Time Gated Content needs a change

Wicked Feedback
1

First off I would like to say that I love playing this game and can’t wait for more zones and quests to be added. That said, there is an annoyance with the time gated content: building contruction, daily/weekly quests, smelting/tanning/weaving, and Finley’s appearance.

First off, when you start to interact with the building upgrade system, it isn’t too bad. The issue comes from when you try to reach level 3 of a certain building and it takes 4 real life hours to complete. I don’t mind time gating building contruction, but nothing in this game should take more than 1 hour to complete. Even 1 hour is kind of pushing on the annoyance button slightly. I would like to recommend level 2 construction to be 15 minutes and level 3 construction to be 30 mins. Reason being is I think there is probably more construction levels than what we have so far so this gives some room to grow. Only adding an extra 15 mins to each building upgrade would help alleviate a lot of the annoyance with the system.

Second, daily and weekly quests in the Bounties and Challenges menus need to be changed. Daily quests should really just be repeatable quests that cycle out once completed or if there were no quests that were accepted within 1 hour real time. Weekly quests should be changed to Daily quests and reset/cycle once a day. There should also be an option to reroll the Daily quests that appear once per day if the quests that appear are not desirable to do. This would provide incentive to engage with the system more often. If I am not doing the Cerim Crucible and I just want to wander around the zones collecting materials, I would much rather have a daily or weekly quest in my log to do in addition to just pure farming.

Third, the processing timers on some of the higher quality wood, ore, leather, and thread are a bit too extreme. I mean how does Pine Wood take so little time to cut into planks and Birch wood takes like 40 some minutes to process 1 piece? I get adding real time to crafting gives a sense of realism to the game but that big a difference doesn’t feel realistic. Cutting any quality of wood should not take any more than 5 mins tops. Turning metal into bars is also off. Realistically it would take probably 30 mins to an hour for a bar depending on melting point and cooling time. For in game purposes however, that time should be sped up some. Copper processing is fine. Iron should probably only be a couple mins slower to process than Copper. Silver shouldn’t take more than 10 mins to process. Tanning realistically would take days but ingame time it shouldn’t take more than 15 mins at the current highest tier material. Same with weaving cloth. No more than 15 mins at the highest tier to process. By speeding up the material processing now, it allows for room for higher grade materials to be processed under than annoyance threshhold (1 hour) later on.

Finally, there is the appearance of Finley only happening on Saturday’s. Finley’s wares are not impressive enough to justify him only appearing on Saturday. Also the guards in Sacrament are super lazy as he just sets up shop behind one of them so that also makes his timer not make sense. The General goods vendor is rotating his stock every hour or so. We can run probably 300 Crucible runs in a week and gather thousands of pieces of armor and weapons. Where as Finley not only brings us a normal haul of a Crucible run worth of gear, it is pretty underwhelming at that. PLEASE upgrade his inventory and timer. Finley should show up at least 3 times a week and have Blue and Purple gear only with 1 of those pieces being a random Unique item. This would at least get me interested in seeing what he has to offer. Maybe he could even rarely have Ichor in his inventory for sale.

These are just my suggestions on how to lower some of the pain points of the time gated content and to make it more fun and enjoyable to interact with.

2

I personally don’t understand why they use real time ingame. I can understand if the game is based on mtx with online heavy focus. But NRFTW is neither of that.

First, real time progress gate just screams mobile game to me. My first instinct was “there will be items to skip this timer and it would be available with real money”. In mtx heavy games, the timer creates anxiety to players so they have the urges to skip it and progress faster. But in this game, I’ve yet to find the purpose of it.

Not that I’m opposed to timer in general, I just find it weird why it has to be real world. Even Finley’s shop. My suggestion would be to change the timer to be based on ingame timer. We know that the game have a time system albeit we still don’t know whether it has a day system or not. For example, the daily bounty/challenge could be changed to 7 ingame days while the weekly ones become 30 ingame days.

This way, players don’t feel “forced” to play the game just to finish the bounties/challenges. They can play the game with their own pace whenever they have the time (very helpful for people like me with family and job).

I personally have no opinion on the length of crafting timer. I understand that the exponential processing length doesn’t really make sense, but I also understand that the progressive nature of the game requires things to be more difficult. The middle ground could be having a constant time for every refining process, but with varied processing cost. The cost gets more expensive the rarer the material is. Having your own refinery would negates that cost. I think that’s a decent incentive for building refinery, although I think building/buying one should be a bit more expensive than current cost then.

3

I think the idea of using the ingame timer would make things happen more frequently but at the same time it seems weird when applied to the daily and weekly quests. If it were applied to them, players would need a third party website to track the next reset on them as opposed to just knowing they will reset on a set specific time.

The reason I also suggested changing daily/weekly challenges and bounties to what I suggested is because of the reward. I think grinders will find the current reward a bonus for just playing the game and people that have families won’t be missing out if they skip them entirely for a week. I would not suggest making those quest rewards any better or fear of missing out would set in for people that do have families. Honestly the quest rewards are just barely adequate and honestly you can get way better gear just doing 2 rooms of the Cerim Crucible versus any of those quest rewards.

4

players would need a third party website to track the next reset on them

Not really. The game just need to have a clearer time indicator (for example, Sunday, 17:00) rather than current hour:minute only indicator. The bounty/challenges then need to have deadline like “3 days remaining to complete this mission” with the time of when that request was posted. While I do like that bounty is more narrative based than ingame UI based (without marker, arrow, etc), I do think it needs improvement.

I do agree that the rewards are underwhelming (12 silver for 3 ichors??). But I doubt things are gonna stay like that. Bounties and challenge have massive potential. For example challenges that improve relationship with the vendors, unlocking hidden perks. Connected bounties, like several low-reward bounties that if all completed, would unlock hidden bounty with better reward. The possibilities are endless. Having the timer tied to ingame time is just better overall, imho.

5

I am probably going to say something controversial but I don’t think bounties and challenges that you accepted should expire at all. Rather every other bounty and challenge that you don’t accept should rotate at a set time. This gives players an unlimited amount of time to do those quests and get those rewards and eliminates the fear of missing out entirely.

There are some good quests though such as slaying the uber elites that drop ichor. While the quest turn in reward isn’t worth much, the fact the quest allows you to spawn in a monster that has ichor to drop as a reward is super good. Those are the only quests I really look forward to doing. That and the easy ones like 5 wood/ore are nice give me free loot quests that are not too encumbersome. The weird ones where you need to kill enemies with fists or a bow or block x attacks. Those quests are ok if you plan to do that anyway but are annoying otherwise to keep on the list. That is why I wish they would swap out more frequently.

As far as the potential of Bounties and Challenges, I think it would be cool to earn some reputation with vendors to unlock discounted prices or their secret exclusive VIP only merchandise they normally don’t show the public. That sort of thing I can definitely get behind. Connected bounties sounds just like a side quest. You find animal tracks that lead to a bear cave but the bear is a mutant so after killing it you need to track down the contamination source and it is a torn boss of some kind. Yeah those chain side quests could be introduced into the bounty board I guess, but it would be better and more meaningful if you found a citizen of the city that is always there to give you that quest after asking them what is wrong versus hoping the quest spawns in the bounty board. The bounty board could do chain errand side quests but npc character development side quests shouldn’t be on the bounty board. They should be available at the specific NPC.

6

That’s a perpective I haven’t really think about. I still don’t really know what the purpose of these things from devs’ vision. Is it just to give people something to do, something to gain, or other purposes. But your suggestion could work, especially in multiplayer settings where you find time to play together with your friends to finish that bounty that’s been sitting for too long but with good reward that you can’t abandon.

7

This is just my perception on the bounty and challenge system, but I think the devs intent is just to give the players some direction on what to do while they are logged into the game.

Some players need to have their hand held the entire way. Some just need a little guiding and are fine. Others like myself will just explore everything and do everything, figuring out what do do along the way.

I can see without this system in place, a lot of players would log in and be like “ok what do I do? Crucible? Anything else?”

8

the crafting and vendors are not tied to your main game proggression so i dont mind if there is timegated stuff and Thomas already told that the developers are not going to add MTX to boost timers on the game if it get released in other platforms (phone, playstation, nintendo).

9

to be fair, I don’t mind time gated stuff either. The thing I am hoping for is shorter timers so they are not so annoying.

10

I have seen a lot of interviews of Thomas, and I think I have an idea of where it is comming from when he says that he wants people to come to Wicked everyday and there is something new to do, and I think this is great, and totally excited to follow that vision, but I think that using real life timers and timed game mechanics like daily shops and Finley is a terrible mistake and it will have an opposite effect, especially giving no alternative to players.

My experience comes from a vast amount of hours in mobile games and personal frustration with these systems. I have no issue with the timer for building sacrament since I have a CHOICE for speeding up the process.

REAL TIME TIMERS: Why I think this is a terrible idea when you dont give the player an alternative to speed up?

Well you can just look at the revenue of mobile games, specially in farming games, they artificially create this problem (waiting) and then people are willing to spend A LOT of money to get rid of this problem, thats how anoying it is. I can think of more examples of developpers artificially creating problems that dont exist and then charging for it (timed battle passes etc.)

Now does this time keeping help the vision to make people excited to come back tomorrow for something new? Maybe the first 2-3 days but after that, for the average player this is just annoying, I need to plan my life based on your game for no legitimate reason? You are just creating friction in my opinion.

Finley goes from 8-12pm, do you work night shifts? Too bad for you, do you have other responsabilities and today you can play 5h but you cant for the rest of the week? Too bad for you too, etc. etc.

There is literally no reason why I cant pay 2 silver and have rerol on the shop or calling finley early on the day instead of waiting until 8pm.

For the minmax andy, he will just create 20 worlds and thats it, but I dont think Thomas wants this as his vision right?

Oh yeah I am really exited to log in - check shop (nothing interesting) - check finley (nothing interesting) - log out and repeat this process 20 times for how many days until I find what I want, because this is allowed by the game, for the average player, instead of doing that process which is boring, I just go to an area and clear it, interact with your world and then rerol. The outcome is the same but one way is fun and the other is not.

I am being a bit harsh because I think that this type of time keeping will push out a lot of casual players and make people dislike the game, and I dont want that I want wicked to succeed and hence trying to give my 2 cents.

For finley and the shop to be frank I dont even think rerols are needed, just tie the “rerol” to the in game clock, make me look at the clock and think oh damn its finley time, or new day let me check the shop, now thats more exciting.

Why I put the shop as an example in particular is because I think a lot of player will enter this unfun cycle:

  1. I have finished story with a megh weapon, ok damage but not my playstyle and not that fun
  2. I build my character example main dex
  3. I dont like my weapon and want to try new one
  4. I have played for 10h-20h and mainly get armor drops and int/faith/str type of weapons
  5. I dont want to keep farming more with this weapon since I am not having fun
  6. I try to buy a new weapon suitable for my character but uh-oh wait.. and for how long?

Why do I need to wait so long to have fun?

I believe in the vision of coming back tomorrow and have something new and excited, but not at the cost of limiting the players at this level. I think the intention was to distribute fun in multiple dosis, not to wait in order to have fun.

I think this system work ok if you have not completed the story and if you had luck at the begining and found a weapon suitable for your playstyle then this systems feel ok, but when you finish the story with a megh weapon, oh man it feels bad. I think the trade off is just not there. In the long term you will lose more user retentiom than have satisfaction from existing and new users.

When I think of exciting things if I log in tomorrow I am thinking off things like:

Give me multi-layered quests where everyday I advance to a new tier increasing the difficulty and reward.

Give me events where i can get more enchantment materials

Give me quest where I can pick the reward like selection chest in clash royale if you want.

I hope that I put my point accross, I want to be excited to come back tomorrow and play wicked, I just think that looking at the shop or finley should not be one of them in my humble opinion

Have a great day guys, you guys earned a fan here!

11

I think you’re into something there. The time mechanics can be frustrating and sometimes even unclear. It would be cool a little timer or re-roll button as you mentioned inside the NPCs shops UI. For Finley, as he is a rather “rare encounter”, it would be cool a notification/banner that informs his arrival or a news board somewhere in Sacrament that informs of his arrival or something like that if his time mechanic is going to stay.

12

Yes exactly, even if you want to playtest during early access you dont even need the rerol in the shop.

Just give me a weekly quest where you give me 10 rerol tokens to spend on any shop, this is very limited and you can see the impact - effect on how much user interact/want this system.

To be honest this timed mechanic has a lot of underlying issues in my opinion:

User retention: How long do I need to wait to find my fun experience? Feels like I need to plan my free time around your game since most suitable time to play is everyday between 8 - 12 pm.

Content creation: If I want to make guides for your game how much time I need to invest to pop out videos? Return on time invested?

Even if you are insisting on keeping the system I still think you should keep the filosophy of stick and the carrot, I give you artificial problem, but if you are willing to interract with my world and my systems for 10-30 more minutes by clearing this area or farming 10 wood then you can get rid of this issue this time. If I dont care about the shop then thats fine, I will just do another activity nobody forces me to do this, the important thing is having the choice here in my opinion, if you give me the stick, give me a carrot and let me choose to eat it or not.