[LCN] Changes to Location Drop Stats

As you may have noticed, the newest LCN location, Los Angeles, has been released today, with bosses and crafting coming out before the end of this month. The new location is open to players level 9,820 and above, and of course comes packed with a new set of jobs and drops.

Savvy forum posters will remember our announcement two weeks ago about changes to the game, which included a mention of location drop stat changes. I have some important news about this change, but it requires some explanation, so please bear with me.

We’ve heard from players for a long time that location drops are too weak to be used by players able to access the most recent location, especially when compared to new Limited items. For example, the Despot Pistol from the most recent Exham Penitentiary Location has stats of Att: 116 and Def: 119 (235 combined). In contrast, you can currently buy a Limited item like the Spiked Knuckles with stats of Att: 346 Def: 433 (779 combined), which is about 3x stronger.

This ratio of roughly 3x has been in place for a very long time, and it exists because it’s much easier to get these location drops. To illustrate this, the process of completing the location and getting the achievement (1400 jobs total) nets you about 420 items. If you didn’t use any free energy, you could get there by purchasing about 52 energy refills at a cost of 526 FP, the same cost as about 18 Limited items. Just as an example:

18x Spiked Knuckles: 14022 total in stats
420x Despot Pistols: 98700 total in stats

This math doesn’t include the benefit of all the cash, XP and achievement benefits you get from completing those jobs, or reflect the fact that you could get a lot of this energy for free via boosts. But as you can see, there’s a significant discount on these items for their stat line.

So — location drops are pretty good for their price. But does anyone actually use them to fight?

In order to answer this question, we analyzed the average inventory for players able to access the top level Locations. It turns out that these Location drops are still strong enough to replace worse items in most people’s inventories at this level; you can equip so many items thanks to your friends and Hired Mobsters that it is still beneficial to collect a whole lot of these drops.

Now: in order to make doubly sure that these items are usable by players at this level, we have bumped them up slightly so their average stat line is around 250 combined. This should guarantee that all the location drops from Los Angeles, and future locations, will be able to replace weaker items in most players’ inventories — and keep in mind that crafted items will also be proportionally stronger, further ensuring these items are useful to most players.

Now, I know this isn’t the kind of boost many of us were expecting, myself included. The single largest problem in the game right now, in my eyes, is that long-time players aren’t getting the benefit of their hard-won inventories because many of the items aren’t useful anymore. I thought that location drops were a big reason why, and I was hoping this change would have a big effect. But the statistics show that new Location Drops are actually relatively strong and are indeed used in people’s inventories, so we need to look for other solutions to bridge this gap.

We’ve discussed the Pawn Shop (trading in old Limited items), changes to the Raid Bosses, and a number of other ideas, but so far, the data we’ve found shows that these things don't have as much of an impact on that problem as changes to Crafting theoretically would. We promised to make changes to things like Location Drops, so we have within a safe limit, but hopefully that explains why some of these changes have been smaller than we expected at first.

Our plans for Crafting are material for an entirely different thread, but I hope you’ll agree with me that this issue and potential fix are among the biggest issues right now. Going forward, we'd like to continue sharing more of the stats behind the game with you guys to help explain why we're doing things in a certain way.

If you have any questions about this change, or Location drops and stats in general, I will do my best to answer them, but let’s keep things on topic; I’ll put up a new thread about crafting once I have some more info to share on that.

Thanks for reading and as always I appreciate your feedback.

 

I cant see any improvement on the drops... so skipping all the reading.
However I cant find the only thing in this new location that might make a difference, the City Properties, just a blank page. On the Exham Penitentiary Properties there is a Travel to New York Button.

 

Drops have been bumped up a bit more than they normally are, reason why it's not a major change is explained above.

Thanks for the tip re: Properties, we're on that right now!

 

it may be usable for the ones that can access it now but anyone that has to level to it like me a city away by time i get there the items are hardly being used to be totally honest. thats half the problem is by time most get there its no good due to all the raid and other aspects, i do understand where you come from but you are forgetting about others that have to work to get there and when you get to the top levels and things just arent very good stats it makes it hard to level we level to gain access to some decent items, like the nomad vehicle i can use alot of them and that is alot of cities behind there needs to be more items that have a higher par like that vehicle from the nomad boss. Im in Exham and the items there have nice stats but i hardly use anything from the jobs only to craft which is ok. as for the

Optimal Desert Roamer

110 Attack

115 Defense this was a great item for the city it is located in

 

Location properties link should be fixed now, let me know if you're still having problems but it looks good to me on LCN FB.

@Sir Opinion Alot I will take another look at that aspect of it, but what we found was that the tail end of people's inventories (the stuff that was still being used) included items that were almost always worse than the newest location drops. It's very unlikely for someone to collect enough raid drops or Limiteds that their entire usable inventory consists of those and items stronger than the most recent location. And if you do reach that point, you should be able to craft the location drops you can't use anymore into items that you can (this is why crafting is still worth it at that point despite taking multiple items.)

The problem with long-time players having really big inventories is that even with the current amount of crafting, many of those items are too weak to make it in, which is why I think people need a batch crafting tool to bring that old stuff back into relevancy. That's what we're working on now.

 

crafting aspect could offset this, granted what you say about things being used that is true but when we get a item say aka new job drop the stat for improvement varies very small a couple points att and def if your lucky. Exham boss when i collect the items for that it is 3 i can use but the totally added to my attack and defense is very low this is the problem we see is our numbers due to the last item that may get knocked off the list is only a few points difference, i believe this is what we as the players see and why we have such a issue. Your stats and figures may be correct about us using them but its the actual amount of benefit we get from it is the problem. Maybe this might help clear up why the players are not seeing this like you guys do, different aspects. Thanks for replying @Scoughman

 

I do not understand English. You write as if everyone understood English. Do not worry even to write in a translatable way. So even if we use the translator does not understand the rules.

 

if some one does 200 raids or more, they will in 20 sets of raids have 4000 items if they do 500 raids each time which i have heard of thats is 10000 items, and then if you say no one has a full inventory then why are players asking for these items to be craftable, they must have a insane amount. LCN has a total of 12,000 items so in 20 raids it can be done

 

Exactly. So who cares about challenge drops, job drops, or regular boss drops anymore? The games are so raid-focused now, just do raids for drops and quit complaining about the other inventory stats, because it's not going to do any good anyway.

 

Another problem with this logic is, that a Despot Pistols with Att: 116 and Def: 119 (235 combined) is useless for anyone in Exham as they have better weapons, so

420x Despot Pistols = 0 (ZERO) total in stats

 

I dont even use them and havent since they came out period....

 

In Viking Clan the common drops are a lot better then in LCN, and there they will be useful until the end of the game, here in LCN most of the common drops will be useless after 2-3 more new locations. Here the game is all about buying limiteds and nothing else.