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.

@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

@teh-jokeer they made it pretty clear that hitting level 50 in any 3 factions gives you pl

@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:

@mikethemutinous

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.

1. Would take to long to level without to picking up loot though. I think this 25% extra grade rep needed is good.

2. 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.

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.

For those of you worried about getting your grade in reapers up being increased by 25% have no fear.

When you start a game grab a ton of cargo voyages, go collect about 40 cargo. Turn them all in at reapers, instant grade v ;)

Is it still possible to get to Athena grade V with one Athena's Run of Thieves' Haven? I don't care about the nerf to the emissary quest itself.

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.

oh yeah, grade 5 flags now sell for only 5K. "we want flags to be a big bonus" when it is less than most of the treasure you sell. come on. why even bother?

@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!

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.

Seriously you made it harder to reach grade 5 Athena. I am solo and this going to suck. I don't mind the loop being broken but if I finish the Thieve's Haven run which I have to PAY doubloons for and don't get up to grade 5 i will be sad. You already ruined a good update.

REVERT!!

@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.

So I basically don't have time to get to grade 5 again thanks a lot RARE!

@marc4815 Wait 5k at what grade of reapers?

@satanicnemesis But the Ledgers favor non-stop streamers

@dantivirus only 5K for grade 5 now.

@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

Rare after update: "lets ruin an update people loved!"

@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

@sirvexus 5K from voting down your grade 5 flag.

@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.