know plenty of people get by fine with it as a device, but I personally would like to see some more darkness themed travel powers. A shadow teleport would also be nice.

Just going to second this as a suggestion. If our Dev team is looking for ways to create SCR/GCR sinks this would be a great idea.

Bug: The Major Power Temporary Forcefield can't be slotted

I bought this device from the Hermes Requisition Vendor. This error message is received when I attempt to equip it: "Requires None (1)"

Bug: Manifest Mind Worms Device debuffs the caster
The New "Manifest Mind Worms" Device casts it's Stress and Regret debuffs on the caster instead of the enemy target.