A Casual Gamer's Giant 1.0 Feedback

[Heavy]

@rittchard

I think part of what I’m getting at is that in spite of there being plenty of content for a casual player, the design focus (at the moment) seems heavily tilted toward satisfying endgame players. Which of course gets back to what the devs’ goals and priorities are and how that influences things going forward. There’s nothing wrong with this emphasis, but I do think that that perspective may be limiting the game’s overall favorability in the broader market.

This is quite funny, because this sounds like this was the case for the last or last few patches.

But with the exception of the monolith expansion in Patch 0.7.9 there was no major endgame added since. They only tweaked the endgame from time to time and added 3 more islands in 0.8.1 (Original Monolith had only 7).

I wouldn’t even count the dungeons being added in 0.8.4 and 0.8.5 as an endgame patch, because they are available in low level version.
0.7.9 also brought Exalted Affixes and 0.8.4 also brought legendary crafting which both did increase the top end ceiling of everything, but I would still not consider 0.8.4 an endgame patch.

If you agree with my statements, we didn’t had an endgame focused patch since August 2020, that is 4 years.
Saying that the focus “at the moment” is heavily tilted towards endgame player I would say: YES IT IS, FINALLY.

All major patches revealed in the Roadmap have at least one endgame item in them, some even more. But even within those patches we will get new stuff for non endgame players.
Even 1.1 will have things for non endgame players. Nemesis can spawn in the campaign and EHG specifically added them so player that will not engage with the pinnacle content still have something to look forward too:

@EHG_Kain

While 1.1’s primary focus was around a Pinnacle Boss system, many players may take some time to reach that point in the game. We wanted to make sure these players didn’t feel left out of 1.1, as well as introducing more systems for everyone to engage with.

While Traveling throughout Eterra, during both the Campaign and Monolith of Fate, you may randomly come across this new encounter type: the Nemesis.

@rittchard

This also ties into the ongoing discussions I often see involving boss difficulty (Lagon comes to mind) with one shot mechanics that are theoretically dodge-able - but this assumes players have a minimum threshold of reflexes to do so.

Bringing up reflexes for Lagon… this is misrepresenting (or misunderstanding) how this mechanic works. Lagon needs no reflexes, it needs understanding of how the mechanic works… His Eye Beam charge up takes like 2 seconds. and you hardly need to “dodge it”, you just need to make the boss aim that ability, where you have enough space to simply walk away. You can literally walk away from that ability without any movement skill.

@rittchard

In my case throughout the 1.0 release I’ve consistently been multiple ranks behind what I actually wanted to buy. By the time I had reached the required Rank for something in particular, I had long moved on to a different character. Note even at the end of my 3 month stint and there few players playing, I hadn’t hit the final Rank. In other words it feels like the system as it stands is primarily a gate that shuts out casual gamers for whatever reason. Even if that wasn’t the intention, that is the effect.

No offense, but with the type of content you primarily engage with and how you play, that is what you get.
Exp/Favor gain exponentionally increases with higher levels, so if you only ever play character to Level 60-80 you will stay behind the curve. But that is ok, because the content you play doesn#t even require anything you would be able to purchase anyway.

Also the “final” ranks are specifically meant to take even longer than bringing a single character to level 100. For both Factions the last few (1-3) ranks are completely optional and you don’t need them at all.

Without wanting to sound mean, EHG can’t adjust every mechanic and game system so a player playing a certain way (not engaging with the endgame) will still give you full access to that feature.

I feel like with Nemesis being announces and new story chapters in the horizon even the type of player you are will get lots more things to do, despite the “focus on endgame” now.