Why Sagas?

[SilkofDrasnia]

$$$$$$

Ftfy

Money

[ThreeEyedBob]

Very simple. By making sagas essential to earning Hearts they basicaly FORCE you to buy their **** adventure packs with baloney xp rewards. Thats what its all about. Not immersion. Not fun. Its all about making you and me HAVING to buy the adventure packs related to the sagas.

[lugoman]

Because removing choice from gameplay is so very rewarding.
Myself, I just adore the cattle-chute game design of Sagas.








moo.

Hopefully the other end of the DDO cattle-chute isn't the slaughter house.

[Satyriasys]

Sagas are a neat idea in theory but throwing in a single quest from the Druids Deep pack for no other reason than to force people to buy their underwhelming module is such a disgusting money grab. If they want to make money they could do it honestly by increasing the pathetic xp/loot found in the these undesirable packs. Instead they decide to make these packs required if you ever want to TR. for shame Turbine, for SHAME!

[Dawnsfire]

Very simple. By making sagas essential to earning Hearts they basicaly FORCE you to buy their **** adventure packs with baloney xp rewards. Thats what its all about. Not immersion. Not fun. Its all about making you and me HAVING to buy the adventure packs related to the sagas.

This is probably the reason. If certain packs aren't selling very well, collecting them into sagas might force a few sales.

[Memnir]

Hopefully the other end of the DDO cattle-chute isn't the slaughter house.

Worse. It's a grinder.
Slaughterhouse would be quick.

[Havok.cry]

Yea, I can imagine that you would want to avoid some quests (like Coyle, Crucible, Chains of Flame). However, if a saga is added for each pack in the game with roughly equal rewards, there are plenty of quest chains to choose from. I guess people value the impression of having a choice... but in fact the game makes the choice for you by making some quests more rewarding than others.

To earn the last heart I got I ran:
Wiz king
offering of blood
von 1 ehhrm... "many" times
big top
That quest in house C with the explosives
snitch
party crashers
tried to run storming the beaches but found out it was the only quest, in the middle of its chain, that was not epicified in it's pack.
Chains of flame

Note that von 3, devil assault and time is money was not run. Note that I ran the quests I felt like at the time and still progressed.

[rayworks]

ok I get that turbine is intent on doing away with the old epic tokens, for reasons beyond my understanding, but whatever. enough is being said about that already.

what I can't wrap my head around is why link it to saga completions?
nearly all sagas have 1-3 quests that I have no desire of ever running. in the current system (epic tokens) I can run whichever content I like, and get rewarded for it.
in the new system, I am forced into running content I dislike.

that to me (commendation amounts aside) is the major, major flaw in this upcoming change

That, and to date, all of the sagas are in content that you have to pay for.

[Lauf]

To earn the last heart I got I ran: ...
Note that I ran the quests I felt like at the time and still progressed.

exactly.... not sure how they figured that dictating which quests we run is a welcome change.

seems they are hell bent on getting it wrong though, regardless of how easy it is to get it right

[Eistander]

Quite possibly the biggest draw of DDO considering the lack therein of a true end-game as it were (TRing was basically the unofficial end-game activity for those who don't like the Realms, myself being one) was the choice, even if some don't see it that way, of being able to choose your way and quests to be able to earn your tokens albeit through trying for that elusive shard/seal or just for kicks. Pushing the players into the Realms shuts down a lot of content that is perfectly viable for those new players hitting 20 (since they seem so concerned about powergamers acquiring hearts too quick) without the pressure of having to gear up or stay at the epic levels to replay the 1-20 game once more. This is where the proposed system fails miserably.

I have tried the FR content on a fresh 20, as I have altitis it was easy for me to do.. and it was not easy not having the gear that one of my more established characters has, and I have plenty of experience in the game to know how to approach fights or what have you.. for the more casual, newer player this might become a lesson in frustration, especially in the proposed new system where higher difficulties get rewarded more quickly.. and we get another BB fiasco all over again, thus invalidating what the devs are so high-strung to try to 'balance'.

In short, this gives players less options, a far longer way to go to get back to the 1-20 train that seems to be the real gem of DDO, which I foresee lower sales of pots and the like as most players who don't want to shell out the cash for the heart themselves over the consumables to make the trip that much shorter (xp pots, boxes, whatever), and thus take their dollar elsewhere. If a concession is somewhere, the ease to get the hearts is where it was at. It promoted more Eberron pack sales, as well as all those goodies that make the levelling more interesting/fun/quicker. It just feels like they (whoever is guiding this ship) just want to make this another generic MMO where only the latest stuff gets run and the rest gets invalidated for anyone but the new players.

The problem is, with these additions, there's nothing to keep the player base who is training along the Heroic line to want to go to the new cap. Never mind that we will only see one new raid by the winter when the cap hits 30.. as if we don't have enough grinding/repeating to do the trip in the first place post-20.

My 2 cp.

[Ryiah]

Its all about making you and me HAVING to buy the adventure packs related to the sagas.

A good portion of which are actual expansions.

[donblas]

Sagas are the special dev pet project. They think forcing people to run them will make them like it better. It is special and new and shiny and they are devs so it must be right, because we all know shiny, new, and special are automatically good, and devs are infallible god like paragons of all knowing perfection.

Moo, I mean I agree.

However, like a lot of things that have happened in DDO, I suspect that the devs may add another saga or two over the next year. Then old devs will be lost and new devs will come in with their own ideas about what is shiny. There will be no new sagas after that and a new, badly thought out shiny will replace the old.

Deja vu all over again

[Shinjiteru]

I think this shows, that the Devs have many probably nice ideas but they don't think enough about all the stuff that is getting hit/changed by their ideas. The main idea of sagas giving a reward to gather hearts for reincartion isn't bad. But if you look closer...

Sagas is a system which I would call to be far from beeing finished, we only have 3 real sagas and on top some random quest chaining with a saga reward, which I wouldn't call a Saga. But maybe I missed the storyline that is connecting these random sagas or I have another idea of the meaning of the word Saga.

So tying tr hearts to Sagas is fine, but making this the only option to obtain them (aside from the store) is not a good design idea especially as long as the Saga mechanic is not really finished. And if Turbine really thinks the Saga system would be finished... well I better stop that sentence here. ^^
There are just not enough epic quests to have enough Sagas for the stuff that the devs want do with the Sagas.

They raised the level cap two times without giving us enough new raids, so that the people who like raiding don't have an endgame anymore besides TRing.
Raising level cap to 28, introducing random named items and announcing another level increase in the next months... most people are not mad enough to farm for these random items until they got the ones they really want just before the next patch that raises the level cap again.

Some new devs came and thought epic dungeon tokens are a bad idea in general? And to make sure no one can complain that they are not dropping in Eveningstar they get renamed to tokens of twelve... Now they introduce another currency like epic dungeon tokens and try to delete them from the game completely.
Why didn't they just modify the epic dungeon token system?
Just decrease the amount you can get from each quest and you could have any amoung of grind for a tr heart that you want... And now more than one year after MotU you realize that TR hearts are too easy to aquire? Why didn't you change the token drop rates any further, you did that anyways with MotU?

And as long as you want to put the new commentions only in the reward list of epic Sagas they are just some other kind of epic dungeon token fragment. And if you don't put them in heroic saga rewards they are still tied to epic quests because offering possibilities to get them with heroic quests but not as a reward for heroic Sagas would be very strange. So they are just some epic token fragments with another name...
Is it really easier to introduce a new currency and delete an old one instead of changing the drop rates of the old one?

This just looks like you would invest development time for stuff that has the main reason to change old game mechanics without any noticeable benefit compared to the old system. (And changing mechanics to sell more stuff in the ddo store is not a real benefit for the game itself)

So at the moment you are giving us new hearts for TRs and only one possibility to get them, and this possibility is some unfinished game feature? This is very strange and even more concerning than the current 'place holder values'... And even if you say you want to introduce other ways of obtaining them... how long do we have to wait until you are giving us these possibilities? If I think about the cosmetic armor kit change this doesn't sound promising...

Why not add them with a 100% chance to most 20th raid completions lists? Some weeks ago you had the game mechanic to ty them only to the 20th epic raid completion, but with all the time needed and effort for a 20th raid completion lists that should be enough grind to get a heart of your choice, or am I wrong? Most people do the raids for items or tomes anyways so it would be a hard decision to take these hearts from a 20th raid completion list for most players. And there were several other nice changes you could have done with this split of raid completions and 20th completion reward lists, but instead you prefer to invest development time to mess with the raid completions of the players another time. And each time you told the players to consult the GMs?
Seems someone in the management doesn't like your GMs.

Why don't you let us buy the new epic hearts and iconic hearts with 100-200 epic dungeon tokens or some other value that you think would equal the amount of grind you want to force us to do, if we don't want to buy them in the ddo store? Or ty them to the raid tokens.

And everything you want to do with the commendations of valor can probably also be done by using the current epic dungeon token/fragment system. Even if you changed their name with MotU, you could rename them again for your needs... You only have to add them to the end chests of the epic quests since MotU. But you need to do something like this with your new commendations of valor anyways, at least if you don't want to ruin the fun for many players by forcing them to run quests they don't like over and over again.


So really, please don't introduce another half finished mechanic with you heading on to other changes and not finishing it until several updates later. TRing is the only endgame you left us with your last updates, so please make sure you don't break this too by giving us a half finished TR mechanic.

Have a look at Sentinals of Stormreach pack... how long is this pack ingame now? And one still can't do all of the quests which are needed for the chain to get a chain reward on epic... You you don't get an epic chain reward anyways, but there is an adv pack with 5 quests where 4 of them belong to a quest chain and 4 of them have an epic option, why not at least all 4 quests which are needed for the quest chain? Not sure if there is still someone of the people working for Turbine who remember why they did that because I don't seem to get the idea behind that.

[RTFM]

It would seem to me that Sagas are not very popular. That means whoever came up with the idea (which could be a "team" of people) now are facing the fact that the conceptual and actual outcomes vary greatly which is of course embarrassing and is seen by others as a "waste of resources". So, how to save the day?

1. Make the XP from Sagas bankable for a future life or alt. We all know that is not going to happen.

2. Make guild renown actually important again. Well considering that the removal of renown decay seems to be permanent, and the re-introduction would be less than popular, we all know that is not going to happen.

3. Include named item loot for Sagas. Under the current DDO model, that would be BTA loot, which would just cause more complaints, that is not going to happen.

4. Include higher level "Mastercraft" BTA or BTCoE random loot. Again, more complaints about BTA/BTCoE AND power creep! Not going to happen.

5. Include higher increment skill tomes (+5-6). +2-3 skill tomes are not an incentive except for perhaps 1-3 different skills on most toons. But, +5-6 skill tomes would be Power creep....not going to happen.

6. Shock and awe by showing a plethora of sagas will be required to earn commendations in order to TR/E-TR/I-TR on Lamania, then upon release make it a much more reasonable yet filthy grind forcing players to do many sagas in order to TR. Bravo, player base is relieved the grind is not unachievable (as it was on Lamania), those who are impatient will buy hearts of wood from the store. Revenue increased, less complaints on live compared to Lamania, and most important the very unpopular by demand "sagas" are now showing that players are happily grinding away at them proving they were a great investment of resources by "the team".

Personally, I find sagas very unattractive and un-enjoyable as a player. I have run quests I absolutely do not like to finish off a saga (most of those are the easier quests that are boring with no interesting loot). It reminds me of the days we had to run DQ flaggers for EVERY raid run, and VON 1-4 flaggers for EVERY VON 5/6 run. It is just nonsensical from a player's perspective and feels like devs trying to make all the content look equally attractive to higher ups and prove they are doing a great job across the board. When in fact all they are doing is holding a carrot that the player cannot choose to ignore (i.e.: grind).

[Lauf]

making this the only option to obtain them (aside from the store) is not a good design idea.

at the moment you are giving us new hearts for TRs and only one possibility to get them, and this possibility is some unfinished game feature? This is very strange and even more concerning than the current 'place holder values'...

You only have to add them to the end chests of the epic quests since MotU. But you need to do something like this with your new commendations of valor anyways, at least if you don't want to ruin the fun for many players by forcing them to run quests they don't like over and over again.

Personally, I find sagas very unattractive and un-enjoyable as a player. I have run quests I absolutely do not like to finish off a saga.
It is just nonsensical from a player's perspective and feels like devs trying to make all the content look equally attractive to higher ups and prove they are doing a great job across the board.

Moo.