LET'S START WITH A PLEA: If you're just commenting to say people like me are not welcome in PG because we ruin the game, and "win" by getting this thread locked down, yes, I already know you think that and I've heard "GTFO" from you before, in game and on this forum. Please for at least half a second think about just not commenting. Anyone's capable of a little politeness.

Context: How we ruined Monaco for a friend.

Another PG player and I used to play a game called Monaco, which is a top-down 2D heist game where you run around avoiding guards. We enjoyed it, played a lot, and eventually invited a friend to try it with us. Unfortunately, we were so used to playing the game at our own fast pace that our friend couldn't keep up and was frustrated by the difference in play styles. I think we ruined the Monaco game experience for her and she never played again.

What goes around...

I bring this up because I've heard about similar things happening in PG. In fact, it happened to me, and partly as a result, I really don't play much PG right now.

The pain point in the player experience is the power curve from when you max your combat skills, to where you start to accumulate enough well-rolled gear to really make the most of your combat abilities. It's more of a cliff, you hit max level and you're doing a small fraction of the damage and have a small fraction of the survivability of a well-geared build, but because it's max level, you're all aiming for the same pool of mobs for gear and crafting ingredient drops.

For me, I felt a real sense of accomplishment at maxing my combat skills, had a fair mixture of gear, enough that I could solo the top level non-elite mobs, and start to farm gear. I enjoyed grouping with others of similar power level and especially helping out guildies and lower level players with uncursing, etc. What I really wanted was to farm up some gear to where I could pull my weight without taking charity from much more powerful characters.

And so I farmed, and farmed, and farmed, Gaz Caves, Rahu Plateau, Gaz overworld, etc. Every place I could find a single max-level non-elite mob (and I'm pretty sure I found them all), I spent week after week patiently killing them, hoping for that purple or yellow drop with the right ratio of skills so I could reroll it to work for my build.

Project Gorgon had taught me to be patient, and that I'd have to work for it, so I was patient, and logged in every night, grouped occasionally for dailies or to help people out, and went back to killing frost mage skeletons, except when the area was too full of other players to be worth it.

Eventually, I decided to join a Gaz run to see what that was all about, since I died instantly in the entryway on my own. It was frantic, people pulling quickly to advance through the dungeon before things respawned. My damage output was negligible compared to the fully-geared uber-players, and the elite mobs dropped loot so fast that I couldn't even read the descriptions before it was time to keep moving.

I think I ended up replacing almost every piece of gear that I'd found in my entire previous time playing the game. Two hours as a spectator in a group had completely outweighed months of solo play.

And that was it. The answer was to just accept charity, and play what was, to me, a too-fast, confusing, not-fun experience where the screen was so full of damage effects and numbers that I really couldn't even follow what was happening. Like my friend who never played Monaco, I'd encountered an experience (elite mob group runs) in PG that simply wasn't worth the headache to learn to enjoy all at once.

If there was a way that didn't hit that particular gameplay cliff, I'd probably play through the progression and end up just like all the other players who've tuned their builds and enjoy elite runs, but in PG, there simply ISN'T any other way to farm up gear. Solo mob loot drop rates are simply so low that nobody seriously considers doing them. (Obviously crafted gear is an option for most slots, but that doesn't give the gameplay experience progression that combat does.)

This leads to a simple suggestion:

  1. Increase the gear frequency and quality drop rates of non-elite, top-level mobs, enough that they're a viable choice.
  2. Take a look at whether there's any locations where top-level mobs are reasonably concentrated and can be farmed. (For 70, it was that one corner of Windy Cave where you could get 8-10 mobs, and nowhere else in the game. For 80, I honestly didn't even bother looking. "Fool me once," etc...)


Even if rare gear drops are 100x more likely on solo mobs, they'll still probably not be half as good as elite mobs, with their 6x built-in multiplier where everyone in the group gets loot.

I'm not talking about making non-elite mobs a GOOD option, just making them not laughably, ridiculously pointless compared to elites. Just get them up to maybe HALF as rewarding as the turbo-group elite mob drop rates. Since solo farming is inherently slower (partially due to risk since you can't expect a rez, partially DPS + regen time, but also because there's no safe concentration of them to reliably grind anywhere), there's not much risk of them drawing many people away from the group combat experience.

Overall, PG is a great game, the community, guilds, and events are awesome, the writing and humor are fantastic, the new zone work on Fae Realm and Sun Vale have been impressive and cool. I think "make soloing gear farming even half as viable as grouping elites" is a pretty modest suggestion, and still wouldn't make soloing remotely good enough to pull people out of groups.

This will create an alternative path to joining and enjoying end-game grouping:

What it would do is give a little bit more of an on-ramp to the end game experience. Being able to gear out your first build (I was never able to, especially since main/off-hand gear are effectively impossible to get without charity runs), and then moving on to trying different combat skills, knowing that there's SOME way you can actually finish the build, would make it less of a gameplay cliff when people are transitioning to the end game experience.

For players who enjoy the crazy group runs from the start, there's no harm in it all. They'll load up on gear and phlog from Fae Realm elites and GK runs. You could make non-elites drop 100x the rare gear and most players wouldn't even notice because it'd still be a waste of time compared to the rewards they're already getting.

Yes, 100x is a made up number. I have no idea what the actual tuning should be, since what I've seen from my ~100? ~200? hours in PG from max-level non-elites has been basically zero "keeper" drops. (Hard to estimate what percent of my total gameplay time was spent at max level, but I definitely broke 100 hours just solo grinding at 70 when it was the max and never saw a useful yellow drop.)

Obviously I haven't given up on PG! Still a great game.

Thanks for reading this long post! I tried to give more context about my perspective and game experience, which hopefully helps explain the request.