Fatshark, I appreciate your recent blog post about attempting to improve the Armoury Exchange, but as long as the optimal strategy to acquire gear is going to be “log on every round hour with all of your characters”, all of the new ways of acquiring gear will still feel unrewarding in comparison. I am confident that none of these changes are going to stop people from complaining about the shop, because they don’t address the core issue of having the optimal loot-acquisition strategy being the most boring strategy, which doesn’t reward playing the game, and still ends up with feeling like you are entirely beholden to RNG.
If you truly want the shop to feel like an extension of the mission completion phase, where you “choose your own reward”, the shop should simply refresh after every mission completion, or better yet, mission completions grant you ‘shop refresh’ tokens which can be usable whenever you want. I would go as far as to say that even if you did only this, it would ameliorate most of the issues with the shop, because you would at least feel that you are getting gear from playing the game.
*If we’re being honest though, I’m doubtful that you would ever do this, because it seems that the hourly refresh is simply a part of your monetization strategy, and not something designed out of actual intent to make the game better. The sad reality is that all of your attempts to monetize this game as hard as you did are having the opposite effect. I just wish you would realize this before it’s too late.
They moved shop up one layer, instead of looking for the right item with the right stats, you’re going to be looking for the right blessing.
There’s a theory because of the wording in the blog that the extracted blessing might only be able to be applied to the exact same mark of weapon, but I hope that’s not true, because then it moves it to looking for the right blessing on the right type of item and we go back to:
Not that there’s really all that much reduction in RNG with the proposed changes.
Otherwise 3-4 additional rerolls with dockets per hour would be nice if they absolutely must keep the shop.
Edit: Reread the blog:
GOOD LUCK FINDING THE RIGHT BLESSING ON THE RIGHT WEAPON
I do not get why fatshark think that it is nice to constantly get new items to throw away, and to get a new item once in a while, that is slightly better than the old one, and replaces it.
Why not let us freely modify the items we have, and let us upgrade them to perfection?
Why should the entire system revolve about RNG upon RNG, and huge amounts of loot that goes right in the trash?
They think people need the carrot of itemisation to keep playing. They know there’s a core that will keep playing because of the gameplay, but in trying to get the item progression people it feels like they are alienating the gameplay people by deliberately extending or blocking item progression with layers of RNG.