Decay – Perception vs. Reality and a Recommendation

... it. Was. A. Joke. Ah well.

 

No, there is no need to reduce rewards. They are nearly zero now for many mobs that can actually kill a group.

There is an issue that should be fixed that I think we can agree on thou. Killing things VIA unlimited rapid fire rezzing is a sign of a crappy game design. There should be a mechanic to block this. Decay isn't doing it now.

Maybe a decay relacement could be: no decay if you leave the instance as a ghost.

 

I agree with you that people will spend insane amounts of money on a digital thing that they will probably loose. Take eve for example. Your almost guaranteed to lose ships in that game yet people spend loads of real and fake money on that game. The difference comes down to level of difficulty in earning money in game. In eve there are loads of ways to earn money so one could actually earn the funds to replace said ship but making money in sota is rough. Compare that to the cost of many high end gear on the market I can agree with people who say make my armor break faster and I probably won't play cause I can't afford to buy more. I am a player who has played since final wipe and I have acquired loads of stuff in game but not because I relayed on my in game earning potential. I craft all my gear myself so that saves having to buy from other players stuff I can't afford and the times I have bought from other players (usually resources to craft my stuff) I got the gold NOT from earning in game but from buying cotos and selling them to people in game who buy them. I have spent loads of real money on this game. If I relayed on my in game earning potential, I wouldn't have 2 gold coins to rub together. This needs to be fixed imo.

 

Aw. So your one of the rich people trying to convince the poor people why they have it so great being poor. "You'll have something to aspire to" please...... Buttom line. Gear is to expensive with methods of earning gold not enough to offset the expense which equals people like me leaving game if my gear breaks faster cause I can't afford to buy more. I don't get why the crafters don't get this. I'm a crafter and I get it. If no one has money to buy your stuff..... You don't sell anything.

 

Dude.... Obsidian armor??? Really??? You WANT your obsidian armor to break faster???? Obsidian armor is my elusive unicorn. I have pursued it briefly but quickly realized the actual cost of what just a set of whatever the gods of chance happened to give me (not even my specific stat needs) would cost and quickly abandoned it. It is so far out of my price range and if the armor broke and needed replacing after just a few weeks or a month, there's no way in hell I would even bother.

No... Its because your wares are to expensive as it is and no one can afford to buy it (to be more specific the good gear with the stats we actually need is to expensive. Junk armor is cheap sure but its garbage. We have no desire to wear garbage) because the methods of earning in game gold sucks in sota atm.

Crafters..... Your not going to sell stuff to people who have no gold or can't afford your wares regardless if you think its reasonably priced or not....

 

He's not an elitist. He just has standards and understands the pitfalls of mediocrity and where that mindset leads which you clearly don't. Stats matter if your actually going up against the real high end stuff in game which does exist. If all your doing is running in 4 skull zones or maybe easy 5 skull zones than sure.... Garbage will suffice. Now we are back to the pitfalls of mediocrity and never striving for excellence.

 

Unless something has dramatically changed in WoW since I played it (admittedly, its been years) I never once stepped into a "raid" such as you describe, where people had to work together and probably have some deaths in the process until you learned the content, and had the boss drop 16 gold pieces and a piece of pie. Not once! Your WoW comparison is missing that very important detail, that taking down big targets dropped a nice item - 100% of the time. Even bosses in 5 man dungeon scenes dropped items - maybe not the item you particularly wanted, but always something - 100% of the time. Often ,multiple things.

So in this example - WoW has "boss loot is good, but boss loot is limited by time."
Sota already balances this: Boss loot is not good, but is not limited by time.
There's simply no need to throw death penalty into the mix as well.
You're already wasting your time killing a boss that - more likely than not - is going to drop you a few hundred gold worth of gems, or at very best, a crapifact to crush for essence worth a few thousand. And that's not very frequent.

In your super duper dragon example, yes sure, your 'raid group' could kill it every 30 minutes, even if a spawn timer was introduced because people will abuse the mode selection. Whatever. And every 30 minutes they'll get disappointed by the loot. This already happens now with lower lvl avatars trying to take on the bosses we have now.
They all arrive at the same choice:

• Get good enough to solo it, so you're not trying to split 1 decent drop every 4 hours of constant farming (with risk!) across a party of 8, or
• stop bothering entirely.

That's the reality. This is a FUNDAMENTAL problem with the reward mechanic, one that the devs have acknowledged and is in the works to try and improve.

I am so sick of people saying risk vs. reward. Anyone who waves this phrase around clearly is not playing the same game I am.
In the time it takes to kill a boss - which is "risky" ...right? You can make more money in a Tier 1 scene like soltown catacombs which has zero risk. In the time it takes to fell even the smallest dragon,, you can make more XP doing just about anything else.
This is not risk vs. reward. This is 'risk for nothing' and piling on more risk (penalties) is not the solution. Risk vs. reward does not work when the rewards are nonexistent.

I was really excited when I could finally kill siege cabalists. After felling over two hundred of them over a period of months, I had yet to see a single hood drop or a single weapon drop. The loot on the body of this cabalist, this boss that is contingent on solar alignments requiring entering and clearing a temporary, conditional scene to even spawn, bosses who I struggled to even kill at first, who even today can still easily kill me if I'm not paying attention - drop less loot than a Tier 1 mob with 80 HP.

In fact, I had taken a bunch of screenshots of cabalist loot windows cutting off the name, and put them next to T1 bandits, and honestly, nobody could tell which was which. That is a pretty sad commentary on "reward."



I'm sure seeing this loot everyone is going to RUSH out and spend 10 minutes spawning a cabalist after finding a siege in the first place, spend time taking down the cabalist - risking an hour of "xp grind" time, - to get to this loot.

----------But SHIM they can drop bundles!!! ----------------------------------
Lets not forget the additional insult of:


I've had 3 total since they implemented them and every one of them was exactly like this.
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Sure, they have some miniscule chance of dropping something of value - but if you consider the time investment I could easily get considerably more value in loot doing -anything else- with no risk of decay. In R57 they now drop ward gems worth 200g. So now they are the equivalent of killing 5 trash mos. Better, sure. Worth risking a million XP and wasting an hour of my life re-grinding what I've already earned? Absolutely not, in any circumstance. Worth risking gear that takes months to make? Absolutely not.

Conversely, a game that is full of limitations with high risk with little to no reward is equally unappealing as a long term time investment.
You can only keep running around the hamster wheel so long before you realize you're not going to get anywhere.
There needs to be a middle ground.

 

This interests me. I've never been in any group where this is done. Is this prevalent? While sure, sometimes one of the DPS will get a bit overzealous and anger the big angry boss mob who turns and thwacks them, I've never seen anyone 'rapid fire rez' to kill anything. It seems very inefficient - not to mention the significant XP loss all around for poor return, but if the boss kills you all it resets which is start over from scratch. If this is common behavior (presumably in lower level groups?) then I agree, this should not be a viable killing mechanic beyond the 'learning phase'. I'm not sure how to prevent it though, as long as 1 person is alive to remain engaged with the boss and every avatar can learn the rez skill. I would have thought enrage timers would mitigate this due to the time it takes.

What I notice very often is that higher level players are simply unwilling to help do content that's going to get them killed because of the decay - and that's the problem I have with decay. The punishment should not be so harsh as to encourage players to avoid playing the game. I know I personally wont go fight anything that I know I can't survive a few hits off of because it means my next four hours of gameplay are just loss prevention (unless I drag myself to tears, which is certainly not my preferred gameplay).

 

@kaeshiva

Since you keep dismissing ”risk vs reward” and try to invalidate it, even thought its the absolute core of ANY game of this style in the history of gaming , and no game developer ever would agree with it for the health of the game , i Feel that this discussion cannot go any further.

You keep ignorinh basic facts and decades of knowlage of lessons learnt in the game industry , no matter how much they are presented to you.

Even if that long post of yours now you STILL compare game mechanics thats already Said to change with rewards thats already Said to change and try to mix it together into some kind of rant about things that are not relevant.

I Will point you to the Q4 update post , several times its stated that loots Will be greatly improved. They have Said that for a long time , but they are tuning it slowly.

We know loot Will change to increase reward, yet you scream about removing risk because of lack of rewards????

 

I have never witnessed this chain ressing in groups in the few years i play. Perhaps the groups i had the pleasure to fight with had a healer who actually healed

 

This is spot on. Boss loot is **** which the devs have acknowledged and have said they are fixing. Quite frankly the bundles loot is **** to. I have yet to get an orange and the
Blues I have got gave ****. All the other ones give **** most of the time. This hole risk vs reward this is total crap because there is no reward. Only risk
......but they are working on it.

 

I actually mentioned the Q4 post in my own post and stated that its being addressed. I'm not "ignoring" that at all. If you're going to quote me, at least read it first.

The current state of the game? Risk vs. reward is invalid. And since risk vs. reward is the entire basis of the rationale to impose penalties, I continue to reject it.

Unless there are significant changes to boss mechanics (ie adding limitations as you say), I fear the loot will never be "worth" the current level of risk. They can't make the boss drop nice things every time if you have people steamrolling them every 3 minutes. It isn't going to work economically - I think we agree on that. But if you make them extremely risky and punishing to do, then only the elite will ever bother doing them.

I'd much prefer some sort of other limiter be imposed. I'm not ever going to be likely to gamble hours of my time against a very low potential "maybe" payout - its not fun (disappointment after disappointment), and its not an efficient use of my time (I could use time more lucratively in other activities.).

Fundamentally, I am agreeing with you - there needs to be a carrot and a stick of some description. Otherwise you're absolutely right - everyone gets all the things, wins game, no more worlds to conquer etc. etc. I've ended up in that very space in countless MMOs precisely for the reasons you articulate. But the carrot needs to be worth the stick. Nobody's gonna let themselves get whacked repeatedly with the stick if the best they can hope for is a stale moldy carrot.

While we wait to see what may or may not happen with the reward schema, players are being whacked with the stick now. Most of us just dodge the stick by staying off its radar doing low-risk activities. But that will only be fun for so long. Already people lose interest and ask "what do I do now?" because the high end stuff isn't worth doing and the low end stuff has gotten repetitive.

I personally hate the idea of 'gambling' earned xp or belongings (which have taken me hours or weeks to acquire depending on how far this penalty nonsense goes) on the chance that I or my group will successfully kill this monster and it wont get in a lucky crit. That is not fun for me. Even if that monster dropped amazing loot every time, I'd be hesitant. That sort of punishment does not entice me to "try harder" it encourages me to "play something else."

 

You can do all the content with 2x mw 2x ench gear, or less, which tends to cost about 10,000 to 20,000 a piece. Yes it helps to have great stuff, but it is not necessary. No one is talking about teir 4 or 5 zones, you can do that stuff with literal npc purchased armor and weapons.
Top teir gear is very expensive becuase it takes many attempts with expensive resources to get the best combinations, and when you don't get there the item is basically a near total loss. There are other reasons why top teir gear is so expensive, mostly having to do with the market and the way items decay, if people aren't buying gear becuase they only have to purchase something 1 time and then they can repair it for 3 years with cotos, then there is no recurring demand for armor. There is only a recurring demand for cotos. Yes, new players and people wishing to change their items will buy new armor or weapons, but that is a 1 shot cost. If the limit on how much you can make to recoup your costs and make some profit is based on short demand, then you have to make enough money off each item that you do sell.

 

He is NOT dismissing the idea that we need a true risk vs reward setup which you would see if you actually read his post. What's being disputed is the notion that sota in its current state has an actual risk vs reward setup which it does NOT. What it has is an absolute risk (losing many hard earned experience on death) vs a POSSIBLE reward (at about a .0000001 chance). That's not a true risk vs reward setup. A true risk vs reward setup is risk (losing millions of exp on death) vs reward ( 100% chance to drop a very valuable item on defeat of boss). That's what we need but currently don't have but..... They are working on it.

 

There was a thread recently where people claimed to kill the ancient dragons that way. Get a large group that has people with fast rezzes and all dps and just rez as people die.

I personally witnessed it recently in the Lost Vale. We had probably 10 deaths in the troll room. It was a pickup group so I just followed along.

the argument is/was that the death decay doesn't compare to the experience you could have gotten farming Tears for the time you are killing the dragons. As in if we kill dragons for 3 hours we are taking a 4 million hit to experience so the 100-500k penalty for max deaths pales in comparison. Its yet another example of the decay just NOT doing what its intention was. And also another example of how crappy the attenuation system is. DESIGN the game right and neither of these issues would be in play.

 

Good that this works for you.

Glad our healers keep us up fighting ancient dragons/aethers. Still can't understand WHY people would want to play with a group of chainressing healers instead of just staying alive.
too al their own ofcourse

 

I have a simple suggestion to replace the decay death penalty.

Die once and you get a 10 minute “chaos” debuff, if you die a second time whilst having this debuff on you get rezzed at a random ankh Rez point in the zone.

 

Recommendation: No decay whatsoever before reaching Adventure Level 80. For 80+, only decay on skills trained above level 80.

Bump this up after Episode 2 when they introduce new bosses that award enough XP to viably train beyond the 120 area.