perhaps I missed it but one thing I didn’t find in all the posts in this thread is that swl (and TSW before it) never were MMOs. TSW even less so. They both are open world action RPGs, so the official definition. And this explains some of your concerns very accurately.
In an MMO many ppl (hence the massively) play simultaneously, potentially in the same area. they can group or not, there is a lot of group contant and so on.
In SWL even when a few (15+ or so) ppl are in the same area they are being split into many layers and not all can see each other. it was never intended that all of them work together. Basically the description ‘single player game with group content and grouping possiblity’, which many brought as concern or criticism, is the very definition of the game.
I’m very much with you at the rate of new content, the explanation for this is very simple though: funcom themselves state in their company history that TSW ran very bad financially and, together with that lego game that came out nearly at the same time, made a big hole in their possibility to develop new things fast. SWl is financially better and perhaps saves the franchise and now they’re bringing new content - hopefully more in the future.
About the possibilities to play everything has been said - even I am at that point already after 1.5 months of SWL (years TSW though) and having IP400. You don’t need to play very long to reach the point where it’s either fun or not
agartha being one exception I never encountered that many ppl in one place - except when they met intentionally and formed a group. But perhaps I just missed them
We’re getting off topic, but yes, TSW was described as an MMO pretty much up until they started talking about freezing TSW and re-launching. Then it was retconned/re-described using the ‘shared-world action RPG’ thing. So I am thinking around 2016-ish was the change?
Getting back to the issue of ‘how can FunCom give me things to do at high IP?’, one of the ideas I heard discussed that had potential, was putting in a scaled version of each zone. So you would be able to play through the game on Story mode, then set your difficulty to Elite or to Nightmare and play through them again.
However the issue isn’t as simple as saying ‘Elite mobs all have 10x the HP and hit 10x harder, and Nightmare mobs are 25x more’, since power abilities, hazards etc don’t all scale in the same way. Plus, when people play harder content, they want bigger rewards, which just accelerates and exacerbates the “I am now at demi-god power, what do I do?” issue.
Many games make themselves alt-friendly, so you can at least play through another time on a new alt, but for some reason FunCom has never liked this approach.
Personally, I think it’s kind of the opposite: SWL has me thinking Funcom doesn’t understand other publishers’ games. Or at least one other publisher’s games, as it were (i.e. PWI).
To me, so much about this relaunch feels like they emulated the worst aspects of systems in other games (particularly Neverwinter and other Cryptic games), presumably because someone deluded themselves into thinking that’s what made those systems (somewhat) successful.
Ssssalty… but so true. I’m playing Skyforge now, and only stop back to check the game occasionally - maybe something in the AH sold, or an agent got a critical success.
But, since I’ve completed the story… nothing else to do, and seemingly no interest by Funcom in player retention.
[quote=“Merihem, post:1, topic:2290”] Because I find myself (maybe just apathy) playing Secret World Legends Gatcha more than anything else; I log on, dispatch my agents and poke the AH for anything interesting, then I run 1~4 missions to do a daily and see if I get another agent. [/quote]
That’s been mostly what I do too. I do randomly work on a couple of other characters, but that’s lukewarm at best as I did that all in TSW. New Dawn has zero faction differences, so why worry about leveling them. I do like the story, but how many times can you replay the new content w/o it becoming stale too.
The other thing I do just to keep myself busy work on the museum/bestiary kill count. But even that I can only do for a limited time - grinding isn’t my style or of interest. I seriously cannot bring myself to run dungeons, I don’t care how many keys they give me - and even the temptation of agents - I’ll buy them off the AH before running endless dungeons for a potential chance of a chance of a chance. It’s mind-numbing to me at this point.
I know FunCom doesn’t like PvP to be mentioned and honestly I’m not sure how good it would be with the reticle, but that was one endgame activity that was enjoyable and a change of pace (and NOT Shambles FunCom). Group scenarios are way less boring than solo. It does seem FC is actively anti-group content though.
Shoving us all into Agartha and instanced bosses is boring to IMHO. I liked the lair bosses in the lairs. Same for the Gaia events and hunting Krampus and the Cat God. Sitting in Mallgartha - no thanks. I think that was the silliest move ever stripping everything from the zones and faction hubs and sticking it in one place. I spend as little time as possible there. It could have been done well as a great RP hub, but it’s just lag-central and always the first place to break.
It was absolutely the right move in terms of creating a modern MMO hub that appeals to attention span of a gnat MMO players. I mean, who cares how immersion-breaking Mallgartha is, right?
How it managed to elude Funcom that it might therefore be a silly idea when the game is being relaunched as a story-focused shared-world action RPG that’s supposed to appeal to… idk, some other target audience, apparently… is one of the great mysteries of SWL.
So yeah…I now stumbled into the endgame issue too. After hitting the 5k Achievement points I ran out of things to do. I theoretically could get E10 (currently E7) but I don’t feel pushing numbers up would really entertain me and I really got through 95% of all achieveable achievements (which I plan to 100% as soon as I can…which I for the most part can’t force or won’t force due to bugs ingame).
So basically I am sitting her doing a few dailies every day for the free mof, maybe farm an area to build up some shards for the currently unavaidable wings or the upcoming new one but generally I am not doing much. What makes that worse is that as a f2p I can’t really farm points as fast as a patron can. So SA is a “every three days” kind of thing.
My current plan is to take it slow and distance myslf from hardcore playing the game and play more other games so that all the exhaustion from overplaying the game has time to settle and I go in with relative fresh eyes once new content, an event or even a cool weekend arrives (While I have no pleasure in grinding for grindings sake weekend events normally are to good to pass up).
On the side I probably will still cook up ideas and talk with the devs about it since being a nuisance is my character trait but I doubt that much will come from it. I got a bit used to the phrase “We don’t have the people for it” or “They are all busy”. While I understand the situation it always leaves a bitter aftertaste.
I’m not even an RPer and I hate Mallgartha… turning it into a commercial fashion zone was perhaps the most disgusting thing they could have done with the penultimate tree. That damn dance floor and the bar make me want to pay someone to reskin the assets out of my game so I don’t have to look at it any more.
Patron makes the AP/SP grind fly by, at least… but there’s not much to mitigate the gear grind, and even fewer reasons to actually do it (I say this with a maxed red hit glyph).
You CAN swipe to success through caches and distillates but it’s incredibly inefficient. More dollars than sense there.
Personally, I suspect with the drop rates etc-- they’re running into the same problem baked in that D3 had for the longest time. Because of the RMT auction house, the drop rate for meaningful drops that people want is garbage. For SWL, you’re running into the MOF<->Aurum exchange market.
I don’t see how in a F2P game they can unbake that issue, so. Yeah. There’s that. That’s kind of a thing.
Well, the agent system is proof that they want to add more to do at endgame. Sure, it’s not much, but it’s progression. And progression is v e r y s l o w in the endgame if you’re a casual loner, like me, who doesn’t go patron very often. I’m extremely unlikely ever to max out my gear or weapons, so I can always grind every three days for a little progress. (I have two characters at 50 in South Africa, so I can double-grind.)
I play WoW also, and in that game after taking a character through the questlines of an expansion, getting flight, upgrading your gear, seeing the dungeons and raids at whatever difficulty you enjoy, picking up the mounts and/or transmogs, you are left with the same choices to make: replay the existing content, revisit old content, or start a new character. Maybe accumulate gold or something like that.
MMOs are what you make of them after maxing out in an expansion. I still like to wander around in the early zones, and after getting some cash together I visit the plastic surgeon in New York. Can’t ever get too handsome. (Somehow the plastic surgery remains after rezzing.)
SWL for me has been about the story. Much like TSW before it.
I don’t do elite content. I don’t do scenarios. I hardly even do storymode dungeons; I just don’t enjoy playing
content with strangers. I’m not interested in the agent system as it adds nothing to the story for me and I couldn’t care less about a little buff (I’m far from maxed out gearwise - nor do I need to be to play the content I enjoy).
The fact that SWL said to be focussing more on the story and being more aimed towards solo play was music to my ears. The problem is though, that because of the limited resources and manpower the devs have, new content is coming out rather slowly. And so there’s huge patches of time where I just don’t play.
And all these things that people are asking for is going to require resources and manpower. Something the game is already short on. So, if the game wants to live up to its mission statement, it simply can’t give much of those requested things.