S10 loottable nerf working as intended ?

[Mesa]

I dont see the reason for TOTALLY remove the bounties. lowering the droprate would still have been the right change... why ? first because s10 is bad for farming axp. (le mish and daily are way better). Also these bounties even with a lower droprate would help alot of newcomers to get there first millions to get some better gear...
IMO this change 1 week after releasing stuff would have been ok, but YEARS later ? and totally remove them ? cmon this is not cool. THink about all the time ppl spend to make their twinks..

[Abdominaux]

just make lead bot drop on every single general done in city raid and im fine with the nerf ><
whoa fc killing the fun day by day oO

[Namiru]

Yeah, I'm not happy with this, either. I'm not a player with billions and billions loaded up on toons. Sec 10 has been my only major source of real income in a long time, and I had spent the last year/year and a half gearing and twinking my fixer for S10 use. I'd go in and come out 2 hours later with 20 million, 30 million if I was having a good day. That's 10-15 million an hour.

20-30 million usually meant I could buy an upgrade for one of my levelling toons. Say, 10 million for a new wrist symbiant, or 25 million for a new gun. Every now and then, I'd go in and farm up a crapload o cash, but it would be over the course of several days and always with a goal in mind - usually a new Symbiant.

Now, it's back to farming Concrete Cushions like a noob to scrape up enough cash to make ends meet on my toons. I'm sorry I leveled my fixer now. I'd have been making MORE money as Foreman's Services Twink. *sigh*

[lyledesol]

Hehe, got in trouble and had two posts from here censored so far.. Thanks Anna be nice, I'll try not to be too shirty in this one.. Honest!

Here's why I think this nerf's a bad decision..

AO is unarguably losing it's players.. Numbers have dropped 20% in just the last 8 months on RK1 (I have figures from a private tracker to back that up btw).. IMO, anything FC do now to piss off their remaining player-base is a bad decision on their part..

I've seen hundreds of people with all sorts of toons in S10.. It was finally a reasonable way to let the masses make some creds.. Not everyone had ubah toons that could make 100mlh but they made something and it's not even as if it was free creds, you had to work at it or you died .. After S10 was introduced it was basically too hard for the average joe, and too easy for fixers who basically pillaged the bosses for over two years until FC finally made some changes.. That opened it up to everyone equally.. Prime example of a good decision..

Now they've nerfed tokens and ICE's!!! Worse decision they could have made IMO.. Not everyone made a living from there, but a lot of people did (and no, I wasn't one until a few weeks back when I finally gave in and made a new toon for it)... So they nerfed tokens.. No more easy creds.. Guess it's going to be harder to finish that 220 now.. Can't afford that 300CSS now, not when it costs 4b or so.. Can't afford them end game symbs and huds you wanted.. hell, can't even raid the cities easily anymore, no ICE's too :/

No one's going to bother with S10 except occasional people doing quests.. Won't be any market for relays.. Won't be anyone farming them.. 1h each just for the chance of a crappy 143 Spiritual bot drop.. No ta.. Lack of lowbie bots on the market will just increase the price back to stupid levels where only ubah people can equip twinks.. There could have been more highbie bots except ding! no ICE's! so I can't see them coming down in price either..

Altogether, I'll stick to my first opinion on this, "IMO, anything FC do now to piss off their remaining player-base is a bad decision on their part.." The last thing they should be doing is making things harder/worse!


And, for those that are whining about S10 killing the economy, I think you're wrong, too many sploits that didn't get dealt with made it worse not S10.. Even if it was proved to be S10, they could have reduced the tokens by 50% to 2m or 1m even.. At least they wouldn't have killed S10 that way!

[Abdominaux]

if u can do city raid , its a raid every 2hrs, so 12 raid a day. if lead bot drop on every its 12 bots, but no it will no deflate economy.. im doing plenty of solo raid (mainly because people dont wanna loose 1 hours for.. hmm nothing) and the lead bot dont drop that often.
700m a supple bot is a joke.
All this patch does is making the things harder

[Dragam]

And billions per day is a laughably outrageous number. Combining everyone that goes in there in a 24-hour period, on both servers, you'd be lucky to hit 1 billion credits/day generated. Remember, you can't count bots or relays or similar. Only bounties and the 4k or whatever from looting.

I made an average of 70m/h there when pushing it and w/o anyone else there (counted twice over 3 hour farming periods with best dd gear avail MA) ... alone. Most of the time though with some slacking/phone/afk/tabbing I averaged around 50ish, which is still a lot considering how often s10 was farmed.

[Hematuria]

Market is determined by supply and demand.

This will cut the supply of ai bots of all level ranges, as well as s10 hud items. Add in s10 was the major source of cru which is needed for the other major source of ai bots and prices on ai armor will skyrocket.

The loss of the biggest source of revenue for a new/poor player with the raising of the price of ai armor will make the game much less accessible to those who don't already have billions stashed away.

Having one level range be the only source of non player revenue generation was probably not wise, but s10 solved a lot of ao's economy problems. A new player could level to 150 and begin to make money. If FC is determined to cut bounties from s10, an alternative source of income for new players must be created.

[Windguaerd]

I asked the Devs in this thread to confirm if these changes were intended.

I posted there since it's the FwM which spoke about the Holiday Patch, thus I thought it was close enough to the topic at hand.

[Dragam]

an alternative source of income for new players must be created.

There are loads of ways new players can make millions a day. Tbh I doubt an undergeared s10 toon made more in there than he did with some RK blitzing for nanos. Roll CS for 10min and you got at least 3 nice nanos (SFA/behem/baton etc.) per hour. Those sell for around 2-7m depending on how lazy ppl are ^^. It's less direct but it will sell over time and you will prolly make about the same or a bit less creds/h/workload like in s10.

[Abdominaux]

There are loads of ways new players can make millions a day. Tbh I doubt an undergeared s10 toon made more in there than he did with some RK blitzing for nanos. Roll CS for 10min and you got at least 3 nice nanos (SFA/behem/baton etc.) per hour. Those sell for around 2-7m depending on how lazy ppl are ^^. It's less direct but it will sell over time and you will prolly make about the same creds/h workload like that as you did in s10.

what happens if everyone starts blitzing again? price drop down.

[Gridpain]

OMG ... why does FC only know how to go from one extrem to the other extrem ?

S10 bounties droprate was raised a lot during S10 boss rewamp and a lot of people warned about possible inflation...
2 years later ... FC finaly realize there's a problem
their solution :

lower the drop rate ?

nahhhh

make it that you can only turn in 4 or 5 bouties per day (like DOJA)

nahhh

let's remove them completly !

[yurp]

20-30 million usually meant I could buy an upgrade for one of my levelling toons. Say, 10 million for a new wrist symbiant, or 25 million for a new gun. Every now and then, I'd go in and farm up a crapload o cash, but it would be over the course of several days and always with a goal in mind - usually a new Symbiant.

Now, it's back to farming Concrete Cushions like a noob to scrape up enough cash to make ends meet on my toons.

Ooor you could just farm those perennium weapons and pocket bosses yourself? Granted, you might have to grab a friend to kill the PB's. A friend! Pretty awful, I know.

Both of those activities would also net you plenty of symbs and weapons to sell for cash but nope, I guess there's no middle ground between farming S10 and blitzing concrete cushions.[/sarcasm]

Don't mean to come across overly arsey but S10 bounties were just as stupid as ingots used to be and I for one am glad they did this. In true FC fashion the fix came a few years too late of course, but better late than never as they say. I don't quite agree with the ICE breaker nerf but whatever, there are other ways to get CRU and city farming is mind rottingly boring in excessive amounts anyway.

[gehin]

Glad to see S10 bounties go, they were totally ruining the game, people didn't even enjoy bounty farming, they just did it to buy phatz to farm more bounties to buy more phatz. I think other MMOs pander to that element enough.

People are QQing because their cred source died but really, is that all you wanted in this game? Farm endless numbers of the same mob over and over and over again all day to get some items and do it again? AO is so big and there's so many places to go and yet I swear half of the playerbase was just perpetually camping S10.

That said, I would like to see a boost to put other methods of cred earning on equal footing with AI content, like missions, dynas (not via excessive camping though..), etc. Why should city raids be at the top of the AO earnings pyramid? This is the kind of boring thing that happens when you make hideously overpowered items like AI armor. When it becomes not about the uniquness of the equipment setup, but the willingness to accept an always-more-powerful cookie-cutter status.

[Xephonics]

People are QQing because their cred source died but really, is that all you wanted in this game? Farm endless numbers of the same mob over and over and over again all day to get some items and do it again? AO is so big and there's so many places to go and yet I swear half of the playerbase was just perpetually camping S10.

Funcom killed diversity when they made hecklers the best xp from lvl 90-180+

[Windguaerd]

Glad to see S10 bounties go, they were totally ruining the game, people didn't even enjoy bounty farming, they just did it to buy phatz to farm more bounties to buy more phatz. I think other MMOs pander to that element enough.

I have to disagree.

Players who did not spend hundreds of millions on a S10 toon, would require a team to survive in there for any decent length of time, nukers would demolish a toon without decent gear. This forced those who did not have the hundreds of millions that vets had to work together until the creds from S10 would allow them to get better gear before they could go solo in there.

My org has a few who are in this position, 150's with mostly imps and some regular stuff (some symbs for 150's go for hundreds of millions) that team together to get axp and share the loot.

I'm a vet and even with the ability to fund a S10 toon, it took me weeks to finish it so I could handle most situations in there to have the options to solo there when I wanted to have some personal time away from the regular grind of alts and when a team of orgmates needed a hand.

I could easily farm Albtraum, but it was more fun in S10 with the lower level members of my org since Alb was mostly for TL7.

At the rate I was playing in S10 solo, it would have taken about 1 1/2 - 2 months before I got my investment back, and then I would actually be making a profit. Keep in mind every time I went with orgmates, I would pass on my share of the loot since they needed it more than I did.

I encouraged people to make S10 toon to build funds for when they went for endgame gear which would cost in the end, hundreds of millions.

S10 helped my org learn about teamwork, communication and fair sharing of loot.

The ICE's encouraged more of my orgmates to join city raids since now they could provide the CRU's to do them more often not only at lvl 150, but at lower levels on their alts.

I see the removal as a bad idea, if it was intentional. If it was accidental, I hope it's fixed.

Lowering the droprate would be acceptable if they can show exactly with research based on server data that keeping the droprate as it was, has unbalanced the economy of the game in a serious way.

S10 was not like the ingots from Hecklers, neither is it an easy place to farm if you don't have some serious creds already to invest.

Also, the competition there can be brutal, trains are common and it requires quite a bit of patience to make creds there.

[Ciex]

Lowbie content looks like this:
1. Subway - no one except froobs and newcomers visit it as sl outdoor mobs offer better xp – dead zone.
2. Totw - you farm it once with lvl 60 twink or wait till lvl 50 or so when you can do it alone and never come back as sl outdoor mobs offer better xp – dead zone.
3. Foremans Office - no one except froobs and newcomers visits it as sl outdoor mobs offer better xp. Some people may want CDR pistols but they are at last average and lvl lock makes things worse – dead zone.
4. SoM - no xp inside, mobs have ridiculous HP, no one plays there, you may encounter dual logged people farming items with their high level mains. No need to train tho, just ask a friendly engi to warp you near nelebs corpse and finished battlerod upgrade is yesdrop so GL - dead zone.
5. CoH – no one visits it except high level farmers warped inside by engis,, no xp there – dead zone.
6. Inner Sanctum – impossible to get any items without tl6/tl7 support. Froobs farm it for xp from time to time but even borgs or rk missions are better anyway, not to menton hecks – dead zone.
7. There was also some will to fight dungeon but ive never been there during my 5 year playtime, it may be also a dead zone but idk really.

Does anyone see a pattern so far, what exactly those places have in common? Anyone? Yup, they are dead zones that are not worth coming back once you get your nodrops or not worth doing at all.

And finalny after 150 levels of pocketing, kiting and dual logging and farming grey mobs with our uber 220 mains we get s10 at mid levels. Zone where you earn noticeable axp, credits and have a chancefor viralbots – zone thats worth doing over and over. This doing over and over may not be the most interesting thing in the world but you actually play your character and get some benefits from it.

I really dont want it to be dead, cmon FC …

(...)

I agree with most of the things but s10 could be really better it it did encourage teaming up. It was marvelous when it was introduced and we had massive raids for viralbots but it was broken as ga4 fixer could solo it and camp on timer. Instead of making it more difficult or something FC changed it into current state that encourages behavior like kill stealing, training or playing solo instead of teaming. Ive seen even people of same org refusing to team because it cuts profit down. Thats not good for sure. Not to mention fact that raid version did encourage more unique twink builds oriented to support raids like 2s ND docs etc. Now everyone is just solo/dd monkey.

[Mastablasta]

That's with the flawed viewpoint that leveling content should be something you keep coming back to on the same character. You're supposed to outlevel it and not come back. Making "farm toons" doesn't really make much of any sense other than you end up ruining it for people who come there for the first time by sitting on the loot.

[Ekarona]

Lowbie content looks like this:
1. Subway - no one except froobs and newcomers visit it as sl outdoor mobs offer better xp – dead zone.
2. Totw - you farm it once with lvl 60 twink or wait till lvl 50 or so when you can do it alone and never come back as sl outdoor mobs offer better xp – dead zone.
3. Foremans Office - no one except froobs and newcomers visits it as sl outdoor mobs offer better xp. Some people may want CDR pistols but they are at last average and lvl lock makes things worse – dead zone.
4. SoM - no xp inside, mobs have ridiculous HP, no one plays there, you may encounter dual logged people farming items with their high level mains. No need to train tho, just ask a friendly engi to warp you near nelebs corpse and finished battlerod upgrade is yesdrop so GL - dead zone.
5. CoH – no one visits it except high level farmers warped inside by engis,, no xp there – dead zone.
6. Inner Sanctum – impossible to get any items without tl6/tl7 support. Froobs farm it for xp from time to time but even borgs or rk missions are better anyway, not to menton hecks – dead zone.
7. There was also some will to fight dungeon but ive never been there during my 5 year playtime, it may be also a dead zone but idk really.

Does anyone see a pattern so far, what exactly those places have in common? Anyone? Yup, they are dead zones that are not worth coming back once you get your nodrops or not worth doing at all.

And finalny after 150 levels of pocketing, kiting and dual logging and farming grey mobs with our uber 220 mains we get s10 at mid levels. Zone where you earn noticeable axp, credits and have a chancefor viralbots – zone thats worth doing over and over. This doing over and over may not be the most interesting thing in the world but you actually play your character and get some benefits from it.

I really dont want it to be dead, cmon FC …

Hi level content is much different?
1. Farm inf mish or dailys for level
2. Go to each instance untill you get all the phat, unless somone needs help not at all after it.

It is what AO is...

[Ciex]

You're supposed to outlevel it and not come back.

Things like that dont keep people interested in playing for 10 years. What am i supposed to do? Get kited to 160, dual log inf missions up to 210, start sheol quest, ding 220, claim /win and move to wow?

Hi level content is much different?
1. Farm inf mish or dailys for level
2. Go to each instance untill you get all the phat, unless somone needs help not at all after it.

It is what AO is...

Thats exactly why we have so many people playing at mid levels and mostly on mid levels. Or shall i say we "had" instead of "have" ... I hope no one is naive enough to think they will just join tl7 farm community, some of them must quit, maybe even me :/

[lyledesol]

That's with the flawed viewpoint that leveling content should be something you keep coming back to on the same character. You're supposed to outlevel it and not come back. Making "farm toons" doesn't really make much of any sense other than you end up ruining it for people who come there for the first time by sitting on the loot.

You're obsessed with level 220's dude.. Get over it!

I've been playing 7 years now and my one and only 220 still isn't finished.. That's mainly because as an Australian, I play during the dead zone.. I don't mind tho, because I have lots of other toons built at specific levels for other content.. Like, guess what.. A 150 for S10!!!