Changes in EoD and Mystic Clovers [Merged]

[maxwelgm.4315]

I play fractals since day 1 and love it. Back when people gave up on the very first week and went back to dungeon farming I kept running it (no LFG so we would just grab randoms on the portal in LA lol), and I was even the one doing groups that did any fractals that came up and not just playing the RNG until swampland came up. Fractals have improved so much since then and a huge part of it is that most of the time, updates were additive and only put more stuff into fractals until it became the go-to 5 people "hard" content in-game. I go on fractal daily binges from time to time just because of how fun it is.

 

All of this said, I see no reason at all for this nerf, it's so strange even if it doesn't completely break the gold/hour in fractals. I don't remember anyone complaining that CMs were the only semi-reliable source of MCs and in fact, I started doing them explicitly because I set a personal objective of having a full legendary armory - making even a couple of CMs a week like I currently do a super investment towards that goal. And I actually got better at the game because of how something like 99CM truly pushes you individually to not kill the rest of your team. It's clearly also somewhat of a successful mode since CMs+T4s are one of the few "hard" instances you can LFG any time of the day without long waiting times Why would they nerf that at all for any reason is a mystery, going by the reasons given by the blog post.

 

If we assume however they explicitly want people to move along and set their sights on making EoD strikes appear popular by making it the only reliable MC farm - right when they gave a % of the population incentive to make their first legendary weapon in the form a precursor + amulet that shows the armory functionality - Then this strange change starts making sense for all the wrong reasons. Yes, they are not killing fractals but this is a clear message on the other hand: if you want this thing you had ample access to before, you must get the new expansion. And I don't even know how to feel about this to be honest.

[George.9745]

31 minutes ago, maxwelgm.4315 said:

I play fractals since day 1 and love it. Back when people gave up on the very first week and went back to dungeon farming I kept running it (no LFG so we would just grab randoms on the portal in LA lol), and I was even the one doing groups that did any fractals that came up and not just playing the RNG until swampland came up. Fractals have improved so much since then and a huge part of it is that most of the time, updates were additive and only put more stuff into fractals until it became the go-to 5 people "hard" content in-game. I go on fractal daily binges from time to time just because of how fun it is.

 

All of this said, I see no reason at all for this nerf, it's so strange even if it doesn't completely break the gold/hour in fractals. I don't remember anyone complaining that CMs were the only semi-reliable source of MCs and in fact, I started doing them explicitly because I set a personal objective of having a full legendary armory - making even a couple of CMs a week like I currently do a super investment towards that goal. And I actually got better at the game because of how something like 99CM truly pushes you individually to not kill the rest of your team. It's clearly also somewhat of a successful mode since CMs+T4s are one of the few "hard" instances you can LFG any time of the day without long waiting times Why would they nerf that at all for any reason is a mystery, going by the reasons given by the blog post.

 

If we assume however they explicitly want people to move along and set their sights on making EoD strikes appear popular by making it the only reliable MC farm - right when they gave a % of the population incentive to make their first legendary weapon in the form a precursor + amulet that shows the armory functionality - Then this strange change starts making sense for all the wrong reasons. Yes, they are not killing fractals but this is a clear message on the other hand: if you want this thing you had ample access to before, you must get the new expansion. And I don't even know how to feel about this to be honest.

Betrayed. You feel betrayed. Your reward for improving and wanting to do better is gone. BUT HEY at least u now can buy 10 alt accounts for login rewards to make some MC again because they also cost double MC not to buy clovers.

[Vayne.8563]

22 hours ago, YamiNoNeko.8739 said:

They already went up by a lot. They went all the way up to 2.4... by the looks of it they will just keep going up and up and up and up...

This change is really horrible because MCs will most likely be super over price that a lot of people won't be able to swallow when they see the prices be so high when they want to get some for their legendaries.
I can't believe that even BDO has a better reward structure than GW2... I never thought I would be saying that about BDO.

Which is why they're at 2 gold 8 silver right now, I guess?  

This ALWAYS happens.  Kneejerk reactions cause instance panic buying, quantity goes down, price goes up.  Cooler heads prevail, prices come down.

 

And at some point the new strike missions will be in the game and there''ll be more mystic coins again.  Honestly this sky is falling stuff gets old after a while.

[jokke.6239]

5 hours ago, byebye.5492 said:

i would like a refund for eod. i bought for support but ruining the game for people so that you push new content is just bad policy. im going to lost ark

byebye

(sorry couldn't help myself) 😆

[Imba.9451]

The message behind this to me is: Screw fractals. We are abandoning them, so you should too. Here, have an incentive not to play them anymore. But we have some cool new strike mission in the next expansion!

Thats just a bad move. I get it, they want players to mirate. They want to sell the expansion. They want to have players in the expansion (wich opens the question: Are they not confident enough they will migrate by themselves? Are they afraid there are not enough players?), but killing old content, even if it's "soft killing" like done here instead of locking content away like Destiny 2 does, sends the wrong message.

You could limit the amount of coins you can get per day or week. But erasing them completely? One of the actually wort decisions ever made in regard to this game. Doubling down on that with doublig the price for Clover exchange, this seems so horribly, HORRIBLY out of touch. Unless of course, there will be an alternative way to earn more coins in EoD, wich they did not anounce yet - wich begs ANOTHER question of how Anet didn't see this kittenstorm coming and adressing this beforehand.

[Wintermute.5408]

It's just a classy move on anet's side - to lock mystic coin farm behind expansion purchase. Won't have any effect on already kittened MC economy, not at all /s

[DodonRay.8740]

6 hours ago, byebye.5492 said:

i would like a refund for eod. i bought for support but ruining the game for people so that you push new content is just bad policy. im going to lost ark

Servers are full there man. Sorry.

[vares.8457]

6 hours ago, George.9745 said:

Exactly how I feel. It killed all the hype for me. I am just sad now. I really love CMs and the MC popping once every now and then.

I have good news for. You can still play Fractal CMs, even after EoD is released. 

[Nephalem.8921]

Anet knows what they are doing. They are very good with spreadsheets and math.
They dont want anyone doing raids over drizzlewood or strikes. its that simple.

[kharmin.7683]

4 hours ago, byebye.5492 said:

you are meant to play as you like what you like. saying you are meant to play other stuff is like saying the destroyed your home, but you should like your home alone, go live somewhere else 

There is nothing preventing you from playing as you like what you like.  They're just moving the rewards around. 

 

Your home analogy is flawed.  You can still do fractals. 

[Janitsu.6284]

ANet is just making it clear that the raid and fractal community deserve nothing 😍😍😍😍

[Shadowmoon.7986]

Thinking about this, anet is on an aoc inspired "eat the rich" mentality. They are once again targeting the elite player with pervasive design decisions. Doubling the cost of discount mystic clovers is targeting the elite who can do fractal cms while leaving naked man and the mystic toilet untouched which is where the majority of the coins and clovers come from.  And anet will get away with it because of the a culture of toxic casuals that have been cultivated on these forums. They allowed this us vs them mentally to perpetuate, and picked a side.

So at this point take your game, it will be casual and whale only. All my friends are going to lost ark and ff14, they are leaving because of raid abandonment in IBS, the over monetization of build templates ( another eat the rich feature) and now the butcher of cm fractal rewards. They are not excited about mirror comp coming back, they are not excited by strikes because how awful, boring, and bugridden ibs strikes are.  And this forum will cheer that they are gone, which is the saddest part of it all.

[Jokuc.3478]

A-Net:

"We want to spread the love to other types of content"

 

Also A-Net:

*removes 100% of the "love" from one type of content and moves it to another*

[Khisanth.2948]

There are other factors not accounted for. Selling the infusion carries a risk of not selling unless you do instant sell. The price of the ghostly infusion has been trending down for years. The change will either do nothing if it fails to increase the number of raiders or accelerate that downward trend because more people will be selling. If it drops a little more it will become cheaper to get a ghostly infusion than to get the no cosmetic version.

[ReaverKane.7598]

So, i've been playing GW2 off and on since pre-release times, i've got roughly 8k hours in the game, and i've had many ups and downs with the game, all of the downs due to poor decision making from Arena Net degrading the enjoyment of the game. (Season one alone saw my ~100 active player guild dwindle to ~5ish), and there's been stuff aplenty.

Now due to work, i've been unable to play the game at all, and in the last few months when i was doing anything in the game it was to login and play some CM Fractals. So full disclosure here, i do enjoy Fractals, because, unlike raids, its way easier to group up, less work to keep the group going which means i get to keep on playing. I never quite took to strikes mostly because rewards weren't as good IMO.

Now, i'm seeing the news, and i can't help myself but relive all the downs on the game history coming back. Lets be honest that post is mostly say one thing plan to do the exact opposite:

Fractals and MC economy

Now, i understand wanting to keep some scarcity on MCs, but lets be real, the price for MCs increased as much in the last 2 years as it did in the first 5. So its not like there's an overabundance of MCs in the game. Quite the opposite, they're the most valued "currency" in the game, and with the addition of more legendaries in the expansion, its not likely this will change.

I've been pretty much doing daily CM for the last half a year or so until December-ish. And the max i've dropped in one day was 15 (which is awesome, but happened once in ~200 days of playing), with most days getting 1-6 being the norm (including the one(s) in T4 chests). None the less, i did manage to get my storage up to 2k MCs for a rainy day, but lets not forget, this was me being one of the luckiest in my static, and it also represents hundreds of hours of gameplay.

Now even if this wasn't the case, and there was an actual merit to removing MC drops from CMs. Is what Arena Net doing the right way? Or even the smart way?
I mean, looking at the metrics available to players, that being stats in gw2efficiency, comparing Legendary Tokens and UFE, 13,5% of GW2 Efficiency players have 40 or more UFE (meaning they completed 1 CM fractal), while the number of players with 3+ LI are double at 28%, now its not a fair comparison, sure, cause escort exists, but still, a lot more people do, and complete raid encounters than Fractal CMs. And what insightful thing does Arena Net do, to right this wrong? Oh, they COMPLETELY REMOVE one of the main rewards from doing Fractal CM, and add NOTHING in its stead, WORSE, they add salt to the wound by increasing the cost of buying Legendary Clovers from Fractal vendors, cause that should incentivize people to play more fractals.

I mean, seeing that they're planning on adding MCs to other content rewards, i could understand removing the 3 MC drop from the table, and just keeping 1 - 2 drops. But removing it completely and not balancing that by adding some other incentive? How does that even make sense?

Sure, they want to incentivize people to play the new Strikes, but its the NEW STRIKES, people WILL PLAY IT BECAUSE THEY'RE NEW. 

 

Strike Currencies

Don't stop at removing Red shards, remove them all, or keep just blue ones. One of the most obnoxious things you do to this game is keeping currencies separate. You don't want people who don't have the expansion to get the new goods, keep those goods in a vendor tab that is accessible only with the expansion. Done, no more issues. Stop bloating the game with new currencies that sooner or later you're going to make interchangeable with the old one. I thought you'd learned this lesson with magnetite shards and gaeting crystals.

Boon target limits

You say one thing, and do the opposite, sorry, but that's how it ends up being, instead of restricting us and forcing mirror compositions in raids (or akin to that), why not just unlock MORE professions with 10 target boons. Put the 10 target option behind traits, like in Renegade, so people will have to make a trade-off to get those, and that way you DO make the game more balanced, and DO give people more options, because right now what you're doing is forcing us to funnel the raid composition to a point where 60% of the group is going to be bound to specific roles, instead of allowing us the flexibility to choose.

New attributes

A reshuffled Marauder's and a cool stat combo. That's it?

TLDR:

Personally this news article just wiped out all the good will and hype i had for the expansion... I mean, unbalanced nerf to Fractal CMs, the continuation of old tropes and the one.track mind of nerf everything instead of opening up the game to the player creativity. This obsessive iron grip with controlling every aspect of the game, is the main reason why GW2 never fulfilled its potential. And i wondered how does a game company design games for almost 20 years, and still fails at elemental things like balancing a change like the Fractal one. And then i remember recent history of Arena Net, and realize, nothing changed, and i was a fool to have thought otherwise. End game will forever be who has the flashiest gemstore item, and the few of us who want to actually play the game will always be regelated to the background, because Arena Net wants the quick and easy buck rather than making a quality game.

I'm ashamed at myself for having believed things might change, honestly.
 

[Imba.9451]

A good feedback. Too bad seemingly nothing that is written in these forum gets ever adressed by Anet though.

It's crystal clear that Anet wants to funnel people into EoD. But the way HOW they do it is pretty dirty.

Edited February 13, 2022 by Imba.9451

[Gorem.8104]

7 hours ago, Vayne.8563 said:

Which is why they're at 2 gold 8 silver right now, I guess?  

This ALWAYS happens.  Kneejerk reactions cause instance panic buying, quantity goes down, price goes up.  Cooler heads prevail, prices come down.

 

And at some point the new strike missions will be in the game and there''ll be more mystic coins again.  Honestly this sky is falling stuff gets old after a while.

 

What? Did you even read anything or understand anything? What even is this complaint? 
We are going from a lot more then 10 coins, to 10 coins per week to only people who own EoD and also do strikes AND also spend EVERYTHING on coins which is the exact amount you get to transfer to clovers only from the one single source. 

So there will be thousands of less coins in the system unless EoD has other ways to earn them, and the rest will be spent for more expensive clovers.  If nothing else changes the best way to play GW2 will be to buy multiple accounts and spend your time just logging into them if you want to craft legendries. 

 

If nothing else changes, I am expecting coins to go above 3gold each when EoD drops, unless of course they keep manipulating it by injecting fake coins into the system with dev accounts. 
They are trying to remove all incentive to do old content in favour of the new, just like they did with Dungoens, which killed that content off. Unless the people defending this decision like yourself want all old game modes to die? How dare people play the game differently then you do, right? 

[Mell.4873]

I think the solution to all of this is to just provide more gold to cm runs. It does seem like the main reason people try run these is to make more gold per hour than other content. The mysic coin pipeline they are balancing is to try make it more fair for people who want to farm clovers effectively. 

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

I'm afraid you're incorrect about one point in particular: That there's not an overabundance of MCs in the game. The devs keep metrics on this and have repeatedly said its false, and that players are hoarding literally millions of MCs. Players have even posted screenshots of 10k+MCs just casually sitting around.

 

Its not a new problem either, its also why they couldn't fix the leather problem back when Cured Hardened Leather Squares were selling for 1g and basically making it impossible to craft anything Ascended (as well as purchase guild upgrades), becaues you'd pay over a hundred gold per item/upgrade.

 

This is because players who played at the beginning when many of these currencies were sold to vendors (including MCs), and hoarded stacks of them on mules have an infinite supply to sell. They want things to remain the way they are more than anyone else because it it means endless gold for their entire remaining playtime.

 

The only way to fix this is to saturate the market with the item so that the hoarded caches lose value, but the devs can't do this with something attached to Legendary weapons so its a lose-lose situation.

 

Removing them from Fractal CMs at least reduces the "one stop shop" approach to making Legendaries.

Edited February 14, 2022 by Hannelore.8153

[ValkyrieStorm.8721]

I understand that Anet want people to play the new Strikes in EoD but removing mystic coins and penalising the small group of highly skilled players geared for Fractal CM's (some of the hardest 5-man content in the game and expensive to prepare for ie. 150AR with infusions, asc gear + trinkets, other items) is a recipe for bad blood and Dead Dungeons 2.0.

If you're worried about coin saturation from fractals it will never, ever be the case because only a small group of players does CM's. And CM's only average 2.7 coins (sometimes even 0 coins!!!) per full complete anyway due to RNG. If you absolutely have to, REDUCE mystic coin drops, NOT REMOVE. Reducing coins may incentivise these skilled players to go play Strike content as well, WITHOUT destroying the player base for fractal content. On top of that, with the way the new Strikes are apparently being built for the casual normal player, there won't be an overwhelming need for 'leet' CM player-level skill anyway. Anet posted that CM's will only come much later for new Strikes.

And once new fractal incomers find out that Fractal CM content has an even smaller player base and poor reward, they'll be completely disincentivised and will not engage with the content, which is a HUGE chunk of endgame and integral to building ascended armour and legendaries.

Removing mystic coins, an already rarified resource, disincentives a whole tier of difficult content and removes the pipeline of skilled players coming from 5-mans to other content!

Also, we see right through you Anet. Doubling mystic coin cost for Clovers from fractals vendors and subtracting one ecto is mathematically NOT a ""discount"" like you claimed. It's just straight up insulting to our intelligence. The time-gating of 10 Clovers from vendors per week is also ridiculous as Coins have always been the limiting factor to how many Clovers you can purchase anyway! Artificially time-capping Clovers from vendors is asinine.

YOU NEED TO REWARD YOUR DIFFICULT CONTENT WITH FAIR PRIZES FOR SKILL AND ENGAGEMENT.

Because I sure do not want any more ascended rings or jade glass fragments.

Edited February 14, 2022 by ValkyrieStorm.8721

[Vayne.8563]

3 hours ago, Gorem.8104 said:

 

What? Did you even read anything or understand anything? What even is this complaint? 
We are going from a lot more then 10 coins, to 10 coins per week to only people who own EoD and also do strikes AND also spend EVERYTHING on coins which is the exact amount you get to transfer to clovers only from the one single source. 

So there will be thousands of less coins in the system unless EoD has other ways to earn them, and the rest will be spent for more expensive clovers.  If nothing else changes the best way to play GW2 will be to buy multiple accounts and spend your time just logging into them if you want to craft legendries. 

 

If nothing else changes, I am expecting coins to go above 3gold each when EoD drops, unless of course they keep manipulating it by injecting fake coins into the system with dev accounts. 
They are trying to remove all incentive to do old content in favour of the new, just like they did with Dungoens, which killed that content off. Unless the people defending this decision like yourself want all old game modes to die? How dare people play the game differently then you do, right? 

Unless more people do Strikes that Fractal CMs. That's the point.  Since you don't know how good they'll be or how popular, you can't say one way or another.  I understood what you said.  You also said that coins were 2.4 and they were down to 2.1 so you know they didn't just keep doing up even the day after the panick. At one point yesterday they were below 2.

Do you know what panic means?  Do you own a crystal ball?  Do you know how many mystic coins the new legendaries will use.  I think there's a lot you don't know. What you're doing as allowing your fear to fill in the blanks. It's easy to do without having the information that Anet has.  I always prefer to see what happens before I say for a fact that something will happen.  Because this community has often said things they were absolutely sure about that turned out in the longer run not to be true.

[Imba.9451]

2 hours ago, Hannelore.8153 said:

I'd like to point out that you're wrong about one point: That there's not an overabundance of MCs in the game. The devs keep metrics on this and have repeatedly said its false, and that players are hoarding literally millions of MCs. Players have even posted screenshots of 10k+MCs just casually sitting around.

 

Its not a new problem either, its also why they couldn't fix the leather problem back when Cured Hardened Leather Squares were selling for 1g and basically making it impossible to craft anything Ascended (as well as purchase guild upgrades), becaues you'd pay over a hundred gold per item/upgrade.

 

This is because players who played at the beginning when many of these currencies were sold to vendors (including MCs), and hoarded stacks of them on mules have an infinite supply to sell. They want things to remain the way they are more than anyone else because it it means endless gold for their entire remaining playtime.

 

The only way to fix this is to saturate the market with the item so that the hoarded caches lose value, but the devs can't do this with something attached to Legendary weapons so its a lose-lose situation.

 

Removing them from Fractal CMs at least reduces the "one stop shop" approach to making Legendaries.

By that logic however, we are on the mercy of hoarder to flood the market with their suply all at once, so the price goes down.

Wich probably won't happen. If you have an overabundance of something that many people want, you don't throw it at the market all at once. If anything, the actual changes play into their hands: MC's get more expensive (provided we do not get additional sources in EoD), and they gain even more profit from drip-selling them.

Edited February 13, 2022 by Imba.9451

[Aeon.4583]

Honestly, i think that every in-game content, Challenge Modes specifically, should have Mystic Coin as completion reward, being an end-game currency. Only usable reward in CMs will be Integrated Fractal Matrices. It's account bound, unless you plan to multi-class fractal with min-maxing then Matrices are useless.

The way i see it:

- Give 1 Mystic Coin reward per day, account-wide, for completing Fractal Challenge Modes ( 98, 99, 100 ).

- Remove Integrated Fractal Matrix reward for completing Fractal Challenge Modes.

- Add a chance for 1-3 Integrated Fractal Matrices drop for defeating Champion bosses in Fractal Challenge Modes.

 

In other words: Mystic Coin reward and Integrated Matrices reward should change places.
Farming +stat+9agony infusions is hell. Easier to buy WvW infusions for alt PvE characters with Laurels and be happy, much cheaper.

If arena net really thinks that current Mystic Coin drop rate in Fractal exceed expectations, simply lower it. And if that 1-3 chance per boss is really that high. give it to Matrices. Lower Mystic coin drops but give us something in return, like faster stat infusion farm.

[Mell.4873]

Just add a random chance to get 2 to 6 gold from CM runs and that should fix this problem. 

I got thrown into the merge pile mehhh

Edited February 14, 2022 by Mell.4873

[maxwelgm.4315]

Maybe Anet just wants the fractal CM playerbase to become the Strikes CM playerbase? lol