Currently there are a few anti-teamwork systems in place that I would like to see removed from Chult.
#1 The door will not let us enter Chult in a party if some party members are already in the river. This is the first clue of where the teamwork zone has ended.
#2 T-Rex fang drops are not as much RNG as they are an old performance system copied from some heroic encounters. If you solo a T-Rex, you get a fang almost every time (95% according to my testing, 100% according to others). If you are a high DPS monster, you also always get a fang. If you are a support class buffing everyone, you get nothing without being in a party, getting significant alone time with the T-Rex, or if the DPS in the group is slow and you are allowed to repeatedly get healing numbers on your nearby allies (if we can call them that).
This system is extremely anti-teamwork, and is very unfair to support classes and lower geared players. This is not a good system at all. I am not saying that a puny 8k should be able to come up and "steal" your hard earned loot. I am saying that your fang rewards should be completely unrelated to how many people are fighting the T-Rex, whether you are in a party, what class you are, and how bad your gear is. If the top DPS players on the server are the only ones allowed to get T-Rex fangs, then why am I playing a support class?
This applies to all trophy monsters, not just T-Rex. Individual trophy rewards instead of rolling on a single chance that we are only allowed to roll on because we were in a party with the main DPS.
#3 Hunts are awesome. Just to be clear, I love the hunts system. However, the loot system feels like a step backwards. Having only one item drop from a hunt and having a party roll for it just means that either the person who worked hard to find the trophies for it gets nothing, or the party that worked hard to kill it gets nothing. It would be great if everyone in the party had an equal reward for participating, however, I would be very disappointing if you had to decrease the drop rate in order to make this happen. Fixing this would also allow two friends to bring two halves of a lure together to go on a hunt, currently this isn't possible, since only one of them can get loot.
The idea here is that we'd like groups of friends, guildmates or strangers to be able to team up in town and pool their resources.
Could you make it rewarding for us to do so instead of punishing?
Signature [WIP] - tyvm John
Comments
- Improve the T-Rex fang drop rate somehow. It is an absurd bottleneck. I have gotten quite a few trophies from ogres, batiri, smilodons etc, but even with all the fishing, HEs and T-rex killing I have done, I have just gotten ONE T-Rex fang - It's just silly.
- For T-rex fangs, just giving the fang to the person doing the most damage is blatantly unfair those those who cannot solo a T-Rex. Actually, both this issue and the one above can be solved in the same way - by changing this so that anyone contributing sufficiently to the kill has a chance of getting a fang. Having a T-Rex potentially drop multiple fangs would solve the first problem, and giving other people than just the top-dpser a chance of a fang would solve the second.
- Get rid of the "unique" trophies - being forced to use a silly workaround to store all the trophies you accumulate while hunting for T-Rex fangs is absurd. Yes, mailing them to myself works OK for people with VIP, but it is just plain silly. Be reasonable and allow them to stack.
- The hunts only work when you run with a group of people you trust, and where you agree beforehand who gets the drop. That person "needs" the others pass. The system just does not work when you run with strangers....too many scammers out there. What I would do is the following - The person who places the lure gets a guaranteed drop, and anyone who contributes sufficiently to the kill has a chance of a drop.
Something like this would make hunts worth running.Signature [WIP] - tyvm John
It's very frustrating to see the same trends show up with each new Mod. I think here is the high level pattern I've seen a few times now for the last few mods:
- Introduce a new zone with a variety of mechanics and systems that favor dps classes. This is separate / in addition to de-facto dps checks involved in most repeatable missions (more dps = significantly faster completion = less room for error = less need for "respecting" mechanics).
- Listen for feedback from players. The feedback is often along the lines of "mechanics and systems in new zone are unfair to support classes and heavily favor dps, in addition to the regular de-facto dps checks".
- Make some small improvements to allow support classes to have at least a fighting chance at engaging with the new mechanics.
- Forget any lessons learned and repeat the process exactly in the new zone.
This on top of the fact that the debuff changes primarily hurt support classes. Support classes often relied on uncapped debuffs disproportionately for solo dps (because they also helped in group settings), compared to dps classes that have sufficient dps for soloing without debuff assistance.But back to the OP, I completely agree that at face value the "Hunts" and other Chult mechanics appear to be inviting teamwork. But the loot system was designed by someone who wanted to discourage teamwork. That conflict really undermines some of the great new mechanics that were introduced. I love them in theory, I hate them in practice (especially on my DC and OP).
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Actually the current system encourages teamwork and social play. However, since nothing exactly like this has existed in the game before, it will take some time for the social constructs to develop for publicly formed groups to handle loot in a satisfactory way. I'm sure some of you are already experimenting with different approaches: "my pops, my drops," "everyone bring a pop, and free lot on loot," etc.
We'll keep an eye on things and consider making adjustments, but we'd really like to avoid making hunts play out like glorified heroic encounters.
It is not intended that you are able to store these in your mailbox to avoid the unique limit. We will be making adjustments. It is very much intended that you can only hold one of each lure and one of each trophy. We think its great if people hunt their own lures ahead of forming a group, but we don't want the play experience to be hording huge amounts of lures and running the same hunts over and over. Both for pacing of play as well as congestion on lairs.
Though I'd likely be more inclined to use the items if the discrepancy between getting t-rex fangs and everything else were evened out.
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It's very frustrating to "lose" duplicate items that happen to drop as you go about your day / dailies. And especially since hunts require some time commitment / coordination (and buying lures requires going back to port), it's pretty common for duplicate items to drop over the course of regular play.
Personally, I'll likely only be able to organize hunts once every few days, probably on weekends. Keeping the uniqueness requirement adds a lot of frustrating management (frequently going back to port, having to farm trex fangs on a frequent basis for trading... getting really frustrated if a trex fang happens to drop when you already have one), or it causes you to "lose" sometimes preciously rare drops when you can see them right in front of you.
Is it really intended that we are to "lose" drops unless we micro-manage trophy inventory? Why?
This system is extremely anti-teamwork, and is very unfair to support classes and lower geared players. This is not a good system at all. I am not saying that a puny 8k should be able to come up and "steal" your hard earned loot. I am saying that your fang rewards should be completely unrelated to how many people are fighting the T-Rex, whether you are in a party, what class you are, and how bad your gear is. If the top DPS players on the server are the only ones allowed to get T-Rex fangs, then why am I playing a support class?
You seem to have completely missed the point of this comment Asterdahl. People enjoy doing their daily quests solo and when they happen to run into a rare spawn that someone is in the process of killing they are more than happy to join in to help out either by dealing damage or by buffing, healing or tanking. But if you are saying the only way to have a chance at a drop for a person who supports a fight and doesn't deal damage then that is screwed up and stupid. Players have been asking for a better system of loot drops ever since HEs were introduced and you guys made major mistakes on the criteria needed to qualify for Great Success as a healer or a support, many people who were BIS geared could not heal their way to a great success even if they were the only healer in a major HE and were there right from the start, while a DPS character could show up for the last 25% hp, deal some damage and get a great success.
This bad criteria for rewarding people on the rare spawns feels very much like the crappy system that HEs have for support classes and it is incredibly frustrating.
In addition, please allow people to hold up to 3-5 of a lure and trophy. When people play they don't always have time to do a hunt (gathering team mates to help, combining the lures etc) because they have 15 minutes to knock out a couple of daily quests before they go to bed and then they play more on the weekends. Forcing all the farming for hunts to be done immediately prior to a hunt is an incredibly inefficient waste of time and it feels horrible.
You guys designed the daily quest system for chult in a great way this time, allowing players to do all their dailies right away or spread out over the week. It is much more player friendly since it allows players to play the game on their own time instead of being forced to log in every single day or fall behind. But the hunt system is completely contrary to that idea if you can't hold at least 3-5 lures at a time that you can gather while doing short stints of daily questing and then dedicating time to do hunts later on.
I understand that you don't want people to be able to save up 30 lures and do nothing but hunts for 8 hours and that is fair, but saving up 3-5 lures isn't going to be harmful and it will make players feel much more satisfied and engaged with the hunt system when RNG chooses to not drop the next tier of lure they need from a hunt if they can immediately try again a couple of times.
We are searching for slave labor, will pay with food from our farm!
If it's all about "teamwork", why not set healing values near the T-Rex to be worth 300 billion times more than DPS? That would mean healing is more useful than DPS for getting the fang, so supports will always get the fangs, so people will want to party supports.
Yes, we can party up with a DPS to increase our chance of a fang, but why would a DPS ever party with a support if they are already going to get the fang for themselves, and if they party with a support they have to roll for it now? There is no possible way that a performance system encourages teamwork.
The spawns aren't unreasonably congested at the times I play. I can just move to a smaller instance. The issue is that no matter whether the instance is full or if it has two people in it, if a DPS class shows up to the T-Rex they win the fang due to the performance system. K, this isn't the worst. I enjoyed the drop rate, however, these items are already bound. Just hoping you were aware of that. Yeah, this has to be one of the weirdest design decisions since black ice/voninblod empowerment. So you want to create a system that encourages using people's lures solo instead of waiting for you friends to come online? You also want to create a system where people see that they just missed out on a juicy rare item that they just got two of at the same time because they shouldn't be allowed to hold two of them. You also want to create a system where players who are fishing repeatedly get no loot because the fishing game keeps giving them the same trophy over and over again. You want to keep a system that prevents someone from playing a specific 1-star hunt again because they already have the 2-star lure for it and don't want to waste the 1-star lure if a 2-star lure drops from it, but also already have the the 1-star lure so they cannot kill the rare monster that creates that lure either. You want to have a system where to get a 3-star hunt you must repeatedly kill all of the lower hunts many times, possibly even 5-20 times each, yet you want the same system to encourage not running the same hunt more than once in a row? You also want to create a system where players start storing the trophies/lures on their alts instead of the mail by either using the shared bank or by giving them to their friends to hand to their alts if you disable the shared bank as well. Is this really what you are trying to design? Just curious.
Signature [WIP] - tyvm John
There was a suggestion regarding being able to hold 3-5 lures and trophies. This could only be accomplished by making these items currencies, and we'd like to not further inflate the currency tab with dozens of esoteric items that will only be highly relevant for a limited amount of time. Also the same problem would still occur where your capacity is full and an item drops.
We do understand that for many, time is a limiting factor and you may be unable to form a hunt party except on certain days of the week and would like to farm on other days. As such we understand that you may run into a frustrating situation where an item is lost, but we feel that for most of the rare spawn drops, their rarity is not so exceptionally high that it's excruciating to lose one at the same time they're rare enough that during normal play it's not overly likely you'll be obtaining and losing huge quantities.
However, because we added an additional chance of obtaining the fangs from the heroic encounter and fishing as alternate sources—content you may be playing for other reasons, as opposed to explicitly hunting the rare spawns—there is a higher chance you may gain one of these items and see the text that it was lost. We may make adjustments to these reward tables so that these items do not drop when you are in possession of one. We hope that these adjustments, along with the adjustments to the Tyrannosaurus rex, will alleviate some of the frustration.
If you want it to be an active activity requiring teamwork, and not just a solo farm for ingredients, why isn't it a quest? The Hunts NPC could have time limited quests (like Dwarven Valley) requiring 8 Smilodon kills, and 1 T-Rex kill that must be completed in 2 hours to create a unique 1-star lure. This quest could disable all other hunt quests as well like the Mercantile Missions from River District.
The lure itself is far more acceptable for being unique than the actual ingredients to craft it.
Signature [WIP] - tyvm John
What I'm hearing from you sounds like the exact opposite of what the players want.
Consider what we are doing in The Holy/Unholy Crusaders for instance. We have some players who, due to RL commitements and other time constraining factors, cannot play as much as others. Despite this we want to help these people progress alongside those who can play more. As such we hoard up RexFangs and other Trophies waiting for times when these people are available to do hunts for extra totems so they won't fall even further behind when it comes time to unlock the new dungeon.
Anything you do to reduce the efficiency of multi-hunting will be directly hurting those guildies that the other Guild Leaders, Officers and I have put so much time, effort and currency into helping. Please don't hurt my guildies.
I regret that we seem to in opposing positions on this issue. Please take this feedback into consideration moving forward.
▁ ▂ ▄ ▅ ▆ ▇ █ Gankdalf The Icehole █ ▇ ▆ ▅ ▄ ▂ ▁
However, I do want to raise my voice in respectful yet firm disagreement with this approach (somewhat like others have in this thread as well).
Increasing the drop rates for the fangs without other changes to the mechanics is going to exacerbate the issue of feeling like you are losing loot. And if you don't address the imbalance in who gets drops (support vs. dps) then it will skew the content even more towards a straight dps check.
Increasing the drop rate will also increase the pressure to constantly be returning to port to trade in your drops for lures, which again will for me contribute to the unpleasant experience of "losing" valuable drops. Over time I'm sure I'll be reconditioned to not care as much, but as of right now it is significantly bumming me out.
More broadly, this game already feels too busy. There's already too much stuff to do (heaven forbid you want to keep a couple alts current), and new stuff keeps getting added. Moving towards a strategy that makes the player feel like they have even more to do, and that it needs to be done urgently or they begin missing out and getting less "ROI" out of their time in-game makes the experience more stressful and actually unpleasant. Exactly the opposite of what I'd like to see in terms of game direction.
I want more choice, and I don't want to feel like I'm pressured to do things urgently. I want to be encouraged to engage with group content, but not feel like I'm losing out if I cannot commit to a schedule.
Again, just my opinion, but actually a quite strong one.
So say I'm wandering through the zone, doing one of my quests for the day/week. I stumble upon a pack of Eotyrannus', I kill them knowing that they have a chance to drop a talon. Hey! A talon dropped! Well at this point I am encouraged to immediately drop everything I'm doing to go farm TRex's until I get a fang and god-forbid I stumble across another group of Eotyrannus'. So now I'm farming TRex's, except the only thing that is spawning for 20 minutes are normal Tyrannosaurs. Finally an actual TRex! I viciously murder it... no fang. Well dang! More Rex farming! *indeterminate amount of time later* Sweet I got a RexFang! Now I want to make this lure and do this hunt, ok cool. Well I should probly ask my guildies if anyone wants to come along for the extra totems from the hunt. Found a few people, group is formed. Oh wait we all have to go back to the Port and come into the River together or enter the River seperately, form the group... wait 2 minutes and move to the same instance as each other. Thankfully I'm in a group with guildies and they're just coming along to get totems so there wont be the usual PUG argument about who gets loot and who's allowed to roll on what. Our hunt is now complete, 75% chance it was just a +1 ring so no one cares. Now its an hour later and I can go back to finishing up my dailies... kill some Yuan-ti and save some unfortunate Templars.. ooooh look, a couple of Smilodons... but if I stop and kill them and by some miracle actually get a smilodon tooth to drop I'll have to start the whole process over again, because if I continue doing my dailies and stumble across any other Smilodons I'll be non-plus'd at the concept of killing them knowing I have that trophy in my bags already.. and those smilodon tooth's are so damn rare I would be insane to consider killing any while I have one in my bags.. but I can't just walk away.. I mean, Smilodons are so rare to begin with.. by now its 2 hours later and I still haven't completed the daily quest I set out to do in the beginning of this story/rant.
You see where I'm going with this right?
Would you want to be put in this situation? What about the people who only have a certain amount of time per day or week to play the game? How will they ever feel like they're progressing if they have to drop what they're doing periodically to do a Hunt simultaneously avoiding any group of mobs from which they already possess a trophy?
I implore You, all of You; to think very carefully about this system and any changes you may or may not implement.
Can someone confirm the drop rate is 100% or is it actually not? I would say that 66/66 is not luck but well i might be wrong. I know that in party its 100%, we rolled on it, but solo?
As for the change in mailing the items, i'll implore next to the previous poster to really consider not doing so. I still try to maintain 4 toons in this zone and if you do that, its like asking me to sacrifice more of them. I was playing 7 classes some time ago. You're just encouraging us to give up on our toons and progress. I do not want to have to find a T rex fang on my dc (the OP is totally right with his post) if i get a Batiri trophy while doing my dailies. Its just impossible for us.
Please dont destroy the enjoyment i had in this module so far and please dont ask me to chose again one of my toons and get rid of the others because of a system that, in my opinion, doesnt make any sense if you think about implementing it.
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We use Round Robin looting all the time. Thus, no rolls are triggered on anything. So we haven't triggered any rolls on trophy items, which would apparently be expected if you use the default setting to roll on rare or greater. If we had need/greed active, I guess I'd have gotten my chance at items too.
There are a couple of potential issues with this. First, apparently we need to change our normal loot setting if we want to complete a hunt. This is... good to find out now as opposed to later, I guess. I'm not sure why I was assuming hunts triggering a roll couldn't be overridden by personal settings. I guess because it's a new mechanic.
Second, Round Robin looting... isn't. You'd expect items to be somewhat evenly distributed, but we routinely see one person getting at least 90% of the drops. Most of it's junk so it doesn't matter.
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We do understand that for many, time is a limiting factor and you may be unable to form a hunt party except on certain days of the week and would like to farm on other days. As such we understand that you may run into a frustrating situation where an item is lost, but we feel that for most of the rare spawn drops, their rarity is not so exceptionally high that it's excruciating to lose one at the same time they're rare enough that during normal play it's not overly likely you'll be obtaining and losing huge quantities.
However, because we added an additional chance of obtaining the fangs from the heroic encounter and fishing as alternate sources—content you may be playing for other reasons, as opposed to explicitly hunting the rare spawns—there is a higher chance you may gain one of these items and see the text that it was lost. We may make adjustments to these reward tables so that these items do not drop when you are in possession of one. We hope that these adjustments, along with the adjustments to the Tyrannosaurus rex, will alleviate some of the frustration.
We'll keep an eye on things and consider making adjustments, but we'd really like to avoid making hunts play out like glorified heroic encounters.
So, If you want to make hunting very boring and useless -> Improve the quality of loot.
I have already done more than 200 hunts with my group. And we did not get anything! +1 +2 rings, sometimes +3 and even less often +4, a lot of Purple items that no one needs anymore.
Every day 2-4 hours of HE farm. A lot of time for grinding mobs to get a components for hunting baits.
And like a result = NOTHING!
How long people need to do this for +5 ring?)
Dungeon farm with random +5 rings was more interesting because of Astral Diamonds from dungeons.
And hunting looks like a waste of time.
I understand that getting BiS items on the first day is bad. BUT, hunt hunt hunt hunt hunt... everyday.... all time... is bad too.
Well, this is pretty much a slap in the face of the players. We were hoping for a fix to at least some of the issues that @darthtzarr raised, but instead you say it is working as intended, and you will eliminate the workaround we have in order to make this even worse.
Wow! That's the point - we would like to go on hunts. What we don't like is the fact that 90% of the "hunt" time is actually not spent on the hunts, but on farming T-rex fangs, through a system that in inherently unfair and frustrating.
If I solo a T-rex, I would be pretty much guaranteed a fang, but I'm a DC, not a DPS class, so soloing it will take some time - and in all probability a group will show up, it will get killed quickly and I will get nothing.
So, grouping up for a T-rex "farm" run is the only way - but if you disable the workaround to allow people to mail extra fangs to themselves you also remove the incentive for people to stick around in a group after they have gotten "their" fang.
It will work for guild/friend groups, but grouping up with strangers? Forget it..... the system only encourages cliques - not general interaction and cooperation.
For a group of friends, well, they can run around, killing T-rexes until everyone has a fang - then go and buy 5 lures and do the same hunt 5 times in a row. That's what you want, right? Other reasons? What other reasons? If there are any other reasons, I have not found them yet. I have been fishing a lot - not gotten any T-Rex fangs, but some other trophies. If I would not even have gotten those (because I would only be able to hold a single copy) then fishing would have been pretty much pointless. As for HEs....well, the only reason people do them (or rather the KoS one - nobody bothers with the other one - it's just an annoyance) is for the minuscule chance of a T-rex fang drop....and yea, in all the HEs I have done, I have gotten ONE T-rex fang. In fact I have heard people asking why they should be doing the KoS HE at all.
You created a system with an extremely annoying bottleneck, and now you are saying you will make it even worse by not allowing us to have a workaround.
You say you don't want people to run the same hunt many times in a row, but then at the same time you design the system so we are forced to do that. We need to farm the T-rex over and over in order to do the 1-star hunts over and over in order to do the 2-star hunts over and over in order to do the 3-star hunts over and over in order to get the best drops - and at the same time you want to discourage us from doing the same hunts over and over.
I mean...seriously?
One more example: If I'm in a T-Rex farm group, we can run between the two locations, and kill the the spawns. On the way I pass some big cats and kill them as well. Sometimes a smilodon appears. Do you really think players will consider it fun or motivating to pass by a rare spawn and know it will be pointless to kill them as you will not get anything because you already have that trophy?
The rewards from the hunt can be good, but if you make a bad design even worse, player frustration will rise significantly and the bottom line will simply be that you lose players.
When Mod 12 launched people had pretty high hopes. The dungeon was interesting and the hunts seemed interesting. Then we discovered that the actual hunts are just a minor part - 90% is just running around, looking for a T-Rex.
What you created was not a Hunt system - only a T-Rex farm.
Sorry.
And seriously - why does it sometimes feel like the designers are trying to annoy and frustrate the players? It's no wonder that even the most dedicated players are hesitant to recommend the game to their friends.
Well i got one fang from fishing but fishing sux for me. Fishing is boring and buggy as hell.
So what is this hunt system?
To keep the brainless bunnys running in circles? Till they can run one new dungeon? To obtain one new set of gear?
Everyone pointed out literally every mistake with these systems and how you designed the hunts and trophies yet you keep going on and on about it supposed to be a team activity and so and potentially fun too.
In real it's 99% solo grind for the trophies, the team activity is basically run to the hunting spot, spawn boss and get your junk loot after 5 secs. Such fun team activity!
After trying to do hunts for a few days now already i'm starting to realize it's a huge waste of time, all the grind for trophies, all the frustration of not being able to hold more at once and the absolutely useless drops makes me think i would have been better of running dungeons/skirms/stuffs. We tried the "team" approach too and that was basically run to the spot, spawn boss, boss dies in 5 secs, there's nothing fun as a team to do hunts. Of course after we all solo farmed the trophies.
If u want to make hunts indeed fun and an activity people would bother to do then listen to the feedback everyone gave here and put it to good use. Ignore it and this will simple be another activity very few or no one will bother will for longer then a few days.
Signature [WIP] - tyvm John
Sorry if I sound a bit aggressive (it is nothing personal), but I can only shake my head in disbelief at such a statement of yours.
Edit: Btw, if you write "will alleviate some of the frustration" doesn't that ring the alarm bells in your head? I mean, telling from this statement you (the studio) obviously KNOW that you cause frustration on the players, even more, you obviously did it ON PURPOSE, and you "feel" that you should do something to only remove SOME of this frustration...? Is that really what you are saying...?
I can only take so much fantasy from a fantasy game. Toothless trexs trying to gum me to death is too much.
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