Haven't they sort of been haphazardly working on bringing old named items up to snuff with the new ones? Namely Sharn and Red Fens? I don't think they will take the time or effort to rework every unbalanced item though.

For Epic/ Legendary gear?

Slim to None.

For Heroic...

Not so sure anymore, but better than "zero".

They did passes on Red Fens and Sharn, 2 all but forgotten packs and made some nice improvements to the twink gear.

I think this is due in large part to the game now being geared to Reaper grind and Racial TR, both or which happen in Heroic levels.

So I would look to see what old Heroic-but-non-Epic-capable packs are left and that is the most likely place to start.

My guess would be Catacombs or Tangleroot, but I'm sure there are others.

Ravenloft and it's loot will determine what if any old gear gets updated in the near future.

I guess if I take Sharn and Red Fens as examples, I can't expect to get to update my items to to the newer ones. I guess next TR I'll clean house. Its a shame, I fought like hell for some of that crap, be a shame to see it go.

The extra-annoying part is I think if SSG DID go back and update a lot of that crap, it'd spurn renewed interest in those chains. And its not like it'd be hard, they could assign an intern to do it!

noamineo wrote on Sep 7^th, 2017 at 3:19pm:

They are concerned with their ROI. Not yours.

Which is the same old typical Turbine-think: Fuck the players; they'll pay us anyway.

Seems like revamping loot is a way better ROI than creating new content.

Bumping up the XP and improving the loot on an old quest would take, at best, an hour, and suddenly make it marketable again. That definitely adds up to more dollars per minute than spending weeks making a new quest.

Ah Pook wrote on Sep 7^th, 2017 at 6:06pm:


Their intern seems to be able to fiddle with numbers on a table pretty efficiently, it cannot honestly take much effort to change a few values around. Balance is of course a challenge, but all the really have to is pull up the CC planner and go "Hmm, this item is lvl 12, at lvl 12 items get +6 to a stat now. Let me change that outdated 4 to a 6. Fin!"

Ah Pook wrote on Sep 7^th, 2017 at 6:06pm:


This is the part where I say something about new players and you point and laugh. What new players? Why would new players stay and spend money on out-modded packs with sub-par loot and low XP?

noamineo wrote on Sep 7^th, 2017 at 7:21pm:


Gosh! I wish that were the case! Would have made my summer so much easier.

Items have enchantments on them, but enchantments can be on multiple items. Tweaking the numbers on that effect would touch every other item with that same enchantment. Also, items are super tricky to swap enchantments on, as only newly created items will get the new suite. Think of items like an electronic billboard that has a set list of advertisements on it. The billboard knows which ads to run, and we can change what the ads do. If we change the ad for, say, some soap to some new soap ad, all billboards with that ad will know to use the new soap ad. What we can't do without making a new billboard is change the list of ads to run.

The new Red Fens and Sharn stuff has totally different data than the old ones. Sadly, it takes the same amount of time to revamp old loot as it does to make new stuff. Plus, tweaking the set bonuses really took some time for me

Sailias wrote on Sep 7^th, 2017 at 7:54pm:

That sounds like a hilariously inefficient way to manage things, but your honesty is appreciated.

Maybe at the next Pac-Man LARP you can explain to them (gently, because ROCKSTARZ have egos) that some of the old packs are just plain shite and they're losing revenue because of it.

They might not give a rat's ass about the players, but I bet they care PROFOUNDLY about the continuance of their pay-cheques.

Sometimes you have 8 ads for the same thing and you're not always sure what they are all tied to.  It's not so much that it takes long to make all 6's into 7's or whatever.  It's that QA'ing that change takes forever and a day.

So it becomes a priority system.  If you have X number of QA hours in a day, do you want them QA'ing old loot, QA'ing bug reports or QA'ing new content?  While I'm sure QA works their butts off, a lot of stuff slips through as is so suddenly saying, "Hey we bumped all +5 str items up to +6, go and make sure this didn't break anything."

Then you have to ask if it's even worth it.

Even if you make it on par with or even just slightly better then CC, the ease of access to and versatility of the CC system still trumps it.  If I get a named drop but it doesn't have the one stat I need on it that CC provides, then I need to move everything around.

The items that stand the test of time tend to be unique or have a somewhat unique effect.  FoM boots, torc, jibbers, blur bracers, Abbot quiver, etc...these are worth the effort.

+8 str instead of +6 at level 10 or whatever isn't really worth farming VoN6, especially if it's on a bracer slot and I really need it on my cloak or whatever.  Not only that but CC is all BtA so when I upgrade an item I can toss it in the shared bank and not have to worry about losing it when I TR.  I can create a full suit of perfect CC gear at any level for any build and stash it on an alt until I need it.

Hanging onto my SoS on the off chance some day I decide to do a 2H build again however?  Not worth it.  Poof it went.

The Sharn/Fens loot revamp was more of a "We have not added any mudflated gear to this level range ever so Cannith loot is so much vastly better holy jeebus."

It'd be nice if the Harbor/Korthos quests got a similar treatment since that's where new players first experience the game, but a girl can only dream.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love for a general game wide loot revamp but there are much bigger problems with the game right now that would require similar dev skillsets/QA and we have a work around in the CC system.

While the revamping of the Red Fens loot was a decent idea, I took one look at the updated versions and thought "meh".  No point in bothering to farm those again.   Outlevel them too fast during TRs and crafted stuff is on par and far easier to slot.

I'd much rather they use any time they might spend updating old stuff that was surpassed years ago doing QoL bug fixing for the players, especially if they're not going to make the updated items as good or better than the new stuff that's readily available.

Digimonk wrote on Sep 8^th, 2017 at 4:43pm:


1)some of us might actually consider outdated named loot to be a serious QoL

2)Most general needed QoL fixes are way out of the dev's reach.

Its super awesome when Salais fixes typos, I'm not complaining, but *real* QoL things like ladder bugs, stair cases you have to jump to climb, lag, etc, is all generally stuff that just can't be fixed easily.

Why not encourage a little effort to go to revamping named items? They've probably got the manpower if they'd spend less time naval-gazing.

noamineo wrote on Sep 8^th, 2017 at 6:47pm:


There is actually a ladder fix in U36.2 fyi