Stop encouraging players to grind vs others - Some solutions

Unknown

Please slow down the rate at which repeatable missions recharge and make the windows for gaining points more forgiving.

I know I'm going out on a limb here and I'm guessing very few people will share this sentiment, but I'm going to share it anyway because it disturbs me so much. So here goes: I find it disturbing that you guys are creating PvE missions where you're ultimately pitting people against each other by forcing them to repeatedly play the same missions over and over again (for 20 ISO - pittance) over an extended duration of as long as 10 days.

There have been plenty of complaints that PvP tournaments are all about what goes on in the last hour, and that nothing else before that matters. I get that these PvE tourneys are a fair response to that because not everyone is free at the last hour to win PvP tourneys, a new format needed to be created to allow people to compete at all times as opposed to just at the last hour. That's okay with me. What I don't like is that to optimize your gaining of points, you need to be playing the game once every 2-3 hours or so. Because you don't know what the points are and when they're available unless you get into the game and mission and check those missions themselves, there is also no transparency as to how the point system works.

When you put it altogether, you've essentially designed the tourney such that you're encouraging your players to adopt unhealthy lifestyles where their lives revolve around checking the game constantly over the entire day in order to stay ahead.

Yes, sure. I don't have to grind if I don't want to. But because the system encourages players to do it, what you're seeing is a trickle down effect. The most relentless grinders will work away at the game in the pissing contest to top each other for the 1st-5th places. The rubberbanding then pushes all points up such that people can just leapfrog over their competitors by playing these recharged a few times for ~100 points each fight. Now the guy who dropped from #167 to #1827 checks his MPQ and goes, "WOAH what?" and realizes that if he just spends half an hour playing these 100 point missions, he's going to be able to get back to about #200 or so and can stay there if he repeats this pattern of checking for 10 days. Now the entire player base is throwing away their time at each other just because the point gains are runaway.

Solution:
Change the way point-farming works.

1) Missions shouldn't refresh so relentlessly. Give your players a break!
Perhaps them recharging once every 6 hours, and not simply based on when you last 'exhausted' the points and instead giving it a window. For example, you can change the algorithms so that the points recharge twice in the span of 12 hours, regardless of when the players play the game. So they can gain some points at 9am, then play again at 7pm and still be able to play again at 9pm and remain competitive with players who played at 9am and then at 1pm and then at 9pm. This will be akin to how other games have "first win of the day" rewards that refreshes not every 24 hours, but every 22 hours to be more forgiving and to give its players more flexibility.

2) Mission point gain and the refreshing of missions should be more transparent.
The sub-missions of The Hunt are a great way of accomplishing something like this. Make is so that the same repeatables don't stay in place for the entire duration. To use the above suggestion, lets say you're refreshing missions every 6 hours. Instead of making the points recharge invisibly on these same missions, allow new ones to pop up and leave the old missions at their low point values for the people who REALLY want to grind out every last point that is available. When new missions pop up, give the players a notification.

3) Refreshing of missions should come with a refreshing of mission rewards, less 20 ISO!
Having new mission rewards out to accompany refreshing of points also encourages people to play the few times that would make sense for them to gain the points from the repeatables. The mission rewards should be balanced against the points so that it would be likely that once you get all 4 mission rewards, you'd nearly be close to plateauing in terms of your point gain from the mission. You can reduce the mission rewards and dilute them if you find that you are giving too many rewards away, but the point is that these tourneys shouldn't feel like a pointless grind just because others are grinding and points are flowing so quickly.

4) PvE missions should have more variety. Design more interesting bot characters!
The PvE fights are so incredibly binary. Either you can deal with their cooldown tiles by killing them fast enough or with special abilities or you can't. Right now, once your roster becomes strong enough, the enemies variety becomes inconsequential. This trivializes the gameplay and makes PvE mindless. Don't just keep throwing PvE tourneys and missions at us without looking at improving the state of the PvE experience itself!

I hope something can be done for future PvE

Unknown

My name is Ranzera Fitzgerald Stez and I support this message.

Unknown

How do you propose a slower format that still discriminates between top players (which is required unless they significantly widen the reward windows)? Not that I wouldn't love to see such a format, but I am not sure how it would work.

Unknown

JohnduBois wrote:

How do you propose a slower format that still discriminates between top players (which is required unless they significantly widen the reward windows)? Not that I wouldn't love to see such a format, but I am not sure how it would work.

Here's one way I'm imagining it (I'm sure there are other ways of accomplishing something similar), though let me know if my description is too confusing.

You have 3 repeatables of varying difficulties:
Mission A1 (hard) - goes from 200 points to eventually plateauing at 10 points
Mission B1 (medium) - goes from 150 points to eventually plateauing at 5 points
Mission C1 (easy) - goes from 100 points to eventually plateauing at 3 points

These missions stay alive for 6x2=12 hours. When missions are supposed to refresh, instead new missions pop up and the old missions continue to remain for some other short times. These new missions will have new rewards and provide new enemies so now players now have a choice between farming A1 or A2 based on which one they find their team comp is better suited for:

Mission A2 (hard) - goes from 200 points to eventually plateauing at 10 points
Mission B2 (medium) - goes from 150 points to eventually plateauing at 5 points
Mission C2 (easy) - goes from 100 points to eventually plateauing at 3 points

A2-C2 stay alive are introduced 6 hours after A1-C1 are introduced, and stay alive for 12 hours as well. Eventually, A3 appears, and A1 vanishes when A3 comes up. Again you see new mission rewards and a new crop of PvE enemies encouraging new tactics.

The people who REALLY want to grind it out can do so at 10 points a mission. It's completely transparent and I know how many missions I have to win on top of my competitor in order to best him. And the way to fight this is to just play the missions, not to time my gaming times to half-an-hour worth of grinding every 2 hours because that's when the missions refresh invisibly.

To even better discriminate between the best of the best. Repeating missions after their points plateau can also have the effect of increasing the levels of the enemies within it with no cap. So if you're just farming the 10 points for the first few times, you may get level 40 enemies. But eventually they go up to level 100 and beyond. Eventually it becomes much more efficient to wait for the next crop of missions to pop up. Overall, you're also encouraged to participate over the entire course of the 10 days the PvE tourney is up because missing one set of missions is a huge detriment to your points, but these 'refreshes' are forgiving because you have a 12 hour time-span to do them and you can keep yourself ahead by just playing the game once every 12 hours (maybe devoting 1 hour to play the game).

MarvelMan

JohnduBois wrote:

How do you propose a slower format that still discriminates between top players (which is required unless they significantly widen the reward windows)? Not that I wouldn't love to see such a format, but I am not sure how it would work.

It doesnt distinguish between "top" players now, its just who grinds the most. Right now Im #1 in both my Hunt brackets not because Im the best, but because Ive repeated tough missions.

Even the 3x 230s wasnt that bad for me and I used a 1 skill IW, a lvl 85 IM40 and lvl 75 Thor (havent paid a dime yet). Maybe there was some skill involved for that mission, but the rest were pretty mundane. And that is part of what I think the key is, make some missions much harder. If possible add a little variation as well, but that is tough while keeping the game play simple. In general, I like Sooty's ideas and hopefully the devs will take them, refine and run with them.

Unknown

I thought this new system for the missions would be better and to be fair, it is. But I am officially burned out from the last one. Even though this in reality this is less of a grind, I'm done with grinding. You guys are right about the grind being too much of a pissing contest. I don't want to give up my weekend or my week to get the new cover -- the IW covers from last one were definitely not worth the effort.

Unknown

I think the way the rewards are tiered, it doesn't really matter. Unless you are really hell-bent on getting the top 2 spots.

Often the differences between places 3 and 100 (in a non-lightning round tournament) are pretty minimal. Maybe a cover or a few ISO and HP. It's fairly easy to place in the top 25-50 in these week long events (in my experience).


Almost every new cover they have rolled out has been pretty easy to get in the following weeks after it came out. I've already sold many IM40's, Black Widow (Originals), Captain America's, etc etc.

Unknown

sps-puzzlequest wrote:

But I am officially burned out from the last one. Even though this in reality this is less of a grind, I'm done with grinding. You guys are right about the grind being too much of a pissing contest. I don't want to give up my weekend or my week to get the new cover -- the IW covers from last one were definitely not worth the effort.

Tell me about it! I vowed "never again" after the last grind. The tragedy is that while the IW covers were definitely not worth the effort, by the looks of things the Punisher ones might be...
Typical...

Unknown

I'd like to see the mission get harder rather than the reward points decreasing. They can move up levels and even get boosts. Then the fights would get more intense as you go. You can still have the grindable missions as well, but these would be much more valuable. Do you take the easy mission or go for the difficult mission when you barely survived the last one? It adds a little bit of risk/reward.

Unknown

Blue Shoes wrote:

I'd like to see the mission get harder rather than the reward points decreasing. They can move up levels and even get boosts. Then the fights would get more intense as you go. You can still have the grindable missions as well, but these would be much more valuable. Do you take the easy mission or go for the difficult mission when you barely survived the last one? It adds a little bit of risk/reward.

That'd be cool but you do reach a point in this game where more hp just means a slightly longer fight.

Unknown

Ranzera wrote:

Blue Shoes wrote:

I'd like to see the mission get harder rather than the reward points decreasing. They can move up levels and even get boosts. Then the fights would get more intense as you go. You can still have the grindable missions as well, but these would be much more valuable. Do you take the easy mission or go for the difficult mission when you barely survived the last one? It adds a little bit of risk/reward.

That'd be cool but you do reach a point in this game where more hp just means a slightly longer fight.

This is entirely true, and is something I neglected to reiterate in my second post here.

Unknown

Ranzera wrote:

Blue Shoes wrote:

I'd like to see the mission get harder rather than the reward points decreasing. They can move up levels and even get boosts. Then the fights would get more intense as you go. You can still have the grindable missions as well, but these would be much more valuable. Do you take the easy mission or go for the difficult mission when you barely survived the last one? It adds a little bit of risk/reward.

That'd be cool but you do reach a point in this game where more hp just means a slightly longer fight.

True, that's why they get other boosts. Starting AP, extra damage, first turn advantage. There are other ways to make them harder. They should be able to make things impossible hard if they wanted. It wouldn't be to frustrate people because you be able to see it getting harder and harder. At some point, it wouldn't be worth it, and you switch back to the grind. Then maybe come back after leveling a little.

Unknown

Am I the only one who was fine with the original system where repeatables had static values and could be repeated indefinitely? I really don't like this rubberbanding nonsense. It seems to reward players for not participating until towards the end of the event and screws over players that have been relentlessly grinding throughout the duration. With the old point system, we could go at our own pace and did not have to check back every few hours.

Nemek

ZzzWolph wrote:

Am I the only one who was fine with the original system where repeatables had static values and could be repeated indefinitely? I really don't like this rubberbanding nonsense. It seems to reward players for not participating until towards the end of the event and screws over players that have been relentlessly grinding throughout the duration. With the old point system, we could go at our own pace and did not have to check back every few hours.

I completely agree. Rubberbanding has been annoying to me more than anything, and I'm not actually sure what the real benefits are, either for encouraging people to play more or to make things more 'exciting'. It's just been frustrating to me never knowing what things are going to look like.

It's weird, when Polkio went on his tear during the first event, people were in awe by his...persistence. Now, nobody can Polkio an event (one day, this will be a normal verb)...but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.

Unknown

I liked what they did with this one initially in Alaska where there were several missions coupled together. You could choose which to do, based on difficulty, with the harder missions being worth more. Now they seem to have decoupled these, which means more grinding.

Unknown

As much as they seem to want to promote "competition", I think the PvE events would be much much better with the placement rewards replaced by better progression rewards. The developers can't seem to make up their mind who they want to award the placement rewards to. Without rubber-banding it's who spends the most time grinding. With the ridiculous rubber-banding of the last few events, its who spends the most time grinding in the last part of the event. In fact, with the point decay on the repeatable missions of The Hunt, its not even who spends the most time grinding in the last part of the event, it's who holds off playing at all until the last few hours (if you join in the last few hours, your boosted non-repeatable mission rewards will bump you up past folks who have been grinding for far longer and already used the decaying rewards from their repeatable missions).

The "repeatable missions with decaying rewards and rubber-banding" approach is also extremely obtuse - the method for maximizing your score at the end of the event is often very different from the obvious approach of playing as many missions as you can as often as you can, and generally involves not playing, moreso even than the PvP events.

I don't think their is really a good choice of who to give the "competitive" PvE rewards to - just get rid of them entirely!