LE Runes and Availability

Good for you.
I have excactly 0 people willing to trade a Harbinger for ANYthing. Just for fun I tried negotiating a offer where i gave a 1000000 credit profit on pb (in out of stock high end runes) The trader said it was not worth his time to do trades for insignificant profit.
I have had a lot of people offer to sell me them via Paypall though.

 

That is exactly the issue. They didn't want lower valued runes, which includes all the other runes in the game. They wanted money through Paypal.

 

1 mil in my opinion isn't bad. Especially since poxbox inflated the prices of legendaries and what not but kept harbs the same price. I guess you just have to find the right people.



But on the topic of reskins, if they release legendary runes, the limited ones need something special, like a taunt, or make the reskins ugly >.>

 

The reskins don't even need to be legendary. Look at Haunting Spirit and Boghopper Zombie, or meat pies. These are units that aren't exactly 'limited level' pieces. They're different, and arguably, the Bog Zombie is a 'hero' deathguard in the Wastes. But even then, I wouldn't really consider it on par with Angels and Doomies for uniqueness or impact. I'd be perfectly fine if the 'reskin' versions were of their respective rarity levels; likely uncommon or rare.

And even further expanding that thought, there are likely a few under/never-used runes that already exist that can just have their toolkits/stats swapped for these LE shinies. Disturbed Spirit in FW for example, has likely never been used since the introduction of more magic damage to all the factions. Strip it's current toolkit and replace it with Haunting Spirit's. They already use the same sprite for the most part, now one just has cool text, and can even be given a taunt or other non-combat perk.

Or, in the Bog Zombie's case, as sad as I'd be to see it, strip it's toolkit and make it a 'reskinned' deathguard. There are plenty of cheap/no-cost ways to make things obtainable in a standard form.

Harbingers I'm all for keeping in their original skins, and leaving whatever is still out there the only ones that can be acquired now. They can make a rune that's two pieces of Auroch's dung flying around on a cockatrice feather pinwheel for all that matters, and give it the same toolkit, and put it in the same 'rune group' as the Harbingers, like how Pyro and Aria are in the Skeletal rifleman and Northern Cross Priestess groups.

And to re-address the playability aspect. It does NOT matter if the rune is garbage, or the end-all-be-all of Pox (there is likely at least one person who would like to drop a meat pie where they want), it's a matter of perceived disparity, fairness, and the fact that as Banshee stated, the game is first and foremost a strategy game. That's the only reason I attach the 'or ban them' part of the initial post. People are going to lose a match at some point and blame it on that LE meat pie that the opponent was able to drop where they wanted, and since it's nearly impossible for anyone else to obtain, Pox would lose some number of players over it, even if we never saw them post about it in the subsequent whine thread that would pop up. Because for a lot of people, it's that red flag that may or may not mean that at some point, rarity is going to equal power, and people are going to be able to pay to win.

Maybe we actually have moved past that paradigm for the most part BUT, if it can still be perceived as such, whether truthfully or not, that will be nothing but harmful as Pox moves forward with the intent to actually grow past that ~1000 some odd people that still play it.

Maybe DoG doesn't want to see Pox become an E-Sport level game, which is cool, it has the potential but not every game should be pushed in that direction, but I'm sure they want it to grow, and this will become a problem, tiny or not, that will rear it's head over and over, even if I'm not the one starting the thread (Though I'd have every intention of posting in them).

Thanks for reading,

Mercer Skye

 

I believe that usablity does matter for this argument. If a LE rune adds a unique and unreplaceable advantage in ranked play then you have a point. If all it does is giving you an rare alternative to something that you could have had in a different form then your argument shrinks down to "my opponent has a thing that I don't have, that's not fair because I want it!"

Balance is likely the bigger problem here. Though I don't think that it's impossible to balance the game while keeping the "limited feeling" in it. Will some people blame LE runes for a loss regardless of how little impact they actually had on the game? Sure they will. Just how people occasionally blame certain abilities, spell spam, exotics, legendaries, lag and bad weather for losing. Is that an issue that is worth dealing with? That'll likely be decided by the Owls budget.

That statement got me seriously confused. I thought it was obvious that Pox Nora is a pay to win game...