They announced a maintenance, you won’t believe what happened next

I just had to use this clickbaity cheesy heartbreaking title, they seem to be very popular. 🙂 But the correct title would probably be Update 21.3.1, although in-house they are calling it 21.3.3 or did I miss 21.3.1 and 21.3.2 in my away time?

In fact, given the history of communication of SSG towards the player base, you can believe this very easily.

What we have had happen now is that the daily quests were changed to reset properly and have, imagine this, only one daily quest per day instead of the two resets until now. Some players are reacting in the game and on the forums because there will be fewer slivers to trade for Black Steel Keys, but some are actually complaining again about the communication of the company. Namely, this change was somehow snuck in under the 8-hour long maintenance.

A few months ago Cordovan did mention that the intention was to have 3 keys per week. This was back when we actually had keys as rewards from dailies and dailies with no rewards. I guess we were hoping we would keep the three keys and have some slivers, but now it’s 14 slivers per week, which is 4,6 keys. So, this change was expected, but many reactions would have been avoided if the news (or lack thereof) wasn’t sprung like this. The announcement forum doesn’t mention any changes either.

In the +Cord of the Rings it has been pointed out that this has actually snuck into the maintenance and was supposed to happen next week with the update. We will have to wait and see if there will be any change to the amount of slivers received in the comming patch.

At the time of writing this, the following announcement has been made.

Cordovan

Daily Expedition quests now rotate their availability at 3:00 AM Eastern (server) time rather than 10:00 AM Eastern to align with quest reset times. This prevents a situation where players would not always get credit for their daily because the reset times didn’t match up.

Given how long Mordor is out, I guess some of the players have gotten used to this kind of “daily” reset and it lasting for that long it would have seemed like SSG accepted that as a rule. But there are other issues here, tied to the key topic. And this would be the two statements made by the Executive Producer Severlin and the Community Manager Cordovan.

For those of you who don’t remember, here it is again.

Severlin

There will never be a design that has loot from lootboxes that is statistically better than what you can gain someplace or somehow in game. Finding that loot in game might be hard, but it will be possible. Our overall design philosophy is that loot boxes are not required to reach the best gearing. If players do find some piece of gear that is best in slot and can only be gained through loot boxes then 1.) it is a bug or 2.) it is an oversight and will be fixed or 3.) there was some release timing issue and the loot will be available someplace in game soon.

In this case the intent is that those rings can be purchased from the Ash vendor for an appropriately large amount of Ash.

Sev~

But we still do have this and nothing is changing. In fact, even the t2c raid content gear is sometimes surpassed by the loot box gear, which gave me a 339 level shield, while we can barter for a 337 one. I may be a bit wrong here as I didn’t yet get a shield drop from the raid directly, but this is a barterer that unlocks after completing the three bosses, so I guess it shouldn’t be inferior. This ties in nicely with the statement that the Ash system wasn’t intended to be the main way of getting the gear.

Cordovan

We have tried to be clear that Ash of Gorgoroth is meant to be a non-primary way to get gear, with the primary method being running the content. We are working to better align with that principle in Update 21.3 through guaranteed or near-guaranteed drops depending on difficulty in the Update 21 instances.

But somehow all the gear, even the lesser purple version, cost Ash in the range of 700 for purple, through 1750, 2500, all the way to 3500 per piece. Yet the Ash is capped to 10.000 so you can’t accumulate it from the items you do not need or want, so you would need to farm a bit longer after something comes out or buy more keys. And a few more items that are comming to the traders and the boxes in the new update, like mounts, cosmetics, etc.

And even though some of these more profitable changes that favour the company instead of the player seem to find their way to the live servers sooner or later, mostly sooner, for some reason scholar and cook essence crafting couldn’t be resolved since the Wastes.