New token system for speeding up but not unbalancing gear grinding

Ultiscrub Gaming

Ignore any grammar discrepancies or misspellings I don’t care that much about writing to check everything.


Basic idea for a new system to be implemented into dungeons.

You get tokens from a boss instead of gold. Nothing changes about any other drops from bosses just this. The amount you can sell a token for should be no more than 100 gold to a merchant.

The tokens can be turned in for gold or item sets from dungeons EXCEPT for named drops.

The amount of tokens you get depends on how well your group handles the boss. For instance a no death speed kill on a boss will grant the most amount of tokens lets say 5 on veteran and 2 on normal. While getting wiped by the boss any amount of times will only grant 1 token upon defeating the boss.

Spending the tokens can be simple and could be done at any of the undaunted areas via new npc character being introduced as “a hoarder of rare items” that is willing to part with a item if you have enough tokens in exchange he just has to send his assistant to his secret stash to get it(this could take some time because his stash is huge and far away)

10 tokens would get you a random set item with a random trait from a specific dungeon

25 tokens would get you a random item from a specific set with a random trait from a specific dungeon

50 would get you a specific item in a specific set but in a random trait

250 would get you the specific item from a specific set in the specified trait you want.

But here is the catch you will need to wait for the npc assistant to retrieve the item you want. Ranging from 10 minutes to 5 hours. You will also need the appropriate dlc unlocked for the set piece to be available. I think the max amount of tokens should be no more than 2500 with eso plus. That is more than fair to me.


Obviously these numbers could be tweaked a bit but anything more than a 5 hour wait time for a specific item in a specific set in a specific trait is going to be too much in my opinion and anything over 250 tokens is way to much

In summary I think this could be a great way to make pve more popular and bearable for people that don’t enjoy it as much as some of us.

I have other ideas for both pve and pvp from just talking to people in the community over the years and some of them are amazing.

Yes i know I don’t post a lot on the forums but i do have what I think are balanced ideas that would be a great addition to the game.

aleksandr_ESO

what is the purpose of this addition? There is already a sticker book. You farm gear, transmute crystals and create any set item for yourself. The proposed system actually duplicates the sticker book.

Nairinhe

aleksandr_ESO wrote: »

what is the purpose of this addition? There is already a sticker book. You farm gear, transmute crystals and create any set item for yourself. The proposed system actually duplicates the sticker book.

The main difference that I see if that you don't have to farm an item at least once to be able to get it. Like, what got most complaints? BSW fire staff? If it won't drop at all, stickerbook won't help, but tokens will.

aleksandr_ESO

Nairinhe wrote: »

aleksandr_ESO wrote: »

what is the purpose of this addition? There is already a sticker book. You farm gear, transmute crystals and create any set item for yourself. The proposed system actually duplicates the sticker book.

The main difference that I see if that you don't have to farm an item at least once to be able to get it. Like, what got most complaints? BSW fire staff? If it won't drop at all, stickerbook won't help, but tokens will.

yes, but this is an MMO. You have to farm. The rest is in the sticker book

Tommy_The_Gun

ZOS tried to add some kind of "token" system, that allows to by-pass dungeon grinding. In IC dungeons, we have key-fragments. You can use them to get random gear set part from IC dungeons. So you can either PvP in IC to gather some of those fragments, or you can buy it at guild traders. This means that you can pretty much "buy" (with gold) boxes with random IC dungeons gear.
Why it is only in IC dungeons and was not added to other dungeons ? I have no idea...
I kinda hope that in the future something like this will be added. So we can do content we like & enjoy and trade the reward.

Nairinhe

aleksandr_ESO wrote: »

Nairinhe wrote: »

aleksandr_ESO wrote: »

what is the purpose of this addition? There is already a sticker book. You farm gear, transmute crystals and create any set item for yourself. The proposed system actually duplicates the sticker book.

The main difference that I see if that you don't have to farm an item at least once to be able to get it. Like, what got most complaints? BSW fire staff? If it won't drop at all, stickerbook won't help, but tokens will.

yes, but this is an MMO. You have to farm. The rest is in the sticker book

You would still have to farm 50 tokens for a specific type of item

aleksandr_ESO

Nairinhe wrote: »

aleksandr_ESO wrote: »

Nairinhe wrote: »

aleksandr_ESO wrote: »

what is the purpose of this addition? There is already a sticker book. You farm gear, transmute crystals and create any set item for yourself. The proposed system actually duplicates the sticker book.

The main difference that I see if that you don't have to farm an item at least once to be able to get it. Like, what got most complaints? BSW fire staff? If it won't drop at all, stickerbook won't help, but tokens will.

yes, but this is an MMO. You have to farm. The rest is in the sticker book

You would still have to farm 50 tokens for a specific type of item

this system is already redundant

Nairinhe

aleksandr_ESO wrote: »

Nairinhe wrote: »

aleksandr_ESO wrote: »

Nairinhe wrote: »

aleksandr_ESO wrote: »

what is the purpose of this addition? There is already a sticker book. You farm gear, transmute crystals and create any set item for yourself. The proposed system actually duplicates the sticker book.

The main difference that I see if that you don't have to farm an item at least once to be able to get it. Like, what got most complaints? BSW fire staff? If it won't drop at all, stickerbook won't help, but tokens will.

yes, but this is an MMO. You have to farm. The rest is in the sticker book

You would still have to farm 50 tokens for a specific type of item

this system is already redundant

The proposed one? Maybe, partially, but there's still nothing in game that you could do if a certain piece wouldn't drop for you and there were reports of absolutely unreasonable numbers of runs it took to farm certain gear.

Ultiscrub Gaming

To make life better for players that don’t have fun grinding for one specific set piece for 5 days

aleksandr_ESO wrote: »

what is the purpose of this addition? There is already a sticker book. You farm gear, transmute crystals and create any set item for yourself. The proposed system actually duplicates the sticker book.

Ultiscrub Gaming

aleksandr_ESO wrote: »

what is the purpose of this addition? There is already a sticker book. You farm gear, transmute crystals and create any set item for yourself. The proposed system actually duplicates the sticker book.

No it doesn’t duplicate the sticker book but instead allows for a person to by pass horrible rng for a specific item

simple_specops

So I can just do normal trials to farm stones and get vet drops at vendor? The various chests of disappointment, conveniently located after high tear content, are one of the most important part of the game for me, that thingly sensation, spend weeks in a progression group, finally complete trial after 4hours, fingers tired, eyes closing, but that last boss is dead, you go for loot and you get a battle axe for a magicka set, you obviously only play stamina. You really think I would want that feeling to go away?

Ultiscrub Gaming

simple_specops wrote: »

So I can just do normal trials to farm stones and get vet drops at vendor? The various chests of disappointment, conveniently located after high tear content, are one of the most important part of the game for me, that thingly sensation, spend weeks in a progression group, finally complete trial after 4hours, fingers tired, eyes closing, but that last boss is dead, you go for loot and you get a battle axe for a magicka set, you obviously only play stamina. You really think I would want that feeling to go away?

I would hope so thats torture man. But no you would need to grind vet trials for the perfect gear and normal for the imperfect gear.

ThePedge

The issue with key frags or tokens is that you would need separate ones for each dungeon.

Otherwise I could farm FG1 for tokens and use in another dungeon for quick drops. I don't want that, or fancy having god knows how many stacks of tokens.

Something needs to be done so I don't have to do over 100 runs for the likes of a Caluurion Inferno ever again.

Araneae6537

I would very much like for some form of the idea proposed. I greatly appreciate the sticker book, but the drop rates of set weapons from dungeons is just abysmal. It’s not like people don’t run dungeons unless they’re looking for particular items. I do appreciate that ESO is much better than it was when it comes to grinds and item drops, but I feel this would be a change in keeping with the improvements: It’s ideal to get the drop you want, but you can transmute/recon to get the piece in the desired trait. Similarly, it would be much less discouraging and frustrating if, while hoping for a particular drop, I could be saving up some sort of token to be guaranteed to get the piece eventually.

hafgood

I do understand where the OP is coming from and in principal the idea sounds ok until you actually come.tonapply it. And then you realise that as others have said this would have to mean each dungeon giving out its own fragments, otherwise this is so abusable. I see lots of runs of FG1 to accumulate the tokens and then them being spent on weapons from dlc dungeons.

And then what? The same for trials? Do vAA and vHR to get the tokens and spend on Perfected False Gods?

Perfected Siroria Fire Stick anyone? Don't worry about farming vCR for it, just farm vAA and vHR for your tokens and then get it.

See where I'm coming from?

So would have to be a different token for each dungeon or trial, and thats just not workable

Araneae6537

hafgood wrote: »

I do understand where the OP is coming from and in principal the idea sounds ok until you actually come.tonapply it. And then you realise that as others have said this would have to mean each dungeon giving out its own fragments, otherwise this is so abusable. I see lots of runs of FG1 to accumulate the tokens and then them being spent on weapons from dlc dungeons.

And then what? The same for trials? Do vAA and vHR to get the tokens and spend on Perfected False Gods?

Perfected Siroria Fire Stick anyone? Don't worry about farming vCR for it, just farm vAA and vHR for your tokens and then get it.

See where I'm coming from?

So would have to be a different token for each dungeon or trial, and thats just not workable

Why not? So long as that currency was in the appropriate folder and not taking up inventory space (THAT would be untenable). GW2 has dungeon specific tokens for buying dungeon styles and specific runes (which give set bonuses). I just bring that up as an example of how another game has made such a system work, not that ESO should just because another game does.

Ultiscrub Gaming

hafgood wrote: »

I do understand where the OP is coming from and in principal the idea sounds ok until you actually come.tonapply it. And then you realise that as others have said this would have to mean each dungeon giving out its own fragments, otherwise this is so abusable. I see lots of runs of FG1 to accumulate the tokens and then them being spent on weapons from dlc dungeons.

And then what? The same for trials? Do vAA and vHR to get the tokens and spend on Perfected False Gods?

Perfected Siroria Fire Stick anyone? Don't worry about farming vCR for it, just farm vAA and vHR for your tokens and then get it.

See where I'm coming from?

So would have to be a different token for each dungeon or trial, and thats just not workable

I see your concern but it is a easily fixed one. I thought this stuff up as i went, it took me no longer than 15 minutes to type it all. If i spent more than that I could easily come up with a more balanced system. With that said, I understand that you would be frustrated if someone ran an easy trial and got tokens and spent them on a hard trials gear. That be be adjusted by adding this system to the sticker book in some way. Regardless you can’t argue that it wouldn’t be a good idea. This speeds up the grind and makes the leaderboards more competitive because you would have more people competing with the proper gear.

But to address your concern specifically, you could add a penalty to the token grinding. Like they stop dropping if you run the same dungeon over and over and instead it would drop the equivalent gold amount you would get for trading in the amount of tokens you would have earned. It would force you to run different dungeons and limit how much you can get in a day.

Lum1on

I know this was just a suggestion, but with this exact design I find few problems.

First of all, the tokens, fragments, keys (whatever you wanna call them) should be instance/mode specifics. So you couldn't farm AA to get gear from vHoF for example.

Second thing, I wouldn't limit the amount of those tokens by the achievements, so to speak.

The amount of tokens you get depends on how well your group handles the boss. For instance a no death speed kill on a boss will grant the most amount of tokens lets say 5 on veteran and 2 on normal. While getting wiped by the boss any amount of times will only grant 1 token upon defeating the boss.

And the reason for that is, imagine if your guild group is farming a specific instance to get enough tokens and someone messes up and dies (doesn't even have to wipe the entire group). I'm absolutely 100% sure in some guilds that person is going to get flamed, called out, even kicked from the guild because now they lost a bunch of tokens that need to be get from yet again another run.

Third thing is, that yes, it definitely is a grind to get some gear for some people, but at least it's rewarding when you get it. Is it going to be the first run that you get the ideal weapon, for example? Or is it going to be the 4th, 7th, 13th? With this kind of a system it just makes it more of a "mandatory, dull grind" than potentially "enjoyable, excited grind" what it at least in theory should be now - and for me it is.

However, I do understand that some players want a certain way to earn stuff. But I wouldn't do it this way. We all know weapons have the lowest drop rate in trials at least (maybe not the lowest, but correct me if I'm wrong but those can only drop from each instance's final boss), and I'm not sure is it controlled in any way at the moment, but how I would do it is to make it gated that 1 out of 4 players would always get it at the end. So in group dungeons one person gets the weapon for sure. In trials 3 players get one weapon. Now, of course the type and trait would be random, but it's a guaranteed drop with no guarantees, if you know what I mean.

All in all, allowing players to farm a specific item with tokens is not a good idea in my opinion, but there should be somewhat certainty that each run is most likely helping somewhat. And because of a sticker book, the above suggestion would make much more sense than the token system.

hafgood

I'm sorry but nothing you say will change my mind. Gear drops as gear drops, its not ideal but it does add a little to the excitement of doing a dungeon or a trial, I don't want to be able to do 50 runs (for example) of a dungeon and then hand my tokens in to get every set piece from there into my sticker book

I want the sticker book to fill up with time and I want that warm fuzzy moment when that rare item finally drops into place. RNG is a pain but without it this game becomes a job.

I'll have 50 fungal grottos, 45 darkshade caverns and 75 helra's to go please....

Just accept that you have to do some grinding, that you will have to run content many times to complete the sticker book, which is exactly what the devs want - the sticker book is billed as an end game collection game. They want us to run dungeons over amd over to complete it and they know we will, they are not going to make it any easier for us, and I don't want them to

Gundug

There is already precedent for a token system in the game, as mentioned previously with the Imperial City dungeons, but also with the undaunted keys. The Imperial City dungeons do suffer from requiring a specific item that takes up inventory space. Undaunted keys were revised to be a currency and eliminated that issue.

The important consideration to keep in mind about Undaunted keys is that the system is fairly simple and does not deal with convoluted calculations as to whether a character has solved a dungeon in a certain way, earned specific achievements, or even cleared the dungeon. You can receive shoulder pieces for dungeons you have never set foot in. If you count the weekly Golden Vendor in Cyrodiil, you can purchase an entire monster set without ever having to clear the dungeon it comes from.

Cyrodiil and Imperial City also already have set loot boxes available for purchase with AP and tel var. I would suggest a token system based on a similar type of currency, or possibly currencies - one for trials, one for dungeons, where players can purchase boxes with random chances for gear drops similar to these existing systems. As long as the cost is high enough, and players are not able to lock in the exact drop they receive, I feel this system would work as well as all of the others already in game.

I would also suggest perfected gear be excluded from this token system altogether.

Ultiscrub Gaming

hafgood wrote: »

I'm sorry but nothing you say will change my mind. Gear drops as gear drops, its not ideal but it does add a little to the excitement of doing a dungeon or a trial, I don't want to be able to do 50 runs (for example) of a dungeon and then hand my tokens in to get every set piece from there into my sticker book

I want the sticker book to fill up with time and I want that warm fuzzy moment when that rare item finally drops into place. RNG is a pain but without it this game becomes a job.

I'll have 50 fungal grottos, 45 darkshade caverns and 75 helra's to go please....

Just accept that you have to do some grinding, that you will have to run content many times to complete the sticker book, which is exactly what the devs want - the sticker book is billed as an end game collection game. They want us to run dungeons over amd over to complete it and they know we will, they are not going to make it any easier for us, and I don't want them to

It is already a job, i did over 2000 dungeon runs to get hulking drauger and automation a long time ago, I don’t feel accomplished i ran the same two dungeons that many times, i feel dread every time i get those 2 dungeons. I am completely worn out from them. Even after 2 years I still hate those dungeons. It completely ruined that part of the game for me. Not to mention I WORK 80 plus hours a week sometimes more than 100. MYSELF AND OTHERS DO NOT HAVE TIME TO GRIND FOR LITERAL DAYS. IT IS NOT FUN THERE IS NO SENSE OF ACCOMPLISHMENT. I remember being happy getting the last piece. I felt lucky not accomplished. The best part was i was only able to enjoy that build for a little while before it was not bis.

Ultiscrub Gaming

Gundug wrote: »

There is already precedent for a token system in the game, as mentioned previously with the Imperial City dungeons, but also with the undaunted keys. The Imperial City dungeons do suffer from requiring a specific item that takes up inventory space. Undaunted keys were revised to be a currency and eliminated that issue.

The important consideration to keep in mind about Undaunted keys is that the system is fairly simple and does not deal with convoluted calculations as to whether a character has solved a dungeon in a certain way, earned specific achievements, or even cleared the dungeon. You can receive shoulder pieces for dungeons you have never set foot in. If you count the weekly Golden Vendor in Cyrodiil, you can purchase an entire monster set without ever having to clear the dungeon it comes from.

Cyrodiil and Imperial City also already have set loot boxes available for purchase with AP and tel var. I would suggest a token system based on a similar type of currency, or possibly currencies - one for trials, one for dungeons, where players can purchase boxes with random chances for gear drops similar to these existing systems. As long as the cost is high enough, and players are not able to lock in the exact drop they receive, I feel this system would work as well as all of the others already in game.

I would also suggest perfected gear be excluded from this token system altogether.

You are completely missing the point in this system 🤦🏻‍♂️