Attn Developers: Please expain limited use grenades. Will we lose our Orange Grenades

[Arcisen]

so after watching that, dlc 2 all i have to look forward to arkfalls that i can create myself with friends, ? GIVE US NEW CO-OP MAPS DEATHMATCH 'REAL' STORY MISSIONS

[WhiteF8ng]

Alright here's my 2 cents...

Grenade Identity

The variety of the grenades in game lacked identity. Due to the four axis variability of each grenade mod, many of the rarer mods were not an actual improvement over the lower rarity mods. The only axis which provided significant benefit to our players was damage. (And duration for flashbang, pyro, and bio grenades.) This created a deeply negative experience for players when looting higher-tier grenades, and generally cluttered and already cumbersome inventory. By focusing on grenade identity, we are able to guarantee that each type of grenade is distinct and each rarity an improvement.

Ok there was/is a problem with the stat progression. I'm a little confused as to why this would clutter inventory. Unless the new grenade mod system won't take up inventory slots. Not sure what this is hinting at...

Risk-reward

Grenades had a serious risk-reward imbalance in a variety of common situations. With a fast-fire grenade thrown from a third-person perspective, misses were common and the long cooldown on grenades made this incredibly punishing. As such, grenades become something which lacked real strategic choice. Even with all the cooldown reduction synergies and bonuses, grenades could not be relied upon as a problem solving tool. Ideally, players should be able to make significant strategic decisions prior to a fight to enable themselves to play in the style they most enjoy. The original execution of grenades did not feed this dynamic.

I get it. But what happens to synergies that decrease grenade cooldown? Are these numbers changing? Maybe change cooldown % to % chance of earning a grenade? If grenades are gonna be consumable then why even have a cooldown? If I wanna spam my grenades to "problem solve" then why not let me? If the max amount able to carry is gonna be 3 (or is it?) then why am I restricted by a cooldown? I know I'll run out. I know how to manage ammo (Oh wait, it's not ammo, it's something else...). I also know I'll run out. Let me choose to do so if this consumable grenade change is set in stone.

Economic Issues

Ark hunters are the elite scavengers and warriors of the New Frontier. They are equal parts treasure hunter, bounty hunter, and monster hunter, and an infinite supply of high explosives really stretched this fiction and prevented a players from making significant economic decisions. An intended mechanic which never played out was that players should be making a significant decision between selling their loot and scrapping it. However, there was no viable economic sink for scrip, and this removed a significant choice from players. The answer was always to break down loot for salvage to get ark keys.

This robbed players of choice and the ability to own their decisions.

The consumables (grenades, spikes, and stims) provide an economic pressure with significant gameplay implications. They allow players to convert scrip into significant short-term power increases. Now the scrip vs salvage decision has teeth.

This actually makes since. Scrip has been on the back burner for many moons. Now its viable to want scrip. However, the payout from EVERYTHING in general sucks.

In one of the first episodic missions, Varus offers Nolan and Arisa s90,000 (EACH). I get 500 jekking scrip for doing the whole jekking Motherlode? Wtf? Dark Matter runs around in top-of-the-line shtako constantly and you're gonna tell me that those Monitors only carry 5 scrip total? The in-game NPCs wouldn't survive on the amount of scrip they carry for the prices that we have in the vendors.

If everything is gonna be a scrip vs salvage decision, then where are the big money events? I know how to get salvage, show me a viable place to get paid (fairly) for the work I put in.

Now, for clarification on some issues. “Grenade ammo” is not a thing. When a person picks up an uncommon frag grenade loot, they will get a stack of 3 uncommon frag grenades added to their inventory. If they pick up an Orange bio grenade drop, they will get three orange bio grenades added. “Smart Loot” ensures that players will primarily see drops of things they already have of the same rarity they have or lower. Essentially, players who don’t want to spend money to refill grenade stacks will rely on the luck of the drops to refill the grenades that they have in their inventory.

This went downhill the very second I read Uncommon. Is this a:

• "You get more nades depending on the rarity" thing?
• "If you got a purp and that drop ain't purp, you ain't got shtako" thing?
• "You need the same rarity and type of nade to replenish but if you pic up a lower rarity nade 'stack' you now have the latter" thing?

And is 3 gonna be the max amount of nades allowed or am I gonna have to purposely leave a nade drop on the ground in case I need it later?

[Tekrunner]

I was going to write a long post to express my feedback, but other people have already said pretty much what I wanted to say. So instead I'm going to leave it at two short points:

• A move away from cooldowns to consumables saddens me, and goes against what many modern games (that don't aim to be as realistic as possible) have been doing. I'm usually not one to complain about changes before I can actually experience them, but I'm almost certain I'm not going to like this one. I don't like consumables, I find them much less interesting to use tactically (grenade and spike spam, woo...) and they make you miss out on a whole range of possible cooldown-reduction mechanisms and builds centered around them.
• From the explanation we've had, the planned change goes against Occam's razor. The current grenade system may have some flaws (though I don't really understand the arguments about grenade identity, and feel like the risk-reward balance is perfectly fine, especially when using 24s grenades with refresh-reduction perks / bonuses), but it's simple and fairly efficient. The proposed changes sound complicated and confusing in many ways (balance problems in PvE and PvP, performance issues with too many items on the ground, confusing players who may have trouble deciding whether they should pick up the grenades or not, inventory management issues...)

So yeah, I'm personally unconvinced, at least for now.

And uh, if you really want to make scrip useful... just add an auction house where you can only pay with scrip, and all complaints about scrip being useless will instantly vanish.

[Zabuza]

“Grenade ammo” is not a thing.

So what you're saying is we will lose our Orange grenades when they run out??

And uh, if you really want to make scrip useful... just add an auction house where you can only pay with scrip, and all complaints about scrip being useless will instantly vanish.

I think they are afraid that will take away lockbox sales.

[Indra Echo]

The main point on this issue seems to be this: if you have no good reason for changing some current mechanic that is not geared toward fixing something and seems likely to add to one big thing driving people away, why do it?

Also, this as part of DLC (though I know the idea is that stims and spikes are new content) is just sad. Spikes I can understand as a way to call down arkfalls (where's the story immersion here-we're arkhunters I thought, not ark controllers), but stims? As I've said I've seen this show before. Grenades today, ammo, EGO, and HP tomorrow.

The fact that it seems no one thought about lag, no one thought about Arenas (you know DLC1), no one thought about grenade synergies, bonuses, or shield buffs to grenades and no one thought very hard about grenade refresh rates is sad and ridiculous. But they did think about economic pressures, risk reward, and some vague issue with inventory clutter--which means grenades must move out of our inventory, and leads to questions as to whether they'd still be able to be traded. It also raises questions as to how exactly this will work.

If I have just 5 grenades right now-that are cluttering up my inventory and that I had no choice over and couldn't use to fit into my strategy (things also said as reasons for doing this), then what happens when I pick up those random grenade loot drops (ok seriously, ammo is ammo and grenade loot drops are ammo-but this probably will be put into the category of loot, to try and get us to buy loot boosts-it is ammo).

My example is I have 5 grenades-say, an orange pyro, purple bio, frag, and cluster along with the infector grenade. I don't want to buy spikes or stims or stacks of grenades. I run out of the stack I have on me, but the placeholder remains-so if I buy more stacks at a vendor, I will again have the oj pyro, purple frag, bio, cluster, and I guess the infector as well. What happens to the stacks I get from enemy drops? Say I loot 3 green pyros-where do they go? Are they in my inventory? Once I use them are they totally gone or does a placeholder remain so I could refill them if I want to? And this placeholder (I don't have a good name for it, but this is supposed to help un-clutter our inventories, so I don't know what to call it), can we sell it if we don't have any reason to ever get a lot of green pyros?


Again my fear is this is just the beginning. I've seen this before. There are games that have tried to up the degree of difficulty by limiting the amount of HP regenerating items you can carry-until you get to some place to replenish it. These other games decided to make a lot of things consumables so as to force players to consider paying real money for things, or as a way to force grinding (which people get sick of so they decide to pay real money), or as a way to insert that perceived difficulty, instead of creating real difficulty.


I can understand wanting to find ways to get people to pay real money, for scrip and loot boosts-I just think there are better ways to do it, and it's a losing proposition to change existing things to try and make it happen. I am sure this is why grenade ammo (in a lot of other games you replenish it by going to an ammo box, if you have to replenish it) is being called loot and is not a thing, whatever that means. It will drop more often with loot boosts.

I really do want this question answered but don't think it will be-I know because of so much that happened with DLC 1-but what part of this new (actually old) content will be part of paid DLC and what part is free? Can't say anyone would pay for a new grenade mechanic, stims, spikes, and different arkfalls. Well maybe some would but then does that mean DLC 3 will have even more types of arkfalls and a change to ammo mechanics which will then be called Gun Replenishment Loot because gun ammo is not a thing?

[Tekrunner]

I can understand wanting to find ways to get people to pay real money, for scrip and loot boosts-I just think there are better ways to do it, and it's a losing proposition to change existing things to try and make it happen. I am sure this is why grenade ammo (in a lot of other games you replenish it by going to an ammo box, if you have to replenish it) is being called loot and is not a thing, whatever that means. It will drop more often with loot boosts.

I doubt it. I'm pretty sure that loot boosts actually make enemies drop more ammo as well.

[Overtkill21]

The main point on this issue seems to be this: if you have no good reason for changing some current mechanic that is not geared toward fixing something and seems likely to add to one big thing driving people away, why do it?

Also, this as part of DLC (though I know the idea is that stims and spikes are new content) is just sad. Spikes I can understand as a way to call down arkfalls (where's the story immersion here-we're arkhunters I thought, not ark controllers), but stims? As I've said I've seen this show before. Grenades today, ammo, EGO, and HP tomorrow.

The fact that it seems no one thought about lag, no one thought about Arenas (you know DLC1), no one thought about grenade synergies, bonuses, or shield buffs to grenades and no one thought very hard about grenade refresh rates is sad and ridiculous. But they did think about economic pressures, risk reward, and some vague issue with inventory clutter--which means grenades must move out of our inventory, and leads to questions as to whether they'd still be able to be traded. It also raises questions as to how exactly this will work.

If I have just 5 grenades right now-that are cluttering up my inventory and that I had no choice over and couldn't use to fit into my strategy (things also said as reasons for doing this), then what happens when I pick up those random grenade loot drops (ok seriously, ammo is ammo and grenade loot drops are ammo-but this probably will be put into the category of loot, to try and get us to buy loot boosts-it is ammo).

My example is I have 5 grenades-say, an orange pyro, purple bio, frag, and cluster along with the infector grenade. I don't want to buy spikes or stims or stacks of grenades. I run out of the stack I have on me, but the placeholder remains-so if I buy more stacks at a vendor, I will again have the oj pyro, purple frag, bio, cluster, and I guess the infector as well. What happens to the stacks I get from enemy drops? Say I loot 3 green pyros-where do they go? Are they in my inventory? Once I use them are they totally gone or does a placeholder remain so I could refill them if I want to? And this placeholder (I don't have a good name for it, but this is supposed to help un-clutter our inventories, so I don't know what to call it), can we sell it if we don't have any reason to ever get a lot of green pyros?


Again my fear is this is just the beginning. I've seen this before. There are games that have tried to up the degree of difficulty by limiting the amount of HP regenerating items you can carry-until you get to some place to replenish it. These other games decided to make a lot of things consumables so as to force players to consider paying real money for things, or as a way to force grinding (which people get sick of so they decide to pay real money), or as a way to insert that perceived difficulty, instead of creating real difficulty.


I can understand wanting to find ways to get people to pay real money, for scrip and loot boosts-I just think there are better ways to do it, and it's a losing proposition to change existing things to try and make it happen. I am sure this is why grenade ammo (in a lot of other games you replenish it by going to an ammo box, if you have to replenish it) is being called loot and is not a thing, whatever that means. It will drop more often with loot boosts.

I really do want this question answered but don't think it will be-I know because of so much that happened with DLC 1-but what part of this new (actually old) content will be part of paid DLC and what part is free? Can't say anyone would pay for a new grenade mechanic, stims, spikes, and different arkfalls. Well maybe some would but then does that mean DLC 3 will have even more types of arkfalls and a change to ammo mechanics which will then be called Gun Replenishment Loot because gun ammo is not a thing?

It would be amazing if the devs put half as much thought into this as you have. Your points are bang on, very cogent and constructive post.

I find myself caring less and less about this game as this grenade change looms...from the look of the server population I am not the only one.

[Elric1]

I got an easy solution. Diablo 3.

*No AH nor Bit store.
*Offline mode unlike Defiance.
*Almost (like 90%) BUG FREE!
*Nearly 60 FPS!
*BONUS: The game isn't made by this company.

Sorry I found another game where I can be socialize without the drama this company creates.

I have no idea why they want to make people angry. I could care less on the dlc known changes, I like Defiance as is but if every one of my friends is leaving there is little reason for me to play either regardless what they do to keep me.

[Zugo]

I got an easy solution. Diablo 3.

*No AH nor Bit store.
*Offline mode unlike Defiance.
*Almost (like 90%) BUG FREE!
*Nearly 60 FPS!
*BONUS: The game isn't made by this company.

Sorry I found another game where I can be socialize without the drama this company creates.

I have no idea why they want to make people angry. I could care less on the dlc known changes, I like Defiance as is but if every one of my friends is leaving there is little reason for me to play either regardless what they do to keep me.

You too? Guess I'm the only one left in Gunsligners/Defiance. Gonna have to fix that today.

[DreadRaver]

I got an easy solution. Diablo 3.

*No AH nor Bit store.
*Offline mode unlike Defiance.
*Almost (like 90%) BUG FREE!
*Nearly 60 FPS!
*BONUS: The game isn't made by this company.

Sorry I found another game where I can be socialize without the drama this company creates.

I have no idea why they want to make people angry. I could care less on the dlc known changes, I like Defiance as is but if every one of my friends is leaving there is little reason for me to play either regardless what they do to keep me.

I'm sorry, I don't understand - what Diablo 3 game are you talking about?

No drama? Have you ever spent any time on the Diablo 3 forums!?!?

60 FPS - WOW that's awesome for a 2D game, no?

I played D3 for 3 months last year - and Defiance is much more fun for me.