The purpose of this feature is to keep new players from adventuring where they shouldn't be. This can be done without having individual gate passes. I think they should just scrap the individual gate passes completely and leave the tier 1, 2, and 3 overarching passes. And once you reach the milestone you have permanent access to that tier in any level. I don't want a game forcing me to play levels I don't want to. I am a free player and once the market goes back to normality I will only be able to play with 100 energy a day. Using that 100 energy for stuff I don't want to do will piss me off enough to quit. I can get away with wasting energy right now because of how cheap energy is with crowns.
One Overarching Tier Pass to Rule them All!
Thu, 12/23/2010 - 03:55
#1103
Kaybol
Legacy Username
Hi Cyclo :)
I finally got around to reading your post. Sorry busy busy busy :)
I think most players agree with you that the per-gate tier restrictions are quite the restriction. Looking at the game development progression though, this is clearly intended. We used to have elevator passes before, that expired in 7 days. The idea was apparently that you'd be whisking between Haven and other towns/depths all the time, so that at some point without your elevator pass you'd be stuck in Haven again and you'd do a run to regain your elevator pass(es). Players worked around this by either inviting friends/guildies into their party next to the town elevator (7 day pass for 10 energy) or by having some players assigned to buy equipment in Haven while others stay in Emberlight to send invites for runs. Effectively this was segregating advanced players from podlings (gotta love that name).
The new system forces at least one player in any party to have done the HTE grind. This is clearly in line with the previous setup, except it's even more restrictive than before. Basically tier passes used to be loosely in place, now they are official. Gate passes never existed in any way, that's new.
I find it hard to form my opinion about this, since they just made another release to make shallow levels more challenging and rewarding to advanced players. Perhaps this makes things right again, and it would actually start to make sense to do gates starting from Emberlight. Namely it would become enjoyable to have a whole strong of levels to do before reaching the core (instead of the same 7-9 levels over and over again). If the levels before Emberlight are now rewarding to advanced players, then we wouldn't even be in our right to call this a grind anymore.
I'll be back :)
Thu, 12/23/2010 - 04:37
#1104
Bolgron
+1 to the original.
I agree with the original entirely. Except for a 30 day pass. Maybe a fortnight.
Thu, 12/23/2010 - 04:48
#1105
Nooblar
Legacy Username
I heard something from the
I heard something from the game about a warden in haven who could give me clearance? Perhaps if that warden granted passes to all levels, that would solve the issue? Once you had the tokens, a stop to the knight in haven would allow travel downwards at any point.
This -- to me -- sounds like a nice comprise. I'm a new player and I'm not geared to get to Emberlight yet (nor could I have made it there before the gear restrictions. At least, I couldn't have made it there without dying far more often than I'd be able to afford -- energy wise) and so my experience with the game is different than those who have already done the HTE (Not a bad acronym, really) grind.
For me, in all 2* gear, the new way of doing things works. However, I have a feeling that in a few weeks I'll be less than pleased with it. Making more experienced players tediously run through the first stages of the game over and over is... incredibly lame, if nothing else. I understand that OOO needs to make money and that they've decided selling CE is their business plan, however forcing experienced players to pay into the game to play non-challenging levels is a bit unfair. A player who is having fun below emberlight is likely to be incredibly bored above it and might decide to quit the game rather than stick it out for the elevators they've unlocked.
A separate suggestion from Cyclohexane's is that players that have unlocked a subtown don't pay energy to access gates between Haven and that subtown, or else pay a reduced fee. While this doesn't eliminate the time aspect of the complaint, it at least means that those players who can handle the harder content do not have to pay out the nose to grind there through the easy levels.