TOPIC: Token Prices plummet?

Dave wrote: Love that people are throwing out ideas to reinvigorate the game. I encourage that line of thinking. My issue with the last idea is PUG runs. I go back to how they eliminated "Treasure" rooms because people running more than once would ruin a puzzle just to make sure they got the treasure token for that room. Would the same type of behavior occur if we were getting points for how we did in the dungeon? Again, it's sad, but it only takes a few to ruin the experience for many.

I've seen vets ruin puzzles in recent dungeons with hardly any incentives at all, not infrequently. I think there are a bunch of motivating factors there. People hate to "lose" even if the only consequence is push damage that means nothing to high level players on low difficulties. They want to appear smart and useful to their parties. They want people to see the correct outcome of the puzzle and not be frustrated by failure. I think sometimes it just comes down to people being very bad at giving hints, giving them too early/eagerly, and their "hints" amount to solutions.

No matter the reason, it's almost always a poor experience for the rest of the party. Seeing people deflate or give up when they know someone is going to step in and "save" them is heartbreaking and I think it's a very legitimate complaint from PUGs. Vets need to learn to cool it and let people fail, at least for most of the time in the room. I get that watching people do poorly at something is hard when you have the power to save them, but we are not helping people by taking the challenge out of the game. The challenge *is* the game.

Another thing that could be motivating a decline in token prices is TDs general structure for charachter improvement.

Td keeps adding slots, and any token usable by your class you can equip up to slot count limits.

Over time, Td has also introduced more tokens that give an effect (like +2 to STR), and more powerful effects overall in one token (e.g. relic, legendary, eldritch, etc.)

The result is the total hit and damage numbers of high end builds has gone higher and higher.

The result is twofold:

1. The cost/effort to entry to high level builds is ever increasing.

A decade ago in 2014 a top level build would have 5-10 legendary or edlritch tokens, and maybe 10-15 URs or relics.

Nowadays a top level build can have 15-20 legendary or edlritch tokens, and another 20-30 UR or relics.

It’s quite a different collection journey in terms of time, effort, and cost to put together top end builds now, and it may be leading to a reduction in the number of people who see that as potentially appealing.

2. Diminishing marginal returns.

When Drake’s Staff of Focus came out a top end Wizard probably had a spell damage bonus of around 10. Drake’s increased your spell damage bonus by 50% from 10 to 15! Wow!

Top end spell damage builds now have spell damage bonuses in the 50-100 range. A new +5 spell damage item adds the same quantity (5) as drakes, but only increases your damage bonus by 5-10%.

Deciding to acquire a legendary to increase your damage bonus by 50% versus by 5% are very different propositions.

I thought you were going to also mention in your list:

3. Good enough builds are easier.

There's no reason anyone needs a maxed out build to beat Epic, the highest difficulty. Sure, Epic solo may want to have every option, but Epic solo is more about whether a particular room just owns you or not than whether you have a vast quantity of UR+.

With the vast number of slots and the vast amount of tokens that power characters up significantly, it's easy to have a Nightmare build, so you don't need most of the rarer tokens. Can have an Epic build without a lot of the rarer tokens just because every new UR+ is a smaller percentage of the total pool of UR+ tokens that exist.

Eseell wrote: I've seen vets ruin puzzles in recent dungeons with hardly any incentives at all, not infrequently. I think there are a bunch of motivating factors there. People hate to "lose" even if the only consequence is push damage that means nothing to high level players on low difficulties. They want to appear smart and useful to their parties. They want people to see the correct outcome of the puzzle and not be frustrated by failure. I think sometimes it just comes down to people being very bad at giving hints, giving them too early/eagerly, and their "hints" amount to solutions.

No matter the reason, it's almost always a poor experience for the rest of the party. Seeing people deflate or give up when they know someone is going to step in and "save" them is heartbreaking and I think it's a very legitimate complaint from PUGs. Vets need to learn to cool it and let people fail, at least for most of the time in the room. I get that watching people do poorly at something is hard when you have the power to save them, but we are not helping people by taking the challenge out of the game. The challenge *is* the game.

I thought about quoting only part of this, but I agree with all of it. No, not every single puzzle in every single run will be ruined, but it is far more common for people to feel that a puzzle room is ruined than we behave like it is.

I find combat to have analogous problems. I try to avoid PUGs as playing with one's peers/friends, in theory, solves these problems. But, it's not always possible, and I'm moving closer to believing that PUGs should only be playing sealed pack to remove the vast build variances or even the perception of vast build variances.

Ian Lee wrote:

Eseell wrote: I've seen vets ruin puzzles in recent dungeons with hardly any incentives at all, not infrequently. I think there are a bunch of motivating factors there. People hate to "lose" even if the only consequence is push damage that means nothing to high level players on low difficulties. They want to appear smart and useful to their parties. They want people to see the correct outcome of the puzzle and not be frustrated by failure. I think sometimes it just comes down to people being very bad at giving hints, giving them too early/eagerly, and their "hints" amount to solutions.

No matter the reason, it's almost always a poor experience for the rest of the party. Seeing people deflate or give up when they know someone is going to step in and "save" them is heartbreaking and I think it's a very legitimate complaint from PUGs. Vets need to learn to cool it and let people fail, at least for most of the time in the room. I get that watching people do poorly at something is hard when you have the power to save them, but we are not helping people by taking the challenge out of the game. The challenge *is* the game.

I thought about quoting only part of this, but I agree with all of it. No, not every single puzzle in every single run will be ruined, but it is far more common for people to feel that a puzzle room is ruined than we behave like it is.

I find combat to have analogous problems. I try to avoid PUGs as playing with one's peers/friends, in theory, solves these problems. But, it's not always possible, and I'm moving closer to believing that PUGs should only be playing sealed pack to remove the vast build variances or even the perception of vast build variances.

Locking difficulty level by player level could help with this. If you needed to be level 6 to play nightmare and level 9 to play epic it would curtail a lot of gear sharing in pugs which would most likely be limited to hardcore or lower.

OrionW wrote:

Ian Lee wrote:

Eseell wrote: I've seen vets ruin puzzles in recent dungeons with hardly any incentives at all, not infrequently. I think there are a bunch of motivating factors there. People hate to "lose" even if the only consequence is push damage that means nothing to high level players on low difficulties. They want to appear smart and useful to their parties. They want people to see the correct outcome of the puzzle and not be frustrated by failure. I think sometimes it just comes down to people being very bad at giving hints, giving them too early/eagerly, and their "hints" amount to solutions.

No matter the reason, it's almost always a poor experience for the rest of the party. Seeing people deflate or give up when they know someone is going to step in and "save" them is heartbreaking and I think it's a very legitimate complaint from PUGs. Vets need to learn to cool it and let people fail, at least for most of the time in the room. I get that watching people do poorly at something is hard when you have the power to save them, but we are not helping people by taking the challenge out of the game. The challenge *is* the game.

I thought about quoting only part of this, but I agree with all of it. No, not every single puzzle in every single run will be ruined, but it is far more common for people to feel that a puzzle room is ruined than we behave like it is.

I find combat to have analogous problems. I try to avoid PUGs as playing with one's peers/friends, in theory, solves these problems. But, it's not always possible, and I'm moving closer to believing that PUGs should only be playing sealed pack to remove the vast build variances or even the perception of vast build variances.

Locking difficulty level by player level could help with this. If you needed to be level 6 to play nightmare and level 9 to play epic it would curtail a lot of gear sharing in pugs which would most likely be limited to hardcore or lower.

I'm not sure how strong the correlation is between player level and desired difficulty level. It seems like TD might have a lot of unhappy customers if they tried to enforce something like that, where for example someone that only started playing a year or two ago but either loves a great challenge or quickly dove into token buying wants to play Epic.

I think a lot of the issues with PUGs would go away if some sort of mechanism were in place to limit sharing of TE tokens. I suspect quite a bit of veterans joining PUGs is due to a desire for more loot.

Mike Steele wrote:

OrionW wrote:

Ian Lee wrote:

Eseell wrote: I've seen vets ruin puzzles in recent dungeons with hardly any incentives at all, not infrequently. I think there are a bunch of motivating factors there. People hate to "lose" even if the only consequence is push damage that means nothing to high level players on low difficulties. They want to appear smart and useful to their parties. They want people to see the correct outcome of the puzzle and not be frustrated by failure. I think sometimes it just comes down to people being very bad at giving hints, giving them too early/eagerly, and their "hints" amount to solutions.

No matter the reason, it's almost always a poor experience for the rest of the party. Seeing people deflate or give up when they know someone is going to step in and "save" them is heartbreaking and I think it's a very legitimate complaint from PUGs. Vets need to learn to cool it and let people fail, at least for most of the time in the room. I get that watching people do poorly at something is hard when you have the power to save them, but we are not helping people by taking the challenge out of the game. The challenge *is* the game.

I thought about quoting only part of this, but I agree with all of it. No, not every single puzzle in every single run will be ruined, but it is far more common for people to feel that a puzzle room is ruined than we behave like it is.

I find combat to have analogous problems. I try to avoid PUGs as playing with one's peers/friends, in theory, solves these problems. But, it's not always possible, and I'm moving closer to believing that PUGs should only be playing sealed pack to remove the vast build variances or even the perception of vast build variances.

Locking difficulty level by player level could help with this. If you needed to be level 6 to play nightmare and level 9 to play epic it would curtail a lot of gear sharing in pugs which would most likely be limited to hardcore or lower.

I'm not sure how strong the correlation is between player level and desired difficulty level. It seems like TD might have a lot of unhappy customers if they tried to enforce something like that, where for example someone that only started playing a year or two ago but either loves a great challenge or quickly dove into token buying wants to play Epic.

I think a lot of the issues with PUGs would go away if some sort of mechanism were in place to limit sharing of TE tokens. I suspect quite a bit of veterans joining PUGs is due to a desire for more loot.

A lot of this went away with the strong restrictions on treasure chips in epilogue.

Wade Schwendemann (Dr. Uid) wrote:

Mike Steele wrote:

OrionW wrote:

Ian Lee wrote:

Eseell wrote: I've seen vets ruin puzzles in recent dungeons with hardly any incentives at all, not infrequently. I think there are a bunch of motivating factors there. People hate to "lose" even if the only consequence is push damage that means nothing to high level players on low difficulties. They want to appear smart and useful to their parties. They want people to see the correct outcome of the puzzle and not be frustrated by failure. I think sometimes it just comes down to people being very bad at giving hints, giving them too early/eagerly, and their "hints" amount to solutions.

No matter the reason, it's almost always a poor experience for the rest of the party. Seeing people deflate or give up when they know someone is going to step in and "save" them is heartbreaking and I think it's a very legitimate complaint from PUGs. Vets need to learn to cool it and let people fail, at least for most of the time in the room. I get that watching people do poorly at something is hard when you have the power to save them, but we are not helping people by taking the challenge out of the game. The challenge *is* the game.

I thought about quoting only part of this, but I agree with all of it. No, not every single puzzle in every single run will be ruined, but it is far more common for people to feel that a puzzle room is ruined than we behave like it is.

I find combat to have analogous problems. I try to avoid PUGs as playing with one's peers/friends, in theory, solves these problems. But, it's not always possible, and I'm moving closer to believing that PUGs should only be playing sealed pack to remove the vast build variances or even the perception of vast build variances.

Locking difficulty level by player level could help with this. If you needed to be level 6 to play nightmare and level 9 to play epic it would curtail a lot of gear sharing in pugs which would most likely be limited to hardcore or lower.

I'm not sure how strong the correlation is between player level and desired difficulty level. It seems like TD might have a lot of unhappy customers if they tried to enforce something like that, where for example someone that only started playing a year or two ago but either loves a great challenge or quickly dove into token buying wants to play Epic.

I think a lot of the issues with PUGs would go away if some sort of mechanism were in place to limit sharing of TE tokens. I suspect quite a bit of veterans joining PUGs is due to a desire for more loot.

A lot of this went away with the strong restrictions on treasure chips in epilogue.

I'm not familiar with that, what are the strong restrictions on treasure chips in epilogue?

My understanding is that players are strongly encouraged to get the rolled 20 packs and draw any extras immediately rather than getting treasure chips (1x, 3x, 10x) for later redemption. Basically cuts out the mechanism to "pay out" someone who loaned TE's to the group. Whereas before if you got 2 10x chips and a 3x chip, the loan shark could just ask everyone to give them a 10x chip for their troubles.

Marc D wrote: My understanding is that players are strongly encouraged to get the rolled 20 packs and draw any extras immediately rather than getting treasure chips (1x, 3x, 10x) for later redemption. Basically cuts out the mechanism to "pay out" someone who loaned TE's to the group. Whereas before if you got 2 10x chips and a 3x chip, the loan shark could just ask everyone to give them a 10x chip for their troubles.

Has that had the result of players no longer loaning out TE tokens and taking a cut in some way? I have a feeling that people will still figure out a way to do some treasure farming.

Mike Steele wrote:

Marc D wrote: My understanding is that players are strongly encouraged to get the rolled 20 packs and draw any extras immediately rather than getting treasure chips (1x, 3x, 10x) for later redemption. Basically cuts out the mechanism to "pay out" someone who loaned TE's to the group. Whereas before if you got 2 10x chips and a 3x chip, the loan shark could just ask everyone to give them a 10x chip for their troubles.

Has that had the result of players no longer loaning out TE tokens and taking a cut in some way? I have a feeling that people will still figure out a way to do some treasure farming.

I haven’t seen that happen in the last several years. For myself, if I join a PUG, I’ll offer max treasure TEs as a courtesy. I’m already getting the 2 or 3 extra from the full COA set bonus for myself out of my own draws- that is more than payment enough.

I suspect treasure farming is more likely in VTD than in-person due to cost. With that said, Jeff & Co were smart to add things like the gears and idols. Of late, that is what I have been most interested in getting from treasure draws.

This upcoming year’s 8K auctions will tell us quite a but about the token market. Path, 2nd rings, and patron codes will still have strong value. With the safeholds, I suspect trade goods will be higher than usual. With the bead of greed, part pf the greaves set, and a synergy item (hedgehog), my guess is we’ll see decent pyp prices but secondary market prices for most of the other new URs may not be strong.

It would be wise for TD to have sinks for unwanted URs.

Mike Steele wrote:

Marc D wrote: My understanding is that players are strongly encouraged to get the rolled 20 packs and draw any extras immediately rather than getting treasure chips (1x, 3x, 10x) for later redemption. Basically cuts out the mechanism to "pay out" someone who loaned TE's to the group. Whereas before if you got 2 10x chips and a 3x chip, the loan shark could just ask everyone to give them a 10x chip for their troubles.

Has that had the result of players no longer loaning out TE tokens and taking a cut in some way? I have a feeling that people will still figure out a way to do some treasure farming.

I can't speak to that. Maybe our esteemed epilogue volunteers can shed some insight as they'd be the ones to observe that behavior.

I hypothesize that VTD has also chipped away at some of "lease" mentality, as lots of veterans have lent TEs with no expectation of reward.