March 2019 Tuning Discussion - PRELIMINARY

[chrismt]

Kaz : what about those who bought the beast for 3500 like myself, are you going to give back the extra 500 it cost just a few days ago ? Seems really unfair if you don’t.

[Blade]

Hello everyone,

Thank you very much for the comments regarding today's changes to Soul Fragments.

Whenever we make changes to game systems, we do our best to give everyone warning to adjust. However, due to an oversight on our end, our tuning notes were posted later than expected.

For a little more context regarding this decision, our past few updates have made Soul Fragments of all kinds much more common. They now drop from Event Challenges, Skull Quests, Sacrifice, and will appear when Souls are summoned. The previous Fragment conversion rates were based on the relative rarity of these items. This change was meant to update the system to be more inline with the current levels of Fragment drops.

This is indeed ok, but only for the recent and in particular FUTURE fragment drops. But definitively not for the frags that we earned during the old times when these drops were NOT that common.
Do you plan any sort of compensation?

[Muzzleloader]

Leviathan, I cant speak for anyone but myself. I dont find the exchange rate increase out of line since all the recent changes in acquiring frags. The problem is the devaluation of current inventories without an explicit time for the change to allow players a chance to cash their frags for souls.

An alternative to devaluation could have been creating new frags and allow players to use the old frags at their original exchange rate.

[druid138]

Well then lucky you! I should have anticipated this, as it is known that you also have a good inventory management. Druid, how about you?
Within my anger and frustration I also think about to quit.

Hey Blade - I've been thinking about how to respond to this thing. A lot of my thoughts have already been stated by others.

But, since you asked me specifically, let me say a few random things.

First, it was just a couple days ago that the LotB team unexpectedly lifted the limits on some key Blood Fragment items in the Store. That built a ton of goodwill with me, so I'm probably a lot more tolerant of this price change than I otherwise would have been.

Second, the actual impact of this specific change to my own account isn't that terrible. I am a notorious hoarder of resources, but rare souls and rare soul fragments are the least valuable souls to me, so I always burn them first in sacrifice events. I currently have only 200 or so rare soul fragments. Similarly, I don't have a ton of rare class soul fragments. Because rare class souls are scarce enough, they don't create large inventory problems against the 50 soul stack limit. So, I usually convert those fragments to souls right away. Legendary Souls were a bigger loss, where I lost about 30 of them. So, I personally got pretty lucky based on how I have optimized in the face of the 50 soul stack limit. I have been asking for over a year for the 50 soul stack limit to increase, and that only becomes more reasonable as we get more types of souls.

Third, even though I personally wasn't hit particularly bad this time, I don't evaluate changes to the game based on how they affect me personally. I try to be more objective and consider how they affect the game integrity and community. In that regard, I'm quite unhappy with this change. For me, it's less about the specifics of the particular change and more about the precedent that was set. We were given only about 24 hours notice that this was even being considered. And, there was no notice about the specific timing. So, waking up to a significant reduction of resources makes me more cautious about the future.

I do believe that the LotB team has good intentions. Very often, choices they make that seem strange at first turn out to be very reasonable once we get the big picture down the road. That may happen again this time, but I still don't like the feeling of essentially having souls taken away without notice.

[druid138]

Leviathan, I cant speak for anyone but myself. I dont find the exchange rate increase out of line since all the recent changes in acquiring frags. The problem is the devaluation of current inventories without an explicit time for the change to allow players a chance to cash their frags for souls.

An alternative to devaluation could have been creating new frags and allow players to use the old frags at their original exchange rate.

I agree with this 100%.

[edsel]

Would you rather buy one beast or ten trooper Eddies?

Or six Eternity Eddies

Or 4 Lilith's

Or 2 Gods

Or 1 Alexander Eddie

So Amarthir...The Beast is one of the only characters you don't have. Will you get him or should we wait until he is on sale for less than 3k? Really all we use any of these novelty characters for is once or twice every two weeks in Gauntlet. Takes a looong time to pile up 3k FC.

[R1ck]

Seriously devs, two days ago The Beast was released on FC store for 3500, which I bought this morning. Now it costs 3000. Will you give me my 500 FC back?

[Blade]

Seriously devs, two days ago The Beast was released on FC store for 3500, which I bought this morning. Now it costs 3000. Will you give me my 500 FC back?

There was again the new data info. I thought they would set back the fragment rates.... but guess what they did? The Beast now costs 3.5k again!

[Tim28213]

I'm sure the changes will be wonderful moving forward. I'm sure I will appreciate having an easier time getting these resources moving forward. I feel really ripped off for the way this was presented and implemented right now, and likely for a good bit of time moving forward. This is just a really bad PR job and lack of consideration of the impact of changing an existing resource.

Were you in such a hurry to implement this change before we could all cash in our existing stock that you weren't able to get the Banshee fix in as well? Now you increase the cost of Beast again in a hotfix? Way to make a bad customer service event look even worse.

I love this game. I hate the way you guys implement updates and changes. It always feels like everything is so rushed that you just cannot get it all right.

[Blade]

Hey Blade ...

Hey Druid,
thanks for your reply! That's why I usually like your post a lot. They are well written (at least for me as a non-native speaker), well reflected and always seeing the bigger frame.
Also I remember that you always did a good job in being effective and efficient in the game so I wondered if we share more strategies. This is not the case concerning the rare soul frags. I think they are valuable, as in some events they are the only souls that count. Moreover, I recently avoided using rares during sacrifices, as I currently have/had all chars available in that pool, until Iron Maiden Eddie came out.
I mostly agree with the reasoning Leviathan gave, certainly not for the class rares...those frags are the most scarce resource in the game actually, lol!

The idea from Muzzle about the new rare soul type is just perfect! And could still be implemented...cough cough devs.... easy solution making your players happy...cough cough