Rashere introduces himself and talks about future changes

Hello everybody! I wanted to pop in here and introduce myself and talk a bit about some changes we’re making that should find their way to PTS soon. 

First things first, my name is Travis McGeathy, though you’ll see me post as Rashere, a name I picked up in the early days of MMOs and that has stuck with me as a developer ever since. I’ve been making MMOs for about 18 years. In that time, I’ve worked on almost every genre out there from text MUDs to flight sims, turn-based strategy to first-person shooters, and everything in between. Before coming to Trion, I was the Design Director for an MMORPG known to the world as Project Copernicus and before that I was the Lead Designer on EverQuest (and now I just feel old…) I joined Trion a few months ago to work on another project and recently moved over to Defiance where I’ll be focusing on the game systems and economy (jumping right into the fire!)

With that out of the way, the stuff you actually care about: what am I doing?

Arkforge:

We’ll be reducing the cost associated with increasing the EGO rating of an item. 

I’ve been looking at the rate that Arkforge is entering the game after the recent changes relative to the costs associated with upgrading weapons. As some of your feedback has attested to, even if you’re focused on finding Arkforge, you’ll tend to gain EGO faster than you’ll find the Arkforge needed to upgrade your high end items. Since enemy difficulty scales as your EGO increases, this puts you in a rough spot. After this change, assuming you’re seeking out Arkforge drops, you should be able to keep an Epic item levelled with you without too much trouble. Keeping a Legendary upgraded will be more difficult, though not so out of reach as it is currently.

Some of you will ask why reduce the costs instead of increasing the drop rates since the initial change was to lower the drop rates? The answer is largely because of the cost associated with upgrading the rarity of an item. That’s something that should be difficult, especially upgrading from an Epic to a Legendary item, and increasing the drop rates would also affect those upgrade costs.

That leads me to encryption. 

Encryption:

We’re going to reduce, or remove altogether, items dropping in an encrypted state, with the exception of Legendary items for obvious reasons.

Legendary items should be, if not actually Legendary, at least very hard to obtain. Unfortunately, when you can take an Uncommon drop and bring it all the way to Legendary, that’s no longer true and it leaves you, as a player, with very little to look forward to in the future. Encryption helps with that since you can only upgrade an item one rarity tier before it’s locked, so that Uncommon that was trivial to get can only become a Rare at best. To get a Legendary, you need to start with Epic (which would be a great life motto, actually). It leaves room for new, better items to enter the world and find their way to your inventory.

That being said, difficult to upgrade is one thing, impossible is another. When the majority of new items are dropping in a pre-encrypted state, it renders the upgrade feature largely useless. 

This is probably a bit shocking to some folks since auto-encryption was just introduced and this seems like an about face. Put simply, that’s because it is. Sometimes you accidentally use a hammer when you really needed a scalpel. I believe the encryption system itself, combined with the Arkforge cost required to upgrade an Epic to a Legendary, is sufficient to ensure Legendary items remain highly desirable. Auto-encrypting the majority of drops on top of that doesn’t add a lot of value. So, I’d like to fix that.

Lock Boxes:

We’re removing a host of items that you feel are undesirable from the lock boxes and bumping the T4 lock boxes to always drop at least 1 epic item. 

Phantasie has talked about our goal of ensuring you’re getting value out of the lock boxes and this is part of it. We’ve seen a lot of feedback that it sucks to get 4 blues when buying the big box and we agree. I think ensuring an Epic on those T4 Lock Boxes will be a big step toward that goal.

We’ll also be introducing lock boxes that only drop weapons or only drop shields. This comes from player feedback that some people are trying to get just a weapon or just a shield and they’d like to be able to focus their purchases on those.

For the weapons, defining undesirable is tricky since it’s very subjective, but there was a great thread on these forums that helped pinpoint weapons that most of you feel are currently undesirable. I plan to retune those weapons so they are more desirable in the future, but that’s going to take some time. In the meantime, we’ll be removing them from the T2, T3, and T4 lock boxes. The affected weapons are:

VOT Mazu Blast Rifle
VOT Bolter
VOT Meteor Bolter
VOT Blast Rifle
VOT Rebounder Cannon
VOT Fragger
VOT Swarm Cannon
VOT Auto Fragger
VOT Outbreaker
VOT Breaker Cannon
VOT Infector
VOT Longshot Cannon
VOT Afflictor
VBI SMG
VBI INF-27 Immunizer
VBI AR1 Armada
VBI Short-Barrel Shotgun
VBI Auto-Shotgun
VBI Guided Launcher
VBI LM-43 Thunder
VBI LM-12 Rocker
VBI Semi-Auto Sniper Rifle
VBI Shotgun
FRC Birdshot Pump
FRC Magnum
FRC Sub-Carbine
FRC Particle Repeater
FRC Northstar Flare
FRC Nomad SMG
FRC Rocket Pod
FRC Sawed-off Scattergun
FRC Innoculator
FRC Incubator
FRC Interceptor
VOT Auto Lobber
VOT Rebound Lobber
FRC Crash Boomer
FRC Matchlock Boomer

Feel free to chime in if I’m yanking your favorite gun or if there’s some abomination you feel should be on the list. I’m erring on the side of caution here, so unlikely to remove something that’s controversial, but I’m happy to get the feedback and take a look. If you want to take a look at how it works before it goes live, this should be showing up on the Public Test Server (PTS) in the next couple of days. Hop on, try it out, and let us know what you think. 

If you read this far, thanks for your time! That’s a lot to digest at once. I’m in the process of making these changes now and they’ll be hitting PTS as fast as I can get them done. Keep an eye on the PTS patch notes so you’ll have the opportunity to come try them out and let us know what you think before they go live.

Looking forward to getting to know you all better,
Travis “Rashere” McGeathy