@musicmee That's assuming people playing Reaper ships ignore those with no emissary flags. They just attack anyone in sight. This is regular player behavior.
Balancing Emissaries
@d1no said in Balancing Emissaries:
@mikethemutinous As an essential worker still going work with the Covid-19 pandemic, I have not had as much time to play the update as much as I would like to.
It's unfortunate that there was no rollback to those who took advantage of the initial reputation payout. (You have Leaderboards with in-game rewards now so this should have been implimented)
Now those of us who play when we can because of essential work will have to play 3 times as long to get the same emissary rewards.
Thanks Mike! :(
I don't believe ledger values has changed. Ledger value is the gold you get for an item multiplied with 3. (We tested it a lot so we believe it works this way). So for example, a skull that sells for 1000, gives you 3000 ledger value.
Also, the nerfs to reapers bones rep had to be done, it's a PvP faction, and yet the best way to level it was to PvE ;P
@sonicsonic3 said in Balancing Emissaries:
@musicmee That's assuming people playing Reaper ships ignore those with no emissary flags. They just attack anyone in sight. This is regular player behavior.
Although true, I solo sloop and when I see another ship approaching and I have loot I just sail away and do outpost runs, aka jump off and sell, let the ship sail on its own. Or I fight, which 99% of the times I win since skill cap isnt really high :P
🔸 1. It may be more logical to remove the progress by touching the loot (what is the achievement?), and add that percentage when you leave it on your ship.
🔸 2. So we partially solved farming by playing solo/crew ... but we didn't solved farming on Alliance Servers. 🤷🏻♂️ The Alliance System needs a redesign soon.
@rikuoo you couldn’t be more wrong, gold remains mostly untouched. You currently only need to get above athena value of 286k to be considered top bracket. That’s nothing at all to a lot of good players. You have 32 days to get top bracket. This nerf changes nothing for anyone trying to get rewards.
@quietrobot said in Balancing Emissaries:
1. It may be more logical to remove the progress by touching the loot, and add that percentage when you leave it on your ship.
2. So we partially solved farming by playing solo/crew ... but we didn't solved farming on Alliance Servers. 🤷🏻♂️ The Alliance System needs a redesign soon.
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Would take to long to level without to picking up loot though. I think this 25% extra grade rep needed is good.
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alliance servers farming can't be solved. Remove alliance system, those servers would still exists. But somehow people don't understand that.
@willbilly7386 said in Balancing Emissaries:
@teh-jokeer they made it pretty clear that hitting level 50 in any 3 factions gives you pl
Yeah and it is supposed too, but reapers bones has a bug right now. Will be patched in a future update.
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I love this change! I love wasting hours grinding the same repetitive voyages over and over and over, just to get some reward that is deemed fancy! I absolutely adore how you made it so you dont feel rewarded by stealing loot from other players! Please keep the game going in this generic, repetitive, not rewarding direction! It is very clear that this is the direction Sea of Athena Voyages needs to go! I also love how you gave people with a lot of time on their hands cheese their way to max levels before this change, instead of putting it in like this in the first place.
@mikethemutinous said in Balancing Emissaries:
Athena’s Fortune Reputation
The biggest issue to callout with Athena’s Fortune was that we unfortunately introduced a loop where players could progress through Athena’s Fortune grade progression, claim their Grade V quest, lower their flag, and use the quest to get back to Grade V again. This has massively decreased the intended time for players to increase their Reputation level.
While we didn’t want to reduce the value of the Athena’s Fortune Emissary quest, this balancing issue has now been addressed as part of the below:
The grade progression for Athena’s Fortune has been adjusted to ensure that to takes more actions to advance, preventing the Grade V quest loop.
There is a small increase in sailing times for the Emissary quest, which was quite small anyway, requiring players to sail and carry loot further distances.
Hi Mike and Rare, thanks for the quick turnaround on some of these changes.
I understand the need to break the Grade V loop, and I suspect this was likely the most practical way to quickly apply a band-aid to the problem. I hope the team will continue to look at it, though, because these changes introduce a new issue for a lot of "mid-core" players: simply, they make an Athena's Emissary "session" (get to V, get emissary quest, get back to V, cash out) take longer.
I've had time for two sessions since the update went live, and both took about 3-3.5 hours of sailing, which is about the limit of what my crew can generally commit to. Pretty much every session ends with "let's cash in and then I really need to go to bed." We don't even get to the "loop" part of the process; it ends up being a natural stopping point with a solid reward for us. I don't know how long "Grade V - Emissary - Grade V" takes post-patch, but I suspect it will be longer than my crew can commit to.
Meanwhile, the V-Emissary-V loop is still very much intact for the other trading companies. So here's a suggestion: break the loop in a different place. Instead of making it take longer, what if players had to keep their Grade V flag for the duration of their Emissary voyage? We already have the ability to remove voyages from the player's wheel (timed-out merchant deliveries), so this would be similar - a warning on the Emissary voyage maps that "this can only be completed by a Grade V Emissary of [trading co]", and a warning if you choose to lower your flag that you still have outstanding emissary voyages that will be canceled.
Double win: it encourages players to sail around at Grade V, making more tempting targets for Reapers and other ships, instead of immediately cashing out.
As some people said, now the grind will be even longer and we'll get back to what we had before : a long long long grind to get a few levels. To me, this update is killing the fun people could have : maybe the xp rewards were a little bit too high, but now the nerf makes them low : it is like killing a fly with a rocket launcher !
As some people also said, some players will leave the game again. This is bad, people went back on SoT because they saw a cool and free update with some new contents and a way to progress in a less repetitive way. Making people happy is a good thing, but then taking back all the fun they had isn't a good way to make people stay. Those fixes are a no from me, at least not the way they have been made.This part is just my opinion, but I think that during the test insider sessions, devs should definitely add a list of points that insider should check/do, and give you feedback. Because as someone already said, by knowing what we have to verify (in addition to the bugs and everything we do), then devs can know before the release if their rewards are too high or low; that would avoid the whole community using "normal" things to xp "too" fast and also avoid a wave of ragequits, bad feedbacks, etc...
Maybe (it depends on the time you have each week to check but you could just go with closed questions, in addition to the feedback we can do like now) you could add for each week a little form with closed questions about the patch you released, xp rewards, bugs, and anything you need to know. To me, people that can't write full feedbacks (language, time, etc) could still give their feedback, people that already do write feedbacks could also share data or do the old fashioned way, so you can have more feedbacks ?
A form without open questions (which you have on written feedbacks, so that would be useless to add into that form) can be easy to interpret, with just a spreadsheet app and a few graphs. No need to check for correlations, you just want to see where people agree, where the problems are and where there are debates.@dutchdeadschot said in Balancing Emissaries:
@mikethemutinous with every update, including these tweaks, it always gets harder for solo players. Always.
as a solo slooper, I hope the game gets even harder. I love the challenge of solo slooping. challenge means fun to me.
please keep solo slooping difficult!
@mentimjojo I'm not suggesting that the alliance system be removed, that would be easy. You can set distances where the reward is effective, divide percentages according to how many ships make up the alliance, etc etc.
The grade 5 voyage should be cancelled if you bring down the emmisary flag, this is the number one thing that should be done to slow the loop, and have people sailing around as grade 5 emmisaries longer.
Edit: although playing it today it didn't feel bad at all, doing Athena runs and a grade 5. Its still quite an enjoyable voyage right now. Maybe the change isn't still needed. But I do think it'd be a good idea to encourage people to be grade 5 longer. But I'd revert the change making it harder to get to grade 5 in the first place I guess, if you were gonna make it cancel the grade 5 voyage for taking down the flag.
Where are your priorities, Rare? You come at us with this nonsense and still haven't addressed hit registration? What business is it of yours how quickly we progress through the game? It's not like we're going to stop playing once we hit 75. You want to address progression? Address Hunter's Call. That faction is a garbage grind. I don't play this game for grind. I play this game bc it is fun and these changes are sapping the fun out of the new emissaries by making it such a dumb grind. We're not your precious streamers that can log on for 8 hrs/day. And one last thing, Reapers Bones should be renamed to Scavengers bc that's all we are when we don't get grade for PvP across the board.
@xghostadmiralx yes, they only sell for 5 K. so basically a huge [mod edited] you from rare for people who can't play as often.
@buccanerd Any idea what the gold payout has been dropped to ? I know it was 15,000 for 5, 10,000 for 4, 7,500 for 3 under the old emissary system, what about the new one.
@cb58logan said in Balancing Emissaries:
@mikethemutinous Okay but now please fix the fact you cannot reach pirate legend when you're 50 in Reapers Bones
i have this issue too, im 50 with gold/merch/reapers with all the upgrades
@marc4815 said in Balancing Emissaries:
@d1no Agreed, this is kind of a slap. everyone who could rush through it is fine, but screw over anyone with less time to play. very nice.
This is exactly my problem, people who have maxed out literally grinding for hours on end. Now people that don’t have as much time have to grind even longer than the other players did. That’s pretty unfair. Should’ve left the flag rewards and the speed at which you get grade 5 emissary. @MikeTheMutinous
@marc4815 Oooft that was a bigger drop than I was expecting, in my head I was thinking 10k wasn’t too bad. Thanks for the reply
@the-aby55 Not just streamers but dedicated players...
That's the whole premise of a leaderboard I suppose. I know I will never make grade one but glad someone does and can.
@musicmee said in Balancing Emissaries:
@dutchdeadschot I see the point, however...
A benefit for solo sloopers here is that ships will make Reapers Bones Grave V much slower than they did previously, meaning you can go about your business should you wish!
there is no point in pursuing grade v as a reaper. by the time u acquire it. the server is vacant and you have to hop servers and start to grind back to grade v
if u want to PvP, u can't Dawn the reapers bones status IMHO. because everyone clears out of the server in my experience.
@musicmee The top Reapers Bones player is currently at $48M in emissary value...after a week. That is either a non-stop streamer or a bot. I consider myself pretty dedicated and I'm only at $2M.
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