Ultimate Coils should Never be rebalanced

[RiyahArp]

If you don't have the time now, you won't later when it will be impossible to find people who care about it.

[Serilda]

I would like them to one day allow undersized entry so that I can actually see it, but never unsynced or echo. It should stay brutally hard and it doesn't bother me at all if that means I'll never complete it; let those who expend the effort have their special content.

I would also like them to add some similarly brutal 4-man content one day so that my tiny group can have something to work on.

[Lambdafish]

If you don't have the time now, you won't later when it will be impossible to find people who care about it.

Depends, people still farm ARR ponies. If the content is designed to last then it will. The big problem is the Dev team are poor at incentives IMG longevity in content

[Zojha]

Depends, people still farm ARR ponies.

I'm at a loss of words here. Sure, yes, they do, that is fact. Likewise, people still do the Lord of Verminion challenges to get the Clockwork Twintania. Does that make these challenges "lasting content"? Because they have rewards new players have yet to attain? Because then all content is "lasting". But for any given player, any given pony farmer or LoV challenger, the content only lasts a rather limited amount of time - right up until they got the rewards.

Now, increasing the longevity of a piece of content for a given player is extremely tricky, because if you try to create "longevity" via rewards - and MMOs always do - then the longevity equals the gating of the reward. And the tighter you make the gate, the less people will fit through. You can gate things behind time, skill, effort/grind, disposable income... whatever, the harsher the gating, the less players will bother, the less people will qualify and there's a clear tradeoff between longevity and accessibility, between the amount of players doing the content and the time it lasts the players doing it. And your job as designer becomes to find the sweet spot between them.

What SE then commonly does is to nerf content over time - they start with a tight gate and widen it over time to let more people through. In essence, that's the skimming strategy you can find in price politics. As the skilled people get their rewards and move on, you open it up to the next skill segment so it doesn't die out and then, once those got their rewards and moved on, to the next and the next until it's pony farm and anyone can get it "for cheap" to maximize it's longevity for the playerbase as a whole as it passes all skill segments. Which is precisely what people are yelling against here.

And a side note on the content volume: The game already has more content than anyone can reasonably consume and people are eager to point out all content there is in this game whenever someone complains that there's a lack of content. The key to understand the plaint is to realize that when they say there isn't enough content, they mean there isn't enough content they like to engage in. Which, for the vast majority of players, Ultimate is gonna fall into. It's dead on arrival content for most and the longevity of it for those players is zero.


Personally, I expect Ultimate to fade into obscurity before the end of the expansion and then never get touched again until it gets nerfed in one way or the other. It's only relevant to a small subset of players while it's fresh already and as those start to get their rewards and clears, the pool of players for it will dwindle and the remainders able and willing are gonna have an increasingly tough time finding people.