TheAlmightyLootius
New Member
Hey,
sorry, this got quite long but i wanted to give a complete review for toulan and make suggestions on how to make it a very interesting and rewarding place.
i have visited pretty much all the planets recently in the search of a home planet that allows me to play without depositing too much but still being able to cycle peds.
Toulan is a pretty decent planet for players of all skill groups but there are quite a few things that you could do to further improve it. To show this, i am going to show a few things that other planets do well and how you could adopt this.
Markup is king, especially since looter profession and efficiency implementation that leaves many players at 92%ish TT returns. Profiting off of markup is extremely hard now and some might say its borderline impossible without selling your house to buy skills and equipment. But it doesnt have to be that way. Best example for this is Vixens on Rocktropia.
Vixens on RT drop Vixen Android Gear which has a MArkup of about 400% and the best about it is that the markup stays consistens despite them being farmed by multiple people 24/7. Vixen Android Gears are used in the D-Class mining amps, which have a huge turnover. Vixen Android Gears also have low TT and D-class amps have comparable high TT, which makes having gears have high MU have no real big impact on the MU of d-class amps, which means thanks to its low markup it gets used by a lot of miners. Vixens are probably the only mob that has about 108% average MU return.
Now toulan has things like TabTab hides that have 300% MU so why arent TabTab as good or similar enough to Vixens? Thats because TabTab hide only drops about 5-10% of the time that you hunt TabTab. And i am not talking about drop chance. The drop chance for TabTab hide is literally 0% for 90-95% of the time. In my experience TabTab hides drop for about 5 to 10 minutes every 85-100 minutes. Outside of these windows they cant drop.
The issue with this is that the best course of action when hunting mobs for valuable MU items on toulan is to just stay afk 90% of the time which imo is a bad design decision. Vixens on the other hand drop their Gears constantly. every third or 4th mob is going to drop them on average and thats for 100% of the time. which means the best course of action for Vixens is to hunt them basically 24/7.
More cycling = More MU for the player = More cash for the planet partner.
I get why Hides arent ideal to drop 24/7, as they are used much less frequently than consumable goods like amps but still, i would much rather have hides drop every 10th 20th mobs throughout the whole time instead of every 2nd mob 10% of the time.
Next thing that is nice on rocktropia is the AI daily. AIs spawn after killing a certain number of mobs in an area, e.g. vixen parking lot. they have 5 hp and for the AI mission you need to kill them 40 times, so about 200hp total. The mission rewards you with1 ped ammo, a 2 ped TT certificate and a pay stub that is essentially worth 2 peds when combining 260 of them. So in essence it rewards 5 peds for an investment of less than 1 ped, which makes it possibly the best value daily in the game.
When i consider dailies i always look at the investment needed to complete the daily vs the PED value reward it gives. For example on toulan the best value mission is the crafting daily. 1000 attempts on e.g. Explo Projectiles 1 BP costs 20 PED cycle, at 95% thats a 1 ped loss for 0.7 ped machinery which are worth 4-6 peds. So you basically get a reward profit of 3-5 peds, which puts it at nearly the same value as the AI daily on RT. This is good.
Other daily missions on Toulan are e.g. the Juvenile Dog Tag mission that rewards 0.5 ped Ammo. Now the cycle amount needed for that is varying wildly. The best i had was about 10 peds cycle needed, which means a 5% return, which is okay value and the worst i had was i cycled 40 peds and still only had 4 out of 5. And all 4 dropped in like the first 2 peds. I expected it to be bugged and abandoned it and stopped. So best case is 5% and average seems to be about 3%.
Not really good but not terribly bad either. Imo it should be changed to something like kill 50 of each juvenile instead to cause less frustration when the thing just isnt dropping.
Then there is the Khaffash Temple daily. 150 Khaffash there cost about 100-120 peds depending on how selective you are with your targets. the reward is worth approx 1.5 peds but you can also collect more nawa fragments while doing it and i generally get asbout the same amount as the mission rewards on top of it so roughly 3 peds total, making it a return of about 2.5-3%. Not good but not terrible again, especially as Khaffash is dropping Tier 3 comps, which can increase average MU quite a bit depending on luck.
And then there is the wood cutting / hunting / sweating mission at the event area. The reward is 2.5 ped Ammo and you need to cycle 100 peds hunting, get 200 sweat and 1000 wood shavings. all in all its like 105 peds cycled but the issue is you gotta hand in the wood shaving and the sweat, which means you need to pay about 1.3 peds of your value to get 2.5 ped ammo so the actual return is just 1.2 peds which makes it slightly above 1% return which is really not good.
And then there is the whole bunch of skill missions that all reward in the area of 0.5-1% return in skill value (always including MU) which is okay if you hunt them anyway but doing it for value is kind of a waste if the mob doesnt have good enough MU anyway.
Other prominent dailies on other planets are Ark moon daily where you run around for 30 minutes and then kill mobs for around 5 peds and getting back 2 peds, so a roughly 40% return but the cycle amount is very low and there is basically nothing else to do so you gotta travel a lot wasting a lot of that value again.
Next island is pretty okay with dailies. There are 4 dailies that reward around 13-20% TT cost in value back at a cycle volume of around 60 peds combined and then another 3 missions with a cycle volume of about 300-400 peds (if doing all 3 of em) that reward about 5%. there are also a bunch more that reward things that i have a hard time putting a value on so i cant comment on them.
Cyrene is kind of weird. Theres lots of badge dailies that dont have direct value and a bunch of dailies rewarding mission tokens that can be sold but the return value for pretty much all missions is relatively bad. Though still better than calypso or ark but not good either. And the mobs do drop decent MU items but too infrequently (power supplies etc) but then there are pristine elements needed for upgrade missions that have high values (400-3000 peds) but those are extremely rare and counting on them for MU to get by is not useful.
In essence, if you cycle like 400 peds a day, next island is likely the best. If you just wanne hunt mainly, real grinding, then RT is the best. Toulan is somewhere in the middle here for dailies. Toulan should have a Universal Ammo daily for all its mobs that rewards about 5% of the cost in UA. ideal would probably be somewhere around the equivalent cycle of 100-200 kills per mob.
Next point is planet UL partner armors / plates / weapons / upgrades and other items.
There seem to essentially be 3 types of this.
1st type is the toulan coat. do dailies, get tributes, unlock reward. This is imo a very good design as it reward the player for spending time on a planet. the last stage being trdeable is nice but not really needed.
2nd type is the horns from monria, kill a ton of mobs, loot chapter that have very low tt value, trade in for item. this is also a very good design as it does the same as the first type. only issue is that you have to kill all mobs and this alienates people who cant / dont want to kill the bigger mobs which makes it unattainable for them.
3rd type is the most common type. gather materials (that are tradeable) and trade them in for the item / upgrade. Cyrene does this with its armors and plates, NI does this, caly does it and i think the toulan armor is the same as well.
All items you need to gather are tradeable and so is the end product.
Imo this is by far the worst kind of mission. The reason is simple. You want people to dedicate their time to get something special. But by having to trade in essentially 5k peds of TT+MU just to get an item that has a value of 5k TT+MU means doing this whole thing added zero value for the player. the reward is the exact same as outright buying it. no value gain whatsoever which makes the whole thing pointless.
Why should i hunt 102% MU mobs just to get this armor when i could hunt 108% mu mobs and just buy it? its just bad design.
Cyrene also had weapons though that are obtainable through missions but they only work on cyrene. i think this is an interesting design as it rewards the player for spending time on the planet but the reward is only helpful if continuing to spend time on the planet.
Many people disliked the arkadia armor due to it beung untradeable. the main reason for this is because it combined the worst way of obtaining it, spending TT + MU with un untradeable items, resulting in getting only TT back.
People like the mayhem way of obtaining items though because they dont have to spend tons of TT to get items.
What i would propose now is to have a kind of loyalty program. Have toulan mobs drop tokens (similar to rare mayhem tokens, no TT value, untradeable) with a drop rate of like the monria chapters (so pretty rare, like 1 in 100k kills rare or something) then have a vendor that sells Limited items (for 1 token) and UL items (depending on the level requirement, maybe 20 for an opalo equivalent UL gun to 500 for endgame items). available should be basically everything from armors, to weapons, to mindforce stuff, plates etc. weapons should be in the 65-75% efficiency range at least.
Now the two big points: the items require you to have tributes depending on the level requirement of the item (see cyrene faction badges) AND the items should be untradeable and only be usable on toulan.
this would offer an incentive for people to make toulan their home and rewards them for staying there longterm instead of only for the time it takes to farm the gear they want. Similarly you should have stuff for miners and crafters as well that drop token corresponding to their profession.
You could also offer upgrade tokens in the shop as well, to upgrade the stuff further.
Now UL stuff would be decoupled from TT and MU and would be a goal to work towards. Ideally one would couple this with them only working with toulan amplifiers that have high efficiency (80%+) that are all limited. similarly to android gears from vixens the items needed to craft them should have relatively low TT value compared to the end product.
this would incentivize long term stay, increase MU for hunters and miners while giving crafters things to craft. e.g. the blueprints for these amps could come from the vendor as well in exchange to crafting reward tokens. oh and of course the vendor should have unlimited supply, obviously, as all is bound anyway.
on a last note: the instances have to change. right now they are the only way to get toulan UL items but instances are a guaranteed loss of peds. and on top of that they are bugged. the message sayingf you get increased loot doesnt increase loot at all, neither TT nor MU wise. you have to change them to drop loot on the mobs instead of the chests so they are working and are not a scam.
sorry, this got quite long but i wanted to give a complete review for toulan and make suggestions on how to make it a very interesting and rewarding place.
i have visited pretty much all the planets recently in the search of a home planet that allows me to play without depositing too much but still being able to cycle peds.
Toulan is a pretty decent planet for players of all skill groups but there are quite a few things that you could do to further improve it. To show this, i am going to show a few things that other planets do well and how you could adopt this.
Markup is king, especially since looter profession and efficiency implementation that leaves many players at 92%ish TT returns. Profiting off of markup is extremely hard now and some might say its borderline impossible without selling your house to buy skills and equipment. But it doesnt have to be that way. Best example for this is Vixens on Rocktropia.
Vixens on RT drop Vixen Android Gear which has a MArkup of about 400% and the best about it is that the markup stays consistens despite them being farmed by multiple people 24/7. Vixen Android Gears are used in the D-Class mining amps, which have a huge turnover. Vixen Android Gears also have low TT and D-class amps have comparable high TT, which makes having gears have high MU have no real big impact on the MU of d-class amps, which means thanks to its low markup it gets used by a lot of miners. Vixens are probably the only mob that has about 108% average MU return.
Now toulan has things like TabTab hides that have 300% MU so why arent TabTab as good or similar enough to Vixens? Thats because TabTab hide only drops about 5-10% of the time that you hunt TabTab. And i am not talking about drop chance. The drop chance for TabTab hide is literally 0% for 90-95% of the time. In my experience TabTab hides drop for about 5 to 10 minutes every 85-100 minutes. Outside of these windows they cant drop.
The issue with this is that the best course of action when hunting mobs for valuable MU items on toulan is to just stay afk 90% of the time which imo is a bad design decision. Vixens on the other hand drop their Gears constantly. every third or 4th mob is going to drop them on average and thats for 100% of the time. which means the best course of action for Vixens is to hunt them basically 24/7.
More cycling = More MU for the player = More cash for the planet partner.
I get why Hides arent ideal to drop 24/7, as they are used much less frequently than consumable goods like amps but still, i would much rather have hides drop every 10th 20th mobs throughout the whole time instead of every 2nd mob 10% of the time.
Next thing that is nice on rocktropia is the AI daily. AIs spawn after killing a certain number of mobs in an area, e.g. vixen parking lot. they have 5 hp and for the AI mission you need to kill them 40 times, so about 200hp total. The mission rewards you with1 ped ammo, a 2 ped TT certificate and a pay stub that is essentially worth 2 peds when combining 260 of them. So in essence it rewards 5 peds for an investment of less than 1 ped, which makes it possibly the best value daily in the game.
When i consider dailies i always look at the investment needed to complete the daily vs the PED value reward it gives. For example on toulan the best value mission is the crafting daily. 1000 attempts on e.g. Explo Projectiles 1 BP costs 20 PED cycle, at 95% thats a 1 ped loss for 0.7 ped machinery which are worth 4-6 peds. So you basically get a reward profit of 3-5 peds, which puts it at nearly the same value as the AI daily on RT. This is good.
Other daily missions on Toulan are e.g. the Juvenile Dog Tag mission that rewards 0.5 ped Ammo. Now the cycle amount needed for that is varying wildly. The best i had was about 10 peds cycle needed, which means a 5% return, which is okay value and the worst i had was i cycled 40 peds and still only had 4 out of 5. And all 4 dropped in like the first 2 peds. I expected it to be bugged and abandoned it and stopped. So best case is 5% and average seems to be about 3%.
Not really good but not terribly bad either. Imo it should be changed to something like kill 50 of each juvenile instead to cause less frustration when the thing just isnt dropping.
Then there is the Khaffash Temple daily. 150 Khaffash there cost about 100-120 peds depending on how selective you are with your targets. the reward is worth approx 1.5 peds but you can also collect more nawa fragments while doing it and i generally get asbout the same amount as the mission rewards on top of it so roughly 3 peds total, making it a return of about 2.5-3%. Not good but not terrible again, especially as Khaffash is dropping Tier 3 comps, which can increase average MU quite a bit depending on luck.
And then there is the wood cutting / hunting / sweating mission at the event area. The reward is 2.5 ped Ammo and you need to cycle 100 peds hunting, get 200 sweat and 1000 wood shavings. all in all its like 105 peds cycled but the issue is you gotta hand in the wood shaving and the sweat, which means you need to pay about 1.3 peds of your value to get 2.5 ped ammo so the actual return is just 1.2 peds which makes it slightly above 1% return which is really not good.
And then there is the whole bunch of skill missions that all reward in the area of 0.5-1% return in skill value (always including MU) which is okay if you hunt them anyway but doing it for value is kind of a waste if the mob doesnt have good enough MU anyway.
Other prominent dailies on other planets are Ark moon daily where you run around for 30 minutes and then kill mobs for around 5 peds and getting back 2 peds, so a roughly 40% return but the cycle amount is very low and there is basically nothing else to do so you gotta travel a lot wasting a lot of that value again.
Next island is pretty okay with dailies. There are 4 dailies that reward around 13-20% TT cost in value back at a cycle volume of around 60 peds combined and then another 3 missions with a cycle volume of about 300-400 peds (if doing all 3 of em) that reward about 5%. there are also a bunch more that reward things that i have a hard time putting a value on so i cant comment on them.
Cyrene is kind of weird. Theres lots of badge dailies that dont have direct value and a bunch of dailies rewarding mission tokens that can be sold but the return value for pretty much all missions is relatively bad. Though still better than calypso or ark but not good either. And the mobs do drop decent MU items but too infrequently (power supplies etc) but then there are pristine elements needed for upgrade missions that have high values (400-3000 peds) but those are extremely rare and counting on them for MU to get by is not useful.
In essence, if you cycle like 400 peds a day, next island is likely the best. If you just wanne hunt mainly, real grinding, then RT is the best. Toulan is somewhere in the middle here for dailies. Toulan should have a Universal Ammo daily for all its mobs that rewards about 5% of the cost in UA. ideal would probably be somewhere around the equivalent cycle of 100-200 kills per mob.
Next point is planet UL partner armors / plates / weapons / upgrades and other items.
There seem to essentially be 3 types of this.
1st type is the toulan coat. do dailies, get tributes, unlock reward. This is imo a very good design as it reward the player for spending time on a planet. the last stage being trdeable is nice but not really needed.
2nd type is the horns from monria, kill a ton of mobs, loot chapter that have very low tt value, trade in for item. this is also a very good design as it does the same as the first type. only issue is that you have to kill all mobs and this alienates people who cant / dont want to kill the bigger mobs which makes it unattainable for them.
3rd type is the most common type. gather materials (that are tradeable) and trade them in for the item / upgrade. Cyrene does this with its armors and plates, NI does this, caly does it and i think the toulan armor is the same as well.
All items you need to gather are tradeable and so is the end product.
Imo this is by far the worst kind of mission. The reason is simple. You want people to dedicate their time to get something special. But by having to trade in essentially 5k peds of TT+MU just to get an item that has a value of 5k TT+MU means doing this whole thing added zero value for the player. the reward is the exact same as outright buying it. no value gain whatsoever which makes the whole thing pointless.
Why should i hunt 102% MU mobs just to get this armor when i could hunt 108% mu mobs and just buy it? its just bad design.
Cyrene also had weapons though that are obtainable through missions but they only work on cyrene. i think this is an interesting design as it rewards the player for spending time on the planet but the reward is only helpful if continuing to spend time on the planet.
Many people disliked the arkadia armor due to it beung untradeable. the main reason for this is because it combined the worst way of obtaining it, spending TT + MU with un untradeable items, resulting in getting only TT back.
People like the mayhem way of obtaining items though because they dont have to spend tons of TT to get items.
What i would propose now is to have a kind of loyalty program. Have toulan mobs drop tokens (similar to rare mayhem tokens, no TT value, untradeable) with a drop rate of like the monria chapters (so pretty rare, like 1 in 100k kills rare or something) then have a vendor that sells Limited items (for 1 token) and UL items (depending on the level requirement, maybe 20 for an opalo equivalent UL gun to 500 for endgame items). available should be basically everything from armors, to weapons, to mindforce stuff, plates etc. weapons should be in the 65-75% efficiency range at least.
Now the two big points: the items require you to have tributes depending on the level requirement of the item (see cyrene faction badges) AND the items should be untradeable and only be usable on toulan.
this would offer an incentive for people to make toulan their home and rewards them for staying there longterm instead of only for the time it takes to farm the gear they want. Similarly you should have stuff for miners and crafters as well that drop token corresponding to their profession.
You could also offer upgrade tokens in the shop as well, to upgrade the stuff further.
Now UL stuff would be decoupled from TT and MU and would be a goal to work towards. Ideally one would couple this with them only working with toulan amplifiers that have high efficiency (80%+) that are all limited. similarly to android gears from vixens the items needed to craft them should have relatively low TT value compared to the end product.
this would incentivize long term stay, increase MU for hunters and miners while giving crafters things to craft. e.g. the blueprints for these amps could come from the vendor as well in exchange to crafting reward tokens. oh and of course the vendor should have unlimited supply, obviously, as all is bound anyway.
on a last note: the instances have to change. right now they are the only way to get toulan UL items but instances are a guaranteed loss of peds. and on top of that they are bugged. the message sayingf you get increased loot doesnt increase loot at all, neither TT nor MU wise. you have to change them to drop loot on the mobs instead of the chests so they are working and are not a scam.
