Casual PVE?

Unknown

If it were offered how many of you would spend HP (like an elite tourney) to unlock a non-competitive PVE episode to play at your leisure. No placement rewards, just some progression rewards and node rewards. No HP to be won anywhere but there will be some tokens and 3* covers awarded. No scaling or rubberbanding, just you vs. nodes. Some or all nodes could be one time play only, thus you might get a hulk cover for sure, but the color may be assigned randomly. Make it last just as long as a normal PVE but pay upfront for the right to only be competing against yourself.

Unknown

Such an event would probably look a lot like the original Heroic Oscorp with actually achieveable progression rewards.

Unknown

Yes. A thousands times YES! I would jump on that! Only thing I would do differently is add HP as a progression reward structure, so that you have the opportunity to earn some of your HP back, it not all of it if you progress high enough.

Unknown

The real question is, would you be willing to pay ~1250 HP per 3* cover awarded to play this? Because every such cover is pretty much a guaranteed award, so I can't see it being offered at much of a discount, if any.

Unknown

Instead of guaranteed specific covers they could give out some number of those 3* tokens they've been using for the No Holds Barred lightning round things they've held a few times now. Maybe sweeten the pot with one specific cover at a high progression amount. Since the value of a random 3* is way lower for most people than the exact one you want, the entrance fee could be priced significantly lower and it would make the whole affair a good deal for people with transitioning 3* rosters, who are generally treated the worst by the whole system.

Unknown

If you used the recent elite events as template I think top 2 or 3 out of 50 gets the 3*? So if you translate that to PvE you'd have make the progression prohibitively high to get the same ratio. You'd have to charge quite a lot of upfront to justify putting a 3* token within easily achieveable progression, but if it cost 500 HP to enter that wouldn't be very casual at all either. If you charge the same 150 HP to enter then the appropriate progression prize would be '1/3 of a 3*' but there's no such thing in the game right now. 2 heroic tokens is kind of close, but it's still not quite the same.

Unknown

You could still have the 3* there, just put it a point value that is unobtainable for a week or week and half.

Unknown

Well the current PVE gave away two 3* covers from progressions for free. It isn't set in stone that they cannot let some covers out without charging us 1250 hp each. If they scale back the rewards too far no one would voluntarily buy into a 7 day event for pocket change in return. D3 would be taking a gamble on more people being willing to spend some to play a new game mode and get better rewards than people currently willing to spend a lot to buy covers. After all if you can convince 5000 people to spend 250 HP to join an event then they just raked in the same amount of value as selling 1000 covers.*

*numbers chosen for easy math

Unknown

Cryptobrancus wrote:

Well the current PVE gave away two 3* covers from progressions for free. It isn't set in stone that they cannot let some covers out without charging us 1250 hp each. If they scale back the rewards too far no one would voluntarily buy into a 7 day event for pocket change in return. D3 would be taking a gamble on more people being willing to spend some to play a new game mode and get better rewards than people currently willing to spend a lot to buy covers. After all if you can convince 5000 people to spend 250 HP to join an event then they just raked in the same amount of value as selling 1000 covers.*

*numbers chosen for easy math

Lazy Cap is somewhat of an outlier in terms of 3* cover availability. This is the second time I can remember them giving out so many of his covers over a short period. Doesn't happen with any other post-laziness 3*

Unknown

Cryptobrancus wrote:

Well the current PVE gave away two 3* covers from progressions for free.

That's actually a really good point. I think they could charge a much lower amount in HP if it were an either/or choice - you either entered the 'classic' PvE, or the casual with a nominal entry fee. What I don't see D3 wanting to do is significantly increase the acquisition rate of 3* covers by letting us do both.

FaerieMyst

The current PVE has two places that give you a 3* character. While it requires regular play, it does not require you try for a specific placement. How casual do you want? PVE isn't like PVP. You don't lose points if you don't play for a day. My alliance asks for us to make half the points of the maximum prize. PVE isn't normally my thing but I easily make that each event.

As for a pay to enter pve - it depends. On the price, on the prizes, on the duration, etc. It's always about cost/benefit.

Unknown

PvE progression reward is all over the place. There are some events like TaT where you get some 3* cover for just showing up, and then there are also plenty of events where the highest overall scoring player still didn't come close to getting the 3* progression reward. Since this structure is likely similar to elite, we'd be looking at 150 HP buy in and 2 or 3 out of 50 guys get a 3*. Translate that to PvE and you'd have to have the 3* at a progression threshold where only 5% can reach and I'm not sure if that's very helpful. I suggested 1/3 of a 3* as reasonably obtainable because then if you run this event 3 times, and assuming you've the 'heroic token for just entering' gimmick too, then you'd end up spending 450 HP for 3 heroic tokens + 1 3* token plus whatever the events themselves yield and that seems like a decent investment for casual players. But there's no such mechanism as '1/3 of a 3* cover' at this point and I don't think it'd be the same if you just give out 2 heroic tokens instead.

Spoit

FaerieMyst wrote:

The current PVE has two places that give you a 3* character. While it requires regular play, it does not require you try for a specific placement. How casual do you want? PVE isn't like PVP. You don't lose points if you don't play for a day. My alliance asks for us to make half the points of the maximum prize. PVE isn't normally my thing but I easily make that each event.

As for a pay to enter pve - it depends. On the price, on the prizes, on the duration, etc. It's always about cost/benefit.

PvE is actually waaaaaay worse about needing to be hardcore in order to get covers. In pvp, if you really want to, you can easily just burn HP on shields and boosts to go as high as your pocketbook can take you. Whereas in pve, you have the full calvinball rules, and RBing means if you're not around for close, even if you've been maintaining top 5 every refresh along the whole event, you'd be lucky to get 2 covers even if you start your last refresh too early, much less miss the last hour altogether

FaerieMyst

You missed my point. You don't have to 'place' in a PVE to get progression rewards. You also don't lose points if you aren't playing or lose to the node.

Unknown

I voted yes, but as some have pointed out it really will depend on the cost of entry into said event...

Naturally if it were to cost 1250HP then obviously i would say forget it, and i'm sure most casual players will too... but if they charged around 150 - 200 maybe even 250HP for decent rewards, i could see it working out pretty well among those transitioning or starting to transition from 2* to 3* territory...

Spoit

FaerieMyst wrote:

You missed my point. You don't have to 'place' in a PVE to get progression rewards. You also don't lose points if you aren't playing or lose to the node.

Progression rewards are almost always up to the whims of the calvinball rules though, and only rarely actually highly competitive covers. Usually they're just repeats, especially punisher repeats. Either no one gets anywhere close, or you just have to put in a token effort for it. You don't lose points, but you sure as hell lose placement. Sharding aside, points in pvp are fairly predictable, and you can predict your placement and shield accordingly for placement as far as 24 hours out. (even with the sharding 1.2k should probably be good enough for top 5)

Unknown

gobstopper wrote:

Lazy Cap is somewhat of an outlier in terms of 3* cover availability. This is the second time I can remember them giving out so many of his covers over a short period. Doesn't happen with any other post-laziness 3*

Yup, I think I could have fully covered 2 ShieldBro's by now and be well on my way to a 3rd if I'd wanted. Given out like sweets.

over_clocked

I voted 'No' but simply because I firmly believe that any such content should be free

How to monetize it? Easy! Build in achievements that influence progression and cover/ISO/HP acquisition in no way whatsoever but are displayed prominently on a global achievement scoreboard. Top achievers get to display their respective gold, silver and bronze pixel medals against their names during all of the next week or until the next 'casual' PvE ends. The icons will probably have to differ from the regular Versus ones, so let it be medals instead of cups.
I'm telling ya, one million dollar idea, this is. And X-Men probably won't be the only ones to whale, as they never seemed to favour PvE that much anyway. Ergo, more whaling overall!

Unknown

So...basically you would fight an entire pve for no rewards whatsoever, except a little icon next to your name, that you don't even get to keep, that would probably just make you more of a target for pvp thrashings than anything else...

who would want to pay for that??

over_clocked

Ralstonator wrote:

So...basically you would fight an entire pve for no rewards whatsoever, except a little icon next to your name, that you don't even get to keep, that would probably just make you more of a target for pvp thrashings than anything else...

who would want to pay for that??

Did I say no rewards? They get same rewards as everyone else but also a cute little icon. You are very wrong if you think that people don't like to collect pixel trophies.

Tyronepowers

Crypto,
The way I read your proposal sounds like "paid DLC campaign content" on the console systems. If that is the case and you keep the campaign in your "story" tab to play at your leisure to milk all the rewards, then yes. I would spend on that.

If it is time limited like the current PvE then no I would not buy. The time limit makes it no longer casual.