123235-the-big-bad-burnout

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needs to have something to engage the players. lots of game have ways to pull the players into doing the content. wildstar doesn't. yes, you can search for it on your own and it is there. but the game does a bad job at pulling you into doing it. so i think. anyway, my original post tries to decipher a problem with the retention in wildstar. for example, gw2 thrown in collections, achievement point rewards, limited edition skins/items. wildstar needs a way to make the players DO stuff. it would all start with having a rallying mechanic so that it is a bit more "fun" to go back to lower level zones. then once this system is in place, the sky is the limit.


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I think "exploded" might be too strong a word regarding the population, but it has definitely improved. I for one, am back on the 10 day trial and there's multiple "welcome back" threads. Personally, I think the population was at a point it could really only go up. The next question will be can this current bump be sustained and further improved upon? Only time will tell.


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This is what I agree with. If, as a level 50, you've ever rallied down to one of the normal level 20 dungeons, this is what vets feel like in raiding gear. I'd be all for a third tier of "Legendary" dungeons, but outside of gear what would they reward? A title for gold (expected), AMP/Ability point (who'd need it in Legendaries?), costume pieces (being able to costume any piece I want already I feel this is unnecessary)... Actually a couple things just struck me... Rewards could be exclusive decor, extra costume slots and LASes, housing deeds (exclusive houses for plots)... How else can we grow a character beyond gear? Let's generate some ideas!


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Because when it comes to MMORPGs, these games aren't simple games for us to pick up and set down. MMOs have always been and are contiued to be designed as and expected to be, aspects of our daily lives.

Especially if it's a subscriber game that makes you pay monthly.

I remember those days when an MMORPG could literally consume me, 10~12 hours a day, everyday, for months on end, and there was still stuff to be done.

Now everything's so short, consumed so easily and people come and go like it's a 2nd job.

Sure throw me inline for the nostalgia goggles but I miss that.


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Maybe so, but actually the fixes in PvP actually seem to me to be exhibit A supporting Fran's complaint that they're stepping too far in the other direction in an effort to address the overwhelmingly negative reaction that people had to things like the rep grind. After one day of not particularly aggressive PvPing in the post-PvP normalization world, I have one of the old 1800 rated weapons. That's the most expensive PvP gear piece there is, the rest are substantially cheaper. That seems really fast to me for going from entry-level PvP weapon to best PvP weapon there is. Don't get me wrong--I thought the ratings requirement for gear was an absolute PvP-killer. I'm really glad it's gone. But I had been imagining, perhaps naively, that when they took it out they would increase the prestige cost of the gear somewhat so that it would make sense to work your way up through the different qualities of PvP gear and spread out the climb to the top. Because sure, you might get beat up a bit along the way, but as long as you kept at it and slowly earned up prestiige you could get to the top just by keeping at it. The same was not true when you could PvP all day and end up with exactly the same rating you started with, and that was the problem PvP was having--people outside of the big PvP guilds didn't see that getting to the top was even possible for them to do with the ratings requirement in place. But now that it's gone without increasing the prestige cost of the existing gear at all, it makes no sense at all to get PvP gear below the top quality and work your way up because you'll have earned enough prestige to get at least one piece of the best in a single day. I find myself wondering what it is that people are going to be working towards in PvP a few weeks from now, when everybody who does any PvPing has the best PvP gear they can get and a surplus of prestige but nothing to spend it on.


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I think you're conflating two related but unambiguously distinct issues there. RNG is about getting rewarded but with a reward that you may or may not actually want. People will tolerate it until the odds of getting what you want become too low to justify aiming for the reward. Grind is about how long it takes you to chip away at a task to get to a reward. People will tolerate it until the time it takes to get the reward no longer justify aiming for the reward. RNG and grind together make it so that you have to chip away at a task that you can't actually ever guarantee will pay off with what you want. And that made it an absolutely terrible idea. Complaints about RNG-based rewards are not the same thing as complaints about grinding-based rewards. We don't use the same thought processes to handle those two different forms of assessing effort/reward at all.


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I think this is a brilliant idea, Jeff. Very true to the spirit of challenge vs. reward. :)  More difficult equals more rewards, rather than "the faster you can blow through content with your OP gear that trivializes it, the more rewarding it is".


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By the way, this is a good point, but considering the volume of complaint versus the volume of contradiction, I'd imagine the "average" was still the problem. However, if it was not, this would be the case.


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"THAT'S IT.  I'M RUNNING THIS @#$% WITHOUT PANTS."


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yeah i read Jeff's idea of removing gear and getting better reward. i mean, all kind of ideas to make the lower level content relevant to over geared people is good at this point. i simply think a straightforward "gw2 like" mechanic of downleveling is the way to go. add on top of that some kind of reason to replay the content and your good to go.


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