Fixing Thick As Thieves Design Flaws

NorthernPolarity

Wrote this post in the event thread itself, but realized it probably belongs in the suggestion section. The current event structure requires a particular play style that just isn't intuitive, and is very punishing to players that don't follow this playstyle.

For reference, here is the optimal way to play this event:
1. Join a subbracket at an 8 hour interval from the end of the event.
2. Play the first mission to unlock all of the missions, and then grind the hardest missions first since their levels haven't scaled yet.
3. Grind each mission exactly twice (and no more since that raises the levels of the enemies).

This just seems really silly to me. Players are punished for tons of arbitrary reasons because of the systems in place, such as:
1. Playing a mission more than twice, which increases the levels of all the mobs (making everything harder) and only nets you 1 point.
2. Grinding a single subbracket heavily, which makes all subsequent subbrackets harder. This is also unfair to the grinders, since people who join later can rubberband to the top and have a much easier time than the people who have to play vs 230 mobs from the start of the 2nd subevent.
3. Doing the easiest missions first, which makes subsequent missions harder. This applies especially to newbies, since the last mission would be feasible if they did it right after the first mission since the enemies are level 70s, but could be impossible to do due to level scaling if they went up to 150+. This is incredibly silly because it punishes people for playing missions in the order that they were presented.

I think there are some improvements that can be made on this system:
1. Enemy levels reset each subbracket. This makes it so that grinders can still earn iso (i now have to boost every single mission, which really cuts into my iso generation anf feels unfair), and is fairer to the rubberbanders.
2. Playing a mission only increases the levels of the mobs for that particular mission. This eliminates the problem of having an optimal order to do the events in, while preserving the intended effect of having pve be competitive for the high-end players.
3. Don't increase mob levels when the mission is only worth a single point. Punishing players for playing a mission when the mission doesn't give any meaningful amount of points seems silly.

The event would probably be a lot less frustrating if the current system was changed to something more like this, since as is, people are just heavily punished for not playing optimally, which is hard to figure out for people that don't read the forums. I think that the devs were on the right track with this system, but it needs to be tweaked so that it's less frustrating for the players.

Unknown

I'd say they need to either make missions give less points when repeated or make the harder. Doing both is seriously killing the amount of fun I'm having.

Unknown

Yeah, while the general idea of mob scaling is great, the particular application here lacks tuning for sure.

As the optimal approach is indeed what is written above -- and it's not really hard to figure out either -- but normally you realize it only as you get to part IX that far doing them is number sequence. As that should be the natural thing in the first place story-wise, isn't it?

While I'm not sure how to fix the family map, I'd design some next map to follow intuition: say you attack a castle, the initial missions are on the perimeter. You can start anywhere outside, but inside is blocked until you breach somewhere. As you attack, the current post falls, and anything near it by topology gets reinforced. And some of the inside gets accessible. While other points far from here go down in strength (as troops are reassigned). But if you attack a different perimeter point instead of following your initial breach, the fallen post may gets populated again. I hope the idea gets through without drawing.

During play I saw twice that levels on the last mission dropped somewhat, not sure it's bug or feature, but it could be -- weakening a position by winning some locations. Leaving some hints in the story so those who pay attention can figure out the optimal approach.

Nemek

While I did fairly well in the first sub-event, I'd agree that this hasn't been the most fun of the episodes thus far. I enjoy a good challenge, but facing lvl 230 opponents constantly for a couple of points and a small chance at making back the ISO from boosts is pretty rough.

I'd vote for level resets at the beginning of each sub-event. I'm not terribly sure what the reasoning for not resetting them is...I suspect it's a reaction to what happened in the last Hunt with the same high-level players winning almost all of the sub-events (though I'm not sure if they really had much time to make any changes in a week.) I don't see it benefiting either the high or low-level players, though, as stated by many others. The only thing I can see is that they were concerned about the amount of ISO being given in these events, so wanted to curb that a bit.

Not a big fan.

Unknown

The big problem with level scaling missions, apart from locking people out of progression, is that the increased difficulty does not come with any increased rewards. If you are going to make things tougher for me it had better be worth the additional risk to my health packs.