I haven’t played LotRO, and I’m sure others here haven’t, either. Can you elaborate on what happened?
Sure, hoping to avoid the TL;DR by providing the link
Basically, LotRO introduced a new mechanic that you needed Radiance to counter. If you didn’t have Radiance on your gear (it was only a gear attribute), you literally could not do certain content. In addition, only a limited number of quests dropped this gear. It was not available in a random drop.
The players overall hated it. Sure, certain powergaming grinders didn’t care, but LotRO isn’t exactly a hardcore game. The devs ended up removing the entire mechanic to satisfy their players.
it’s this luck based mystic toilet that we’re all so sick of flushing our money down. -Salamol
ANet already did this in a previous game. It was called Spectral Agony. People absolutely hated it. It required people to do a rather difficult dungeon in order to infuse one piece of gear (had to do this 5 times over all) to protect you from an insta-gib attack that all Mursaat enemies did. Eventually ANet compromised and made it so it would infuse all your armor instead of just once piece. Then they never used that mechanic again until now.
ANet doesn’t even learn from their own mistakes it seems. Or perhaps its Nexon/NCSofts meddling. Either way, whoever is in charge of these decisions hasn’t done any kind of research. Sadly, the damage has already been done I’m afraid. I fear this may have been the straw so to speak. Combined with the ridiculous amount of bugs still in the game, the class imbalances/bugs, along with their focus on these broken one time events (I couldn’t do it because it was permanently broken on my server), and this new development direction that goes in a 180 degree direction from their previous design goals, we’re going to see people leave soon. The gem store is also a massive failure in many peoples eyes that just compounds the issue. We’ll start seeing the results of that damage here in the next month.
LotRO wasn’t the only company to introduce something like this, several years back EverQuest II introduced something called Critical Mitigation. It was only on raid gear at the time, then began being placed throughout the game in Solo, Group and Raid dungreons. It took 4 years to completely remove it from the game.
A single factor that takes any form of skill outside of the players hands such as a limiting factor shouldn’t be added into any game. Remember your players are your customers and while some players might enjoy a debilitating condition placed on themselves not all your players will, ultimately you might lose some customers over this issue if its not handled the right way.
ANet already did this in a previous game. It was called Spectral Agony. People absolutely hated it. It required people to do a rather difficult dungeon in order to infuse one piece of gear (had to do this 5 times over all) to protect you from an insta-gib attack that all Mursaat enemies did. Eventually ANet compromised and made it so it would infuse all your armor instead of just once piece. Then they never used that mechanic again until now.
ANet doesn’t even learn from their own mistakes it seems. Or perhaps its Nexon/NCSofts meddling. Either way, whoever is in charge of these decisions hasn’t done any kind of research.
Maybe the original GW1 developer who thought up Spectral Agony was hot for a chance to “do it right”. But whatever the situation, it seems like a terrible decision again.
it’s this luck based mystic toilet that we’re all so sick of flushing our money down. -Salamol
LotRO wasn’t the only company to introduce something like this, several years back EverQuest II introduced something called Critical Mitigation. It was only on raid gear at the time, then began being placed throughout the game in Solo, Group and Raid dungreons. It took 4 years to completely remove it from the game.
A single factor that takes any form of skill outside of the players hands such as a limiting factor shouldn’t be added into any game. Remember your players are your customers and while some players might enjoy a debilitating condition placed on themselves not all your players will, ultimately you might lose some customers over this issue if its not handled the right way.
I remember that. It got so bad that you needed upwards of 200% critical mitigation just to do entry level dungeons. A new character or player had no hope of ever achieving that much mitigation without some serious back tracking by your guildmates. PUGs and casuals had no hope if they didn’t play during the first month of an expansion when everyone was gearing up in those dungeons..
LotRO wasn’t the only company to introduce something like this, several years back EverQuest II introduced something called Critical Mitigation. It was only on raid gear at the time, then began being placed throughout the game in Solo, Group and Raid dungreons. It took 4 years to completely remove it from the game.
A single factor that takes any form of skill outside of the players hands such as a limiting factor shouldn’t be added into any game. Remember your players are your customers and while some players might enjoy a debilitating condition placed on themselves not all your players will, ultimately you might lose some customers over this issue if its not handled the right way.
I remember that. It got so bad that you needed upwards of 200% critical mitigation just to do entry level dungeons. A new character or player had no hope of ever achieving that much mitigation without some serious back tracking by your guildmates. PUGs and casuals had no hope if they didn’t play during the first month of an expansion when everyone was gearing up in those dungeons..
Exact same thing happened in lotro. Newer dungeons would be made requiring more radiance to counter more dread (their version of agony). It was a way to force people to grind dungeons in a specific order regardless of player skill.
The ascended gear just seems like another resist mechanic to me. Never liked farming fire resist gear in WoW, don’t expect this will be any more exciting.
You don’t NEED ascended gear for 1-10 which has ALL of the same content as the higher tiers. You get to see all the exact same content as the hardcore players. Thus there is no gating.
If you WANT to push through and progress then you can CHOOSE to do that by upgrading your pve items and advancing your toon.
How are you all so blind that you can not understand this simple fact?
You don’t NEED ascended gear for 1-10 which has ALL of the same content as the higher tiers. You get to see all the exact same content as the hardcore players. Thus there is no gating.
If you WANT to push through and progress then you can CHOOSE to do that by upgrading your pve items and advancing your toon.
How are you all so blind that you can not understand this simple fact?
Arenanet has stated that the Agony mechanic will be in future dungeons. People here are pointing out how this type of gaming mechanic failed for other companies. Worse, they lost customers and later clearly showed their were wrong by removing it. But by then the damage is done – lost sales, lost customer loyalty and disappointed people with long memories.
