Ryvox mission is calling for adjustments

[sokolade]

Hello Cyrene,
This post is directed at developers, but anyone please chime in if I miss something or you just want to add your own thoughts.

Mission is not easy, and by no means it should be an easy one, but I do feel like it could be worked on, to be improved.

Mission requires you to be proven in the HUB, the whole story line is about it and honestly its awesome, good job there!
First you need the coat. 550k tokens. I have not done the math (someone could chime in here maybe), but it seems you can pick up around 100 tokens every 30 minutes or so, or get a few for each kill. This takes a long long time if collecting by yourself, or gets expensive if you buy (currently around 3-4 ped per 1000, making price of the coat at around 2000 ped give or take. Now this is not a bad thing, but it is very expensive none the less. Issue here is that hub is pretty deserted. Skills here don't count (by design), and you can not skill here, no skill gains ( by design).
Once you have the Coat, you can now talk to the Ryvox.
I will skip the boring parts here...
Once you have found all you need to find around Cyrene, Ryvox will ask you to kill 5000 players in the proving grounds. Problems here are obvious, it will take years for anyone to do it just purely due to the lack of activity down there (or up there? still have not figured it out), luckily there is the more expensive way out, which is to hire someone to run and die for you. Not ideal, but works.
After that you need to give Ryvox 60k sweat oh and did you know, you also need 900 A.R.C. Badges to be able to take this next step.
Now comes the hard part (if you thought its hard or expensive till now, oh you are so so wrong).
This is stage 7, Ryvox require you to do the following:

• 
  
  Spoiler: Stage 7 objectives

  [*]Collect 2500 Infected Lungs ( can only be looted from other players in the Volcano ( Lootable pvp, toxic zone, requires toxic shot (5.00 ped per use))
  [*]Collect 5000 Molten Hearts (drops form Molten golem and Lava golem in the Volcano)
  
  [*]Collect 25000 Tide Claw Pincher Sinew (Tide claws)
  
  [*]Collect 25000 Intact Duster Ears ( Duster Gang)
  [*]Collect 25000 Fenris Soulchips (Fenris)

Problem here is not so obvious unless you are doing the mission.
First I will complain about pvp zone. It has been changed for some reason, I have never seen restrictions like these in any pvp around the universe. I do consider myself a pvp veteran, or at least an oldie who has spent considerable amount of time in the pvp zones around the universe.
Ngu Volcano pvp rules:

• No Vehicles
  
• No Teleportation chips
• No Radar

This makes it very very hard to to do first 2 of the required collections. And not just that, it sort of renders pvp useless, or at least not interesting at all to come check out.
If a player dies in the zone, he cant drive or tp back, he has to run to the spot he died, especially bad to the miners. As a comparison, here is how toxic zones are set up on other planets:

• PVP4 ( Akmuul, Calypso)
  No vehicles
  Radar enabled
  TP chips allowed
• PVP3 ( Aegis Mound, Calypso)
  No vehicles
  Radar Disabled
  TP chips allowed
  
• Arkadia toxic zone
  No Vehicles
  Radar enabled
  TP chips allowed

Lets touch on the each of stage 7 parts:

• 
  
  Spoiler: Discusses stage 7 mission requirements and objectives

  [*]2500 Lungs, drop rate unknown, drop form other players
  Lets say its a guaranteed drop each time you kill another player, then only issue here, is to actually find 2500 players to kill, or what we will have to end up doing is - hire someone to die 2500 times, now this will be expensive (Toxic shot costs 5.0 peds to use, you get some back in loot, but it is always less than 5 ped, cost to run this stage, not sure yet, but definitely expensive, this would even be hard on calypso at the current meta, much easier than here thou, for sure)
  [*]5000 Molten Hearts , drop rate seems to be 1 in 5, so 25000 kills total, apart from some obstacles explained above, its not terrible, still expensive thou.
  Average hp 1875HP, total hp (not including regeneration) - 46,875,000
  If your damage per pec (DPP) is 3.0 then this stage will require ~160k ped turnover.
  [*]25000 Tide Claw pinchers, drop rate 1 in 5 (unconfirmed), I still need to test this out, but currently it seems that this stage will require 125k kills with an estimated 125k ped turnover
  [*]25000 Duster ears, drop rate is 1 in 5, so 125k kills total, with estimated 340k ped turnover
  [*]25000 Fenris Soulchips, drop rate is 1 in 10 (unconfirmed), so 250k total kills, with estimated whopping 2.6 Million ped turnover
  [*]Total estimated ped cycle for stage 7 is at least 3.2 Million ped

I will leave to individuals to what they think their return will be over 3.2M ped cycled.

Now time, gathering all the green lime tokens, doing pvp kills (even if you hire someone) and then pure grind on the stage 7 is incredible. Looking at Entropia tracker top 100 hunters list and seeing their total loot per month, knowing what are they mostly killing and applying that to this mission, I Estimate that it will take about a 6 months for a dedicated hunter, and over 5 years for someone who spends on average 8h hunting during a week.

All that work, must be an awesome reward right?
Well, not really, reward is planet bound item with stats that are not great. Not too bad, but not very great either. The kicker for the reward weapon is that it could be a really decent gun if it wasn't planet bound, but I get why it is, and wont argue with it, however, maybe you would consider making it usable throughout the universe. Or adding a mission at the end to make it stable? Stable Turrelion Assassinator. If you want to attract as many players to Cyrene as Moloch instances have attracted to Ancient Greece, this is your ticket. IF not at all possible, consider to make additional mission or an upgrade mission to slightly improve on the stats of it!


List of things needed to be fixed in my opinion:

• Fix PVP zone, if you ask me I would make it like this:
  No vehicles
  Radar enabled
  TP chips allowed
  (Or at the very least enable TP chips.)
  
  
• Fix PVP kill requirement, it is a tremendous amount of player kills, for a planet that doesn't have a tremendous amount of players, and pvp zones (both proving grounds and toxic zone), is nearly empty.
• Drop rate of collection items, its just high, and especially high for Fenris. I would say drop rate of 1 in 3 would be very reasonable for the reward, please consider that!
• The coat! Make it prettier, or add buffs to it please! Both the Green and Red, maybe 25kg and 50kg (respectively) additional carry weight to the wearers inventory, or something else even nicer.

Lastly - thanks for even giving us this mission, and finishing it as late as it may have come.


If you stuck around and read the whole thing, thank you,

Have Fun, Hof Big
/Soko

 

[Shawna | Cyrene]

Hello Cyrene,
This post is directed at developers, but anyone please chime in if I miss something or you just want to add your own thoughts.

Mission is not easy, and by no means it should be an easy one, but I do feel like it could be worked on, to be improved.

Mission requires you to be proven in the HUB, the whole story line is about it and honestly its awesome, good job there!
First you need the coat. 550k tokens. I have not done the math (someone could chime in here maybe), but it seems you can pick up around 100 tokens every 30 minutes or so, or get a few for each kill. This takes a long long time if collecting by yourself, or gets expensive if you buy (currently around 3-4 ped per 1000, making price of the coat at around 2000 ped give or take. Now this is not a bad thing, but it is very expensive none the less. Issue here is that hub is pretty deserted. Skills here don't count (by design), and you can not skill here, no skill gains ( by design).
Now once you have the Coat, you can now talk to the Ryvox.
I will skip the boring parts here...
Once you have found all you need to find around Cyrene, Ryvox will ask you to kill 5000 players in the proving grounds. Problems here are obvious, it will take years for anyone to do it just purely due to the lack of activity down there (or up there? still have not figured it out), luckily there is the more expensive way out, which is to hire someone to run and die for you. Not ideal, but works.
After that you need to give Ryvox 60k sweat oh and did you know, you also need 900 A.R.C. Badges to be able to take this next step.
Now comes the hard part (if you thought its hard or expensive till now, oh you are so so wrong).
This is stage 7, Ryvox require you to do the following:

• 
  
  Spoiler: Stage 7 objectives

  [*]Collect 2500 Infected Lungs ( can only be looted from other players in the Volcano ( Lootable pvp, toxic zone, requires toxic shot (5.00 ped per use))
  [*]Collect 5000 Molten Hearts (drops form Molten golem and Lava golem in the Volcano)
  
  [*]Collect 25000 Tide Claw Pincher Sinew (Tide claws)
  
  [*]Collect 25000 Intact Duster Ears ( Duster Gang)
  [*]Collect 25000 Fenris Soulchips (Fenris)

Problem here is not so obvious unless you are doing the mission.
First I will complain about pvp zone. It has been changed for some reason, I have never seen restrictions like these in any pvp around the universe. I do consider myself a pvp veteran, or at least an oldie who has spent considerable amount of time in the pvp zones around the universe.
Ngu Volcano pvp rules:

• No Vehicles
  
• No Teleportation chips
• No Radar

This makes it very very hard to to do first 2 of the required collections. And not just that, it sort of renders pvp useless, or at least not interesting at all to come check out.
If a player dies in the zone, he cant drive or tp back, he has to run to the spot he died, especially bad to the miners. As a comparison, here is how toxic zones are set up on other planets:

• PVP4 ( Akmuul, Calypso)
  No vehicles
  Radar enabled
  TP chips allowed
• PVP3 ( Aegis Mound, Calypso)
  No vehicles
  Radar Disabled
  TP chips allowed
  
• Arkadia toxic zone
  No Vehicles
  Radar enabled
  TP chips allowed

Now lets touch on the each of stage 7 parts:

• 
  
  Spoiler: Discusses stage 7 mission requirements and objectives

  [*]2500 Lungs, drop rate unknown, drop form other players
  Lets say its a guaranteed drop each time you kill another player, then only issue here, is to actually find 2500 players to kill, or what we will have to end up doing is - hire someone to die 2500 times, now this will be expensive (Toxic shot costs 5.0 peds to use, you get some back in loot, but it is always less than 5 ped, cost to run this stage, not sure yet, but definitely expensive, this would even be hard on calypso at the current meta, much easier than here thou, for sure)
  [*]5000 Molten Hearts , drop rate seems to be 1 in 5, so 25000 kills total, apart from some obstacles explained above, its not terrible, still expensive thou.
  Average hp 1875HP, total hp (not including regeneration) - 46,875,000
  If your damage per pec (DPP) is 3.0 then this stage will require ~160k ped turnover.
  [*]25000 Tide Claw pinchers, drop rate 1 in 5 (unconfirmed), I still need to test this out, but currently it seems that this stage will require 125k kills with an estimated 125k ped turnover
  [*]25000 Duster ears, drop rate is 1 in 5, so 125k kills total, with estimated 340k ped turnover
  [*]25000 Fenris Soulchips, drop rate is 1 in 10 (unconfirmed), so 250k total kills, with estimated whopping 2.6 Million ped turnover
  [*]Total estimated ped cycle for stage 7 is at least 3.2 Million ped

Now I will leave to individuals to what they think their return will be over 3.2M ped cycled.

Now time, gathering all the green lime tokens, doing pvp kills (even if you hire someone) and then pure grind on the stage 7 is incredible. Looking at Entropia tracker top 100 hunters list and seeing their total loot per month, knowing what are they mostly killing and applying that to this mission, I Estimate that it will take about a 6 months for a dedicated hunter, and over 5 years for someone who spends on average 8h hunting during a week.

All that work, must be an awesome reward right?
Well, not really, reward is planet bound item with stats that are not great. Not too bad, but not very great either. The kicker for the reward weapon is that it could be a really decent gun if it wasn't planet bound, but I get why it is, and wont argue with it, however, maybe you would consider making it usable throughout the universe. Or adding a mission at the end to make it stable? Stable Turrelion Assassinator. If you want to attract as many players to Cyrene as Moloch instances have attracted to Ancient Greece, this is your ticket. IF not at all possible, consider to make additional mission or an upgrade mission to slightly improve on the stats of it!


List of things needed to be fixed in my opinion:

• Fix PVP zone, if you ask me I would make it like this:
  No vehicles
  Radar enabled
  TP chips allowed
  (Or at the very least enable TP chips.)
  
  
• Fix PVP kill requirement, it is a tremendous amount of player kills, for a planet that doesn't have a tremendous amount of players, and pvp zones (both proving grounds and toxic zone), is nearly empty.
• Drop rate of collection items, its just high, and especially high for Fenris. I would say drop rate of 1 in 3 would be very reasonable for the reward, please consider that!
• The coat! Make it prettier, or add buffs to it please! Both the Green and Red, maybe 25kg and 50kg (respectively) additional carry weight to the wearers inventory, or something else even nicer.

Lastly - thanks for even giving us this mission, and finishing it as late as it may have come.


If you stuck around and read the whole thing, thank you,

Have Fun, Hof Big
/Soko

Hey Soko,


I wanted to address a few of these points now while we wait for Kris to have more time on his hands to post in more detail, so to address your list of things you felt needed to be fixed:

• PvP zone:
  • The team and I have gone back and forth on this one. While we aren't 100% sold on allowing vehicles and the radar, we do think enabling TP chips is something that can be turned on, so we will make that change.

• PvP kill requirement:
  • This is where it gets a little more tricky. The kills for the coat can’t be changed, it has been that way since the missions first release. It would be unfair to the players that have already done it in the past. That being said, we can look at adjustments for the Toxic area.

• Drop rate of collection items:
  • This is something that we’ve been keeping a close eye on, and one of the reasons that the collection works the way it does vs traditional drops. We understand players are feeling distraught about drop rate, so we will be making improvements to the rate.

• The coat:
  • Change the look and people are unhappy, don’t change the look and people are unhappy. It’s a delicate balance but something we can take a look at. However, when it comes to buffs it's never so cut and dry and it's something we need to take into more careful consideration.

Stay safe out there
Shawna

 

[Justine]

I will leave to individuals to what they think their return will be over 3.2M ped cycled.

According to MindArk : 97% TT return (alot players got less than that TT return)

That's 96 000 ped minimum to lose for a player with a pretty decent gear. At this price, better to buy a universe wide weapon with 80%+ efficiency and still tiered.

 

[sokolade]

• PvP zone:
  • The team and I have gone back and forth on this one. While we aren't 100% sold on allowing vehicles and the radar, we do think enabling TP chips is something that can be turned on, so we will make that change.

Thank you! This will be an awesome improvement, consider enabling radar too please, but as far as this goes, its great news!

• PvP kill requirement:
  • This is where it gets a little more tricky. The kills for the coat can’t be changed, it has been that way since the missions first release. It would be unfair to the players that have already done it in the past. That being said, we can look at adjustments for the Toxic area.

Oh yeah, its fine, hub is hub, 5k is a lot of kill inside the hub that doesn't have any people, but as i mentioned there is a workaround. What do you mean kills for the coat? Coat requires tokens, not kills. Thank you for looking into toxic zone adjustments, those kills there currently will be terrible experience, especially if drop rate is 1 in 5 or 1 in 10

• Drop rate of collection items:
  • This is something that we’ve been keeping a close eye on, and one of the reasons that the collection works the way it does vs traditional drops. We understand players are feeling distraught about drop rate, so we will be making improvements to the rate.

Much love <3

• The coat:
  • Change the look and people are unhappy, don’t change the look and people are unhappy. It’s a delicate balance but something we can take a look at. However, when it comes to buffs it's never so cut and dry and it's something we need to take into more careful consideration.

I totally get it, it is what it is. Appreciate even if you just consider it!

on another note, here are more findings:


Confirmed Fenris stage is 1 in 10 drop rate, so its 3.5M ped cycle give or take.

Not all dusters near Kwarn TP count. IF you are more south rather than south/west, then they do not count. So if you accidentally drift too far, all of a sudden you are out of range and they dont count even if you are still within one lesser TP jump from Kwarn TP.

Have a great day
/Soko

 

[Shawna | Cyrene]

Oh yeah, its fine, hub is hub, 5k is a lot of kill inside the hub that doesn't have any people, but as i mentioned there is a workaround. What do you mean kills for the coat? Coat requires tokens, not kills. Thank you for looking into toxic zone adjustments, those kills there currently will be terrible experience, especially if drop rate is 1 in 5 or 1 in 10

To clarify, I was lumping the way you get the coat and the 5k kills in one. These missions can not be changed.

 

[Kris | Cyrene]

Hey Soko,

I wanted to say that this is a great and thorough post, I’ll do my breakdown and answer what I can as follows:

Mission requires you to be proven in the HUB, the whole story line is about it and honestly its awesome, good job there!

First you need the coat. 550k tokens. I have not done the math (someone could chime in here maybe), but it seems you can pick up around 100 tokens every 30 minutes or so, or get a few for each kill. This takes a long long time if collecting by yourself, or gets expensive if you buy (currently around 3-4 ped per 1000, making price of the coat at around 2000 ped give or take. Now this is not a bad thing, but it is very expensive none the less. Issue here is that hub is pretty deserted. Skills here don't count (by design), and you can not skill here, no skill gains ( by design).

Once you have the Coat, you can now talk to the Ryvox.

Yes, collecting the Reward Token (Lime Green) can be daunting due to the sheer amount, but the actual collecting action is something that any player can do. I also wanted to point out that you can also collect them in the Pit in the Hub by killing the Beast and the Turrelia Lurkers.

To try and make the token collection more streamlined we’ve adjusted the Proving Grounds with a more centralized item spawner as well as increasing the spawn rate.

It’s a fine line to change it more, as there are players who did this grind and to discount their work isn’t something we want to do.

Once you have found all you need to find around Cyrene, Ryvox will ask you to kill 5000 players in the proving grounds. Problems here are obvious, it will take years for anyone to do it just purely due to the lack of activity down there (or up there? still have not figured it out), luckily there is the more expensive way out, which is to hire someone to run and die for you. Not ideal, but works.

After that you need to give Ryvox 60k sweat oh and did you know, you also need 900 A.R.C. Badges to be able to take this next step.

We’ve tied this mission into the Proving Grounds intentionally to not only generate more activity via increased value for the current rewards, but also because in all PvP Arenas, but specifically the Proving Grounds for this case have reduced deterioration and very low entry fee.

I’m always interested to see and hear how players are going about these missions and feedback or suggestions about how it could be changed (like this post).

Problem here is not so obvious unless you are doing the mission.

First I will complain about pvp zone. It has been changed for some reason, I have never seen restrictions like these in any pvp around the universe. I do consider myself a pvp veteran, or at least an oldie who has spent considerable amount of time in the pvp zones around the universe.

Ngu Volcano pvp rules:

• No Vehicles
• No Teleportation chips
• No Radar

This makes it very very hard to to do first 2 of the required collections. And not just that, it sort of renders pvp useless, or at least not interesting at all to come check out.

If a player dies in the zone, he cant drive or tp back, he has to run to the spot he died, especially bad to the miners. As a comparison, here is how toxic zones are set up on other planets:

• PVP4 ( Akmuul, Calypso)
  No vehicles
  Radar enabled
  TP chips allowed
  
  
• PVP3 ( Aegis Mound, Calypso)
  No vehicles
  Radar Disabled
  TP chips allowed
  
  
• Arkadia toxic zone
  No Vehicles
  Radar enabled
  TP chips allowed

I don’t know much about how other planets set up their PvP areas, and it’s something that we’re still open to change in a way that best suits Cyrene players.

As @Shawna | Cyrene mentioned we’ve already made some changes in this regard by allowing TP Chips. I have my own feelings about the other two but I would encourage any player to chime in about this.

Lets touch on the each of stage 7 parts:

• 
  
  Spoiler: Discusses stage 7 mission requirements and objectives

  [*]2500 Lungs, drop rate unknown, drop form other players
  Lets say its a guaranteed drop each time you kill another player, then only issue here, is to actually find 2500 players to kill, or what we will have to end up doing is - hire someone to die 2500 times, now this will be expensive (Toxic shot costs 5.0 peds to use, you get some back in loot, but it is always less than 5 ped, cost to run this stage, not sure yet, but definitely expensive, this would even be hard on calypso at the current meta, much easier than here thou, for sure)
  [*]5000 Molten Hearts , drop rate seems to be 1 in 5, so 25000 kills total, apart from some obstacles explained above, its not terrible, still expensive thou.
  Average hp 1875HP, total hp (not including regeneration) - 46,875,000
  If your damage per pec (DPP) is 3.0 then this stage will require ~160k ped turnover.
  [*]25000 Tide Claw pinchers, drop rate 1 in 5 (unconfirmed), I still need to test this out, but currently it seems that this stage will require 125k kills with an estimated 125k ped turnover
  [*]25000 Duster ears, drop rate is 1 in 5, so 125k kills total, with estimated 340k ped turnover
  [*]25000 Fenris Soulchips, drop rate is 1 in 10 (unconfirmed), so 250k total kills, with estimated whopping 2.6 Million ped turnover
  [*]Total estimated ped cycle for stage 7 is at least 3.2 Million ped

I will leave to individuals to what they think their return will be over 3.2M ped cycled.

The drop rates that were set in the mission don’t reflect these numbers here, which are a bit lower than I expected, especially for the Fenris Soulchips.

However, this is *exactly* why the mission was set up this way, so we could make changes in this way. Which is what we’ve done for the next PP VU:

- All drop rates have been increased (and keep an eye on it)
- Toxic Lung drops are now 100% drop rate

Of course, we’ll monitor these changes and continue to incorporate feedback from players.

Now time, gathering all the green lime tokens, doing pvp kills (even if you hire someone) and then pure grind on the stage 7 is incredible. Looking at Entropia tracker top 100 hunters list and seeing their total loot per month, knowing what are they mostly killing and applying that to this mission, I Estimate that it will take about a 6 months for a dedicated hunter, and over 5 years for someone who spends on average 8h hunting during a week.

When we planned this mission (some time ago now) the goal was very straightforward: reward players who were already playing on Cyrene, collecting badges and collecting tokens, and going through these missions with Ryvox.

It wasn’t planned to be completed within the span of a VU, but more of a long term goal of players who are Cyrene focused. I like to think of it as Test of Faith v2.2.

All that work, must be an awesome reward right?

Well, not really, reward is planet bound item with stats that are not great. Not too bad, but not very great either. The kicker for the reward weapon is that it could be a really decent gun if it wasn't planet bound, but I get why it is, and wont argue with it, however, maybe you would consider making it usable throughout the universe. Or adding a mission at the end to make it stable? Stable Turrelion Assassinator. If you want to attract as many players to Cyrene as Moloch instances have attracted to Ancient Greece, this is your ticket. IF not at all possible, consider to make additional mission or an upgrade mission to slightly improve on the stats of it!

I’m SO glad you touched on this @sokolade ! This weapon does have quite a high skill requirement, but it’s a bit plain otherwise. For a planet bound weapon it was something that we needed to see the engagement from players with before we doubled down on buffing, unlocking, versioning, etc.

ALL these things you mentioned are things that we’ve all considered for the future of this weapon and mission chain, but it depends 100% on player engagement.

List of things needed to be fixed in my opinion:

• Fix PVP zone, if you ask me I would make it like this:
  No vehicles
  Radar enabled
  TP chips allowed
  (Or at the very least enable TP chips.)

The 1st change will come in the next VU and we’ll gage player feedback and engagement via the reports and posts to where we go next.

• Fix PVP kill requirement, it is a tremendous amount of player kills, for a planet that doesn't have a tremendous amount of players, and pvp zones (both proving grounds and toxic zone), is nearly empty.

This is sort of like the chicken and egg you know? Also to echo what @Shawna | Cyrene said, players have already gone through this process for part of it and it’s our hope that more players will start to work towards this mission and have more players in these areas now that there are more rewards.

• Drop rate of collection items, its just high, and especially high for Fenris. I would say drop rate of 1 in 3 would be very reasonable for the reward, please consider that!

To reiterate from above:
- All drop rates have been increased (and we will keep an eye on them)
- Toxic Lung drops are now 100% drop rate

• The coat! Make it prettier, or add buffs to it please! Both the Green and Red, maybe 25kg and 50kg (respectively) additional carry weight to the wearers inventory, or something else even nicer.

I think Shawna said it best with:

• The coat:
  
  • Change the look and people are unhappy, don’t change the look and people are unhappy. It’s a delicate balance but something we can take a look at. However, when it comes to buffs it's never so cut and dry and it's something we need to take into more careful consideration.

We’re always looking to add value / style so if there’s a way to do so that can give players *options* it’s something we can see where we can go.

Lastly - thanks for even giving us this mission, and finishing it as late as it may have come.

This was a great post and it allowed us to elaborate on the philosophy of this mission chain so thanks for writing it. I’m sorry for my late reply, just a lot to do for me. Luckily @Shawna | Cyrene is on top of the communication in the Game / Forum / Discord on top of her other duties, so a big thank you to her as well.

Looking forward to more discussion about these changes post VU.

Cheers,
Kris

 

[Penelope]

Just killed 100 Molten Golems and got 35 Molten Heart Shards