Adoulin Colonization: Post Delve

[Pug]

Part request, part question, part suggestion.

The question:

How has your world's colonization effort been impacted by the divergence of players into Plasma/Delver farming activities, and away from Colonization activities?

Yahse has been sub 30% for the most part, but Morimar has been steadily falling away from high 80s/90s, Foret like Yahse has never really taken off. Ceizak has fallen away from hits high marks, but maintains a 70s rate as it stands on my last check of Asura.

No one is clearing the obstructions in zones, and only the ones that impede access to a Delve outdoor ??? seem to find themselves destroyed at some point or another.

Bayld acquisition has fallen to only gathering/find missions as a generally feasible means to build the vast supply needed to cover all the possible wants offered by the Coalitions.

The request:

Delve needs to have an impact on Colonization, or Colonization must be required for Delve.

While you can see the potential future state of Colonization reflected in current state of the Campaign efforts in Wings of the Goddess, the moment you place higher tier reward/emphasis on a different, unconnected character progression system, the old ones just die off.

Colonization Reive, and Skirmish never really had a time to shine and develop into something that could still draw people in while the newer/'better' equipments entice those that only want best in slot stuff.

Lair Reive have never taken off. Their low bayld/exp reward, and generally extremely brief combat leave them untouched for the most part.

Your item level/content level system and bridging gaps between them has been conveyed in your most recent posts, but there are big jumps for most of us that can't be overcome as easily without a high amount of bayld flowing into our coffers to hit those initial content levels.

The suggestion:

Make lower hp/lower offensive output versions of Delve monsters as the 'final stage' of Lair Reives, with Bayld & Plasma rewards added to the array of possible random reward drops currently in the Reive system.

This will allow Delve players to do something within the Colonization system that impacts the colonization state, and still push on with their personal Delve progression, as well as share and experiment on the tactics involved in defeating these interesting monsters, and the tricks/gimmicks that really make these creatures unique.

Colonization Reives I would like to see open up to make both parts of the process critical, and required. A Colonization Reive appears unprotected by Monsters.

When the first (and only) Root/Rock that can be targeted is defeated, the wave of monsters appears, and when defeated, we return to obstructions, and repeat for root/rock #2, and post destruction now with 2 waves, and the final rock/root appearing along with monsters that may or may not need to be defeated in the current style of Colonization Reive.

I'd like to hear others thoughts on the above, and would like to see if every world is starting to see a slip in their ability to navigate and access all parts of the expansion in part due to the drop in Colonization efforts. Bivouacs becoming more difficult to supply, missions are more time consuming to complete and therefore less rewarding compared to other activities, and the cycle continues downward.

Thanks for reading.

[Alhanelem]

I see it happening too, but I'm not entirely sure why, because there are still many useful items for bayld, and more will be added. There's no reason to stop doing colonization reives.

[Urthdigger]

Sadly, I get the feeling the new producer just doesn't understand the player mentality: Second best isn't worth getting. He envisions newer players spamming reives for bayld, doing skirmish and naakuals to get better gear, and finally doing delve. But what's actually happening is players just jump immediately to delve: It has the best gear, and that also makes it the easiest to recruit people for.

I imagine we're gonna have the same thing that happened with Shinryu, where it WAS difficult when it first came out, but in the end people will just get folks who've already done it to beat it easily so they can get their gear.

The only way I see this being fixed would pretty much require an overhaul of Adoulin content... and most likely the game in general, so that the gap in both equipment and difficulty between events was so immense that you NEEDED gear from the previous event to participate in the new one. They've stated that the gear from the higher level content should be considered level 110, or level 120 gear. In that case, trying to do delve without gear from other adoulin content should very much be like someone trying to do endgame at level 50 back in the old 75 cap: You can't contribute jack and you should come back when you can.

In addition, the lesser content needs to be casual content to reflect the fact that nobody is going to keep spamming it for years, not when they're going to replace the rewards with better stuff down the line. There are two reasons for this: The first one is that if it takes a player months to get a piece of gear, they're going to be pretty pissed off when all they can do is toss it once they get the piece from the next event. The gear needs to be easy to get so that replacing it is relatively painless. In addition, with stuff like reives and skirmish being content you only do until you can do better things, it needs to be possible to do with a less than optimal group: Whoever you can find bored in your LS, or a small group of friends. The content with the best rewards will be the one everybody flocks to and stays at, and as we can already see finding people for lesser content will be difficult.

Lastly, this is the opinion of someone probably up too late bored and browsing the forums. I could be entirely wrong on all points, who knows.

[Kristal]

Have reives grant Rank Points on equiped Delve weapons. Like giving airlixirs on reive completion, depending on colonization rate. (The lower the colonization rate, the higher the chance for an airlixir.)

[Fynlar]

Sadly, I get the feeling the new producer just doesn't understand the player mentality: Second best isn't worth getting. He envisions newer players spamming reives for bayld, doing skirmish and naakuals to get better gear, and finally doing delve. But what's actually happening is players just jump immediately to delve: It has the best gear, and that also makes it the easiest to recruit people for.

While that's pretty much the crux of the issue right there, another major contributing factor is the fact that the cost of entry for Skirmish/Naakuals was just set way too high, deterring repeat runs to actually get the desired equipment, whereas it's incredibly easy in comparison to get into Delve.

While at the time, the cost of entry seemed somewhat justified due to the comparatively high tier of the equipment dropped, nowadays nobody can see the point of it if they were just going to outdate all of it with Delve in a month.

[detlef]

Well, Skirmish is super cheap now. It's super accessible for anybody at the moment, and it's a decent way to get caught up.

[Fynlar]

Well, Skirmish is super cheap now. It's super accessible for anybody at the moment, and it's a decent way to get caught up.

Just because it's cheaper doesn't necessarily mean it's more accessible.

You still need a group to do it, and most people couldn't give two bleeps about Skirmish now because they're off doing Delve.

[detlef]

You can do it with a single party, the triggers are now cheap and plentiful (and can even be purchased on the AH), there are no prerequisites (other than being level 95), and there are no restrictions on reentry. That's practically the definition of accessible.

[Dragoy]

I'm surprised they didn't make the lower content level required for the higher. That's probably the only way to get people to do it the way they envisioned. Say, you would get some form of 'tags' to do more delving from doing the lesser content, or something like that.

I could pretty much immediately see Colonization becoming like Campaign; deserted, and soon...

[Fynlar]

You can do it with a single party,

You still need a group to do it, and most people couldn't give two bleeps about Skirmish now

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