[Ghouls] RNG lore is NOT acceptable!

[StinkyPygmy]

2 hours ago, KingOfPredators said:

And EA today is not same EA from 10 years ago but what they want now and what they wanted 10 years ago did not changed.

Do you remember getting 2 amber stars for completing last bounty?! Because I do. Improvements were made, but their decisions tells us what they really want.

You cant even get lore on 1st objective because only common rewards can drop on 1st objective. Rgiht now this is just a grind, but what happens when they add more hard locked content and people with more money than time wants to get those?! Well, I guess that we know answer to this question...

[-dicht.ThanksFrost-]

1 hour ago, [DE]Aidan said:

Hey All,

Just chiming in here to shed a little more light on the Ghouls + Lore situation. As @DustyFlash has pointed out in their post above, the Ghouls will be a recurring occurrence on the Plains, they are not treated like other 1-time events. That means that there is no need to discover all of the fragments this time around, they will be back every couple weeks or so! 

Happy hunting!

 

I don't really care for the lore thing but. A cool suggestion would be to add high kiva drops to the common reward pool. 

 

That way it can be an even exclusively for farming for end tier players and at the same time gives motivation and thus journal entries. Also it should scale with boosters

[AVSManfred]

1 minute ago, Eureka.seveN said:

I don't really care for the lore thing but. A cool suggestion would be to add high kiva drops to the common reward pool. 

 

That way it can be an even exclusively for farming for end tier players and at the same time gives motivation and thus journal entries. Also it should scale with boosters

Wouldn't work for me... i'm not into all that Riven bullS#&$ and lately there was no Kuva demanding blueprints i would need more of it for...

[Mewvg2]

Just now, Eureka.seveN said:

A cool suggestion would be to add high kiva drops to the common reward pool.

For endgame players, Kuva Floods are still the best way of getting Kuva. Tossing it into the bounty rewards (again) just dilutes the table more with bloat we can get elsewhere. Kuva, relics, etc have other places to farm effectively, they shouldn't be in bounties at all.

[AVSManfred]

1 minute ago, Mewvg2 said:

For endgame players, Kuva Floods are still the best way of getting Kuva. Tossing it into the bounty rewards (again) just dilutes the table more with bloat we can get elsewhere. Kuva, relics, etc have other places to farm effectively, they shouldn't be in bounties at all.

Yeah i honestly wish Lenses coudl be agian in Sortie drop pool

[Voltage]

2 hours ago, [DE]Aidan said:

Hey All,

Just chiming in here to shed a little more light on the Ghouls + Lore situation. As @DustyFlash has pointed out in their post above, the Ghouls will be a recurring occurrence on the Plains, they are not treated like other 1-time events. That means that there is no need to discover all of the fragments this time around, they will be back every couple weeks or so! 

Happy hunting!

 

That's like saying: you don't need to celebrate your birthday this year, you have one next year. The "you don't need to do something" argument is so mundane. I don't need to even install this game. The fragments should not be RNG-gated. There is no other way to try and slither around that.

Edited December 22, 2017 by --Q--Voltage

[Skaleek]

Well i feel silly for busting my balls to grind 30 of these out last night now.

 

EDIT: Hold the phone. You can get DUPLICATE lore entries?! Okay that is not ok by me. Please fix this. getting 54 of these is enough without having duplicates giving you effectively nothing. Thats insanity.

 

@[DE]Aidan, Any Chance to see a fix for this before the end of day? im sure most of the office is already gone and shut down (much like mine). I'm guessing the chances are slim. Surely this can't be the intended system.

Doesnt seem to work as you mentioned...

Edited December 30, 2017 by Skaleek

[Maganar]

1 hour ago, [DE]Aidan said:

Hey All,

Just chiming in here to shed a little more light on the Ghouls + Lore situation. As @DustyFlash has pointed out in their post above, the Ghouls will be a recurring occurrence on the Plains, they are not treated like other 1-time events. That means that there is no need to discover all of the fragments this time around, they will be back every couple weeks or so! 

Happy hunting!

 

Thanks for checking in DE.  I brought up a concern over codex entries (I hadn't even realized these journal fragments belonged in the codex too) in another topic and said I hoped these Ghouls were planned as a reasonably common recurrence based on the sheer number of codex scans required for some of the enemy units (not considerate to codex completionists for a limited-time event, I felt). Someone else also confirmed it was coming back routinely on that thread, which was a clarification I was glad to have.  This gives some more perspective on what your teams were probably thinking when balancing codex numbers.

Still of the opinion that lore shouldn't be locked behind a grind gate quite this way (juicy loot to power up my gameplay feels better as a reward, not having to break my back just to hear a story that adds perspective on the game world), but it's easier to get your angle with these updates.

[RzdAkira]

@[DE]Aidan Is it possible that we make the entries being unlocked in an order. Because at it stands now the grind does feel very hopeless and discouraging, since I could spend multiple hours with nothing to show at the end because RNG decided that I unlock 1-2 part of every entry. 

 

If the entry are unlocked in an order, at least I could feel that I have accomplish something with my time. Especially since with bare minimum I would have is at least one entry unlocked after some hours

[toafarmer]

3 hours ago, [DE]Aidan said:

Hey All,

Just chiming in here to shed a little more light on the Ghouls + Lore situation. As @DustyFlash has pointed out in their post above, the Ghouls will be a recurring occurrence on the Plains, they are not treated like other 1-time events. That means that there is no need to discover all of the fragments this time around, they will be back every couple weeks or so! 

Happy hunting!

 

So the drop rate for fragments won't change and they will still be hidden behind a rng wall. Terrible news. 

Edit: at least the thread wasn't locked.

Edited December 22, 2017 by toafarmer

[BlackCoMerc]

3 hours ago, [DE]Aidan said:

Hey All,

Just chiming in here to shed a little more light on the Ghouls + Lore situation. As @DustyFlash has pointed out in their post above, the Ghouls will be a recurring occurrence on the Plains, they are not treated like other 1-time events. That means that there is no need to discover all of the fragments this time around, they will be back every couple weeks or so! 

Happy hunting!

 

Thats great and all, I get that...

But next time, can you make Ghoul bounties be ONLY Ghoul bounties? The original Bounty missions were...never the most inspired, engaging missions in gaming history. And mixing them into the Ghoul bounty rotation makes the even much less unique, and much less interesting and fun, than it could have been. 

Ghouls should just be Ghouls. We should get bonus rep for clearing out their spawning grounds, without needing to first go to Cetus and take a Bounty mission. Bounties are tired, boring, repetitive wait walls that need to be scrapped and their rewards added to the open world to begin with. Over relying on something that is already as tired and boring as these bounty missions will kill player interest in PoE even faster than the ridiculously insulting idea that was RNG Lore drops...and you have to WORK to get worse than something like that.

[WolfTitan]

While it's nice to know that there are some things that will be recurring, the problem arises when we do not know how often. The acolytes were promised to be recurring, and they are, but they came back only a few times this year.

Players love exclusive/time-locked items because they can show them off, be proud of their achievement, and/or sell them for a high price. Then the players on the other end of the spectrum, those who do not have those items, complain because there is no way to obtain them except to pay an obscenely high price for things like Maiming Strike.

The best things that DE can learn from all of this is: Don't make things exclusive or unobtainable until Soon^TM. For "exclusives" such as event rewards, make them available immediately after the event end, even if they will become more difficult to obtain - such as rare enemy drops or rare mission rewards.

 

[-QUILL_PETER-]

Just in case someone hasn't already said it-

They're uncommon, so you'll still get them pretty regularly, even though there will ofc be outliers, who will in turn rant on the forums assuming that their case is the same as everyone.

Also, bear in mind that you can't get the same* lore bit twice. You will always get a different lore bit, so at least that part has zero RNG.

 

Edited December 22, 2017 by -QUILL_PETER-

[RayPerth]

nvm

Edited December 22, 2017 by RayPerth

[MirageKnight]

57 minutes ago, -QUILL_PETER- said:

Also, bear in mind that you can't get the same* lore bit twice. You will always get a different lore bit, so at least that part has zero RNG.

But you won't always get a lore fragment on each run, necessitating running those bounties multiple times and getting a ton of (at least) near-useless rewards in the process.

Lore Fragments should be a guaranteed drop / reward from the Commander and / or the Defector imo.

[FlinttheImmortal]

"Well, it's another year and yet again we failed to deliver on our year-end content.  It's not a big deal, really.  The community will just swallow it as they always have, because, hey, we're just a poor, itty-bitty little studio who's been doing this same thing for over five years and have yet to learn how to budget time and manage resources.  The community excuses us for this stuff all the time.  No real reason to change, whatsoever.  Still, we do feel just a wee bit guilty 'bout the whole thing, so what should we give all our little tennos as a consolation? Any ideas?"

"Let's cobble together an event using assets we've been sitting on for months 'cause we couldn't come up with any ideas on how to utilize them thus far."

"That's a great idea!  But listen, we're all real short on time this year.  I mean, REAL short.  Like, we all bugger off on vacation in like two days.  Hardly enough time to add any real meat to this event.  What do we do about that?"

"Just recycle some old rewards.  They won't even notice."

"Great!  Still, probably end up a little short on the goodies.  We need something else."

"There's some story bits lying around that we could toss in as an added incentive."

"Good idea!  And so we don't have to do as much thinking on new content down the road, lets put the lore bits behind our Grand Exalted Mechanic RNG.  That's way, since not all tenno are going to get all the bits this time, we can reuse the same event again, and again, and again.  It's genius!  Content that keeps on giving!  We're piling up so many repeatable, RNG events we're barely going to have to do any creative work in the not too distant future.  Wonderful!"

 

RNG lore...?

Feh.

DE's really hit creative rock-bottom with this one.  RNG lore as an event reward?  Seriously?

DE needs to go back to the drawing board when it comes to the utilization of RNG.  It's getting damn repetitive, and damn boring.  It isn't engaging, and it sure isn't rewarding.  And it damn well shouldn't be applied to as many aspects of the game as possible.  I'm sure it's in the Geneva Conventions somewhere that RNG is not to be used to hold lore hostage.  Seriously DE, stop using RNG as a crutch mechanic every single time you run yourselves out of time on a content delivery.  If you can't be bothered to come up with anything better (ex. More thought out, or rather, thought out at all, because RNG is rather brainless), then just don't release the content until you have the time to refine it...assuming you don't get distracted by some other shiny in the meantime and forget about the whole thing.

Try doing some out-of-the-studio research when it comes to reward mechanics.  Surely there's more you can adapt from other developers than just tech and graphical improvements.  I'm fairly certain the community would greatly appreciate it.

[Anthraxicus]

I've tried a few runs and got two fragments and the blueprints. With that being said, can someone tell why I should keep doing the bounties? I don't quite get the purpose, or goal, of this event.

[Oreades]

After actually clearing a couple of the lore locks I was actually kind of interested in hearing about the lore.

.... So just spent the day hammering my face on the rescue bounty specifically to try to get the Lore because there is literally nothing else I want. I've got piles of those blasted gun blueprints at this point. 

After spending the last 7+ missions without a single lore unlock and then having the bounties completely bug out on me.... I just ended up spending between host migrations and broken/nonresponsive bounties.... about 5 loading cycles trying to get a working bounty. To the end that I ended up in the plains non responsive bounty, hit alt+f4 and didn't look back... I'm done.

@[DE]Aidan It's nice to know these are coming back in a few weeks, but ya know what for me it isn't worth all the headache and frustration. So In a week or so I'll just watch them on Youtube and let someone collect ad revenue so I don't have to. 

There is a not so distinct line where things are grindy and things are pounding your face into a wall grindy. This has moved into that second category and all it does is punish people who want the lore. I want to unlock it and I want to experience it..... but I am not going to RNG 53 drops to do so. 

I'm sure there is a special convergence out there of Lore Nerd and Grind Masochist and I truely hope they are enjoying this as again I look forward to watching this on Youtube and they are the ones who are going to get me there :D

[LSG501]

24 minutes ago, Oreades said:

Lore Nerd and Grind Masochist

Maybe that's what most of the the staff at DE are... it would explain situations like this.

[Mewvg2]

12 minutes ago, LSG501 said:

Maybe that's what most of the the staff at DE are... it would explain situations like this.

That assumes they test these systems before releasing them.

[VGPowerlord]

[deleted post]

Edited December 23, 2017 by VGPowerlord

[thepppirate]

Already posted about this in another thread, but this thread seems to be getting traction and I wanted once again to express my personal discontent for the insane RNG wall behind the new lore.

In addition to that, the rewards for the ghoul bounties are incredibly lackluster and not worth doing.

[DoctorPelusa]

Can't just make journals common? With their current drop chance I don't even care to farm them, got my weapons, i'm outta this event :S

[Wilson264]

On my 8th or 9th hour now over two days...Got a measly TWO entries done with four half done and six completely still in the dark..i've got fifty or so hunter mods (On top of the two full sets from plague star ) and at least two dozen of each weapon blueprint. Couldn't tell you how many lith relics i've gotten but at this point i don't even care. If it was like every other optional lore bit in the game like the chep fragments or the glass fish i'd be alright with it..Heck i even did all the kurias a while back because it was neat but i'm tired of smashing my face into a wall for this. One fragment drop every THREE RUNS is my average if i'm lucky...Rng lore is not the way to go...Just throw down the journal somewhere or do a hackable minigame or something like the rest of it that's already in game. Make it optional not something that those of us who want it grind for and those who don't  are stuck with in place of something else they could be rewarded with.

[zfenty]

I have done plenty of grindy things in this game, and after running this mission a few times.... yeah, i don't think can do it. It is coming back in the future; COOL. Will i farm for it again in its current iteration?  

Edited December 23, 2017 by zfenty