Ad drought...? Not sure if anybody else can confirm this, but Freeblade seems to be having serious problems serving ads Sunday. Things had seemed back to normal late last week, but today I couldn't even get a ad-based salvage team because the play button to send one never appeared...while I did see a Get Free Ore button light up this morning, that's been about it through two sets of patrols. Strange, to say the least.
There are sooooo many forge quests!!! Just nailed down the Forge 20 Rare Wargears Quest and these prompted out..... Update: the forge quests reappeared in 2 days after I finished the daily forge quest and the loyalty forge quest. They are so annoying especially coming at such short intervals.
Yeah, forge quests have to go away and die. As others have said, they are simply just not fun. Why have an element of your game which everyone agrees is not fun?
I think the frustrating thing about forge quests is that they don't consider, let alone reward, why people forge items. If they were more along the lines of "Forge a (player-scaled item level) (item type)," with none of the asinine rarity requirements and completed upon committing to the forge process rather than 16 hours later, they'd recognize the creation of tactically useful wargear. Heck, if the item type were set to detect a player's lowest-level equipped item or least-used weapon types, it might even encourage uniform progression of Knights' equipment or experimentation with different combat tactics...which is far more than I can say for "Forge 20 rare wargear items."
Pain in the Nekkruncha... On another tangent, I've got a loyalty quest to three-star the Slaughter objective on Nekkruncha No More, which as far as I can tell is effectively impossible. I'm blowing away his Gatling gun and missile launcher on sight, as well as his flunkies, then laying into him with four shots from a 7,000-damage thermal cannon and a salvo from my best rocket launcher before landing perfect crits with a 5,000-damage Thunderstrike gauntlet until he goes down under an 8x multiplier at the one-minute mark. This is apparently a two-star performance. Which, frankly, fits right in with how I couldn't three-star most of Titanic Clash until I came back at it with Thunderstrike wargear...only now I don't have a loyalty quest until that happens. Maybe these thresholds can be set at sane numbers for a change?
I managed to three-star all of Nekkruncha at about 3300~ wargear rating. Basically- 1. Blow up his gatling asap 2. Take out the two tanks with your melta and activate your carapace weapon. Blow up clusters of destructibles with your battle cannon. It is possible to get a massacre bonus here. 3. If you didn't get a massacre bonus in (2), get one at the next scene with the destructibles and the Boyz mob. Execution bonus. 4. Blow up his missile launcher asap so you can get an execution bonus on the boss with 6x or 8x multiplier. It is possible to get a second massacre bonus as well.
Huh -- I honestly hadn't thought to shoot up the destructibles, because Freeblade's three-star paths are almost invariably speed-based. Ended up doing that to score the massacre bonus, although I shot down the Mega Dread because he was taking too long to approach and bring up a melee indicator. I also saved a few seconds by going straight into melee with Nekkruncha, because I suspect he's invulnerable in open combat once he's lost the missile launcher; I thought it was worth the time to shoot him up because it'd help, but I never saw that it did. Passed with 132,000 points, although the threshold still feels too high to accommodate multiple strategies since I got the time down to 52 seconds but kept scoring 129,000 points.
Finally managed to reach lvl 50 and therefore can start exhausting the salvage runs for Legendary gear again. I was holding off as the gear level you receive is maxed out at lvl 50. Time to spend that saved gold. Starting get a bit more range of gears has brought home how useful it would be to have different load-outs saved. I've got gear that has bonuses for farming ore and crates and then more powerful gear for tier events and maxing medals on the later stages. Switching between the two is a pain. On the same note, it would also be good to be able to tag gear so it doesn't appear in the forge choices. Trying to remember which gear you want to reserve and not burn in the forge is a pain. More than once I have used up a high level blue by mistake which I was intending to save for it's damage stats. Both just suggestions. Loving the game.
Update ok BUT.........! Been reading some of these past posts and I agree that the patrols have been dumbed down with little rewards. Us level 50 players who now have some good gear need a challenge. Would it not be good if the patrols had three levels that the player could choose, increasing the challenge and allowing better rewards to be received. I agree the 10X 20X forge quests are beyond a joke, I've only just completed one after seeing it for a month, what did I get for the effort, practically nothing. One bug I keep encountering, as the mech or lizard charges you sometimes I get a snap shot in that kills my opponent but I still go through the melee process after they have dissolved. This ends up with the game freezing or the mech not moving from that location. All in all love the game but need more challenges.
One good fix would be to add the small, floating 'speech bubble' info boxes (used in the new tiered events) to the forge screen. One quick tap would allow easy identification of items and the best judgement of which items to use in forging, and which to toss.
At this point, as someone who usually runs about 30 patrols a day, it's frustrating to keep pulling wargear I might have been able to use were it properly leveled...only to scrap every last piece of it because it's junk. While I understand the sentiment that patrols were too difficult pre-Thunderstrike, it feels like this has been massively overcorrected: I'm completing patrols with 90 to 95 percent of health, even after the epiphany that I need not stop firing to shield attacks because everything's so damn weak now. At this point, patrols have lost any semblance of their previous high-risk/high-reward nature, and I think that's a huge loss. Frankly, I'd have fixed the difficulty problem by more accurately labeling patrols' difficulty, and making use of the Rescan button free and immediate for any patrol failed by the player...because events shouldn't be the heart of this game, not when they truly reward only the twitchiest of players and appear so vulnerable to cheating. For my part, I'd much rather take on a hard patrol and face tactical questions ranging from which carapace weapon I bring to whether I bust out a Revive if I go down, all in the service of obtaining what skill can make a sure thing -- gear that gradually improves my arsenal. Those factors are much more under my control than how many people play today's loot-casino Gauntlet, say, or whether the game mistakes my double-tap to fire missiles for a failed melee attack and dooms my last free event run to a Competent rating...
There is something seriously off about these events. I've just taken part in today's TIER V event in the woods, there is little to no scenery to destroy so I just made sure I killed everything and in record time. I only got 69,000. The top scorores are scoring 370,000, how is this even possible? Or is this yet another game letting all the hard working honest players down by allowing cheats/hacks? For the record I'm not a weak player, I've got a Wargear rating of 3479.
Yeah Leoric, the thing about that is nobody from pixeltoys has been here in at least two weeks. Many of us have asked these same questions and when answered in the past we've only gotten platitudes. Seems they're done dealing with us. What do they care? We keep giving them money anyway. And the cheaters are getting all the event wins.
For what it's worth, I'm not ready to assume Johnny has abandoned us -- sure, it's frustrating not to have quicker responses and hotfixes, but in the grand scheme of things the only thing that really changes about Freeblade is how quickly it gives us stuff. I'm willing to give this game much more latitude than, say, Fallout Shelter -- I basically quit that game because in Freeblade terms, when you fail a patrol the warband you were fighting DESTROYS HALF YOUR WARGEAR and leaves you to pick up the pieces. In an ironman game system, with no do-overs save starting again from scratch. Could we be getting more out of patrols, events and the Forge? Sure. What does it cost us to wait, save the gains we'd get under quicker fixes? Nothing. If we go a month without hearing from PixelToys, I'll be as upset as the rest of you, but...I hesitate to rush to judgment, especially when Johnny's been so responsive in the past.
Excellent points Voo. I rush to judgment because I'm a junior developer myself (nowhere near able to do something like this) but I tend quickly to my projects. But I also understand project scope. I'm sure these guys are crazy busy. But it's still frustrating.
Hi folks, It's been a little while since I last posted - we've been hard at work on the next update to the game. That said, I can share some more information with you on where we're at with some of the current hot topics: FORGE QUESTS We've done another balancing pass on quests and the random weighting of them. In theory, you should see more quests for killing things and fewer for forging and the numbers required for each forge quest should also be reduced. We've elected not to get rid of them at this time as they're useful in the early game for driving players towards upgrading their gear. PATROLS We'll be reviewing the difficulty of these for 1.5 with the goal of making these more enticing for end-game players. The difficulty reduction was definitely required and I think it's a much smoother experience for people who enter the later chapters at lower levels (30-40 vs 40-50), but I think there's more we can do for players who are closer to the level cap. Until then, we've got another system planned for 1.4 that may help end-game players find some more gear that's appropriate to their level... hopefully I can share more on that soon! CHEATS We do monitor the events where possible to eliminate cheaters and ban them from entering subsequent events. This said, it's challenging for us to look at every single leaderboard in the game on a daily basis. If you do spot any exceptionally untoward scores on the leaderboards or in events, please PM me and I can look into them.
Please consider to remove patrol medals reqs for new campaigns. I bought two gear packs and there is no need for me to grind for better gear.
Johnny, that's great news -- for what it's worth, I'd argue that no forge quest should ever exceed five items. Twenty rare items is maddening, but so is 10...at a generous average two item drops per mission attempt, that's a bare minimum of six mission plays to get the 11 items necessary for even an "any 10 wargear items" quest. That means you have to pick at it over the course of two or three patrol rotations, which means the quest spends most of the day blocking your access to a new one. Honestly, if it's truly necessary to keep them for new players, can we just get a Rescan button for quests? That'd solve the whole issue, with no revamp to the forge quests themselves needed...people could do 'em if they like 'em, and I could put something more efficient in that quest slot... I don't know how closely these two are linked, but fine-tuning patrol difficulty is a much lower priority than improving patrol loot. Even if I were just getting the level-45 stuff from last month, I'd have a steady stream of viable forging components and much more incentive to experiment than I do right now. If I had difficulty options for patrols to ramp up the risks and rewards, I'd max them out and put my machine to an actual test (because stomping out of a level-45 patrol at 0.3 percent health by the grace of the Golden Throne was glorious beyond words), but if I had to choose I'd just upscale the loot and figure out the rest later. Intriguing -- reading between the lines, that sounds like a wargear trading system (particularly the word "find"), but can I ask if your proposed Forge addition of guaranteed item traits for added ore is going to make it into 1.5? That's a piece of information I could really use, because it's one of the main reasons I'm keeping all these items and ore stockpiled...when the inputs include three Legendaries, the prospect of not having to forge blind is appealing like you wouldn't believe. For my part, I don't have any specific evidence whatsoever, but...I think this comes down to the opacity of the event-scoring system. It's one thing to understand that there's a significant time bonus as well as the potential for an 8x multiplier from constant kills, but quite another to make the best run apparently possible on an event and then see people scoring three times what you did. Either a detailed layout of exactly how Freeblade scores events, or a video of one of these first-place runs I keep seeing Xindi or HellBlade or Airs-X post, would really help improve the credibility of the whole thing. I've also mentioned a few other ideas over the last few weeks in posts here, but I'm not sure if you've had a chance to read them. I could send a PM if it'd help to have them in one place?
^^^ *THIS* ^^^ It's completely maddening to do what seems to be a very effective Event run and end up at Competent and see a list of scores that are 3-6 (yes sometimes 6) times that! It's unimaginable what kind of secret produces such high scores and nobody's talking about it that Google can find... That means it's an actual secret, not just good playing advice. And your scoring makes no sense. I have scoring turned on and blowing stuff up produces numbers that don't seem to add up to the total I get. Likewise some scores are white and some are yellow and there's that unexplained incrementing total in the top left that doesn't appear to relate to score... I've also got a small list of valid bugs but posting them here has gone overlooked.
