Death of the Alt

geochris

I have been playing PWI since about 3 weeks it opened its servers up to the public. I have seen great updates and poor ones and others that were great but poorly implemented. Having said this PWI seems to be waging a very deliberate war to eliminate people playing alts. Every update in the last few years removes some feature that helps the alt either passively or directly. It has also eliminating every single source of farming but that is for another post.

These are some of the changes that I would rate as anti alt. Also many can be considered anti new player.

-Lowering the rewards for BH 1. BH has been a staple of PWI for so many years and its usefulness has been pushed to almost nothing. I kept a tally of my BH1 rewards for about 4 months last year. After 113 BH1 completions I got cards only 6 times. Socket stones, war avatars, chips are all practically worthless, not even worth the gear repar + teleportation fee to get to the instance and back to Arch. Mirages and cards are really the only thing worthwhile for BH1. Sure you can get a nebula dust orb or choice of other items but really it is worth the time anymore? You used to be able to get a nebula dust for completing a 5 min daily. Now pick up bh1 find a 10 person squad, spend X# of tels and wait for squad to form 5-30min, then complete instance. Nebulas are nice but I am up to astral energy 4 on my main and still don't have a great chart despite using 1000s, of nebula dust orbs. 1 nebula per BH is kind of ok but still not worth the time. Before you were guaranteed to get 5 ultimate substance or 5 mirages, which were tradable. Those made it worth doing BH now I only really do it if I have the time.

-Removing star chart (SC) items from primal dailies. The daily grind was awful, gaining boundary levels was awful. I am sort of glad that the pressure to complete these dailies is gone because there is no reward for doing them. However if you wanted to play an alt to try a different class/play style then the primal daily SC items allowed you to have a semi geared alt that you could use. Now in order to get any sort of SC items you have to either complete 3.5hours of mind numbing boredom slugging throw the tower or somehow get insanely lucky with transmutation to get your SC items. It is one thing to do tower on a main but to do it multiple times on an alt??? no thanks. Besides doing tower gives less SC items than a week worth of primal dailies used to do and tower takes so much more time, more effort and less reward. An easy change would be to add more items and tradable to the transmutation NPC but even then it would be hard. It used to be possible to get an aptitude 10 SC without much difficulty now it is almost an unbearable daunting task not to mention an aptitude 15 SC.

-There has been a steady progression away from non-bound equipment to bound equipment. CoM, Matchless wings, jaden crystal, coliseum equipments, avatar cards, star charts and more are all non-tradable. It used to be nice to be able to sell or buy someone's older refined/sharded gear for a discount. It helped the sell and the buyer. Now you can't sell/trade those items. I am sure there are people who would sell their sharded/refined CoM so they could make the upgraded coliseum helm but not now.

-Faction bases. Sigh this update is going to put severe strain on the smaller factions and completely kill others. I for one have toons in a faction where the leader stopped playing about 1.5 years ago. It had an upgraded base that had the capability to make the faction helm. My veno had enough merit to get it and I was going to do it. My seeker was close to getting it. Now any alt in these leaderless factions are just homeless now. Even my main is in an active faction we try to do the first few weeks of TW we can get about 15 people for a battle. We get eliminated quickly but we have fun. Now I don't know if we will be able to generate enough as most people in the faction don't do DDH/UP. I liked being able to gain contribution at my own leisure instead of getting everyone in the faction together to complete a quest at the same time. This is a bad move for both alts and mains in small factions.

-Difficulty of obtaining older content. Older content should become EASIER to obtain over time instead of harder. PWI appears to not understand this concept especially with star charts.

-Having said all of this I have to point out that there were a few changes that helped the alt. Having books dropped from EU and AEU are fantastic. The low level transmutation is great for alts/new players. Also, experience pills are the friend of alts everywhere. I wouldn't have a DB if it weren't for the exp pills. Sadly because of the above grievances it will never be played. I don't have the years to dedicate to it doing tower, boundary levels, glyphs, ect.

I play alts from time to time as side projects to enhance game enjoy ability and to experience game play from different toons and play styles. Even before exp pills I leveled 2 venos (both sage and demon), 1 seeker, 2 sins (sage & demon), 1 BM, 1 mystic, 1 cleric and 1 barb to 100. I loved playing alts and enjoyed being able to fill any roll in a squad with one of my toons. I have 3 sets of r9s3 gear and sets of NirvyS3 gear in AA, LA and HA and a myriad of s3 weps. I am not a heavy cash shopper but I spend a couple hundred on this game a year. Playing alts keeps the game fresh for me and makes it difficult to get bored. When focusing on only 1 toon... I get bored.

I like playing alts it is one of the things I really liked about PWI. For a while I was doing my primal dailies with 6 different toons because I wanted to try them out in NW. Now because of the many changes I mainly play 1 toon and occasionally play 3 others. Will this latest update make me quit? I really don't know yet, it might. PWI has been a part of my life for over 9 years it is hard to say goodbye. However, I can say if this anti-alt trend continues I will quit and take my few hundred a year and go somewhere else.

Sincerely,

A dedicated and long time player