Removing Mount as achievement reward from Variant Dungeon is a bad development choice

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Maybe if everyone wasn't so opposed to AI, they could use it to make 1,000 mounts quickly. Just because AI does it doesn't mean it's slop; depends how they utilize said AI, but everyone will disagree with me anyway because they've hardly used AI themselves.

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Jeeqbit, did an evil wombat bite you? You're usually the reasonable person, and I agreed with the rest of your take, but frankly, that's crazy. Environmental concerns? Copyright concerns? My dude? Bro?


e/: But also yeah, 71-99 was casual friendly and fairly easy to grind the 10 runs on. The hard part was finding people who listen instead of pulling fifty things.

A facewear item? Could they be more out of touch? Well finding this out zaps a lot of my motivation and that’s from someone who really likes the variant dungeons. Also the fact that the I just know the friends I’m doing it with won’t want to continue when they hear this. They often do not do, enjoy, or have time for even extreme level content. Nor are they into the style of glam this dungeon offers. The main, and for some only, interest was the mount. Because at this point the mount should be expected after completing all routes.

What they should’ve done if they had a lone shred of any sense at all was to give the single seater carpet for normal and a two seater carpet for the advanced reward.

I'm sure they will change it back. They might try out the new system and though a facewear item would be a good idea.

Did we even get a crumb of main scenario quests?
Or it’s just Hildy quests and Variant dungeon?
I guess this new Variant isn’t worth running to if we only get a silly mask… :c

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Originally Posted by 0blivion

Jeeqbit, did an evil wombat bite you? You're usually the reasonable person, and I agreed with the rest of your take, but frankly, that's crazy. Environmental concerns? Copyright concerns?

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In terms of copyright concerns, there are none with getting AI to write out mundane table entries. For example, if the mount is a goodbue, it might need to go to a table and write "mount_goodbue" and somewhere else it might need to estimate the height a rider would sit, and somewhere else it might need to find the most relevant animation set and adjust it accordingly. This way, it could be used to turn every enemy in the game into a mount instanteneously - something SE has gradually been doing for the last 16 years, manually. So in my example, they would speed this up, allowing for more mount rewards.

Another example could be to ease their localization. They say how they are overworked and most other companies just use AI for it now due to lack of translators generally. Well, they don't have to stop hiring localization staff; they could just use AI for the stuff nobody cares about - like item descriptions. I barely catch the descriptions of my quest items, and it's a giant waste of their time and money that could be spent on creating and localizing quest content. If you wonder what delays expansions so much now, the marathon pace at which they have to localize everything is surely one of the contributors to it going by how they described it.

An example of this already in use is that WoW uses it to adjust gear for different races. SE plans to use it to help QA run at walls constantly to find missing clipping faster. It could be used to find errors in code, or mass-produce lua and excel files, the boring backend stuff you will never see in the game.

The whole reason people have copyright concerns about AI is because they think the only way AI can be used is to create artwork. Many companies that implement it are run by boomers that implement it in the wrong way that is public-facing and turns away customers. But there are genuinely so many ways that it can be used behind the scenes to save time on the mundane stuff and quite literally cut down the development time of this game (and hence reward production), if people's resistance to it wasn't a concern. Another way to say it, is that if it's replacing labor then it's being used wrong and that qualified people do actually need to check its work is good - it can just make them more productive in what they do.

Environment concerns I can't comment on really, but most likely it will be temporary - apparently the RAM shortage will recover when the new data centers are all built and most likely technology will grow more efficient to require less resources. Either way, the world is much too deep into this already for SE to be able to somehow stop it with an AI boycott.

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Originally Posted by Pimsan20

I'm sure they will change it back. They might try out the new system and though a facewear item would be a good idea.

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I actually doubt it because they've done the same thing with the rest of the game. PvP sometimes has a mount, but sometimes it's just gear or facewear or something like that. We had M8 which dropped a facewear item instead of a minion. I could go on, but you see how they have actually been doing the facewear or parasol thing for quite some time now and used them in place of mounts and minions as rewards.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

they've done the same thing with the rest of the game. PvP sometimes has a mount, but sometimes it's just gear or facewear or something like that.

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This is false, the rank 25 reward has consistently always been either a mount or a unique glam set coffer, both significant rewards. It's completely incomparable to the reward for all routes in the new Variant being a facewear reskin of an unpopular headgear item that has been craftable for years and has literally no connection at all to the dungeon or its associated content. It's beyond just a "bad reward", it's borderline insulting and feels almost like it was a malicious decision.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

I don't see it, no, because 71-99 was perfectly casual friendly and plenty of non-raiders did it; it just wasn't as thoroughly unsatisfying as a lot of normal content is because things could actually kill and hurt and have consequences. Just enough to feel something. Enough to feel like there were stakes and that you had to use your eyes and be a little careful and think about your movement and action usage, but not so difficult that others couldn't save the day with theirs'.

The variant duty actions aren't particularly intended to be OP guardrails but rather to make up for lack of party members such as a DPS, a tank or a healer, and these are still present in Advanced. As overly easy as most variant dungeon bosses tend to be, the last ones or secret ones have often been quite rough, at least solo.

I also feel like if the main content I was interested in was exploring with no challenging fights involved, to do after a busy work day, that I would just do it anyway regardless of mount. Completing the book is a good enough reason to me if that's really all I want out of the game.

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The inability of some people to figure out that storymode and "casual friendly" deep dungeon optional floors are two entirely different ranges in difficulty was definitely something that's afflicted SE for ages, but I didn't think it would afflict you too.

There was no reason for them to remove a mount reward for 12 paths, when it was already there for every other variant before. A few of my fc people were upset about it and literally just logged off.
You had to slog through almost 3 hrs of paths for the mounts, which is almost as much time as it takes to clear an extreme. People DO want to feel like they are getting a little something in return for their playtime.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

It makes a lot of sense actually. We'll complete all routes anyway for lore/fun, if we want, while mount collectors won't be pushed into doing slightly different busywork variations of the same thing when they could be progressing through a fight with a friend instead.

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We were promised "better rewards" and here you are defening the game actively REMOVING content.

What are you doing

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Originally Posted by honest_psycho

We were promised "better rewards" and here you are defening the game actively REMOVING content.

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Alright, let's break down what was removed:

• All routes still there and completable, with trash I believe.
• Advanced is extra content that we didn't have before.
• Variant (Advanced) gives a mount just like previous Variant dungeons did.
• Criterion lost its (Savage) version I believe? But it was just a copy+paste of Criterion with some rule changes anyway.
• Criterion still has its mount like before.
• Arguably, we lost 2 Variant/Criterion dungeons, because it seems like this is probably the only one we're getting, unless they push out two in 7.5 suddenly.