|
Post by chainlink on Sept 9, 2021 6:37:38 GMT
Is your 'Demi' level not calculated to include Abyss Prince wins and paragon character levels and not just based on the amount of times you have killed Asmo? I'm pretty sure one of the changes was to do with that.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Sept 9, 2021 8:29:12 GMT
It most definitely is. The problem is that again, you’re dealing with players who play all the time, with maxed out toons. And as the calculation stands you’re penalized for progression because the increase in paragon difficulty for the hell wins comes back to bite you because it’s so marginal.
As Starcore mentioned, if you just adjust how the Paragon bumps are awarded, you’d not have to change anything else and solve the issue. He started that Demi 3-6 have very negligible impact on a characters growth, but carry significant weight in the Demi calculations. Adjusting that calculation so the total value is the same, it’s just broken up differently would fix the problem.
This adjustment would also account for future runs being added and allow the implementation of those runs and their respective tags into the calculation as desired and if desired. It changes nothing except when the Demi points from Hell wins are awarded. Instead of after every cycle, it’s after Demi 1, Demi 2, and then Demi 7 to earn all of the Hell points. This would follow the significant gains in a characters Hell growth progression versus the marginal gains. Again, not adjusting the total value, just adjusting when that value is awarded / contributes to the Demi count.
|
|
|
Post by woqued on Sept 9, 2021 10:52:58 GMT
Demi 3-6 are not negligible, just not even remotely as powerful as demix1-2 or 7, or abyss wins (per layer comparison).
Reasons: layer pens only matter in areas where you are penalized. Layer pens only help when you aren't restored or in restore-restricted fights. They do account for +2 skp /layer under pens, but +10 regen and +10 all skills ain't bad even if it is within magic cap. It is not at all a simple task to max all useful skills, not to say that it's not possible or that it's even a worthwhile endeavour to max everything, but just that it is not useless and not without "weight" when it comes to paragon increase; ignoring them entirely in the calculation doesn't seem fair; even if my Sorc doesn't give a flying carrot about the skills, my melee types would - disc/hide/listen/conc/ca/cw/parry +10 is not bad.
In terms of calc, the 3-6 should count only as 1/4rd a layer for demicount, for a total of +1 for all of 3-6 imo.
But then when you line it up against layer pen reduction, or hell x7, or the demix1-2 stat bonuses... SO WEAK. I wouldn't mind buffs to the middling hell win rewards, even if I'll still never slog through hells like I used to so only some of my characters would ever benefit from any such buffs.
Potential buffs/changes: For instance, adding in rogue skills and UMD to the skills granted list; as well as something more interesting - open to ideas. Maybe the stat check boost could be at Hellx5, and Hellx7 could be the conquering of Hells and grant something else, honestly I'd wish for a cosmetic reward here more than power and end total demicount calc at x5; to show off you conquered Hells x7, not to give players incentive to go all that way for actual power. I liked the olden times where x5 was the cap and x7 was for bragging rights. Stygia hellshop could give x7 "conquerors" the choice to change/swap tail/wings to a hell themed one, due to growing so acclimated to the Nine layers of Hell, it rubbed off on ya.
In general cosmetic bonuses for bragging rights are a better approach than endless powercreep from "old" content, and leaves a less straining future development environment of back & forth with power levels.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Sept 9, 2021 13:38:30 GMT
I would agree and disagree with you on skills. A significant portion of your very active player base in the end game has already, or is growing into XR stockpiles where the “skill” game becomes beyond easy. When you factor in your XR gear, plus your paragon points for magical cap, your bonuses from other tags, etc the +50 is very easily realized and the 3-6 Demi slots become almost entirely worthless.
Your active population groups:
The people who play with me. Moldyvoldys group. Your Europeans with Boroie. The mesh of kid, chubby, Marcus and others. The dark templars
All four groups are in limbo with varying amounts. All players with XR subs, gear, weapons, etc.
Then you have other players who will dabble with one of the four above mentioned groups and grab morsels along the way. The end game landscape has dramatically shifted to a place where a considerable number of players have XRs. That’s diluted the value of the Demi skills to varying degrees with each player, but has led to this dramatically reduced dependency on the Demi skills than prior to this end game revolution.
You have a significant chunk of players in this mix, all who will have varying degrees of opinion on how dependent they are on the Demi skills. All completely fine. But that XR access eases all of it considerably which is why the suggestion of 1, 2 and 7.
Any adjustment would be welcome. Buffs would also be nice. I personally think cosmetic stuff while super nice is impractical because whose going to do it? What about reincarnations? Etc. too much manual stuff needed. If it could all be automated, that’s still time given how long we have gone without patches and content that’s 100% better spent on more content versus this when what we have works, we just need an adjustment to how the current state is applied.
Just my thoughts. I think we all will likely agree an adjustment is warranted. If nothing else comes from this I’d love to see such an adjustment and then anything else can be sorted out later because as you have said, they do do something.
|
|
|
Post by chirality on Sept 9, 2021 13:44:28 GMT
Is your 'Demi' level not calculated to include Abyss Prince wins and paragon character levels and not just based on the amount of times you have killed Asmo? I'm pretty sure one of the changes was to do with that. Yeah, my post probably could have used a bit more detail/context clues. What I meant was more along the lines of like, "we changed the recipe cuz people didn't like the taste but now the whole cake still doesn't taste good" By "pens system rework" I meant the adjustment to how wins and layers interacted (aka the easing of penalties by shifting the layers up and removing x1 as the super-penalized juncture). Overall it seems like people feel like instead of anything really improving, it was just a big fakeout. One thing got swapped for another without providing any clear sense of having the system work better as a whole. I think there's some room for pointing out that there's a tiny bit of whinge behind feeling punished too harshly by paragon presence in runs, especially considering that paragon mobs were rather significantly nerfed. I think there's also a level of jaded-ness and burnout that accompanies growing feelings of resentment about grinding runs and how details like more elites on the run scale up quickly from being small irritations to becoming major sources of frustration. The level of commitment and playtime involved with heavy HG investment definitely compounds the problems caused by runs taking longer than you know they should, or wishing you could go back in time and not do those 5 now-redundant hell cycles that seem to be more of a punishment or penalty than a reward. It's hard not to say "hey it was way harder in 20XX, and less rewarding too, look on the bright side" and hard not to kind of say that this desire to precisely optimize your demicount to minmax the game's progression structure seems a bit short-sighted and is pretty much exactly the problem with demi shackling in the first place. However, the fact that people who *do* play the game for dozens of hours per week *now* and aren't happy should probably be addressed in a way other than the standard "back in my day..." approach. It was bad for people to burn out when demi shackling helped enable them to crush the game, and it would be bad now for people to burn out feeling like hell cycles are shackles on their fun. Before the change, consensus was that hell wins (demi + asmo gear + layer pens) was OP and abyss wins were underwhelming. Now, rather than feeling balanced out, it feels like they just switched places. In fact, with better vestiges, solar mote, and layer pens, I think the change actually pushed abyss cycles too far. Some people feel like hells cycles now only exist for the x2 DD, because abyss gives all the other meaningful carrots that they want; before, prince win bonuses were never chased as much as solar mote and 1-2 solid vestige options anyway, so with hell wins past 2 only giving the least valuable goodies of the collective hell/abyss cycle bag, hell 3+ are arguably in an even worse standing now than abyss cycles 3+ were before the change. Bad loot reward equality was a big part of it (poor vestiges objectively disappointing, then in comparison to both asmo gear and overall ness payout, even worse), and I think the update to bring vestiges closer in parity to asmo artis helped there (special shoutout to sg for really helping make that happen). On that note, one thing that has always been a double-edged sword is the difference between the way the prized win-linked gear is awarded and collected and available for use. Whereas asmo artis only need the tag to wear, vestiges must be collected 1 by 1. Both are limited to one worn at any time, but asmo gear is just another piece of loot, while vestiges don't work as fluidly. As a thought experiment, imagine if you had to finish a hell cycle for each piece of asmo gear you wanted on your toon, and you only got to pick one after every asmo win. I'm not suggesting such a path, but the implications make you realize part of why hell demi bonus/asmo gear is so frontloaded. Even with vestiges getting a seriously oomph-y buff, there's still the fact that you only have to do those 2 "required for DD stats" hell cycles to access the full complement of asmo gear on a whim. Actually, the vestige buff probably helped a little too much when accompanied by the demi system swap, because just as abyss wins are exchanged in value for pen reduction, now better vestiges also contribute to abyss cycle incentives. I think that major changes such as unlocking hell tag progress, which once was more or less unthinkable to ever happen, have the potential to be more of a good thing than they are. Case in point, no one cares about how much easier it is now to do 6 hell cycles if no one wants to do 6 hell cycles. There's probably some structural changes along the lines of woqued's suggestions or those of others that should be given a hard look and considered at some point "soonish" because it does seem that the layer penalty/cyclical reward/incremental hierarchy of these runs are a dinosaur and should go the way of the dinosaur. It's kind of sad (or maybe just overly-dramatic ) to say it like that, but let's be honest, these aren't new problems or new complaints, either.
|
|
|
Post by boroie on Sept 9, 2021 17:18:57 GMT
Before the change, consensus was that hell wins (demi + asmo gear + layer pens) was OP and abyss wins were underwhelming. Now, rather than feeling balanced out, it feels like they just switched places. In fact, with better vestiges, solar mote, and layer pens, I think the change actually pushed abyss cycles too far. Some people feel like hells cycles now only exist for the x2 DD, because abyss gives all the other meaningful carrots that they want; before, prince win bonuses were never chased as much as solar mote and 1-2 solid vestige options anyway, so with hell wins past 2 only giving the least valuable goodies of the collective hell/abyss cycle bag, hell 3+ are arguably in an even worse standing now than abyss cycles 3+ were before the change. I am a newer player, only having joined last year so a lot of the history of the game is just that to me - ancient history (I do enjoy reading old threads to see what it was like though back in the day). It is interesting though seeing the motivations and arguments that lead to certain decisions being made/undone. Personally, I only aim for x2 hell cycles on all my characters as I see very little benefit in the grind for negligible reward. The thought of going to x7 completely turns me off. Meanwhile I aim for 5x abyss cycles on my toons because of concrete rewards at each cycle, changed up boss fight (each prince is at least thematically different), and layer penalty reductions. For me the path is pre-LL > uro/sissy/thids/desert/db (until 55) > tia and 1st demi cycle. Then I start doing ely/abo/abyss while I complete the 2nd demi cycle. Being demi means runs like pyramid, rona, etc become more tolerable. After 2xD is when I focus on abyss and making them limbo ready. I very rarely will bring a toon back to hells after getting 2x unless its for xp purposes or as a helper for something else. The stat boost at 1x and 2x is game changing. Everything after it is meh. As prepared mentioned, its easy enough to hit the +50 skill cap on the ones that matter. Doing another 5 Canias to get +10 to some skills? no thanks. I might try to get just one character to x7 just for completeness sake, but thats it. Unless the game changes to make it either worth my time, or make it so that I have to do it. Only then will I reprioritise. Edit: to clarify, my reason for not going past x2 is nothing to do with paragon spawns or additional time per run as a result, it is purely because I cannot be bothered doing another 5x hells layers for negligible benefit - especially when I have lots of characters that I want to enjoy playing. 2nd edit: another point I thought of - by the time you get around to making a toon x7, with all the abyss/limbo/etc that has been done then the toon is usually on or around level 80 anyway so even XP becomes worthless on those runs. Double grind, zero fun.
|
|
|
Post by woqued on Sept 9, 2021 19:11:54 GMT
Before the change, consensus was that hell wins (demi + asmo gear + layer pens) was OP and abyss wins were underwhelming. Now, rather than feeling balanced out, it feels like they just switched places. In fact, with better vestiges, solar mote, and layer pens, I think the change actually pushed abyss cycles too far. Some people feel like hells cycles now only exist for the x2 DD, because abyss gives all the other meaningful carrots that they want; before, prince win bonuses were never chased as much as solar mote and 1-2 solid vestige options anyway, so with hell wins past 2 only giving the least valuable goodies of the collective hell/abyss cycle bag, hell 3+ are arguably in an even worse standing now than abyss cycles 3+ were before the change. I am a newer player, only having joined last year so a lot of the history of the game is just that to me - ancient history (I do enjoy reading old threads to see what it was like though back in the day). It is interesting though seeing the motivations and arguments that lead to certain decisions being made/undone. Personally, I only aim for x2 hell cycles on all my characters as I see very little benefit in the grind for negligible reward. The thought of going to x7 completely turns me off. Meanwhile I aim for 5x abyss cycles on my toons because of concrete rewards at each cycle, changed up boss fight (each prince is at least thematically different), and layer penalty reductions. For me the path is pre-LL > uro/sissy/thids/desert/db (until 55) > tia and 1st demi cycle. Then I start doing ely/abo/abyss while I complete the 2nd demi cycle. Being demi means runs like pyramid, rona, etc become more tolerable. After 2xD is when I focus on abyss and making them limbo ready. I very rarely will bring a toon back to hells after getting 2x unless its for xp purposes or as a helper for something else. The stat boost at 1x and 2x is game changing. Everything after it is meh. As prepared mentioned, its easy enough to hit the +50 skill cap on the ones that matter. Doing another 5 Canias to get +10 to some skills? no thanks. I might try to get just one character to x7 just for completeness sake, but thats it. Unless the game changes to make it either worth my time, or make it so that I have to do it. Only then will I reprioritise. Edit: to clarify, my reason for not going past x2 is nothing to do with paragon spawns or additional time per run as a result, it is purely because I cannot be bothered doing another 5x hells layers for negligible benefit - especially when I have lots of characters that I want to enjoy playing. 2nd edit: another point I thought of - by the time you get around to making a toon x7, with all the abyss/limbo/etc that has been done then the toon is usually on or around level 80 anyway so even XP becomes worthless on those runs. Double grind, zero fun. Maybe we should all just be happy we don't feel baited in by demi beyond x2 so we don't need to do those canias and such. All hail shit demirewards xD Frontloaded rewards ftw, anything after that is for cool factor. I'll note that the abyss/hell tag swap was not that ancient history; it is as recent as 2018. There's been relatively few updates since that change happened.
|
|
|
Post by woqued on Sept 9, 2021 19:24:00 GMT
I would agree and disagree with you on skills. A significant portion of your very active player base in the end game has already, or is growing into XR stockpiles where the “skill” game becomes beyond easy. When you factor in your XR gear, plus your paragon points for magical cap, your bonuses from other tags, etc the +50 is very easily realized and the 3-6 Demi slots become almost entirely worthless. -cut out bunch of player blabla - Any adjustment would be welcome. Buffs would also be nice. I personally think cosmetic stuff while super nice is impractical because whose going to do it? What about reincarnations? Etc. too much manual stuff needed. If it could all be automated, that’s still time given how long we have gone without patches and content that’s 100% better spent on more content versus this when what we have works, we just need an adjustment to how the current state is applied. Just my thoughts. I think we all will likely agree an adjustment is warranted. If nothing else comes from this I’d love to see such an adjustment and then anything else can be sorted out later because as you have said, they do do something. No manual stuff, it would have to be a demishop implementation (or otherwise automated, player/npc only interactions). I personally dislike the whole shifter quest thing pigeonholing cool appearance changes to one quest and on one DM. If they allow for a vendor to change appearance and implement it once somewhere instead of forcing it upon manual stuff then it would open the door for more cosmetic stuff to be done automated in other areas/places; offering rewards of the cosmetic kind to be implemented across the module as a carrot without following power creep. This has been widely used very effectively in different games and archetypes as an effective carrot for decades to combat powercreep or to just provide a variety of rewards for different types of players. There's also the cool factor of course. I agree XR gear makes it easier and worth less but beyond easy is exaggerating it a tad. What if you have insane XR pieces that don't fit the skill types you have? I have characters wearing almost only XR gear (+ vestige/asmo arti on top) and haven't maxed all skills despite UR augs; if +10 allows you to not use augs then it's worth something - it saves powerful augment slots for something else. There are rather strong combinations of XR gear that have the weak point in the skill department. And honestly, while an adjustment is warranted, I'm not sure it reaches anywhere on the priority list of things to do, or is an interesting avenue to implement cool concepts. I think the cosmetics would be one of the more interesting approaches; that isn't just moving player power one way or the other - from dev pov that is generally a rather boring thing to work on unless it's actual new stuff, especially when it has to be rather minor. It's something they haven't done here beyond subraces and SG quest / manual dev/competition stuff. I think time spent on making new things (like conceptually; appearance changes) while not as good as time spent on Mechanus, is better than weird power tweaks on demicount or their rewards. It's old content stuff that is really rather irrelevant beyond completionist stuff.
|
|
|
Post by boroie on Sept 9, 2021 21:10:18 GMT
Maybe we should all just be happy we don't feel baited in by demi beyond x2 so we don't need to do those canias and such. All hail shit demirewards xD Frontloaded rewards ftw, anything after that is for cool factor. I'll note that the abyss/hell tag swap was not that ancient history; it is as recent as 2018. There's been relatively few updates since that change happened. 2018 is ancient history to someone that joined in 2020 I would note though that if the hell cycle rewards were modified to shift the concrete rewards later in the cycle that it might have a negative motivation impact on some players. Adding additional rewards though to incentivize doing #3, #4, #5, #6 might have a positive uptake though. There are a large amount of completionists on this server (how could there not be, given the longevity). Treat it like pokemon and you will have uptake.
|
|
|
Post by chirality on Sept 9, 2021 22:52:02 GMT
One way to look at it could be that the current system pretty much curves out to far less runs than up until the demi swap change, and therefore saves everyone a bunch of runs (hell cycles 3+) that were traditionally considered a "given" for any non-cleric (if non mandatory, at least very common).
Before continuing, however, it should be noted that runs after hells were released in succession, so it took each of abyss -> limbo dropping to kind of dilute the pool of endgame runs to even compete for your time. To clarify that statement, before abyss was released, people amassed huge demi counts not only because it was rewarding to repeat hell cycles over and over, but there was no competition from abyss or limbo; then, after abyss was released, there was incentive to conquer hells multiple time.
[On that note, it's worth re-stating that x7 was never a goal except for bragging rights--was always more of an exception than a thing done for a material reward--a sign of someone who just played a lot and or a toon that went on a lot of runs (usually because they were a core or the person's pet tank or whatever).]
Anyway, so then abyss cycles become a thing to negotiate your playtime; then after years of back-and-forth about whether it's rewarding enough or not, eventually limbo follows, and now there's no longer "you do hells a bunch of times, abyss a bunch of times to become a zomgconqueror" but now there's "do you want to do hundreds of runs repeating hell cycles, abyss cycles, or limbo?" and the calculus is much more complicated.
So for players that stacked up big hell cycles in the ancient times, the current state is undesirable, because they feel saddled with high-demi toons that don't gain much reward (since the "prince win skill bonus" system was always fluff, whereas pen reduction was critical) but create more slog. On the other hand, it seems reasonable to argue that newer players are presented with a new world in which they can do 2 hell cycles and stop, instead of 5 hell cycles. The counter would be that "well, before, you could just do 2 abyss cycles and 5 hell cycles so there's no net gain" but almost everyone shot for all 5 abyss cycles, even if vestiges sucked and the skill bonuses weren't amazing--but simply because limbo didn't exist to compete for the players' attention and time, and after 2-3 hell cycles, you wanna play around in abyss, then work on hell 4-5 in the meantime, finish abyss, etc but other than abo/ely farms, the back-and-forth between x5 hell + x5 abyss didn't have XR collection competition.
[On another note, it was mentioned above that 5 abyss cycles has the built-in "benefit" of experiencing 5 different boss fights--which is cool and fun, even if you've already done the p3 boss 4 previous times--whereas doing 5 asmo fights is the same 5 times in a row.]
I think the demi swap change was a really heavy blow, both to ancient players that had vaults of x5s and x7s from back in the days when abyss runs were rare (or didn't exist), as well as to players that maybe could have done 5 prince wins but instead went for 5 hell wins as a priority.
I think post-demichange-new-players don't have it any worse than in the past, and arguably have it better (well, I think objectively far better, for many reasons, but I'll try to stay focused). I mean, if we're saying at this point that the accepted pathway for new toons is to stop at x2 hells, do 5 princes, and spend the rest of their time in limbo, that sounds muuuuuch better than telling new toons to do 5 hells and 5 abyss. Maybe I'm trying too hard to justify the math by saying that not having to do a few dozen hell runs is a good thing (maybe it's irrelevant for people that can knock that out in a couple weeks), but considering that every hour of every one of those runs is an hour that could be spent farming limbo, that should count for something. (Especially in light of the overall conversation revolving around an extra hour or 2 getting added to runs from higher demi count).
I think being an old faithful hound dog that feels their time investment was massively devauled is a rough spot to be in. It's arguably part of the game (hey, last time I checked, HG is still technically a beta server, heh) and joking aside, arguably part of what keeps people invested (big changes always risk driving players off, but that risk is also countered by the potential to make others stick around longer).
Maybe a compromise could be to add an option to the abyss pedestal and allow players to permanently delete helldemi iterations. (I almost said "swap for pen reduction iterations" but that's far too generous to match HG style).
That way, people can feel like they have a little bit of that metagamey "abusive" control over their toons' impact on runs that shackling provided, but without affording the full manipulative on-a-whim nature of having the cake and eating it too--no going full demi one run for a tank that likes the full stack of skill bonuses, or for a run that will be so well-oiled that accepting more paragons doesn't add slog as much as adding more gems.
If nothing else, it would give something to the old guard that aren't happy about their high demicount. I don't see much of a downside, although I haven't thought about it for more than 5 minutes as of writing this.
As for moving forward, I definitely think that trying to improve the overall system is something that should be done. Even if I'm trying to be optimistic and say "well, at least new players and new toons of old players don't have it worse or even have it better nowadays" there's still the fact that repeating hundreds of runs is no longer suitable in the way that it once was:
--Times have changed, for gamers, for HGers, etc
--There's more runs to do now, which really takes "repeat hells a bajillion times" out at a the knees
--The next new zone released will only make it less fun and interesting to do cycle after cycle of hell/abyss
--Enabling out-of-order tagging was a step in the right direction, follow this "acceptance of easing the Old Uphill Walk To School" shift in philosophy and embrace loosening up restrictions and requirements. It's 2021...screw it
|
|