Removal of CD of Energy Balls.

[Hiosahaf]

On the latest FaceTime with SpaceTime episode, we saw the introduction of energy balls for entry into the portals. I'm gonna keep this thread short and simple.

Why I think it's a bad idea?

1. HEAVILY supports the plat users. Deviates from the essential F2P nature of the game in THIS aspect (only in this aspect)
2. Counter argument that free offers are there don't work for most laptop users and majority of people in countries where there are no offers
3. Hardcore farmers (the guys who earn the portals via their hardwork) don't get the benefit if they find 4 portals at a time
4. Cooldown is too long. Dissuades players from finding portals.
5. The event is for us. Let us play it for as long as we like!
6. I see no need for another Platinum drain to be added.

Suggestions:

1. Remove it completely
2. Remove the long Cooldown. Make it something like 20 mins.
3. Give us more energy balls instead of just 3 (20 perhaps?)

~

Feel free to bash me up or ignore this idea.

Thank you for reading, please keep the comments civil and constructive.
Hio.

(Yes, I know it's my second rant. But hey! This is justified!)

[Hectororius]

I'm very much disturbed by the addition of the energy mechanic in the upcoming event. I have played plenty of games with a similar model and they very quickly became a pay to win type of game, and was the only way to get ahead and stay ahead on leaderboards.

Another thing that also troubles me is the fact that portals will now spawn from any mob and not just bosses. One of the beauties of the winter event was finding a pug on ANY map and being able to run through to the boss and defeating it. With portals spawning randomly, maps will no longer be completed. Parties will break up immediately and that shared experience becomes broken.

This will only be worse in elites if portals will spawn there too (and why wouldn't they?). Now a party must decide on whether to finish the map or run through a portal. And what if a party member can't warp through cuz they have no energy or plat to buy through?

This energy concept will create division between guild mates and friends or lead people to not play at all.

I have already suggested to sts to revisit how quickly the energy refreshes. Most other free to play games using this model at least offer lives every 15 minutes or a full bar of energy after say 1.5hrs and not 8hrs for 3 energy balls.

I'm not sure why sts feels the need to implement this model. It was suggested that this will limit portal abuse and keep players from farming them too much. But isn't that what u want? People to play your game for countless happy hours? I know last event portals were adjusted to keep portals from remaining open and this reduced much of the abuse that was present during that event.

Last event you could buy your way through to the bosses without hunting for portals. I don't see why this model isn't revisited again. Plat spenders who want to quickly kill a few portal bosses have that option and players who want to hunt for portals and actually enter them will also have that option.

[Gorecaster]

I haven't seen the facetime vid but based on what Hec has stated here, I'm wary of these ideas being tossed around, everything Hec said makes perfect sense. Why convolute things even more? It seems that in striving to create new and interesting content, the only useful currency these days is plat. It's really the only currency I use daily aside from pot purchases and hoarding luck lix. How has it come to this?

[Serancha]

I agree, this energy thing sounds terrible. We already have a lot of people playing less due to crafting waits, lack of appropriate things to farm at our level, and boredom. If you make an event where people have such a limited opportunity to participate before getting told they have to plat, you will lose a ton of interest from the community for the duration of the event.

Honestly, if i start a game, and after doing something 3 times, I am told I need to pay or wait, I immediately delete it. I'd estimate 90% of the people I know do the same. Please devs, don't make AL into a to-be-deleted game. Re-using the tarlok system would be perfect. it was the most amazing setup you could have developed, so why break something everyone loved?

An energy system won't make people spend more plat, it will make them leave.

[GoodSyntax]

This energy system will likely be a port from DL - and to be honest, I hated it there! Bad enough that the current elite legendary gear, which can be farmed, is worse than previous season elite gear, and that the only way to make any reasonable amount of money is to either open locked crates, farm locked crates, or merch all day. Adding yet another pay to win gate to the game is just a hostile maneuver for your player base (most of which either don't spend platinum or do so very conservatively).

It seems that STS is hell-bent on consolidating wealth and top-end gear into a smaller and smaller pool of players every season. Would it be too much to ask that those who actually play the game and run the maps actually get rewarded once in a while?

[Hectororius]

Well these events are meant to played by all levels, especially newer players to the game or those that may not be optimally geared, yet they are hiding it behind a very archaic paywall that does the opposite of encouraging players to play the game.

The winter event was such a success because players farmed their hearts out and it brought guilds together to hunt down the portals. I dont see that happening with this system in place.

[Remiem]

I appreciate all of the feedback, everyone. It's a great opportunity to hear what you think about certain systems before they go into the game. We'll take all of your feedback into consideration as we move forward and will keep you updated on any changes we make.

[Rare]

The energy system work well if you want to create a more casual game. Where people come on, play for a bit, then log off. This conflicts with the way AL has been developed up to this point. I think its pretty obvious to anyone who plays, the game targets hardcore gamers.

Now, if the event system is only meant for lower level/twink players, then fine. End gamers that dedicate a lot of time to the game are not going to like this.

[Osabevie]

I am massively against the idea of energy- people want to play for as long as they want, then log off. Now players will have to wait for more energy to continue. Recently the devs made elixir kits available to non plat players as they wanted to open up the game to us however-unless energy regens quickly its a step backwards.I didn't mind the way plat payers could pay for a tarlok portal- dedicated farmers could easily find one but this energy will add another currency (kind of) in AL which will probably require plat.

Having thought about it , maybe a energy ball kit system could be introduced? Plat payers can buy a kit with say 10 balls in it which can be listed in cs and be opened at any time to receive those balls-kinda like how the current lix kits work. If the plat price was the same prices in cs would probably be around 10k/9k which people might be prepared to pay...

[falmear]

Pretty much expected this once they announced the new event system. This is like locked crates basically because even though you craft an energy ball there is probably no guarantee of looting anything. The way I see it working is the people who are spending plat now want to be the first to loot and sell these event items. So whatever can be farmed on these portals, people will dump quite a bit of plat so they can be the first. Eventually the cost benefit ratio drops off when the items are not worth very much. So it depends how long the event runs and how hard it is to loot the most wanted items. But for myself when I see stuff like this being implemented or how crafting & upgrading works, it makes me less interested in this game. Because its no longer about how well you can play this game but how much plat you are willing to invest to gain an advantage.

[Rare]

An energy system won't make people spend more plat, it will make them leave.

Would it be too much to ask that those who actually play the game and run the maps actually get rewarded once in a while?

"You have given out too much reputation in the last 24 hours, please try again later"

The energy system was already demonstrated in Dark Legends. It didn't work well there (in terms of actually playing), and I don't think it will here either with a noticeably more hard core audience.

[Covert]

yeah energy is a no no for me also

[Hectororius]

what would be somewhat ok is if bosses rewarded these energy balls as a way to compensate for the long wait time, similar to how teeth drop currently. This will at least have players completing maps instead of leaving at boss knowing that its quicker to kill mobs than try and kill a boss.

[FluffNStuff]

I would love to join in on the Energy Ball hate but unfortunately we did this to ourselves During the Tarlok event, the idea was you could enter the portal as much as you want, but to keep the items rare the portals would be rare spawns. The communities first answer to this was to find a portal, camp a player there, and have other players come in and farm it in waves. Average time to get to boss: 1 min. After stopping that, the communities next answer was to split up, find the fastest bosses and just keep running those over and over, pop a portal, invite the rest and farm em. Average time to get to boss: Up to about 3 minutes. The point is they did try to make it so they could be rare and free, but the simple fact is we will always find a way around them. So the new plan to keep them rare is to make them spawn EVERYWHERE, but you can only enter 3 times per session. That way there is no worries about HOW we will figure out a way around them next time, because the simple fact is, we will.

[octavos]

Pretty much expected this once they announced the new event system. This is like locked crates basically because even though you craft an energy ball there is probably no guarantee of looting anything. The way I see it working is the people who are spending plat now want to be the first to loot and sell these event items. So whatever can be farmed on these portals, people will dump quite a bit of plat so they can be the first. Eventually the cost benefit ratio drops off when the items are not worth very much. So it depends how long the event runs and how hard it is to loot the most wanted items. But for myself when I see stuff like this being implemented or how crafting & upgrading works, it makes me less interested in this game. Because its no longer about how well you can play this game but how much plat you are willing to invest to gain an advantage.

Agreed, I might spend plat to get limited time items (but not for portals), but I just remember Dark Legends. Energy for an MMO..doesn't work..Now mafia wars is a different story. I see devs that want to kinda limit the market to give people who do spend an advantage....Im not saying its bad..but AL isn't set up to wait (crafting and upgrading is a different story also), since this is a limited event....I think this wont be the last we hear of this topic.

heres a nice pic to illistarate that

[Hiosahaf]

I see some pretty interesting comments here and I think many of you have spoken on my behalf.

@Fluff- The point is that it's just giving power to the plat spenders. Power to them is fine, but them being OP is a bit too much Timer is always a nuh uh. Tarlok was a perfect event for me actually. It got all the guildmates just that much closer!

[Serancha]

If the issue is a concern about too much loot going out, lower the drop rates. Removing the players' ability to play as much as they want / are able to, is a total detrement to the community, not to mention counterproductive.

I left the last game I played when I was told "you can only farm this area until you get x amount of loot, then you must stop or there will be too much of x item in the game". This is the same thing "we're going to make you pay so we can limit the loot and slow down it's de-value process". Makes no sense

Having portals spawning all over the maps, portals that we can't enter without paying once we reach our limit of 3 for 6 hours? That's going to get really annoying really fast for those of us who actually enjoy PvE. The tarlok event brought people together, caused guilds to bond, and encouraged people to play properly, doing full runs and killing bosses. This new system, as it was described, will do the opposite.

Sorry, there's very few thing I oppose, but this is a biggie.

[Zeus]

The energy system is a good way to show customers your competition, honestly. During the downtime, they will find other things to do. Some will find other games to play in the meantime and eventually, some may like the other games better.

As many others said before me, this was implemented in Dark Legends and it made the game fail if I remember correctly. So, implementing the same thing here would irk players, would it not? I mean, just take a look at the comments above!

I sincerely hope STG doesn't ignore us in this! The tarlok portal was fun, why can it not be designed the same way? I know I paid for a lot of tarlok portals and I know many others who did the same.

[Rare]

Someone might have suggested this already. Don't have time to look. I think this could be a fairly decent gold sink.

[MetalForce]

Ugh... Energy system in an mmo... Worst idea ever