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What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
Release Notes 4/11/2024
kaiserin
Posts: 3,210 Cryptic Developer
Lockbox
For the next 2 weeks this lockbox will be available.
Foxbatcon
This event is over. The vendor will be available for 1 week. A reminder that all Foxbatcon event currency will expire.
(For next year)
Powers
For the next 2 weeks this lockbox will be available.
- Added drop rates to Collector's Lockbox.
- Added the contents of the Forces of Nature lockbox to the store.
- Updated voucher names and rarity to match new Lockbox rarity colors. This is just a visual change.
Foxbatcon
This event is over. The vendor will be available for 1 week. A reminder that all Foxbatcon event currency will expire.
- Added missing materials to the Handlebar Mustache costume.
(For next year)
- Fixed an issue where the Foxbattlebots during the To the Convention! open mission wouldn't always follow Foxbat to his next location.
- Fixed an issue where a fake foxbat downtown wasn't counting towards the mission.
Powers
- When using the Tunneling travel power, certain auras that conflicted are now disabled while the travel power is active.
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Comments
Feedback for the Event Currency now that it's over:
Account Bound Event Currency: A great addition that let me play characters I wanted to play at the time instead of the ones that needed/wanted something from the store, that may have been inconvenient or otherwise not preferred to play at that time.
Account Bound Event Sidekick: This is good. I didn't often need sidekicks on the characters I was playing, so they became clutter. Now I can just move it around to where I want it, if I want it.
Sidekick/Premium Currency: Replacing the wrapper is overall fine. I don't have to keep track of which character(s) are doing 10/10 event wrapper. The week 2 change to allow excess SK/Prem currency to be turned in for additional general tokens was also very welcome. I didn't feel compelled to do extra runs on additional characters till I was sick of it and it's alleviated some of the event burnout I might usually feel.
Daily Timers: Changing from Acquisition to Turn-In was fine for this event because the dailies are fast. This won't work as well during other events where dailies will take longer, in particular the large OMs that can have long delays in grouping and completion: High Noon, Nightmare Colossus, Doomlords, Takofanes, and to a lesser degree Clarence. These can easily push an offset greater than the 20-hour cooldown's 4-hour grace period can cover for on slow days, particularly for players with off-peak playtimes. It doesn't really impact me since my playtime is pretty fluid, but it makes the difference on getting a daily done or not for some.
Currency Expiration: Decluttering the currency window passively instead of it getting worse over the course of the year would be nice. The 30-day timeout could probably be extended to 40 for the sake of the two 4-week (28 day) events we have during the year: Winter Event and Anniversary. That'd cover the 1 week the vendor lingers. Unless the currency timer refreshes when you get more, in which case disregard this consideration. My only remaining concern on this section is what it means for the Reprint event at the end of the year.
Overall the account-wide event currency is an improvement, except for that bump at the end which wasn't an issue (for me at least) during this particular event, but may be in others.
Thank you.
Account-bound currency in and of itself was always going to be a huge QoL increase on the small scale in allowing people to use one character to acquire auras or devices for another character, enabling people who just want to get one or two specific costume pieces to do it all in one day rather than having to space out just one or two characters over several days. In turn, the currency expiration isn't exactly problematic; I'd argue it doesn't really even make a difference outside of wondering how this'll affect the end-of-year Reprint event. And making sidekicks account-bound is nice for avoiding clutter as well as giving a little boost to sub-40 characters still stuck in leveling without having to spend extra Gs or SK vouchers on it. However.
The change to daily cooldown timers to be on turn-in rather than completion is something that people who are only playing on one or two or three characters are grievously underselling to the detriment of everyone else. Running sixteen characters worth of ten-to-twelve-minutes-each-on-a-good-day Foxbat dailies was miserable due to being punished for so much as taking a bathroom break due to how long it takes to check off that many characters at once, and exactly as I predicted, not being able to hold to an exact consistent "show up every single day at the exact same time on the dot (you work for us now) OR ELSE" schedule meant I lost multiple days worth of dailies and, in tandem with the price hike from 400 to 500 tokens, would have been unable to get every last unlock I needed were it not for the last-week introduction of the Mega-Foxbattlebot OM letting me buy a lot of unlocks from other players. This pairs noticeably with the removal of the wrapper missions, which, while I don't have any objection to in and of itself, does mean that at the 5-day or 10-day mark, bursts of 500 extra tokens to 1k or more are now completely missing, which partly offsets the QoL/flexibility of account-bound currency. Which leads into the issue of...
Sidekick and Premium currencies are much worse than wrappers for the same reason dailies are worse now: the cooldown nerf means that even a slight instability in schedule can wildly throw off cooldown and force missed days. Sure, sure, unlike regular dailies I suppose you could just stay awake 20 hours straight and keep a dedicated back-up character doing dailies independently of others to force a roll-back of the timer every single day to regain lost days over the course of one every five, but... saying that should highlight how ridiculous forcing players- some of whom have jobs, lives, etcetera- to do that is, and if it doesn't then I recommend professional counseling because that just ain't right. If cooldown started on initial accepting instead of on turn-in like it used to, and I'm not sure how you'd do that with these new account-wide wrapper-tokens instead of the old per-character wrapper missions, then this would not be a concern, nor would the prior issue of daily CDs forcing players to lock in at the exact same time every single day and not take a single break unless they want their timers rolling forward whether slowly or violently and forcing them to miss days as a result. (Which achieves the opposite of what I'm at least guessing this decision to try and force players to log on every day instead of using CD-on-pickup to double down every other day and skip a day was meant to do, by instead giving people no reason to log on at all on a day they'll now be forced to miss by bad timing.)
Like I've said in prior posts these last few weeks, these issues are only going to be even worse when it comes to any event that requires other people to complete dailies, especially ones that have a high player requirement, between not enough people being online late-night to get things done, so many people online (for zone caps being so utterly tiny these days) that people are having to back up one or even two zones waiting for access (especially a problem during Blood Moon and Anniversary but also a Nightmare Invasion and Christmas/Winter problem,) server hiccups causing forced wastes of time via SNRs and zone collapses (this was already crazy common during Foxbat for whatever reason and I do not look forward to having to handle a dozen Takofanes a day under those conditions) and more. And that's before even acknowledging once again that real life will be a kick in the pants at all times for this.
Of particular note, this harms:
1 - late-night-only players,
2 - mid-day-only players,
3 - new players or old returning players trying to catch up on unlocks in bulk,
4 - players who don't have several dozen free/available characters to cheese easy or casual dailies (read: Fox Hunt, Trick Or Treat, the winter tinker toys I forget the name of, etcetera) with,
5 - players with unstable internet connections (rise up my boondocks gang,)
6 - players with unstable/glitchy computers liable to crashing CO or crashing completely often,
7 - players with unstable work schedules and/or unstable sleep schedules who cannot match a consistent early-morning, very-late-day or early-night schedule and force themselves to play hours at those exact hours uninterrupted reliably,
8 - players who regularly can't afford to play at all some days no matter how badly you want to force them to (the largest benefactors of the old cooldown-start-on-pickup system and wrappers tied to individual characters rather than an invisible account-wide cooldown timer,)
? - and more.
While I would be lying if I claimed "oooOOOoOOO I know people who QUIT FOREVER because of this," I have noticed a few random zoners at least claim they won't be bothering with events any more if this is how things are going forward. And while I don't know how true that is for all of them, I'm more inclined to believe the few others who've said this pushes them over the edge towards not recommending this game to potential new-players-to-be, and given that this does overall make bulk unlocking of costume pieces from events much, much more excruciating and this game's sole biggest allure is the sheer amount of costume customization, I absolutely get why.
All in all, while making event currencies account-bound is a big QoL increase, the myriad of other changes that come packaged with it are enormous QoL decreases to the bulk of players in various ways that, overall, just make this a downgrade from the old cooldown-on-pickup-but-character-specific-tokens system that, ironically, just leaves myself and many others not wanting to log in daily, despite the fact this change tries to force people to log in daily and clock in the nine-to-five grind like a job instead of a hobby in the first place.
TL;DR:
Would recommend keeping account-bound currency.
Would recommend keeping account-bound Loyal Sidekicks.
Disapprovingly/sourly indifferent on store price changes.
Questioningly/openly indifferent on event currency having a 30-day timer before expiring.
Would recommend making wrapper tokens for costumes and SKs CD on pickup (somehow) or reverting new wrapper tokens to old wrapper missions if this is impossible.
Would recommend reverting daily cooldown timer to on-pickup instead of on-turn-in.
Edited for a few typo fixes.
This is my cry for help
Account-wide tokens are a nice QoL increase. Who would've thought.
I'm kinda indifferent on the Premium creds. Functionally, they're practically wrapper missions minus the bonus rewards at the end. Looking with a developer's point-of-view, I kinda get the switch. Still prefer wrappers, but eh.
Sidekick creds, on the other hand, I still would've preferred if it didn't have a daily limit. Didn't matter much in this event, but sometimes I'd want a specific sidekick on more than 3 characters, and I don't want the hassle of passing the item around. Remove the limit. Who cares if people with a lot of alts gets the sidekick immediately. Upside, that's a few less variables the game has to keep track of. Without a limit, it's just a +1 on the accountwide sidekick cred counter, no need for timers or counting how many creds that account has accumulated for that time period.
Looking at it, there's also the Circus Malvanum wrapper that rewards a vehicle. I'd hate it if that's a vehicle I want on multiple characters but I can't get multiples of.
Cooldown timers. One thing I feared actually happened. I had a busy day doing not-game-related-stuff, and my timers were fucked the next day. Good thing it happened right at the last day of the event, and I wasn't chasing anything anymore. Please just let the cooldowns start on pickup. Please.
Or revert to wrappers if it's the extra currencies' fault that you can't make the cooldowns on pick up. Theoretically you don't have to - referencing the mission's cooldown timer to attach to the accountwide Premium timer should be doable, but I have no idea how much of a spaghetti the game code is.
I have two concerns about currency expiration - long events and repeated events. It's already said by other posts, but wouldn't the 30-day expiration be bad for 4-week events? The other thing is that I like to hold tokens for repeated events like Invasion or High Noon for the next one to ease the grind and/or act as a safety net if I'd be unable to play that event. Guess that's a bad thing.
Finally, it may be because of where I live, but the game has been extremely laggy on the second week. I don't know if it's because of the new stuff or something, but I started getting seven-second latency plateaus during said week.
Event Currency:
If dealing with overall event currency being account-wide, this is a positive change.
The negative is having had the pricing adjusted to the event stores: this makes little sense. I don't think the price changes do much else but marginally increase overall player retention.
Question 1: does the '30 day timer' get reset every time a player earns/picks up the currency? That isn't made clear.
If not, this may possibly present a problem with the Anniversary event.
Question 2: how will account-wide Currencies be handled with Events which show up multiple times, such as Circus Malvanum; High Noon; Nightmare Invasion, and Nighthawk? A 30-day timer on any currencies earned during those might cause friction with the playerbase, much like when Event Currencies went from "forever" to "yearly".
Premium / Sidekick Currency and Rewards
The 20hr cooldown timer ought to start on pick-up rather than on Mission completion.
I understand that the timer-choice could be to prevent players from 'douple-dipping' every other day, but I've had a few times where I logged in; saw the timers weren't up, and immediately logged out. Probably not intended player behavior.
I am positive about wrapper rewards being made account-bound - the problem being that not all players are Premium or LTS, and as such lack a Hideout/Account-wide storage. There's only a single chance per year to earn Hideouts.
While it's possible to purchase a Hideout via Zen, they aren't promoted well to players - leaving casual/newbie players confused as to how to transfer Account-Wide items between characters.
As for the special event currencies themselves, it oddly feels less fun to earn these.
It might be as easy as changing the amount of currency earned per Mission, but the chore of "gotta do that mission across all characters I want that reward on" changed into the chore of ticking off a checklist: "got this 1 coin, got these 3 coins with these characters, I'm done for the day". I'm unsure how to increase the 'fun' factor however, so consider this a personal problem.
This system encourages alting on a level this game has lost sight of since Snowflakes were first introduced and the Silver rec change that lowered farm and inflated heroic gear cost.
The cooldown on premium event currency is the compromise we'll have to deal with so that we don't have to deal with these 10 dailies sets. Unless it is possible to make event cooldowns just reset when alert dailies reset. Sure players can farm two dailies within hours of each other, but people can work around a specific time rather than set a timer for 20 hours.
Of the few hours I can get on at any given time, I always come across people who don't know the hideout provides account wide storage and that it even exists as well as Supergroup bank storage. They've had to trust random people to trade their items across characters.
Ever since Arc stopped giving away one hideout to all accounts, the information "has been lost".
-=-=-=-=-=-(CO in-game handle: @WarCan )-=-=-=-=-=-
"Okay, you're DEAD, what do you do NEXT?"
This has been a really long 2 weeks. Are we almost done with the collector's lockbox?