As the title say, those feathers should be exchangeable with wolf marks.
They are useful in crafting equipment, but the items they are used for in synthing is PvP only.
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As the title say, those feathers should be exchangeable with wolf marks.
They are useful in crafting equipment, but the items they are used for in synthing is PvP only.
You can, sort of.
Use Wolf Marks to buy iLvl 205 accessories (Heavenward items). Turn those in for 1160 GC seals a piece through Expert Delivery turn ins. Use those seals to buy the feathers.
So anything purchasable with GC seals is basically purchasable with wolf marks. It would be convenient to make some of those items a direct purchase, though.
Yes, I know. The WD marked need something consumable imo, not just equipment.
It is really sad that people playing PvP for reward instead of enjoying the PvP.
A World of Warcraft developer was once asked what he thought was the biggest surprise in how his audience of players approached the game. He said the fact that "players choose efficiency over fun" came as a surprise to him. It seems counter intuitive, but mmorpg players in particular appear to be very objective oriented, even to the point of choosing the most efficient methods over the most fun ones. Not many people would be willing to continually do PvE for no reward after finishing the stories either. Things aren't much different for PvP mmorpg players.
But do they really?
IMO, that statement primarily highlights how very badly understood the concept of "rewards" is within the industry. The whole point of rewards is to make people do something they'd rather not do - to make them do something they do not enjoy to get something they 'do' enjoy as compensation for a positive net effect. As such, a reward serves as substitute enjoyment/fun. This fundamental concept of:"Do something you do not want to get something you do want" is widely used not just in MMOs, but in real life as well.
This is also what makes rewards that people do not care about completely useless and people will most definitely not choose efficiency over fun if they don't care for the reward in the first place. The reward itself needs to be enjoyable for the person in question in one way or the other, otherwise the rule does not apply.
Offering people a raise for example does not always make people more motivated or work harder, some would rather have more authority, some would rather have more free time for themselves or whatever. How to properly incentivize people is a big topic in human resource management, misincentives included.
Net fun thus becomes an equation of "Intrinsic Enjoyment + Enjoyment from extrinsic Rewards". It's rarely just either or.
Efficiency becomes such a big topic in MMOs because they are very repetitive by nature and repetition will drag intrinsic enjoyment down fast and the equation will lean more and more on the right side of that equation. That has nothing to do with the MMO playerbase in particular, this is something that happens with just about everything and was a big issue with assembly line work. It was monotonous, repetitive and workers became less motivated as a result, thereby making the learning curve benefits it created void. And that means that these games make heavy use of rewards to make up for this shortcoming, which in turn also puts optimization of said rewards into the forefront. It's an unavoidable necessity, especially in scripted PvE content.
This normal degradation however is usually much slower in PvP than in PvE due to its variable nature. Rewards are ultimately necessary, but generally later and less than in comparable PvE games or content. The big issue for this game is that the starting point of that degradation isn't particularly high for most for various reasons that are probably best debated in a different thread.
Another tricky bit is that games and content compete with each other, as your time in a given day is limited, so choosing one or the other will come down to which you value higher in its net sum. Hence why people often just log out and play a different game instead of bothering with capping tomes - The enjoyment from playing a different game outweighs the enjoyment from the latest tome armor. This goes back to the point that rewards need to be enjoyable for the person to have any effect.
This point is one I am an example of myself - If I want to PvP, I don't play this game's PvP, I play League of Legends. I would get extra tomes from it here, maybe XP marks, whatever - I don't care. I've given it a lot of fair chances, I don't find it enjoyable. I am putting my foot in this game's PvP if there's an exclusive glamour I really want to have.
Now, that was a big rant and only tangential to the topic, so let's close with a simple statement:
I personally think that it should rather be the Regain Feather and Icarus Wing that are buyable with wolf marks. Reason being: They are Frontline exclusive items, where else should they be if not on the PvP vendors?
Personally I care very little about the rewards. I'm probably one of the few that exclusively plays just for the fun of it. At the same time I find it annoying sitting on 20K WD constantly. The only things I use WD for is desynth or exchange for GCseals. I would rather spend them on something PvP specific from time to time.
Yup, that would make sense. Why not both? I would also argue HQ max potions and max ethers should be on there too, but I would probably be lenient with any counterarguments. Aka not a nazi about it.
what noooo I use those items on frontlines, I buy 'em on the market if less than 1k gil, and use on frontlines :D
You're assuming that the person receiving the reward must necessarily not enjoy the prerequisite task. Not true. You're oversimplifying how rewards work in reality. Sometimes people enjoy the task at hand, sometimes they don't. However, people get rewarded for things they enjoy doing all the time.
Most professional athletes genuinely enjoy the sport that they're playing. IRL, I sometimes have to be motivated to do things that I actually enjoy and I still enjoy myself.
I don't believe I've ever stated otherwise. You've made a lot of incorrect assumptions about the point I was trying to make but it's probably my own fault for not clarifying. My point was not to say that rewards should come before gameplay or that they will serve as a solution to any inherent gameplay issues, which is how you seem to have interpreted my comments based on my interactions with you on other threads. Note that the developer I mentioned never said that the players who chose efficiency enjoyed the game more or that development should be tailored in such a way as to promote efficiency over fun.
"Efficiency over fun" suggests that the players choosing efficiency had less fun. It suggests that the fun content and the efficient content were separate things. My point was to make the fun content and the efficient content one and the same. My point isn't to keep the efficient content and the fun content separate. If PvP is fun, I want it to also be efficient. I don't understand your argument against this position, because if rewards help bad content, they'll also help good content. If PvP was good by your standards it would still benefit from a better incentive structure. It's not the either-or situation you're making it out to be where SE either makes adjustments to PvP or provides more incentive. Other PvP games, including League, have lootboxes, ranked rewards, grindable characters, grindable character mastery, regular events, etc, so I can't for the life of me figure out why you keep arguing for less while Dota/LoL/HoTs compete to give their playerbases more.
You haven't explained to me how it hurts the game or why it shouldn't be done. Just that it shouldn't be necessary, essentially making your argument one of unexplained frugality. The funnest game in the world will still benefit from a better incentive structure because some percentage of people will process incentives as one of the deciding factors in whether they engage with a piece of content and whether they stick with that same content for a long duration.
This is more or less the point I was making but since you've attacked me for it, I'll reduce it to an undeniable premise. Rewards make fun things better. Everyone knows it, every PvP game does it. Lastly, the grind for an extrinsic reward can become an intrinsic enjoyment when done properly, which is something you've completely discounted. This is a part of the satisfaction in drawing, painting, working on a puzzle, etc. Seeing your individual efforts culminate into a worthwhile final product can be enjoyable.
This isn't meant as a critique or anything; I don't know the "history" (except the one in this thread I guess) behind this post. Simply a comment.
Depending on your angle, an incentive can indeed be hurtful for an activity. For example, if the incentive encourages fast work where careful work is needed, and the pool of potential workers the incentive applies to contains workers who can't work fast and careful at the same time.
In the case of exp reward in PvP, the incentive does not encourage the player to do anything at all (except participate). For those who want to play by the "rules", this can hurt their experience (bots/afkers).
/offtopic