Feb Patch Discussion & Deobfuscation

Glitchless · 03-03-2014, 07:35 PM

Much like the size of the words in the heading of this thread, the controversy surrounding this patch has been unnecessarily inflated. We'll attack the talking points coming from the always-panicked naysayers here.

We'll tackle the big one first: downtiering. The initial change to downtiering - an enchanting rod ability that already existed in the game - yielded 1x to 2x the lowered tier item rather than the usual 1x. As was intended, this produced an influx of lower tier resources as players enjoyed the exponentially growing stack size and downtiered until their inventories were swollen. The problem was an epic gem with a high price for its level - Derinium. Players discovered that the low tier dusts that were normally in low supply could be made in drones by downtiering, and that they could create Derinium for a price that was below the store sell value. They quickly - well... if you're a crafter you know that nothing is truly done quickly, but some rushed to produce as many Deriniums as possible, making a profit of over 20k per gem selling to the store. We reacted by first nerfing the downtier growth and increasing the tier requirements for Deriniums, then did it again. Within 48 hours of the patch going live, the craze was over. Some complained about being left with inventories full of items they were intending to use to craft Deriniums. Others more rightly complained that the problem existed in the first place. Let's take a moment to analyze just how big this problem actually was.

If you've crafted before, you know it is a labor of love. The effort involved in acquiring, organizing, and putting together the resources necessary to create items is time consuming. It may not use RT creating soulbounds, but it uses IRLT. A player that had the patience to sit there and craft stacks of Deriniums, each recipe and each gem one at a time, may have actually been better off burning TCs with double accel had they gotten a few lucky chests. All our records show that the amount of gold produced by the Derinium rush was about 1/75th of the gold being dropped in chests and items during those 48 hours. It had virtually no impact on the game economy, and TC prices dropped during the time. Any influx in gold would result in TC prices increasing.

Why the craze then? It was naughty, novel, and felt exploitative. A few players adept at crafting probably made a few million gold, but the impact of that, especially considering what they could have been doing otherwise with that time, was rather insignificant. More significant was the reward given to those who reported the issue to us properly, reinforcing once again that the best thing to do is report an issue, not try to take advantage of it.

The question some of you are asking is why did we even implement the change to downtiering? Won't it hurt sellers of tier 1 resources? Yes, this change will inevitably lower the value of tier 1 resources, but one could argue that it is detrimental to new players' morale when they start getting tier 2 resources only to find they sell for less. Moreover, it is extremely important to remember why this change was done in the first place: to get low tier dusts in the marketplace and to increase the fluidity of the resource market in general. The end result will be the ability for crafters to once again make low level epics for affordable prices, something that will inevitably help new players.

Paid Reroll. There are not many complaining about this new feature. Those that do purport that the cost is too low. Compared to the previous cost of sacrificing all your gear for store sell value, rerolling, and then buying choice bits back (and often failing in that), the cost is indeed very low. However, the problem of developing characters being afraid to invest in top gear for fear that they would need to reroll at some point either to change their class or to take advantage of overskilling via rerollers boon was a worse problem in our eyes. Now players can feel free to buy badass legendaries, unproven ones at bargain prices, perhaps, and they won't incur terrible losses when rerolling to try out new builds with optimal class configurations. This change will be very helpful to those brave enough to try such a thing, whereas before the prospect of striking out in a new direction was as daunting for vets as it was for new players.

Enchantrashing - the 5 million gold ability that allows you to quickly destroy a resource repeatedly, each providing a 50% chance that it will uptier instead of being destroyed. "Why does it cost 5 million gold?" they asked. "Should I be worried that this is OP or UP?" they silently wondered. Well, for people low on time and inventory space (most everyone) this ability could be extremely useful. Just click, click, click, on the trash icon until your resource reaches the desired tier (or is destroyed) and you have just saved yourself tons of time with an echanting rod. Even items in your inventory can be enchantrashed immediately, with no warning message, allowing for far faster uptiering than using the traditional method. Is it worth 5 million? It depends on how much gold you have vs. how much time and space. Some people are already reporting loving it and buying it on multiple characters.

Spider Trapping - Not extremely controversial, but the true value of this skill is currently debatable. When maxed this skill provides 10 tiers higher silks but at 1/300th the frequency. For someone who always uptiers, this will save them time and produce more silks than they would have gotten. But for others who have enough resource space and patience to farm and sell all 30 tiers of silk, they may wish to not level or only partially level this skill. We're watching this skill to determine if it needs a slight buff or not.

In summary, we feel the shortcoming of this patch to have been overblown, and already corrected. We welcome constructive criticism, as it is a major guiding force for future patches, but there is no reason for the clan-festered hysteria that often arises from issues that are so easily corrected, or merely misunderstood.

Hoodrat · 03-03-2014, 07:40 PM

I still stand by my point that you should have held a group discussion regarding any possible issues coming from the downtiering buff. You could even involve players to help discuss or come up with possible exploits for future patches to prevent them from even happening in the first place. Obviously from this patch, your team cannot think of everything.

Nontheless, nice patch, good job fixing it, and woowooo !

Excellence · 03-03-2014, 07:43 PM

Ty for explanations Glitch. Yea I think that spidertrapping should be slightly buffed, of course not too much but some smaller change to make it worth it for everyonee, just my opinion

instead of 1/300 make it 1/200 or 1/100

Glitchless · 03-03-2014, 07:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hoodrat

I still stand by my point that you should have held a group discussion regarding any possible issues coming from the downtiering buff. You could even involve players to help discuss or come up with possible exploits for future patches to prevent them from even happening in the first place. Obviously from this patch, your team cannot think of everything.

Nontheless, nice patch, good job fixing it, and woowooo !

The exact details of the downtiering changes were made public for discussion more than 24 hours prior to the patch going live.

StormGuardian · 03-03-2014, 08:05 PM

As someone who was directly involved in the fix for the derinium problem, and who was crafting some(LOL), I figured I'd chip in here and give my thoughts on the patch.

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