Question: Are mission rewards devaluating skills?

[M Rufen Power]

I basically had a nice chat with someone from the Ma-Team this morning.

(name or who does not matter here)

Basically I want to know from the community if skill rewards are somehow devaluating the skills market. If so why, if not so why. Give reasons why skill rewards is a good thing & not bad for the economy or vice versa.

We as a community need to rationalise this in a informative way so that the folks at MA can see the positives to the economy than the negatives. Do you hunt more now due to missions? Is there even a need to chip skills in now? What actually does devalue skills if not rewards off missions, any other ways this can happen in EU?

This is what I think & feel about the matter. Firstly missions ie iron challenges are in no doubt the best thing I've seen in EU with which I would not have been motivated enough to hunt at the level which I' am currently at without it. That means less ped cycled & ultimately less ped in the lootpool + MA's share. So in my opinion this is good for the economy.

I don't plan to quit anytime soon so the skills I've acquired through missions I won't be selling. But either way missions have actually helped me to realise that chipping skills is ok & have sort of encouraged me a bit to do so in little ways. In future I will no doubt chip my way to the top & not ashamed to say it, all thanks to missions. To me more iron challenges should be added with careful moderation to what rewards are given & the TT values assigned to them.

It's nice that some missions give you a multiple choice while others don't. It's nice to see that some of the TT values of the current missions we have now are assigned very well, apart from 1 or 2 being the opposite.

Are mission rewards devaluating skills? Yes - No. Vote Now!

For my vote I'll say No they are not, so more iron missions should be added obviously.. You need skills to even acquire the skills in the first place & most of what MA is doing isnt creating trust for the platform so people have had enough they quit & of course sell many abundant set of skills on market, pushing prices down.

~Mark~

 

[Norbert]

I don't think they are devaluing the skill market, if anything after the skill changes they are needed now for people to advance. At higher levels skill gains are so slow these boosts to stat and skills are needed imo, also with the skill/stat boosts for missions it improves the market for higher weapons, faps, etc. If anything a diminished playerbase is more responsible for devaluation along with some bigger player sell outs which flooded the market.

If stat/skill rewards for current missions were removed i dread the shitstorm that would follow, i think it would be a great mistake.

For many they have provided an incentive to grind which must be a good thing?

I think devaluation mostly occurred when the skill system was "rebalanced" that change alone put more esi tt value in the game than any amount of grinding missions could possibly do. The highest skilled players gained a sickening amount of skill value as a result of that, and i believe the devaluation we see today is as both a result of those changes along with a stagnating playerbase. We need a big influx of players who will stay and deposit, with little demand and supply increased via the skill changes i believe this to be the situation we currently face.

My opinion anyway

 

[Shady]

heya Mark

I did many mission because of the skill but maybe it devaluate them idk so im 50/50 i guess
one problem could be
whit diferent planet there would always been a low lvl mob iron chalenge you can got get the skill from

 

[aa840]

I voted no...

Because... Its simple, To aquire the skills at the end of a certain mob mission. 16600 mobs must be killed.


When you think about it, you need skills to aquire the skills at the end of missions.

Not to mention the time and patience.

In the end I think its a good reward for the people doing the mission. But to think it devaluates the cost of skills being sold. I'm not too sure cause everyone is able to get the skills.

Example:

A 2 day noob could go out and kill 16600 atrox & Gain lots of skill doing the whole grinding.

Get 100ped evade.

Time + Ped spent = Reward.

----

Same noob could just save time and buy all the skill points.

---

In the end, We used to grind to get skills anyway, now we just get a bonus. It's just more harder to skill then it used to be years ago.

PS: I never chipped ever, This is a nice bonus to a person like me! I also don't plan on chipping out in a LONG LONG TIME

Jay-Jay

 

[Thorns Rose]

Great Topic!

I voted "No"..I don't think so.I am doing Iron Missions and think it is a great thing to strive for actually. I have a few open so depends on level or mood I'm in if I want to go peck at them. I like the skill rewards offered helps I think.

 

[SashaSD]

I voted 50/50 but now I have to be constructive :/ here goes...

I don't think the rewards will have devalued the skills however if the value of skills is declining it may be because of the missions. If more people are hunting more to complete the missions, by the act of hunting they will be skilling more which would imply there are more skills in game than there would have been if people were not hunting (if you see what I mean). So maybe I should have voted yes lol.

I do think the misions are good, they have certently kept me more interested in hunting.

Sasha

 

[Fishface]

I basically had a nice chat with someone from the Ma-Team this morning.

(name or who does not matter here)

Basically I want to know from the community if the skill rewards are somehow devaluating the skills market. If so why, if not so why. Give us your reasons why the skill rewards is a good thing and not bad for the economy or vice versa.

We as a community need to rationalise this in a informative way so that the folks at MA can see the positives to the economy than the negatives. Do you hunt more now due to missions? Is there even a need to chip skills in now? What actually does devalue skills if not rewards off missions, any other ways this can happen in EU?

This is what I think & feel about the matter. Firstly missions ie iron challenges are in no doubt the best thing I've seen in EU with which I would not have been motivated enough to hunt at the level which I' am currently at without it. That means less ped cycled & ultimately less ped in the lootpool + MA's share. So imo, good for the economy.

I don't plan to quit anytime soon so the skills I've acquired through missions I won't be selling. But either way missions have actually helped me to realise that chipping skills is ok & have sort of encouraged me a bit to do so in little ways. In future I will no doubt chip my way to the top & not ashamed to say it, all thanks to missions. To me more iron challenges should be added with careful moderation to what rewards are given & the TT values assigned to them.

It's nice that some missions give you a multiple choice while others don't. It's nice to see that some of the TT values of the current missions we have now are assigned very well, apart from 1 or 2 being the opposite.

Are mission rewards devaluating skills? Yes - No. Vote Now!

For my vote I'll say No they are not, so more iron missions should be added obviously.. You need skills to even acquire the skills in the first place & most of what MA is doing isnt creating trust for the platform so people have had enough they quit & of course sell many abundant set of skills on market, pushing prices down.

~Mark~

I had to vote 50/50 because that one is closest to how I feel about it.
I wasnt even going to bother replying here, because it really doesnt do any good. MA will do what they want and use some of the posts here to justify it, while ignoring the ones that they dont already agree with.

But since mark came to me in game and asked me personally to reply anyhow, here is my view:

The whole idea of skill rewards for iron challenges was wrong to start with. When missions first came out, MA trumpeted them, saying that new players continuously asked for missions, so here they are, etc. The problem, however is that those players asking for missions really meant: I want a way to grind mobs on here and make ped rewards that I can use to fund my game play just like I do on WoW.

Many times, when the new players come in and find the missions, they will ask what the reward is. When they are told that the reward is a skill or attribute increase, the standard reply is: then what is the point of doing them if there's no ped reward?

I've heard this many times, over and over.
So then the population that MA used to justify putting the missions into the game in the first place is not benefiting from them as intended. So now we have a set of missions that benefit the people who need them less.

But they cant be removed from the game because so many people have done them already. It would be just as unfair to the generation to come as the original skills nerf that left an entire generation of players with skills that the normal player can never reach. It would be just as unfair as changing the stamina that you start with so that a whole group of people get more stamina than you can ever have. It would be just as unfair as dropping all of the uber items into mobs that only that same generation of players can kill.

As for devaluing skills? I'd say that it does devalue them to some degree, but that it doesnt matter. As soon as they put ESI's into the game, skills were doomed to spiral downward in value. The reason for this is simple. Whenever anyone with any amount of skills leaves the game, they chip out and sell their skills. So the sum total amount of skills in the game will forever be increasing. Add to this the 2x and 3x bonus periods and the declining population base and it's easy to see why skill prices are in the toilet. A few iron missions may add to that a little bit, but not much.

And then to compound the problem, now there are new planets. Each planet will want to be able to keep the players that they attract to the game, so they are almost forced to add iron missions to their own planets or risk their players running to Calypso for "free skills".

To me, the correct answer is not to add or take away iron missions. The correct answer is to improve the game play for the new players so that they stick around a while. We need an expanding player base. With the numbers of new players that I see come into the game, we should have tens of thousands of OJ's running around by now. Where are they?

We have a kickass platform here, and it is barely utilized. Gameplay is virtually unchanged from v9.4
Where are the new features that cryengine is capable of? For that matter where are the old ones? It's been years now, and we still cant sit down, let alone dive on the ground and crawl on our belly through a trench, jump up and shoot, drop back down, and then heave a grenade. There are no laser explosions, rocket launcher shockwaves, exploding mobs, or buildings falling down around you. But we do have some dancing feffoids. And the shops almost all work.

 

[DRDoom]

NO, the skills are actually a 'small' bonus if you compare with the effort put into killing 16K mobs.

But it is an incentive to do hard-core grinding which is good for the EU economy.

 

[Arthurs]

Grate post
Vote yes...
Bigest faild was longtooth mission finishing u get 60 ped TT of First Aid skill and u can finish missions with exosaurs.

But yes with missions I hunt a lot more

 

[M Rufen Power]

Grate post
Vote yes...
Bigest faild was longtooth mission finishing u get 60 ped TT of First Aid skill and u can finish missions with exosaurs.

But yes with missions I hunt a lot more

Thank you all thus far for the constructive comments . Yes I do remember it was because of this change I was actually able to do it, a lot of the hunters from the previous year was totally fuming about it. But it also give ppl like me the opportunity to spend spend spend like never before and win the prize at the end.

 

[chevrons]

I think you have missed the main problem with introducing more and more iron missions - it isn't the skills which are the problem, it is the attribute gains. These set off as a nice bonus, but then grew until you could get a large amount from just doing the missions up to the 1k level.
The other planets did the right thing, and stopped this inflation, and now it seems MA have also realised their error.
There isn't a problem with skill gains; the other big problem with missions is the effect they have on non-mission mobs and LA's.

 

[Mega]

NO, the skills are actually a 'small' bonus if you compare with the effort put into killing 16K mobs.

But it is an incentive to do hard-core grinding which is good for the EU economy.

My thoughts are as above.

 

[Infinity01]

Sorry i couldn't vote!

My answer is Yes, skilling missions definitely have an impact on skill price... but I guess not so much

No, Irong missons shouldn't be removed.... in fact they should add more.... It's one of the factor that motivate people to hunt.... Human behaviour is strongly influenced by goals and rewards..... Iron missions are providing that/

the new calypso missions are great... have important goals.... but yet many (including myself) are a bit discouraged coz there is no skill gains. Personally i really dont' care much about the token and the armors.... I'm more interested in skill gains... there are many like me in the game.

This game is fundamentally all right... except some issues with implementations...

But the biggest problem with this game is its stagnant or shrinking player base... and MA seems to have no clue as how to expand it...

In my 2.8 yrs experience in this game, i've seen players becaming inactive, stoped playing or even leaving the game primarily due to increase cost to play after certain level.
MA has to address this issue if the game has to survive!

 

[Jimmy B]

I'd like to see more Iron missions in time, although I've got a long way to go with the current ones so for me it's more a matter of more choice than needing new missions. I'd like to see a Formidon one for instance, then I'd happily camp the formi/scip spawn for a long time.

Not unhappy to see the new missions with tokens as rewards, seems a shame if they're saying no more skill rewards ever though. Maybe skill chips could be purchasable with tokens one day...

 

[GeorgeSkywalker]

Any future missions iron or not should never give skills. The existing missions in game that do give skills should be preserved as a legacy and it wouldn't be right to change them.

Note some non iron missions also give skills. Some so easy they just require you to go from point A to point B and you've acquired some kind of skill. Frankly that's a joke and makes it far too easy to skill up.

In the past we all managed fine without any bonus skills from missions. There is no reason why we can't manage without them.

Also more importantly if future missions can give skills then this has a huge impact on the rate at which our avatars progress. Without skill giving missions we can all agree it takes much longer to skill up. Now consider five years into the future when we may have over 50 planets. Now if each one had skill giving missions consider then how easy it would be to skill up. It would be extremely easy. So easy that most avatars who are intrested in skilling up would become skill "whores" (me included) jumping from planet to planet with complete disregard what the planet is all about just to do the easy skill missions.

Now as you can see it would be very easy to skill up and consequently there would be more skills in the market. Simple economics thus dictates price of skills should drop as supply is increased.

One of the intresting aspects about this game I've like is the fact it's slow to skill up. By ruining that you ruin a fundamental pillar of EU and thus in my opinion it would lead to the demise of the game as a whole because then it wouldn't be about spending a lifetime to skill up but a matter of few months or years. Thus loosing the overall attachment to the game as it would become just another game to be played for a bit before moving on to the next.

 

[Mega]

Not unhappy to see the new missions with tokens as rewards, seems a shame if they're saying no more skill rewards ever though. Maybe skill chips could be purchasable with tokens one day...

I wasn't aware of that - so we will never see a Silver / Gold challenge then?

 

[Nooba]

Seems more like when the advertising brings people in, (and loot balance for the newer player is addressed, since we need to retain those players once they have heard of the game, as it has to be disheartening for a noob to put in their $10-20 and get a probable 30-70% back, along with being told that if they put more in thay are likely to get 90% back overall), that then skill values will rise again.

I don't think the missions devalue skills, they provide an incentive to kill that many of a particular mob, it's not like killing 16k of anything happens overnight and with no input of time/money.

If anything, when they revamped the skill system, higher level players gained a lot of TT value in skills, and then a series of changes upset a few, and just those chipping out will have had a detrimental effect on the market since there is not enough new blood to soak up that amount of skills.

Just my initial thoughts on the matter.

 

[aridash]

how about "yes" but the impact is too little to be a big issue, so have more iron missions anyway.

i think they should be available for all mobs, to even out activity. currently hunting is focused on mobs offering skill bonuses (with a few exceptions for uber/ath chasing), which skews hunting returns. certain mobs are now unhuntable if you have any expectaion of sensible period to see a decent return.

 

[MartinXVI]

I love Iron missions, but I don't think the skill devaluation is the problem here. Whats worse is MU on looted items going down almost instantly after new iron mission added, that's not good for me as an eco hunter. Imagine they would add drone mission then gazz would drop to 110% and all spawns crowded. So I say bring more iron missions but do it on all mobs in one VU.

 

[remontoire]

I voted no. There should be more iron missions. There are two parts to this really.

The Balancing part
Iron missions are an excellent way of balancing which mobs get hunted and introducing variety into this alongside providing a structure to what we do. However, if you want to change people to hunting other mobs, what you have give them an incentive to do this. Give people a carrot, and they will go and hunt stuff they'd otherwise laugh about hunting any great amounts of, be these foul or droka or eviscerator or longu or even atrox old and up.

The Skills part
I don't think most of the skills rewarded are getting chipped out and sold, and I also don't think most skill rewards would get chipped in if the missions did not exist. There is a big difference to accepting something as a reward after a big effort (and killing 10K anything is a big effort for most players) and buying the same thing. Also, skills that are being rewarded from missions are not dropping in markup (one way of measuring devaluing) faster than others, if at all.

If there is a problem with devaluing of skills, why not have missions where you get something valuable but your skills get reduced in the process? Kill 10K calypsocod, give up 100 ped TT of LWT or BLP skill and as a reward receive ... oh, I don't know, one of those things you were going to suggest is going to motivate us to do the missions anyways?

Also
In all the talk of tokens and trading items for tokens - why has nobody asked MA where the TT value is coming from? Doesn't this introduce an inflation of peds?

 

[remontoire]

Also more importantly if future missions can give skills then this has a huge impact on the rate at which our avatars progress. Without skill giving missions we can all agree it takes much longer to skill up. Now consider five years into the future when we may have over 50 planets. Now if each one had skill giving missions consider then how easy it would be to skill up. It would be extremely easy. So easy that most avatars who are intrested in skilling up would become skill "whores" (me included) jumping from planet to planet with complete disregard what the planet is all about just to do the easy skill missions.

Due to the ability to chip in, people can already pick the pace at which they progress. There are quite a lot of people in game with much higher skills and professional standings than me, who at the same time have lower attributes - even after I adjust for the fact that I got attributes from mission awards. Skilling up already is extremely easy, just go shopping on auction, no effort required at all. Killing 16600 foul certainly does not sound like a profitable way to get a 20PED melee combat implant.

Also, if missions are to get done, and act as a way to channel people's activities, the rewards need to be worth the effort.

 

[GeorgeSkywalker]

Due to the ability to chip in, people can already pick the pace at which they progress. There are quite a lot of people in game with much higher skills and professional standings than me, who at the same time have lower attributes - even after I adjust for the fact that I got attributes from mission awards. Skilling up already is extremely easy, just go shopping on auction, no effort required at all. Killing 16600 foul certainly does not sound like a profitable way to get a 20PED melee combat implant.

Also, if missions are to get done, and act as a way to channel people's activities, the rewards need to be worth the effort.

I agree rewards need to be worth the effort but not at the expense of skills and hence the downfall of the game. The token system is ideal because tokens can then be used for different types of rewards. I suspect in future we'll see progress on what tokens can be used for.

Furthermore if you do really want to increase skills the token system allows for that. You sell your tokens and buy skills that you want. This cleverly avoids the devaluation of skills because no new skills are produced out of thin air.

 

[Theren Strange]

They dont have to give skills as the reward on missions, to say no more iron missions or no silver/gold mission due to skill rewards is short sighted. I'd still do some of the missions if attributes alone were the rewards.

As for skill rewards devaluing skills, MA have implemented so much other crap into the universe which has more contibuting factors in this than missions do, they should concentrate on these issues first and not the missions.

Iron and bronze missions are a good source of income for MA & motivation for players. Keep them, bring more and implement silver & gold I say.

If not, then implement something else that doesnt take away motivation.

How about finish iron and choose to take the reward or to continue onto bronze. If you choose to continue, Bronze then gives you the bronze and iron reward once completed, unless you choose to go onto silver. If you choose to continue and finish silver, you can then take the iron, bronze and silver rewards, or choose instead to go onto gold where you then get all rewards plus a gift of dung for the acheivement(joke). If you finish iron, or any other mission tier and choose the reward/s, you can always start again but you can never be given the same reward twice, so if you choose the iron reward, then later decide to go for bronze, youll have to complete iron again this time with no reward..

I'd expect half the people going for gold will quit before they finish it and hence no reward at all.

 

[ZAN ZAN]

Skill value has been going down the drain since the (L) gear was introduced, so I don't think missions are really the big deal here, as most of the damage has been done already.

 

[remontoire]

I agree rewards need to be worth the effort but not at the expense of skills and hence the downfall of the game. The token system is ideal because tokens can then be used for different types of rewards. I suspect in future we'll see progress on what tokens can be used for.

Furthermore if you do really want to increase skills the token system allows for that. You sell your tokens and buy skills that you want. This cleverly avoids the devaluation of skills because no new skills are produced out of thin air.

In a world where the total amount of skills only ever increases, it is impossibly for the skill prices not to deflate and hence having some fixed amount of skill - or level - not to devalue. For skills to retain value, something will need to be constantly taking these out. The missions may be slightly increasing the flow of skills and hence adding to deflationary pressures, but getting skills from missions is not really the root cause here.

 

[fluske]

the iron/bronze missions is what motivated me to start grinding again,couple years ago i started selling out..mind you,im talking about 300-400k ped here if all was sold,
now im motivated again to grind..but im running out of missions,i was looking forward to seeing iron missions on ambus/osseos/levis etc..and silver/gold missions for feffs/trox

those new missions dont do anything for me,in fact,i find them annoying..i dont want to go to position a or b and collect something,i just want to shoot 16k mobs and get some nice skillrewards

ps; i find it a bit worrying that ma-officials have private chats with players,this game evolves around information and how to use that info regarding buying/selling stuff..ma-officials should only communcicate via forums so every1 has the same info

 

[GeorgeSkywalker]

The missions may be slightly increasing the flow of skills and hence adding to deflationary pressures, but getting skills from missions is not really the root cause here.

It's certainly not the solution and doesn't help the situation. The other causes can be corrected by the system in due time. Producing skills from thin air will only increase inflation.

I too would like an easy way to skill up but frankly that is not this game and making it easy to skill up will only damage this game as whole. The bigger picture is what matters, so although it's hard to skill up it really should stay that way. The fact that it's hard is what creates value for skills. If it were easy skills loose value and mission rewards make it easy.

 

[M Rufen Power]

ps; I find it a bit worrying that MA officials have private chats with players, this game evolves around information and how to use that info regarding buying/selling stuff. MA officials should only communicate via forums so everyone has the same info

If this were the case people would not have participated in the atrox and bot events due to lack of poor implementation. But otherwise I like that MA staff "taketime" talk to some of us (like they used to ingame) as I'm sure I' am not the only one who does, that MA ask or are keep for suggestions.

Plus I'm not fishing for info that could give me an advantage in selling & buying stuff. I'm not that kind of a player and that behaviour could get me banned, no thanks. I just want answers to further my enjoyment of this game. All I asked was what happened to the new iron missions "we" thought we were getting & respective rewards? It was a private chat of course but the subject matter was revolving around the topic in question. Don't you want MA to listen to you besides robot support?

Are mission rewards devaluating skills? I thought this was worthy of community feedback as I "am bias" but I gave my opinion towards it & want more reward missions. I posted the topic here to get more feedback on the situation at least now the MA individual can see where the game needs to head in & where the community is most happy with or where changes, idea, suggestions need to get implemented or altered.

Personally I want the skill rewards more than the attribute gains. Would I mind if MA now put in place tokens per mission stage for the purchase of attributes and/or skills in future? Maybe not, at least the end cause is similar if that is what they are planning to do. At least it will give me a multiple choice answer, I've to choose.

Thank you so much for all your comments please keep it coming & let all your contacts know about this.

~Mark~

 

[Futurama]

It depends. Missions like longtooth definetly - it is a very easy mission for most people and he reward is relatively large compared to others and difficulty. Also such skills as first aid (probably the choice for most who have finished longtooth mission) are sold way less and are gained slower, therefore migration really does devaluate the prices for more expensive skills over time.



Although I think the problem itself is in ESIs... They aren't common and are very expensive. If you look at the regular skills your avatar gains, most have very low values. Like anatomy (and many other combat related skills) for example - it costs around 800%, ESIs are ~600% or more. If ESIs had a lot lower value themselves we might actually see somewhat decent prices for skills themselves. Nowadays they are worthless and a lot of not really worth chipping out...

P.S. Argument that ESIs provide some markup for the hunters and that you cannot take it away is invalid, because MA can always make something up and put it in the loot that has markup in order to replace ESIs markup

 

[Norbert]

It's certainly not the solution and doesn't help the situation. The other causes can be corrected by the system in due time. Producing skills from thin air will only increase inflation.

This is exactly what happened as a result of the "rebalancing" of the skill progression, people at the top of the game were effectively given insane amounts of tt skill value as a result of the changes. The skill gains from iron missions really do become insignificant in relation to the gains made in that changeover.

VU8.8 skill changes

https://www.planetcalypsoforum.com/...vel-100&highlight=chages+to+skill+progression

Skill Devaluation soon after

https://www.planetcalypsoforum.com/...lues-in-freefall&highlight=devaluation+skills

Skills have been devaluing ever since that point and further as (L) SIB weaponry came along, not sure really what the answer is but even with mission skill gains it will be more or less impossible for people to attain the likes of star etc. The iron missions have been popular and i think a successful addition to the game, i don't think people would grind as much for tokens... but i may be wrong ofc.

At the end of the day there are less buyers for skills at the moment, that can change very quickly with a big influx of players. Anyone who was around at the time of CNd will know this well how quickly the market can become inflated again.