Quick Update on Sprint Four and Shard Dungeon Mutations

The Major mutations have now been switched over for dungeon runs beginning now, and Aggressive should now act like Mobile. Thanks!

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This mechanic shouldnā€™t apply to bosses period because its impossible to balance! This should only be something that applies to trash mobs. This is just as bad as aggressive on bosses.

Hopefully this means more inventory space very soon!

T7 Desert Crypt, the shrooms are spawning on the mech bossesā€¦ goodbye T8 shard and T7 loot.

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yes everyone public service announcement do not do your 6+ dessert today because it is impossible with the current bug.

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Really disappointed with thisā€¦ Grinded this shard up to t7 for hours, declined my guaranteed drop from a t6 to save it for this dungeon and then shrooms pop up on the boss rendering it impossibleā€¦

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@Riley_D @Robert


please send help

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thatā€™s heartbreaking, sorry guys.

Thanks for the feedback everyone and Iā€™m sorry for the issues, Iā€™ll let Riley know. Heā€™s been busy with things today but will take care of the issue as soon as he is able to.

Heā€™ll push a fix for it soon and apologizes as well.

Can we get A replacement for the shard that we lost, because the glitch made us lose 7 shards worth of grind?

Ouchies. I think it should work like how other mmos do it. If you succeed, you move up. If you fail, you get a new shard at the same difficulty. If you abandon without completing at all, you move down a level.

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Okay, it should now be fixed for the new instances/dungeons started from this point on. We are really sorry for the inconvenience.

So are we able to get a replacement for the glitched one?

Well i guess we lost again a guaranteed T7 loot, way to go.

Unfortunately I have been consistent in telling folks we are not doing refunds for dungeon shards. I realize that policy may seem harsh, but itā€™s simply impossible to know where to draw the line on this. Iā€™ve received requests for refunds from many different Fellowships and players due to e.g. a group getting disconnected, having high latency during a run, due to inherent bugs in the game (such as desync issues), etc. Honestly if we open that Pandoraā€™s box Iā€™ll spend all day just granting shard refunds for pretty much every run, since I"m sure the case could be made that something goes wrong every time.

I realize that you all are pioneering the content here which means that some things are bound to go wrong, and weā€™re trying our best on our end to keep that to a minimum and to fix issues as quickly as possible when they are reported. I really am sorry that your run was marred by that bad experience, and I hope that the rest go much smoother for you all.

I do agree that the punishment for not being able to complete the dungeon at all seems harsh though especially now that higher shard levels are being attempted, so I will look into setting up something different for that next week.

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This is good news. Its healthier for the game to have a daily to keep people coming back without an ever-increasing timesink of grinding shards just to do something that is challenging yet rewarding. Right now it doesnā€™t make sense for players to continuously grind shards up from tier 1 every single time they want to do a tier 5.

Also the rewards for doing harder and harder dungeons feels lackluster when only 1 person gets a drop per shard as you climb. There needs to be a better system in place where you reward the effort of 5 players while keeping your daily reward loop (the daily guaranteed drop) in place. It needs to make sense with the amount of time players have to spend in shards just to get to the part of the game where they actually want to play.

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First, what I really like about shard dungeons:

  • The guaranteed roll for the whole group. Finally no longer stuck with a group grinding one boss 5x so that everyone in there gets a guaranteed; even random groups are so much easier to form if you know itā€™s a quick run of 30min; thatā€™s a brilliant change
  • I like the many different difficulty levels so even bosses which been ā€œon farmā€ are suddenly challenging again
  • And itā€™s an awesome idea to level up the low-level dungeons too, I like doing those best, currently :slight_smile:

Two Problems already mentioned:

  • Only one person gets the levelup shard. That puts pressure on single people, guilds need very stable groups to progress at all. For example, a group reaches lvl 3, thereā€™s no time to go on for the evening, and now the player owning that shard canā€™t play daily, so everyone starts from lvl 1 again; and in random groups thereā€™s no real incentive to join after getting the guaranteed, if only one (which is mostly not you) gets an upgraded shard.
    I wonder if there could at least be something like a guild-chest where others can donate their shard to be used by other members (or rather least officers/leaders) of the guild, anytime.
  • The need to start with lvl 1 over and over; this is going to be an increasing problem the better guilds get; there can always be mistakes or lack of concentration, so pressure is very high to loose all of progress - up to the point people are afraid to join/try if they feel their lack of skill might wipe groups - and it is likely never only 3h (6x30 mins) lost when like in the ex. above a lvl 6 group fails, but way more if after that they ā€œfall backā€ in between couple times, like from lvl 4 to 1, from 5 to 1 etc.
    So I second the suggestion above of Corgi_C to still get a (random) same-level shard if you donā€™t make it in time, so you can start over with your tries right where you failed, not at the much much lower levels.

I wonder if people get the point of shard dungeons. I think they are supposed to be a grind for organized groups. They are supposed to be punishing. It is repeatable content to keep the hardcore busy while the dev team works on other things. Of course disconnects and bugs are not good, but other then that, I feel they are as they were intended to be.

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If youā€™re referring to my complaints, it has nothing to do with how challenging it is. And no, I am not missing the point of shard dungeons in this game. Itā€™s here to keep people coming back to play until this MMO has a lot more features fleshed out. But youā€™re missing my point if youā€™re responding to my post.

It already accomplishes this with a daily. It could even have a weekly on top of it.

The problem here is that the shard dungeons:

  1. Are not balanced in every shape way and form (trash killed, timer vs size of dungeon and trash needed, boss difficulty, mutations)
  2. Game breaking bugs (crashes, desyncs, boss fight bugs that are still being discovered that are exasperated when scaled up)
  3. Require both time to do a dungeon and time to grind 1-X dungeons just to get back there, having to deal with #1 and #2 and then needing RNG for something that actually can be done at that tier

A lot of these problems would go away if there were less problems with the dungeons. But the reality is that shard dungeons are impacted by so many issues that make it poorly designed no matter what the ā€œintentā€ of the shard dungeons are (which is again, a time sink). Except this time sink is multiplied by the fact you need to grind to get to that time sink. This is a really old way of designing MMOs. There are other ways to kill time in an MMO than grinding to get to the grind so you can grind.

I can agree with 1and 2, both will take time. The bugs are coming along. Balenced on the other hand is really hard to get right. I donā€™t think they will ever get there perfectly, but I think everyone is trying.