Feedback:User/Seryu/Improving High End Player Rewards

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Where possible eliminate random drop reward schemes, replacing them with collectible tokens that can be exchanged for desired rewards. This is of particular importance in situations such as holiday events and dungeons, where players most often report disappointment with the items they receive, particularly when spending multiple hours of efforts pursuing a particular highly desired or "rare" item. Unlike with the titles system, there is no visible progress towards obtaining items when forced to use the random drop rate system in rewarding players. It is literally possible for a player to spend thousands of hours of efforts and never get the rewards they desire. With high difficulty or limited opportunity to pursue certain rewards, one is effectively punishing players for their efforts when they cannot effectively work towards their goals. The Zaishen quest system and tokens illustrates, exceptionally well, this sort of system. The rarity of items is based on how hard it is to pursue an item, rather than the artificial rarity of mathematical determination that more often withholds rarer items simply because more commonly calculated items will fill potential reward slots before the rarer can be tried for. Further, players actually have a means of monitoring how much more work they will have to put in to get what they want, thereby maintaining player motivation. What tends to be most frustrating about these "high end" rewarding dungeons and events relying on random-drop mechanics is that the more common rewards are easily replaceable with items that can be bought off merchants or gathered by much simpler means. Even party items tend to be infinitely available to purchase methods and ease of gathering, if only for a week or two. It's also possible to revitalize a number of the collectable item traders throughout the game by letting them offer party/sugary treat/alcohol items in trade, particularly those that have empty item lists or the creation of new item traders for collectible tokens that have no collectible trader (Underworld token drops for instance).

List of potential subjects for such changes:

  • Dungeon chests (This even has the potential to cut down on speed runs and farming builds.)
  • "Rarer" Holiday event items (such as mini-pets and costume pieces not already accounted for by such a system)
  • Zaishen Chest (PvE-based rewards for PvP gameplay seems counter-intuitive. As PvP characters cannot register titles in the Hall of monuments, low-end items seem wasteful.)
  • Challenge Dungeons (particularly those where Hero armor upgrades occur)
  • Nicholas the Traveler/Gifts of the Traveler (Many of the items are nice, but a choice of rewards would motivate better and consume less inventory space.)
  • Collectible token traders game-wide (especially those with null/empty item lists)
  • Collectible tokens without traders (Shifting low-end items to new traders frees up higher-end collectible token traders.)

Summary of suggestion (in case the unabridged explanation seems intimidating or overly time-consuming):

  • "Where possible eliminate random drop reward schemes, replacing them with collectible tokens that can be exchanged for desired rewards."
    • Inventory-light alternative: Dungeon reward points (similar to Hero skill points system) or a single Dungeon reward token type from any/all dungeons
  • Shift or add low-end rewards to collectible token traders (party items especially)
  • Encourage player motivation through systems such as collectible tokens on high-end rewards (unique items, very rare items, etc) so that players can see their progress towards goals