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Quoting Kyp from another thread, and breaking out the response so as to not further clutter up the server status thread.

When we go to actually test faction stuff (read: possibly now) it may be necessary to test each facet of the system even if some of the rest of it doesn't work Grendwal, if we didn't do it this way we'd never find the bugs that do exist.

We realize it's annoying, but we want it to work. The only way we can make it work is to provide something for everyone to complain about, because that tells us where we went wrong. If we mask the problem indefinitely by allowing everyone to use those gates for convenience we'll never get anywhere. :D

What you say makes sense and is perfectly fine. The key component that's missing though, is any kind of forum post/announcement stating that faction is entering a testing phase and that the gates will be closed for that purpose. Every time something changes in the game that's perceived to be negative, the lack of communication has always added to the frustration value of the community. Whether that's intended or not, I leave that to others to answer, but I simply ask that someone say definitively whether or not the faction re-enabling is in fact intended and if so, what's the focus of the testing for this period of time?

Alright, now that that's out of the way, let's assume that you're looking for useful feedback on the faction situation. As has been stated in other threads, the starting point for faction for certain classes seems high. -9k RD for my PP to start is just... painful. Having said that, I did finally get both my JE and PP enough standing to enter BBW/Paramis and dock at QAR. Results below...

Short list version for Kyp

- Review the faction awarded/removed scale and see if +11 for CL50+ mobs seems right. Suggestion, could we perhaps move this to +15 and adjust the scaling for lower level mobs accordingly?

- NPC at Paramis Station (Jar Vlodim) has a mission for the Talons that doesn't award any faction at all. Is this working as intended? If not, could we have it award RD faction?

- Sun Tzu @ OMP currently has only one mission for 500 RD faction. There are folks that say he used to have a second followon mission worth 2000 RD faction. Was this removed on purpose? And can it be returned to the game?

- Can there be some sort of token turn-in for RD faction similar to the half-eaten Jenquai/Terran/Progen suits?

- Faction awarded from job terminals seems a bit low for the time/effort involved. Could these be reviewed and perhaps bumped up to 30 faction instead of 25 for an L150 combat job? Explore/Trade jobs at 25 faction seems balanced.

- What I'd like to see is some kind of epic mission arc that you can do instead of the endless grinding for faction. Something along the lines of the Call Forward mission... Something that requires a lot of effort on one's part to complete without the monotony of sitting in one place hitting e+f. Granted grinding and jobs for faction should still be there for those that don't like missions. (Thanks Zyrith)

- Shared faction in a group isn't currently "working." Could this be fixed? (Thanks Grendal)

- Mob spawns that award RD faction are a bit limited right now (beyond simply Chavez). If this could be improved as well as faster respawn times, that would help the grind. (Thanks Grendal)

The Good

It wasn't as terrible an affair as it could've been, it took my JE about a week of casual play to get in. My JE started at roughly -7k or so. Casual play here is defined as, sitting at a spawn point, clearing it, watch some TV while waiting for respawn, maybe miss a spawn or two, clear again. I did this for roughly 2-3 hrs a night. All told, somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-12hrs. I did take advantage of running a few L150 jobs (combat/trade/explore) whenever the RD faction popped up to help things along. I also did Sun Tzu's mission from OMP (where we get to rattle Harvey Krum a bit.) So not a terrible experience.... the first time through.

The Meh

Now that my JE was in, I started working on my PP. This poor sap started with -9k and it took him a long time. Perhaps it was because, by the time I started on him, everyone else was hard grinding faction as well and there were no Chavez to be found. I could've started on my own faction but they don't offer the same kind of faction benefit as Chavez, so it was not in the cards. I started out doing what my JE did, casual play, sit at a spawn point, etc. The problem was, with such a large starting deficit it took a lot longer to bridge the faction gap and I ended up taking around 10 nights or so, again at 2-3 hrs a night, before I was able to limp into Paramis Station. This one also did the Sun Tzu mission, but not jobs.

I do have to say that a lot of this time was also in the middle of the server issues, with the inability to manufacture ammo, characters not saving (that one set me back by around 900 faction alone... grrrrr), mob spawn times being completely messed up and such, so perhaps the pain was more than it should've been under normal conditions.

The Bad

Alright, so two down... and two more to go *sigh*. While in the grand scheme of things, it's not a big deal to spend roughly 2 more weeks to get my remaining two toons to faction, it does mean that all told, I will have spent a substantial amount of time doing nothing more than beating up on no xp, crud loot mobs that others could've been leveling on instead.

My TE and JS are both around -6500 RD right now so roughly close to where my JE started. Both will do the Sun Tzu mission. Both will farm the best faction producing Chavez available, which are of course, low level and easily farmable. This just further causes spawn camping issues and such as there aren't enough alternatives in the game today to gain RD faction.

Bottom Line

The major problem right now is that the "best" (and really only) strategy for gaining faction for high level characters is well, beating up very low level mobs. The high level mobs offer very little relative gain in faction to even bother with. The faction scaling doesn't match up to the increase in difficulty and the reduction in overall mobs killed per hour. So again, farming low-level, high quantity spawns works better.

The Sun Tzu mission isn't repeatable, and it gives only 500 faction. My memory fails me, but I thought there used to be another RD mission that one could do to gain entrance to BBW, but I couldn't remember, nor find such a mission. The job terminals only give 25 faction, which is pitiful considering the amount of time invested to do a single job as compared to nuking a spawn of 5-10 L25 Chavez. There are no token turn in type of missions. Options are quite limited right now.

Improvements

- You could improve the faction awarded from higher level Chavez to +15 for the CL50-52, up from their current +11. That would help those that already went through the initial grind to further improve and maintain their relations with the RD.

- You could make Jar Vlodim's mission from Paramis Station actually award RD faction (it currently does not, perhaps that's intended).

- You could make Sun Tzu's mission repeatable once per faction tier as a sort of reward from the RD faction in recognizing that you're moving towards pirate-hood. For example, the current mission would be the initial one, can be done anytime by anyone. Once you get halfway to gate use for your class then Sun Tzu will recognize your efforts and offer you another mission to help ease the transition to the next phase. By this I mean, if your starting faction is -9k, then once you get to -5.5k, Sun Tzu gives you the second mission. (This is assuming -2k unlocks the gates.)

- As stated in other threads, you could provide some kind of item that could be turned in for faction, an RD version of the Jenquai/Progen/Terran half-eaten space suits. Or even just these items and given to some RD representative. I think the restriction here would be, they'd only accept space suits of your own faction. As a Jenq, giving Terran suits would get me a "ho hum, move along" from the NPC, whereas giving Jenq ones would get me some small amount of faction. A good balance might be to give 2-3 faction points per suit, so a stack of 60 would be 120-180 points. More than that would be unbalanced. I think 120-180 points per stack would open up a neat little pocket black market commodity as well for the market channel.

- The job terminal jobs should probably scale better on the faction awarded depending on the type. Receiving 25 faction for a L150 explore job seems okay, but seems too little for a L150 combat job. Perhaps a small bump to 30 faction instead? This means someone focused on combat jobs could get a maximum of 180 faction from picking six simultaneous RD factioned combat jobs (which in itself could take an hour before the refresh on the job terminal even produces said jobs). If the mob spawned happened to be Chavez, then bonus.

These suggestions could offer more options to folks. Perhaps they end up still being less efficient than low-level mob farming, but at least the gap wouldn't be as big, and folks could take a break from the mob ganking and do something more productive. Overall the idea is to make the process non-monotonous and offer more variety.

If you made it this far in my wall of text, I thank you for having the patience to read my post.

Edit: Added the short list section up top for Kyp.

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The Sun Tzu mission isn't repeatable, and it gives only 500 faction. My memory fails me, but I thought there used to be another RD mission that one could do to gain entrance to BBW, but I couldn't remember, nor find such a mission. The job terminals only give 25 faction, which is pitiful considering the amount of time invested to do a single job as compared to nuking a spawn of 5-10 L25 Chavez. There are no token turn in type of missions. Options are quite limited right now.

On both my PW and PS there were 2 missions from Tzu, one for 500 and another for 2000 positive RD faction. The 2k mission part seems to have been removed. And the poor lil TS also started with -9K faction.

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+1 to Fuulish

- You could improve the faction awarded from higher level Chavez to +15 for the CL50-52, up from their current +11. That would help those that already went through the initial grind to further improve and maintain their relations with the RD.

I agree with another faction bump, however iirc the chavez you are mentioning cl50-52 are only in Paramis. Someone could probably correct me on that, right now the highest level chavez that I have been able to farm is in Rag (well me and usually 3-5 other toons racing to see who can kill them first)

I have already done the 2k RD mission, it is extremely disappointing to hear that mission has been removed if that is true.

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What I'd like to see is some kind of epic mission arc that you can do instead of the endless grinding for faction. Something along the lines of the Call Forward mission... Something that requires a lot of effort on one's part to complete without the monotony of sitting in one place hitting e+f.

Granted grinding and jobs for faction should still be there for those that don't like missions.

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What I'd like to see is some kind of epic mission arc that you can do instead of the endless grinding for faction. Something along the lines of the Call Forward mission... Something that requires a lot of effort on one's part to complete without the monotony of sitting in one place hitting e+f.

Granted grinding and jobs for faction should still be there for those that don't like missions.

Agreed. How about a mission where you have to get a collection of items non-manu/looted-only from Chavez but of different levels. Like you need 10 of component A lvl 2 (looted from chavez lvl 5-10) and 10 of component B lvl 3(looted from chavez lvl 12), etc. You would still have people farming all of these locations to get these comps, but at least they would be moving around to get all of them and grouping would be ok, so toons can share loot (since you can't share faction right now)

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I totally agree this faction grind is starting to get really tedious. I am begining to think its not really worth the grind and may just stop grinding it all together. Currently my PS has about 7900 RD rep to gain before being in the positive, at that kind of deficit its not really worth my sanity to kill millions of chavez and especially when there is a higher level or 2 lurking around with the ones you can kill like in my situation about a week ago I was killing some CL15 ish chavez and out came a level 30 one whom one shotted me and being that I was out of reactor energy I couldnt jumpstart myself so I had to take a tow and being how certain individuals have been within the game now I didn't bother asking for one.

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RD faction or any faction for that matter should be based on level of mob

It is. But the scaling for higher level mobs isn't really in line with the difficulty increase, so it's something that may need to get re-balanced, or at least examined.

I totally agree this faction grind is starting to get really tedious. I am begining to think its not really worth the grind and may just stop grinding it all together. Currently my PS has about 7900 RD rep to gain before being in the positive, at that kind of deficit its not really worth my sanity to kill millions of chavez and especially when there is a higher level or 2 lurking around with the ones you can kill like in my situation about a week ago I was killing some CL15 ish chavez and out came a level 30 one whom one shotted me and being that I was out of reactor energy I couldnt jumpstart myself so I had to take a tow and being how certain individuals have been within the game now I didn't bother asking for one.

Not sure what CL you can handle, but it sounds like you're hunting the ones in Freya that occasionally have a CL30 scout/enforcer (?) with them. If that's your target level range, you could try Jotunheim. Register at Arx Ymir just in case you need to tow and you have your pick of 3 navs of Chavez in the L9-17 range. It's also a short hop from here to Odin Rex where there's L15-18 Chavez.

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Notice how I said it was a week ago >.>, I can take on ones much higher now, the jotunheim ones don't offer much combat experience for me anymore, i can take one ones in the 20-23 range at least now but I have not ran into very many of those yet.

Edited by CptGemini
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Notice how I said it was a week ago >.>, I can take on ones much higher now, the jotunheim ones don't offer much combat experience for me anymore, i can take one ones in the 20-23 range at least now but I have not ran into very many of those yet.

The two hidden Chavez camps in Jotunheim have some in that range. Odin Rex has a spawn of those as well in the NW corner, past the defense drones. And um... There's always Glenn, but that one is quite camped by folks.

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(since you can't share faction right now)

To clarify, are faction points shared amongst group members or does only the member that gets the kill get the faction? I was asked to group with someone in Ragnarok to share the Chavez there. During our time, he said he didn't think he was getting faction for kills I got while we were grouped. We were targeting different mobs to maximize our kills. With so many players grinding Chavez for faction, this is going to occur quite often. The alternative will be competing for targets and more hard feelings :D

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To clarify, are faction points shared amongst group members or does only the member that gets the kill get the faction? I was asked to group with someone in Ragnarok to share the Chavez there. During our time, he said he didn't think he was getting faction for kills I got while we were grouped. We were targeting different mobs to maximize our kills. With so many players grinding Chavez for faction, this is going to occur quite often. The alternative will be competing for targets and more hard feelings :D

I noticed this too when I was grinding some chavez with someone a couple of days ago, I wasn't getting any for the kills that they got which was most of what we were out doing.

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Person with the most damage on the mob gets the faction hit/gain. Grouping doesn't do anything, and there's no sharing of faction like there is with xp.

That pretty much makes having friends to go grinding rep useless which is probably why I haven't really played E&B much in the last 2 days.

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That pretty much makes having friends to go grinding rep useless which is probably why I haven't really played E&B much in the last 2 days.

I too, have been less and less excited about playing. Not sure if it is only the faction issue, but that is right up there. The mobs that you can kill for +10 RD faction each (this may have changed) are behind a RD factioned gate. :D

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I too, have been less and less excited about playing. Not sure if it is only the faction issue, but that is right up there. The mobs that you can kill for +10 RD faction each (this may have changed) are behind a RD factioned gate. :)

For me its largely the faction issue, its way too tedious and the faction gained when your by yourself is very little to none at the present moment, I just hope it gets tweaked in the future so I can have a bigger urge to come in and bust some more bugs.

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What I'd like to see is some kind of epic mission arc that you can do instead of the endless grinding for faction. Something along the lines of the Call Forward mission... Something that requires a lot of effort on one's part to complete without the monotony of sitting in one place hitting e+f.

Granted grinding and jobs for faction should still be there for those that don't like missions.

I agree with this as well, and all the other things mentioned. Job faction could use to be scaled up abit, since in emulator there are quite a few classes that have to grind much further than the -5000 to +2000 that was required in Live.

So my suggestions are A) fix the group faction or B ) add some more spawns for people to get RD faction or C) more static RD faction gain missions.

Agree with what Grendwal said, how about implementing all of his suggestions and let players choose which route that suits their needs best.

In live there was a Progen construction yard, in Primus, that had PW drones, that were low level, spawned frequently, and was a good spot to farm for faction, another good spawn was near the gate to Lagarto in Endriago. Putting those spawns back, and a little more Faction for doing jobs, would allow people to balance working up their RD, while appeasing the Progen with jobs.

Also on JObs and faction, are the Trade & Combat jobs awarding it upon completion? The explore jobs are, not sure about the other 2. In live all of them awarded faction with sponsor upon completion. They were a way to raise faction without angering other factions.

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Great topic guys , well explained argument and some valid points.

Could explain some of the general issues rather than ranting type ones.

Kept nodding my head in agreement as I was reading.

Will try and ask one of the team to have a look at post.

All the best

Alk

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Alright guys,

my current project is actually something else that everyone will find beneficial but I can see my words had a profound impact.

First, I don't know that someone was testing it, thus the (possibly now) thing; however, I know some of you are disillusioned with how it's working so here's what I have to say, if one of you would be so kind as to gather all of these opinions about what would make faction better and make a short list for me, I will set it as the next thing on my list to review and improve where we can. I don't want anyone to have to GRIND because I know what it's like and it's a outdated concept in modern MMORPGs for the most part.

Discuss it to death, like... U.N. Summit on Faction Grinding. :)

I promise it'll be the next thing I look at and we'll fix it all up. (Note that all suggestions may not make it in, but they will be taken into account to try to make it all more interesting)

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  • 2 months later...

I'm going to be discussing faction now with the rest of the team because I've finally completed several of the things I had pending. I just wanted to provide a quick update, look forward to faction changes. I have copied Fuulishs' short list to my list of things to review, if anything is to be added after this point I would appreciate if you speak with the advocate and/or (if that fails) PM me. I prefer less PMs to create less confusion and allow me to finish things quicker but if you can't get a response about it then let me know directly. Please don't abuse that though, I get quite a lot of PMs on a regular basis and I can't track them all! :)

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Ok, i will give a bit more info:

There is already a repeatable mission from a mob out there that gives a small faction gain for Mordana.

And there is a secret mission from a mob out there that gives a good gain of RD faction, for my bad, as i checked that mission, it gave no RD faction.

Since i did see that after the last content update, the RD faction gain will be in at next content update.

Also are turn-ins out there that give RD faction. No, i tell you not where and what to turn in. ;)

Also are new Chavez spawns(CL35-CL39) out there already.

I tell you that, just so you can see we do something. And much more is coming, we had just not the tool to create such things.

greets

Hexergirl

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