Adoulin Colonization: Post Delve

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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...

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Originally Posted by you

You can do it with a single party,

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Originally Posted by me

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

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This text is here because the post is apparently too short otherwise and quoted text doesn't count

Well I suppose the entire game outside of Delve is inaccessible then. And since Delve isn't accessible to everybody then it must be a lonely existence for some.

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Originally Posted by detlef

Well I suppose the entire game outside of Delve is inaccessible then. And since Delve isn't accessible to everybody then it must be a lonely existence for some.

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The sad part is, this is most likely exactly what is happening to anyone without a big enough friend group to do completely different things.

Greetings!

I have some news on upcoming adjustments to a couple of colonization-related activities. While the specifics are not quite finalized as of yet, I would like to share an overview.

• Rewards for Coalition Assignments
  Currently looking into having an additional bonus applied to rewards based on certain requirements.
  
  For example, bonuses are added to rewards depending on the distance or bonuses are added depending on bivouac conditions.
  
  
• Maintaining Bivouacs
  In addition to adding bonuses to Coalition Assignment rewards, we plan on making the adjustments to lengthen the time frame in which you can maintain bivouacs.
  
  More specifically, just like the adjustments that were made to slow the decay of the colonization rate, we will be performing a similar adjustment for bivouacs.
  
  Also, besides these two adjustments, we are also looking into making it possible to restore the bivouac materials by trading gil to the NPCs at each of the bivouacs.
  
  
• Bivouac Conditions
  It’s rather difficult to display this via the Region information tab when considering that we would have to make this possible to confirm from all platforms.
  
  However, we are planning to make it possible to check on bivouac conditions by setting up NPCs at Coalitions, frontier stations, and frontier bivouacs.

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Originally Posted by Camate

Greetings!

I have some news on upcoming adjustments to a couple of colonization-related activities. While the specifics are not quite finalized as of yet, I would like to share an overview.

• Rewards for Coalition Assignments
  Currently looking into having an additional bonus applied to rewards based on certain requirements.
  
  For example, bonuses are added to rewards depending on the distance or bonuses are added depending on bivouac conditions.
  
  
• Maintaining Bivouacs
  In addition to adding bonuses to Coalition Assignment rewards, we plan on making the adjustments to lengthen the time frame in which you can maintain bivouacs.
  
  More specifically, just like the adjustments that were made to slow the decay of the colonization rate, we will be performing a similar adjustment for bivouacs.
  
  Also, besides these two adjustments, we are also looking into making it possible to restore the bivouac materials by trading gil to the NPCs at each of the bivouacs.
  
  
• Bivouac Conditions
  It’s rather difficult to display this via the Region information tab when considering that we would have to make this possible to confirm from all platforms.
  
  However, we are planning to make it possible to check on bivouac conditions by setting up NPCs at Coalitions, frontier stations, and frontier bivouacs.

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wouldnt bonus based on distance kinda give a disvantage to certain jobs? i like the bivouac one tough

A quick way to also drive up desire to do assignments nad rieves is to make an npc where players to convert Byalds into Plasm into a 50:1 ratio or something of that level. It'll provide incentive to do lower content whilst making a connection to the higher end through some in game medium. This also allows players without the resources to farm plasm(lack of job preferred by playerbase, or weapon) to make headway into the content that will probably be obsoleted. This also helps alleviate concerns about the new ammunition from plasm to accessible.

If there is concern about accessibility by lesser geared players to gain this ability throw in a formal requirement such as defeating a wildskeeper rieve or successfully defeat any delve NM.

Maybe just have it so you can buy the shards with bayld? Then you can convert them to plasm if you want. They are kinda rare, and the potential to sell them for gil , so they would probably have a high price.

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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.)

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This is an outstanding idea

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Originally Posted by 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.)

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That's just silly, what would I do without all those wijnruits, logs, and moko grass I would otherwise get from reives!?

Regarding bayld for shard conversion:
This won't happen specifically due to the reason that this would be the new RMT money machine. They would be spamming reives, get bayld, buy shards, and sell shards like mad to all the plasm hungry people out there. It's a good idea but sadly i don't think it will come to fruition.

As long as we're bringing up ways to make the region metagames worth doing, any thoughts on things that might make people more inclined to help out with the other middlelands, past and near east?

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Originally Posted by Aethon

Regarding bayld for shard conversion:
This won't happen specifically due to the reason that this would be the new RMT money machine. They would be spamming reives, get bayld, buy shards, and sell shards like mad to all the plasm hungry people out there. It's a good idea but sadly i don't think it will come to fruition.

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This is exactly why I said direct bayld to plasm conversion rather than to shards.

Just like Cats are required for Prov Watcher, they should make A Colonization Rieve or two required before you take on a Delve boss. Yes, I went there.

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Originally Posted by Satonaka

Just like Cats are required for Prov Watcher, they should make A Colonization Rieve or two required before you take on a Delve boss. Yes, I went there.

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Just keep the damage reduction they have in Wildskeeper's reives. If Morimar is at 50% colonization, Achuka takes 50% normal damage. So too should Achuka's brother inside delve. Problem solved.

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Originally Posted by Smokenttp

wouldnt bonus based on distance kinda give a disvantage to certain jobs? i like the bivouac one tough

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Not attack distance, but distance from Adoulin. So if you deliver supplies to Ceizak biv #3, you get more reward then if you delivered them to #1. Right now it's the same, even though #3 is likely down while #1 is up.