Unable to play whenever you want without being suboptimal

NorthernPolarity

So I was looking to play some mpq this morning (and specifically progress by meaningfully grinding iso) but realized that it didnt make sense to if i wanted to do well in the events. Does anyone else feel like you cant actually play the game whenever you want while still actually gaining something in the process? (Placement rewards in particular). Here are the current things i can do in game, and why i thought that it didnt make sense to do them this morning.

1. The hunt: With events such as the hunt, if you want a good chance at the top of your bracket, the most efficient way to place is to do nothing until 10 hours before the end of the event, grind to first off of rubberbanding, and then grind again as much as possible an hour before the event ends. Since you can only get mission rewards once per event and rubberbanding effectively obsoleting any grinding you do otherwise, playing the events now feels largely like a waste of time.

2. Ares tournament - this would provide me with an endless stream of opponents to grind for, but any progress i make with my score is entirely wasted since im just going to get attacked and lose all of my points. Furthermore, grinding opponents now boosts my mmr and makes fights harder later on, which negatively affects my tournament placements. It doesnt feel good to immediately health pack after each fight either. Shields dont really mitigate this because why would you spend 400hp sieelding for a day when you could just grind those points 8 hours before the end and save a shield.

3. PvE campaign - already collected most of the rewards, nothing exists to bring me back.

4. Shield training - progression is completely broken and it is impossible to obtain the top tier rewards. Once youve gotten the top tier awards, there isnt any incentive to play this mode outside of grinding iso, which isnt sustainable once your mmr reaches a certain level.

All in all, it seems like there is an inherit flaw with the way the reward systems of this game is structured, at least for me. After all, not giving the player incentive to be playing at any arbitrary time in the day seems like a weird thing to do. Maybe im being way too hardcore about this and shouldnt care about being most time efficient when i play, but i want to at least feel like im progressing towards something whenever i play without feeling like my efforts were in vain.

I would like to see some changes that allow the player to feel like they are actually accomplishing something, regardless of when theyre playing. I guess the general idea of my suggestions/ideas is to allow the player to meaningfully work towards something even at the early stages of the tournament, as opposed to the current optimal time-efficient strategy of waiting until the end of the tournament. These obviously werent meant to all be added, but i think having some of these would be a nice addition to mitigate the problems ive been having:

1. Checkpoint rewards for pvp. Give smaller placement awards based on the current rankings every X interval (say half a day or something). This doesnt necessarily have to be tiered, and can be something relatively small such as 500 iso to the top 100.

2. Timed iso refreshes for pve events such as the hunt. You know that mission completed bonus of 100' iso you get upon first completing a mission? Have that refresh every 6 hours to incentivize players to play regularly.

3. Reset shield training every once in a while. The current implementation is a joke: i feel like this was designed to ease newer players into pvp with the thor/wolvie rewards, but it seems silly given that any reward 1.6k+ is completely unreachable for most people. Id like to see a version that resets weekly/biweekly, but has no placement awards and only has progression awards of iso/recruit tokens (and maybe heroic tokens as the top prize). This would have definitely given me something to do for times like today: the rewards arent large enough to really affect the rate at which people are getting 3* covers, but is still something nice to work towards, and the heroic token would help newer players as well.

Unknown

How about permanent lightning rounds that give out ISO and standard tokens as prizes? Could do heroic token for top 2. Wouldn't even need to boost any characters.

I agree with the rest and would like to add optimal times to start tournaments. In the recent tournaments I haven't seen these crazy 1500+ scores in my brackets but it means I can't play an event until a certain time even though I would like to.

In the hunt you can start some matches early because rubber banding tops out at 10X. I usually play early until points start to drop from the max and save the rest for later.

Unknown

Yep, that was the problem I noticed several weeks ago (few weeks in play). The play was feasible only at certain few timepoints, the rest is waste.

The initial introduction of shields were addressing a part of this problem and made tournaments actually playable, also extending the playable time big deal.

It could be done better by making the shields cheaper an/or repeatable. I even posted suggestions along those lines. With some tuning it would be possible to make good use of all the tournament runtime, while use up some HP but not too much for people who are serious about prizes to count.

Now yesterday we got a U-turn back: shield prices got up instead of lowering and the already ridiculous point losses extended in amount and spread. Like someone crapped on the ventilator.

Best current option seems to reduce the timeplay to the remaining sensible time points: nonce. Except for farming -- but what is the point to farm anything if you will not go to play with it?

NorthernPolarity

Iron Batman wrote:

How about permanent lightning rounds that give out ISO and standard tokens as prizes? Could do heroic token for top 2. Wouldn't even need to boost any characters.

I agree with the rest and would like to add optimal times to start tournaments. In the recent tournaments I haven't seen these crazy 1500+ scores in my brackets but it means I can't play an event until a certain time even though I would like to.

In the hunt you can start some matches early because rubber banding tops out at 10X. I usually play early until points start to drop from the max and save the rest for later.

Permanent lightning rounds is a good idea too, although i dont know if the devs want to take away from the uniqueness of existing lrs. Yeah, ive noticed that alaska in particular typically caps out, but the other 2 dont seem to until the last day.

Unknown

Fully agree. Once you've played the game for a bit, a pattern emerges and it's worthless to play outside of it.

Quite boring really.

Unknown

The way you should play this game if you want to gain something is kind of mechanical.
I entirely agree with you and the only thing i want from a game is to be enjoyed only when i want to.

It's pretty sad the game decides when we should play it, and not the opposite way...

Unknown

Short and sweet: This is why they should release the Heroic versions of PvE chapters that refresh on a timed basis.

Slightly longer reply: They need to definitely make some addition to basic PvE and not make it strictly tutorial land and have them refresh, whether that is weekly, bi weekly, or monthly. You can still play to your hearts content, getting first completion bonuses, and grinding out rewards against foes that are reasonably challenging, and it won't affect your enjoyment by scaling your mmr, or have you compete against others for a top prize.

Purty_Hawkeye

I keep saying this but when there isn't something rewarding in the current slate of events I spend time in the last chapter of the prologue trying out new combinations of characters. I have found this to be particularly rewarding as the meta-game is currently under considerable change. Because I have tried many different combinations I am ready to go as soon as things change. Over the past few days I have been experimenting with the new IW and now this morning I added Patch who I won last night. I can do this anytime I feel like playing and this is something very worthwhile especially with all the changes coming knowing how different characters work or don't work with each other I believe is very valuable. so while I may not be making much in iso i am learning things and considering my results of the last week across every event I believe it paid off handsomely. I am completely ready for any kind of IW event now with what I think will be a unique strategy that turns her new abilities into complete game changers. Maybe others have already figured it out but it hasn't yet been mentioned on these forums. I am now pouring iso into IW and the two support characters because once they reach optimal level i think this will be a top tier team. All of that has come from playtesting in the prologue whenever I feel like playing.

NorthernPolarity

Skyedyne wrote:

Short and sweet: This is why they should release the Heroic versions of PvE chapters that refresh on a timed basis.

Slightly longer reply: They need to definitely make some addition to basic PvE and not make it strictly tutorial land and have them refresh, whether that is weekly, bi weekly, or monthly. You can still play to your hearts content, getting first completion bonuses, and grinding out rewards against foes that are reasonably challenging, and it won't affect your enjoyment by scaling your mmr, or have you compete against others for a top prize.

Something like this seems extremely easy to do code wise and solve the problem that we're facing. Maybe throw in a token or 50hp as the prize for beating the last mission as well.

Unknown

The current pattern "works" for me since I play on the bus on the way to work and after dinner at home. But it's really annoying that I can't play outside of those times. It also means I either don't get to sleep in on the weekends or I have to give up on PvE event rewards.