I think that at this point we should not divide issues for Reboot and Non-Reboot, though it's obvious which community has harder time getting stuff. And I have no issues with Reboot being that place where you pour hours upon hours to achieve something that could be merched in reg worlds, that's whole point of Reboot.
However, let's stop for a second and think about bigger picture here. Content. New. Gorgeous. Content. Content that we won't visit again once we obtain Symbol for that area. And yes, it is related to monsters respawn time and being obligated to use Kishin mule. I have no idea why NexonNA doesn't want to address this issue. I am 100% aware they are not capable of pushing any updates like this on their own, but come on, you can do better than just "forward" our concerns. I don't know what would need to happen for them to realize that they are creating amazing content, really beautiful zones and monsters and then lock them behind terrible spawn rate.
As a person with access to a second machine, I can Kish myself and enjoy content up to Arcana. I could push for Morass, and I'll likely do so, but at the same time, my guild that counts around 80~ players logged weekly and 30~ online in evenings has no viable way to train like others or enjoy content like others only cos they don't have a second PC.
Unfortunately, all above suggestions look like a Reboot dude trying to be entitled and get fast mob respawn and high mob count only cos game is hard. Please, do not treat it this way, this is a real game flaw that should not be happening in modern MMOs, where you either gamble on reg worlds or beg for Kish on chats in Reboot.
Topic name is "Esfera Droplate Issue" - I'd first ask our VFMs and CM to share some thoughts on the availability of the content. If there are any talks to optimize the content for Reboot. On release we will only have Hard Will. Something nobody will kill for months. Then we will get Normal Will which might be as unkillable as Hard version. If we will keep on receiving content tailored for DPS sources we simply do not have, we can just stop it right here and never release any further content for Reboot. It already requires inhuman amount of time to obtain weapon when using Kishin. With new zone it will be probably one droplet per 6h~.
As for suggestions: 1. Agree, to some extent. This would need to be followed by Kanna update which would make Kishin from Kanna insanely stronger with bonus effects (like +EXP/DROP% on mobs hit, i.e. 10%) which Decent Node wouldn't have. 2. This would kill reg servers. We already can access cubes for Meso. Frenzy totem which is most broken thing invented shouldn't be pushed to Reboot. As much as I'd like to have it, cos I'm greedy, let's not push broken p2w content to Reboot in non-p2w form. 2.1. What would be price of such item? I'd value such respawn for at least 2b for a week. Some people don't have enough time to grind such amount of money. Nobody should be forced to Meso farm for hours just to have a glimpse of what this game could be. 2.2 Cost per use would be interesting 3. No. There'd be really no reason for people to gamble in Marvel for Frenzy. This is money lost for Nexon. Tons of it. Won't happen.
My own suggestions: 1. Tell us if you're able to actually introduce any changes to the way game is designed right now. Are you able to realistically modify game mechanics like spawn rate. If no, then I see no reason to provide suggestions that will go down the toilet. If answer would be 'we can bring it up' then I'd remind times when small stuff like Invasions running around the clock, events being in standardized time were not delivered despite promises.
Base spawn rates and mob density should probably be addressed in more of the late game maps but it is a hard subject to approach because both Kishin and Frenzy Totems were introduced to deal with spawns. One problem is now both of those end up generating money for Nexon and increasing the base rates too much could lead to players spending less.
Not sure I agree with any of your points.
1. There are already a lot of high-level Kannas out there and this would probably infuriate those who have spent time and money on Kanna. The skills cooldown would kill its use for many if it were significantly lower than the skill duration.
2. I don't think this would be a smart business move for Nexon and highly doubt they would do it.
3. I have already discussed the base spawn rates briefly. As for turning Kishin into a damage buff, I highly disagree. Haku needs to be returned to a %Magic Attack self-buff. Kannas current weakened state should not be remedied by further nerfing her toolkit.
Why would it be called 'decent' kishin if its as powerful as normal kishin? And having frenzy totem in reboot would drive people away from normal servers where frenzy goes for $800-$1,000 USD.
Either increase the drop rate of droplets or make the boss feasible for reboot. It's bizarre that we need to grind AND kill a difficult boss to get an item. IMO it should be one or the other.
The droplet drop rate problem wouldn't even be significant if there wasn't an obvious and strangely missing solution: dailies. Lucid and Will's arcane gear shops function much like Lotus and Damien's absolab shops, gather a bunch of one item from mobs, a few of another from the boss, trade those for coins to buy the equips. There's only two differences between the former and latter pair: a) Coin costs are horribly inflated for the Arcane gear (5 coins for absolab wep, 24 for arcane, nearly 5x the cost), and far more importantly b) Haven and Dark World Tree have dailies for their mob dropped items. Even if some theoretical daily quests only gave 3-5 droplets per day (or 48-80 days to get an arcane wep), that would be a far sight better than HUNDREDS of expected hours of grinding droplets for a single piece of gear, especially in this post-drop-rate-nerf world.
This lack of dailies for droplets seems incredibly suspect to me. Was this how it was when Lotus, Damien, and absolab gear were first added? (Seriously, I wasn't around at that time, were there dailies straight away or not?) The most generous reason for such a strange omission I can come up with is that KMS wanted to wait until all of the Arcane River content was available before making the equips any easier to obtain. Esfera's shop with the rest of the arcane gear only just came out in KMS, with only a Hard version of Will coming with it making him nigh-unbeatable to the vast majority of players. Maybe they'll improve things once normal Will is out and obtaining his drops is more viable? That seems like a rather awful way to go about things though, considering Lucid came out (and in GMS's case will have come out) a year and a half prior to Esfera's release. That's a lot of time to be making people grind that hard for that many rarely dropped items to get even a single piece of gear.
Another kink in the system I could imagine is the fact that the Arcane River already has dailies for each area already (or will have in Esfera's case, presumably) to collect arcane symbols which have a similarly abysmal drop rate, and are perhaps more important to the way the Arcane River functions than arcane gear. Maybe they couldn't come up with decently differentiated dailies for both symbols and droplets? Maybe, similar to the above, they have greater plans once all the River's areas have their symbol dailies? They're already streamlining dailies with the release of Esfera, requiring fewer to no dailies needing to actually be done depending on how far down the river you are, so maybe relief is coming? But again, a year and a half or more is a hell of a long time to wait.
I suspect the deepest reason for this manufactured problem is the most cynical one: Nexon needs its players to keep playing. That's how you keep free-to-play online games with cash transactions going. You need to keep a large player base active as long as possible to attract the whales. Without enough little-to-non paying customers players to be bigger than, whales can be prone to getting bored and moving on to the next game that can prey upon their fat bank accounts or compulsive gambling issues or what have you. And with so much competition in the market these days to lose those small players to if they run out of interesting free content (which can only be produced so quickly), what do you do? Stretch out how long it takes to finish that content. Heck, getting even one piece of arcane gear was a monumental time investment when the content was first released. Then what happened? Drop rate nerf. Suddenly that time investment skyrockets even higher, with no alternatives to an ever greater grind being presented (yet). I really do believe that at some point in the future, some better means of obtaining both types of droplets will be implemented. But by God I guarantee they're gonna take their sweet time putting it out there, probably just in time for the next set of gear to come out that will take a minimum 500 hour time investment to obtain a single piece. Maybe this strategy is working well for KMS, which as I understand it is doing rather well for itself with a large player base. But does this do any good for the health of GMS, which is...questionable in its current state? I guess it's hanging on by it's fingernails for now so we'll see.
In the end, I don't think the droplet drop problem necessarily needs improved spawn or drop rates to be solved (at least in the short term, these are definitely problems that need addressing at some point). What we need are daily sources of even a small amount of droplets. My proposal is simple: when you complete your dailies for any given Arcane River area, you get a droplet. Boom, done. That way, once you've cleared the Vanishing Journey, at the same time you get those last 3 symbols from dailies, you also get a droplet. Just 1 a day at first. Then once you unlock Chu Chu Island and can clear your daily Muto PQ runs, that's 2 a day, and so on up through Arcana for 4 a day (and 5 a day once Morass gets its dailies this summer in GMS). Maybe the type of droplet received is random between the usual one we currently grind for and the new Esfera one, or maybe Esfera could get its own daily for 3-5 of those droplets? I don't know, just spitballing. It would still a nice long grind like Nexon needs from us, but starting to get those droplets even before reaching Lachelein would be a nice carrot on a stick for players just reaching the Arcane River. Maybe seeing that they've already got a head start would entice more players not to give up on ever getting their arcane gear and keep grinding like good little customers. I doubt GMS will get anything like this anytime soon since even KMS doesn't have any droplet dailies yet either, but I believe something is coming from them...eventually. It'll probably just take another year at this rate.
Incidentally, I feel like a similar solution could be done for the difficulty of getting tyrant gloves from Kritias in less than a year, since GMS doesn't have access to that one boss you can get more anti-magic stones from. Finish a quest, get a stone. Simple as that. It would help, even considering KMS recently reduced the number of Kritias dailies you have to do per day. One third of the time to get a glove would still be far preferable that what we've got...but that's another topic that will never actually be addressed.
Droplet farming should be the least of your concerns, an impossible boss is coming our way and we need his drops to make arcane equips. Heck normal Lucid is still out of reach for the vast majority of rebooters (and f2pers for that matter). By the time we get around to beating Will 16 times (~2 years), we would already accumulate 10k+ droplets.
And tbh, I'm getting sick and tired of more dailies. It's bad enough that nexon increased the symbol cap. We shouldn't bog down every problem to a goddam daily. I'm perfectly happy farming for my sheit, because i'd get mesos and exp on the way.
Uhhh let's see my Morass Symbol level is 1 with only 1 symbol applied because the spawn is terrible at Morass and because of the drop rate so that Esfera symbol is the least of my worries but I was curious as to what the last Symbol was gonna be and now I know.
I'm pretty sure the Arcane Symbol has to do with the final Boss of MapleStory, and if Black Mage is the final chapter of the game I wonder what updates will ever come out.
And tbh, I'm getting sick and tired of more dailies. It's bad enough that nexon increased the symbol cap. We shouldn't bog down every problem to a goddam daily.
That's why my ultimate suggestion was: at the same time you complete your dailies for any given area, you get a single droplet, no extra dailies necessary. My point about the absence of dailies for them was due to how their nearest analogs DO have them: A-cores and stigma stones to get absolab gear. The absolab shops work about the same as the arcane shops, but you never hear people moaning about the drop rate of the items needed to get their absolab shoulder or gloves or whatever.
And exactly what dailies have got you so up in arms? The only ones immediately relevant to the discussion are the arcane symbol ones, in which case, good news for you! The Ark update where we get Esfera and Will is making it so the further down the Arcane River you are, the fewer dailies you have to do for previous areas, to the point where you'll only have to do 1 VJ quest, 1 muto run, 1 dream defender run, and 2 spirit savior runs a day to get the full amount of symbols/coins per day. And I mean, if those dailies bug you so much in the first place, you don't have to do them anyway. Symbols drop just fine like droplets do, and like you said:
I'm perfectly happy farming for my sheit, because i'd get mesos and exp on the way.
Hey good for you! Turns out other people aren't. Certainly not to say the lazy ones like myself should get a handout that the true dedicated farmers like yourself worked so hard for, but since solutions for other low drop rate end-game items already exist in the game (arcane symbols, A-cores, stigma stones), it just seems a bit weird that droplets are the odd man out.
In the end, none of it matters anyhow. Any solutions, be it better drop rates, spawn rates, or alternate means of collecting droplets would be to the benefit of players, which means Nexon won't be doing it anytime soon. It's just nice to dream sometimes, ya know? Got to have something to do for the next few hundred hours while farming those precious droplets.
Comments
However, let's stop for a second and think about bigger picture here. Content. New. Gorgeous. Content. Content that we won't visit again once we obtain Symbol for that area. And yes, it is related to monsters respawn time and being obligated to use Kishin mule. I have no idea why NexonNA doesn't want to address this issue. I am 100% aware they are not capable of pushing any updates like this on their own, but come on, you can do better than just "forward" our concerns. I don't know what would need to happen for them to realize that they are creating amazing content, really beautiful zones and monsters and then lock them behind terrible spawn rate.
As a person with access to a second machine, I can Kish myself and enjoy content up to Arcana. I could push for Morass, and I'll likely do so, but at the same time, my guild that counts around 80~ players logged weekly and 30~ online in evenings has no viable way to train like others or enjoy content like others only cos they don't have a second PC.
Unfortunately, all above suggestions look like a Reboot dude trying to be entitled and get fast mob respawn and high mob count only cos game is hard. Please, do not treat it this way, this is a real game flaw that should not be happening in modern MMOs, where you either gamble on reg worlds or beg for Kish on chats in Reboot.
Topic name is "Esfera Droplate Issue" - I'd first ask our VFMs and CM to share some thoughts on the availability of the content. If there are any talks to optimize the content for Reboot. On release we will only have Hard Will. Something nobody will kill for months. Then we will get Normal Will which might be as unkillable as Hard version. If we will keep on receiving content tailored for DPS sources we simply do not have, we can just stop it right here and never release any further content for Reboot. It already requires inhuman amount of time to obtain weapon when using Kishin. With new zone it will be probably one droplet per 6h~.
As for suggestions:
1. Agree, to some extent. This would need to be followed by Kanna update which would make Kishin from Kanna insanely stronger with bonus effects (like +EXP/DROP% on mobs hit, i.e. 10%) which Decent Node wouldn't have.
2. This would kill reg servers. We already can access cubes for Meso. Frenzy totem which is most broken thing invented shouldn't be pushed to Reboot. As much as I'd like to have it, cos I'm greedy, let's not push broken p2w content to Reboot in non-p2w form.
2.1. What would be price of such item? I'd value such respawn for at least 2b for a week. Some people don't have enough time to grind such amount of money. Nobody should be forced to Meso farm for hours just to have a glimpse of what this game could be.
2.2 Cost per use would be interesting
3. No. There'd be really no reason for people to gamble in Marvel for Frenzy. This is money lost for Nexon. Tons of it. Won't happen.
My own suggestions:
1. Tell us if you're able to actually introduce any changes to the way game is designed right now. Are you able to realistically modify game mechanics like spawn rate. If no, then I see no reason to provide suggestions that will go down the toilet. If answer would be 'we can bring it up' then I'd remind times when small stuff like Invasions running around the clock, events being in standardized time were not delivered despite promises.
Kanna needs a buff regardless xD..
We're very much in favour of improving the farming rates of everyone not just reboot.
Yea kinda true but you guys also have Frenzy Totems
Not sure I agree with any of your points.
1. There are already a lot of high-level Kannas out there and this would probably infuriate those who have spent time and money on Kanna. The skills cooldown would kill its use for many if it were significantly lower than the skill duration.
2. I don't think this would be a smart business move for Nexon and highly doubt they would do it.
3. I have already discussed the base spawn rates briefly. As for turning Kishin into a damage buff, I highly disagree. Haku needs to be returned to a %Magic Attack self-buff. Kannas current weakened state should not be remedied by further nerfing her toolkit.
Either increase the drop rate of droplets or make the boss feasible for reboot. It's bizarre that we need to grind AND kill a difficult boss to get an item. IMO it should be one or the other.
This lack of dailies for droplets seems incredibly suspect to me. Was this how it was when Lotus, Damien, and absolab gear were first added? (Seriously, I wasn't around at that time, were there dailies straight away or not?) The most generous reason for such a strange omission I can come up with is that KMS wanted to wait until all of the Arcane River content was available before making the equips any easier to obtain. Esfera's shop with the rest of the arcane gear only just came out in KMS, with only a Hard version of Will coming with it making him nigh-unbeatable to the vast majority of players. Maybe they'll improve things once normal Will is out and obtaining his drops is more viable? That seems like a rather awful way to go about things though, considering Lucid came out (and in GMS's case will have come out) a year and a half prior to Esfera's release. That's a lot of time to be making people grind that hard for that many rarely dropped items to get even a single piece of gear.
Another kink in the system I could imagine is the fact that the Arcane River already has dailies for each area already (or will have in Esfera's case, presumably) to collect arcane symbols which have a similarly abysmal drop rate, and are perhaps more important to the way the Arcane River functions than arcane gear. Maybe they couldn't come up with decently differentiated dailies for both symbols and droplets? Maybe, similar to the above, they have greater plans once all the River's areas have their symbol dailies? They're already streamlining dailies with the release of Esfera, requiring fewer to no dailies needing to actually be done depending on how far down the river you are, so maybe relief is coming? But again, a year and a half or more is a hell of a long time to wait.
I suspect the deepest reason for this manufactured problem is the most cynical one: Nexon needs its players to keep playing. That's how you keep free-to-play online games with cash transactions going. You need to keep a large player base active as long as possible to attract the whales. Without enough little-to-non paying customers players to be bigger than, whales can be prone to getting bored and moving on to the next game that can prey upon their fat bank accounts or compulsive gambling issues or what have you. And with so much competition in the market these days to lose those small players to if they run out of interesting free content (which can only be produced so quickly), what do you do? Stretch out how long it takes to finish that content. Heck, getting even one piece of arcane gear was a monumental time investment when the content was first released. Then what happened? Drop rate nerf. Suddenly that time investment skyrockets even higher, with no alternatives to an ever greater grind being presented (yet). I really do believe that at some point in the future, some better means of obtaining both types of droplets will be implemented. But by God I guarantee they're gonna take their sweet time putting it out there, probably just in time for the next set of gear to come out that will take a minimum 500 hour time investment to obtain a single piece. Maybe this strategy is working well for KMS, which as I understand it is doing rather well for itself with a large player base. But does this do any good for the health of GMS, which is...questionable in its current state? I guess it's hanging on by it's fingernails for now so we'll see.
In the end, I don't think the droplet drop problem necessarily needs improved spawn or drop rates to be solved (at least in the short term, these are definitely problems that need addressing at some point). What we need are daily sources of even a small amount of droplets. My proposal is simple: when you complete your dailies for any given Arcane River area, you get a droplet. Boom, done. That way, once you've cleared the Vanishing Journey, at the same time you get those last 3 symbols from dailies, you also get a droplet. Just 1 a day at first. Then once you unlock Chu Chu Island and can clear your daily Muto PQ runs, that's 2 a day, and so on up through Arcana for 4 a day (and 5 a day once Morass gets its dailies this summer in GMS). Maybe the type of droplet received is random between the usual one we currently grind for and the new Esfera one, or maybe Esfera could get its own daily for 3-5 of those droplets? I don't know, just spitballing. It would still a nice long grind like Nexon needs from us, but starting to get those droplets even before reaching Lachelein would be a nice carrot on a stick for players just reaching the Arcane River. Maybe seeing that they've already got a head start would entice more players not to give up on ever getting their arcane gear and keep grinding like good little customers. I doubt GMS will get anything like this anytime soon since even KMS doesn't have any droplet dailies yet either, but I believe something is coming from them...eventually. It'll probably just take another year at this rate.
Incidentally, I feel like a similar solution could be done for the difficulty of getting tyrant gloves from Kritias in less than a year, since GMS doesn't have access to that one boss you can get more anti-magic stones from. Finish a quest, get a stone. Simple as that. It would help, even considering KMS recently reduced the number of Kritias dailies you have to do per day. One third of the time to get a glove would still be far preferable that what we've got...but that's another topic that will never actually be addressed.
And tbh, I'm getting sick and tired of more dailies. It's bad enough that nexon increased the symbol cap. We shouldn't bog down every problem to a goddam daily. I'm perfectly happy farming for my sheit, because i'd get mesos and exp on the way.
I'm pretty sure the Arcane Symbol has to do with the final Boss of MapleStory, and if Black Mage is the final chapter of the game I wonder what updates will ever come out.
That's why my ultimate suggestion was: at the same time you complete your dailies for any given area, you get a single droplet, no extra dailies necessary. My point about the absence of dailies for them was due to how their nearest analogs DO have them: A-cores and stigma stones to get absolab gear. The absolab shops work about the same as the arcane shops, but you never hear people moaning about the drop rate of the items needed to get their absolab shoulder or gloves or whatever.
And exactly what dailies have got you so up in arms? The only ones immediately relevant to the discussion are the arcane symbol ones, in which case, good news for you! The Ark update where we get Esfera and Will is making it so the further down the Arcane River you are, the fewer dailies you have to do for previous areas, to the point where you'll only have to do 1 VJ quest, 1 muto run, 1 dream defender run, and 2 spirit savior runs a day to get the full amount of symbols/coins per day. And I mean, if those dailies bug you so much in the first place, you don't have to do them anyway. Symbols drop just fine like droplets do, and like you said:
Hey good for you! Turns out other people aren't. Certainly not to say the lazy ones like myself should get a handout that the true dedicated farmers like yourself worked so hard for, but since solutions for other low drop rate end-game items already exist in the game (arcane symbols, A-cores, stigma stones), it just seems a bit weird that droplets are the odd man out.
In the end, none of it matters anyhow. Any solutions, be it better drop rates, spawn rates, or alternate means of collecting droplets would be to the benefit of players, which means Nexon won't be doing it anytime soon. It's just nice to dream sometimes, ya know? Got to have something to do for the next few hundred hours while farming those precious droplets.
Don't necro-bump every old thread on the topic.