@djcoil said in Balancing Emissaries:
@mikethemutinous said in Balancing Emissaries:
Athena’s Fortune Reputation
The biggest issue to callout with Athena’s Fortune was that we unfortunately introduced a loop where players could progress through Athena’s Fortune grade progression, claim their Grade V quest, lower their flag, and use the quest to get back to Grade V again. This has massively decreased the intended time for players to increase their Reputation level.
While we didn’t want to reduce the value of the Athena’s Fortune Emissary quest, this balancing issue has now been addressed as part of the below:
The grade progression for Athena’s Fortune has been adjusted to ensure that to takes more actions to advance, preventing the Grade V quest loop.
There is a small increase in sailing times for the Emissary quest, which was quite small anyway, requiring players to sail and carry loot further distances.
Hi Mike and Rare, thanks for the quick turnaround on some of these changes.
I understand the need to break the Grade V loop, and I suspect this was likely the most practical way to quickly apply a band-aid to the problem. I hope the team will continue to look at it, though, because these changes introduce a new issue for a lot of "mid-core" players: simply, they make an Athena's Emissary "session" (get to V, get emissary quest, get back to V, cash out) take longer.
I've had time for two sessions since the update went live, and both took about 3-3.5 hours of sailing, which is about the limit of what my crew can generally commit to. Pretty much every session ends with "let's cash in and then I really need to go to bed." We don't even get to the "loop" part of the process; it ends up being a natural stopping point with a solid reward for us. I don't know how long "Grade V - Emissary - Grade V" takes post-patch, but I suspect it will be longer than my crew can commit to.
Meanwhile, the V-Emissary-V loop is still very much intact for the other trading companies. So here's a suggestion: break the loop in a different place. Instead of making it take longer, what if players had to keep their Grade V flag for the duration of their Emissary voyage? We already have the ability to remove voyages from the player's wheel (timed-out merchant deliveries), so this would be similar - a warning on the Emissary voyage maps that "this can only be completed by a Grade V Emissary of [trading co]", and a warning if you choose to lower your flag that you still have outstanding emissary voyages that will be canceled.
Double win: it encourages players to sail around at Grade V, making more tempting targets for Reapers and other ships, instead of immediately cashing out.
Agree with this sentiment entirely. Progress did not seem too fast for most of us mid-core casual players and this solution seems sensible in mechanics and lore, of course the company only wants you to complete this high level quest with their flag on your boat.