New Variant Dungeon: Reward structure is a downgrade from previous ones.

here to add my voice to the chorus of disappointment. i was looking forward to this dungeon, i wanted to learn more about corvos. i enjoy doing the dungeons themselves, i've done them all multiple times solo and with friends. i also use 2/3 of the mount rewards from the last dungeons frequently. but i am a causal player and it is a time commitment to do all of the paths. getting a shitty sleep mask we already had in the game feels like a slap in the face honestly. i never did criterion dungeons because i was happy with the rewards from normal runs. i don't have the time/energy to put into doing harder content and i was ok with that because casual players would still get rewards that were worthwhile.

You know, somehow I don't think this is what people meant when they said variant dungeon rewards needed to be reworked. Seriously, a pajama mask for getting all the routes? That's real motivating to actually do them all Square.

This has me extremely worried about 8.0

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Originally Posted by Ankhira

most players don’t evaluate glamour, mounts, or weapons based on difficulty they just use what they like.

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Come on, you can't be pretending that MMO players don't like having and showing off rare mounts, items and titles.

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Originally Posted by Ankhira

Seeing someone with an Ultimate weapon doesn’t tell me anything except that they like the weapon.

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It also tells you they completed the activity required to obtain it, that's a fact. (cheating notwithstanding)

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Originally Posted by Ankhira

again, casuals also contribute to the funds that pays for dev time. So only catering to one side of the playerbase is simply not good.

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Casuals who refuse to engage with any challenging content are getting this fun new dungeon to explore. An achievement reward for doing all the routes would be nice, but this type of content generally doesn't need as much reward compared to the subsequent harder difficulties which require greater incentives to invest the effort. They're just fun, unlike spending hours herding the 7 donkeys in my PF group who can't do mechanics to the finish line of a savage fight. Ideally there'd be rewards for both, but SE makes inefficient use of its resources so we have limited pickings.

If there's a way they aren't catering to casuals enough, I think it's more in terms of content longevity - beyond just the items offered. Most casual content is one-and-done spectacle, and doesn't last long enough especially in the grand scheme of the expansion's lifetime. This is a separate problem that I hoped OC would address, but we all know how that went. IMO what we need is more stuff like Eureka and Bozja which makes efficient use of assets to provide long-term enjoyment for all types of players. If they used the existing open-world zones for this gameplay, that'd free up even more dev resources and file size for making reward items. A ton of dev time goes into making casual content, but the stuff they choose to make takes like half an hour for players to finish leaving you with nothing to do afterward. You can add mounts or glam to incentivize repeating the same easy duty multiple times... but I feel we can do better than that.

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Originally Posted by Ankhira

You say that giving rewards to normal‑mode content takes away from raiders but that doesn’t hold up at all in DT. Raiders have had an enormous amount of content this expansion

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Quantum notoriously lacks any rewards beyond a title, and as a result many people saw little reason to clear it. Forked Tower was similar, and everything else has been the standard fare (Savage is still lacking reward-wise, I should add). I agree that the content offerings in DT have been too focused on the high-end boss format, and should be more varied and wide in their appeal as I touched on above. We also need new types of rewards which take less dev work to create.

So. I ran the dungeon once this evening, and I found it charming. I might do all the paths for fun and lore during this final month of my subscription, and I might grind potsherds for the storyteller’s glam set. (There are many things I’m not impressed by in Dawntrail, but the glams are FIRE.)

I definitely agree though that the reward structure is an inexplicable downgrade from the previous variant dungeons, and the potsherd rewards put the lie to the idea that it’s because of limited resources. We got two glam sets, twice the usual quantity of glamour rewards from a variant dungeon. Surely they could have given one glamour set and one mount that’s a reskin of an existing one on an old animation skeleton for a similar art budget. (Though my preference would have been to give us both glamour sets and a new mount.)

One of my personal favorite experiences in terms of dungeon content. Fight designs were great, mechanics were fun. Boss designs really nice.
Locations, graphics, even music, really well done. Very wholesome as well.

And then you drop the ball with the rewards that was the MAJOR problem with V&C.

Don't get me wrong, I prefer the current Advanced and Criterion systems over the old one. But the devs must have known there was a massive problem with the rewards in of themselves.
I'm honestly baffled by this.

Wow, yeah this isn't cool at all. It's insane to a huge degree that the face mask is the reward and everything is just nerfed in terms of rewards in general.

I don't bother doing content since I'm someone with many alts with no time or desire to repeat content on said alts, and who really doesn't have any desire to get new stuff on my "main". Most things don't fit.

And yet somehow this motivates me even less and makes me all the more worried for the future of the game.

What in the world are they even thinking?

Yeah, this just makes no sense at all. I'm usually someone willing to give the devs the benefit of the doubt on things like this, or to at least be willing to give them a chance to make up for bad decisions, but this is just all around stupid.

Why remove the one major reward for doing the 12 paths? I'll still do it because I enjoy the process but it's a pretty big investment if you try to figure it all out yourself and to just get such a terrible reward for doing so? It's just insulting. A stupid sleeping mask? Come the F on.

And why are they still completely unable to just properly reward the players who complete the "savage" version? Why is it so hard for them to just do something like give alternate statted right side gear pieces? Same iLevel as the Savage pieces but with a different stat arrangement would be perfect, wouldn't really detract from the Savage rewards, and would drive the most dedicated hardcore players to the new content (as well as open up an alternate gearing method for those who don't do Savage 8mans).

On a purely mechanical and visual level, the new Variant is great.. but they really need to get their heads out of their collective rear ends on this content or just stop doing it altogether. It seriously can't be that hard.. and this is their 4th go at it.

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Originally Posted by StriderShinryu

It seriously can't be that hard.. and this is their 4th go at it.

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It very much seems like the complaints from the previous 3 went into one ear and out of the other.
What makes this even funnier is that advanced has accessories you can buy, with unique models, but they made them level 1 with no stats.

Criterion is quite literally the same rewards as before. A mount, an orchestrion roll, a framer's kit and materia.
All they really did is shuffle some rewards from variant into the new advanced boss rush.

I haven't even played the new patch & I'm already cringing at their decision from reading this thread.

At the very least, they could've ADD rewards to the higher difficulties. But noooo, let's starve the lower difficulty reward and put it behind criterion equivalent advanced+ difficulty. Hey, at the very least they're tradeable? lmao.

They REALLY do be pushing people into the high ends this expac, eh?

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Originally Posted by Underscore

[…]Rewarding higher difficulty is just basic game design.[…]

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I agree in spirit. However in this case, it would’ve echoed better if that is how they’ve been doing from the get go since Sil’dihn implementation. They made it even better in Aloalo savages, but now they take 2 steps backward.