Justice Gear and Tokens.

theravenforce · January 2015

I'm not a huge fan of farming/grinding for Justice Gear/Tokens but in most of the cases where I have to do so, I don't really enjoy it (Gravitar for me is still fun though)

Now, before people start saying: "Run PQ's problem solved. kthxbye". I do run PQ's as well as PUGs and they mostly go quite well.

The problem isn't my team mates or a PUG but the drop rate of tokens.

I do want to discuss a few things though:

- The amount of tokens it takes to purchase Justice Gear.

- The drop rate of tokens.

1 - Amount of Tokens

I would like to know what arguments people would come up with if I was to suggest that the amount of tokens required per piece of Justice Gear was lowered to 1. So it would take:

10 Salvage, 1 Hypercooled Ignimbrite, 1 Superdense Diamond, 1 Petrified Scale, 1 Destreum Bearing. <-- for ONE piece of Justice Gear.

Sometimes it can take countless runs to get a single token and I know from experience and from speaking to others who have gone through their entire roster/run the alert to death and haven't got another token.

If the amount of tokens required is a bad move to lower then I'd like for the drop rate of tokens to be looked into. Right now there aren't as many people running rampages (seems to be a relatively same-y crowd) as there could be, if there was some sort of reason aside from Q'nite to jump in and try.

2 - Token drop rate.

I think the drop rate for tokens should be looked at, especially for alerts as tedious and time consuming as Sky Command and Lemurian Invasion. Gravitar (IMO) is fine, same with Fire and Ice, but the other two, Sky COmmand in particular can be very irritating to run and to come back with "nothing".

I think that Rampages should have tokens which are guaranteed to be part of the rampage drops (especially those which are longer or have multiple stages. Like Sky Command or Lemurian Invasion). So for example:

10 people run Sky Command/Lemurian Invasion.

Every player at the end should get a bearing/scale guaranteed upon successful run. However the chance to gain another bearing after the successful/guaranteed bearing/scale will be as normal.

This "guaranteed token" system would apply to all tokens and is one guaranteed token per day. So in a complete three day cycle of Sky Command/Lemurian Invasion/Gravitar/Fire and Ice, the minimum amount of tokens that someone would have would account wide would be 3 bearings/scales/diamonds/ignimbrites

--

If this seems horrible for some reason, I would at least like some sort of incentive to run multiple runs of a rampage aside from the dropping rate of questionite per run. Perhaps something like a lingering buff which increases your chance of getting a token or a valuable aura/costume unlock by X%.

Note: This is just intended to be a discussion, because I'm of the opinion that something needs to be done to make getting Justice Gear a little less tedious. Entire rampage cycles can go by without getting a single token let alone getting two to be able to get a piece of gear.

These are just my thoughts on the matter, if its a non issue to you then that's absolutely fine, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd like to see *something* done about tokens.

theapygoos · January 2015

yes, yes, a million times yes!

dr490nbr347hi · January 2015

I agree with everything.

jaazaniah1 · January 2015

My personal experience is that tokens seem to drop around every 7-8 runs (your results may vary). For Gravitar and F&I this doesn't seem too bad because it's usually easy to get into a fair number of those. For the much longer SC and LI it does become tedious because the queues don't pop often due to the poor reward to time invested ratio. I don't know about a guaranteed token for every run, but improving the drop rate a bit for the latter two would be welcome.

kaiserin · January 2015

Tokens are intended to be a rare drop. You can infer this by their low drop rates (duh) and the diminishing drop rates after you get one. By extension, Justice gear is intended to be time consuming to get.

The suggestions above would make gear very easy to acquire. This would go against the intent.

Consequences of this would be harder to pop rampages since people will quickly acquire what they want (and outside of questionite there isn't much of worth in Rampages...this is a problem unto itself but is deserving of a thread of its own). This would also reduce the amount of long term goals in endgame, we don't really have many of those.

The root problem, and I have mentioned this many times in many threads, is that two of four of the rampages are boring and dumb. Suggestions I have read to 'fix' this problem never actually address the problem, but instead make it so you can avoid playing those Rampages altogether. That is not a solution.

Lemurian Invasion and Sky Command need to be looked at and fitted to the Gravitar/Fire and Ice encounter formula. You should enjoy playing them, not cringe when their icon pops up on the alert bar.

As far as token drop rates, if you want a higher drop rate something needs to change with the difficulty of the rampages. As is, they're all on farm basis and it does not take well constructed teams to conquer any of them. As mentioned the low drop rates exist to make Justice Gear time consuming to acquire, and to extend the longevity of the Rampages.

If Rampages were far more difficult, ie *required* 10 on the ball people present and had a high rate of failure, then the rewards could drop more often as more time would be spent trying to complete them.

aiqa · January 2015

Making the two vehicle alerts more enjoyable would be nice, but the drop/time rate should also be more or less the same for all the alerts. For Gravitar I can usually get a token in a hour of two and often much faster, for SC often I've had to farm for over eight hours just to get one token. I don't they SC can be made fun enough for 48 hours of SC farming for justice gear for one character to be an enjoyable experience.

theravenforce · January 2015

jaazaniah1 wrote: »

I don't know about a guaranteed token for every run, but improving the drop rate a bit for the latter two would be welcome.

The proposed "guaranteed token" system would only apply to the first run that you do of the day, not to every single run you do.So if Gravitar ran from Monday to Wednesday and you ran her alert twelve times, out of those twelve runs you would be guaranteed three bearings over the duration of her rampage from Monday to Wednesday (one a day).

Whilst this may make tokens less annoying to get, it gives players something to look forward to if they do run the rampage even just once per cycle, they'll get a token for a successful run.

jimhsua · January 2015

I like market-based solutions: my suggestion, which I'll post later with some analysis, will involve normalizing the drop rates on an hourly basis. Simply speaking, any rampage that drops less than X tokens an hour will have a stacking percentage chance applied to it, increasing the drop rate, per hour, and vice versa. The potential drop rate is unlimited. This has been done with a wide range of other raid-style MMOs, and is well tested.

In other words, no content balancing or token value tweaking needed.

theravenforce · January 2015

kaizerin wrote: »

Tokens are intended to be a rare drop. You can infer this by their low drop rates (duh) and the diminishing drop rates after you get one. By extension, Justice gear is intended to be time consuming to get.

The suggestions above would make gear very easy to acquire. This would go against the intent.

The suggestions wouldn't be used together (I should have stated this at the outset) but would be two possible avenues to go down with regard the token issue.

kaizerin wrote: »

Consequences of this would be harder to pop rampages since people will quickly acquire what they want (and outside of questionite there isn't much of worth in Rampages...this is a problem unto itself but is deserving of a thread of its own). This would also reduce the amount of long term goals in endgame, we don't really have many of those.

This problem that exists right now in game. Because alerts like Sky Command and Lemurian Invasion are lengthy, rampages for these two are harder to pop anyway and the fact that the drop rate is worsened by the time spent doesn't help it either. (By worsened I mean, because it takes longer and there's a good chance of no reward, time feels wasted in comparison to the other two shorter by design alerts)

For me, it's a bit like a "Mechanon Situation" in that a group/groups of people with high end vehicles/builds or people with specific strategies for longer alerts all group together to "farm" these alerts and pretty much leave others who don't necessarily have high end vehicles or time saving strategies or the like to try and queue because they have already (due to either countless runs or good drop rate) obtained the tokens they need in the time available.

MC #1 was "the place to be" if you wanted to beat World Boss Mechanon, because everyone more or less had a strategy, didn't move from the zone and just farmed the hell out of that event, leaving the other zones with dust and potentially poorer performances.

kaizerin wrote: »

The root problem, and I have mentioned this many times in many threads, is that two of four of the rampages are boring and dumb. Suggestions I have read to 'fix' this problem never actually address the problem, but instead make it so you can avoid playing those Rampages altogether. That is not a solution.

Lemurian Invasion and Sky Command need to be looked at and fitted to the Gravitar/Fire and Ice encounter formula. You should enjoy playing them, not cringe when their icon pops up on the alert bar.

I do agree that Sky Command and Lemurian Invasion need to be looked at but the problem is that, they were very much orientated towards Vehicles and the Vehicle system, which was then more or less "fixed/gutted" (depending on your view) because they were working well/over performing (depending on your view).

This had an effect on players who used Vehicles and they no longer bother with anything vehicle related, which extends to rampages where vehicles are favoured.

If one of the suggestions I've posted was implemented: Token drop rate, for example. People would still have to run Sky Command, Lemurian Invasion, etc but they'd at the very least be guaranteed a drop for their efforts for one run each new day. This wouldn't make people avoid the rampages but be more inclined to run them.

kaizerin wrote: »

As far as token drop rates, if you want a higher drop rate something needs to change with the difficulty of the rampages. As is, they're all on farm basis and it does not take well constructed teams to conquer any of them. As mentioned the low drop rates exist to make Justice Gear time consuming to acquire, and to extend the longevity of the Rampages.

If Rampages were far more difficult, ie *required* 10 on the ball people present and had a high rate of failure, then the rewards could drop more often as more time would be spent trying to complete them.

Again, this is true. But I'm sceptical that any changes would be considered to these two "problematic" rampages in order to make them fit the formula of Gravitar or Fire and Ice. They'd need to be completely redesigned in some parts.

Sky Command for example, I'd add in an optional system for players to utilize the larger UNTIL turrets/air weapons etc to better aid the fights. Or have an indoor instance for players who don't want to use disks or vehicles.

So melee based players could cover in door engineers who fix the engines (partially) whilst holding off destroids which have jumped aboard or something.

Ranged players/Vehicle players, cover the scoop and assist with healing as usual. Or something like that. I'd cut out the Mega Destroyer too or place it differently in the alert so it can be "chasing" the UNTIL Carrier or something and players have to destroy it, but that's all for another thread.

I will say that a "high rate of failure" would serve to only further deter people from running rampages. I fully understand that Justice Gear is meant to be a long term goal, but as of right now, its a long term goal that some players are flat out not bothering to attempt because the process is incredibly long winded if you aren't lucky or if your PUGs or even PQ's turn sour.

Sky Command without proper co-ordination and healing can be have a high chance of failure if people are not able to get around to engines fast enough, or are overwhelmed by *something* and then the Mega D comes along etc. There's time limits and engines and scoop have HP which do not benefit from support auras (this in itself could be a way to make SC easier), it also is incredibly lengthy. I've never failed Lemurian Invasion because eventually people will work out the pattern and get with it and beat it.

I do think that Sky Command is the perfect example of a lengthy alert that can be very unrewarding. It can potentially have a high rate of failure in PUGs and even in PQ's if some things don't go according to plan, combined with a normal drop rate (as you've pointed out) makes it "boring and dumb".

I am curious though, what changes would you make to these rampages in order for them to be more enjoyable?

I remember suggesting that melee players/ five of the 10 players in the rampage for SC go into an indoor instance where they have to fend off waves of Destroids and protect engineers or protect [insert objects of interest], whilst the other five cover the scoop and the engines. Each group would be capable of healing the engines and scoop via direct healing internally and externally.

sterga · January 2015

I'd like to see the diminishing returns on token drops removed. If you have an awesome Frosty tank or badass healer that you love to play, the game says "F your fun farming" as soon as you get a drop.

When LI and SC first came out, NO ONE used a vehicle. A temp vehicle could be added for those guys who INSIST on being melee in these alerts. One that doesn't suck. Like one of the Drifter Trash vehicles with healing beam and incin rounds / grav pulse or something. Or a significantly better version of the UNTIL one. And then make the SC waves much faster. In fact, have the Mega D show up half way through the alert. Killing it ends the alert and showers questionite from the skies.

The biggest problem with Mechanon, from what I saw, was the obscene DPS needed to finish in time. Most of the fail zones I ended up in were fine on coordination, but lacked the damage needed.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say lack of progress is what keeps people away from Rampages. That and the huge difference between high end builders and the rest of the player base. Also: boredom.

gaarafrednorrisp · January 2015

MC1 was the place to be because the other zones saw they won always and said "Why bother trying?"

pantagruel01 · January 2015

You could presumably change drop rate on LI and SC without changing it on F&I and Grav; absent reworking those rampages to actually be fun (which would be nice, but requires work), that seems like the best course of action.

sistersilicon · January 2015

sterga wrote: »

I'm going to go out on a limb and say lack of progress is what keeps people away from Rampages.

That's why I don't bother. The risk/reward balance is a farce. "Congratulations! You've beaten some of the most dangerous villains in Millennium City! Unfortunately, you didn't roll a natural 100 on the loot, so you actually failed. Enjoy your vendor trash and Questionite! Buh-bye! [Exiting map in 45 seconds...]"

I think I proposed this alternative once before, or something like it:

- Multiply the token cost on a piece of Justice gear by 10.
- Guarantee that success drops 1-3 tokens, on a suitably asymptotic curve.
- Cap token drops at 3 per day

kaiserin · January 2015

theravenforce wrote: »

...

You could make the drop rate on LI and SC 100%, I would still not run them because they are not fun to play (during the time SC was bugged and dropping too much stuff, I got 6 tokens and did not run it again for the remainder of the time). Since Justice gears launch I've accumulated 6 pieces of it. I refuse to run those two alerts to get any more because they're that poor.

Typically I'm all for the path of least work when making suggestions, but this is content players are required to go through to earn the highest tier of gear currently available. They are not as easily pushed aside and forgotten like lairs. They are presented to us on screen every 9 days and should be an example of fun gameplay.

I would like to see the save the civilian part of LI cut and made into a separate alert (maybe give it a new boss fight, Vikorin could make a reprise). This better fits the alert setup. Rampages were penned as epic boss encounters, so I think it would be a much better idea to start you immediately at the Harbinger.

As for the harbinger fight..

The fight can now be failed. The hovercraft has a limited amount of radiation shots (3-5?). If the harbinger goes too long without being shot by it, his damage will spike up dramatically and it's game over. He will have a countdown buff on him to let players know how long they have.

The Harbinger itself should be beefed up in defense and health. Give him a 120ft+ hard hitting Frosticus level single target and have his rift attacks target other players at random. The rifts now have a much larger area of effect, deal heavier damage and can stack so staying spread out and moving around will be important. His cone attack should also be increased in damage and have a much wider cone to make positioning of it a touch more important.

Make the tentacles *huge* and have them cover a large portion of the map so you're always within shot of one if in shooting range of the Harbinger. Have their attack range be 120 ft+ so they cannot be out ranged and have them attack nearby players erratically (immune to taunt). Your damage is reduced depending on what range you are from them (take full damage in melee, take reduced damage at range). Have them apply a stacking resistance/damage/heal debuff so they have to be addressed. If downed they will respawn after the harbinger recovers from the radiation cannon blast.

After the first radiation cannon phase the Harbinger now gets a 'radiated' debuff that has a short duration. If you are able to down the exocets quickly enough and get another radiation shot on him before the debuff runs out, he will take heightened damage during his vulnerability phase. If you don't, he will take damage as normal. This debuff will reset and count down again once he enters his invulnerable phase.

Consider adding some terrain around the harbinger (fallen rubble and whatnot) to deter players from going underwater.

While this has nothing to do with gameplay I would like to see the reason the hovercraft cannot fire its radiation cannon changed to the exocets are jamming out there systems and must be destroyed, or something less silly then 'we can't fire because some flies are buzzing below us.'

Additionally I would like to see new items added in that you can use tokens to purchase. Something like perma devices, new gear cores, and maybe even a rotating reward that changes monthly to keep things enticing.

Probably too ambitious but I think that would be a lot more fun and team oriented. I'll write up a SC one later, this became a novel.

spinnytop · January 2015

So don't.

Just don't grind for them.

Why bother?

pantagruel01 · January 2015

Hm. As far as fun goes:

Gravitar is reasonably fast, and actually requires a bit of thought by everyone. However, the fact that you can't really do anything about her cascades other than building to tank them, and her love of targeting ressers, are flaws.

Almost all the damage in Fire and Ice can be tanked, and someone spamming lead tempest can clear all the structures without even bothering to figure out what they are, so with a good team it's fairly dull. It can get exciting if you don't have enough tanking (and healing) to both survive and hold aggro; I have rather regularly found myself suddenly dealing with large amounts of incoming damage because I over-DPSed or the tank died.

Sky Command can get interesting with a weak team -- the last time I did it we had all of four players (not entirely sure how it managed to pop...), and it was rather a scramble. With a normal size team, it tends to be a snooze fest. It seems better than it used to be, I think they trimmed some timers.

Lemurian Invasion is the worst, first a tedious grind through group after group of mobs (with no possibility of failure, as there's no time limit, thing to protect, or respawn limit), then a boss fight with a giant sack of hit points that doesn't do especially high damage (and, again, no chance of failure other than getting bored), mixed with colossally annoying 'swat the annoying and irrelevant gnat' sequences, and of course it wants to turn your video card to slag.

roughbearmattach · January 2015

Welp, just gave up on Sky Command for the time being. Doing PUGs with a high failure rate is beyond my high level of patience for farming.

Not enough folks online for PQ.

roughbearmattach · January 2015

It is just so punishing to wait a long time for a PUG, then play for 10 minutes, and fail. I find it taxes my patience less to grind out 5000 kill perks.

crosschan · January 2015

How to fix SC(IMO):
1. Remove the runtime from the rampage entirely and replace it with a "Kill X Mobs" counter. That way if you're crushing this thing fast enough it takes less time to run.

2. Remove the Mega-D and replace it with something more interesting. Also, make sure that something more interesting is immune to all forms of travel power removal. Also, defeating the something more interesting gives you a decent reward(R1 Mods need to DIAF unless I'm like LvL 15 or lower).

___________________________________________

Incentive to run Rampages:

Ok, so some people want it to be easier to get solid gear which can faceroll the majority of the content in the game and some people don't want the effort of Justice Gear to be trivialized. Ok, I think I have the solution for both...

ALL Rampages now drop a garanteed(but diminishing upon multiple runs) amount of Silver Champions Recognition. This would be an addition and not replace current rewards of the various justice tokens. Looking at this from multiple angles(new players, people who hate Unity, people with crap gear, people with tons of alts, and so on) and then comparing it to 99.9% of this game's content(the .1% being Frosticus) being able to farm up some Heroic Gear while you're on your "Road to Justice" would be a pretty decent side effect IMO.

Also, since this is the harder stuff in the game....they drop R5 and R6 Mods. Nothing lower.

What this now means is that while Justice is the desired end result you can get some Heroic Gear for your toon(or alts or to sell) and be working towards some solid mods or, if you're so inclined, the materials to make bigger mods. Players would be making progress even when they do not get the items for Justice and then eventually would have the stuff to get Justice(which is still entirely optional and a choice on a per person basis).

Well, that's how I would do it. :cool:

crosschan · January 2015

Have you run Sky Command over 100 times without getting a single token?

pantagruel01 · January 2015

gradii wrote: »

That still does nothing about the fact a player can do 100 sky command runs and never see a single token.

In theory yes. In practice, I doubt it's ever happened.

pantagruel01 · January 2015

gradii wrote: »

Point stands that pure RNG, especially when dealing with something like this, is 100% bull.

It's not pure RNG, and by the time you're looking at getting a full set, the law of large numbers has kicked in pretty solidly.

crosschan · January 2015

So that was a "NO" right?

chaelk · January 2015

for the person that suggested a guaranteed drop on the first run;

is that per character or per account?

lets see 1 per alt, NO.

why I don't bother farming for Justice gear.
1. I see no need for the gear.
2. I'm one of the people the RNG hates.
3. They aren't fun. Though, Fire and Ice was quite amusing, dodging all the bits.( up until my keyboard decided to do 3 second lag. BOoom)

jaazaniah1 · January 2015

Again, just my perspective. I'm about 1/4 of the way through my 9th set of JG (last set before all my 40s have either JG or LG). It has been a long haul. Can't deny that, but I do feel a sense of accomplishment every time I get a set and outfit a character. Whatever would happen to the JG system I would not want to trivialize that sense of accomplishment. It shouldn't be as simple as getting SCR. If it were up to me I would do something like this.

Let's say that the quickest Rampage typically takes 5 minutes and has a 10% chance to drop a token (made up number for example purposes). If another Rampage typically took 15 minutes I'd give it a drop rate of 30%. That would make for a more sensible rate of return for the amount of time invested.

Oddly, going into this last set I have more SC tokens already (need just 1 more) than I have for any of the others.

spinnytop · January 2015

jaazaniah1 wrote: »

Again, just my perspective. I'm about 1/4 of the way through my 9th set of JG

The best argument for why a new "tier" of gear was a terrible idea in this game.

roughbearmattach · January 2015

Also, Sky Command used to offer better rewards, right?

And LI was super fast to complete.

jaazaniah1 · January 2015

It takes me about 1 month to acquire a set (yes, I actually have 8 sets at the moment). Not quite as fast now, true, but not really impossible. Fortunately for me the time I'm usually on seems to coincide with a fair number of other people who are trying to get tokens, so the queues tend to pop more often.

When SC and LI are up I usually log on, get in the queue, then start on catching up on some reading. When the queue pops I put down the reading, do the alert, get back in the queue and pick up the reading. I've read a couple of books doing this. I also pay bills and the like while waiting. This way I feel like I'm not losing a lot of time.

For me, doing the above is more comprehensible than running 1 mission 100+ times hoping for a rare drop.

gradii wrote: »

I have 2 sets, and I mostly gave up long ago on getting more. the haul is far from worth it.

if you actually somehow have 9 sets I'll bet at least 6 of them were obtained before rampage queues died to this level.

jaazaniah1 · January 2015

Well, I've largely enjoyed it, so I won't complain. I'll leave that to others. Met some nice people in PQs that I likely wouldn't otherwise have met.

spinnytop wrote: »

The best argument for why a new "tier" of gear was a terrible idea in this game.

jonsills · January 2015

See, all this is one of the reasons why I've never scrambled for gear. (Another reason is because it's not necessary.)

jaazaniah1 · January 2015

Again, personally, I don't feel like I'm scrambling. I do other things than alerts too. Having a mix of things to do keeps the game more interesting.

jonsills wrote: »

See, all this is one of the reasons why I've never scrambled for gear. (Another reason is because it's not necessary.)

flyingfinn · January 2015

And imagine if they decide to make CO fixes include "You will need THIS gear to continue".....

chaelk · January 2015

so you've seen the NW updates, more artifact gear

spinnytop · January 2015

flyingfinn wrote: »

And imagine if they decide to make CO fixes include "You will need THIS gear to continue".....

Attunements would be cute.

Can't count the number of times I've been in a group for TherTemple and multiple people have never even been to vibora bay.

bwdares · January 2015

theravenforce wrote: »

The proposed "guaranteed token" system would only apply to the first run that you do of the day, not to every single run you do.So if Gravitar ran from Monday to Wednesday and you ran her alert twelve times, out of those twelve runs you would be guaranteed three bearings over the duration of her rampage from Monday to Wednesday (one a day).

Whilst this may make tokens less annoying to get, it gives players something to look forward to if they do run the rampage even just once per cycle, they'll get a token for a successful run.

And doing it that way would help those who cannot play 12 times in that amount of time. So I would be in favor of that.

spinnytop · January 2015

InB4 all the people complaining that they had to do it "the hard way" and now they're just giving tokens away to all the "casuals", if Cryptic does implement a suggestion with guaranteed drops.

You know it's gonna happen. I can already spot the people in this very thread who'd be doing it.

pantagruel01 · January 2015

I will say that 'guaranteed drops' would basically mean I'd be able to get a full set of justice gear in a single rotation, and plenty of people well over that, because I have multiple level 40s.

gaarafrednorrisp · January 2015

spinnytop wrote: »

InB4 all the people complaining that they had to do it "the hard way" and now they're just giving tokens away to all the "casuals", if Cryptic does implement a suggestion with guaranteed drops.

You know it's gonna happen. I can already spot the people in this very thread who'd be doing it.

I HAD TO DO IT THE HARD WAY. ALL YOU CASUALS CAN LICK MY BOOTS!

..wait. I forgot. I'm too lazy to farm Justice.

theravenforce · January 2015

spinnytop wrote: »

InB4 all the people complaining that they had to do it "the hard way" and now they're just giving tokens away to all the "casuals", if Cryptic does implement a suggestion with guaranteed drops.
You know it's gonna happen. I can already spot the people in this very thread who'd be doing it.

I'd genuinely lol at people who brought this argument or complaint to this thread. I personally see no reason NOT to implement guaranteed drops in these rampages.

If the system was designed for some sort of "progression" for level 40s, either for future content or just for the feeling of progress and a good percentage of the player base is not using it because either:

- It is frustrating
- Hardly worth wasting time for 1.5k, 1.2k, 900 Questionite and costume drops/auras you have multiples of. Alongside a tiny chance of getting a token for said progression.
- Uninteresting and too long.

Then I'd say there is an issue. But that's just me.

If there are people who bring that argument, I'll just straight up say "have a seat", because at the end of the day, we're all playing the same game. The gear isn't restricted to Gold Players or LTSers, nor should it be restricted in any sense. I'm not saying paying players shouldn't get rewards, as an LTSer and past Gold and Silver Player, I do appreciate getting rewards for subscribing or shelling out for an LTS but that's for another thread.

The suggestion would actually help those people who have done it the "hard way" so there's nothing worth discussing on that front, provided they are making more characters.

bwdares wrote: »

And doing it that way would help those who cannot play 12 times in that amount of time. So I would be in favor of that.

Yeah, exactly. Ideally I think it should be accessible to everyone, so having a guaranteed token system would allow people to get gear at a steady and reliable rate.

chaelk wrote: »

so you've seen the NW updates, more artifact gear

I have two words: Cosmic Gear.

I honestly don't want any higher level gear until we have a good amount of content which requires it as well as a few other things. It's possible that in time, provided CO is still around, we'll get to the point where we have enough content and changes to reach this point, but I don't see it being a necessity at this point in time.

And there's all sort of issues associated with attempting to force gear...but yeah.

theravenforce · January 2015

pantagruel01 wrote: »

I will say that 'guaranteed drops' would basically mean I'd be able to get a full set of justice gear in a single rotation, and plenty of people well over that, because I have multiple level 40s.

Possibly.

If I run each alert once a day during their active time, my suggestion for guaranteed drops would mean that upon success each run (one guaranteed token for one successful run with a CD similar to that of the Questionite reset for Rampages, but account wide):

Gravitar - 3 tokens
Lemurian Invasion - 3 tokens
Fire and Ice - 3 tokens
Sky Command - 3 tokens

Which would bag me 1 piece of Justice gear IF they decided to keep the current token requirement for Justice Gear of 2 tokens of each plus 10 salvage for one piece.

If they decided to take both suggestions and fuse them, it would be a lot easier for people to get gear. Which will be good and even if they do this, I don't think there is a danger of it getting "old" now that everyone has their gear.

The reason I say this is that...aside from actual missions in VB/Monster Island, Open World Fights, Adventure Packs (Serpent Lantern, Demonflame, Resistance), Comic Series (Whiteout, Aftershock), Fatal Err0r, Steel Crusade, UNITY & UNITY2 missions and Nemesis Confrontation...Rampages are the only things out there that a level 40 can do at full power, without being altered by alerts which are capped at level 30.

And if people don't want to do that...they can always venture into PvP, duels or RP. Personally I find some rampages (Gravitar & Fire and Ice) nice to do from time to time, I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one either.

deadman20 · January 2015

theravenforce wrote: »

The reason I say this is that...aside from actual missions in VB/Monster Island, Open World Fights, Adventure Packs (Serpent Lantern, Demonflame, Resistance), Comic Series (Whiteout, Aftershock), Fatal Err0r, Steel Crusade, UNITY & UNITY2 missions and Nemesis Confrontation...Rampages are the only things out there that a level 40 can do at full power, without being altered by alerts which are capped at level 30.

And if people don't want to do that...they can always venture into PvP, duels or RP. Personally I find some rampages (Gravitar & Fire and Ice) nice to do from time to time, I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one either.

I'm in love with incredibly large scale battles myself, 20~50 Players participating is where I like to be. Here in CO though, the best I can get are Rampages. I want to feel small, but important at the same time, and that's a hard balance that nothing I've played has gotten perfectly. There are a few games that have gotten pretty close, but are still so far.

pantagruel01 · January 2015

theravenforce wrote: »

Possibly.

If I run each alert once a day during their active time

Once per day? I assumed you meant one guaranteed drop per 3 days. At once per day, you've ridiculously trivialized the token drop rate; to keep it in balance, it should be 10 tokens per item of Justice gear, instead of 2.

theravenforce · January 2015

pantagruel01 wrote: »

Once per day? I assumed you meant one guaranteed drop per 3 days. At once per day, you've ridiculously trivialized the token drop rate; to keep it in balance, it should be 10 tokens per item of Justice gear, instead of 2.

The problem is...would people want to continually run these to get one piece of gear if it was one guaranteed drop per 3 days?

People in this thread have already stated that they don't even run some of the other alerts because of various issues with it.

If you are guaranteed to walk away from the time that Gravitar is up (3 day period) with three tokens and pieces of Justice Gear cost this:

10 Salvage
2 Petrified Scales
2 Superdense Diamonds
2 Hypercooled Ignimbrites
2 Destreum Bearings

^ You have one fifth of the cost for one of your two or three pieces of gear for one character.

So unless you really do only have one level 40, I don't see why making Justice Gear slightly more accessible to everyone by incentivising the continual running of rampages is a bad thing.

If they were to adopt this suggestion alone, I did state in that previous post why I think there wouldn't be anything wrong with it.

Seriously though, if this idea was magically adopted and implemented right now and began during the next rotation, what do you think would happen?

People would run Lemurian Invasion, finish beating up the Harbinger and all come away with one token.

Reaction: "OMG no way! Let's run again!"

They all run again, but this time everyone who has already received a guaranteed token will be running with lower drop rates. Whilst it will not be impossible for them to walk away with 2 tokens, it will be incredibly lucky if they do.

The progression that is meant to be signified by Justice Gear is not even a reality for some players because they either don't like the rampage or they run it and run it and run it for the duration it is up and come away empty handed.

I've been in situations where entire durations of Fire and Ice/Sky Command/Lemurian Invasion/Gravitar are up and I've run them on characters across my account and have nothing to show for it aside from costume unlocks which I've already got...or auras and Q'nite. Not exactly encouraging.

The whole idea is to make Rampages more appealing. If people know that running it three times during it's duration on rotation will allow them to walk away with something(s), they are more likely to join up and try.

Yes, there will be players who no longer want to run Rampages once they have their three tokens, but there are more players who'd still play on, be it for other players sake, potential personal gain or for enjoyment.

To me, it just seems unnecessary to drag out being able to acquire Justice Gear. I get that it's in the name of progression and the idea behind it but when this "progression" is only pursued by a small amount of players, because of the way its designed...that's not much progress and doesn't seem accessible to everyone.

That's just my take on matters. I would never expect Cryptic to take both suggestions and plop that in game because within the space of a month you could deck out quite a few of your characters.

pantagruel01 · January 2015

theravenforce wrote: »

The problem is...would people want to continually run these to get one piece of gear if it was one guaranteed drop per 3 days?

No, people are better incentivized to continue running them with random drops.

theravenforce wrote: »

If you are guaranteed to walk away from the time that Gravitar is up (3 day period) with three tokens

You aren't. It wouldn't be all that hard for me to get twelve -- just run the alert four times per day with four different characters.

theravenforce wrote: »

So unless you really do only have one level 40, I don't see why making Justice Gear slightly more accessible to everyone by incentivising the continual running of rampages is a bad thing.

The way to incentivize the continual running of rampages is to make sure people don't immediately get their gear.

theravenforce wrote: »

To me, it just seems unnecessary to drag out being able to acquire Justice Gear.

The whole point of endgame progression is that it takes a long time.

theravenforce · January 2015

pantagruel01 wrote: »

No, people are better incentivized to continue running them with random drops.

You aren't. It wouldn't be all that hard for me to get twelve -- just run the alert four times per day with four different characters.

The way to incentivize the continual running of rampages is to make sure people don't immediately get their gear.

The whole point of endgame progression is that it takes a long time.

1 - Okay, but what happens when a rotation goes round, you run it as many times as you have time for and you get nothing? Because of your schedule you miss the other days of the rampage. Does that mean that you should play more CO in order to have a better chance at getting tokens to achieve progression? I don't see that as a viable option for people who aren't constantly on CO.

2 - Right, you've come away with this from either not understanding my suggestion the way I intended or me not being clear enough. I'm going to go with me not being clear enough. This guaranteed drop system would mean that if I took one of my toons: Mentella and ran Gravitar once a day for the duration of her time up and then took the rest of my account out and ran Gravitar in between....at the very most I'd expect out of all the runs I do, to achieve maybe...5 tokens including the three guaranteed ones.

3 - It becomes less of an incentive and more of a burden when either the drop rate is too low or the content is not enjoyable. I am not a developer but I do believe that it would be harder to adjust the actual rampage to be more enjoyable than altering the drops.

4 - I understand this, but when does "a long time" turn into "why bother?". It's not like there is some "Justice Level content" that is the ultimate end game for CO. Endgame progression should be accessible to everyone and even if it has to be dragged out somewhat there should be *something* there to push people on.

If everyone was limited to having 1 level 40 then I could see why my suggestion would be crazy. To some this whole Justice thing is a non issue so they don't care or there may be those who believe that my suggestion is just flat out crazy.

At this point in time, if someone like TT/LordGar/Radioscience starts talking on here, which would be quite odd, this is just a discussion regarding a suggestion. (Not saying they can't chip in, so if you guys happen to be reading...feel free lol).

I am against increasing the amount of tokens needed for the gear...it just seems unnecessary. I'd only suggest lowering the amount needed if they were unwilling to alter drop rates.

By no means should the two suggestions I originally suggested be used with each other. That would be crazy.

pantagruel01 · January 2015

theravenforce wrote: »

1 - Okay, but what happens when a rotation goes round, you run it as many times as you have time for and you get nothing? Because of your schedule you miss the other days of the rampage. Does that mean that you should play more CO in order to have a better chance at getting tokens to achieve progression?

That is, in fact, what endgame gear grinds are about.

theravenforce wrote: »

3 - It becomes less of an incentive and more of a burden when either the drop rate is too low or the content is not enjoyable.

The drop rate isn't too low. As grinds go, Justice gear is actually pretty modest, there's plenty of stuff in the game that takes longer to get than Justice gear.

theravenforce wrote: »

4 - I understand this, but when does "a long time" turn into "why bother?".

Depends on the player.

solardynamo · January 2015

pantagruel01 wrote: »

No, people are better incentivized to continue running them with random drops.

Just a personal disagree here. I would actually run them with a 3-day incentive. As it is I have run about 80 or so total rampages and here's my progress:

10 Salvage - have these from lockboxes I guess, but never anywhere else
2 Petrified Scales - haven't seen one
2 Superdense Diamonds - no clue
2 Hypercooled Ignimbrites - nope
2 Destreum Bearings - never gotten these...not sure any of this stuff really exists

I literally gave up Rampages to just play an level alts as a use of my 40 hours a week gaming time. Running Rampages has so far netted me zip, zilch, nada so if I'm going to grind out some endgame I'll do other things. If I had a 3-day guarantee then I'd run these ALL the time since I have 5 screens of 40's.

I spent 3 weeks straight farming for Justice gear for ONE level 40 and have zip to show for it so there you go. I can't be the only one dejected by the low low rate. Even a better rate would work, since getting even one component would be a "lure" for me to play them more.

pantagruel01 · January 2015

solardynamo wrote: »

Just a personal disagree here. I would actually run them with a 3-day incentive.

Once per rotation, maybe.

solardynamo wrote: »

As it is I have run about 80 or so total rampages and here's my progress:

If you really ran 80 rampages with no drops, you're doing something wrong; I don't have exact numbers, but my drop rate appears to be in the 20-25% range. There is some reason to think character rotation is important, I don't generally use characters who will get less than 900Q (so not more than 3x/day with a single character).

Salvage can only be gotten from lockboxes, either directly (by opening them) or indirectly (someone opened one, got a crate of drifter salvage, and sold it). I believe crates run ~100G and contain 10.

sistersilicon · January 2015

pantagruel01 wrote: »

If you really ran 80 rampages with no drops, you're doing something wrong; I don't have exact numbers, but my drop rate appears to be in the 20-25% range.

How can one "do something wrong"? You run the rampage, you complete all requirements before the timer expires, and you "win". Then RNGesus either kicks you in the sidekicks or, if you're astonishingly lucky, blesses you with 1/24 of progress toward your ultimate goal.

pantagruel01 · January 2015

sistersilicon wrote: »

How can one "do something wrong"?

Dunno. Not visiting the reward circles? It's not purely random, there's some reason to think that the number of times a given character has run a rampage during a given rotation affects drop rate (you're more likely to get a token the first time you run it), but zero tokens from 80 tries is well outside the plausible range.

pantagruel01 · January 2015

laughinxan wrote: »

I'll also say this, do you guys even know how CO's random number generator even works in this game?

No, but it doesn't matter all that much unless it's saving seeds. There's enough noise being generated by a few hundred players that even a cruddy RNG will look random. They're probably using whatever is standardly available in the language/OS they used to write the game; all major programming languages have PRNGs good enough for gaming available.

Justice Gear and Tokens.

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