Recent changes to tournaments and horses/loot are ridiculous

[glanton]

• Tournament maximum bet amount is reduced to 150 from 300 and odds for the player are now reducing after each tournament win. Max odds are increased to 3 from 2.
• Tournament prizes pool now includes all items (weapons, armour, and horses only) which have a value between 250-2000 (average 500).

This was totally unnecessary. Tournaments were already a poor time investment considering you couldn't get very much money from them as it was (and no experience until recently). There was no reason to participate in tournaments unless the player was starting a brand new character and needed some cash and a chance to get a decent helmet to wear or sell for more money. The renown reward is pretty low as well. You can't even get free access into the keep of a city for winning a tournament. As it stands now there is pretty much no reason at all to fight in tournaments except for the sheer fun of it, and they are so barebones now that even that is pretty limited. What were they thinking? Crossbows still cost like 40k denars and they decide this is what they need to change?

• Reduced the drop rate of horses as loot by 65%.
• Plunderable gold from each lord after a battle is capped to 10K.

What was the point of this change? It was already annoying and inconsistent to collect horses as it was. Plenty of cities have no horses for sale at all. It wasn't like there was some economic difficulty in acquiring them. It's just annoying to have to wander around the map to pray that the next village or city might have horses for sale. It would make more sense to make horses more abundant, but more expensive. And what is the point of putting an arbitrary cap on how much money you can get from looting a defeated lord? The economy in the game is totally whacked out as it is, this doesn't really change anything except just make the game more annoying and put up more barriers to getting to the fun part (huge battles).

Who benefited from these balance changes? How was the game made better by this? Thankfully these problems are all solvable with mods. I know game balance isn't finished yet and overall I am still happy with the game, but I would just like to make it known how silly these changes were. What's the point?

 

[Adrivan]

You can argue about the tournament prize, fine (even though i never cared about the bet, i always participated for renown and fun).
But there is no argument to be made that collecting horses was annoying. I have like 500 horses in my inventory and i bought maybe 20 myself. It is ridiculously easy to stack them from winning battles.

 

[glanton]

Forgot to mention regarding tournaments, they still haven't standardized the armor participants used. Why they took the time to make changes to tournaments but then let Cataphracts continue to come in with full armor and dunk on defenseless peasants I just don't understand.

 

[Just Jack]

I am totally with you on this one. The tournaments are totally screwed up at this point. I even got a bet to win 150 on a 150 bet..... Now that is just wonderfull.

The case of the horses however. I think there are plenty of horses to buy around the different towns. I am talking about some ridiculously high prices, but they are available. This doesn't mean I disagree with the drop of horse loot of 65%, but this is not because I think horses are scarse, no it is because I think horses should be handed over 1:1 (or maybe a 10-30% loss beacause of battlechaos) because of RP sake.

 

[Nikomakkos]

I agree that you weren't getting much money from the tournaments before the change. It's a bet so there's risk involved. Why limit it so much?

 

[TomaSkTemplar]

the poll doesnt say which changes, the ones you propose or the ones they did in 1.0.7 ?

tournaments and arenas are useless as exp gain from any source is too low due to possible calculation being wrong.

 

[glanton]

the poll doesnt say which changes, the ones you propose or the ones they did in 1.0.7 ?

My apologies for lack of clarity. The poll is asking about the changes made by TW in their 1.0.7 update.

 

[crewsk8200]

As of right now. I don't disagree completely with the tourney change. That's only because almost every city I come to has one going. IMO tournaments and feasts should be a Peace time activity to celebrate prosperity. If that was the case, you absolutely should bring back higher bets and better prizes. Just my $.02

 

[Nikomakkos]

As of right now. I don't disagree completely with the tourney change. That's only because almost every city I come to has one going. IMO tournaments and feasts should be a Peace time activity to celebrate prosperity. If that was the case, you absolutely should bring back higher bets and better prizes. Just my $.02

Wouldn't they hold tourneys in wartime whenever they had good chance to do so to keep up morale and practice?

 

[F0_]

I don't see how all the **** that needs to be fixed and features added they are making the game LESS rewarding to play how you want...

 

[Brixton Ryze]

By making people win less money it prolongs the game play. But I will say they should have fixed the snowball faction effect before doing this since games tend to end quickly right now. Also, giving you armor from them now will only help you out in the next one since I've gotten t6 out of the tournaments now. Making money off bets was never the reason to win them, it was the money you could make by selling the prize, and now with armor and better weapons in the prize list you can actually make more money than before since you won't get the same cheap weapons and horses over and over again.

Forgot to mention regarding tournaments, they still haven't standardized the armor participants used. Why they took the time to make changes to tournaments but then let Cataphracts continue to come in with full armor and dunk on defenseless peasants I just don't understand.

You too can also go in fully decked out in armor and weapons. I play with everything on realistic and honestly only lost 1-2 tournaments due to being cocky. Once you get good gear and good weapons it's unfair how you destroy everything in the tournaments. And back then peasants would actually enter tournaments to try and make a name for themselves but would often be beaten, I've had my last match vs some peasants in-game myself though.

 

[Bramborough]

Even before the patch, I thought tournaments were a bad bet money-wise. As a low-level character, if the few hundred I can win are really significant for my precarious finances, then the bet cost at 2 or 3 to 1 (at best...often even worse) is too much of a crapshoot. Too much chance of getting stuck on some round with a low-skill weapon (including my own bad skill, not just my character's) or without a shield. If character is higher developed/armored and can better deal with that situation, then by then the money is probably not significant enough to worry about any more. I don't really see that fundamental situation having changed. I still do a lot of tourneys for the renown, gear, and now a little bit of XP. Plus they're just fun to do. But (unlike Warband) I didn't bet before the patch, and am unlikely to now.

TBH, I'm somewhat perplexed on why they made a design choice to move tournaments away from being a good early/mid-game money-maker. I don't really see that the old WB tourney money-reward was so "broken" or otherwise undesirable in such a way as to warrant elimination. I suppose the horse/gear prizes are meant to make up for that, and a few of them are really good. But after earliest-game, most of them get sold off or smelted. (to be fair, probably better now that they've added additional non-helmet armor pieces). Shrug.

 

[glanton]

You too can also go in fully decked out in armor and weapons

I know that. It's ridiculous and means that the tournament is not actually a trial of skill, but of who has the best armor.

 

[Mabons]

Honestly the tournaments are pretty boring but a reliable way to grab some quick cash at the start. But they need reworked, they aren't really much better than Warbands system and that's kind of lazy.

-Make tournaments rarer and cost money to throw but improve relations with notables etc. (Give fief holders a reason to hold them)
-Let us pick our equipment
-Bet odds can be altered by accepting handicaps such as: No Blocking, No Horse, No Shield, No Ranged etc.
-Enter as a team with companions
-Jousting, ranged competitions, duels instead of random brawls like they are now
-Restore your HP for the purposes of the tournament, it's not really fun waiting for your HP bar to heal up so you can enter at full HP(And sometimes the tournament would end before you could!)
-Pick harder opponents for more renown/better odds

 

[Skiy]

Not got a answer for the tournament question as I don't do them and they've never really interested me anyway. But the horses change to me is a lot better tbh, I have a staggering amount right now in my current playthrough absolutely hundreds of the things which means I move fast and never need to buy food now lmao.

I keep seeing the same thing repeated here and on Reddit that horses are difficult to come by. They're not, you don't need to pray that the next city or village has some. There are multiple villages that produce horses, they seem to have anywhere from 10-50 horses in stock at each village I go to that specifically produces them. Cities seem to not buy them all from the villages so you'll find most of the stock there. Not sure about warhorses though but regular horses? yeah the changes were good imo.

 

[crewsk8200]

Wouldn't they hold tourneys in wartime whenever they had good chance to do so to keep up morale and practice?

Practice fights are already there, tournaments are not really for practicing. As far as for moral, sure I guess that could fit in to a moral system. But for a losing faction, a "good time" to have one might be hard to find. If I was a villager whose town was raided while the big boys across the yard are having a party, i would be pretty pissed.

 

[Be11um]

Forgot to mention regarding tournaments, they still haven't standardized the armor participants used. Why they took the time to make changes to tournaments but then let Cataphracts continue to come in with full armor and dunk on defenseless peasants I just don't understand.

Because it is realistic? Throughout all of the gladiatorial type of tournament and medieval times, the ones who participated used their own armor.

 

[Tandwan]

I agree with the reduction in bets, 300 per bet was a bit too much.
I agree with the reduction in horse changes. You would have to be completely silly to think that this was ok in its standard form.
I agree with the reduction in prizes. Tournaments are meant to be an early game / mid game thing, not really end game. They're meant to do on the side. However, I mean if you wanted to make a character that only does tournaments then the prizes/renown/money is still more then enough.

In the end, these were in my opinion much needed changes that we all kinda agreed on. Now if they will normalize armor then we'll be perfectly fine.

Edit: Let's be fair. We we're doing them in Warband just for a chance to get 2 influence and money. Adding loot is kinda nifty.

 

[Revenant342]

Tournaments just aren't very much fun, and the cash reward was already garbage for the amount of time you put into them. I'd only do them for very early-game cash and renown farming up to the first clan rank, then after that only if the item reward was good. Since the armor rebalance patch, the armor rewards went from high-tier to mid-tier, so that was one less reason to do them. Now you see literal peasant rags as rewards, so the entire system is just a complete joke.

These changes just ensure I'll never waste my time on another tournament again. There's simply no reason to now. Not fun, not rewarding, not worth my time, and it's a shame.

 

[Madae]

The only time tournaments were useful for making money even before this change was at the very beginning of the game, and that was mostly on the rare chance that you got an item that could sell for a hefty amount to jumpstart your gear and troops. Making tournaments, which are already fairly easy, even more rewarding would invalidate a lot of what the game gives you as an alternate course for income. You might have an argument if tournaments were more rare and difficult than they currently are, which may be a future change, but as of right now, the best way to make money is through trading, holding land, or auto resolving looters that have an infinitesimal chance, if any, to kill your troops, and mostly only wound them.

This thread would be better served by posting in the suggestion forum.