e1 difficulty, e2 rewards and anyone e3 geared moaning about how there’s no challenge and they’re only getting e2 rewards. Then e4s with people who haven’t bothered to really master the mechanics of the fight because they could just ignore them and e6 people calling the e4 people scrub losers who are just being carried. That sounds ACE.
The current brackets mean that the fights aren’t just facerolls. That appeals more to many people than something where they just smash their faces into a button marked “LOOT”. It’s why TSW’s dungeons were boring to so many people. As soon as your gear passed 10.2 there was no real challenge involved. And yet there were still people in ql 11 gear saying fights like Machine Tyrant should be nerfed because they kept getting killed. Going back to an old broken system isn’t better than keeping one which isn’t great, but is still an improvement.
In terms of new mechanics coming in at e5, people learn the mechanics up to e4 and then new stuff is introduced. Yes, that’s an increase in difficulty because there’s more to react to, but any time you introduce new mechanics it’ll be harder. Stick new mechanics into e4 and people will start complaining about the difficulty spike there instead.
The reason for this topic was that tiers such as E2 barely pops.
Any changes should be aimed at new players not you. You’ve already been here long enough, I doubt you will leave. You also either pay or you don’t. That will also likely not change due to activity finder change.
Funcom’s monetization scheme is a complete joke and that’s why the playerbase is dying.
If you old timers wish this game to survive and you to get more content, then you should stop being so resistant to change and encourage Funcom to make the game fun for new players = more revenue for them -> possible new content for you too.
Keep attacking new ideas and defending a system that is already proven to not work and you will be one of the reasons why this game will die.
I agree that the lack of a dungeon population is a problem. What I disagree with is building higher IP walls to keep people in the same tier three times as long. That’s unlikely to attract new players to dungeons.
If E2’s empty then the players are solving this issue on their own and effectively making it “anyone E1-3 queues for E1, anyone E4-10 queues for E4”. Having funcom delete e2-3 and e5-10 just so it’s mandatory instead of a choice won’t improve that.
There’s no secret pocket of players who would distribute more fairly if there were fewer queues, they’re already prioritizing based on the obvious (E1 is fast E4 is the best rewards for easy mechanics) same as in TSW they would be queuing elites or pol/sh only. There’ll always be more people who don’t really care about build/character optimization and run the easiest thing that still rewards them at all, instead of jumping into the hardest content they’re allowed and being criticized until their build passes muster.
Yes, the results show players are solving this - by quitting the game.
Why should a player in E2 have to farm even longer on E1 just to move to E3 where they would have to farm E1 even longer again.
What exactly is the purpose of having so many tiers?
They don’t need to increase the IP wall, quite the opposite - allow lower geared players to access challenging content.
Dungeons are usually meant to be enjoyed by everybody. Raid is considered end game content, not dungeons.
I’m sure that’s why SWL has hundreds of thousands of players and games where running a dungeon is basically pushing the button “LOOT” have a couple of hundred at best.
As Aeryl said, consolidating the tiers would just mean that your only option would be to farm E1, then E4, then E7.
The current situation sucks for people playing solo, because the finder doesn’t pop much at lower levels. Instead of changing the finder, it might be easier to encourage more social interaction so that there are more people queueing and running stuff. There’s plenty of players who want to run the content, but don’t even bother queueing because it never pops. Then you throw out a LFG e2 and suddenly get 6 e2 people sending pms and a load of overlevelled people offering to help.
Once again you are not offering any solution at all.
“Engage in a more social interaction” is not a way to promote a broken feature to people.
It’s people’s decision whether to use finder or not. If nothing is done to improve the situation, they will just leave for another MMO that actually know how to do dungeons and end-game content.
Also, never have I just suggested to remove only a couple of tiers and call it an upgrade. I am saying to completely overhaul the activity finder (fixing the sustain tanks / healer situation) so they actually provide enjoable content for people.
Whether you are in love with the current situation or not, the facts are that SWL is losing players, quickly. Story content brings people back but the end game scheme makes people quit shortly afterwards.
Funcom can either cater to you guys who keep defending everything or they can actually try to invest in a better strategy (especially that it’s factually proven the current system is not as beneficial as they need it to be).
It’s not the group finder that’s broken, it’s the end-game itself. A gear grind consisting of five dungeons and a single raid is only ever going to appeal to a small percentage of players.
That players are leaving because of long group finder queues is just a symptom of a much bigger problem.
I don’t believe the activity finder or elite tiers are the problem, I think that it’s a far deeper problem with the way the progression system works, being long, grindy and dull. It’s a little bit like saying that no-one wants to drive to the swamp with you, so you need a different car.
As for the player population, and
I question your sources. Unless you have access to Funcom’s metrics, you’re making assumptions based on what you believe personally. I’d love it if we had access to those metrics, but we don’t.
I think that TSW and SWL both have had problems retaining players. I think that if your idea that the activity finder’s brackets are to blame was right, then TSW wouldn’t have had the same problem. It’s 2 different cars, both driving to the swamp - and not many people want to go to the swamp.
I think you may have become confused between people not agreeing with your idea and people blindly supporting Funcom. I think that there’s a LOT of changes I would like to be made to the game, but without changing the destination, getting a flashier car to drive there in holds no value.
That’s not changing the activity finder, that’s changing core game mechanics. I agree that it’d be really nice to see it happen, but tbh the amount of time something like that would require to get right, I can’t see it happening.
Look, I am not saying my idea is perfect or that it will fix everything. I am just flagging an issue I’ve seen.
As for metrix, you are absolutely right - I do not have exact numbers, BUT if the steam SWL report is to be trusted, the game has been loosing players massively, with slight increase over events and then back to new lows.
Now I understand that those are probably not completely accurate, but if the game was in profiting, we would’ve seen more / bigger content quicker.
I think that’s a fair assumption that we can all agree on, right?
After years of waiting on new content while TSW was making profits, nope. Sadly Funcom’s main resources are focused on different games like Exiles and Mutant Year Zero.
That means that the dev team for SWL is either going to work on creating new content (which is more likely to attract numbers of players on steam), or totally stall new content development to address basic systems and mechanics - so basically the same thing they did changing from TSW to SWL.
The time it takes to overhaul basic stuff is pretty staggering, because there are just so many different things all linked in together. Honestly, I’d be thrilled if they took another pass at stuff like the trinity. But if people are leaving because they have nothing to do, then it pushes focus onto stuff which will get people to come back, even if it’s just for a brief amount of time.
From the different interviews/streams the devs have done, we know that they really want to get the old content back into SWL, but on their list of priorities there’s stuff which comes first. I think it’s the same thing with the mechanics - I suspect there’s a load of changes they’d love to take the time to code and implement, but that time’s just not available.
I don’t think the equivalent of e16 is 1600 IP. Dungeon scaling is not linear towards the end and e10 is definitely not balanced for 1000 IP (unless they intended it to be a dreadful slog).
Even E1 isn’t actually balanced to be enjoyable for a full group at the low end of that IP range. Funcom really do seem to have “boring, repetitive grind” and “fun gameplay” confused. Possibly intentionally, to sell more distillate cache keys.
Leveled up to 50 yesterday. Have like all blue gear with 1st 25lvl weapon, 2nd 17lvl, and talismans with random levels. IP about 120. Did all Africa side missions, some story/action missions where you need waste like 1-2minutes to kill 1 tarded mob with 15-30k hp and lvl’ed 2nd weapon to 25 and randomly lvl’ed up talismans (about 1-2 levels per talisman). IP became 129. Wasted like 5-6 hours. So with insane grind in next month I will able to get 2 purple weapons and IP near 200(?). Now ‘fun’ fact: I have nothing (!) to do in this game aside those grind missions, cuz que for story mode dungeons (3 dungeons aviable for 50 level via AF) takes from 15 to 70mins (did only 3 dungeons yesterday with loot like sand from ground in Africa). Again wasted like 5-6hours.This game beats some korean MMO in worst grind terms. Need some better activities for newbies. For now I only want to finish story line.