Adventure Updates - Daily Credits!

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  • The exploration ones are tricky anyways, because just visiting the same couple of places over and over has little to do with exploration. Using relatively unknown places doesn't help either, because people will just be dragging their city mates there anyways.

    In the end it's just a (very rewarding) grind. That's true for many of the other adventures as well, but for things like hunting, grinding is in its nature anyways.

    Somewhat more meaningful exploration adventures would be things like "discover X new rooms", but that's only viable for the low explorer ranks. 

    I'm not really sure how to solve this. You could have an adventure to visit a place that is randomly generated, so it's new every day and different for every player, but the question is how to describe said place without simply giving the room name (which would again make it trivial with mappers).
  • edited February 2020
    The aim of the renown system was to cater to all types of playstyles. Seems strange to me they don't have one for actual hunting grinding when there are a lot of people who prefer doing just that. It's typically much slower than the foray and honours mob methods currently in existence so most people will likely stick to those for quick and easy daily credits.

     It works just fine for the other two games, who have also had it significantly longer. It's a multiplayer game, sure, but most multiplayer "rp based" games (see: non fps/moba, generally mmos) have a boat load of singleplayer stuff (often times more than group stuff). Certainly dailies are singleplayer for 95% of them. 

    Current system kinda pigeonholes you if you don't happen to play at the times when people are going out to do those and forces you to do significantly more. It's so weird to me that Achaea has the most development, got two other games to test the waters and, after nearly 2 years, still managed to make the worst iteration of daily credits.
  • That is one of my niggles, and the clunkiness of the system, but it IS heads above what we had before, and it’s skyrocketed participation in so many regards. I worry about burnout, but I think with refinement not on top of spaghetti code it’ll come out better in the end. One of the few times I don’t want to inundate my negatives on the system off the bat, and patience I think will benefit.

    Please, please, PLEASE keep rotating tpieces though, if you have a non-talisman promo tack on a previous set. So much potential for expansion and allowing more to obtain sets (as someone with all but ~3-4 of the “must have” items, I want more in circulation. Even a sleeve once every theme, or a globe every theme etc.)

    Adding in a promo-relevant bonus, even if it can’t ping the top item in a set (harness, lv2 robes etc) will help, and while I can’t say it will help the bottom line, it WILL help retention and player base improvement. I can’t emphasize how much more alive the game world has felt, and even if we aren’t all at each other’s throat 24/7, it hasn’t been TOO lethal to conflict, but has made more, “fine, we’ll work together just for this PvE reason”, which isn’t always conducive to RP, but it is good to be talking to more neutrals/enemies without it being flat out hostile. 
  • I'm torn about some of the ideas. And they are all great ideas, before I point out my criticisms. I guess it -would- be nice to have more solo things. Or, things that could be done in smaller groups. But on the other hand, I'm loving the grouping to do forays, or explore the tree, or even just sit at the arena, and talk kill paths because that's more interesting than 'it's your turn to sit down and take the beheading'. Anything that drives people to stop solo bashing and get together to do something is GREAT. That being said, I don't care how many of you there are, I'm not keen on slapping Yudhi.
  • Rackham said:
    I'm torn about some of the ideas. And they are all great ideas, before I point out my criticisms. I guess it -would- be nice to have more solo things. Or, things that could be done in smaller groups. But on the other hand, I'm loving the grouping to do forays, or explore the tree, or even just sit at the arena, and talk kill paths because that's more interesting than 'it's your turn to sit down and take the beheading'. Anything that drives people to stop solo bashing and get together to do something is GREAT. That being said, I don't care how many of you there are, I'm not keen on slapping Yudhi.
    That's okay I'll slap for you.
  • edited February 2020
    Perhaps the most basic difference of the new system versus the old is the removal of random adventures. At first blush, this seems like an obvious improvement from a player perspective: less arbitrary goals and thus more control over what goals I choose to pursue. However, I'm not quite so sanguine about this.

    Firstly, there's the effect on hunting of the medium/high level denizens. Others have addressed this so I won't say too much, but suffice it to say that these denizens don't stay alive for long of late. This also perversely means that there's still a level of RNG involved: Is one of the high-level denizens alive when you're around, and can you reach them in time before someone else kills them?  So while there's no longer an explicit arbitrariness to the adventures, there's still an implicit element of chance. The 'obvious' fix is to offer more options, but I'm dubious this will help much: I think players are persistent enough that we'll just hunt even more. An advantage of random adventures, in this regard, was that different players had genuinely different goals and so didn't need to grasp desperately for the same resources.

    Secondly, one feature I liked about the old system's random exploration adventures is that they exposed me to quests I didn't know about, in places I may not have visited in RL years. This was certainly frustrating at times--two medium exploration adventures could vary drastically in difficulty--but it helped to give a sense of Achaea's scope. (This also pertained to the other quest themes to a lesser degree.) This is preserved in the new system if you already know a lot of quests; I can attest that it's driven me to gallop up and down the continent in search of such. But it doesn't nudge me to find new quests as much as it encourages serial exploitation of those I already know. So there is a loss there.

    Does the above mean that the old system was better? Probably not: there are certainly advantages to the new system, especially with regards to engagement. But I do think there is a purpose to having "arbitrary" quests, if only to encourage everyone to have different goals, and that this option shouldn't be dismissed too cavalierly.
  • Honestly, adventures are a huge step up in terms of providing opportunities to earn credits IG. I don't think the fact that denizens are dead sometimes or that people don't always have a group to do bigger things with changes that all that much. Even if you don't get 20 credits every day, you're getting more credits far more easily than before.

    It's just obvious how much they affect behavior so what exactly they incentivize obviously impacts the game. There have been a lot more group hunts and forays lately. In some ways, I think that's a good thing. Forays in particular didn't have enough reward to justify doing before so no one ever completed the talismans but now it looks like people probably will. I like that.

    It does feel kind of grindy though and may detract from the game for people less interested in that. I know someone said quest renown gain was off but I'm not sure what it's supposed to be or whether it's been fixed.

    One thing that would appeal to me is if getting a new honours line or completing a new quest always gave a sizable chunk of renown - the idea being to reward people who are looking for new things to do. The quest renown wouldn't be based on the level of area for this - people aren't going to constantly have new quests to do in high level areas. It's more to encourage exploring the things you haven't yet. So just a first time complete bonus. Higher for honours lines than for ordinary quests. Ideally it'd be high enough to compete with the renown gain of just doing adventures over and over. You'd be limited once you got to a point where you've actually done everything, sure, but you can do repetitive adventures like usual when you can't find anything else to do.

    I kind of feel like every out of arena pk should just automatically generate renown too, and we could ditch the out of arena kill adventure. Like people have said, trying to claim various different pk adventures in succession is not very natural during a pk conflict, and it'd be so much more simple and rewarding while still encouraging engagement if it was just automatic for at least something as simple as pks. It could be 50-100 per kill or something. Keep the bounty adventure for a special extra amount of renown.
  • Faction specific mobs pls. It's rather immersion breaking for people to suddenly start grouping en masse to kill Chellan and all the other random names. For Targ, at least, we're not really supposed to go around slaughtering people for no reason, but I feel like an asshole telling people to not participate in this part of the game.

    Also +1 to automatic renown instead of embarking.
  • edited February 2020
    A lot of what people are referencing is what I was trying to say before, just a lot better put.

    I feel like I'm doing things now I don't enjoy as much as what I was doing before, because the credits are there. Running around fighting Yili and Kolyartus is a lot less satisfying to me than fighting NPCs at my usual level, and as a rogue, doing honors mob dives aren't something I can effectively organize, and my ability to do them is contingent on other people asking me. My usual gameplay loop was hunting a certain amount of experience a day, mining, and then fighting Atalkez 400 times a day to work on combat theory. I haven't been able to find the time to do most of those things lately because none of those things except Kez really provide any renown, and even that is pretty slim because I'm fighting someone I rarely beat. The areas I usually hunt don't have any of these unique denizens in them.

    Basically adventures have taken me away from my gameplay loop, and while that's nice for discovering new content, what I'm finding is that the new content I'm finding is less satisfying to me than what I was doing before, and I'm rushing adventures asap in hopes that I can get back to what I actually want to do.

    Can we expand adventures some so that they're 1) automatic 2) not so far out of the way for certain demographics? I don't care about seafaring and that's like 35% of the list. None of the hunting mobs are particularly interesting or challenging to me* except honors mobs, which I can't organize groups for anyway. Forays are fun, that's probably the one thing I've found that are cool from this, but again I'm at the mercy of a group throwing me a bone on that. I've done a bunch of new quests, which I'm finding enjoyable, but the return on investment is very small for someone of my level. Even questing in AREAS usually only gets me 20-30 renown per 10-15 minute quest.

    Just feels very grindy for someone like me now.

    *Edit: I take this back. I've found fighting Balex to be fun and had never tried him before.
  • edited February 2020
    Just spitballing ideas:

    What if the routine adventures were removed from the system entirely (things like tanking, getting PK kills, the 'medium' hunting targets, etc.) and awarded renown by default, but either a) up to a 1k cap per day (leaving 'hard'/group-focused adventures able to make up the deficit), and/or b) having diminishing returns as the same conditions are met, resetting on the IC year? This would encourage people to pull away from their daily routine in order to either get their second half of the daily credits or to finish out their credits for the IC year, but also allow people to keep along their gameplay routines without feeling like they're missing out entirely on the potential daily rewards. It would also prevent people from 'farming' the same adventures every day, as I know several people have already figured out ways to optimize their gameplay to accomplish these in as a little time as possible (which is fully understandable but somewhat works against the objective of the system).

    Also, this is very likely to be an unpopular opinion, but I don't think mindless bashing needs any more rewards - it already gives exp/gold/talismans, it's not engaging to the game as a whole (even if it's an activity people individually enjoy), and it already has its share of automation and the scrutiny involved. Hunting adventures and rewards are good but not as rewards for grinding, even if the other IRE games have it (and I would assume it's largely because the playerbases are so small that people would struggle to get daily credits otherwise).
  • This is why we can't have nice things.

  • Is it really against the system though? Dailies by design are supposed to be relatively quick to complete and move along to other things in the game you want to do.

    I personally think it shouldn’t take more than an hour or two to cap renown. Still some refining to do, and adding more options to allow people to actually cap by themselves is pretty important I think.




    Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
  • edited February 2020
    I guess the question is if engaging content you otherwise wouldn't should be incentivized. If the goal is to just reward people for doing content for X amount of time per day, no matter if it's part of their routine or not, then yeah there's no need to separate it out. 

    EDIT: I guess the adventure themes accomplish that to some extent, but I'm not sure the math involved in matching renown rewards to time committed is on the mark yet.
  • Mix of both IMO.
  • edited February 2020
    Definitely needs some love on the time:reward ratios.

    I don’t see why the minimum renown isn’t 100 across the board, scaling up with difficulty. Grinding through 20 different things to cap is still a hefty amount of interactions. 20 renown wouldn’t even be worth the time to me.




    Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
  • SkyeSkye The Duchess Bellatere
    edited February 2020
    I'm curious what the renown earning rate is like for an actual novice or new player on their own. Like, how much renown can an under-80 achieve in a single day, and what sort of hours would they need to put in without being dragged along to forays by their city?

    If there are players who only manage to clock a couple of hours at best per day (harhar I'm sure they exist), would they be able to earn anything substantial at all? I haven't collected any renown at all, personally, but I do feel like a daily reset seems steep from my POV (established player and rogue, not  a lot of options). 


  • Who cares about noobs? They should just get good and invest $100 upfront, so they can experience what actual Achaea is.
  • edited February 2020
    Firstly: admins, thank you for this implementation.

    With regards to exploration theme would it be possible to - in addition to what's already there - add the option to do what it was previously - ADVENTURE EMBARK EASY(50r)/MEDIUM(75r)/HARD(100r) - where the system assigns you a random quest. Keep the gold cost to drop.  This might alleviate some of the boredom issues some have, as well as save some workload.  

    For all those asking for faction specific mobs, why? Why not just add more depth to the hunting pool?  In thinking about it, the mobs would probably be bashed out otherwise, huh.

    I echo people's sentiment regarding the Conflict related adventures.  They shouldn't need to specifically be embarked upon especially now that they can't be completed from city mates. 
    It felt bad when I laid up a kill in Annwyn for my newer team mate but in the heat of things, '...couldn't find the adventure'.
    Obvious loopholes still exist but they'd be hard to stamp out mechanically.

    A lot of these issues I'm reading about stem from the player generated fear of missing out which sucks.  No real way to address this.  Burnout is also real, but that's in part to the FOMO.


  • Skye said:
    I'm curious what the renown earning rate is like for an actual novice or new player on their own. Like, how much renown can an under-80 achieve in a single day, and what sort of hours would they need to put in without being dragged along to forays by their city?

    If there are players who only manage to clock a couple of hours at best per day (harhar I'm sure they exist), would they be able to earn anything substantial at all? I haven't collected any renown at all, personally, but I do feel like a daily reset seems steep from my POV (established player and rogue, not  a lot of options). 
    I'm trying to work on figuring this out, Skye - if you want, you can check out my spreadsheet to see some of my early info. There's a tab at the bottom for newbie quests only. Out of the quests that I was able to gather info for before turning level 21, there are 21 (coincidence!) quests that net you 662 renown. There are another 10 quests I identified but wasn't able to complete.

    It's a lot harder to pin down the amount of renown that you can earn after level 21, though. I'm not seeing any real pattern to it as I move up to level 50 and beyond. Some quest rewards seem to be cut in half around level 40, but then there are also some quests I completed post-21 that are still giving me just as much renown at level 50. Catching butterflies, for example, no longer nets me any renown at all. I'm sure there is a pattern to it, but I'm not finding it yet.

  • SkyeSkye The Duchess Bellatere
    It's a lot harder to pin down the amount of renown that you can earn after level 21, though. I'm not seeing any real pattern to it as I move up to level 50 and beyond. Some quest rewards seem to be cut in half around level 40, but then there are also some quests I completed post-21 that are still giving me just as much renown at level 50. Catching butterflies, for example, no longer nets me any renown at all. I'm sure there is a pattern to it, but I'm not finding it yet.
    One of the posts (either here or on announce) indicated that we should look at AREAS for an idea of where to earn quest related renown. The AREAS command is supposed to indicate level appropriate areas for bashing, so that might be what is affecting your renown gain as some areas are safe to quest and walk around at low levels but not for bashing. 


  • Skye said:
    It's a lot harder to pin down the amount of renown that you can earn after level 21, though. I'm not seeing any real pattern to it as I move up to level 50 and beyond. Some quest rewards seem to be cut in half around level 40, but then there are also some quests I completed post-21 that are still giving me just as much renown at level 50. Catching butterflies, for example, no longer nets me any renown at all. I'm sure there is a pattern to it, but I'm not finding it yet.
    One of the posts (either here or on announce) indicated that we should look at AREAS for an idea of where to earn quest related renown. The AREAS command is supposed to indicate level appropriate areas for bashing, so that might be what is affecting your renown gain as some areas are safe to quest and walk around at low levels but not for bashing. 
    Hmm... that's a bummer. I've been looking at AREAS all along to find new places to go as I level up, but I wasn't keeping track of which areas were added at each level. I could start tracking it now, but it's another piece of the puzzle that is frustratingly missing!

  • you can AREAS <level> if you want to look back. AREAS 20, for example, gives you the noob areas
  • On my alt, no-trans Shaman level 60, can get 3-4 credits per day from questing. I get eliminated from the bosses so I don't get renown from those. This is also with questing knowledge, so it might not be completely accurate
  • edited February 2020
    Actually home properly now, decided to test on a random alt I had laying around. Tri trans/avoidance, lvl 84... Yeah not even getting remotely close to the cap, if playing at a time when others aren't around (which is going to be me for the foreseeable future). This is with pretty thorough quest knowledge, as well, even going out of the way to do less common quests.

    I stand by what I said earlier.
  • Pyori said:
    Actually home properly now, decided to test on a random alt I had laying around. Tri trans/avoidance, lvl 84... Yeah not even getting remotely close to the cap, if playing at a time when others aren't around (which is going to be me for the foreseeable future). This is with pretty thorough quest knowledge, as well, even going out of the way to do less common quests.

    I stand by what I said earlier.
    You are aware that even if you only achieve 700 renown a day, (which is pretty easy to do solo, or shit, make -A- friend that can help you with the handful of arena ones,) that the tally comes out to 2,555 credits for playing every day for a year, roughly 2 hours a day. Shit, just hitting 400 renown a day every day is 1,460 credits.
    For hitting the cap of 20 every day, that's 7,300 credits you can earn for -free- over the course of a year, which is soooo easy for some of the people that stay logged in 16+ hours a goddamn day.

    It honestly just sounds to me like you're one of those people that expects Iron Realms to essentially give the whole farm away for free rather than a couple baskets of eggs and buckets of milk. A goddamn level 80 should not be getting the cap every single day, that shit is just absurd. I average about 10 and it takes me just a tidbit over 2.5 hours, but the first 5 MIGHT take 45 minutes by itself.
  • edited February 2020
    Why shouldn't a level 80 get the cap every day? The people who should benefit the most and easiest from this are the newest, least experienced, least connected, least buffed characters.

    They need the credits more than the rest of us.

    Also, the argument that you get a whole 2000+ credits if you hit half is absurd. The value of a credit is entirely arbitrary, as is their ease of attainment through this system. The whole argument about "look how much you get" is cached in buying into the horrifically inflated perceived value of a credit that got us into this mess.

    Every new player should be able to smoothly get 20 a day. If the system doesn't allow for that, it is missing the point.
  • edited February 2020
    My retire value is like 8k. I've spent a shitload of money on Cobault. I've had him since 2011 or so.
    So forgive me if I'm not on board with a new player being able to catch up to me in under a year (utility wise. I have a lot of dumb shit I wanted for fun/have shit I've won for free that I'm not counting,) whereas I've invested both time and money to get my character to where he is.

    I dunno where you got the arbitrary argument or whatever, since I never mentioned money in my  post. 2k credits is some decent artefacts just for barely playing the goddamn game.

    People like you are why they're always skeptical to give us shit. Like god damn, what do you want? For someone to jump in and never spend a dime on the game but to load themselves down with arties over a couple months? Do you know how a business works? Do you follow how impractical of a model that would be to follow? Are you one of those "print more money!" people when it comes to government debt?

    I hear where you're coming from but it's just not practical dude. It's like you think if Achaea starts hemorrhaging money the higher ups will all take pay cuts and shit or work for free.

    Some of you people just aren't happy with shit.

    Matter fact, edit: if you think the value of a credit is arbitrary you really need to quit playing this game. I've bought shit to make my character better but I've never really batted an eye because of how much I enjoy Achaea and I don't mind pitching in for a game/service not FORCING me and the shitload of other people that play to pay a monthly subscription fee or some shit. The "value" is what the game means to you when you spend the money. This isn't Call of Duty. You don't jump in, get a super fun year worth of gameplay, and then sit around and wait for the next one to drop. Longevity is the key to this game. There's nothing I can say to help you see otherwise if you don't understand that one sentiment.
  • And I paid for my education.

    I still support free college education legislation. "I had to pay so screw the new people" is brutally selfish.

    What I want? I want to be able to recommend this game to my friends without having to couch the argument in the cautionary tale of how hard they'll bleed you for cash. Which universally drives otherwise interested players off. If you want to talk about what will kill the game, the inability to retain new players is it. Positions like yours are incredibly disdainful towards new players.

    Yes, the game needs to make money. But if you think a 30% sip ring costs 550 dollars because that's what it takes to make ends meet and keep IRE solvent, you are out of your mind.
  • I'm fine with being selfish. 🤷🏻‍♂️
    I didn't climb through the mud throughout my life worrying about who I was gonna be able to give a handout to one day.
    I'm not interested in paying anything forward for someone else. I'm here for me and my people, no one else.
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