FC.31.20240306.24 - Event Account Currency

Comments

• rinzler156 Posts: 121 Arc User

  March 26 edited March 26

  So I'm not gonna sugarcoat it, especially since I went over this concept over and over again in my head. Introducing a brand new currency to once again, an already inflated economy, in an area that doesn't need this, is a bad idea.
  
  I know you're trying this out as an idea, but this is essentially an extra-grindy event-based thing that not allows an account-wide grind, but has it greatly restricted, and from the looks of it by one of them, doesn't even allow it.
  
  The only good thing I can really see is if you wanted to grind these missions on one character and then decided to switch to another character to grind, but a decent portion of the players do not use multiple characters unless it is to grind the normal event currency that is earned by the character, just to be able to buy more of whatever is new from the event store.
  
  This will cut *some* grind down for certain "super special items", sure. But, this is for two extraneous currencies.

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• thisiscraftaaa Posts: 251 Arc User

  March 27

  I have a few immediate concerns.
  
  
  
  
  
  One: how does the game account for capping out on the 10-day not-wrapper costume unlock tokens each day, which is arguably the most pressing issue here? Regardless of whether it's based on when the mission is completed- starting the cooldown only then- or what 20-hour "segment" of the server's global rewards timer (see also: cosmic rewards, TA/TT rewards, etcetera) it's finished on, this could be particularly harmful towards people with irregular schedules, like anyone rotating forwards or backwards several hours a day. (Previously, being able to take advantage of how dailies' cooldowns started when you first accepted them, and wrappers being based off of that, allowed players with irregular schedules to somewhat compensate for those schedules depending on how they went about it.)
  
  I would advise- if we're sticking to this token system- increasing the cap to 2 tokens a day instead of 1, or, and I'm going to be honest, just sticking to the old wrapper system, which I don't like at all but recognize is still more forgiving and user-friendly than this as it is, at least in its current interpretation.
  
  
  
  Two: while the Loyal Sidekicks aren't nearly as much of a concern, the thought arises that some people might want to get specific strains of Loyal Sidekicks for their characters in bulk instead of having to shuffle just one or two across a dozen characters, which- speaking from personal experience as somebody who way, way back in subscribed to the silly "one set of Heirlooms across twenty characters saves money!" mindset- wastes a massive amount of time and is incredibly un-fun to have to do.
  
  Might I suggest, instead, throwing out Loyal Sidekick tokens entirely (trimming down unnecessary currency clutter in the process) and making it an account-wide perk that allows you- at any time of year- to purchase the Loyal Sidekick in question from the Fixer, or whatever vendor would be the most appropriate, on as many characters as necessary? Or if we still need to force multiple new currency types despite the resulting clutter and coding headaches, simplifying things by making it so that acquiring the appropriate number of Loyal Sidekick tokens and spending them unlocks the ability to pick up as many copies of the correct Loyal Sidekick in question as you want from the Fixer (or whichever vendor is appropriate.) (After all, even if you take out the whole "Loyal Sidekick grind every year" deal, people will still be doing the exact same missions anyways- just as many of them, if not more than before due to the increase of gold costume unlock prices- just for the regular event currency to get unlocks with.)
  
  
  
  Three: the increase in price of gold costume unlocks. It seems like a small thing on the surface, but my concern is twofold. Firstly, a questioning: between this increase and the Loyal Sidekick token cap being 3 a day, it seems like we're moving up from "2 characters for 10 days" being the intended for keeping up with new costume unlocks for events to "3 characters for 10 days" being intended? Which is... unpleasant, but technically not the worse. However. Where this seems especially problematic to me is for players attempting to catch up on old event unlocks. See, the Trade Paperback- for the purposes of costume unlocks in particular- is already extremely expensive for anyone that isn't dedicating six hours a day to twelve batches of 4+1 Serial missions explicitly to catch up, and my total respect goes out to anyone willing to subject themselves to that for the sake of completionism. But on top of that, this is a noticeable increase in grind time for anyone attempting to unlock event costumes that are still in their various event vendors, without providing a feasible increase in token gain to compensate. Yes, I am aware that hypothetically someone could just, and I'll use the Anniversary as an example, take advantage of shared event currency by doing the "kill a few Destroids" daily on 30 characters to breeze through, but not every event has something like that; in particular events like Nighthawk are going to be particularly awful moving forward. Very few people, inversely, care about vehicles, bags or titles, and more but still few care about archetypes, so the reduction of their price isn't actually zero-sum.
  
  My own solution would be something simple and easy. Consider this: allow players to spend their Wrapper Costume tokens and Loyal Sidekick tokens at the appropriate event vendor for 100 currency / 50 currency per, respectively, either temporarily or permanently putting off their acquisition of the Wrapper Costume and Loyal Sidekick that event, or rewarding their continued dedicated grind after already acquiring them. This would also serve to make the exchange of Drifter Salvage to event currency actually more... well, worth it. Which is a good thing, since I don't think anybody sane spends Drifter Salvage on event currency right now, and with the introduction of account-wide event currency allowing for perfectly pooling as many characters as possible, that already-tiny number's going to go down even further.
  
  
  
  Four: in and of itself, we simply already have a lot of currencies as it is, that apparently cause server clutter. We had the ability to buy account-wide costume slots taken away and were slapped up the side of the head with a character limit for server clutter reasons, but we still keep having niche currencies plugged in that to my current understanding only get hidden every year instead of actually being wiped and erased from the servers, on top of TT+Rhinoplasty+Eido currencies, which is definitely doing something for server clutter too. And that's to say nothing of the FPS lag it brings whenever the inappropriate windows are open. Do we really need to introduce two extra currencies every event that will probably be reset (namely, just hidden and replaced with the next year's version) every year?
  
  Solution: simply put; either sticking to the wrappers or abandoning "do mission X times for thing" entirely in favor of just putting it all in the event store where it should've been in the first place would be better, at least looking at it from this perspective. Simply let account-wide currencies be a long-asked-for, long-sought-after QoL increase on their own.
  
  
  
  
  
  With all that said, bugfixes and new costume pieces are always welcome and then some, but from an unhealthy amount of experience grinding events both to catch up on old unlocks and just to keep up with new ones, these concerns I've raised remain at the forefront of my mind as they're all noticeable QoL decreases across the board. Making rarely-purchased items like vehicles and bags cheaper is nice, and as a playerbase we've all been asking for account-wide event currencies for a while I think, but the tradeoff here just doesn't seem worth it, as someone who actually plays the game way too much instead of just mostly idling in the Rencen complaining about other people playing the game way too much.

  The fact that the forums refuse to tell you how close you are to the character/post size limit until you attempt to post something that happens to be too big- and the automated spam filter will immediately completely lock you out of posting long-term if you attempt to post or edit posts too close to the character limit- is genuine agony.
  
  This is my cry for help

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• jaazaniah1 Posts: 5,554 Arc User

  March 27

  I am just hoping that if players hate this new system once it is put in place that the devs will have the good grace to reverse course and go back to the old system.​​

  

  Perseus, Captain Arcane, Tectonic Knight, Pankration, Siberiad, Sekhmet, Black Seraph, Clockwork

  Project Attalus: Saving the world so you don't have to!

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• Unknown

  March 27

  This content has been removed.
• historiphile Posts: 95 Arc User

  March 27

  Also going to register my displeasure with jacking up the cost of gold items. I don't care how you justify it, it's annoying and unnecessary.

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• solarfoxy

  solarfoxy#6434

  Posts: 11 Arc User

  March 28

  I like the idea of a currency that can be gathered in the account instead being separated by character. I find it great to grind all the item events in a shorter time. But what I worry is the two extra currencies: the premium and sidekick ones.
  As it's written in the post, this system will be only for this event, but in case you plan to implement it to eventual next events, I suggest you keep the regular event currency and delete the other two ones, basically to simplify things.
  
  About the classic "do this misison x times" quest for an special costume/sidekick, I think they are good just the way they are, or either move those exclusive items to the event vendor and increase the rewards you get by completing that long quest, as it has been said in a previous commentary.

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• crypticbuxom Posts: 4,629 Arc User

  March 28

  Is this premium currency something that applies account wide than just on that specific character? So that we can farm an event on each character and then purchase what we want with currency that was accumulated by all the ones we did dailies on? A system that encourages having multiple characters rather than just farming hard on one character to get something just for them?
  
  If this is so, I don't need to make a spreadsheet to plan on how much farm I need to get all the unlocks anymore and can just play until I get all I need. Even farm to make purchases on all the characters I want that are not good at playing those events.

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• andondarkmore Posts: 678 Arc User

  March 28

  MAybe if items we are farming for is also BIND TO ACCOUNT instead of bind to character.

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• godhandxiii Posts: 95 Arc User

  March 28

  Is this just gonna go to live after today's downtime?
  
  Others have already said what my thoughts are on this, and I don't feel like just regurgitating the same points.

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• ultronyte

  ultronyte#7191

  Posts: 53 Arc User

  March 28 edited March 28

  TLDR: Good changes, overall QoL increase
  
  It genuinely surprises me to see people on this thread being so vocal against these changes. Now that I've gotten first hand experience with how it works, I thought I'd share my thoughts as well, and try not to bloat this post too much.
  
  One thing at a time.
  
  Wrapper missions: I can't comment on what goes behind the scenes regarding server bloat or whatnot, since I don't know how these new premium currencies affect it. These missions are functionally the same as they've always been - do them 10 times, you get a thing at the end. Except now, you can buy that thing with Drifter at a discount if you already have some premium creds to your name. The amount of Drifter you need is proportional to the amount of premium creds you're missing. Now, you can get it day 1 for 400 Drifter Salvage, or day 5 for 200 Drifter Salvage, for example.
  
  Pros: Nice Drifter conversion
  Cons: More currencies to scroll through. Though personally I never really cared about that in CO, I do get overwhelmed when playing an MMO with too many currencies. That being said, the event currencies are wiped eventually, so... I don't know, maybe it's something to consider for newcomers.
  
  Account wide store creds: Love it. For a couple reasons - With enough characters, I can theoretically get everything I want day one just from dailies alone. Without enough characters, well, I imagine it would just work like before, one day at a time, with a slight difference in store prices (which I'll go over in a bit). And you can still farm mobs for currency, if that's your thing. The second reason, and the big one for me - this should significantly reduce the amount of time we wait at an event for specific roles. Need a tank, need a healer? All the rewards go into the same pool now, so I don't see a reason why people wouldn't switch when they're able to.
  
  Pros: Easier accumulation of credits, less downtime at big team events while waiting for the right roles, you can buy stuff for your level 6 RP character.
  Cons: Uhh, I don't know... Maybe currency will be so easy to get that it loops back around to waiting at events cause everyone already got everything they wanted on the first few days. Hard to say right now.
  
  Store price changes: Yeah, yeah, a 500 cost on gold costumes sucks, we get it. Personally, with these new changes, I don't think getting those costumes is gonna be much different than it was before. I got a 500 gold costume I wanted on day 1, with four characters. I didn't do the specific math for the total of JUST the daily missions, but each character got roughly 125 credits at the end, plus/minus any creds dropped from the few enemies I killed for bags. So, four characters per day, for every 500 cost costume. You can adjust the math according to the number of characters you decide to use. In my opinion, this is a meaningless change for most veterans, but maybe tougher for new players without more than the two character slots they get at the start.
  
  Pros: Cheaper bags is nice, inventory clutter is a nightmare in this game.
  Cons: Slightly more expensive gold costumes. Shouldn't matter too much *The rate at which you get these costumes shouldn't be much different than before, except for people with limited characters. Personally I'd meet in the middle at 450.
  
  
  Maybe I bloated this post too much.
  
  *Edit: Poor wording, edited for clarification.

  Post edited by ultronyte#7191 on March 28

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• historiphile Posts: 95 Arc User

  March 28 edited March 28

  ultronyte#7191 wrote: »

  TLDR:
  Cons: Slightly more expensive gold costumes. Shouldn't matter too much except for people with limited characters. Personally I'd meet in the middle at 450.
  
  
  Maybe I bloated this post too much.

  
  If it really doesn't matter, then why change it at all? It's a minor annoyance, sure. But an annoyance all the same.
  

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• heartstringsk3 Posts: 160 Arc User

  March 30

  Yeah, I don't think the price increase for gold items is a dealbreaker, but I'm really, really, really, really hoping the devs take this into account for, say, the Anniversary Event, where for the last couple runs basically every single piece they've added (every Retro part, no matter how minor like that Retro Witchcraft Robe Clasp) is a gold-tier item. One or two parts being upped 100 credits during an event isn't really a huge deal, but like... the Retro Warlord set had like a dozen parts, that extra 100 per part adds up quick!
  
  I'll also add my hat to the ring of "please have the Premium Token timer start at mission acceptance instead of turn-in" so that people who don't have a ton of time can "bank" one now and then!

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