Reworking PVE at the core

Unknown

I think the most important question would be - how do you redesign the pve so there's no need to track a refresh rate

Make the mode into a true PVE where there are no leader boards - it's you vs the AI on your own time. Complete the quest/mission/etc to get the rewards. The reason the gauntlet is so much better even with the insane scaling in there is you can do it completely on your own time, you can calculate what you have to do to reach the rewards and you don't have to do the same freaking node 20 times for every node on a board.

You can throw out sharding and the immense problems they bring.

You could have a daily "gauntlet" if need be where you complete it at your own pace. You would get a ton more participation, enjoyment, and fewer cases of 'grinding burnout'

There's no excitement in having to do the same **** every 2.5 hours for 7 days. First time through - yes probably fun, beyond that it's not

If you want to stay afloat as a business model, you need to make sure people enjoy the game - that is unless you only want new people and don't want to deal with long time players lingering around.

Unknown

Seconded. The problem with PVE as it is is the grind. It gets boring, it gets tedious. Nobody ever describes PVE as fun, especially towards the end of an event.

The reason some of us like the Gauntlet so much - and I think some people don't completely get this - is that its only problem is challenge. The Gauntlet is hard. It's challenging. But overcoming that challenge is immensely rewarding, and once you've beat a tough node you can be done with it. Sure, you could fight it again if you want to - and I think it would benefit immensely from removing the 20 ISO from these nodes, giving you four runs for all four prizes, but that's a different issue - but you do what you want to get the prize you want.

This past one, I didn't even technically finish the whole thing - I skipped one of the essentials in the middle sub because I didn't need the She-Hulk cover - and that was fine. I did what I want, to get the prizes I wanted. I knew what I was going to have to do to get the whole thing done in time (and I figured out a pace I needed to keep up to finish Sunday and it worked fine), I didn't need to stay up late, I didn't need to fight any node more than about three times, and I was happy with how it turned out.

And as things stand now, I'm kind of dreading Prodigal Sun.

fmftint

Since I began playing its been my opinion that the ladder was one of the biggest flaws to PVE. PVE should not be a competitive event.

Hulk11

It's the best version of hell in one game. I managed to fight through the gamora deal, it sucked a lot but since I had the characters I went through it. I don't even remember my final rewards or placing at all. It was just a matter of playing through it. This one is going utter fail for me, I didn't expect the loki was needed. Maybe sentry will be, who knows. This will be rinse repeat as last one, with hella lower expectations than last time.

Unknown

LoreNYC wrote:

You could have a daily "gauntlet" if need be where you complete it at your own pace. You would get a ton more participation, enjoyment, and fewer cases of 'grinding burnout'

I agree with what you said, but this is never going to happen. If they had a huge team then sure, they could put different people in charge of designing the nodes, specifically how they interact with the boosted characters, balance them against limited rosters, balance them against maxed xforce, give the whole thing a theme, a story, and a progression of rewards that made sense both in the short and long run.

We like to think developing this game is easy, but if it was, there would be tons of games like it in the app store. I can't find even one other f2p game with recurring events that are clearly planned out ahead of time both in pvp and (kinda) pve, plus designing new heroes, balancing old ones, listening to the community and filtering through valid criticism and whining, fixing bugs, doling out rewards when they don't catch bugs fast enough, planning huge new features, etc.

These guys do a metric crapton of work. New Gauntlet every day would add a huge, huge amount of work.

Unknown

Yes, a daily gauntlet would be nice as well as more prologue-style missions.

Here are some additional suggestions:
- Short stories: Daily changing format with some pre/post fight character banter (spiderman on patrol, helping punisher take on some goons, help iron man test drive his armor and so on).
- like suggested in the other thread an infinite gauntlet: make it match seasons length and it is a nicely paced alternative to shield sim
- even mini games like in PQ1 and PQ2 would be nice
- a daily challenge: provide a node with a specific goal: "do not let any goon tiles go off", "make at least 3 match4s", "beat the enemy team by round 10"

Xeonic-Ice

I completely agree. I start out liking PVE events but quickly grow to hate them. I enjoy reading the story elements but spending 2+ hours a day just to keep up just plain sucks. I don't know if the developers have ever tried to place well in one of these events to fully grasp how tedious and time consuming it is. They might not want to steal rewards from other players but I truly feel that they need to try it for themselves. Analytics are great resources to help you tweak gameplay, but nothing beats knowing how it actually feels.

I would much prefer a daily challenge or even just a few times a week where they take one of these older events and just make it gauntlet style. They could make each one a 24 hour event where you need to complete every node from every sub within that time frame to earn a single cover of the featured character. That would be way more satisfying than going through each node about 15 times for several days, only to lose out at the last minute.

Unknown

ark123 wrote:

LoreNYC wrote:

You could have a daily "gauntlet" if need be where you complete it at your own pace. You would get a ton more participation, enjoyment, and fewer cases of 'grinding burnout'

I agree with what you said, but this is never going to happen. If they had a huge team then sure, they could put different people in charge of designing the nodes, specifically how they interact with the boosted characters, balance them against limited rosters, balance them against maxed xforce, give the whole thing a theme, a story, and a progression of rewards that made sense both in the short and long run.

We like to think developing this game is easy, but if it was, there would be tons of games like it in the app store. I can't find even one other f2p game with recurring events that are clearly planned out ahead of time both in pvp and (kinda) pve, plus designing new heroes, balancing old ones, listening to the community and filtering through valid criticism and whining, fixing bugs, doling out rewards when they don't catch bugs fast enough, planning huge new features, etc.

These guys do a metric crapton of work. New Gauntlet every day would add a huge, huge amount of work.

For a daily gauntlet they could literally just make 12 nodes with random characters and a 2000 iso prize at the end and if the "balance" ends up screwy who cares it's a one day event

Hulk11

Xeonic-Ice wrote:

I completely agree. I start out liking PVE events but quickly grow to hate them. I enjoy reading the story elements but spending 2+ hours a day just to keep up just plain sucks. I don't know if the developers have ever tried to place well in one of these events to fully grasp how tedious and time consuming it is. They might not want to steal rewards from other players but I truly feel that they need to try it for themselves. Analytics are great resources to help you tweak gameplay, but nothing beats knowing how it actually feels.

I would much prefer a daily challenge or even just a few times a week where they take one of these older events and just make it gauntlet style. They could make each one a 24 hour event where you need to complete every node from every sub within that time frame to earn a single cover of the featured character. That would be way more satisfying than going through each node about 15 times for several days, only to lose out at the last minute.

This way of releasing characters sorta makes sense, you just add new characters while uploading a new/old event. But the execution after that is plain horror film material.

Unknown

gamar wrote:

ark123 wrote:

LoreNYC wrote:

You could have a daily "gauntlet" if need be where you complete it at your own pace. You would get a ton more participation, enjoyment, and fewer cases of 'grinding burnout'

I agree with what you said, but this is never going to happen. If they had a huge team then sure, they could put different people in charge of designing the nodes, specifically how they interact with the boosted characters, balance them against limited rosters, balance them against maxed xforce, give the whole thing a theme, a story, and a progression of rewards that made sense both in the short and long run.

We like to think developing this game is easy, but if it was, there would be tons of games like it in the app store. I can't find even one other f2p game with recurring events that are clearly planned out ahead of time both in pvp and (kinda) pve, plus designing new heroes, balancing old ones, listening to the community and filtering through valid criticism and whining, fixing bugs, doling out rewards when they don't catch bugs fast enough, planning huge new features, etc.

These guys do a metric crapton of work. New Gauntlet every day would add a huge, huge amount of work.

For a daily gauntlet they could literally just make 12 nodes with random characters and a 2000 iso prize at the end and if the "balance" ends up screwy who cares it's a one day event

Here's who cares: Say the covers in that week were spiderman yellow, gamora green, daredevil purple, beast blue, patch yellow, thor yellow, BP black.

Now say randomly the penultimate nodes for the last three days include way scaled up OBW+Hood+Juggernaut or OBW+Hood+Ares.

Riots. Toads raining from the sky. D3 headquarters gets set on fire. Dogs and cats living together.

babinro

I'll repost my PvE rework thoughts here since it makes more sense in this thread....

The Guantlet shows us that having no required refresh rate is ideal for players.
Why not simply increase the mob levels with every victory and reward points accordingly?

Example:
Simple Starting Node - Every victory is 100 points.
- First battle is level 50 goons, 2nd battle is level 100 goons, level 150, ect forever

Moderate Difficulty Starting Node - Every victory is 200 points.
- First battle is level 100 goons, 2nd battle is level 150 goons, level 200, ect forever

Hard Difficulty Starting Node - Every victory is 300 points.
- First battle is level 150 goons, 2nd battle is level 200 goons, level 250, ect forever

Every victory gives out a guaranteed reward...none of this 20 ISO stuff. Easy nods could be mostly 1* tier covers and simple boosts. Moderate could be those ** tier covers and standard tokens. Hard could be ** tier covers with 250 ISO and 500 ISO rewards.

Note: These are just example levels and they could still scale based on roster so new players have a chance. The levels I provided here would be appropriate for end gamers like myself. So a new player may see something like level 5, 10, 15, rather than 50, 100, 150.

This system would allow for various ways to deliver the overall PvE rewards. Rewards could progression based like with The Gauntlet. They could be bracketed as before. They could also percentile based where the top 5% of scorers win _____, top 15% win _____. I'm not sure which system would be best for both players and D3 but it's certainly flexible.

FaustianDeal

I like the 'daily' idea, but is there a way to still have an alliance reward in that world? Seems you would want to have a "top 80% of scorers" kind of arrangement, because requiring everyone to play every day is a good way to use people up and lose players.

Having a "daily challenge" with some kind of "weekly reward" would also be cute.

I would like to see the event have a slightly more reasonable scaling to it and differentiate through some means other than just making it insanely hard (either through consecutive days played, or through hitting a set percentage of the gauntlets within a longer period).

Unknown

The underlying problem really is: There isn't much to do in MPQ. Why would the devs want to expose that?

Grind, grind, grind.

Unknown

the daily idea was more along the lines of ' you don't have to play 5 of 7 days knowing you can't win anything because you can't be on 2 days but don't want to screw your alliance either.

Having a few more non-alliance events mixed in would help the grindy nature

but many people would rather face 395 enemies once than lvl 195 enemies 20 times

Carnage_78

Like it was said in the original post, removing the PvP aspect (placement against other players) out of the PvE is the way to fix it I think.

I like PvE...it's a fun way to get some covers without direct competition...your progress is yours alone...that is...up until I need to keep on grinding for days after I get the last progression reward just to keep my current position in the rankings & hope for a few more covers...which might slip away from me at the last minute because I was unable to play the last few hours of the event/subs (which is less often now that we choose our own ending time...but still...a week from now who knows if I am going to be busy or not the night I chose to finish it?) with the rubber banding working against all my hard earned week's work.

Very frustrating...and a lot of effort & time for low-ish rewards...but without the placement then it becomes a true PvE where it is the player against the environment...each player trying to manage it's own grind against the event/subs clock to get what they want to get as rewards at their own pace.

Plain & simple...no more crazy race against each other...just enjoying the game for ourselves in a space without player vs player competition!

EDIT: The other thing is that PvE was the place for teams to grow their roster...well...with the level of competition in PvE nowadays due to PvE being used as new releases introduction then that is taken away from them as well as a side effect...

Unknown

Carnage_78 wrote:

EDIT: The other thing is that PvE was the place for teams to grow their roster...well...with the level of competition in PvE nowadays due to PvE being used as new releases introduction then that is taken away from them as well as a side effect...

Devs...do you see this!? When will this 2-3 transition be addressed.

Not only do they give out **** rewards, the only chars us noobs can build are these lame new chars. We are trying to catch up. Quit making us go after these new chars and give us a shot at the actually good 3*.

Why am I grinding for a 4* I will never cover or have iso for!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!??!?!? And even if I did, I couldn't because with a **** roster, having one 4* leveled would scale me out of everything. Give us a chance ffs.

Unknown

I've no real problem with the core structure as it stands and I'm sure the devs wont change it as mobile games make there money on compulsion and habit - don't give us a chance to stop or we might not come back. My problem is that I like to sleep, so I cant compete for top places as people on the far end of the spectrum will set their alarm every 3 hours to wake up and hit. I would like to see some sort of pve shield, maybe something which when purchased gives you the average points of the 25 people above and below you at the time of using. This way you wont be able just to shield to win, but it will mean that you'll have a chance of keeping closer to the top grumpy blurry eyed players.

simonsez

Just so the devs don't get the idea everyone feels this way, please, don't....

I'm not saying a 7 day grind is fun, but neither is a lv395 gauntlet node, at least not for me. But at least a long grind doesn't make me want to start flipping tables and throw my phone against the wall. How about a compromise? Leave PvE alone, and make the gauntlet it's own gameplay mode. You do your thing, and I'll do mine.

Unknown

I really like all these ideas. It does need to follow the format where there is a list of things to obtain and you can obtain them on your own time (within the events time of course)

One other thing about pve that puzzles me, when I am up high in a pvp event i dont get attacked much if i have the right team in.

But if I play pve and use weaker characters I get attacked immediately.

Why on earth is who you choose in pve linked to who your team is in pvp?

It makes me not play pve for fear of being attacked and losing pvp points.

Dayv

I've said for months that competitive PvE is probably a bad idea at its core. You're not playing the game to compete, you're a hamster running in the meta-gaming wheel trying to figure out the arbitrary rules of scoring in the game mode.

But I do it anyway, because I am a silly monkey.

Dayv

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Lightning PvE.

Don't put it on a fixed schedule, just roll out a time-limited PvE challenge without notice every so often, with chances at good items based on progression rewards and the 1-in-4 node prizes. Some of the rewards are based on decisions (imagine a branching PvE where choosing one path locks out the other, and the nodes have different rewards at the end of each path), some on scoring well (perhaps a few times per node for the highest rewards) and some are lucky drops from nodes only playable once.