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Make GCR account wide/GCR vendor Gear Bind on pickup
notyuu
Posts: 1,121 Arc User
It's as simple as the title sounds, do one or the other or both.
as for the reasoning behind it... that's simple
I'm sure that I'm not the only person in this situation: the cosmic/TA runs are looking for healers, but I have no use for GCR on my healer, instead I need it on my tank, but very few to none of the teams are looking for a tank, meaning that I get very little runs done.
the result before change: you can eaither get GCR on your healer and waste it on things you don't need or you can spend upwards of 4 hours looking/waiting for a group to run with your tank.
the result after change: you run with your healer and move the GCR over to your tank, who needs it or you save it up on the healer and buy the gear piece and then move it over.
as for the reasoning behind it... that's simple
I'm sure that I'm not the only person in this situation: the cosmic/TA runs are looking for healers, but I have no use for GCR on my healer, instead I need it on my tank, but very few to none of the teams are looking for a tank, meaning that I get very little runs done.
the result before change: you can eaither get GCR on your healer and waste it on things you don't need or you can spend upwards of 4 hours looking/waiting for a group to run with your tank.
the result after change: you run with your healer and move the GCR over to your tank, who needs it or you save it up on the healer and buy the gear piece and then move it over.
In all things, a calm heart must prevail.
Member of Paragon Dawn: Because some people like friendly helpful communities.
Yeah some things are broken... no I don't use/abuse them.. where would be the fun in that?
Member of Paragon Dawn: Because some people like friendly helpful communities.
Yeah some things are broken... no I don't use/abuse them.. where would be the fun in that?
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The real solution is for those dpsers to engage in that old past-time, alting, and make healer and tank alts. If every dps player ( you know, the ones that sit in large groups waiting for healers and tanks to show up ) made a tank and a healer alt, we'd have a surplus of tanks and healers to gear up for quite a while to come.
That's right, the current system encourages alting after all.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Member of Paragon Dawn: Because some people like friendly helpful communities.
Yeah some things are broken... no I don't use/abuse them.. where would be the fun in that?
If I were going for gear, I would be alting even less.
Whoever you are, be that person one hundred percent. Don't compromise on your identity.
I currently have: three tanks and a healer that don't have any need for GCR gear, and a small handful of DPS that could actually use GCR gear. Because of the way GCR & GCR purchases bind to characters, I'm stuck: if I bring the characters that are most useful to the group, I'm not rewarded for doing the content, while if I bring the characters that could use the rewards I get to sit around waiting in hopes that other people have some use for GCR on their tanks / healers.
Member of Paragon Dawn: Because some people like friendly helpful communities.
Yeah some things are broken... no I don't use/abuse them.. where would be the fun in that?
Why should i bring an alt for a desirable role if i don't benefit from gcr on any of my alts in those roles?
For your argument to even work, everyone would have to make tank and healer alts, and then care about them enough to want to gear said alts with gcr gear instead of using their limited playtime to gear the dps character they actually want that gear on. That's just not going to happen. We wait for people who want to use tanks and healers on gcr content, because they're the ones who actually benefit from doing so.
Even if everything else was equal, playtime is limited. You never seem to understand that. Maybe you're in the fortunate position of having no job or other obligations which require your time. Most people aren't so fortunate - stop insisting on time costs for them.
- Recognition rewards are generally designed with a diminishing rate per day -- for example, your first TA run gets you 12 GCr, the second and third get you 7, and the fourth and subsequent get you nothing. Alting bypasses this limit.
- On the other hand, are a fair number of things you can buy that are account-level unlocks, so you can already use multiple alts to unlock them in parallel. If there are five costume parts I want to buy, I can cycle five alts and each alt buys one.
- Bind to character recognition means that you need to actually play the character you're equipping.
- It is significantly easier to get a team together if everyone can play any role.
- I personally find continually playing a single character boring.
Some hybrid might be the best option, such as a tax on transfers or a limit to how much you can receive via transfers.Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
Diablo 2 had no binding whatsoever, and last i looked still had more players than CO does despite being 15 years old with graphics to match. And when you got an interesting or useful drop, it frequently created the *interest* in playing a new character. Rampant passing of items between alts was expected and normal.
If someone says "Well my healer has the gear so I'm no longer logging in on them" and then says "wtf there's never enough healers", that's basically someone slapping themselves in the face with a cream pie and then crying about their shirt having cream stains on it.
People keep acting as if Distinguished Gear is the only thing on these vendors. Look again, there's plenty of stuff on there that characters other than the one farming the recog will benefit from... in fact, it may very well be the majority.
The current system encourages alting. The ones preventing that from happening are the players. It's not the dev's minds you need to change, it's the minds of your fellow players who are sitting there staring at you waiting for you to switch characters. Fact is, even with communal recognition, those players still wouldn't alt when you need them to - but I will
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Well, you dated yourself and shown you don't really play modern games or MMOs.
Silverspar on PRIMUS
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Whoever you are, be that person one hundred percent. Don't compromise on your identity.
There's also another effect of this system that's pretty wonderful: You have to perform on a given character to get the goods. A player can't just sit back and farm up a bunch of tokens on a dps character, then use those tokens to gear up their tank or healer, and then come lumbering up to the cosmic thinking they're hot saucy business with their full set of Distinguished gear. Someone wants that gear on a character, they have to actually play that character, and maybe even get good at playing that character. Motivation to actually become better... this game spent a lot of time without that, didn't it?
Simply put, this system values "quality" over "quantity". It is designed to make you spend quality time with your characters, rather than just swapping between them to see what quantity of total progression you can grind up per a given number of hours.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
hmmm now that I think about it... I will use my other toons more often
This is a big journey, so far if you're reading this, wish you a good day
And why would I spend much time playing modern games when there are so many good old ones? (Also, I don't just play RPG and similar games, but grand strategy and 4x games obviously don't have gear binding, because they don't tend to have gear).
That said, I've also played Path of Exile (which is both an MMO and recent), and I'm 99% sure it doesn't have gear binding either, but i haven't fired it up in about a year, so i'll reserve a little uncertainty. Similarly, Torchlight and Torchlight 2 (the latter of which is certainly an MMO) don't have any gear binding. All three encourage passing equipment between alts. Maybe we just play totally different modern games?
Binding is an artificial mechanic that has no motivation in game-reality, and honestly, I think it's pretty dumb and gamey, and if instead of simplifying gear with On Alert they had expanded its diversity, i don't think there'd be any need for it. Actually, all Cryptic's games seem to have that problem - gear is too limited and rarely interesting. Mostly just a source of numbers.
And if you have played lots of MMORPGs, than you obviously forgot all the binding, or, you are lucky to have found the few that do not do that. For passing of items between alts, is not an expected or normal thing in MMORPGs.
In fact, the reason they have bind on pickup gear is to encourage playing alts, which means more time spent playing their game, which means more money (somehow), and better ratings. I've played almost 50 different MMORPGs, most of them (over 40 of them) had the binding system.
besides resources , Questionite, vehicles , mods ,silver rec gear , costume unlocks , event items , power unlocks and a whole bunch of other stuff is earned on one character and used on others ,
I had a discussion in trade with a group of people who kept saying about devaluing the currency by allowing other characters to use it and that was the reason why its bound, I currently have one character that farms gold rec , to be honest its only for the costume unlocks that I will use on my other characters ,I consider her own gear is better than the gold rec stuff (( full onslaught secondary's , and justice and legion , going for full justice ) so to her its worthless except for that , it would actually have value if I could use it elsewhere , so could someone actually explain how that reasoning works to me?
more alts means I buy more stuff for them, once a character is geared up with bind on pick up stuff , no point in bothering with earning it anymore
I get what you're saying, Spinny. I alt among four toons: tank, healer, DPS, and healer/DPS mix (my main). Since I care more about costumes/powers than gear, it works great for me.
Many players really like alting; really like changing toons for every single mission/alert/etc. Some love the "grind machine" aspect: earning massive amounts of currency is fun for them. Some love the constant variety, and the ability to pool resources makes that even sweeter. I understand those ways of playing, and engage in them myself, at times. Unfortunately, Epic/Cosmic play is not meant to match those ways of playing the game.
I would like to note that GCR is specifically NOT meant for content that favors solo play or alting. Devs have stated that it is to reward team play, to reward skilled play, to reward focus. Pooling recog just doesn't seem like something that will happen in the near future because it would directly contradict stated dev goals.
Whoever you are, be that person one hundred percent. Don't compromise on your identity.
And for items/economy, in terms of player-interaction it was exactly the same as anything you'd consider an MMORPG, because tons of players fed items into a common economy. (Indeed, most of what you'd consider an MMORPG would be ecstatic to have a trading community one-tenth as vibrant as D2's was in its heyday).
Path of Exile is also definitely an MMORPG, and similarly has no binding. I would also argue for Torchlight 2, which also has no binding. Both of these have shared stashes to deliberately facilitate passing items between alts, because both companies understood that a good item system encouraged alts because finding interesting gear for a build you weren't playing could give you the impetus to make a new character.
Just because lots of MMORPGs do it doesn't make binding a good system. Whereas it was the item system which helped make D2 so popular. (Proven by the most common D2 mod feature being new items, and the top mods having the widest range of creative and interesting items.)
People's ideas about what an MMORPG is and should be seem hopelessly limited. I'd rather model an rpg item system off the bar-none empirically-proven best item system ever to grace a multiplayer game no matter what micro-category you want to paint it with. Because D2 still has the best item system I've ever seen, and the player, economy, and mod development back that up. (Not that there aren't improvements that could be made, but certainly binding would not be an improvement).
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Edit: And regardless, bind on equip isn't nearly so bad as bind on pickup, which is an abomination and should be abolished.
To me one of the "fake difficulties" with fighting cosmics is the amount of time it can take to get all the right types of heroes on hand. The fights themselves don't necessarily take long and anything that makes it easier to get to the fight is a good thing. I bet organizing would speed up a bit if players knew they weren't going to be penalized (i.e. lose the GCR and SCR that day that they really want for a specific reward for a specific character) if they switched to a character that they didn't really want/need the reward on but which would help the group get going.
what about altering the vendor items to be BoE instead of BoP?
Member of Paragon Dawn: Because some people like friendly helpful communities.
Yeah some things are broken... no I don't use/abuse them.. where would be the fun in that?
I'd appreciate it if the game's reward structure was designed to discourage selfish behavior. We're playing a superhero game; let us feel like heroes when we go get the right character to help the team, rather than failures who won't be rewarded for our time and effort.
Of course, in that sort of situation, there's no real burden on the person calling 911. Even without that burden, generally asking fails miserably.
It gets worse.
In this situation, there's a definite penalty to being the one that switches. Now you're getting GCR on the wrong character. So your motivation is to not switch and hope someone else does, because then you do get GCR on the right character. Switching is equivalent to not playing at all for anyone who can only really build GCR on one character (won't be on 4 hours later, whatever), so the possibility that someone else will switch or a tank/healer will show up makes the possibility of playing with their chosen character much more valuable than switching, even if the odds are low, because the possibility is better than the guarantee of no relevant reward. There's literally nothing you can do to convince them to switch without solving that rewards problem. When standing around not playing is more rewarding than switching characters to play, guess what's going to happen.
(And even if you do solve it, you still have the first problem).
Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
Anyways back on topic...
Champions has built up a history of allowing you to earn endgame gear on alts allowing you to freely alt between characters as needed to complete content and still earn the rewards and gear you want for other characters at a reasonably decent rate. The recent direction of endgame gear with Onslaught & GCR gear has turned a complete 180 and made it so that you absolutely must grind countless hours of the same content on each individual character that you want the gear for. This change was completely out of left field consdering the history the game has had with endgame gear. BoP was practically an unheard of concept within CO until recently, only reward items from achievements, missions, and vet rewards were BoP. Until recently we have never had BoP gear from anything other than mission rewards and heirlooms. So you can understand why so many are ticked about the new direction. It was completely unexpected.
Combine this with the relatively astronomical prices and youve got a new direction that has actually driven people way... Yes people have quit the game over these changes, and many of those who didnt quit have quit bothering with endgame content in one form or another.
Spinny argues that the new direction encourages alting... but the fact of the matter is that the new direction encourages selective play and specialization. You need look no furthar that the fact that many prominant altoholics have sworn off gearing alts and somehave sworn off making any new alts to see the effect that this has already had. It encourages players to pick a niche to fill and hope that thre are enough players filling the other roles to complete the content. Infact it pushes CO squarely into the holy Trinity system that for the longest time the community here has been quite vocal about CO not being a trinity game. But now I see many of the very same players arguing the importance of Tanks and Healers, and the oversaturation of DPS...
A well known fact of MMOs... Tanks and Healers are rare gems and DPS are a dime a dozen... So it goes without saying that DPS will end up waiting for groups for far longer than Tanks and Healers... it also goes without saying that there are far more people who want to play DPS than Tank or Heal. When the new direction of Endgame Content makes tanks and healers a requirement AND the new direction of endgame rewards makes engame gear BoP rather than the BoE that has been the norm within CO for years, you are going to tick people off and you are not going to accomplish the intended goal. This new direction says 2 things simultaniously:
"You need a Tank and Healer to proceed" - This is pretty common place in MMOs and normally isnt all that big of a deal... but when you make this requirement in a freeform game where the trinity system was largely non-existant and people could make jack-of-all trades hybrid builds that could previously preform equally effective in solo leveling content and group endgame content but now are inadiquate in th new endgame... you create problems... the CO community as a whole was not ready for this type of paradigm shift... Dont get me wrong though, the shift was nessisary on this front. The community as a whole had been for the longest time focused on solo play and the whole concept of team play was foreign to most. This change will, given enough time, cause the community to explore more team oriented play styles and in the end may result in many much needed changes to various powers and play styles.
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"You must play the character you wish to gear" - Again this is pretty common place in MMOs and normally isnt a big deal... but again it was an unexpected paradigm shift that the community s a whole was not prepaired for. It has its upsides like the other message, since it does make people learn to play their characters rather than play their main all the time and then gear up a character that they dont even know how to play... but this runs into the problem that there arnt enough people playing Tanks and Healers to regularlly complete the new content for everyone. Those who only play DPS or wish to gear up their DPS rather than their Healer or Tank are punished in CO. Those who only play DPS expect those who have Tanks and Healers to switch so that they can get their gear, and those who have Tanks and Healers and want to gear their DPS have no desire or incentive to switch.
If the new gear was BoE, I can guarantee that those who have Tanks and Healers would switch on slow days to help things go faster since they know they can still get the gear they need.
Me personally, Ive got 23 non-DPS biulds... 10 of those are Tanks, 7 of them are Healers, and the remaining 6 are CC... 1 of those tanks and 2 of those CC can also run as Healers... and 1 of those Healers can turn her whole party into Tanks with 115% Resistance on top of whatever they already had... and if she had any real offensive ability she could run in hybrid role with 203% Resistance for herself and possibly tank... Out of those 23 non-DPS builds, 4 of the Tanks, 3 of the CC, and 3 of the Healers are level 40.
I'm cynical. I think that "the system", as you put it, is designed because there is a chart in a boardroom somewhere that says the average hamster will run on a wheel for x amount of time if you dangle a carrot at y distance. Which leads to me to the thing I really want to talk about... This is a huge issue for me personally, and this thread is ultimately about asking for some relief from the grind for the already alt-inclined users. This game already attracts and encourages alt fiends, like no other I have played, just not necessarily alts that fit into the classic mmo trinity. The promotional material says "Be the hero you want to be", not "Be the hero we think you should want to be."
Devices and gear combinations could be a source of interesting and compelling gameplay, particularly after level 40. The potential is there. The combination of prices, rate of currency accumulation, and (in)ability to transer that currency, is the opposite of encouraging me to create and play alts. It actually forces me to choose between playing an alt or grinding one character in order to get one item, no matter what that item is.
As a consequence, devices and endgame gear combinations are almost completely divorced from my motivation for playing the game, participating in group content, and subscribing.
- As we discussed yesterday, "quality" use of my time would be to avoid the Cosmics entirely and do TA runs instead, if I wanted to jump on the currency hamster wheel and focus on gearing a single character.
- I should spend my zen on questionite and instantly have a bunch of devices. Philosophically, this is much closer to the equivalent of interacting with a gold seller than immersive gameplay for me personally. It really cheapens the experience for me.
I can only speak for myself, but when I stop subscribing to this game it will not be because I got teh juhstiz gearzorz awn all mai toonzeh pew pew yolo rekt swag. The lack of accessible endgame gear/device experimentation as a form of gameplay will certainly be a factor, however.
People use arbitrary terms. They don't mean anything. In what way is Path of Exile not an MMO?
Yes, they're also 'dungeon crawlers', but how does that stop them from being MMOs? Cryptic's own NWO is very obviously both a dungeon crawler and an MMO. How is a "co-op arpg" with tons of players not an MMO? What is the functional difference? More importantly, what is the functional difference that matters in terms of equipment binding?
(I mean, it's clear from Cryptic's own press releases that CO is supposed to be an action rpg too, so that's certainly not a difference).
I mean, this term "MMO" seems to have no meaning whatsoever. "It's well known" is just an excuse people who don't actually know use to avoid having to explain - usually because no explanation is possible.
The difference is in the scale. I will remind you 1-20 players is NOT "large numbers of players" the first game to ever be tagged with the "MMO" label allowed for 100+ players to play together simultaneously. Now while PoE may qualify as an MMO, D2 and Torchlight do NOT. Sure the play style between D2 and PoE are the same, but the playstyle is not what defines a game as an MMO. And an MMO Dungeon Crawler will differ greatly from an MMORPG. When you look at games that fall specifically into the MMORPG genre you will find that the vast majority of them use a lot of the same features, and while everyone claims they are all "WoW clones" or "following the WoW model" the truth is actually a bit different, many of the features that are shared among nearly every MMORPG out there are actually from older MMORPGs than WoW, and others were first seen in MMORPGs newer than WoW and later copied by WoW. Item Binding is one of those older concepts... and since you said that D2 doesn't have item binding I must direct you to the Blacksmith in D2 and the option to "Customize" your gear which is quite literally just binding under a different name.
If you want more relevant differences, the games have entirely different play styles. You wouldn't say that a top-down shooter was the same as an FPS or TPS, they are completely different play styles. In an MMORPG you play through the story one time with a single character, you can't go back and repeat every quest in the game. In a Co-op ARPG you can go back to the first quest in the game and play the entire game all over again an endless number of times on a single character, and infact the game is designed to make you do just that to progress past a certain point.
Also, there is bound items even in D3 (certain reward packs in the game bind the items in them to you for example). Many a time have me or a friend I was questing with got a legendary with a new look that we wanted to share with each other for transmog purposes, but couldn't.
But as others have pointed out, while the whole thing is trying to promote alting, the stupidly high prices on everything is preventing the alting. A simple solution there would be to either increase the rewards from sources, or decrease the prices. I realize they are trying to get people to play the game, but they are doing it wrong. They want people to play? The solution is to create more permanent content that is less frustrating, and more fun. And while doing that ignoring the min/maxers so they don't just create stupid fights with lots of one-shotting going on.
A player's position on the chart is meaningless. If you contribute a certain amount then you get the reward, and that amount is not that hard to get.
I have seen a couple of times where a tank did not get the reward and think that they need to work on that, but DPS doesn't get better stuff than anyone else.
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I have one character I play a lot and one that I play less. Add to that two more that I play occasionally and an awakened AT that I haven't touched in nearly two years (and haven't even gotten to 40 yet. I just stopped caring about the powers that were the only reason I made the character to begin with).
Both are built as hybrids, especially my main. Regeneration makes for a poor tank and I have no DPS passive.
Guess I am now a drag on cosmic teams.
I posted in another thread how I didn't think that I would be welcome on many F&I teams, but people said otherwise. I still haven't checked in game to see how welcome I might be, but it seems certain that I am now a liability in at least some of these cosmic fights, and TA most likely as well.
Fighting Teleiosaurus? She has specific DPS checks. Who can't do as much DPS as others around him? Me.
Why? Because I decided to build a hybrid by design and chose a passive that makes him pretty much stick with being a hybrid.
Maybe my secondary can get away with tanking, or at least maybe eventually, because their gear needs improvements (I dropped nearly half a million questionite on the spot a few nights ago to get him vigilante gear because we needed tanks for Kiga and I said that I would try to help and still think that I might need to respec him again to make other improvements), but isn't gearing up a big reason to even do this?
Not like either of the other two couldn't benefit from better gear, but they are so far removed from my mind as far as doing this goes that they don't even rate consideration.
At the rate my main is going, it's going to take me a long time just to get him geared up, never mind the extras.
*IF* I get the daily done once in a day I am doing good. How many days to get a full set of gear at even that rate?
When people are saying "Need 1 tank, 1 healer, and 3 DPS for TA", are they asking for a hybrid at all?
Because I guarantee at this time that they are not asking for me to bring my secondary character as a tank.
Mark me down as voting to make at least the GCR an account currency.
Do not make the gear BoE. That would allow people to bypass the cosmic fights altogether to get the gear.
Secondly, TA requires 2 tanks, 1 healer, and 2 DPS... though that second tank doesnt nessisarily have to be a dedicated tank... they just have to be able to keep adds off the rest of the party, a crowd controller can take this role quite effectively, as can most hybrids. Basically if you have defensie passive, know how to block, or have strong AoE Holds you can Off-Tank for TA...All you gotta do is grab aggro of all the adds and stay on the opposite side of the room from the rest of the party...
Maybe if I had certain super stats or was using certain gear, but I'm not. I'm sure a healer would help, but heck, a good enough healer could make a lot of things work, I would guess.
I've tried to help out. I saw one of Kiga's dogs going untanked and so I switched to tank stance, aggroed it, and lasted a few seconds before I got taken out.
I'm not saying that someone trying to set themselves up as a regen tank might not be able to make it work, but me?
It certainly isn't how I am set up to do things.
Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.