Town loyalty came with the first act of the current event arc and while they have recently added new ways to gain loyalty like participating in champion spawns, turning in bulk order deeds and donating resources or even animals, it took
six months for the developers to add those and hopefully for understanding how much the players hated the the first act (
here're some reviews and
Adol's editorial). The decay of the loyalty rating was the cherry on top of this hell. Most players I know already got their town banners and city titles and want to forget all about the mindless grinding and I do too.
I think we can see what they are trying to accomplish with this event cycle, that is to
remove the part of the rng from the reward distribution completely. Every player needs to spend more or less the same amount of time to get the same reward from these events. They accomplished this by implementing grinding, and not just any type of grinding, the type where you actually don't use any of the abilities or any of the skills of your character or yourself as a gamer. If the graphics were a little more basic, I could probably train a monkey to grind town loyalty as it was implemented back in January. It got better though with the later acts but the final one introduced a competition which can be summarized as the person who performs the same action more times than the others gets the best rewards.
There is no doubt that the event reward distribution is more fairly done now without the rng, but after 14 years, this is a huge change on our already established gaming style. Imagine getting an sot on every 30th creature you kill or getting an artifact on exactly the 10th scalis you slayed, maybe even seeing how many you slayed on the loyalty menu. While my friends know that I often claim that the rng is evil, I do like random events and I had no problem with getting relic fragments while others were getting ranger's cloak of augmentation during the In the Shadow of Virtue event cycle, the excitement alone was more than enough. I probably wouldn't complete any fish monger quest if I knew that the 120 points order I just received will yield a lava lobster trap rather than a 120 fishing ps. We don't need to discard rng completely just because they don't know how to implement equal opportunity events. Any event which I know exactly how many times I need to perform an action to receive the same reward as the other players who performed the same action the same times as me, does not excite me and I don't think it is fun either, but it might be just me.
I think your idea is great, I really would like to see town item sets, I just don't want it to be grinded or be associated with the already terrible reputation of the first act.
