Improving PvP design

Unknown

I realize sweeping changes like the ones I am going to propose are not going to be implemented. This should provide a broader view on PvP instead of the focused discussion about the state of shield hopping and is meant as a general brainstorming for PvP designs that may be better than the current zombie slaughterfest. I invite everyone to make their own suggestions or whether they think the current state of PvP is fine.

The problems I would like addressed for PvP are the following:
1. You are not able to control loosing points (aka zombie horde PvP). When you loose points it should be your fault, not some RNG that put you into the top of other people's queues.
2. Segregation between P2W and F2P players. Advantages like boosts or healthpacks are fine, completely shutting down competition IMO is not.
3. There is no roster diversity. Everyone uses their highest level most powerful characters.
4. Time slices interact very badly with the current placement based scoring. Restricting matchmaking to own slice limits scores in slices with little participation. Allowing cross-slice matchmaking favors later slices.
5. Scoring does not take into account difficulty of battles.
6. Money for D3

How would I solve these issues?
1. Do not substract points for loosing defensive battles. If I have a 20 point lead on the next 10 players all 10 needs to win at least one match to surpass me.
2. Shields in their current form are no longer necessary. Boosts and health packs still provide an advantage to players willing to spend money. Given same time commitment and skill a player using boosts and packs will come out ahead.
3.-5. Do not award points based on relative placements. Instead award points based on your team's strength vs the other teams strength. What exactly is team strength? It factors in average level and power of the character. Character power should be measured by how often a character wins or looses when used by players. Show this ranking in game, it would be incredible interesting data
Example 1 (note that the used scores are just used to illustrate the concept): With my L166 team of I attack a L94 team of
I get 20 points for the level difference
I get 13 points because my characters rank lower than the L94
Example 2: The L94 team attacks my L166 team.
He gets 30 points for the level difference
He does not get points for because his characters rank higher than the L94
Points from level difference can not be linear since 4stars are not 63% more powerful than 3stars.
Time slices are no longer a problem because you can safely have cross slice attacks without later slices having an advantage.

6. This one is tricky if and boost sales are not sufficient this suggestion would provide an alternative monetization. Consider the following suggestion completely optional since it (re)introduces a stronger type of P2W. I just mention it for completeness sake:
Track points lost/won on defense in a separate point pool. Winning on offense with negative points in the pool will only increase total score by half and otherwise bring the pool closer to zero (think paying of debt). This slows down climbs. If you are not willing to suffer the reduction in points you can by a that causes all points to go to score increase instead. Of course this kind of shield would not break but has a rather short duration like 10min, 30min, 1 hour. Shields become something you use to play. You still have to squeeze worthwhile matches into the time. Points within the pool should be capped so it is possible to "pay off" the pool instead of carrying it around.
7. Remove skip tax or even better let players define constraints for their nodes ("I want to fight a team with an average level between L100 and L150"). This does not solve any of the above points but skip tax is just annoying.


Possible problems:
PvP becomes a time consuming grindfest! IMO the criteria to distinguish yourself from other players are time, money and skill. Currently the deciding factor is money followed by time followed by skill. I do not see a solution that puts skill in the front because of the random nature of tiles. Deciding between time and money I would always choose time. In the beginning it will penalize players that can not play as much but with some data from previous PvPs players can be bracketed according to their average number of games. If this is not sufficient (I believe it is) it is possible to introduce PvE mechanics like rubberbanding.
This is communism! Using X-Force does not net me many points. Using stronger chars make for easier and faster matches which counter the reduce in points.
This sucks, I leveled my chars and suffer PvE scaling without an advantage in PvP It is out of scope but I also believe that PvE scaling should be based on chosen team instead of roster strength. It should not matter whether you have an XForce or not in your roster when you use cStorm, mMag and mHawk. Two players playing the same team at the same level should face same level opponents. Personal scaling can still be a factor later in a PvE based on individual performance.
There is no limit to the amount of points generated! As seen in PvE D3 has certain expectations about how many players should earn the progression rewards. This expectation can be used for PvP as well.

I am curious what other designs people come up with and hope this will broaden the discussion from the current focus on shield hopping.

GuntherBlobel

The current mode of PvP works well enough, why spend a lot more energy to make it just a little bit better.

How about additional PvP modes? People have been posting ideas for completely distinct PvP modes and I think that they should be considered in addition to the current PvP mode.

Without any thought, the Devs could ripoff HearthStone's Arena mode and let people build temporary teams strictly from 3*/4* Token pulls with static character levels (like during BoP). You would pay a cheap buy-in (200 HP), build your team, and then play 10 matches against other people's teams at your leisure or until you retire. Total # of wins out of 10 matches would be the only metric for winning rewards. "Defensive" losses wouldn't count in any way. New PvP mode: done.

I loved Arena mode as a new HearthStone player because I got to play cards that I wouldn't unlock for months. I think a lot of newer players stuck in the 2* --> 3* transition would like a mode like this. People who love Balance of Power might also like this PvP mode.

Unknown

Sounds like an interesting and fun game mode but why would there be a buy-in? Not every game mode must have a HP sink, the prologue for example does not have one.

GuntherBlobel

Sontar wrote:

Sounds like an interesting and fun game mode but why would there be a buy-in? Not every game mode must have a HP sink, the prologue for example does not have one.

Just because that is the HearthStone model, no other reason. Part of the point of my post is that MPQ has never really gotten PvP or PvE perfect, but the Devs keep trying to make everyone happy despite the diminishing returns.

Why not just steal good ideas and give more ways to play? Buy-in works for HearthStone, it should work here, too.

Edit: If you want the Devs to actually build something new, there really must be a way for them to compensated for their time. So yes, new modes will only be built if they get players to spend . It doesn't have to be buy-in, of course, but it has to get people playing in a way that leads them to want to spend. Arena mode wouldn't use Health Packs or Iso-8, so if I were a Dev, I would make it a buy-in. In HearthStone, you spend just a little more than what it cost to buy a Card Pack, but you always win at least a Card Pack. It's really just a fun way to buy the Heroic Token Daily Deal, with the chance of getting something even better.

SpaceBearPig

The hearhstone idea is fantastic and winning 10 fights should give you the the invested hp back plus a few random prizes like hs. A ton of things could be done with that format.

nimvin

Remove point loss for defensive losses. (Still get points for wins, always 30pts.)
cap point gains based on current score.
0-300 25pt wins 10 pt losses
301-500 21 pt wins 13 pt losses
501-600 18 pt wins 15 pt losses
601-700 15 pt wins 18 pt losses
701+ 15 pt wins 20 pt losses
1001+ 10 pt wins 20 pt losses

Stealing this part from above.
shields are 10 min/30 min/ 1hr
shields double pt gains and negateor or halve pt losses.

Targets available for fighting are always the other 9 guys on your personal scoreboard. So skip tax is reduced and your typically going to be competing against similar competition. Retaliations are a thing of the past.

Thoughts?

Unknown

I think the point drop should be smoother and slightly increased:
13 matches to 325 points
9 matches to 514 points
5 matches to 604 points
7 matches to 709 points
20 matches to 1009 points
30 matches to 1309 points
A total of 84 matches (exactly two gauntlets worth)

Otherwise it sounds like a PvE gauntlet with a smoother difficulty curve and more matches. One problem I can see is a possiblity for abuse. It would require two players that stay within range of each other with a team that is strong on offense and weak on defense. They attack each other at roughly the same time, win both matches, stay together and have an easy ride to the top.

Unknown

GuntherBlobel wrote:

The current mode of PvP works well enough, why spend a lot more energy to make it just a little bit better.

How about additional PvP modes? People have been posting ideas for completely distinct PvP modes and I think that they should be considered in addition to the current PvP mode.

Without any thought, the Devs could ripoff HearthStone's Arena mode and let people build temporary teams strictly from 3*/4* Token pulls with static character levels (like during BoP). You would pay a cheap buy-in (200 HP), build your team, and then play 10 matches against other people's teams at your leisure or until you retire. Total # of wins out of 10 matches would be the only metric for winning rewards. "Defensive" losses wouldn't count in any way. New PvP mode: done.

I loved Arena mode as a new HearthStone player because I got to play cards that I wouldn't unlock for months. I think a lot of newer players stuck in the 2* --> 3* transition would like a mode like this. People who love Balance of Power might also like this PvP mode.

The expected gain from the Arena mode is practically 0 when averaged over the whole population. There are sites that keep track of this stuff and it might even be negative, though players who are exceptionally good/lucky can come out ahead. You do get stuff beyond gold from Arena but that might not even be more than just grinding easy stuff not to mention there isn't an auxillary currency in MPQ.

At any rate to make this work I imagine you'd have to do something like pull 2 heroic 10 packs for the duration of the event and you get all heroes at their max level at 3/3/3 and you can apply any covers you got from those 2 10 packs. Your characters never heal for the duration of the event unless you lose. In that case all your characters are healed to full. All true healing ability is also disabled, otherwise whoever pulled 2 Patch yellow is just going to clean up. Your opponents are chosen blindly from teams constructed the same way but with a weight toward guys with similar number of wins, and you play until you have 3 losses. Collect statistics on the average number of wins in this scenario and make what you get for that many wins roughly equal to what you spent. I don't think you can make this a HP buy in because you'd be losing HP too quickly (you average a gold loss in Arena too but gain in arcane dust and other stuff), so I guess that leaves iso as the only other currency you can charge for a buy-in. You can even rotate the content of the heroic packs if you want to get people to try other characters.

Unknown

The design is never good in a P2w game . those paid get the advantage and keep the advantage forever . Once they disappointed and shout and the designer response to "them" but not you.

nimvin

Sontar wrote:

I think the point drop should be smoother and slightly increased:
13 matches to 325 points
9 matches to 514 points
5 matches to 604 points
7 matches to 709 points
20 matches to 1009 points
30 matches to 1309 points
A total of 84 matches (exactly two gauntlets worth)

Otherwise it sounds like a PvE gauntlet with a smoother difficulty curve and more matches. One problem I can see is a possiblity for abuse. It would require two players that stay within range of each other with a team that is strong on offense and weak on defense. They attack each other at roughly the same time, win both matches, stay together and have an easy ride to the top.

Almost any game design has a flaw that can be abused to make gains that aren't intended. Even as I wrote it I was thinking about that. I would probably prevent players from the same alliance being allowed in the same shard if thats programmable but the outside communication from mega-alliances will always trump that kind of thing. Plus the new shield design would also encourage spending while playing instead of spending so I don't have to play.

Unknown

The format is not a bad idea, it just has some problems. Another "soft" problem would be that the increments are the same for every player with a given score and many players end up with the same scores (losses are rare) since your score only differs when you loose. To fix this you could add/substract a single point for winning against someone above/below you which fills the gaps between scores.

I still think the other problem is pretty severe. You do not even need mega-alliances to find a "jump buddy", you can look on the forum. Preventing two players fighting back to back only means you need 4 players.