New Content Idea: The Daily Challenge

Kelbris

How does this game not have something like this by now?

This would be a non-competitive, developer-set match-up that does NOT use your own covers. It would pit a pre-selected team of characters with pre-set levels against an enemy team. Christ, that's way too many hyphens. Let's not do that again.

A good example would be something like X-Men vs The Brotherhood, where L100 Astonishing Wolvie/L125 Psylocke/L100 C.Storm faces off against L125 MNMags/L150 C.Mags/L100 Juggs. Power builds could be customizable for your team (be it 3/5/5, 5/3/5 etc), but I think it'd be more fun if it wasn't. EVERYONE would get the same daily challenge.

The way I see this happening is that you get three attempts. You could make all three exactly the same, or have an easy/medium/hard stack (preferable), where you need to beat easy to go on to medium. You'd get a level of rewards based on how many times you won, out of the three total attempts. Easy could have 250 ISO and a standard token, medium having 500 iso and a heroic token, and hard having 750 ISO, 25 HP (Hard mode should be freaking hard) and either two heroics or an event token.

No retries whatsoever. You get three attempts and you're done until tomorrow.

This would do four things:

1. Let us break the rules a bit; since it's a level playing field, there's no reasons we couldn't let the user have copies on their team, as in All Three Widows vs All Three Wolvies. There could also be survival-type battles, where you have to beat 3-5 teams of hammer grunts in a row without healing. That'd make true healing pretty freaking important if this was considered to be contained in one single battle.

2. Gives us something after the prologue that we can play at our own pace. People have been asking for that in a while. This would be entirely skippable, but also something fun to do if you felt like playing something at your leisure. Keep in mind that these are NOT your covers, so they'd be at full health if you got whooped during medium difficulty. You could jump straight into hard without needing to heal.

3. Lets new players see what the higher-rarity heroes are like. Do you know how badly I would have KILLED to use a 5/5 Rags back when he was broken? I only managed to have a 5/4 towards the end. This also gives people a feel for how some of the higher-rarity covers handle, so they can figure out who they want to focus on if they're deciding who to use.

4. You can test out new characters like this BEFORE THE ACTUAL RELEASE. It'd also show us what they can do and might convince more people to buy covers, and if something's broken, we can tell you. You're handing the testing over to 1000s of people.



Lastly, for the love of that yellow-eyed demon from Supernatural, don't give this a **** buy in. Seriously. A brand new player who just downloaded the app and played the tutorial should be able to jump right into this and see how cool the game can get when you level up your bros.

You could make a Daily Challenges Completed Leaderboard if the playerbase wants another reason to swing their collective **** around, but I see no reason for it. Just puts more information retrieval strain on the servers.

Mawtful

Kelbris wrote:

You could make a Daily Challenges Completed Leaderboard if the playerbase wants another reason to swing their **** around, but I see no reason for it.

E-peen swinging is its own reward.

Also, this is begging to be themed around "classic" match-ups; imagine a Civil War daily challenge where players choose between siding with Cap or Iron Man, complete with lovely little progress bars that show how well each "team" is doing.

Kelbris

If this thing actually happens, I could see a lot of people that stopped playing because of game changes/character nerfs coming back to play this every day. It's a quick fix that doesn't require any long term (pve) commitment.

y2fitzy

Love the idea

Spencer75

Fantastic idea!

Unknown

Kelbris wrote:

How does this game not have something like this by now?

This is really the six million dollar question. How this game doesn't have daily/weekly/monthly challenges and some kind of trophy/achievement system is just beyond my understanding. It's easy to do, it's fun, and it draws people of all progress levels into the game. It's a big fat duh to do something, anything, along these lines that for some reason they have chosen not to capitalized on yet. I'm not sure I'm totally sold on the format suggested above, but for ****'s sake give us something to take our mind off the drudgery of yet another recycled PvE event and yet another 2 + featured PvP.

Kaeyne

As a big fan of both Marvel Comics and Puzzle Quest, I must say that's an excellent idea.
Now that the developers don't center on Dark Reign any longer this could open up a lot more potential for future content.

Bowgentle

To take this in another direction, how about making the daily challenge a preset board?
Like in the recent Magic The Gathering Duels Of The Planeswalkers games, you get a problem which you need to solve before it's game over.

Say you have LT at 1000 HP, with 12 green AP, and the other 2 chars are dead.
Juggernaut has 3 red AP, so if he gets one red match, it's Headbutt time and you're toast.
The board is set up in such a way that you need to figure out the exact order of matches you need to make to get enough green AP for CTS before Juggs pulls off his Headbutt.
Of course falling pieces need to be set too, not randomised.

This can't be hard to set up, just put a designer to work for a couple of days, he should be able to crank out some 100+ challenges that'll last you a few months.

hurcules

Thugpatrol wrote:

Kelbris wrote:

How does this game not have something like this by now?

This is really the six million dollar question. How this game doesn't have daily/weekly/monthly challenges and some kind of trophy/achievement system is just beyond my understanding. It's easy to do, it's fun, and it draws people of all progress levels into the game. It's a big fat duh to do something, anything, along these lines that for some reason they have chosen not to capitalized on yet. I'm not sure I'm totally sold on the format suggested above, but for tinykitty's sake give us something to take our mind off the drudgery of yet another recycled PvE event and yet another 2 + featured PvP.

I think it's because Demiurge is stretched as it is, resource-wise. Look at the half-baked TU and subsequent "fix" that they pushed out. All pointing to insufficient resources to test/develop/fix.

Marty17

Kind of reminds me of recent FIFA series, instead of daily, it was weekly based upon real life events/results you get to replay/alter the outcome. I had a similar idea in which the developers create new characters (loan) to mimic certain events (either from comic book, films or TV shows) for us to test/offer feedback on the new characters/event style.

Unknown

I like it. But there's no way for the devs to screw us out of our money with it, so they won't do it

GrumpySmurf1002

Bowgentle wrote:

To take this in another direction, how about making the daily challenge a preset board?
Like in the recent Magic The Gathering Duels Of The Planeswalkers games, you get a problem which you need to solve before it's game over.

Say you have LT at 1000 HP, with 12 green AP, and the other 2 chars are dead.
Juggernaut has 3 red AP, so if he gets one red match, it's Headbutt time and you're toast.
The board is set up in such a way that you need to figure out the exact order of matches you need to make to get enough green AP for CTS before Juggs pulls off his Headbutt.
Of course falling pieces need to be set too, not randomized.

This can't be hard to set up, just put a designer to work for a couple of days, he should be able to crank out some 100+ challenges that'll last you a few months.

Puzzle Quest 2 has a few "need 50 of this color to advance" challenges, along with a few others. So it's not like this should be a foreign concept to D3.

CrookedKnight

Kelbris wrote:

If this thing actually happens, I could see a lot of people that stopped playing because of game changes/character nerfs coming back to play this every day. It's a quick fix that doesn't require any long term (pve) commitment.

Absolutely. And this game could definitely use some content that's not themed around MUST PLAY AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE OR ALL IS LOST. That's how you get burnout.

Kelbris

Marty17 wrote:

Kind of reminds me of recent FIFA series, instead of daily, it was weekly based upon real life events/results you get to replay/alter the outcome. I had a similar idea in which the developers create new characters (loan) to mimic certain events (either from comic book, films or TV shows) for us to test/offer feedback on the new characters/event style.

Unrelated, but you're totally playing the wrong soccer franchise.

Unknown

I remember seeing an article talking about MMORPG where games get into a trap where the daily becomes the content. While dailies when used correctly can be useful addition to the game, you'll find very few people who play the game only for dailies. You don't want to get into a situation where there's nothing new for PvE or PvP but we can do Bagman versus Devil Dino + 2 Pyros for daily challenge instead.

homeinvasion

There is a simple reason this wont happen.

With this game mode you have no need to ever buy roster slots, characters, covers, HP, etc as you could just keep playing this mode. Great idea that is just not going to happen.

Kelbris

homeinvasion wrote:

There is a simple reason this wont happen.

With this game mode you have no need to ever buy roster slots, characters, covers, HP, etc as you could just keep playing this mode. Great idea that is just not going to happen.

That means you get a maximum of 3 games a day. That's maybe 30 minutes per day you'd be allowed to play.

after your 3 attempts, you're locked out until the next Daily challenge.

Kelbris

Phantron wrote:

I remember seeing an article talking about MMORPG where games get into a trap where the daily becomes the content. While dailies when used correctly can be useful addition to the game, you'll find very few people who play the game only for dailies. You don't want to get into a situation where there's nothing new for PvE or PvP but we can do Bagman versus Devil Dino + 2 Pyros for daily challenge instead.

Right now we're in a situation where there is nothing new for PvE or PvP and we CAN'T do bagman versus devil Dino +2 Pyros.

Unknown

Kelbris wrote:

Phantron wrote:

I remember seeing an article talking about MMORPG where games get into a trap where the daily becomes the content. While dailies when used correctly can be useful addition to the game, you'll find very few people who play the game only for dailies. You don't want to get into a situation where there's nothing new for PvE or PvP but we can do Bagman versus Devil Dino + 2 Pyros for daily challenge instead.

Right now we're in a situation where there is nothing new for PvE or PvP and we CAN'T do bagman versus devil Dino +2 Pyros.

I know, but I have a feeling if we get these daily challenges we'd just be told "but you can do dailys' when people ask why we got nothing new since 5 months ago. There's an industry trend of companies just slapping some dailys and some achievements and call that content and while even some stuff is better than nothing, if it ever gets to a point where we can only do Bagman versus Devil Dino daily challenge I think that's so bad that it wouldn't matter if that's slightly better than the status quo.

Case in point, it seems like a lot of effort was put on the Teamups instead of making new content in the last month or so. I guess Teamups are better than having absolutely nothing (though that's debateable), but I'll take a "Venom eats everyone" new PvE event over Teamup if I had a choice, and I don't think it'd be any harder to do that.