This is strictly coming from my personal view of the upcoming mod.
When you saw the Pax video previewing Mod 15 were you excited ?
Did the Shriner beholders have you laughing and waiting for them to drop ?
The Penny Arcade people have you chomping at the bit, to try the new Acquisitions Inc material ?
Were you actually thinking wow they are going to do some good stuff for professions that will make it more interesting, when you read about the overhaul ?
When you saw that leadership was being eliminated did you feel you had been sucker punched in the gut ?
When you heard that you were getting nothing for it did you feel like you had been kicked in the nether regions ?
When you found out that part of the goal here was to get people out of crafting did you think there goes that part of the game till it shuts down and a new one comes out ?
What's really sad and annoying was with the good things I saw featured in the pax video, I actually hoped that the changes to the profession system would be good as well.
Look at what could have been added just from what we see now
1. We could have had a new profession that would make consumables for improved crafting.
2. New classes of characters within the existing professions
3. Alternate routes to mastercraft and crafted items instead of AD (Another use for gold stead of this)
4. New consumable items
5. A new fashion crafting profession that would craft items with transmutes attached.
6. New Recipe items only available from lockboxes
Instead of getting a fun overhaul or even an expansion it's a destruction. Cryptic is coming in and breaking toys we have been playing with. Collectibles still in their boxes are being smashed. Legos are having their nubs sanded down. Lincoln logs are being fed to the wood chipper. What is going away is being replaced with knockoffs if at all.
Looking at the aftermath of the changes.
1. The profession system now has a tutorial that is longer than the tutorial for the rest of the game. (takes me about 20 minutes to get a PC through the current intro). Hell just getting through early parts on test took an hour 20 most of which was waiting around
2. There is no account unlock for the tutorial so people who have alts have to go through it again and again (and again)^N. I can see this working out well.
3. It's now even more difficult to break into masterwork professions. Well that will make a smaller number of people proportionally more happy with the crafting system. At least for a little while.
4. People are going to come into the game and find things they paid real money for effectively vaporized. As I said up top this is a personal perspective but I started playing this game when it first came out and left, because I felt that Cryptic had a bad case of rectal cranial inversion. I came back because one of the people I play tabletop with wanted someone to game with, and I figured I could at least give him my stuff. I decided to stay because there was email in my box from Cryptic that roughly said "Sorry we had to wipe out your stuff, here's some things we hope will make it up to you". I read that and thought hey maybe they are starting to get it ? Doing that cost next to nothing but at least said they realized there was an obligation that cut both ways. Now it's back to the old ways with a vengeance.
So i guess what I see with this mod and the various changes, is that Cryptic is still very divided between people that want to gain customers because people enjoy their product and want to enhance their experience, versus people who think the players are going to be here no matter what they do and they can increase revenue by inflicting pain upon them and offering not to for a price.
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Comments
It seemed like nothing more than a way to rope in a new audience. Absolutely nothing about the mod sounds exciting to me. When they announced the professions overhaul I knew, and stated what it would mean. The end of professions for a number of people.
Time will tell if the game will improve over the next few mods but they obviously...hopefully....have a plan in place. I think they're going to lose some players over the coming changes but maybe they'll gain more than they lose and that's the ultimate goal.
As for the professions overhaul, I still don't understand why their goal is to get even fewer players to engage with it. Already, most of the people doing professions are just doing Leadership. There are some of those people who are like me and use professions to generate resources for their guilds. Even fewer people engage with masterwork crafting. The devs have said they want to generate trade and get people making things to sell to other players to use in crafting. I can't see how that will work out when they're making it so that fewer people will do professions. You get more trade when you get more people engaging with a system. Thus, it seems to me that their design goals are diametrically opposed to one another.
I'm also with @empalas in that I'm looking forward to not having to log in multiple times per day in order to tend professions. Doing so is a real slog that takes 20 to 25 minutes for me four times per day. Of course, I'm generating lots of guild resources by doing this, which is the motivation. I'm just ready for it to stop and I'm already relaxing about it today (and probably the rest of the week) since we are in the final week before launch.
The ultimate goal is to limit the amount of RP that was being generated by players. The way to get to that goal is to drive them away with a mundane system that's cumbersome, boring, eliminate a large amount of progress/assets some people have made over the course of years, etc etc.
I have 8 toons I
playplayed on so I used leadership to support upgrading things for all of them. The new system doesn't sound like anything I'll be interested in using so it'll be back to fully relying on double gems and enchants for RP. I won't be surprised when they change QMs, Fey and Dragon Hoard enchants to drop only RP straight into your bank instead of leadership bags, or unbound RP items.Over on XB1, I know a few mastercrafters that have already started unloading their tools/resources and packed it in because they're not interested in the new prof system at all. So when they start leaving and there's fewer crafters and the prices start going even higher the community will gripe and moan and maybe changes will be made. Doubtful but maybe.