Again, bring the conversation back to the issue at hand and NOT me and how I play.
Lillith statues - you seem to think they are good the way they are? Fine, I don’t.
Thanks, for bringing this back to the core issue.
The purpose and intent are not really what they are being used for. They are a barrier to power that people feel forced to do. It’s unnatural.
It’s not about me, or my multiboxing, or how many accounts I have or my stash, it’s about how the statues could be better designed into the game play instead of just expecting them to be randomly found (which strangely some people think is how it should be done also).
I wouldn’t have brought them up if I hadn’t had redone them. Also for most of you it’s an after thought so you need to bring back what you experienced.
The chance it gets brought up as a discussion point is extremely low with veteran players.
When I was redoing them, I kept on asking myself how could this be done better. It’s just frankly NOT fun.
I always struggle with the generic use of the word Developers. I’d be willing to bet most of the people (Coders aka Developers) who are actually building this stuff do indeed play the game. Creative directors, Level designers and story directors maybe not as much…
And the reason for this is that the player base mutinied. It was one of the hottest potatoes, and I think one of maybe half a dozen “vision” problems that resulted in the demotion (this is me connecting dots, based in part on how the controversy played out at the time).
It’s power, locked behind idle exploration - like you said. Bad design. Wouldn’t take much to tweak it - say, remove paragon & stats statues, and also place the 20 paragon earlier in the renown grind. But it’s no longer seen as a “problem” so it won’t get solved anytime soon.
That’s mainly bc existing players don’t think in universal terms, only in “how does this affect me right now?” terms. New players aren’t a thing. Players with 2+ accounts aren’t a thing. Softcore/hardcore isn’t a thing. Attempting to recruit others to play/ get others to play again… not a thing.
Posting this change idea bc it would serve the original design intent, which was exploration & interaction with multiple systems, and bc it couldn’t be worse than the original. The status quo is a ”temporary” hotfix that was surely not meant to be permanent.
Remove stats & paragon from statues. Replace these with gold, boss mats and bonus XP rewards. Make these “mystery statues” that cycle among these 3 rewards… make the bonus XP reward massive at the lowest levels, e.g. most of a full level, with rapidly diminishing returns after level 20. (“Mystery statue” rewards are randomly located per account. Equally split among the 3 types of reward. Locations are account-specific, meaning going back to that location with an alt gives the same type of reward.)
Remove skill & paragon points from renown grind.
Improve the XP & gold unlocks in the character row. (Make both scale with character level?)
Place a resplendent spark at the end of the account-wide row.
Hide the statues per character & make the account-wide row seasonal.
Fix the occult packs near the statues, place them at every statue, and give them quick spawn times.
It’s not inherent player power, so it’s not ‘required’. It’s an enticing reward (6 resplendent sparks for full grind in VoH), so people are incentivized to do it - esp bc 90% will have mounts. It’s not “easier” than current strategies to accumulate sparks, but it’s less lane-y. It’s not endlessly repeatable, like infinite alts.
A “third way” between creating multiple renown alts and serial boss running, which is different from both, and which would appeal to casuals (although everyone would probably do it).
Want to maintain seasonal questlines that end in a spark? Integrate them into the permanent renown grind. You’ll probably need a map/renown UI overhaul to make it fully functional - though such an overhaul is long overdue.
I know you’ve been reusing that Season 2 renown board template, but change could be good. Seasonal NPC interaction could still be a thing (via quest prompts). The main ‘innovation’ here might be to have a seasonal NPC in each region. Restricting the seasonal “thing” to a short quest chain in one corner of one region (+ a couple random dungeons) strikes me as unimaginative & a bit “cheap”.
As a possible side effect: at the first implementation, it could give Eternals another way to recoup losses when their Mythics get reckt. (Too complicated.)
We do renown every season, just not the original renown (which did serve a purpose: it provided stats, skill points, and paragon). If current seasonal renown isn’t fun, that’s a problem that needs fixing… the obvious fix isn’t to just delete it. For one thing, devs would then struggle to come up with a “season theme”.
The original renown is already dead. There should be an innovative way to revive it.
