Requesting a review of RBR on behalf of many community members.

[Ade]

Hi everyone,

I want to stress the fact that I am not suggesting a new mechanic or system in PSO. The purpose of this post is to encourage the staff to review the current Ragol Boost Road (RBR) quest lineup / boost strength in light of recent drop chart changes, the fact that RBR quests change each week (and cannot be exploited for a full month at a time), and that the overall boosts provided by RBR are nowhere near what was possible with Hunter's Boost Road (HBR). I am making this post with the encouragement of several community members who have experienced both the positives and negatives of RBR, and would like to see it reviewed. I don't want to be contentious, but I want to get a discussion going about this. RBR has been in place for 19 months and hasn't received any major changes or updates since its inception (except that max boost can now be attained with 3 players), so hopefully it is within our purview as players to encourage the staff to review existing systems.

Items that would be helpful to review:

A. Although RBR has encouraged players to log in more often, the boosts were nerfed too much compared to what was attainable in HBR. This is yet another nerf for players who are hunting for endgame gear, where opportunities for progression are few and far between. The boosts provided by RBR should be increased by a decent amount. They don't need to be anywhere near what was possible with HBR, but they are too low right now. With the nerfs to Untekked Weapon rate, Weapon Special Tier appearance rate, and the overall nerfing of Events (which more or less leveled off around late 2022), it has become much more difficult to hunt endgame gear than 5+ years ago. Unfortunately, many of the changes of the last few years have made it so that the current boosts aren't strong enough to carry the weaker quests.

B. East Tower and West Tower should be removed from the RBR list. These quests are extremely weak and are basically what "Free Field Tower" would have been if it was an actual thing. The spawn densities of these quests are so low that they don't even deserve to be called quests. Furthermore, these quests still have important mechanics attached to them (adding Specials to S-Ranks and adding Attribute Percents to weapons), so they will still get played / seen. That aside, ET and WT are mostly ignored when they come up on RBR.

C. The following quests should be considered for addition into the RBR lineup:

1. Lost Soul Blade: Now that Lame d'Argent has been moved to Sinow Red, there's no reason to continue excluding this from RBR.

2. Road to Nowhere (potential conflict of interest since I helped develop this quest): This is a full-length Ruins 1 to Ruins 3 + Dark Falz quest. It is challenging and takes a long time to reach the end. It cannot be exploited for any one single enemy any more effectively than anything else.

3. Phantasmal World 2: The Pinkal Lame rate for Ul Gibbons was nerfed to over 1 in 4,000 BECAUSE of this quest. Disallowing it from existing in RBR is a double-penalty for the same thing.

4. Phantasmal World 4: If people want to reset the first two floors of this all day to hunt SJS and melt their brains, that is on them. Even with RBR boosts, it would still take well over 1,600 PW4 resets on average to get a SJS. For everyone else, it's a great quest that barely gets played anymore.

5. Lost Berserk Baton: This quest isn't any more powerful or dense than any of the other "Lost" quests and takes a long time to clear. There's no reason it shouldn't be in RBR.

6. Lost Spirit Striker: Same justification as LBB but even beyond that: This quest has random spawns, so it can't be exploited for anything significant (except maybe Girtablulus).

7. New Mop-Up Operation 3: Due to its shortness in length, NMU4 is easier to farm for HS than NMU3, so there's no reason NMU3 should be excluded. (This was not apparent when RBR was launched, but it is now.)

8. The non-event Maximum Attack E series (MAE1, MAE VR, MAE GDV, and MAE4): These are powerful quests, but there's only four of them. It would be a nice, rare treat to get these once in awhile.

9. The REV series (not the older XRD series). These quests are strong, but they have random routes which cannot be exploited. And there's only three of them, so they won't come up very often.

There are possible MANY more, and hopefully some of my friends and fellow players will add their own ideas.

Conclusion:

I posted in 2023 about concerns on HBR that were addressed enthusiastically by the Staff, and the overall health of the server has increased tremendously since RBR was released. In that regard, it was a massive success, and I continue to be grateful. However, it's been almost two years since any of this was reviewed. This doesn't mean that anyone did a bad job; but that we learned through long-term observation.

I want to stress the fact that RBR has been overall very positive and it keeps players from melting their brains for an entire month straight. You guys are awesome, so I hope we can get a good discussion going about this.

 

[Lantana]

I think one thing that I have really noticed over the past year or so is most players want to hunt the most optimal way, making use of boosts and high density quests.
The RBR system as a whole is important in my opinion because it basically introduces a new "set" of quests every week. I spent some time playing on other PSO servers fairly recently and I can say that servers with no rotation are all just 3-4 quests being spammed 24/7.
When RBR was introduced, replacing HBR, part of the reasoning for the updated quest list was to shine light on some of the lesser-played quests. However I find we are in that same loop again where only the RBR quests are being played. (excluding TTF/RT of course).
I think adding some new quests would breathe some fresh air into the game and peoples hunts. Playing quests you haven't played before is very refreshing.
On a quick count (excluding solo, shop, event, and government quests) there are around 60-70 quests not in rotation, a really large portion of these go untouched.

There is also the argument of some quests being too strong to be boosted. Yes some quests are stronger than others, however if we had a bigger quest list, what really are the odds of those quests lining up perfectly with DAR or RDR rates? (not that great). And as for some quests being "too strong of a reset", I kind of think its been proven with the last Anniversary Event that people are just going to play how/what they want.

I personally think the RBR system is a better fit for everyone, hardcore gamer or casual. I just wish it promoted more of the quests available.

 

[Grizzly]

RBR was an excellent solution to the monthly HBR monotony. Many people agree though that while HBR rates were insane in hindsight, lowering the boosts to their current rates was a significant blow to some of the "weaker" quests on the list. It would be very nice to see some kind of rework that gives RBR some higher boosts to help these weaker quests. If there was concern that some of the better quests would be too powerful maybe there could be a system set in place where quests can be assigned a negative value, so that when those quests roll they would not get the full RBR boosts. In theory if this could be done it also opens up the possibility of adding some of the better quests in the game back to RBR. We have an amazing library of quests here on Ephinea but unfortunately due to the "fomo" from RBR boosts or lack of knowledge of some of the better quests it seems that the only thing that people run now is RBR. It seems that where HBR was introduced to boost up lesser played quests and make them relevant for more variety, we now find ourselves in a situation where the only thing that is run is these lesser played quests.

 

[Cutty Mink]

I was originally an advocate of RBR due to (at the time) finding the grind required for HBR to be "unfair" to players who can't devote much time to the game. Now, with the current iteration of RBR, I'm left wondering-- does it really matter if people who can spend more time on the game get more benefits? Casual players could still build up HBR boosts to a lesser extent, and easily attain rates higher than what you can with RBR. For those who enjoy playing the market, it absolutely feels like the market has suffered over time. With the significantly lower DAR rates in RBR compared to HBR, there are less PDs in flowing and newer players inevitably see the grind to become a veteran with lots of gear far more daunting than before. HBR offered a steady progression path for serious new players to gear up and build wealth. Building points also rewarded players for the camaraderie of making friends to play/grind with.

I'm not saying 'get rid of RBR', but rather, 'isn't there a middle ground between the two?' It feels like we swung from one extreme to another.

Beyond the perks of HBR, the philosophy behind removing powerful quests from the RBR rotation makes very little sense to me for a variety of reasons.

1) I've heard the argument that if powerful quests are in the rotation, no one will do the weaker ones. People will ALWAYS gravitate toward the most efficient hunt regardless of which quests are in the rotation. There will always be quests in every RBR that people ignore because one of the quests is simply a superior use of our time relative to the other quests in the rotation. If the quests are MU1, East Tower, and Sweep-Up 12, people are probably going to do Sweep-Up 12.

2) With a large number of quests in rotation, it's not like these 'OP' quests are going to be popping up every week. Most weeks won't have PW4 or LSB, so why not let us have a treat once in a while with a powerful and fun RBR quest? How does having these quests pop up once in a while somehow damage the server or make all these other quests irrelevant?

3) Some quests are so bad that no one will ever play them even if they're in RBR-- they legitimately just waste a slot, like East/West Tower. If we can have bottom-barrel gutter tier quests clogging the line-up, why can't we also have some OP quests to balance it out?

4) I've heard the argument that some of these OP quests are 'too hard,' and aren't new player-friendly... I'll be honest-- who cares? If PW4 is too hard for a new player, they can play something else or do something else during the week it's in the rotation. Why punish skilled players for some imagined slight against newer players? There are plenty of kind veterans who would be happy to teach these players more advanced tech as well.

 

[Thanatossa]

As a kinda new-ish player compared to other veterans Im actually kinda frustrated with the state of the game. I missed out many years of HBR glory only to realize over the last 12 months, that its basically impossible to "catch up" on the wealth many veterans from back then are hoarding. In addition to the common droprate adjustments it almost feels like "never went through the grind during the golden age? Enjoy your stay in poverty".
Dont get me wrong, i would never want the old hbr system back from what ive heard. You experience powerful quest fatigue redardless of how powerful the quest may be (looking at you christmas fiasco). The introduction of RBR was healthy and almost necessary for the consistency of the playercount but i can only agree with previous posts and i will always disagree with the argument "quest too hard, not good for rbr" since we have event quests, that go far beyond that difficulty. The difficulty argument only applies to Episode 2 cca and seabed anyway in my opinion.

 

[Brvcx]

My two cents is I don't see many people use the Anguish system all too often. It's a great way to make really easy quests challenging again, for an increase in droprate. Most end game players I've played with would easily take on A1 and possibly A2, with a benefit in droprate and an upped challenge. I remember back when I was hunting Pwand with a party we used a lot of Halloween Cookies on A4-6 back then. Makes a very easy quest a true challenge.

While this could be applied to any and all quests people feel aren't worth their time due to being too easy, it works for RBR imo.

Do note, I was never a fan of the HBR in particular, because of "Quest fatigue". Playing the same few quests for an entire month sure sucked the fun out of it for me. And seeing I'm working and have a family I don't have all the time in the world to spend on here, that's saying something. Sure, you want to get somewhere gear or wealth wise, you need to grind and that's more than okay. But I'd rather enjoy the time I play than it feeling like a chore. Cutty Mink might be onto something here, we've swung from one extreme to the other. Though I prefer this extreme a lot more. Maybe a revision isn't a bad thing, but I hope it stays closer to RBR than HBR, if just for "Quest fatigue" alone.