The toxic Pagos bottleneck and how to solve it

Howdy all,

I rarely post here so I’ll try to make it count and avoid writing an essay. Anyway as we know a week or so after it came out SE massively boosted NM spawns and XP presumably after seeing a massive dropout in the number of casual players that it was designed for. This saved the content for a short time at least as it brought back the Fate Train which at least made the content bearable and gave it a social aspect. Unfortunately this has created another considerable problem in that when players get to lv35 they are still massively short of light crystals required to get a single weapon. The only way to do that effectively, albeit still taking a long time, is by light farming in a few specific locations. Since however there are now so many lv35’s and so few decent spawn locations there is a massive and increasingly toxic bottleneck as players fight over those locations that will just get bigger and bigger until once again the casual players you designed this for will just drop out.

To fix this I suggest the following changes: reduce light crystal requirements for a weapon to step 1=2 crystals, step 2=3 crystals, step 3=5 crystals. This will allow most players upon getting to lv35 to get a weapon then or shortly thereafter and then leave the content behind making room for others. Let’s be honest, it’s just not fun and I thought that “Should always be fun” was a central design principle for the game.

Anyway thanks for reading, Azure

TIL competing to see who can occupy a good farming spot in a mmorpg is considered toxic.

An alternate fix would be change the kill credit system which is the root cause here. If you hit the mob and it dies, you get your credit. Make is similar to NM/Fate credit system.

Party does less than 10% damage - Bronze effort, 15% chance of feeble light and 25% XP.
Party does 10% to 30% damage - Silver effort, 30% chance of feeble light, 10% chance of gentle light and 50% XP.
Party does more than 30% damage - Gold effort, 50% feeble, 20% gentle, 5% bright, 100% XP.
Actual numbers are my suggestions and have no expectation of being used.

No more splitting credit that is currently in place. This will help both light farming and XP chain values.
There are many complaints around these forums about AFKers not helping spawn NMs because there is almost no incentive reason to bother helping out. Unless your whole party is strong enough, you will get absolutely nothing for your efforts, so, why bother.

I agree with OP on the bottleneck problem, since I had the exact same problems with all the good light farming spots being taken. Once had a party in Pagos, went out and reformed through PF to get into a new and fresh Pagos instance, but as soon as we got in, the very same spot was already taken by another group...

But don't you think reducing the crystal requirement would make getting the relic a little too easy ? I would lower the value of the item, its "exclusivity". This kind of nerf is more welcome when the expansion is nearing its end, like the previous relic nerfs. It would anger quite a few people who farmed a lot to get those before everyone.

But it would be indeed the faster way to solve this problem.
Or may be add more dragons...

It's almost as if fate-training your way to 35 wasn't the intended method to get light. What a pity that nobody ever told fate train whiners that this would happen...oh wait.

But to answer your question Yoshi said this about Pagos at Gamescon.

"So, with the last patch, we didn't really increase the NM spawn rate to as much as it was before [in Anemos], but we increased the amount of EXP they give. It's not as effective as it was in Anemos, but you can still wait for NM spawns if you want to. But for the weapon upgrades, your predecessors spent a lot of time and effort farming mobs to grow stronger, so we won't ease up on that. Please learn how to do that."

So I wouldn't hold your breath for any nerfs just yet.

Your fix for a "toxic bottleneck" is to reduce the number of frosted crystals required from 31 to 10? Why isn't the suggestion to make other sources of light farming available?

or the community needs to theorycraft a better method for farming light. currently the most efficient method has not been found.

Pagos is too much of a mess to fix.

Please stop trying to give easily to everyone some items that other players did get the hard way at the very beginning. It is an humiliation of all the efforts they have made, and they must feel so outraged by your idea.

... errr nevermind, i thought i was in the white raven earrings thread XD

Party system to it a huge mess. You join party 20 minutes later one has to leave then disbands few seconds later. They need to make Eureka where any class can solo it easy without needing to join a party. Treasure chests is huge mess when all ever get is worthless junk and never items you want. Just hope they look back at Pagos and make next area Logos way better. First fix they need to do is fix light you need. Easy fix let you trade in Pagos crystals for frosted crystals like Anemos has. Another thing they need to fix is item drops from nm's there. like today killed Copycat Cassie got gold rating no earring. I was told it was 100% drop rate if got gold rating guess that's another lie.