Loot sharing and a 25% crown bonus? alt farming again!!!

Im not posting this to argue about my points with other players, Im posting this so developers of game can see that their game changes made it bad. Even unplayable at some point.

Then email it to them. Don't put it on the community forum if you don't want the community to see it.

I'm going to pick apart the OP for a bit.

1: Sharing pickups, while nice, resulted in people filling their inventories with pills and nothing else to heal their way through bosses. As for revives, there's a thread for that.

2: This is just plain silly. While I agree that the failure chance for forging is weird, multiple level-ups aren't a good replacement; remember that the Forge is intended as a roadblock to progression so that you actually have to play the game to advance or else bleed energy in the Supply Depot. Regarding crafting, Orbs need to be more common, not less. Not everyone's a Vanguard, after all.

3: what is this i don't even :S I can't even process this, it's so weird. Come back when you lrn2 game design.

4: While in general I think that binding more items is bad, your sprite food suggestions here might be a good idea to keep the Arcade from slipping into all Freeze all the time. Increasing gate payouts is more questionable though, and I'd need more information before I can recommend something like that.

Overall, you just seem to be butthurt about the new changes and want them gone. I was butthurt too, but after actually playing I saw that the new systems just need tweaking to be less irritating and pay-to-advance, not torn up. Except for revives though; that system still needs to be torn up.

99 percent of MMOs these days require grinding to complete. 80 percent of the time, grinding destroys that game. You don't HVE to grind in this. Who said you did? Make some fun out of your grinding. Use 3 star stuff in FSC. Do Danger missions. You don' t need to grind 24/7 FSC, it is simply the most popular way. For vial/pod/capsule sharing, what is the point anymore? The party will get duplicates one for each person, same with materials. If you don't like the no loot sharing, there is such thing as going solo. Slower, yes, but at least you don't need to complain about loot sharing. So have a bit of fun.

You want to leave still? Goodbye, see you next big update.

/e end rant

So much is wrong in this thread. No point trying to have an actual discussion anymore, as there're firestorms of hate on each side. Oh well; nothing else to do. :P
(Please don't take that the wrong way, I actually do care about this topic.)

First off:

"Im not posting this to argue about my points with other players, Im posting this so developers of game can see that their game changes made it bad. Even unplayable at some point."

Well, that's not what you did. Any part of it. This is not a letter of complaint, you are suggesting that OOO change or roll back things. While you might want to send this directly through to the devs, the forum was probably the best place for this - we can look over it and give you our opinions on what these changes would do. These are changes that would affect everyone, after all! It makes sense for the community to read these ideas. Three Rings' opinion is not the only valid one here. With that in mind, let's move on the the criticism.

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Loot and reviving
Do you know why the original mechanics were changed? It was because of alt dragging. Rather than prevent creation of alternate accounts, which would have been incredibly impractical for both the devs and the players and probably would have had many workarounds, they changed the mechanics of the game so that alt dragging itself became very inefficient and impractical. Let's go through why all of them were necessary.
-No shared loot: dead alts can be left at the start of levels and on party buttons, collecting loot without having to move.
-No shared consumables(vials/pills) and vitas: Alts can be used as storage for, at maximum, twenty seven health pills. This means you could be carrying around, with your knight included, 36 pills - which amounts to a total of 252 extra health.
-No health sharing revives: even if there is no shared loot, dead alts can be revived after the level is complete with no cost to the main knight, and pick up the loot afterwards. More impractical, but still very profitable and worth the extra time.
-Forced emergency revive immediately after death: If this was not forced, Alts could be revived using their ER after the level was completed by the main and collect everything. Forcing the ER means that to stay dead, Alts must be revived with CE.
-Sparks of Life replacing CE for reviving: The only reason this was done was so that they could drop from treasure boxes. Which, effectively, makes reviving cheaper if you're lucky.

So that's why the new system works the way it does. Now about your proposed system.

"1. Reriving and usable items share.
Bring back:
- Teammate reriving by giving half of hp and heat share.
- Vial, Health Capsule and Vitapod share.
These were best mechanics in this game, orginal and simple, I see no reason to not bring them back."

I've already explained why this can't happen.

"Increase cost of reriving by:
1st death - 1 Spark of Life
2nd death - 2 Sparks of Life
3rd death - 3 Sparks of Life
4th death and more - 5 Sparks of Life
Change cost of Sparks to 100 energy for 10.
Sparks of Life still remain as Prize Box drop."

I stated my position on this when the issue was first brought up in the testing server forums. The non-increasing revive cost does two things. 1: appear less predatory to new players ("oh, the rev cost goes up each time, they're jst milking us" *quit* *uninstall* *tell friends how bad it was*). 2: act as a skill barrier - if you can't get through without spending a spark or two, you should probably go practice and come back when you can. Or pay through the nose and stumble your way through. I see this as a good thing - you get a higher skilled high-level playerbase, because they had to actually be good to get there. This is really a matter of opinion though - as long as you can back yours up. ;)

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Forge and heating

"1st tier
-Increase item lvl by 1 with stored heat.
2nd tier
-Increase item lvl by 2 with stored heat.
-Slight chance to win Forge Prize box.
3rd tier
-Increase item lvl by 3 with stored heat.
-Good chance to win Forge Prize box.
Chance of forging is always 100% at all tiers.
2nd tier cannot be used once item reach level 9.
3rd tier cannot be used once item reach level 8 and 9."

I was actually considering making a suggestion a little similar to this, with a few key differences. Namely the double and triple level up. For a 100% chance on every forge, there's no way you should be able to get a guaranteed double level up, unless it cost significantly more than twice the cost of a normal upgrade. That part aside, I do like the idea of all 100% forges with the optional chance to get bonus stuff. I feel that the forging system was implemented to stonewall progression, which is, in my opinion at least, bad game design. Players should never be held back from progression by a game of chance. Want the players to stick around longer? MAKE THE GAME LONGER!

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Crafting:

"-Increase amount of Orbs needed for crafting to 4.
-Orbs still remain as Prize Box drop.
-Orbs can be bought in supply depot in 1,2 or 4 packs:
For example:
Eternal Orb of Alchemy
1 Orb - 225 energy (cost more, but when you have 3 as loot from Prize Boxes you will be happy with this price)
2 Orbs - 450 energy
4 Orbs - 800 energy"

I think changing it to four is unnecessary, but selling single orbs for a slightly higher net price is a good idea. I have 14 5* orbs right now... What if I want to craft 5 5* things? I need to wait forever for one to drop, or buy three! :P That's just inconvenient. At least it's not as bad as LoL's premium store - it was set up so you couldn't actually spend all your Riot Points without buying hundreds of dollars worth of them.

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Loot sharing: nonononono. All the stuff about alt dragging again, plus the stuff about impracticality and some new stuff about it giving too much money. And being confusing. Sorry for not being more constructive here, but really, I see no good side to this idea.
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Food and Minerals:

"Spirites food must be player bound item, since players are crafting their minerals and selling them in Auction House, none deposit them in gates.
Player can craft only food for their Spirite type, minerals not matching Spirite type can be only sold at gates.
Increase value of sold minerals in gates."

I think it's better to let the market play itself out. In a few weeks most people who can afford to put sprite food up for auction will have level 100 sprites with all perks, so demand for them will crash and so will the prices. With prices down, depositing minerals in the arcade will be more viable - but really, even before this update, mineral dumping was never really that useful. Ever since missions, there hasn't really been any point of building a specific gate anyway. Until that part of the case has an actual useful function, better to leave it the way it is.

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Phew! Done responding to the OP. Now I will respond to the responses... Because... I want to! :L

You are my hero. I have some complaints, though:

"Not really. They're about right as they are. You can obtain the lower star ones for pretty cheap in the Depot, even for new players. Only a few days of playing to afford a stack, and if you're new, those few days will be spent discovering what the game has to offer and how fun it is. It won't seem like grinding until 4 or 5*, where it's not even as bad as it used to be because of the free elevators."

And that's how viable at 9k/100CE? (Yes, that's probably temporary, but it's a reminder of how utterly unreliable the market can be as a source of energy for free advancement.) Orb drops are ideally positioned to replace the role of mist in the crafting system. With the current drop curve, they're failing miserably. With the "fixes," Orbs never drop ever on lower difficulties and earlier strata while Vanguards still complain about having too many after a T3 Elite run. To fully replace mist and banish the spectre of P2W, Orbs need to drop more often on earlier strata and less often on later strata, mirroring how mist basically became useless for crafting around 4*. (No, this doesn't make advancement free, but it does put things back on track.)

"Like I said in my previous post, [gate theming] will probably balance itself [out] soon. Plus, OOO isn't dumb enough to leave two minerals useless - we'll have a reason to use those soon, I'm sure."

It's basic economics and common sense to boot; it there's a sink for a given resource that's perceived as better than other sinks, then most of the supply of that resource will go to that sink. Sprite food is an objectively better sink for minerals than gate construction (since it benefits the player directly), so most of the Crimsonite, Luminite, and Dark Matter generated by players is going towards sprite food much more than it's being deposited in gates. This naturally leads to a deficiency of those minerals at the Arcade, which naturally leads to an abundance of Freeze strata since Freeze is the only theme that depends entirely on Moonstone and Valestone. This also means that the Arcade will most likely be completely starved for minerals when Moonstone and Valestone get their own sprites.

"Nah, it's the same as the others. [The revive system] just needs tweaking."

Revives don't just need tweaking; they need completely reworked. I do believe that Sparks don't need to be thrown away, though. They just need to bring health sharing back.

Now for your OP dunking:

The problem with the loot and reviving changes it that they derailed team gameplay. Removing shared loot made splitting up impractical, vastly increasing the time needed to fully clear places like Deconstruction Zones and some boss run floors. Sharing pills let more skilled players hand their pills to less skilled players in PUGs; I agree that the OPness of using alts as pill mules would outweigh the the benefits of letting players do such... if health sharing was still there to let players revive allies and then use surplus pills to make up for the health shortfall. This whole justification sort of contradicts your response to #4 with its "don't force people to stop altdragging, make people want to not altdrag" refrain. In my opinion, free elevator runs make altdragging seem less profitable due to the additional effort involved no longer being as "worth it", and that this makes at least health sharing being gone more of a bother to legitimate players than it discourages altdraggers.

"Ever since missions, there hasn't really been any point of building a specific gate anyway. Until that part of the case has an actual useful function, better to leave it the way it is."

That doesn't mean that Three Rings should just let gates whither and die.

"They made alt dragging still possible, but entirely impractical. I agree that there probably were better ways to do this that weren't as detrimental to the playerbase as a whole, but a just few players alt dragging can leapfrog ahead of the rest, become obscenely rich, and dictate the flow of the game in a way OOO doesn't want them to be able to do. The CE price spikes up to 8k with the announcement of the sale and up to 9k when some guy decided to just change the prices for the heck of it are examples of why that kind of power is bad. I'm sure there is a better system... but no one's come up with one yet :<"

By "forcing" I do mean making altdragging impractical. Also, about the CE market; the "some guy" you're referring to as the great manipulator of the market is Three Rings. Sure, they don't directly up the price, but the recent sale was obviously intended to take CE out of circulation as a way of increasing the market price. Yes, the Wall Street-ification of the market and AH isn't exactly conducive to fun, but your example wasn't really related to that. Feel free to come up with another example though; I haven't played in a while, so I'm sure there's at least a few examples of player-originated market spikes I completely missed.

Here's my solutions:

1. Altdrag. Look at the server telemetry and mark any anomalies versus a standard run over the same levels. Set up a watchdog that looks for those anomalies and drains the party's loot if they exhibit those anomalies. TF2 set up something similar recently for idling. Allows all the anti-teamplay changes to be reversed, but runs the risk of false positives; with tuning those can probably be eliminated though.

2. Implement a staged rollback of the anti-altdragging changes. Start with health revives, since Three Rings' original rationale had nothing to do with altdragging and wasn't valid anyway. Stop and re-add the last stage when altdragging ticks back up. (I wish this could be done on the Test Server, but for a play-pattern experiment like this you really have to go live.) No false positives, and Three Rings keeps only what they need to stop altdragging. They do risk further antagonizing the playerbase though.