This change while it appears to be well intentioned is a flop, Cryptic. It has some good ideas speckled in there but most of it has been poorly implemented and thus poorly received. As many players have pointed out, this will actually hurt newer players instead of helping them and is a massive step backwards when it comes to increasing a player's freedom of choice when running content. Here is the breakdown:
By gutting the way people currently make AD, you ironically end up hurting the newer players a lot more than the new system would help them. This is because you need all dungeons unlocked in a category in order to random que. Most newbies and lowbies do NOT have all content for the categories unlocked meaning they will not be able to use the random que feature for most categories until they have a lot more gear and have done most of their campaigns. While I get that you want to increase the incentives to gear up, stripping away the old system for making AD makes it much harder for lowbies to get the gear needed to random que in the first place. Its not like gearing up was easy before and this change is a massive nerf to a lowbie's income.
Gutting the way people currently make AD and replacing it with the random que AD system also removes some of the incentive to use the recently introduced private que function. This is because your AD earnings are slashed by a large amount if you go private instead of random.
It is also disingenuous to factor in the PVP daily AD bonus as part of the new daily potential income and then treat it like that would lead to higher total daily earnings for PVE players. Most players are PVE only players and the new random que system is unlikely to change that. It wouldn't even be a good thing if this system DID cause more PVE players to do PVP because the PVE players will still hate PVP just as much as before. They would want to do the bare minimum so they can get out of PVP as fast as possible and would only be in it for the AD. This would lead to a plague of AD farmers and create incentives to mooch in PVP. This would raise tensions between PVE players and PVP players and makes both sides unhappy.
What WOULD cause more people to play PVP is to fix PVP itself so it is more balanced and more fun so more people actually want to play it. This would create an incentive for PVE players to play PVP for real instead of them either not playing PVP at all or only doing it for the AD.
A leaver penalty does more to punish the teamates of the person who quit than it does the quitter. It also will end up punishing people for involuntary server disconnects far more often than it would end up punishing people who deliberately quit. A leaver penalty also means that if your team needs to quit a dungeon because they aren't able to finish it, they could end up being penalized for it. Often, teams who don't end up with a good group composition can't complete the dungeon and need to bail. This commonly happens in master svardvorg as a real example.
Most well geared players do not like this random que idea either. A lot of this has to do with the categories for random que not being bracketed well. Right now, all but 1 of the epic dungeons are in the same category. You cannot put tier 1's, tier 2's, and tier 3's together and have people still want to random que for them. Right now, fangbreaker island and master spellplague are in the same category as lair of lostmauth and temple of the spider. These dungeons have very different completion times, vary widely in how hard they are to complete, and some of them need specific group compositions in order to have good odds of getting through them. The rewards for many of these dungeons also do not scale according to difficulty and this has lead to the more difficult dungeons having roughly the same loot or worse loot than some of the dungeons that are faster and easier to complete. This loot inbalance further reduces people's incentive to use the random que.
Furthermore, while a lot of people do enjoy running a wider variety of dungeons, there are also a significant number of players who hate running certain dungeons and avoid them. Loot is a major factor for why certain dungeons don't get run very often but whether or not a player finds a dungeon fun also plays a big role. While creating more AD incentives to run a variety of dungeons is a good idea, the poor implementation has turned a good thing into a bad thing. There are 4 major groups of players to consider here:
Many players do not want to be forced into doing dungeons they hate just to keep making the same amount of AD they did prior to this change.
A lot of players also choose to run the same content over and over because they are trying to earn a specific drop from that dungeon. These players do not want to have to choose between making enough daily AD to keep up and farming for the item they want.
Many people only get a few hours to play each day and will not want to random que if there is a chance they will get stuck doing a dungeon that takes an hour or more. That one dungeon would eat up most of their available time that day and they might not have sufficient time left over to do other things like their campaign dailies or other time consuming content needed for progression.
There are players who do enjoy running a wide variety of dungeons and don't want to feel like they have to choose between content they enjoy and content that makes them progress faster, this random que feature would be beneficial to these players since it adds a loot incentive to doing a variety of dungeons. However, variety should not be the only viable way of making enough daily AD to progress.
All of that said, the random que would become a desirable feature if it received the following adjustments:
The random que should NOT replace the current system for making AD. It should instead be added on top of the existing AD making system. This will make it so this system no longer slashes the income of newer players. It also changes this system from being mandatory to progress into a strong incentive that will boost progression but is not required, which will sit much better with everyone.
Remove the leaver penalty. Its not needed and as mentioned by many people, leaver penalties do a lot more harm than good.
Bracket the dungeons better. Split tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3 dungeons into separate categories. This will better account for the difficulty and duration of the dungeons and make random queuing much more appealing.
Adjust the dungeon loot tables again and make loot scale by dungeon difficulty. This will up the incentive to run the harder dungeons. It will also make the random que more appealing for higher tier dungeons since you no longer would have the chance of ending up in a dungeon with bad loot. Loot from FBI and master spellplague as a real example is notoriously bad and these dungeons don't compete well with faster easier dungeons. One of @asterdahl 's desired effects of the random que was to up the incentive to gear up your character, adjusting the loot tables to scale by difficulty would be a much better way to acomplish this.
Post edited by trgluestickz on
-- PVP Rogue, --[----- "Your friendly neighborhood spawn of Satan." -----]-- ---------------------------------------------------------------- Main Character: Hurricane Marigolds (Rogue WK & Assassin) Ingame Handle: trgluestickz Discord Name: Hurricane🌀Marigolds#2563 Guilds: She Looked LVL 18 & Essence of Aggression Alliances: Imperium & Order of the Silent Shroud Platform: PC
With hero's accord not paying out rough AD, we will be increasing the amount of rough AD from other random queues accordingly. The goal being that the average player who can't tackle the harder random queues can still get to 80-90% of their current daily rough AD gain with half as many runs (because we won't be providing 2 daily bonuses per category.) And that's not accounting for the additional AD from salvage via the new bonus seals.
Thank you all for your feedback. I appreciate your patience in waiting for a more detailed response to your concerns!
Appreciate the increase in rough AD.
The other big concern I have is that I as a Level 70 with 8000 item level will be stuck running standard Dungeons and Skirmishes for a long time. Those won't gain me any upgrades to equipment and will be boring to run since they pose no challenge.
Please reconsider splitting Epic Dungeons (at least) into 2 or more categories so that I'll be able to run the 7500 item level ones for rAD.
Asterdahl apparently had something come up and hasn't been available to comment further, but isn't purposely leaving us in the dark. Kinda sucks to be called away and also look forward to coming back to this hamstershow.
It would be terribly ironic if the information at hand was making us believe it's worse than it actually is. And it would be largely my fault!
Hey everyone! I have been keeping tabs on this thread, but as Becky mentioned I was unavailable to comment—I had been traveling from Thursday morning through Monday night pacific time. I'll be making a more substantive post tomorrow responding to individual concerns as I know there are quite a few of them but I wanted to take a moment to give you all a hint of some adjustments we are planning to make.
We have heard your concerns about the fact that public queues currently handle various circumstances in a less than graceful manner. In addition to the aforementioned vote abandon feature (which is currently available on preview via right clicking on your character portrait (it will later be moved to the queue window)) we will be making a number of adjustments such as significantly increasing the amount of time a player can be offline before being automatically removed from a group (to 5 minutes, from 85 seconds. You will still be able to vote kick an offline player faster than this if you would like.) We will also be making some adjustments to vote kick and vote abandon to ensure that they are not abused, more on this tomorrow.
In addition to improving the overall public queue flow to be friendlier to premade groups and players with unstable connections, we are also making adjustments to rewards. (And I am aware that for most of you this is the biggest concern.) Because we have added new categories that grant bonus rewards, we had to keep in mind the total amount of AD being paid out by the system, and how that runs up against the daily limit on processing rough AD. In order to free up some of that space we are planning to make a significant adjustment and have Random: Hero's Accord pay out a large amount of RP directly instead of rough AD.
With hero's accord not paying out rough AD, we will be increasing the amount of rough AD from other random queues accordingly. The goal being that the average player who can't tackle the harder random queues can still get to 80-90% of their current daily rough AD gain with half as many runs (because we won't be providing 2 daily bonuses per category.) And that's not accounting for the additional AD from salvage via the new bonus seals.
Thank you all for your feedback. I appreciate your patience in waiting for a more detailed response to your concerns!
The vote abandon feature looks like a viable solution. (edit, I sugested earlyer not to have a leaver penalty at all but this proposed adjustment to it is fine)
However, the adjustments to rewards are not good enough. It still sounds like you plan for the main way to make AD to be through the random que, which is a scenario your players are vehemently against. As I stated before along with many other players, slashing the AD for non random ques by taking out the current AD making system will end up hurting the newer players and lowbies a lot more than the new system would help them. The new random que system should provide a strong incentive to use the random que but should not be forced on people as the only viable way to keep earning the same amount of AD that they did before this change. Even if you have to lower the extra AD gained from random queing to compensate for leaving the current AD system in place, that would be a much better system and much better received by your players.
Post edited by trgluestickz on
-- PVP Rogue, --[----- "Your friendly neighborhood spawn of Satan." -----]-- ---------------------------------------------------------------- Main Character: Hurricane Marigolds (Rogue WK & Assassin) Ingame Handle: trgluestickz Discord Name: Hurricane🌀Marigolds#2563 Guilds: She Looked LVL 18 & Essence of Aggression Alliances: Imperium & Order of the Silent Shroud Platform: PC
I will not use the random queue as long as there is a chance I will end up in the likes of FBI/MSP. Pugging them is mostly a waste of time.
No more bonus seals for the first run? I guess that somewhat solves the problem of low seal cap and frequent seal vendor trips.
Since solo queue was added, I find the public queue times are pretty good now. Quite often, even my DPS has shorter queue time than my tank. That probably means all the BiS DPS are doing eToS by themselves. Which creates different set of problems.
Leaver penalty? Doesn't affect players with multiple viable toons. Though not giving the penalty to people after the first leaver is a good move.
@asterdahl Thanks for responding. It's reassuring that you're willing to maintain dialogue with the community. I'm waiting to see the more fleshed out response you'll give us tomorrow.
Whilst we are waiting, I like the adjustments to auto-kicking and vote abandon of an instance. The number of times that I've relogged in after the gameclient crashed, only to find myself back in PE. This is a good change.
I'm disappointed to see that the momentum is still in the direction of random queues, it's tie to AD generation and ultimately limiting the AD potential of lower gearscore players/alts (The players who need it to help gear up and have a sense of reward).
Whilst moving the bonuses around may go a little towards redressing the issue, the manner in which players at different brackets qualify for this is a large wedge driving through the community. The divide between the haves and have nots is going to widen if this progresses in it's current guise. It doesn't take a genius to project the impact this'll have on players progressing through the game.
As per your comment on reward. Rewards need to be significantly improved! This applies across the whole game not just dungeons, Yes, it includes AD bonus and chest rewards, but also the rng applied to drops in places like Shoshenstar River (Smilodons, venomtails etc).
With hero's accord not paying out rough AD, we will be increasing the amount of rough AD from other random queues accordingly. The goal being that the average player who can't tackle the harder random queues can still get to 80-90% of their current daily rough AD gain with half as many runs (because we won't be providing 2 daily bonuses per category.) And that's not accounting for the additional AD from salvage via the new bonus seals.
No, no, no it doesn't solve anything of the concerns previously established. Who care what are the rewards for the Hero"s accord will be? This started from a good idea, but as you'll see the in the results when this come live, Hero's Accord will have a bad time since no one would random queue the hardest dungeon in the game, especially with the bonding changes.
The problem is, and still is after your post, that normal queue won't grant AD anymore. And this is the MAJOR point of these changes, considering the alt play. Do you know how much AD is necessary to get a toon close to BiS? Playing alts for 2* little dungeons and 2* skirmishes helps a lot if you have the time to do it, as i do. But alts are not necessary big-geared toons you want to bring in epic dungeons, sometimes it's just a way to make a daily AD bonus. So in my case I didn't unlock the big skirmishes / nor have the IL to do them on my alts. And I wouldn't like to get in an IG when queueing for MotH.
This means that I can't earn AD anymore on any of my alts through the skirmishes. Amazing, big cut of revenues. But there's more. I would still be able to random queue for pre-70 dungeon on all of them, but i could come up in a dungeon that is 2 times longer than ToS. Why in Earth would I spend 2 times more time to get the exact same reward? No one would do that!
I'll repeat what I said in a previous post: I get that you want us to play more diversified content, but that's absolutly not the good way to do it, by cutting our revenues from normal queue. Players should be able to play what THEY want to play and not what YOU want them to play.
WHY is it so hard for you to keep the actual normal queue AD rewards and just add the random queue ones on top of that? As always, and you seem not have learned from the NUMEROUS experiences in the past, this counter-bot measure will affect players way more than actual botters. Why is it so hard to let this bit of AD every day, it seems that you clearly don't want players to grind AD, even when you know the horrific total cost to become BiS, not talking about getting BiS on several toons.
EDIT: Edit thanks to trgluestickz, this change was not originally intended to counter bots, and indeed only a side effect. Nevertheless this will again affect a lot the players.
In a general way, why do you seem so reticent to give us proper rewards and want to cut every possible source of revenue for the players? We have so little to earn each day, and it's not like that everyone would get BiS in one day with a bit of an increase in AD, rewards (wards anyone?) in the repetitive stuff.
With hero's accord not paying out rough AD, we will be increasing the amount of rough AD from other random queues accordingly. The goal being that the average player who can't tackle the harder random queues can still get to 80-90% of their current daily rough AD gain with half as many runs (because we won't be providing 2 daily bonuses per category.) And that's not accounting for the additional AD from salvage via the new bonus seals.
No, no, no it doesn't solve anything of the concerns previously established. Who care what are the rewards for the Hero"s accord will be? This started from a good idea, but as you'll see the in the results when this come live, Hero's Accord will have a bad time since no one would random queue the hardest dungeon in the game, especially with the bonding changes.
The problem is, and still is after your post, that normal queue won't grant AD anymore. And this is the MAJOR point of these changes, considering the alt play. Do you know how much AD is necessary to get a toon close to BiS? Playing alts for 2* little dungeons and 2* skirmishes helps a lot if you have the time to do it, as i do. But alts are not necessary big-geared toons you want to bring in epic dungeons, sometimes it's just a way to make a daily AD bonus. So in my case I didn't unlock the big skirmishes / nor have the IL to do them on my alts. And I wouldn't like to get in an IG when queueing for MotH.
This means that I can't earn AD anymore on any of my alts through the skirmishes. Amazing, big cut of revenues. But there's more. I would still be able to random queue for pre-70 dungeon on all of them, but i could come up in a dungeon that is 2 times longer than ToS. Why in Earth would I spend 2 times more time to get the exact same reward? No one would do that!
I'll repeat what I said in a previous post: I get that you want us to play more diversified content, but that's absolutly not the good way to do it, by cutting our revenues from normal queue. Players should be able to play what THEY want to play and not what YOU want them to play.
WHY is it so hard for you to keep the actual normal queue AD rewards and just add the random queue ones on top of that? As always, and you seem not have learned from the NUMEROUS experiences in the past, this counter-bot measure will affect players way more than actual botters. Why is it so hard to let this bit of AD every day, it seems that you clearly don't want players to grind AD, even when you know the horrific total cost to become BiS, not talking about getting BiS on several toons.
I agree on all of this, +1.
I will mention that @asterdahl said this change's effects on botting were not intentional but do indeed have a negative effect on bots. That conversation started when a player pointed out this change's effect on botting but that doesn't appear to be why the devs did it. Here is his exact words:
While it's certainly true that there is an added benefit of this feature making it significantly harder to farm AD from dungeons with bots, this was actually entirely a bonus that fell naturally out of the design. Random queues is something we've wanted to implement for a while to improve the play experience.
-- PVP Rogue, --[----- "Your friendly neighborhood spawn of Satan." -----]-- ---------------------------------------------------------------- Main Character: Hurricane Marigolds (Rogue WK & Assassin) Ingame Handle: trgluestickz Discord Name: Hurricane🌀Marigolds#2563 Guilds: She Looked LVL 18 & Essence of Aggression Alliances: Imperium & Order of the Silent Shroud Platform: PC
One of my personal bugbears in this game has always been how OP characters dominate the basic dungeons, often making them a misery for pre Level 70 characters to play. If you need a minimum of 11k IL to even join the Epic dungeon queue, where is everyone with an IL 10'999 or below and anyone who hasn't unlocked every end game dungeon going to go to farm RADs?
Whatever problem this idea is aimed at solving, its going to make other situations much worse.
For instance, (again) I'm diligently queuing my 8k GWF for EToS to get his Cleric quest done and suddenly I'm joined by four 11k minimum guys on a random queue. They're over the moon they got Spiders and not Fangbreaker, and not only get to leave me in their wake they also get free AD for the pleasure of rolling a dungeon I need while I get 10 shards.
Can you see how that impacts those sub 11k players? How valued it makes you feel as a customer?
To start with, if you are queuing for eTOS, you are queuing for eTOS. If you do private, the random queue folks can't come. If you do public, the random queue folks still can't come. They will not go to your eToS. They go to their random queue eTos.
Sorry, but there's a whole section in the OP explaining why that is one of the actual goals of this suggested change.
Also everyone is talking about how it is crazy to group EToS with FBI and MSP, but what about the fact that you are grouping Malabog's with FBI and MSP. How does that make any sense?
The different epic level dungeon tiers need to be separated into subcategories somehow with the bonus given to only the first Epic dungeon run of the day. And Malabog's needs to just have its requirements brought up to the other tier 1s.
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adinosiiMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 4,294Arc User
In order to free up some of that space we are planning to make a significant adjustment and have Random: Hero's Accord pay out a large amount of RP directly instead of rough AD.
I am sorry @asterdahl, but that change totally misses the point. Look at this from the perspective of a player who actually and regularly runs T9G - someone like, well, me.
I do not care one bit whether I get a bonus RAD/RP reward at the end - yea, it is nice, but that's not why I'm running the dungeon. I am running T9G for the rings that I can pass to my lesser-played alts to gear them up. If I do not get rings from the chests, I get at least pretty decent purple items to salvage. Finally, I get seals which I can use to buy IL 500 items.
Now, my playing time is limited, so having a "smooth", fast run is very important to me. T9G is a tough dungeon and IMO perfectly balanced for the "top tier" players right now. (Well, actually for the past few days it has been a little too tough, because of the broken DC powers, which causes a noticeable drop in group performance - I actually had a failed run yesterday - first one in quite a while. I really hope that fixing the powers that broke in the last patch is a high-priority issue)
With the proposed changes to bonding runestones, T9G will become tougher, and players will be more selective in who they run T9G with. Nobody will want to run with a random group, due to the high chance of failure, and if you queue as a premade 5-man party, you will want to go in as a private group - if you go public/random, you take the risk of having a disconnected player replaced by a random one.
So...in short:
The change you propose to Hero's Accord is utterly irrelevant because the typical players that actually run T9G will not random queue anyhow.
With hero's accord not paying out rough AD, we will be increasing the amount of rough AD from other random queues accordingly.
Again, irrelevant.
The players that need AD the most are those gearing up, and they typically cannot use the Random epic dungeon queues anyhow.
Let me give you an example. One of my alts reached 70 not so long ago. He is currently at IL 9500 or so - quite enough to do some content, but not all of it.
He cannot do the Epic dungeons, because he does not qualify for all of them. He can do the non-epic dungeons, but why should he? The rewards are just not worth the time, and doing easy stuff like that does not give me a sense of accomplishment.
He could go into PvP, but why should he - first, he would get slaughtered, which is not fun - second, I hate PvP. One of the reasons I play NNO is exactly because I am not forced to participate in PvP.
That basically leaves skirmishes - and just hope he does not end up in IG....and the overall total RAD he gets will be less than what he gets today.
In short:
The change will actually hurt, not help the players who need the RAD the most.
If you are determined to go through with this idea, there is one thing you can do to partially salvage it - split the Epic dungeon queues up. Being unable to use the Epic dungeon queue because you have not unlocked all of the dungeons is simply not acceptable.
As has been said many times already, you really need to separate FBI/MSP from the other epic dungeons, it's pretty obnoxious to require someone to have 11k IL and a couple of months of time investment in 2 difficult camapigns (for newbies) in order to get RAD from epic dungeons.
As to the AD rewards for doing content, rather than having people need to do all of it, including PvP to get the max amount, why not consider something like a cap on the amount you can get from the random queue system per day, but let you run whatever content you want in order to hit the cap. That way dedicated PvP players can do their thing without feeling forced to do PvE content where their builds may not be suitable, and PvE players don't feel forced to go try PvP and get slaughtered. This would also help lower level players who have yet to unlock the higher tier dungeons and so would otherwise miss out on the potential reward from those categories.
This system also interferes with getting dungeoneer's shards for guild strongholds, so maybe a guild quest that rewards shards for doing a random dungeon/skrimish?
I have to say overall I am not a fan of this proposed change, as it seems to unfairly penalize newer players, and limit player choice, but if you really must add it, please carefully consider all the feedback people are giving. There is a reason why a lot of queues go unfilled, and it's usually because it's just tedious. I can only speak for myself but I tend to run the same content over and over because it's what I enjoy the most, so perhaps look into exactly why some queues go unfilled and try to fix the cause of the problem rather than the symptoms.
just to say it again add a vote between two dungeons at the beginning that way if there is something particularly odious coming up it can be avoided. I think that would solve a lot of problems
I have 3 toons over 12k and one as 11k atm and only one of them have Storm King Thunder so i think he's the only one could go random queue, and i'm certain that i will not use this stuff, i never did ended FBI with this char, he's not good dps enough to be usefull there, so why you think anyone will use this tio gear up ?
If you think this will be good to sell "Campaing Tokens" you wrong, becaus e the fact that you have the boons dont mean you have the gear and enchants you need, and to get those you beed AD, that is being increased fot already well equipped players but will be reduced for new players beceuse they will fail or wil have to vote quit a lot of times to get a good run so many ties that they will need to do the normal queue runs and live with salvages alone...
Dont expect that ibs players enter this stuff, they will preffer to run tong only with bis players to sell the new enchantment runes that only drop there, thsi after they get all that they need to level theyr enchants to 14...
This will not help to sell Camp. Tokens and Keys guys !
Will FBI be fixed before this goes live? No one seems to have answered that. Or maybe it's just a PS4 issue? If someone dies at Hati they can't get back in the dungeon- forever locked behind your invisible wall?
This is the reason we private queue it, so that if someone gets hosed up they can quit and be reinvited to finish the dungeon. As it is, if we use random queue, we will most likely not have the same full group from beginning to end.
and yes I know that if the person lies there dead and doesn't release they can stay with the group - but what % of the random players know that?
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I personally dislike the random queue idea as proposed, but if you are going to go forward with it, let us (the players) choose our roles rather than assigning them by class. If I want to run my Conq. GF as DPS, he shouldn't be forced to take a tank role. That would be a disservice to the rest of the group by forcing them to use a player not designed for the role assigned by class.
Loadouts do allow some flexibility and allow people to choose multiple roles. However, loadouts are not a panacea for roles as enchants and gear do a lot to help establish effectiveness in a role.
I also feel the group distribution should be 1 Tank, 1 Healer, 2 DPS, and 1 Support (e.g., MOF CW, Tact GF, whatever buff/debuff spec you can come up with). Support often has a difficult enough time doing dailies and don't deserve a separate random queue penalty because they don't truly fit into one of the traditional roles. You could even put little icons above the player to indicate what role they were filling so that group-mates could judge whether they were fulfilling that role and to signal to the player that they need to adjust their loadout if the role is different than what they currently have loaded.
I also support the need to split the dungeon into Tiers. Tier 3 (FBI, MSVA, MSP) takes longer to complete and you will actually encourage BIS to aid less-geared players by allowing them to choose the faster Tier 1 and Tier 2 dungeons if they just want to grab some AD rewards/salvage and have limited time available. Breaking up the lower Tiers also allows new-70s an opportunity to actually use the random queue system to obtain gear to further their progression rather than trapping them in sub-70 content for an indeterminate amount of time.
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micky1p00Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 3,594Arc User
Will FBI be fixed before this goes live? No one seems to have answered that. Or maybe it's just a PS4 issue? If someone dies at Hati they can't get back in the dungeon- forever locked behind your invisible wall?
This is the reason we private queue it, so that if someone gets hosed up they can quit and be reinvited to finish the dungeon. As it is, if we use random queue, we will most likely not have the same full group from beginning to end.
and yes I know that if the person lies there dead and doesn't release they can stay with the group - but what % of the random players know that?
I'm not sure on consoles, but 2 solutions, one use ViP to TP to the moonstone or PE or anywhere, and then you should have a button "Return to instance". Pressing it will get you back together with the group. Without ViP but in private queue, it's possible to leave and get re-invited to fix this.
Obviously you are right, people without ViP in random queue are screwed.
With 12+ pages, hopefully someone has answered this: "We would like your feedback on if there are any queues which currently require an item level too low to be successfully completed." MSP needs more than 5x 11K.
Since you are reworking things, can you do some sort of minimum with a group average, like maybe the minimum is still 11K to get in but the group average needs to be something higher....sorry if this was already said in this post.
Here's a suggestion. IF Cryptic insists on random queues, then increase the item level requirements for using random queues. Add another 1000 item level to FBI, MSP, and tong, just to weed out some weak players. It's not a nice thing to do, but I dont see any other way to make random queues work. Players will have to greatly over gear the dungeons, so that it's possible to succeed with a standard dungeon party.
If there is no way to get rid of weak players, then what will happen is, players will solo queue for random dungeon, and get FBI/SP/ToNG, and then take a 30 minute leaver penalty, because party can not handle that dungeon.
You might also want to increase item level requirements for low-end epic dungeons too, because with so many players waiting on a 30 minute leaver penalty, the poorly geared players might be less likely to end up in a decent party for any epic dungeon.
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svenisperfectMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 40Arc User
Could you stop pretending that your Astral Diamond gain is being gated? The "normal" dungeons will also get a random queue so you can still run those. Besides every random skirmish that you complete past the first one will still net 400 rAD. There is absolutely no difference between the ways to gain AD before and after the change for newer player. They will just have to be patient as usual and do what they can. Which will probably be running skirmishes/lvl dungeons for daily astral diamonds untill they have progressed through the campaigns to unlock the epic ones.
Heck now you will see less "barely made ilvl for this dungeon now i'll hold you back" type of characters around. The system will actually require you to unlock your campaigns, maybe pick up a couple of boons so there is a bigger chance that they will actually survive the content they try to run.
So is this a good change? Yes it is, new players will have their own way to gain AD (skirmish/lvl dungeons) and the fast track is gated behind playtime/experience/effort (campaign) as it should.
The fact that they make it easier to find normal queues if you are looking for a specific piece of loot is pretty awesome. Because right now the queue times are almost not worth it if you don't have one of the support roles in group.
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plasticbatMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 12,229Arc User
Could you stop pretending that your Astral Diamond gain is being gated? The "normal" dungeons will also get a random queue so you can still run those. Besides every random skirmish that you complete past the first one will still net 400 rAD. There is absolutely no difference between the ways to gain AD before and after the change for newer player. They will just have to be patient as usual and do what they can. Which will probably be running skirmishes/lvl dungeons for daily astral diamonds untill they have progressed through the campaigns to unlock the epic ones.
Heck now you will see less "barely made ilvl for this dungeon now i'll hold you back" type of characters around. The system will actually require you to unlock your campaigns, maybe pick up a couple of boons so there is a bigger chance that they will actually survive the content they try to run.
So is this a good change? Yes it is, new players will have their own way to gain AD (skirmish/lvl dungeons) and the fast track is gated behind playtime/experience/effort (campaign) as it should.
The fact that they make it easier to find normal queues if you are looking for a specific piece of loot is pretty awesome. Because right now the queue times are almost not worth it if you don't have one of the support roles in group.
The bottom line is: 1. you won't get skirmish/dungeon AD if you don't do random queue. 2. you can't do random queue unless your character qualifies for ALL dungeons in that random queue. A character (say level 30) that can earn AD from dungeon today cannot earn AD in mod 12b because this character is banned from random queue until he reaches (say) ~level 53. 3. you may not have key for all dungeon in that random queue. So, if you are sent to the 'wrong' dungeon, you sure get AD but lose the chest. 4. New character will not get AD until he qualifies the random queue for ALL skirmish or ALL level dungeons.
*** The game can read your mind. If you want it, you won't get it. If you don't expect to get it, you will. ***
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svenisperfectMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 40Arc User
The bottom line is: 1. you won't get skirmish/dungeon AD if you don't do random queue. 2. you can't do random queue unless your character qualifies for ALL dungeons in that random queue. A character (say level 30) that can earn AD from dungeon today cannot earn AD in mod 12b because this character is banned from random queue until he reaches (say) ~level 53. 3. you may not have key for all dungeon in that random queue. So, if you are sent to the 'wrong' dungeon, you sure get AD but lose the chest. 4. New character will not get AD until he qualifies the random queue for ALL skirmish or ALL level dungeons.
1. agreed, but there should also be a random queue for normal version of dungeons, which are accesible at lvl 70 straight off the bat, just like you can immediately do normal temple of the spider queen today, you can still do random queue: normal dungeon. 2. Read the OP, lvl is an exception, it clearly states that those low level characters can still random queue. 3. irrelevant, I don't have most keys past my daily dungeon key, the big complaint wasn't dungeon chests it was the AD, which you can still get. 4. They will instantly qualify for the random queue for normal dungeon, just like there are no requirements on them now. The skirmish might only have the item level as a gate, but with the 420/430 jungle crafting tasks it will be easy to obtain since you can buy that gear on the AH. Prices aren't that high now, will only drop and you can still get the startup AD from other sources (all of the weekly quests, seriously this is a thing people)
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plasticbatMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 12,229Arc User
The bottom line is: 1. you won't get skirmish/dungeon AD if you don't do random queue. 2. you can't do random queue unless your character qualifies for ALL dungeons in that random queue. A character (say level 30) that can earn AD from dungeon today cannot earn AD in mod 12b because this character is banned from random queue until he reaches (say) ~level 53. 3. you may not have key for all dungeon in that random queue. So, if you are sent to the 'wrong' dungeon, you sure get AD but lose the chest. 4. New character will not get AD until he qualifies the random queue for ALL skirmish or ALL level dungeons.
1. agreed, but there should also be a random queue for normal version of dungeons, which are accesible at lvl 70 straight off the bat, just like you can immediately do normal temple of the spider queen today, you can still do random queue: normal dungeon. 2. Read the OP, lvl is an exception, it clearly states that those low level characters can still random queue. 3. irrelevant, I don't have most keys past my daily dungeon key, the big complaint wasn't dungeon chests it was the AD, which you can still get. 4. They will instantly qualify for the random queue for normal dungeon, just like there are no requirements on them now. The skirmish might only have the item level as a gate, but with the 420/430 jungle crafting tasks it will be easy to obtain since you can buy that gear on the AH. Prices aren't that high now, will only drop and you can still get the startup AD from other sources (all of the weekly quests, seriously this is a thing people)
#3 is irrelevant to you but relevant to many because we like to earn the most from a run. Not 40% of it. With this (regardless if one wants to do random queue at all and that is arguable), one has a chance to not to get the chest while one doesn't have that issue right now because the person chooses the dungeon that one has keys.
And, because of this reason, I will not do random queue at all. I would just forfeit the AD and get the 60% from the dungeon of my choice.
I do not do normal dungeon today just for the sake of AD only (nothing in the chest that worth anything). I will also not do normal random queue for the sake of AD only in the future.
*** The game can read your mind. If you want it, you won't get it. If you don't expect to get it, you will. ***
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silverkeltMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 4,235Arc User
edited September 2017
Nonsense.. this change would have made me around 30-40% less AD a day.. its also time consuming, if I participated in that utter nonsense.. random queue to hell is what is going to happen.
How the hell do you come on here and say utter nonsense.. this change isnt a increase, this change really doesnt help newer players.. newer players cant really run most of the stuff that they would have to do.. and no running campaigns all the way through , doesnt always have a net increase of power.. the easier campaigns + stronghold ones are good enough for them.. they shouldnt have to finish a effing HAMSTER area like SKT.. it offers very little to them. Plus newer players would have hell of a time to finish that area tbh.. it would be soooo time consuming for a mid range player.
if they changed it around a bit, it wouldn't be quite so bad.. but yes.. this exact change would make me earn quite alot less AD in any given day.
It would only be about the same, for players who can carry most players and only play 1 or max 2 alts .. otherwise, those of us who set up multi alt farms, are screwed with this change.. plus it limits how I personally like to play the game.
It sux in a nutshell, it literally hampers me in my enjoyment, that this game has allowed for four years.. Massive paradigm shifts are not usually good, unless they replace something bad.. current form of queuing isnt bad.. there is literally nothing wrong with current system.
So sorry that in a MMO system, that players cant reach out and join alliances that were literally set up for them so they could particpate in certain areas and not face judgements.. you know communication.. clearly we shouldnt have to talk to anyone in game.. this just makes everything hunky dory and the community will grow and be better off with random queues! Right?
So yes.. what you are saying us utter bullox.. dont post things that you clearly do not understand, and defend actions you clearly do not get.
Ok so I'm going to sound like an elitist and <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font>, but telling you how I see this playing out.
I'm a 14k DC that uses public queue to run my stuff now, 2 skirmishes, 1 etos and either 1 CN or 1GWD. For the skirmishes and etos run, I don't care who I get grouped with and run the instance, with knowledge it will be completed in a relatively short time.
With CN and GWD I do inspect the team, and if there is low gs (usually under 10k), I leave instance. Not because group cant complete, but because I'm not wasting 30 min or more of my time to complete it for a junky reward.
With your leaver penalty in place, I will try to vote to abandon instance. If voted "no",;then I will ask to be kicked. If not, then I am forced to TROLL instance until group kicks me. Group is not happy, I'm not happy.....bad planning on your part.
Or Im now forced to make a 5 person group to do random queue and you just took a support role out of doing any public queue. I don't think that is your intention either.
Simple solutions; Dont implement a leaver penalty, and use random queue as an additional AD gain. Otherwise this is going to blow up in your faces.
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silverkeltMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 4,235Arc User
its even worse then the loss of the random AD if you stop and think about it.. simply put.. you can blow through a t2 with a premade team in x # of minutes.. you will most likley double or triple the time..
frankly this nerf is a direct 50% loss of AD if not more to the average player..
they are clearly driving to get people to buy zen to sell for AD, which is crazy.. they can go to the nine hells .
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silverkeltMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 4,235Arc User
Ok so I'm going to sound like an elitist and HAMSTER, but telling you how I see this playing out.
I'm a 14k DC that uses public queue to run my stuff now, 2 skirmishes, 1 etos and either 1 CN or 1GWD. For the skirmishes and etos run, I don't care who I get grouped with and run the instance, with knowledge it will be completed in a relatively short time.
With CN and GWD I do inspect the team, and if there is low gs (usually under 10k), I leave instance. Not because group cant complete, but because I'm not wasting 30 min or more of my time to complete it for a junky reward.
With your leaver penalty in place, I will try to vote to abandon instance. If voted "no",;then I will ask to be kicked. If not, then I am forced to TROLL instance until group kicks me. Group is not happy, I'm not happy.....bad planning on your part.
Or Im now forced to make a 5 person group to do random queue and you just took a support role out of doing any public queue. I don't think that is your intention either.
Simple solutions; Dont implement a leaver penalty, and use random queue as an additional AD gain. Otherwise this is going to blow up in your faces.
If I pug, I do so with usually my top DPS.. because if worst comes to worst I couldve soled it myself typically. of course with bondings change.. that makes it like 30% longer.. (not that I care anymore.. since im moving on) but still, trying to point out these defencies.. doing everything 30% longer.. sounds like a pain in the HAMSTER to me.
2: only if they have unlocked EVERY dungeon in the random q.
3: how is this irrelevant?? Maybe for you, but the point that's being made here is with regards to new/low ilvl players who want the chests plus any extra salvage. No, this is completely relevant.
4: but will get no rad from them. As for weekly ad quests, new players need to unlock them 1st & seriously how is, at most (unless I've forgot to add any. Shar, Dread, Mantol, WoD, PtT, IWD), 27k ad per WEEK going to be enough ad to make any worthwhile progress with their toons so they can enter the epic d's? & to BiS/high ilvl players, that same ad is pocket change!!
Comments
By gutting the way people currently make AD, you ironically end up hurting the newer players a lot more than the new system would help them. This is because you need all dungeons unlocked in a category in order to random que. Most newbies and lowbies do NOT have all content for the categories unlocked meaning they will not be able to use the random que feature for most categories until they have a lot more gear and have done most of their campaigns.
While I get that you want to increase the incentives to gear up, stripping away the old system for making AD makes it much harder for lowbies to get the gear needed to random que in the first place. Its not like gearing up was easy before and this change is a massive nerf to a lowbie's income.
Gutting the way people currently make AD and replacing it with the random que AD system also removes some of the incentive to use the recently introduced private que function. This is because your AD earnings are slashed by a large amount if you go private instead of random.
It is also disingenuous to factor in the PVP daily AD bonus as part of the new daily potential income and then treat it like that would lead to higher total daily earnings for PVE players. Most players are PVE only players and the new random que system is unlikely to change that.
It wouldn't even be a good thing if this system DID cause more PVE players to do PVP because the PVE players will still hate PVP just as much as before. They would want to do the bare minimum so they can get out of PVP as fast as possible and would only be in it for the AD. This would lead to a plague of AD farmers and create incentives to mooch in PVP. This would raise tensions between PVE players and PVP players and makes both sides unhappy.
What WOULD cause more people to play PVP is to fix PVP itself so it is more balanced and more fun so more people actually want to play it. This would create an incentive for PVE players to play PVP for real instead of them either not playing PVP at all or only doing it for the AD.
A leaver penalty does more to punish the teamates of the person who quit than it does the quitter. It also will end up punishing people for involuntary server disconnects far more often than it would end up punishing people who deliberately quit. A leaver penalty also means that if your team needs to quit a dungeon because they aren't able to finish it, they could end up being penalized for it. Often, teams who don't end up with a good group composition can't complete the dungeon and need to bail. This commonly happens in master svardvorg as a real example.
Most well geared players do not like this random que idea either. A lot of this has to do with the categories for random que not being bracketed well. Right now, all but 1 of the epic dungeons are in the same category. You cannot put tier 1's, tier 2's, and tier 3's together and have people still want to random que for them. Right now, fangbreaker island and master spellplague are in the same category as lair of lostmauth and temple of the spider. These dungeons have very different completion times, vary widely in how hard they are to complete, and some of them need specific group compositions in order to have good odds of getting through them. The rewards for many of these dungeons also do not scale according to difficulty and this has lead to the more difficult dungeons having roughly the same loot or worse loot than some of the dungeons that are faster and easier to complete. This loot inbalance further reduces people's incentive to use the random que.
Furthermore, while a lot of people do enjoy running a wider variety of dungeons, there are also a significant number of players who hate running certain dungeons and avoid them. Loot is a major factor for why certain dungeons don't get run very often but whether or not a player finds a dungeon fun also plays a big role. While creating more AD incentives to run a variety of dungeons is a good idea, the poor implementation has turned a good thing into a bad thing. There are 4 major groups of players to consider here:
Many players do not want to be forced into doing dungeons they hate just to keep making the same amount of AD they did prior to this change.
A lot of players also choose to run the same content over and over because they are trying to earn a specific drop from that dungeon. These players do not want to have to choose between making enough daily AD to keep up and farming for the item they want.
Many people only get a few hours to play each day and will not want to random que if there is a chance they will get stuck doing a dungeon that takes an hour or more. That one dungeon would eat up most of their available time that day and they might not have sufficient time left over to do other things like their campaign dailies or other time consuming content needed for progression.
There are players who do enjoy running a wide variety of dungeons and don't want to feel like they have to choose between content they enjoy and content that makes them progress faster, this random que feature would be beneficial to these players since it adds a loot incentive to doing a variety of dungeons. However, variety should not be the only viable way of making enough daily AD to progress.
All of that said, the random que would become a desirable feature if it received the following adjustments:
The random que should NOT replace the current system for making AD. It should instead be added on top of the existing AD making system. This will make it so this system no longer slashes the income of newer players. It also changes this system from being mandatory to progress into a strong incentive that will boost progression but is not required, which will sit much better with everyone.
Remove the leaver penalty. Its not needed and as mentioned by many people, leaver penalties do a lot more harm than good.
Bracket the dungeons better. Split tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3 dungeons into separate categories. This will better account for the difficulty and duration of the dungeons and make random queuing much more appealing.
Adjust the dungeon loot tables again and make loot scale by dungeon difficulty. This will up the incentive to run the harder dungeons. It will also make the random que more appealing for higher tier dungeons since you no longer would have the chance of ending up in a dungeon with bad loot. Loot from FBI and master spellplague as a real example is notoriously bad and these dungeons don't compete well with faster easier dungeons. One of @asterdahl 's desired effects of the random que was to up the incentive to gear up your character, adjusting the loot tables to scale by difficulty would be a much better way to acomplish this.
PVP Rogue,
--[----- "Your friendly neighborhood spawn of Satan." -----]--
----------------------------------------------------------------
Main Character: Hurricane Marigolds (Rogue WK & Assassin)
Ingame Handle: trgluestickz
Discord Name: Hurricane🌀Marigolds#2563
Guilds: She Looked LVL 18 & Essence of Aggression
Alliances: Imperium & Order of the Silent Shroud
Platform: PC
The other big concern I have is that I as a Level 70 with 8000 item level will be stuck running standard Dungeons and Skirmishes for a long time. Those won't gain me any upgrades to equipment and will be boring to run since they pose no challenge.
Please reconsider splitting Epic Dungeons (at least) into 2 or more categories so that I'll be able to run the 7500 item level ones for rAD.
However, the adjustments to rewards are not good enough. It still sounds like you plan for the main way to make AD to be through the random que, which is a scenario your players are vehemently against. As I stated before along with many other players, slashing the AD for non random ques by taking out the current AD making system will end up hurting the newer players and lowbies a lot more than the new system would help them. The new random que system should provide a strong incentive to use the random que but should not be forced on people as the only viable way to keep earning the same amount of AD that they did before this change.
Even if you have to lower the extra AD gained from random queing to compensate for leaving the current AD system in place, that would be a much better system and much better received by your players.
PVP Rogue,
--[----- "Your friendly neighborhood spawn of Satan." -----]--
----------------------------------------------------------------
Main Character: Hurricane Marigolds (Rogue WK & Assassin)
Ingame Handle: trgluestickz
Discord Name: Hurricane🌀Marigolds#2563
Guilds: She Looked LVL 18 & Essence of Aggression
Alliances: Imperium & Order of the Silent Shroud
Platform: PC
No more bonus seals for the first run? I guess that somewhat solves the problem of low seal cap and frequent seal vendor trips.
Since solo queue was added, I find the public queue times are pretty good now. Quite often, even my DPS has shorter queue time than my tank. That probably means all the BiS DPS are doing eToS by themselves. Which creates different set of problems.
Leaver penalty? Doesn't affect players with multiple viable toons. Though not giving the penalty to people after the first leaver is a good move.
I'm waiting to see the more fleshed out response you'll give us tomorrow.
Whilst we are waiting, I like the adjustments to auto-kicking and vote abandon of an instance. The number of times that I've relogged in after the gameclient crashed, only to find myself back in PE. This is a good change.
I'm disappointed to see that the momentum is still in the direction of random queues, it's tie to AD generation and ultimately limiting the AD potential of lower gearscore players/alts (The players who need it to help gear up and have a sense of reward).
Whilst moving the bonuses around may go a little towards redressing the issue, the manner in which players at different brackets qualify for this is a large wedge driving through the community. The divide between the haves and have nots is going to widen if this progresses in it's current guise.
It doesn't take a genius to project the impact this'll have on players progressing through the game.
As per your comment on reward. Rewards need to be significantly improved!
This applies across the whole game not just dungeons, Yes, it includes AD bonus and chest rewards, but also the rng applied to drops in places like Shoshenstar River (Smilodons, venomtails etc).
The problem is, and still is after your post, that normal queue won't grant AD anymore. And this is the MAJOR point of these changes, considering the alt play. Do you know how much AD is necessary to get a toon close to BiS? Playing alts for 2* little dungeons and 2* skirmishes helps a lot if you have the time to do it, as i do.
But alts are not necessary big-geared toons you want to bring in epic dungeons, sometimes it's just a way to make a daily AD bonus. So in my case I didn't unlock the big skirmishes / nor have the IL to do them on my alts. And I wouldn't like to get in an IG when queueing for MotH.
This means that I can't earn AD anymore on any of my alts through the skirmishes. Amazing, big cut of revenues. But there's more. I would still be able to random queue for pre-70 dungeon on all of them, but i could come up in a dungeon that is 2 times longer than ToS. Why in Earth would I spend 2 times more time to get the exact same reward? No one would do that!
I'll repeat what I said in a previous post: I get that you want us to play more diversified content, but that's absolutly not the good way to do it, by cutting our revenues from normal queue. Players should be able to play what THEY want to play and not what YOU want them to play.
WHY is it so hard for you to keep the actual normal queue AD rewards and just add the random queue ones on top of that? As always, and you seem not have learned from the NUMEROUS experiences in the past, this counter-bot measure will affect players way more than actual botters. Why is it so hard to let this bit of AD every day, it seems that you clearly don't want players to grind AD, even when you know the horrific total cost to become BiS, not talking about getting BiS on several toons.
EDIT: Edit thanks to trgluestickz, this change was not originally intended to counter bots, and indeed only a side effect. Nevertheless this will again affect a lot the players.
In a general way, why do you seem so reticent to give us proper rewards and want to cut every possible source of revenue for the players? We have so little to earn each day, and it's not like that everyone would get BiS in one day with a bit of an increase in AD, rewards (wards anyone?) in the repetitive stuff.
I will mention that @asterdahl said this change's effects on botting were not intentional but do indeed have a negative effect on bots. That conversation started when a player pointed out this change's effect on botting but that doesn't appear to be why the devs did it. Here is his exact words:
PVP Rogue,
--[----- "Your friendly neighborhood spawn of Satan." -----]--
----------------------------------------------------------------
Main Character: Hurricane Marigolds (Rogue WK & Assassin)
Ingame Handle: trgluestickz
Discord Name: Hurricane🌀Marigolds#2563
Guilds: She Looked LVL 18 & Essence of Aggression
Alliances: Imperium & Order of the Silent Shroud
Platform: PC
I have 1 simple question for you to explain.
How will 53rd level and lower players be eligible for any of these random queues to earn bonus RAD?
The different epic level dungeon tiers need to be separated into subcategories somehow with the bonus given to only the first Epic dungeon run of the day. And Malabog's needs to just have its requirements brought up to the other tier 1s.
I do not care one bit whether I get a bonus RAD/RP reward at the end - yea, it is nice, but that's not why I'm running the dungeon. I am running T9G for the rings that I can pass to my lesser-played alts to gear them up. If I do not get rings from the chests, I get at least pretty decent purple items to salvage. Finally, I get seals which I can use to buy IL 500 items.
Now, my playing time is limited, so having a "smooth", fast run is very important to me. T9G is a tough dungeon and IMO perfectly balanced for the "top tier" players right now. (Well, actually for the past few days it has been a little too tough, because of the broken DC powers, which causes a noticeable drop in group performance - I actually had a failed run yesterday - first one in quite a while. I really hope that fixing the powers that broke in the last patch is a high-priority issue)
With the proposed changes to bonding runestones, T9G will become tougher, and players will be more selective in who they run T9G with. Nobody will want to run with a random group, due to the high chance of failure, and if you queue as a premade 5-man party, you will want to go in as a private group - if you go public/random, you take the risk of having a disconnected player replaced by a random one.
So...in short:
The change you propose to Hero's Accord is utterly irrelevant because the typical players that actually run T9G will not random queue anyhow.
Again, irrelevant.The players that need AD the most are those gearing up, and they typically cannot use the Random epic dungeon queues anyhow.
Let me give you an example. One of my alts reached 70 not so long ago. He is currently at IL 9500 or so - quite enough to do some content, but not all of it.
He cannot do the Epic dungeons, because he does not qualify for all of them. He can do the non-epic dungeons, but why should he? The rewards are just not worth the time, and doing easy stuff like that does not give me a sense of accomplishment.
He could go into PvP, but why should he - first, he would get slaughtered, which is not fun - second, I hate PvP. One of the reasons I play NNO is exactly because I am not forced to participate in PvP.
That basically leaves skirmishes - and just hope he does not end up in IG....and the overall total RAD he gets will be less than what he gets today.
In short:
The change will actually hurt, not help the players who need the RAD the most.
If you are determined to go through with this idea, there is one thing you can do to partially salvage it - split the Epic dungeon queues up. Being unable to use the Epic dungeon queue because you have not unlocked all of the dungeons is simply not acceptable.As to the AD rewards for doing content, rather than having people need to do all of it, including PvP to get the max amount, why not consider something like a cap on the amount you can get from the random queue system per day, but let you run whatever content you want in order to hit the cap. That way dedicated PvP players can do their thing without feeling forced to do PvE content where their builds may not be suitable, and PvE players don't feel forced to go try PvP and get slaughtered. This would also help lower level players who have yet to unlock the higher tier dungeons and so would otherwise miss out on the potential reward from those categories.
This system also interferes with getting dungeoneer's shards for guild strongholds, so maybe a guild quest that rewards shards for doing a random dungeon/skrimish?
I have to say overall I am not a fan of this proposed change, as it seems to unfairly penalize newer players, and limit player choice, but if you really must add it, please carefully consider all the feedback people are giving. There is a reason why a lot of queues go unfilled, and it's usually because it's just tedious. I can only speak for myself but I tend to run the same content over and over because it's what I enjoy the most, so perhaps look into exactly why some queues go unfilled and try to fix the cause of the problem rather than the symptoms.
1. range of difficulty varies too much
2. leaver penalty
3. random queue rewards are poor compare to the risk
Combining 1,2 and 3, I don't see how anyone would want to random queue.
If you think this will be good to sell "Campaing Tokens" you wrong, becaus e the fact that you have the boons dont mean you have the gear and enchants you need, and to get those you beed AD, that is being increased fot already well equipped players but will be reduced for new players beceuse they will fail or wil have to vote quit a lot of times to get a good run so many ties that they will need to do the normal queue runs and live with salvages alone...
Dont expect that ibs players enter this stuff, they will preffer to run tong only with bis players to sell the new enchantment runes that only drop there, thsi after they get all that they need to level theyr enchants to 14...
This will not help to sell Camp. Tokens and Keys guys !
Will FBI be fixed before this goes live? No one seems to have answered that. Or maybe it's just a PS4 issue? If someone dies at Hati they can't get back in the dungeon- forever locked behind your invisible wall?
This is the reason we private queue it, so that if someone gets hosed up they can quit and be reinvited to finish the dungeon. As it is, if we use random queue, we will most likely not have the same full group from beginning to end.
and yes I know that if the person lies there dead and doesn't release they can stay with the group - but what % of the random players know that?
Ravenskya - TR / Krisha Chaos - OP / Waffles - GF / Dex Domitor - HR
Becky the trendy GWF - GWF / Too Toasty - SW / Falcor - DC / Morrigan - CW / Sir Didymus - OP
Loadouts do allow some flexibility and allow people to choose multiple roles. However, loadouts are not a panacea for roles as enchants and gear do a lot to help establish effectiveness in a role.
I also feel the group distribution should be 1 Tank, 1 Healer, 2 DPS, and 1 Support (e.g., MOF CW, Tact GF, whatever buff/debuff spec you can come up with). Support often has a difficult enough time doing dailies and don't deserve a separate random queue penalty because they don't truly fit into one of the traditional roles. You could even put little icons above the player to indicate what role they were filling so that group-mates could judge whether they were fulfilling that role and to signal to the player that they need to adjust their loadout if the role is different than what they currently have loaded.
I also support the need to split the dungeon into Tiers. Tier 3 (FBI, MSVA, MSP) takes longer to complete and you will actually encourage BIS to aid less-geared players by allowing them to choose the faster Tier 1 and Tier 2 dungeons if they just want to grab some AD rewards/salvage and have limited time available. Breaking up the lower Tiers also allows new-70s an opportunity to actually use the random queue system to obtain gear to further their progression rather than trapping them in sub-70 content for an indeterminate amount of time.
Without ViP but in private queue, it's possible to leave and get re-invited to fix this.
Obviously you are right, people without ViP in random queue are screwed.
Since you are reworking things, can you do some sort of minimum with a group average, like maybe the minimum is still 11K to get in but the group average needs to be something higher....sorry if this was already said in this post.
OP - Sunshine: 16000 IL
Casual Dailies
IF Cryptic insists on random queues, then increase the item level requirements for using random queues.
Add another 1000 item level to FBI, MSP, and tong, just to weed out some weak players.
It's not a nice thing to do, but I dont see any other way to make random queues work.
Players will have to greatly over gear the dungeons, so that it's possible to succeed with a standard dungeon party.
If there is no way to get rid of weak players, then what will happen is, players will solo queue for random dungeon, and get FBI/SP/ToNG, and then take a 30 minute leaver penalty, because party can not handle that dungeon.
You might also want to increase item level requirements for low-end epic dungeons too, because with so many players waiting on a 30 minute leaver penalty, the poorly geared players might be less likely to end up in a decent party for any epic dungeon.
Heck now you will see less "barely made ilvl for this dungeon now i'll hold you back" type of characters around. The system will actually require you to unlock your campaigns, maybe pick up a couple of boons so there is a bigger chance that they will actually survive the content they try to run.
So is this a good change? Yes it is, new players will have their own way to gain AD (skirmish/lvl dungeons) and the fast track is gated behind playtime/experience/effort (campaign) as it should.
The fact that they make it easier to find normal queues if you are looking for a specific piece of loot is pretty awesome. Because right now the queue times are almost not worth it if you don't have one of the support roles in group.
1. you won't get skirmish/dungeon AD if you don't do random queue.
2. you can't do random queue unless your character qualifies for ALL dungeons in that random queue. A character (say level 30) that can earn AD from dungeon today cannot earn AD in mod 12b because this character is banned from random queue until he reaches (say) ~level 53.
3. you may not have key for all dungeon in that random queue. So, if you are sent to the 'wrong' dungeon, you sure get AD but lose the chest.
4. New character will not get AD until he qualifies the random queue for ALL skirmish or ALL level dungeons.
1. agreed, but there should also be a random queue for normal version of dungeons, which are accesible at lvl 70 straight off the bat, just like you can immediately do normal temple of the spider queen today, you can still do random queue: normal dungeon.
2. Read the OP, lvl is an exception, it clearly states that those low level characters can still random queue.
3. irrelevant, I don't have most keys past my daily dungeon key, the big complaint wasn't dungeon chests it was the AD, which you can still get.
4. They will instantly qualify for the random queue for normal dungeon, just like there are no requirements on them now. The skirmish might only have the item level as a gate, but with the 420/430 jungle crafting tasks it will be easy to obtain since you can buy that gear on the AH. Prices aren't that high now, will only drop and you can still get the startup AD from other sources (all of the weekly quests, seriously this is a thing people)
And, because of this reason, I will not do random queue at all. I would just forfeit the AD and get the 60% from the dungeon of my choice.
I do not do normal dungeon today just for the sake of AD only (nothing in the chest that worth anything). I will also not do normal random queue for the sake of AD only in the future.
How the hell do you come on here and say utter nonsense.. this change isnt a increase, this change really doesnt help newer players.. newer players cant really run most of the stuff that they would have to do.. and no running campaigns all the way through , doesnt always have a net increase of power.. the easier campaigns + stronghold ones are good enough for them.. they shouldnt have to finish a effing HAMSTER area like SKT.. it offers very little to them. Plus newer players would have hell of a time to finish that area tbh.. it would be soooo time consuming for a mid range player.
if they changed it around a bit, it wouldn't be quite so bad.. but yes.. this exact change would make me earn quite alot less AD in any given day.
It would only be about the same, for players who can carry most players and only play 1 or max 2 alts .. otherwise, those of us who set up multi alt farms, are screwed with this change.. plus it limits how I personally like to play the game.
It sux in a nutshell, it literally hampers me in my enjoyment, that this game has allowed for four years.. Massive paradigm shifts are not usually good, unless they replace something bad.. current form of queuing isnt bad.. there is literally nothing wrong with current system.
So sorry that in a MMO system, that players cant reach out and join alliances that were literally set up for them so they could particpate in certain areas and not face judgements.. you know communication.. clearly we shouldnt have to talk to anyone in game.. this just makes everything hunky dory and the community will grow and be better off with random queues! Right?
So yes.. what you are saying us utter bullox.. dont post things that you clearly do not understand, and defend actions you clearly do not get.
I'm a 14k DC that uses public queue to run my stuff now, 2 skirmishes, 1 etos and either 1 CN or 1GWD. For the skirmishes and etos run, I don't care who I get grouped with and run the instance, with knowledge it will be completed in a relatively short time.
With CN and GWD I do inspect the team, and if there is low gs (usually under 10k), I leave instance. Not because group cant complete, but because I'm not wasting 30 min or more of my time to complete it for a junky reward.
With your leaver penalty in place, I will try to vote to abandon instance. If voted "no",;then I will ask to be kicked. If not, then I am forced to TROLL instance until group kicks me. Group is not happy, I'm not happy.....bad planning on your part.
Or Im now forced to make a 5 person group to do random queue and you just took a support role out of doing any public queue. I don't think that is your intention either.
Simple solutions; Dont implement a leaver penalty, and use random queue as an additional AD gain. Otherwise this is going to blow up in your faces.
frankly this nerf is a direct 50% loss of AD if not more to the average player..
they are clearly driving to get people to buy zen to sell for AD, which is crazy.. they can go to the nine hells .
1: you still won't earn any rad.
2: only if they have unlocked EVERY dungeon in the random q.
3: how is this irrelevant?? Maybe for you, but the point that's being made here is with regards to new/low ilvl players who want the chests plus any extra salvage. No, this is completely relevant.
4: but will get no rad from them. As for weekly ad quests, new players need to unlock them 1st & seriously how is, at most (unless I've forgot to add any. Shar, Dread, Mantol, WoD, PtT, IWD), 27k ad per WEEK going to be enough ad to make any worthwhile progress with their toons so they can enter the epic d's? & to BiS/high ilvl players, that same ad is pocket change!!