Best Of

My short thoughts on this, since I hate our new forum format: the way these timed buffs work right now really sucks. I hate being forced to choose between:

a. an 8 hour block of logged in time where I interact with nobody and nothing besides NPCs and their health pools
b. actively wasting credits per minute that I am not bashing because my character has some place in the narrative of their orgs.

Leaders do not have the luxury of telling their orgs 'sorry, I'm on chocolates' - or, if they are, they probably should consider abdicating their position. It sucks when an event starts and I'm halfway through a chocolate, because I'm probably about to lose most of the remaining time due to my greater investment in the story going on.

With that out of the way, here's an echo of some fixes you guys keep throwing around:

Break chalices into 24 sips with hour long buffs each.

Why? There should be not a single consumable item worth credits that you cannot get the maximum benefit out of. I feel that the current way a chalice works is actually just as egregious as how chocolates work, because it encourages you to be logged in for a lot longer than a player might want to be anyways. Every minute of it where you aren't is a flat loss of credits/gold used to obtain it. It is, in my opinion, very predatory to the consumer first and foremost. I do not buy chalices. I will take them from donations or promo chests, but I refuse to spend money on a consumable that ticks down when I'm logged off.

Break chocolates into 2 or 4 bites with four or two hour long buffs each. Revise the decay time on these or bring back the mesh chocolate bag relic (I truly believe not bringing back is a tremendous mistake by terms of promo items)

Why? Because even though being logged out is a way to pause these timers, 'just log out' is the literal worst solution to suggest for every single one of these problems - it doesn't matter context or content or issue, 'log out' hurts the player and the game long term. It will cause players to miss events and the game to miss players. Using chocolates is allowing the game to set your schedule instead of you setting it on its own. It also encourages another problem evident to me:

We already don't have enough bashing areas to support the number of people who suddenly caught the Level 200 Bug. Forcing everyone to meticulously plan their chocolate schedule, etc when there's a big block of 'EVENT THINGS' most nights right now means that a lot of players have even less time to be spread out and thus fight over EXP sources constantly. It makes the 8 hours before the 'event start' range and the 8 hours after the night's scene much, much more busy.

Market value of chocolates is definitely relevant, and the price they're sold for on the extremely infrequent articarts is not the only way that chocolates are valued, especially if you want to get into the average cost per promo/giftbag and how frequently thoes do or don't give away chocolates***. But at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter how much you value them at. A couple bucks or a few bucks, money's money, and it's a massive bummer to have no solution other than either pouring that money down the drain or avoiding every other aspect of the game (or logging out entirely) until the cooldown has been used up.

I'm also not sure why we're resorting to rating on-topic comments as "off topic," but I suppose we all cope with opposing arguments in unique ways.

***edit: because I can't help myself as a person, I did run another evaluation on the cost of chocolates. Another method of getting them (aside form doing weeklies for 2 weeks just to buy one) is buying the box of chocolates for 15ic. You get anywhere from 3-5 chocolates from a box. This makes chocolates gotten from these boxes worth 3-5ic each. ic sell for about 2 credits each if you're lucky, making the cost, via this method, 6-10cr per chocolate, making the cost $2.09-$3.49 each. This is arguably cheaper (though ics are still hard to get), as long as you feel like ignoring membership costs and all that as a factor. Like I said, it's like dumping coke or pepsi down the drain for no real reason other than "They're good, so flushing money down the toilet is an acceptable tradeoff."

I just don't think I see the point if disallowing at least one free buff pause in a game where RP or Org Obligations or Events (all of which can more or less come out of nowhere) can all take several hours, and are considered a vital part of the gameplay experience. They almost always cost some sort of extremely-difficult-to-get currency (iron coins, silver keystones, promos, articart--most of those requiring real money in some form or another), so it's a ticking clock usually on a real dollar investment somewhere. I've heard the "well they're too strong" thing get bandied about here and there, but they're kinda ubiquitous at this point for major leveling pushes. I don't even think they're that much of a power creep problem, getting levels/exp at high end gameplay is a MASSIVE grind, and usually people end up sinking a decent amount of real money into the game if they're making an actual concerted push into the game.

I guess they could be deleted or nerfed, but that really feels like punishing people for wanting to have a decent/fun play experience. Kind of one of those "how dare I want to not want to jump out the window while bashing at level 185" type situations.

I just don't think we've ever been given a solid argument for why we shouldn't be allowed to pause chocolates AT LEAST one time for free, maybe subsequent times with a 1 credit cost or something silly. These things can jump to 15/20 credits. Pausing to play any other part of the game and letting the cooldown burn away is like buying a resealable bottle of coke and, instead of putting it in the fridge, you pour a little bit of it down the drain at a steady rate. I don't think it's totally fair to be put into a position where you have to choose between the chocolate cooldown and the rest of the game, especially if it's super important. We're not talking about roleplay stakes or difficult IC decisions here, like me choosing between being a my character being Carnifex or sidehopping to kiss Duiranites--this is purely about player value.

There's even a bigger discussion here around buffs needing a serious rework - it feels like the game has been balanced around having 100% uptime on these things, when in reality they are not always available or make sense to have going.

But, let me get straight to the point: pausing timers and buffs for things that you pay for is long overdue.

Having a timer running when other things are happening in the game facilitates an unhealthy playing experience - not just for the person burning a timer or a consumable, but anyone else who needs them.

Having a ticking clock running leads you to feeling like you are actively wasting real life money/credits if you aren't getting the most out of it. If you start a timer, you're going to want to see it out.

Seeing it out means ignoring events that are going to take 2-3 hours away, but you really want to participate and watch = bad
Seeing it out means making a hard decision as a leader of a guild/order/city = bad
Seeing it out means ignoring other RP situations, and virtually anything else = bad

Choosing not to log in so you don't have to make a choice between bashing and doing other things = bad.

A game is going to want to keep its players logged in an engaged/motivated to spend more time in the game, one of the most fundamental rules of game making / social media.

If I'm at the point where I have to log out and not play the game, something is wrong.

If you come at me with 'well thats ur choice to XYZ' just don't bother replying because that's the dumbest answer and you know it.