Level drop mechanism

Nonce Equitaur 2

IceIX wrote:

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

The comment on OBW's tile match damage does bring up the issue of level-specing. Many people have their characters carefully leveled so that they'll tank for each other in a particularly way.

Easiest fix -- some sort of mechanism for putting a character at a lower level. For example, I might want to drop my Hood eight levels for awhile. On the character screen showing the stat block, there could be a "-1" and "+1" button, with the "+1" button initially grayed out. If they press "-1", then the "+1" button is activated, along with "1 available level", which would increment each time "-1" was pressed.

Ideally, we want players to always level characters to max level. What you're talking about would definitely work, but it would also be yet another UI element that would be very potentially confusing for players when only a very small minority of users would actually make real use of it.

How many people would be bothered by an obscure mechanism added to the stats-block screen?
How many would be confused by the -1 & +1 buttons, and the "Available levels" when it was activated?

How many people would find this useful for playing characters like Patch, Hulk, OBW, and squishy characters jumping on tiles too often?

Unknown

I would use a down level function. I have always wanted to see what happens if you make a hulk with exactly the right hp to get angered by espionage, but alas mine is too large already even though far from maxed.

This would also help espionage so you can get OBW to sit on top of people, Patch as you mentioned and help well every squishy character trying to hide behind tanks.

I can't think of one rational argument in favor of "max is always better" for every character. If we want to remove all subtlety, and strategy then stop introducing new characters and only let people play with Juggs while shouting:
IMMA HEADBUT NOW!!

GrumpySmurf1002

I also suggested this, both level down and ability down (think: IM40) would make the game a lot more flexible.

Spoit

Even if there was a mechanism to permanently lose levels (even if it ate the ISO!) it'd be nice, with all the changes they keep making

Unknown

How is this a bad idea? Personally I never thought of controlling character levels before reading the forums, but now I am intrigued. Think if the strategies that people can come up with. The game would seriously gain notoriety as a thinking mans match three game. And I am sure there would be some way to profit from it without seeming like its another cash grab tactic. I think this would be a huge step towards the "use your whole roster" goal as well. Be different d3, and you will be rewarded for it.

mischiefmaker

I agree that it's potentially confusing for users -- a new player who doesn't even know what the numbers next to the colored tiles means is going to wonder why they would ever want to lower a character's level -- but it's also totally harmless if implemented in the way that Nonce suggests. A curious user will press the -1 button once, see his level and tile damage decrease, scratch his head, then press the +1 button and be on his way. Nothing lost and his confusion won't prevent him from doing anything else.

Meanwhile, players who want more strategic thinking in their game get a fun tool to play with, and it gives Demiurge room to play with things like tile damage, health, and other stats without incurring unexpected wrath from the playerbase.

mischiefmaker

I've been thinking about this a bit more (stupid level 145 Psylocke!) and I'd like to present a rebuttal to what I think are the most obvious counterarguments.

Counterargument 1: It's confusing UI. See above -- it may be confusing at first, but if there's no cost to lowering or re-raising, then the confusion has no adverse effect.

Counterargument 2: This benefits a very small percentage of users. This is true. However, IceIX has said on multiple occasions that Demiurge wants to design the game such that you always want to max out your characters. Right now there are at least three reasons not to do so:
- Characters with less health begin taking more damage on offense, a problem magnified by true healing (e.g. Hood goes great with Thor, but if he's maxed he tanks yellow, which is one of your highest priority colors). So you might want to keep those characters at a lower level, for easier and more sustainable offense.
- People are afraid that leveling characters past a certain point will change how the game views them, giving them harder fights or putting them in more competitive brackets. Regardless of whether these fears are justified or not, it's a reason not to level up your characters.
- It takes a lot of ISO to get those last 20-30 levels, for sometimes questionable benefit.

Allowing people to lower character levels removes both of the first two reasons from consideration. So, while you might say that this change only benefits a small percentage of users, another way to say it is that this change would make it so that everyone is encouraged to max out all their characters, which seems like a pretty significant benefit both for Demiurge and the players.

Counterargument 3: Opportunity cost of developer time. I'd argue that since this change is good for the player base and good for Demiurge's bottom line (less reason not to level up characters = greater demand for ISO = higher engagement/revenue as people play for or buy ISO), it ought to be high priority anyway. I also don't think this change is a ton of work, but not having seen the code, I'm not really qualified to make that assessment.

Unknown

I know optimal covers is a separate issue but being able to drop unwanted covers at will would be a similar change to this and also be favorable to some people. I took the recent IM40 rewards as an opportunity to sell my old one with 3 yellow covers and start a new one that currently only has 1/1/1 and I am already liking the new one much better than the old, just wish I could have had the mechanic to do that without trashing the old one completely.

Unknown

An alternative to this could be ability to just set the tile ownership for the team potentially overriding the damage numbers (and sucking up the lesser damage).

That even aligns with the DU target of 'every character should be leveled to max'.

Though some abilities like TBTI would need some tuning.

squirrel1120

Just to add to mischiefmakers post above...

I don't think a +/- button on the character's leveling interface is even very confusing. There are a myriad of games that use such a feature out there, so the concept is hardly novel or new. Anyone that can take it such a simple concept isn't going to get the best use of the deeper parts of the game anyway.

I don't think the feature would be all that seldom used either. Especially if the feature is briefly but well explained via mouse-over or popup.

"Character level effects tile match damage and ability damage. Use this adjustable tool if your low health characters take too much damage over higher health characters using the same color tiles. <insert cost or lack of here>" Make sure tile damage is shown on the same screen so the correlation is obvious. Or include in the tutorial.

We have a coded feature where if you pull a tile several times without matching, it will tell you how to do it... so perhaps this feature isn't for that particular subset, but I think most everyone else would get good use of it.