Essence Looting, Inclusion and You

[rrusse.7058]

"Thank you. Thanks to you, Jora's Keep sees another sunrise."

As a hero and defender of the Marches it's only natural you receive a hero's reward.

You must train your Essence Manipulation to open this chest.

All right, the reason I wanted to bring this up was to actually applaud Arenanet for making the changes to this mastery and allowing players to open 'Large' chests with the correct mastery at rank 2. You get a reduced reward from the chest for not having the higher rank 3, but you are not excluded from a reward at all which is a big difference from Episode 1.

The scenario I described earlier was the reality for myself and many other players at least once. You took part in the meta event and beat the boss, so it feels like a little bit of a slap to the face and be told that you can't get rewarded because you didn't grind hard enough while watching other players get theirs.

Mind you this is not a whine-fest that mastery ranks are too hard or are too much grind in the Ice-Brood Saga, quite the opposite actually.https://twitter.com/that_shaman/status/1223944939714830337

A number of players have expressed that the current pace is somewhere in between and that it gives the mastery system a feeling of importance and like an actual goal to work towards as oppose to just unlocking it quickly by the end of the story. If players are so inclined to finishing a mastery the moment it comes out, there are ways of doing that, and the rest are free to take things at their pace.

No the reason this is an issue is because for anyone joining the fight in the Bjora Marches will be excluded from getting rewards initially.

Instead the mastery should be a motivating players to get the highest rank because it means more loot! Not please use your mastery points to gain the opportunity to be rewarded for your time and effort in this event.

I sincerely hope Arenanet keep up the good work, but tune the mastery system for Episodes 3 and 4 in a way that players want the masteries because it will offer more fun, convenience or at the very least more loot. More inclusion, not the opposite, that feeling of ...

"Can't collect your loot? Hm, guess you better try a little harder."

Anyway, what are your thoughts on the current pacing of the mastery system for the Ice-Brood Saga? Are these good masteries? Do you feel rewarded for your time? What do you want for Episodes 3 and 4 in terms of mastery skills and abilities?

[Trise.2865]

You people wanted "harder content", and "longer goals". This is what that looks like.

[rrusse.7058]

@"Trise.2865" said:You people wanted "harder content", and "longer goals". This is what that looks like.

Great, I'm on board. However, does it have to include "You can't be rewarded for this yet because you need more masteries."

I'm not sure this idea works for motivating a playerbase to engage in content.

Instead of saying, "Soon you will be able to get loot! Isn't that exciting?"

We should be saying, "Nice job, here is some loot. Would you like even more next time? Get this mastery and it's yours"

They're fundamentally the same thing in that we are working to motivate play and interaction with content. One has players walking away with less until later in hopes that the player continues to play, another wants to motivate players by building anticipation of getting more if they put more time in.

It's not so much an issue of hard content or longer goals, but just how playing feels.

[Bassdeff.1895]

@"Trise.2865" said:You people wanted "harder content", and "longer goals". This is what that looks like.

Longer goals and harder content are fine aspirations but locking shit behind mastery points isn't the way to do it. Unlocking masteries isn't fun or challenging, it's tedious. The only reward you get from completing them is the feeling of finally being rid of them. I for one am glad that these masteries only require a few points and a couple of hours to level up in Grothmar. There are plenty of long term goals to chase in this game, we don't need this to be one.

[kharmin.7683]

I haven't played too much in this season's maps because I haven't really found them to be engaging. Heck, I just got to the new map last night. Part of my issue has been what the OP is talking about. I didn't want to grind masteries just so that I would be able to open chests for loot. That's pretty much why I left those maps in the first place. Changing the scope to smaller rewards with the incentive to greater ones is a good idea, so long as greater rewards doesn't simply mean 1-2 more rare unid gear drops. Having said that, though, I'm not sure what "greater" rewards would push me to this content.

[Super Hayes.6890]

I think most of us are going to agree that zero loot pre mastery is not a good approach. I like the OP's suggestion, however, I also hate grinding for masteries unless the pay off is significant like gaining the ability to fly. RNG loot is a poor goal for a mastery.

[rrusse.7058]

@kharmin.7683 said:I didn't want to grind masteries just so that I would be able to open chests for loot. That's pretty much why I left those maps in the first place. Changing the scope to smaller rewards with the incentive to greater ones is a good idea

I figured this would happen to some players. It's a shame because the dev team obviously wants people to engage in this content, yet the way the masteries and content is presented is doing just the opposite for a portion of the playerbase.

You are right in that adding more blues, greens and a few more yellows might not be what people want to see as bonus rewards. There is a decent amount of crafting materials coming from Essence Chests which I like, but I don't know what others think of it. I too want to know what other kinds of rewards players would like.