At first i though farming that pirce of rare unidentified gear is great at new map, untill recently i noticed that i didnt get any rare one from mystic coffers only green and blue one, did anet put limitation on that? Or it's just me If anet did put limit on that can anyone share how much so we can get more clear understanding in that, thanks
External link →This is correct. Every 3 chests guarantees a drop of 3 rare items. There is an effect that plays when this happens. After opening 100 chests, you will no longer continue to get the rare items and a different effect will play to demonstrate that you hit the limit. This daily limit has been in place since the map shipped.
Additionally, there is a rare chance to get one of the Weapons of the Scion. If you haven't received one by the 1000th chest opened on your account, you will get one guaranteed.
I assume this counter resets once a weapon drops? e.g. if I get one after 500 chests, I start at 0 again?
So worst case scenario means I have to open 19k chests?
The ascended bonus does not reset. It is a one time bonus for your account.
Since this reward structure is quite different to what we have seen in the past, it would be nice, if you could elaborate a bit on it from a designer perspective. For example why you chose this structure and what you think are the advantages over old reward structures that gave similar rewards.
Basically, what was the reason why you implemented this reward structure in that way and what do you hope to improve with it?
On a personal note, I would like to say that I am quite a big fan of your work. I tihnk I started following it after the major reworks of Halloween Bags and Wintersday Gifts in 2017 (?). I think especially the WD Gift overhaul was a great update to festival rewards, even though it will probably take a couple of more years to get rid of the oversupply from previous years and take full effect.
Are reward systems a major focus of your workload or what else are you working on?
I appreciate the kind words!
The majority of my time at ArenaNet has been focused on rewards and reward systems. However, I have had the opportunity to work on a variety of other projects for short periods of time.
Just for you, I will share some of it in no particular order:
Birthday gifts: I took over the birthday gift from year 3 onward. I always loved the birthday gifts in GW1. We couldn't do the same thing in GW2 for a variety of reasons but I wanted to make them as exciting for GW2 players as the GW1 gifts were to me.
Auric Basin: Each HoT map had it's own team. I was brought on to be an extra hand partway through development. I worked on the Auric Basin team and my implementation task was to populate Tarir. That was an interesting challenge because we wanted the city to be fun to explore and have NPCs to interact with but I didn't want it to feel like it was teeming with life. It has such a magical atmosphere and I wanted the player to feel like they were the ones discovering it. On top of that, the city has to transition between its siege phase and peaceful stage.
Domain of the Lost: Once again, I was brought in later in development to help out. I worked on the populating this area and the Eater of Souls boss fight. I wanted to create a really simple boss that would feel devastating at first but have an easy mechanic to overcome. Unfortunately, I overestimated how intuitive it would be and failed to properly telegraph the mechanic. I expected that it would be natural to run in the opposite direction of the Eater's life steal attack which would negate his ability to both deal damage and heal.
Level-80 Boost: This is one of the things I'm most proud of. Link Hughes and I were told that we had to create the best max level boost on the market. It had to be reversible and usable on any/multiple characters at once. It may look simple on the surface but we put a ton of work into it. We were lucky to have two dedicated programmers on the team: Ryan Deiderich and Kevin Verholtz. In addition to the boost itself, this team was responsible for creating the shared inventory slot which was created by Ryan to solve a design issue of making this item usable on multiple characters at once. In our downtime, we created the salvage-all QoL feature.
Current Activities Team: I was brought on to this team shortly after it formed and had a ton of fun working on releases with Matt Pennebaker. Matt is an incredibly fast implementor with deep technical knowledge of our internal tools. I am very good at polishing and refining things. Together, we were able to put together some really wild events like the Legendary Leyline Anomaly. The first event that could happen anywhere on a map-wide path. I also worked on some solo releases like Burden of Choice.
Legendary Weapons: I was part of the design group that helped brainstorm the story collections for the gen 1 and first few gen 2 legendaries. I was unbelievably excited to be a part of this as I got to canonize parts of my own in-depth stories and ideas about the origins of legendaries that I had come up with before I started working at ArenaNet. In particular, I had strong opinions about the liquid in the juggernaut being a living metallic ooze that shared a symbiotic relationship with the player. Years later, I was involved with the design side of generating new legendary weapons for generation 2. There was no way we could continue doing the massive unique story collections for the new legendary weapons while matching the pace of living world releases, but I always tried to tell a small story through the names of the precursors and legendary itself and occasionally blurbs in the patch notes. It has also been a ton of fun collaborating with many artists but primarily Chelsea Mills who is incredibly talented and has created many of my favorite weapons.
Festivals: Joe Kimmes, Brett Nellermoe, and I maintained Festivals together for years. Usually, I would handle the bulk of rewards while Joe worked on making the festivals easier to maintain and more consistent (such as the achievement overhauls). However, this team was also the Current Activities Team so sometimes Joe or I would have to handle a festival mostly on our own as we were juggling other releases.
Musical Bass Guitar: During my internship, I worked on the commerce team and got to make this idea a reality. My internal name for this is the Guicharr. I've always believed that charr are the true innovators of Tyria while asura are better at refining of existing ideas. I wanted the charr to make the precursor to an electric guitar. It's inspired by real-world resonator guitars.
That's probably enough for now.
Keep in mind, for every feature big or small there are many teams and individuals involved. What I shared above is merely my perspective on things that I have worked on. It does not do justice in giving everyone their deserved credit.
Our Quality Assurance team is truly amazing. When you are working on a feature it can be hard to see it clearly. Our QA teams have saved many releases. Not just from bugs but from design flaws that would have created negative experiences.
Our editing and localization teams have the patience of saints. They are often given so little time to work and are so understanding when we have to make emergency text changes last minute.
Our production team keeps us focused and on track as well as contributing design input themselves.
Our office admins who coordinate food truck schedules, office communication, lunch delivers, keep huge stocks of office supplies, stocking our kitchen, planning events (as someone who just went through a wedding I will never take this skill for granted again), as well as just being incredibly pleasant people.
Tools, IT, HR, server, release management, and many more teams and people who make everything possible. It feels overwhelming to try and list everyone.
Now back to the original topic.
Rewards in GW2 are incredibly difficult to balance. We want to make as satisfying of an individual experience as possible, while also keeping a global perspective in mind, and balancing an economy. For example, when designing the wintersday gifts my goal was to have a very meaningful use for the most common stuff you receive as well as having very desirable rare rewards that would have a high value on the trading post. I also never want to flood anyone's inventory with too many different items that make managing it a headache.
The Mistborn Coffer reward structure is something that we have discussed in the past and wanted to try for a while. It was a mix of time, new tech, and MattP expertise that let us implement it under the hood. The advantages of this system are that it creates a compromise between something feeling rare and special globally while ensuring that it is obtainable individually. I don't believe this should be used for all things as some items need to be truly rare to have real value on the trading post.
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