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Comments
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).
→My Mudlet Scripts
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.
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.
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.
Also +1 to automatic renown instead of embarking.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.