Personally, I'm fine with seeing "premium consumables" such as the masterwork alkahest on the cash shop. However, that is only if those items are available to non-paying players as well. Preferably if they're available through the same channels that you can get them now (for instance, so long as the alkahest is still available from the vendors).

On a related note, if everything that's in the cash shop is available to free players, even if it takes a long time to earn, I'm happy. GW2 has the right idea with letting players sell the cash shop currency on the auction house, as it means free players can still unlock full character slots and bank tabs, buy boosts, and so on by buying gems from other players instead of from the store directly.

Quote: synaesthetic on 08/13/2012, 11:45 PM - view

QFT.

What I would like is a system where you get Enchanting Points (EP) for every enchant you attempt, and when you hit a certain number of EP, your item levels up. You always gain some EP, although using low-end items (whites or greens) on high-level enchants gives extremely little.

The EP you gain is randomized, but not enough to be frustrating (i.e. if it takes 100 EP to level up, you'd get between 10 and 20, not between 1 and 30). It's also hidden, so you never know how close you are to the next level. Finally, there's also a very small chance (around 2%, perhaps) to get a "critical success" and instantly get +1, no matter how much EP you had.

What I don't like about the system is working to get the gold and material for the enchant, hitting the button... and then getting nothing. If I knew that a successful enchant was getting closer with every fail, it would be much more fun.

Cool info, thanks Ez.

Is there any chance you could do like a daily graph showing how much money was spent in Ostagarth each day? Not post a graph each day necessarily, but something showing each day's spending?

So, I recently hit level 60 - yay me. Problem is, as soon as I leveled, I got a message telling me my quest log is full (about three of them, actually).

What I'm thinking is, there's supposed to be a few quests you get automatically when you level. Unfortunately, I didn't actually get those quests, and I've no idea where to go for them. Any tips?

No, but it is rather crappy that they add new content to the game, that would be fun to use, but costs extra RL money. Admittedly, it's only new graphics, but that development time could have been spent on new armor graphics, new dungeon mobs, and so on. Don't get me wrong, I love getting fun, casual stuff like this, but I don't like having to pay extra to keep it.

That being said, it also depends on how much they charge. If they're only $5 each, I'd probably buy one for each of my four characters. If they're about $10, I'll probably get just one for my Slayer main. If they're any more, I'll just enjoy the freebie. And yes, that means if they charge less, I'll spend more; money's funny that way.

By the way, any chance we can get the store-bought swimsuits to be broker-able? It would basically be the same as chronoscrolls, in that you can spend gold for things that cost RL money, or spend RL money for gold from another player.

@Losat: So because a handful of people will spend all their time on the game, that means it's fine to force the people that work evening jobs (and thus WON'T be spending all their time on the game) to only do this in the few evening hours they have off work, right? Somehow that seems incredibly... stupid.

Quote: Losat on 07/27/2012, 10:25 PM

The problem is, there's no reason they can't make it start at 12:00 AM instead of 12:00 PM on weekdays. It's just a nonsensical reason to make the event shut off at certain hours, when they could just easily make everyone happy by making it run all day. That's what most of us are annoyed about, it happened with the first egg event, it happens right now with nexus, it's happening again with the summer event, and there's no reason it should.

Back to the event, personally I'm fine with the swimsuits being rare, and I'm fine with the swimsuits being temporary, but I'm NOT fine with them being both rare AND temporary. They really need to have common enough droprates for everyone to get one without having to spend 40 hours farming the event, if they're not going to stick around. If they've got an incredibly low droprate though, then I'm going to be a tad annoyed.

And you're right, the event days were listed as the 3rd to the 13th early in the post, and the shop was listed as having the suits until the 21st; now it's changed so both dates are the 13th.

This is pretty cool, actually. I wish it were possible to get permanent swimsuits from just the event (possibly at a much rarer rate than the temporary ones), but at least we get something. A few comments, though:

-Again, a limited time event. Why not make this 24/7? Admittedly, going from noon to midnight is MUCH better than the egg event only going for a few hours, but why not let the people playing in the morning in on the fun?

-There's a bit of confusion on the dates. On the page for the event, near the top it's listed as Aug 3rd-Aug 13th. But later in the page it says that the swimsuits are available in the store "until August 21 when the Summer Event ends!". So does it go until the 13th or the 21st?

-It would be nice to know how much the swimsuits cost. Hopefully no more than $10 like the weapon skins. Any chance we can use dyes on the non-temporary ones for more color options?

Nice interview, glad the site gets a bit of official recognition :)

@SolidGold: The idea was that I didn't want to negatively impact what players are able to get right now from nexus. I've heard that good groups could do 10-13 nexus clears in a single event, so I wanted to make sure that was still possible, and since doing that 6 times in a week meant about 60 nexuses, that seemed like a logical cap. That being said, I'm fine with fiddling with the numbers; I wanted the cap to be obtainable in 4 or 5 events if in a good group, or 8 to 10 events in general zerg pugs.

@Phaere: That's true. What I'm thinking is have the reset on Mondays. That way, during the week no one's at cap yet so there's plenty of incentive to do them, and when the weekend rolls around, there should be a bunch of people at cap already, but still enough not at cap to make running them possible, if that makes sense. Also, the reason for the secondary currency was to give an incentive to players to keep running them even if they're at cap, for easy rewards. Still, one idea is that if none of the nexuses are cleared after 15 minutes, there's a stacking -HP and -damage debuff on all nexus mobs, to weaken them for smaller groups. Not as many rewards, and this would probably void the mega-reward for clearing the whole event, but it would at least let people do them when there's not a big enough group.

@Xicor: Possibly. But remember, there is a limit to how many times you can get currency in a week, so there's less incentive to run them after you're at cap. You can't just look at it and say "there's 26 nexus events now, that means everyone's going to do them all", without looking at the rest of the changes. The entire system builds off of itself here.

Also, let's try to keep this on topic, folks.

How to Fix Nexus, or What I Would Do if I Ran EME

Right now nexus has a few problems. Massive lag, only available on weekends, and lots of AFKers. So, I've come up with ideas that would at least help fix all of those problems. This is a list of what I would change if I ran EME.

Changes to the base system:

First off, Nexus is now available on all days, Sunday through Saturday, in about 6-hour intervals.

To keep players from getting too many rewards, the main Nexus currency is capped at a certain amount per week, approximately equal to closing 60 nexuses. If a player is at this cap, he instead gains an alternate currency. This currency can be spent on items such as blue and red crystals (including crystals that aren't available on regular merchants), alkahest, consumables (including rare ones such as Reglyph items), and crafting runes (all levels). Players may down-convert the normal Nexus currency to the new one, but may not up-convert the new one to the normal currency.

When a Nexus event starts, only 15 nexuses are opened; if they are closed before the timer is up, the event simply ends early; more on that below. Also, when the timer is up, any nexuses currently in phase 2 or 3 remain open for five minutes, letting players finish killing the current enemies. A nexus will not begin phase 3 if it was in phase 2 during this grace period, however.

New Nexus reward system:

When a Nexus event starts, everyone standing at an active Nexus gains a "Nexus Attunement" buff that lasts for 3 minutes. When a Nexus phase is completed, everyone in the Nexus gets the Attunement buff; 5 minutes for completing phase 1, 10 minutes for completing phase 2, and 15 minutes for completing phase 3. This buff lasts through death. Whenever a nexus phase is completed, all players with Nexus Attunement, even if they aren't actually at that particular nexus, get the reward. Thus, splitting up into several groups to work on different nexuses at the same time will result in all groups getting the full reward. If all 15 Nexuses are closed during a single event, all players with Nexus Attunement also get a bonus award equal to 5 full Nexus clears. This bonus reward does not happen if the final Nexus is closed during the five-minute grace period after the event ends.

Changes to Nexus phases:

Sometimes, there is a problem with a Nexus mob not spawning properly, or being kited away. Instead of ending when all enemies are killed, phases 1 and 2 end when a certain number of enemies are killed. The target number is equal to what currently spawns at the start of a Nexus phase, but this adds a small extra challenge of killing them quickly so that they stop spawning, as phase 1 enemies killed after progressing to phase 2 don't add to the kill counter. Phase 3 works as it does now, with killing a singular boss.

Nexus scaling is also changed. The scaling works as it does now up to 40 players, but after that it reaches a "soft cap" where HP scaling is drastically lowered. Thus, if there's a large number of AFK players in a Nexus, they won't have as much of a negative impact on mob health. Also, a large group will be able to clear a Nexus much faster, although large groups aren't a requirement at all.

Reasoning for changes:

Right now, the main issue with lag from a nexus event is because practically the entire server shows up to do it. By making it available through the week, and capping the reward so players don't feel as if they're forced to participate in as many as possible, there should be less people at each nexus, meaning less strain on the server.

Another issue with nexuses is that everyone wants to follow the big zerg, since that's usually the easiest way to get the most points. Again, capping the number of points per week means that this isn't necessary, but also by giving the rewards to everyone participating in the Nexus event, even if they're not at a particular Nexus, means that there's now an incentive to split up and close as many as possible - especially with the mega-reward for doing just that.

Keeping a Nexus from "bugging out" and not progressing, either because a mob didn't spawn or someone kited it away from the group, means that there's no bad feelings about getting to a nexus and clearing some of it only to find out you don't get a reward and wasted time. Giving a big reward for doing all of them also requires that you don't miss out just because the game glitched or one person decided to screw up everyone's fun.

It's almost impossible to police AFKers, so instead of trying to find a solution for that, I decided to just cap how much damage they could do by not letting the mob's HP scale as fast. Plus, this means a large group can have a few players tag along that maybe aren't as good or aren't 60 and still have fun with the event, without dragging others down.