Changes to Motes/Ember/Figments

[Frisco]

Embers:
- The purpose of Embers was to act as a way to mitigate being unlucky with RNG. However, what it turned into was the fastest and best way to get the gear. We don't want players to run things that aren't the content the gear comes from as their primary way of getting that gear. In looking at why this was happening, the disenchanting of gear from any tier of any group instance was obviously where the bulk of Embers were coming from, in a way that really pushed players to grind to maximize their time. And especially, grind lower tier content to get higher tier gear. So that's why we removed the gear disenchant option to Embers. We'll have more ways to earn Embers when this goes live, and we'll be balancing around how many Embers a player can earn without opening lootboxes, as that's how most players play and we want to make sure you're still able to consistently get the gear you want... but the way we want you to get most of your pieces is by running the content where it drops.

If the goal is truly to get us to run the content you guys spend lots of time creating (and it's a good goal), why not just remove Embers from lootboxes and silence the Pay-to-win criticism? Because as long as you offer a shortcut in the store for end-game gear, every decision you make that makes it more difficult to earn gear in-game (which is fine--I fondly remember SoA days when it took months) is tainted by that cloud. I'm totally cool running around in sub-optimal equipment, other than having to be judged against people who drop real money for top gear when it comes to getting instance invites. Never mind the difficulty in balancing content so that it can be both complete-able by people who don't buy their gear from the store and not completely trivialized by people who do.

And if the other goal is to not push us to grind for Embers, why are our only other options daily/weekly quests? Which are far more grind-y, and even more trivial than running low-tier instances. Also, this disincentivizes people from running instances *at all* if there's not anything they need. So you're gutting the replayability (the bread and butter of MMOs) of the content you all spent so much time creating. It's shooting yourselves in the foot, which is why it's difficult for me to believe that all this is for the noble goal of getting us to have more fun instead of grind.

[punker_rocker]

I just have two things to say: 1) what's the point of increasing the cap if embers are automatically converted to motes with every big update? The only time anybody would want to save up more than 10k is when they're preparing for an update where embers will become important.

And 2) I've been intending to start a thread about lack of engagement with the current endgame content and what the reasons might be, and using the Stair Battle instance as a comparison. We all know that at the 130 cap, people were running Stair every single day, and the main reason for that was simple: easy embers. If their change to make lootbox gear the only gear that can be disenchanted into embers really does mean that you can no longer get embers from instance gear, then this is moving in the exact wrong direction. People are already not running the 3-mans and 6-man because the difficulty/reward or at least time/reward ratio is so broken. Take embers out of the equation and the people who are already geared are never going to run them again. That makes it incredibly hard for people like me, who missed the initial push to run 3-mans, to ever get to the point where I can get worthwhile gear from a 6-man, let alone start raids when those come out.

SSG, I was already considering cancelling my VIP over the Storvagun loot issue as I got royally screwed over by that. The more you make these changes to hurt players for the sake of monetization, the more likely you will make it for long-time players like me to disengage with endgame entirely, go back to F2P, or even quit the game altogether.

[Happybudgy]

Alright, gonna go ahead and see if I can provide some answers and context on stuff here. I was the big driver of this change, so any frustrations or questions can be (politely) directed at me and I'll do my best to address it. Any successes are the team's. I don't ever really remember to look at my Private Messages, so I encourage you to keep responding to this thread, and I'll continue to read and respond as I'm able.

I've picked out a few consistent concerns and questions I've seen, and resp


I think it's fair to say we could've done more to indicate our intentions, so let me do so here. There were a few different reasons we wanted to make these changes:

snip

I'll try and come back to this thread periodically over the next few days!

Too little, too late, too vague, too far into the monetization of this entire game.

What on earth are you thinking? Please spare me the blame me/praise the team stuff. I remember your post where you blamed paying customers.

I (and many others) want rewarding fun, less punitive grinds and useful, rewarding drops.

I want to partake, not sit out or avoid, stoning up, or being content with former endgame when a new endgame is released.

I do not want cognitive dissonance every fr!cking time I log in.

I want to play, not constantly calculate.

I want good servers, I do not want to disconnect all the time, to lag, to freeze, to wait for the game to revive when it freezes.

I want less monetization, not more.

I want the corporate speech, marketing tricks, and purposeful delays to end.

Everything that is released includes the store/MC nowadays. It really shows, and that's not a good thing.

A lot of posters in this thread are telling you that play this game despite what you are pushing on them. Many have had enough.

That has to be telling you something.

We are playing in a store with a pixel front. This is not Middle Earth as it was a long time ago anymore, in a time almost forgotten.

It's time for a change in direction.

[Feldanor]

Plus additional sources we add.

First ty for your responses. Its nice to see the thinking behind the change, at least now it makes some slight sense. Can you give us some ideas of these sources you keep mentioning? At the moment it feels like we will have to keep farming weekly stuff that gets boring very quickly.

[Joedangod]

but the way we want you to get most of your pieces is by running the content where it drops.

Does this do that?

Instances would no longer give any embers at all with this change. So you'd only be getting pieces that randomly drop for you. But the pieces that randomly drop for you don't respect which spec you actually play as, a Champion could receive a bunch of might tank/heal gear despite never playing tank and not even having a healing traitline. Combine that with loot locks and you may often find that you can't get any useable pieces to drop each week.

On the other hand if you spam the weekly quests and open lootboxes you'll receive a bunch of embers that you can use to directly barter for the specific piece you want.


Whilst I'm definitely not fond of the pre-U32 loot system I don't think you're making much improvement here.

[0987654321]

I can see what you are trying to do, but the Lootsystem is not made for what you are trying to do. It's another point why the player base is complaining so much.
I already run an instance as much as possible. Unfortunately this is once per tier 4/5 per week T3 is more or less irrelevant at that point. Well with so much trash gear floating around it's often pretty demotivating to get the right stuff. Especially escalating this into a raid situation. The primary way is already to run instances to gear up. Barters are only so popular because the Loot is so bad and you cannot get good gear.
Another big problem is right now, that there are only such few instances to do. If we could only run old instances for usefull purposes, this would be much less of a problem.

Change the Lootsystem and probably it will be better. Leave it and i bet satisfaction will go down the drain.

Thanks for the answers anyway.

so much of this. if you want people running instances to get the gear, then remove the god awful lock system thats in place. 1 lock for t5 is nothing. you get a tank statted piece of gear your for dps class? better luck next week when you will most likely get the same thing again because tank items drop far more often

[Frisco]

First ty for your responses. Its nice to see the thinking behind the change, at least now it makes some slight sense. Can you give us some ideas of these sources you keep mentioning? At the moment it feels like we will have to keep farming weekly stuff that gets boring very quickly.

Yeah, I'm having trouble reconciling the stated goal with the changes. They're removing Embers from dropped gear because it incentivized people to run the group content they just spent a lot of time, money and effort creating, but they're just going to add Embers back in...somewhere else? Increasing the reward from trivial solo weekly grinds at the same time they're trying to keep people from getting too many Embers from lower-tier group content? It makes no sense.

[TobiasEstForte]

Does this do that?

Instances would no longer give any embers at all with this change. So you'd only be getting pieces that randomly drop for you. But the pieces that randomly drop for you don't respect which spec you actually play as, a Champion could receive a bunch of might tank/heal gear despite never playing tank and not even having a healing traitline. Combine that with loot locks and you may often find that you can't get any useable pieces to drop each week.

It just occurred to me. This issue could be solved by having selection boxes like with Osgiliath T2 armour pieces. The Storvagun mess would also have been fixed with bracelet selection boxes dropping. Why are SSG so averse to gear selection boxes and instead forcing us to do RNG where we could basically try 20x and get nothing appropriate for the role our character has. Chambers earrings didn't get a barter option for embers but the presence of a selection box more than made up for it, and people were still more than happy to repeat it and pass on earrings to friends.

[Arnenna]

Alright, gonna go ahead and see if I can provide some answers and context on stuff here. I was the big driver of this change, so any frustrations or questions can be (politely) directed at me and I'll do my best to address it. Any successes are the team's. I don't ever really remember to look at my Private Messages, so I encourage you to keep responding to this thread, and I'll continue to read and respond as I'm able.

I've picked out a few consistent concerns and questions I've seen, and resp



I think it's fair to say we could've done more to indicate our intentions, so let me do so here. There were a few different reasons we wanted to make these changes:

Embers:
- The purpose of Embers was to act as a way to mitigate being unlucky with RNG. However, what it turned into was the fastest and best way to get the gear. We don't want players to run things that aren't the content the gear comes from as their primary way of getting that gear. In looking at why this was happening, the disenchanting of gear from any tier of any group instance was obviously where the bulk of Embers were coming from, in a way that really pushed players to grind to maximize their time. And especially, grind lower tier content to get higher tier gear. So that's why we removed the gear disenchant option to Embers. We'll have more ways to earn Embers when this goes live, and we'll be balancing around how many Embers a player can earn without opening lootboxes, as that's how most players play and we want to make sure you're still able to consistently get the gear you want... but the way we want you to get most of your pieces is by running the content where it drops.

- Embers being barterable into Motes and Figments never made a lot of sense to me, and in discussions with the team and observing player interactions, led to a lot of unintentional consequences we didn't like. Most players were converting into these other currencies because they were hitting the cap so often, and didn't really value them. This is generally ok for Motes - I'll explain why below - but less so for Figments - which I'll also explain below. Removing the ability to losslessly barter these currencies allowed us to feel much more comfortable raising the caps dramatically - of everything besides Figments, which I'll explain below. Breaking apart this relationship meant that we could better tailor rewards to players and give them good amounts of each of those things without having to worry that we were giving them game-breaking amounts, for example, so now we have the opportunity to give you Embers in places where it makes sense you'd care about them, and know that you're going to use them on the cap-level gear.

- The versioning is important for a few reasons:
1. It gives us a lot more flexibility to raise the currency cap, because if something goes wrong in a particular cycle and we give out too many sources of Embers, we can be comfortable that we haven't wrecked progression for Updates to come.
2. Similarly - and the reason the cap existed in the first place - Embers were a currency that only ever increased in value as you kept it. The best times to spend it were either when you were capped out or in the next Update, because the gear in the future would generally be better than the gear in the past. That turned it a completely different thing than we wanted it for. As mentioned above, the goal for Embers is to give you a way to mitigate bad luck, but if spending it is often the wrong move long term, it doesn't feel great no matter what you do with it. Versioning Embers into Motes lets us make it clear what Embers are for and give you lossless value without making you want to hoard it forever.
3. One of the issues we ran into was that in order to properly price new gear, we had to keep moving the price up and up until you basically needed to have Embers capped to spend it. This wasn't exactly a great experience for players. Versioning lets us maintain more consistent pricing, limits how much we need to increase prices as we roll out smaller content updates, and make it such that we can set them more sensibly in general. Even though we're increasing the cap by an order of magnitude, prices won't increase to match.
4. Versioning specifically Motes also lets us re-establish Motes as the catch up currency - more below - and lets us move gear that won't be top-end into Motes at that time, so it'll be even easier for players to catch up.

- We're going to add more sources of Embers. Some of those will be new repeatables, but we can now also do more one-off grants from different sources, such as landscape quests - the Epic, for example - and the Reward Track. One-off grants will generally be bigger than any of the repeatables, but now they'll be valuable and won't feel nearly as bad to get, where before a one-off could've easily overwhelmed your capped amount. Similarly, we won't be just multiplying the pricing by 10x as we did the cap, so you'll still gain value from these.

Motes
- The purpose of Motes was to essentially be a catch up currency, either for yourself or for your alts. You can also use it to get gear that has cosmetics you value. Now that we'll be versioning more consistently, we can do a better job of shifting stuff over to Motes more often so catch up is easier, and it gives us the opportunity to do more consolidation.

- With Motes no longer being barterable, we can also add more catch up things to it, like the Enhancement Runes mentioned in the announcement. This is something I'm personally pretty excited for, as it opens up a lot of great possibilities for improving the pre-cap experience. We're discussing more ways of taking advantage of that, and will have more to announce in the future.

- Motes are going to still be available to disenchant from gear because we want to maintain the Motes sourcing, even when you're doing max content. Motes will be pretty easily and reliable gained from multiple sources.

- Because of all this, we want to make it easier for you to hold onto a lot of Motes, so we've dramatically increased the cap to match. There's also an element of protection here to make sure we don't accidentally overdo it, but we're not versioning Motes to anything else.

Figments
- We're looking at the pricing structure we currently have. Giving the player a bigger cap will make it a bit easier for us to adjust pricing, but we're not planning to double the cap and then double all the costs, there's no value in doing so. We aren't increasing or changing Figments as dramatically because they're still an eternal currency in this model - however many you earn today is as many as you'll have until you spend it. And similar to how Embers are, whenever we add new cosmetics to the barterers, they're available for Figments directly, so your Figments have nominally infinite value. Of course, cosmetics tend to be a bit more subjective than power comparisons, so we expect that most players will get a bit choosier in terms of what cosmetics they prioritize. This is definitely trickiest for players who liked to collect 'em all, but we'll keep an eye on that and see what we can do.

- We're also going to add more sources for Figments, just like are with Embers, again such as with landscape quests and the Reward Track. We'll keep an eye on how acquisition looks for those, as we want to avoid the problems that caused us to make the change for Embers.



We can certainly debate this, but I don't think that's what the end result will be. If we find that players can't acquire gear consistently by playing the game, we'll adjust to improve that.



Yes, the current other Ember sources will continue to work. And as mentioned above, we'll continue to add Embers in more places.



I mostly explained this above, but caps give us flexibility for pricing while also giving us protection in case we make sourcing that currency too easy. That's why the caps have been low for these currencies until now (and why it remains lower on Figments).



I don't think that's what'll happen, but we'll see how it plays out. Part of the goal with this is to increase the value of running the instances that have the gear you want, and to make that the primary way to get gear. Right now, Embers are the best way to get the gear you want, not playing content.



So this certainly isn't true for Motes, based on what we described. It's less true for Embers, though of course we are removing some of the "normal" - by which I assume you mean "current" - ways of getting them, but as I've said above, we're adding new ones with 32 and beyond. Figments are definitely in the trickiest position here, but we'll be adding new ways to earn them as well. We'll see how that plays out and adjust as needed.



We expect that most players won't hit the Ember cap like they're used to, but that's ok, because we also expect them to more consistently use their Embers as well, which is the goal. We certainly don't plan on making them ridiculously easy to obtain, but we are going to add more ways to get them.



Figments will still be available from Festivals, and we'll be adding additional sources in 32, such as with the Reward Track. We'll do landscape quests in the future, not sure if any of those will reward Figments in 32.



No, these'll be disenchantable into Motes, not Embers. Only Adventurer's Gear will disenchant into Embers.



Repeatable sources of Embers will be more frequent, but I don't think we'd put that amount on boss chests.



Plus additional sources we add.



It'll still contribute to Mote accrual, but not Embers.



We'll see some price growth, but Ember prices will probably stabilize at 2-3x of current prices. We'll see how that plays out. Mote prices probably won't change at all. Figment prices are more variable, but we're not talking about a 2x increase there.



To be clear, that's not the intent. We still want players to get the game and get the gear. But we want y'all to play where that gear drops more, as opposed to farming easy content to get the hard gear after earning the deed.



More power to ya. Enjoy your break, we'll be here when you're ready to come back.

I'll try and come back to this thread periodically over the next few days!

Sorry, but your whole post has main focus on funnelling players into a certain playstyle. Some players, in fact, a lot of them don't roll that way, they never have and they never will. They do their weeklies and earn gear that they can use, and then buy the rest at the ember barter. It's been the way since ash was introduced in Mordor years ago. Its why this whole new currency system was born in the first place. Youve got to have been on these boards for a very long time to remember what's been said in the past.

The players that you seem to be completely overlooking are not going to go after those drops, especially with the new difficulty levels that the game has now. They may have got their feet wet a few years ago, but its a very deep end now. Story-mode drops rubbish, and the ember gear is superior to it, so I don't know what you're expecting or why.

You say you don't think this will prevent players from running group content. But you're wrong on that. Drop into game over the weekend on an anon char and join a few pugs, see how much trading for ember burning goes on. You've got to have been in it to know how it works. Players are generally good at helping others in the game, as long as they can get a little something out of it. Take that away and they'll run to gear - then stop.

The last few years, and as far as I know, the future - ember gear is not the best in game. That drops in instances and raids. It is easy to tell a player that does the content apart from a player geared from the ember barter. And when you consider a full set of both, side by side, they are a million miles apart. So this, get the hard gear by completing a deed, is not accurate. The hard gear is in t3 and above.

If you really want players to gear up inside instances and raids, adjust the loot tables. Stop with the random useless drops and make the drops count. They don't count at present.

And 2 - 3x current ember prices? Yeah, you'll have no players left.

Sorry, late edit as tea was ready to be taken off the stove. If you really, genuinely want players earning drops from runs, they wouldn't be able to get everything they want with a wallet full of LP and a clicky finger now would they. But hey, they can. You going to change that? If key sales aren't the intention, no reason not to. Its no different to buying all the gear from earned embers.

Its very nice of you to step up and volunteer to take the flack on this, but, this has been going on since long before you arrived.

[Laerthan1997]

Alright, gonna go ahead and see if I can provide some answers and context on stuff here. I was the big driver of this change, so any frustrations or questions can be (politely) directed at me and I'll do my best to address it. Any successes are the team's. I don't ever really remember to look at my Private Messages, so I encourage you to keep responding to this thread, and I'll continue to read and respond as I'm able.

I've picked out a few consistent concerns and questions I've seen, and resp



I think it's fair to say we could've done more to indicate our intentions, so let me do so here. There were a few different reasons we wanted to make these changes:

Embers:
- The purpose of Embers was to act as a way to mitigate being unlucky with RNG. However, what it turned into was the fastest and best way to get the gear. We don't want players to run things that aren't the content the gear comes from as their primary way of getting that gear. In looking at why this was happening, the disenchanting of gear from any tier of any group instance was obviously where the bulk of Embers were coming from, in a way that really pushed players to grind to maximize their time. And especially, grind lower tier content to get higher tier gear. So that's why we removed the gear disenchant option to Embers. We'll have more ways to earn Embers when this goes live, and we'll be balancing around how many Embers a player can earn without opening lootboxes, as that's how most players play and we want to make sure you're still able to consistently get the gear you want... but the way we want you to get most of your pieces is by running the content where it drops.

- Embers being barterable into Motes and Figments never made a lot of sense to me, and in discussions with the team and observing player interactions, led to a lot of unintentional consequences we didn't like. Most players were converting into these other currencies because they were hitting the cap so often, and didn't really value them. This is generally ok for Motes - I'll explain why below - but less so for Figments - which I'll also explain below. Removing the ability to losslessly barter these currencies allowed us to feel much more comfortable raising the caps dramatically - of everything besides Figments, which I'll explain below. Breaking apart this relationship meant that we could better tailor rewards to players and give them good amounts of each of those things without having to worry that we were giving them game-breaking amounts, for example, so now we have the opportunity to give you Embers in places where it makes sense you'd care about them, and know that you're going to use them on the cap-level gear.

- The versioning is important for a few reasons:
1. It gives us a lot more flexibility to raise the currency cap, because if something goes wrong in a particular cycle and we give out too many sources of Embers, we can be comfortable that we haven't wrecked progression for Updates to come.
2. Similarly - and the reason the cap existed in the first place - Embers were a currency that only ever increased in value as you kept it. The best times to spend it were either when you were capped out or in the next Update, because the gear in the future would generally be better than the gear in the past. That turned it a completely different thing than we wanted it for. As mentioned above, the goal for Embers is to give you a way to mitigate bad luck, but if spending it is often the wrong move long term, it doesn't feel great no matter what you do with it. Versioning Embers into Motes lets us make it clear what Embers are for and give you lossless value without making you want to hoard it forever.
3. One of the issues we ran into was that in order to properly price new gear, we had to keep moving the price up and up until you basically needed to have Embers capped to spend it. This wasn't exactly a great experience for players. Versioning lets us maintain more consistent pricing, limits how much we need to increase prices as we roll out smaller content updates, and make it such that we can set them more sensibly in general. Even though we're increasing the cap by an order of magnitude, prices won't increase to match.
4. Versioning specifically Motes also lets us re-establish Motes as the catch up currency - more below - and lets us move gear that won't be top-end into Motes at that time, so it'll be even easier for players to catch up.

- We're going to add more sources of Embers. Some of those will be new repeatables, but we can now also do more one-off grants from different sources, such as landscape quests - the Epic, for example - and the Reward Track. One-off grants will generally be bigger than any of the repeatables, but now they'll be valuable and won't feel nearly as bad to get, where before a one-off could've easily overwhelmed your capped amount. Similarly, we won't be just multiplying the pricing by 10x as we did the cap, so you'll still gain value from these.

Motes
- The purpose of Motes was to essentially be a catch up currency, either for yourself or for your alts. You can also use it to get gear that has cosmetics you value. Now that we'll be versioning more consistently, we can do a better job of shifting stuff over to Motes more often so catch up is easier, and it gives us the opportunity to do more consolidation.

- With Motes no longer being barterable, we can also add more catch up things to it, like the Enhancement Runes mentioned in the announcement. This is something I'm personally pretty excited for, as it opens up a lot of great possibilities for improving the pre-cap experience. We're discussing more ways of taking advantage of that, and will have more to announce in the future.

- Motes are going to still be available to disenchant from gear because we want to maintain the Motes sourcing, even when you're doing max content. Motes will be pretty easily and reliable gained from multiple sources.

- Because of all this, we want to make it easier for you to hold onto a lot of Motes, so we've dramatically increased the cap to match. There's also an element of protection here to make sure we don't accidentally overdo it, but we're not versioning Motes to anything else.

Figments
- We're looking at the pricing structure we currently have. Giving the player a bigger cap will make it a bit easier for us to adjust pricing, but we're not planning to double the cap and then double all the costs, there's no value in doing so. We aren't increasing or changing Figments as dramatically because they're still an eternal currency in this model - however many you earn today is as many as you'll have until you spend it. And similar to how Embers are, whenever we add new cosmetics to the barterers, they're available for Figments directly, so your Figments have nominally infinite value. Of course, cosmetics tend to be a bit more subjective than power comparisons, so we expect that most players will get a bit choosier in terms of what cosmetics they prioritize. This is definitely trickiest for players who liked to collect 'em all, but we'll keep an eye on that and see what we can do.

- We're also going to add more sources for Figments, just like are with Embers, again such as with landscape quests and the Reward Track. We'll keep an eye on how acquisition looks for those, as we want to avoid the problems that caused us to make the change for Embers.



We can certainly debate this, but I don't think that's what the end result will be. If we find that players can't acquire gear consistently by playing the game, we'll adjust to improve that.



Yes, the current other Ember sources will continue to work. And as mentioned above, we'll continue to add Embers in more places.



I mostly explained this above, but caps give us flexibility for pricing while also giving us protection in case we make sourcing that currency too easy. That's why the caps have been low for these currencies until now (and why it remains lower on Figments).



I don't think that's what'll happen, but we'll see how it plays out. Part of the goal with this is to increase the value of running the instances that have the gear you want, and to make that the primary way to get gear. Right now, Embers are the best way to get the gear you want, not playing content.



So this certainly isn't true for Motes, based on what we described. It's less true for Embers, though of course we are removing some of the "normal" - by which I assume you mean "current" - ways of getting them, but as I've said above, we're adding new ones with 32 and beyond. Figments are definitely in the trickiest position here, but we'll be adding new ways to earn them as well. We'll see how that plays out and adjust as needed.



We expect that most players won't hit the Ember cap like they're used to, but that's ok, because we also expect them to more consistently use their Embers as well, which is the goal. We certainly don't plan on making them ridiculously easy to obtain, but we are going to add more ways to get them.



Figments will still be available from Festivals, and we'll be adding additional sources in 32, such as with the Reward Track. We'll do landscape quests in the future, not sure if any of those will reward Figments in 32.



No, these'll be disenchantable into Motes, not Embers. Only Adventurer's Gear will disenchant into Embers.



Repeatable sources of Embers will be more frequent, but I don't think we'd put that amount on boss chests.



Plus additional sources we add.



It'll still contribute to Mote accrual, but not Embers.



We'll see some price growth, but Ember prices will probably stabilize at 2-3x of current prices. We'll see how that plays out. Mote prices probably won't change at all. Figment prices are more variable, but we're not talking about a 2x increase there.



To be clear, that's not the intent. We still want players to get the game and get the gear. But we want y'all to play where that gear drops more, as opposed to farming easy content to get the hard gear after earning the deed.



More power to ya. Enjoy your break, we'll be here when you're ready to come back.

I'll try and come back to this thread periodically over the next few days!

Every single thing you just wrote, feels really disconnected from the actual reality. People do farm content to get the gear they want, because the actual instances have, now hear me out, WEEKLY LOCKS and the gear they drop is TOTALLY RANDOM so you can get TANK gear on a class like HUNTER that can't even tank. So of course people get the deed and then farm embers because after multiple weeks of not getting the gear they want and having to wait and be frustrated, they turn to ember grind and the barterers to mitigate bad luck. Your proposed changes will only accelerate this trend, but instead of running instances to do it, people will farm weeklies and possibly open lootboxes. The aim behind your changes either shows a lack of understanding of how the game loot system works or is just lying in the face of your customers becaue you want to push opening the lootboxes. I'd like to give you the benefit of the doubt and hope you have good intentions.

[Happybudgy]

I am coining a new phrase: P&W

Play and Win

Play this game your way, which most likely will be below endgame level, and Win: you get to have fun without spending extra money.


The system in this game is punitive - it is not fun. Things can change seemingly on a whim - yet all of that is WAI - and we players are seen as payors on strings.

The purpose of these changes: to make you either avoid those parts by paying $$ straightout or jump through hoops that you can avoid by paying $$.


Everything you see here now and over the last years is: WAI - see the slide show linked in my sig: this company doesn't only want monetization to be icing on the cake: it wants it to be found throughout the entire dough as well.

WAI is also the order in which things are changed in game (including delays). No doubt about that. It is sad that when looking back I realize: behind the scenes, on the marketing/monetization side of this game, for years now, there has been a big board on the wall with the outline of how this monetization scheme of the game was going to be implemented. And here we are today, looking at many 'odd' things in game, which however make a lot of sense when looking at it through the monetization lense.

As we have been used to this company's way of communicating for years now, this still goes on: what they do write doesn't mean what they would like you to conclude from their words.

Apparently all this is a profitable business model. Like the Paiz' (who remembers them still?) used to say: you can throw whatever you want at gamers, they will continue with paying to keep playing.

I have only been back for a few months. I will not renew my sub, however convenient I find 'town services' at the click of a button. I can only play this game with blinkers on, which I will gladly do to immerse in the pixels while not spending a dime.

[theultimatekyle]

We can certainly debate this, but I don't think that's what the end result will be. If we find that players can't acquire gear consistently by playing the game, we'll adjust to improve that.

You're not even denying that its pay2win. Just that we can "debate" it? And we're just supposed to believe that you'll adjust or improve gear drops gear drops when the devs literally never have before? Storvagun wasn't that long ago, the RNG system is a fresh wound for a lot of players, and most of us don't appreciate the blatant dishonesty. This change stinks of a poor attempt to copy the ff14 endgame gearing model without actually understanding why it works.

Like others have said, if you don't want people grinding embers to get gear, then you need to increase the locks on higher tier instances, and you need make sure its actually dropping useful gear. This is a shallow attempt to push keys and loot boxes and literally everyone here knows it.

[Feldanor]

Yeah, I'm having trouble reconciling the stated goal with the changes. They're removing Embers from dropped gear because it incentivized people to run the group content they just spent a lot of time, money and effort creating, but they're just going to add Embers back in...somewhere else? Increasing the reward from trivial solo weekly grinds at the same time they're trying to keep people from getting too many Embers from lower-tier group content? It makes no sense.

I am seriously dreading having to do the horiffically boring daily stuff we got atm, or similar stuff. Dont wanna get forced to do stuff i hate :P

[Froyo_K_Baggins]

- The purpose of Embers was to act as a way to mitigate being unlucky with RNG.

Say the people who added lootboxes to combine being unlucky with the RNG and paying SSG for they privilege through keys...

[laughatdo0m]

The purpose of Embers was to act as a way to mitigate being unlucky with RNG. However, what it turned into was the fastest and best way to get the gear. We don't want players to run things that aren't the content the gear comes from as their primary way of getting that gear. In looking at why this was happening, the disenchanting of gear from any tier of any group instance was obviously where the bulk of Embers were coming from, in a way that really pushed players to grind to maximize their time. And especially, grind lower tier content to get higher tier gear. So that's why we removed the gear disenchant option to Embers. We'll have more ways to earn Embers when this goes live, and we'll be balancing around how many Embers a player can earn without opening lootboxes, as that's how most players play and we want to make sure you're still able to consistently get the gear you want... but the way we want you to get most of your pieces is by running the content where it drops.

...

The purpose of Motes was to essentially be a catch up currency, either for yourself or for your alts.

If you want players to get most of their pieces by running the content then have that content be the only way to get the gear. None of your changes to the ember system will address the biggest reason players barter for gear - unreliable RNG + restrictive locks. People want to do the latest content to get the latest gear, but you only get a couple rolls per characterweek with the favored locks system. Rework it and have all instances give instance-specific (maybe even instance-and-tier-specific) currencies for barters and you solve this. You can still limit this with the lock system so that people only get "X" pieces of gear per week if you're worried about hardcore grinders having an advantage over players with less hours per week. Have the barterers later sell the currencies for an appropriate motes/embers cost to provide a catchup mechanic once that content is deemed no longer contemporary.

[Fresuvi]

Maybe because the gear in these boxes is better than the gear from the content? This gear should be cheap and have baseline stats for people that don’t want to endlessly grind. Not be raid ready as they were at 130.

The lootbox gear is worse than most quest/landscape/missions gear so I'm not really sure what you're on about? At 130 stairs/crafting/rep barter gear were better than almost all lootbox pieces.

[4andreas]

Right now, Embers are the best way to get the gear you want, not playing content.

Easiest way to get gear you want is buy keys from store, open boxes which gives you embers, and barter for gear you want. Some people actually refuse to pay and will rather play the content to earn the embers and buy the gear. Good job removing this alternative.
Btw. the reason why I and probably many others hold on embers and spent them near cap is, that if there is several items i need, i will run the instances until im near cap to see if by chance one of the items i need doesnt drop so i wouldnt spent embers on it. Not because i would not want to spent them and hoard them....
The old system would work completely fine if you were properly phasing out old content. Which i understand is harder to do than just up the cap/rewards. Instead of the need of rescaling old content down we are getting new content (that has to be created and set up anyway) scaled up. Can already see gear for 100+ million embers in couple years...

[JH15547]

And if the other goal is to not push us to grind for Embers, why are our only other options daily/weekly quests? Which are far more grind-y, and even more trivial than running low-tier instances. Also, this disincentivizes people from running instances *at all* if there's not anything they need. So you're gutting the replayability (the bread and butter of MMOs) of the content you all spent so much time creating. It's shooting yourselves in the foot, which is why it's difficult for me to believe that all this is for the noble goal of getting us to have more fun instead of grind.

This one is easy ... because the # of weeklies you can do on an account is tied to how many capped alts you have. Not to how often you grind instances.

[4andreas]

But we want y'all to play where that gear drops more, as opposed to farming easy content to get the hard gear after earning the deed.

Why not just simply remove scaling instances as source of embers? and let only gear dropped in current new endgame instance be disenchantable into Embers?

[Seregthol]

Like others have said, if you don't want people grinding embers to get gear, then you need to increase the locks on higher tier instances, and you need make sure its actually dropping useful gear. This is a shallow attempt to push keys and loot boxes and literally everyone here knows it.

That would be far too easy and make too much sense.


Seriously SSG...it's like watching a train wreck over, and over, and over again.

[tanlis]

I think it's fair to say we could've done more to indicate our intentions

Ya think? Because the way this was explained was incredibly poor. What are you and the team going to take away from this lesson? Because this needs to change. We, the players, do not deserve to be whipped around like this when big changes are being made. You are generally still going to get flak about the change, but at least if you provide more information then a sparse statement, we can at least see the thought process. Even better, would be bringing this up earlier so we can have a discussion about it.


Now that being said, your additional information definitely helps explain this better and at least at the moment feels like it could be a better change for the game.

I will say, I'd like to see some sort of replacement for the loss of ember/mote to figment conversion that isn't reliant on the festival. I find many of the games/quests in festivals are not super enjoyable when you run them over and over. The benefit of the ember/mote conversion was that while I was running content and I got gear I didn't need, I could break it down to embers and then convert that to figments to get the cosmetics I want once I had all the gear I wanted. So adding an additional way to gain figments besides festivals would be beneficial, shoot I'd be okay with another weekly.

[Snowlock]

To be clear, that's not the intent. We still want players to get the game and get the gear. But we want y'all to play where that gear drops more, as opposed to farming easy content to get the hard gear after earning the deed.

Why does this matter to you? It seems like it's very important to SSG that players are playing fewer instances more than more instance less? It's the exact polar opposite not just of what players want but human nature in general.

If you have all of these scaled instances available, why can't we pick the ones we want to play to get the gear we want? Thats the embers model. By the end of the Minas Morgul cycle, players had 10 instances and 3 raids to get gear from via embers. Shouldn't that be the goal? It seems like it's your desire to restrict us to Den, Assault and HOR. But if we run 10 instances 3 times or 3 instances 10 times, what's the difference to you? To us, it's a repetitive slogging nightmare with high attrition rates amongst our friends and community.

I think it's fair to say we could've done more to indicate our intentions

Turbine used to do dev diaries to explain new implementations. This is the second in a row now where a dev diary would've been useful, the first being LI 2.0.

[road.rage]

You want us to run instances to gear up, fair deal. But why, as many other have stated above, should I run them if they drop such useless stuff like tank rings for a lore master or heal pants for a champ?

What about crafting, you killed that already, now instances drop ####, now we can't properly farm embers - and you think we don't all think of black steel keys here?
You must think very little of the player base that you assume such marketing bs-bingo would go unnoticed.

Having high hopes into actual fixes and changes would mean believing in all the other promises that never got fulfilled or were starved down so much it hurt.

[Vilan]

The purpose of Embers was to act as a way to mitigate being unlucky with RNG. However, what it turned into was the fastest and best way to get the gear... but the way we want you to get most of your pieces is by running the content where it drops.

Complaining that the ember barterer is a better source of gear than RNG drops seems a little bit disingenuous. You guys design the RNG, you guys design the ember barterer. If RNG drops are supposed to be superior to the barterer, how about you have instances drop selection boxes rather than random pieces? The reason embers are the fastest way to the gear we want is because instance drops are often useless, while the ember barterer lets us choose the piece we want. Seeing the removal of selection boxes from the Storvagun quest leads me to believe you are not interested in this option, for reasons one can only speculate on.

Giving the player a bigger cap [on figments] will make it a bit easier for us to adjust pricing, but we're not planning to double the cap and then double all the costs, there's no value in doing so.

Sure there's value in that. Increased figment cost + reduced figment supply = lootbox sales. I'm not saying you WILL increase the cost of existing items... I'm pretty confident you won't. But let's not claim you wouldn't profit by doing so.

Regardless of our mutual opinions, I'm glad to see you putting on your asbestos suit and wading into the fire to communicate with us.

[Frisco]

Why not just simply remove scaling instances as source of embers? and let only gear dropped in current new endgame instance be disenchantable into Embers?

Isn't this already the case? I feel like I ran a Stairs early on and the drops disenchanted to Motes. Do old instances drop gear that gives Embers?

Complaining that the ember barterer is a better source of gear than RNG drops seems a little bit disingenuous. You guys design the RNG, you guys design the ember barterer.

A great point that I never thought about. Imagine being the producer of a game and coming on the forums complaining about the RNG system that you have all the power in the world to change. Gave me a good chuckle. RNG was a point of contention in Moria as well, and the solution was to create Medallions of Moria. Which resulted in people mindlessly running Grand Stair over and over because they didn't make an instance-specific Medallion. If they had made a Medallion of Moria Boots for GS, a Medallion of Moria Gloves for FG, etc. they could have gotten people to run a variety of content, but they started down the road of universal currency and here we are today bartering Embers for everything at every cap, and SSG complaining that players take the path of least resistance when they're the ones who create the paths.