I would want to share my opinion about some of the most controversial changes the patch has introduced (relating to the acquisition of luminiscent skins) and about the future of Silverwastes as a replayable map.
Adding RNG to mordrem organ extraction might provide some increased lifetime to the content, but does it in a very limited and arguably quite annoying way (incredibly annoying if we have to roll for one over more than six parts at some point in the future :P)
It’s pretty much the same issue we can find on story missions. It’s nice to have them permanent, to be able to play them with an alt at some point or just to have them ingame for new players, but they lack replay value.
Most players will repeat them for the achievements or run them on an alt for some specific reward (like the carapace shoulder box from the previous chapter, or the black lion key at this one), but all this is incredibly limited.
In the end, persistent replay value is closely related to rewards, specifically marketeable ones, and story missions offer none.
The RNG extraction will obviously increase the map activity for the next days or weeks, but it doesn’t achieve nothing in the long run. A year from now, when almost everyone will have unlocked the luminiscent armor, this won’t matter on if the playerbase finds the map interesting and worthy of playing on it.
Another controversial change from the previous release is not being able to get carapace armor boxes from replaying the story on alts anymore, which forces players to grind bandit crests or pray for a lucky RNG roll on some bandit/labyrinth chest.
The most annoying part of this is that the probably best way to farm these crests is to tag as many succesful events as possible, which leads to lots of players roaming across the map.
On unorganized maps, this results on a complete chaos where keeps are randomly taken and lost over the course of the metaevent and where some breach boss can easily be let completely unattended without anyone noticing it until it’s too late.
On organized maps it’s probably even worse, since the dedicated players who hold keeps and works towards a faster meta are rewarded for less than roaming event taggers.
Considering that both mechanics, the RNG organ extraction and the crest grind, achieve exactly the same goal and force players to spend some time on the map, I wonder wether if would not have interesting for some item to have been tradeable.
This would have, at least, slightly increased the profitability of the map.
We obviously don’t know what the final shape of Silverwastes will be. We don’t even know if all the remaining carapace pieces will be awarded here or if another new map is coming in the close future.
Even with the absence of specific account bound rewards to aim for, the final shape of the map might be worthy of coming back from time to time or even on a daily basis.
If that’s the case, if we won’t see the true potential of the map until the last content patch, then I guess I can understand having some artifical way to keep people playing and getting familiar with the map for much longer than it currently deserves.
But if it’s not … is it really worth the resources and the effort to make a map doomed to oblivion? is it worth to increase its anyways short lifetime with mechanics that most players will find incredibly annoying?