Let's talk about DRM's (Dragon Response Missions, not Digital Rights Management)

[Arkanaloth.3059]

I must admit I'm not pleased with this new icebrood saga achievement rotation. 

let's talk about DRM's because this change pretty effectively nerfs the best solo / duo leather farm in the game. 

Prior to this change, you would log in and do the Priority Dragon Response missions, these could be solo'ed pretty easily, you'd come away with 80 or so tokens give or take, then you buy some Olmakhan material boxes (since leather is in the common section of that box) and come away with some nice leather for your time at the expense of tokens, not gold, not karma, not any other currency that you need for other stuff... just DRM tokens. If you were lucky you got an amalgamated draconic which is a nice 8 - 10g lottery item.

A typical Priority run would net you about 4 material boxes a day for about an hour of your time. Without the token boost from the priority DRM's now you're seeing maybe 2 for the same amount of effort. The sad fact is, even with this nerf the other ways of acquiring leather are either so bad and can't be solo'd / small grouped (Lake Doric) or take so many resources that have other uses (gold and magic) that DRM's are *STILL* the best solo / small group leather farm in the game, just not as good as they used to be due to this boost in grind time.  For people still getting more expensive icebrood saga items (like weapons which are 100 tokens) their grinding time just went *WAY UP*.

one of the things I love so much about GW2 is how it generally respects my time but this change is the opposite of that, and the rewards for the rotation achievements: A sip of karma, 5 tokens, a mastery scrap.. really, that's it.. really? I'm not going to mince words, those rewards are just bad guys. 
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possible solutions:

1) bring back the priority DRM's
I understand the point of consolidating the various dailies associated with the story instances of the game.. makes the list shorter, I get it... but is there any harm in bringing back the priority DRM's? They are a fun little activity the wife and I can do real fast if we want to get some materials but don't have the time or energy to devote to massive events like Drizzlewood but want something more exciting than just wandering around a zone hitting gathering nodes.  

2) increase the base token reward for all DRM's
If we're not getting the token reward bonus for priority DRM's anymore.. increase the amount of tokens for doing all the DRM's.. right now you get... 10, sometimes more, sometimes less.. boost DRM token reward per completion to say... 20 minimum. 3 DRM's, which would match the number for the old Priority system, would net 60 tokens minimum, and say... add a token per bonus activity done in the DRM which would bump that up to 69 for clearing three, not quite as high as what you get from the Priority DRM's but far far better than *maybe* getting 30 if you're lucky. 

3) Change the Achievement system away from a rotation
Honestly, I think this is the most difficult option with respect to the amount of upheaval it would create, but instead of a rotation... the icebrood saga achievement would go something like this:

Icebrood daily achievement
do any 3 icebrood saga achievements - reward 20 eternal ice, 20 DRM tokens, Keg of liquid Karma, 1 Mastery scrap

then the list of possibilities would be
Do 3 DRM's - reward 5 eternal ice, 25 tokens, 1 mastery scrap
Do 3 Light puzzles - reward 5 eternal ice, <something else>, <something else>
Do Jora's keep meta - 15 eternal ice, < something else>, <something else>
Do Drakkar - 15 Eternal ice, < something else>, <something else>

You see where I'm going, but add about... 3 more things to that list of options to do for the daily to give people choice instead of the limits and time gating created by a rotation.... but you get my meaning by this point I'm sure. 

[Arkanaloth.3059]

ok maybe a KEG of liquid karma is a bit much but you know what i mean... something worth the effort / time. 

[mindcircus.1506]

Not going to pretend I agree with your armchair deving regarding the solution for this issue.....

But I agree than removing the dailies here makes no sense. This wasn't exactly overpowered loot.
It's not like the content was on farm by anyone.
DRMs really are a nice alternative to t1 or t2 fractals. They were/are fairly strong peices of content I used to run almost daily.
I don't understand the need to lower the rewards on them.
If the concern was pulling people away from fractals....

then maybe making new fractals is the answer.

[Labjax.2465]

Pretty sure it ended up being a nerf to drizzlewood too (albeit a very minor one, but nonetheless one less incentive to do it every day).

This patch in general was frustratingly thoughtless simplification, imo. Sorta like cleaning up beautiful street art, it's this idea that tidiness is intrinsically better than messiness, when sometimes something is messy for a reason. This is a problem in coding sometimes and can even happen in your own code that you come back to later lol (I've had it happen and learned to leave comments more thoughtfully!). You go "this is needlessly complex, I'll simplify it" and then an hour and some fixes later, you're reverting it when you finally realized it wasn't messy because somebody wanted it to be messy, but because that was the best way to get it to work with the tools available.

That's the kind of vibe I get from this patch. Dailies simplified in a way that essentially nerfs the content they relate to. Dungeon currency simplified in a way that detaches meaning from the completion of the individual dungeons and replaces it with a soulless vendor lock.

I don't want to be dramatic, but when thoughtless development attitudes like this become the standard, not just a one-off thing like this patch, it's how a beloved game can turn into a game people don't want to play anymore. It happened with SWG back in the day. I hope they will learn a lesson from this patch and think more carefully in the future because if not, I worry I've just moved from one game that's going to be worse by its 10th anniversary to another.

[Hotride.2187]

The DRM dailies need to come back IMO. The content is dead anyway, the dailies at least give SOME focus to players when choosing which DRM to enter. So MAYBE (but only MAYBE) you get to see another player in your instance.

And honestly, even further nerfing rewards from DRMs (as without dailies there are basically no reawrds), who came up with this? They applied the same change they have for LS3 and LS4 maps, to instanced content that no1 does anyway because its pointless...

Edited June 11, 2022 by Hotride.2187

[Scheherazade.7148]

I am annoyed about this and i agree its inappropriate simplification. LS3/4 are old now, they need this rotation system to a certain extent and as i am doing the legendary trinkets, those maps are much busier those days but DRM's? just No. How am i supposed to get achievements done for a particular DRM when it may not rotate in for 2 weeks or more? And no one will want to do them outside of dailies if the rewards have been nerfed ( have they?) DRM's arnt even that old.

 

They had enough maps to do rotation on Icebrood if they insisted upon it and split the maps as they do on release ( and really i think its too early to)

 

Grothmar

Bjora South

Bjora North

Drizzlewood South

Drizzlewood North