Author Topic: March 16, 2020 - Upcoming Overseer Changes  (Read 2683 times)

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Offline Riou

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March 16, 2020 - Upcoming Overseer Changes
« on: March 16, 2020, 08:33:49 PM »
We eagerly launched the Overseer feature last week, and the response has been incredible. It's an ambitious project for us of a scale we haven't done in quite some time and because we were so eager to get this feature in your hands, there have been some unexpected issues that require changes and fixes. We wanted to review the upcoming changes and explain what they mean and why we are making them.

We also wanted to take this opportunity to offer our apologies that so many changes are needed right after launching this feature, but we feel they are necessary to protect the integrity of not just the Overseer system but EQ itself.

But, before we launch into an explanation of why we turned off the Finish Early button and what changes you can expect in the upcoming patch, we wanted to be clear that we will be refunding a portion of the DBC spent on immediate quest completion through the system due to a bug.

Also, as a thank you for your patience and all the reports that helped us track and tackle Overseer issues, we will be granting an Overseer pack to all accounts that have logged in within the past month on servers that can use Overseer. The pack grants and refunds will be happening after this patch as we need to work out all the logistics, but we expect all affected accounts to see them in about 3-5 weeks.

Now, let's dive in.


Quest Success had a bug
It was a pretty big bug. A miscalculation in the way we determined if a quest should critically succeed resulted in a notable drop in its overall success chance. We are sorry for that, and we will be fixing it this week. The good news is that this fix will also result in the chances of critical success on all quests increasing by a significant factor.


Temporarily removing the ability to purchase immediate quest completion
Due to the issue with quest success, we felt it was best to temporarily remove the ability to spend Daybreak Cash to complete quests. We will enable the ability to purchase instant completion when the bug is fixed and, as mentioned above, will be refunding a portion the DBC spent on immediate quest completion


Reward Changes
Unfortunately, we made several miscalculations with what and how much was offered. We believe it is important that this system is supplemental to gameplay and that it does not replace it. Some of the rewards offered were either too easily attained or greatly devalued items that are granted through gameplay. To repair that we will be making the following changes:


Overseer merchant price changes
We will be increasing the Tetradrachm cost of most items on the merchant (as a side note from Absor, "I also want to apologize for the name of those coins..." as a side note from Ngreth, "I'm not."). The most notable change will be a significant increase in the price of McKenzie's Brews to align with their actual value. These are the new Tetradrachm prices for the items sold:

•The unique clockwork armor pieces: 70,000
•The unique clockwork robe: 175,000
•Spitegems: 87,500
•Crystallized Luck: 35,000
•Essences: 4,375
•McKenzie's Special Brew: 26,250
•Token of Resurrection: 43,750
•Urthron's Ulitimate Unattuner: 175,000


Tetradrachm will no longer be tradeable
Frankly, these were never meant to be tradeable. The intent was that rewards be earned by using the Overseer system, not by purchasing or trading for those rewards. Please take a moment to move your existing Tetradrachm to the character/account that you wish them to be on before the update this week.


Lowering the number of collectible items rewarded
We will be reducing the number of collectible items obtained on success. Because you can choose specifically what item you receive, introducing these items into the economy too rapidly will reduce the value of the rarest collectible items. So now collectible rewards will almost always only give you only one item. Also, you will usually not be guaranteed to get that item. The new rewards will offer you two options: either some number of Tetradrachm, or fewer Tetradrachm and a percentage chance to also gain a collectible of your choice. As a pretend example: succeeding on a Quest might offer you 200 Tetradrachm OR 150 Tetradrachm and a 25% chance to get a collectible item of your choice.


Other reward restrictions
Because we want to maintain the value of doing current content when it is current, we will no longer be rewarding collection or tradeskill items from the current expansion as rewards. Items from older expansions will obviously still be available.

We are restricting the ability to obtain collectible and tradeskill items as rewards to Gold members only. Free accounts will be offered a Tetradrachm reward for successful quests rather than a collectible or tradeskill item. This is to prevent abuse of the free to play system to gather these items, especially with the potential of upcoming free Heroic Characters (shh... it's a poorly kept secret!). As mentioned above, we do not want to undervalue the effort of playing the game through Overseer, we want it to be a way to enhance gameplay.

We will likely be making other changes and improvements to the system in the future, so please keep offering us feedback (scrollbars would be nice). Your ideas are always welcome.

Again, we would like to apologize for the need to make such dramatic changes to a system that we only just launched, but we felt they were necessary to protect the integrity of EverQuest and the Overseer system itself.

- Dreamweaver, on behalf of the EverQuest Team
https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/upcoming-overseer-changes.264015