1 hour ago, Roland said:Well, very few complaints about the current default ruleset are coming from brand-new players. By far, the group that is complaining the most are veterans and this forum is predominantly populated by veterans so that is the group I am mostly addressing.
It isn't my intention to try and talk the developers out of doing their job of balancing the game since we can self-impose rules to make it "better". I am simply stating that when balancing adjustments are made they will please some and anger others. Changing quests and quest rewards to align better with the gamestage and lootstage of the player will definitely help the magazine system be more effective and relevant in the game and I'm all for the developers doing that to a degree.
I just think that for some of the suggestions like limiting the availability of jobs per day or increasing the number of quests needed to graduate to the next tier or removing loot from the rewards and making it cash and/or parts only are changes better left as options because if they are enforced rules that everybody has to play by, it won't end the balance debate. It will only shift the identities of the complainers.
Undoubtedly changes will always produce complaints. Those would too. Even just reducing current rewards by any amount will produce complaints by people who like an OP trader. Remember that the introduction of magazines and the water changes also didn't end debates, those are continuing to this day. Even LBD still rears its head. So the goal can't be to end debates 😉
You are correct that some of the proposed changes are rather heavy-handed. Especially limiting the player to x quests a day would probably be very artificial and hard to explain. I would surely try out all other options before taking a look at this.
And there are probably better, less artificial options. For example if rewards do not use reputation to roll for the quality of items, but use reputation to roll for quantity of the reward. So if someone gets to tier5 quests rather early in the game the difference between a tier1 and a tier5 reward would not be between double-barrel and auto-shotty. Both would give a double-barrel, but the tier5 would also give say 4 times as much money, ammo, magazines and materials.
Yes, some players will complain and say they don't care about money, ammo, magazines, materials . But that is a different topic, the game has to provide expensive money-sinks for example so that players care about money and material.
Or here is another idea: Diminishing returns on quest reputation: Only the first quest of a day gets you full reputation, the next half, the next half again and so on. You still get the rewards, increase your reputation, but the difference between a slow quester and a fast quester is never too big to balance.
Basically this doesn't change anything for normal questers (no, you don't need to do one quest every day unless you actually want some high-rep stuff from the trader, and there are always alternatives to the trader). But it practically limits fast questers reputation gain to less than 2 per day.