While conversing with other members of my alliance, we concluded that grinding has become increasingly tedious and borderline impossible at times. We all discussed the following ideas and want to get reactions from the community and staff in terms of feasibility.
- Instanced Shrines
- Instanced Nether Wart or faster re-spawn times
- Instanced Glowstone and Quartz
- Group Grinding in Nether and End
- Double Mob Drops in exchange for Conquest Points over 24 hours
We believe that these changes are necessary for server growth as right now, it is challenging for totally new players to create a town. The amount of grinding that needs to occur to establish a new town is unrealistic for most players unless they have the support of an alliance. Currently, almost all of the new towns are created by experienced players who already have the support of an alliance, which eliminates possible new ones. This hampers growth by impeding the generation of new alliances on different continents, which would be great for the server as a whole. If it is changed so that players don't have to spend such a large amount of time grinding, they can focus on other aspects of the town. Loka, as it stands, is mostly just PvP and Grinding. There are not as many other things happening since the dedication to supporting these large towns requires grinding for hours.
Continental PvP is disappearing from 2/3 continents; this is another reason we included Double Mob Drops for CP. Implementing these changes would increase the amount of Continental PvP since Pot Mats wouldn't be as scarce and making it not as big of a commitment to fight since several hours of grinding could sustain the town for more than one or two large fights. PvP on all continents would make the server more active as there wouldn't be dead periods where people move to other continents in search of PvP and hopefully increase the active player-base.
You bring up a lot of good points that all have a good amount of merit to them. I will just go one by one breaking down my thoughts and such on each.
For starters, instanced shrines is a good idea, however would be difficult to implement. I think it'd just be more of a hassle especially when considering how it might work when multiple people go to a shrine. I think a better solution for the time being would likely be to make it so that the actual shrine cooldown is lower, as well as changing the shrine cooldown to apply to individuals, as opposed to the entire server. Adding more shrines could also work, but would be a permanent solution.
Instanced nether wart, glowstone, and quartz are all pretty obvious changes that definitely need to get implemented some time soon.
Group grinding is actually a discussion that we've had in LCR chat in the context of if there were instanced mobs when grinding and the consensus we came to was sort of "what determines a group?", because you could do it by alliance, town, etc. and have each "group" have a cooldown, but I think the issue is that people grind with friendlies and the like all of the time and simply allowing for anyone who is grinding "with you" to be in your group is generally a bad idea. I think I could see a system where people who you have mutually marked friendly get tagged into your "group" but that also is a bit annoying if you don't want to be in the group. I do like the idea of the more people being there, the more mobs spawn though. Clearly this would not work with the instanced grinding, however I think it's a good solution for how multiple people grinding together should function.
Double mob drops for CP is something that wouldn't really make sense to have for CP due to it already being a Balak buff. I think that pulling and replacing the Balak buff and allowing it to be a CP buff would generally be much better.
Sidenote with Balak and the like in general is that allowing for Balak buffs to give the continent caps a clear advantage against the newer players is definitely not good. The less of an edge that the continent caps have against newer players, the better. With camps and the new Rivina a lot of this has gotten much better, however could still use some improvement.
PVP on all continents is definitely something that would be quite optimal in the future, but is increasingly difficult to sustain. Many of times the big alliances on all three continents are aligned with at least one of the large alliances on another one of the continents, if not two of them, and this whole "We want PVP on all three continents" thing is sort of on the fault of the big alliances only fighting at one place at a time.
Overall I generally agree that grinding for new peeps needs a lot of improvement, and working through how to get it fixed is definitely something that needs to be done. Making items that aren't supposed to be restricted available to everyone is definitely something I would like to see in the future and something to work through in the coming months.
