A Discourse on...Design Elements...

Unknown

As a software developer, I rarely care enough myself to go into other software developer's forums and rant and rave about their poor design choices. God knows I have probably made my share as well.

But sometimes, when a software company's path becomes so egregious and embarrassing that one of my interns could have provided better project oversight, I cannot help myself. And in this case....well, I cannot help myself.

Fellas. Fellow software developers. My friends. You have fallen into the most common trap in all of software development. I like to call it the "Silver Bullet Trap", which I use to describe any case in which a dev team attempts to apply a score of micro-fixes to problems which are clearly macro in nature. Allow me to provide you an example.

You have recently changed your event scoring mechanics such that the level of each opponent increases the more a particular mission is played. There are a number of reasons why this decision was likely made, ranging from previously abused scoring mechanics to needing a means for skill to play a larger role in one's overall rank. The problem here is that you will obviously alienate your casual players who don't stand a chance against a trio of 230's.

Guys. Stop thinking at a micro level... It is not the event mechanics that need fine-tuning, it is the events themselves. Your problem is that your only source of new content comes in the form of these rankings-focused events. So when you go to tweak them to make each event more equitable, it is going to affect your casual players. I may be a project manager but this is a common sense situation with a common sense fix. Not all your new events need to be competitive. Scale the non-ranked events to a few levels above the player, throw in some mediocre new covers as rewards, and ta-da you are done.

I am going to end this rant here as I think the point has been made. Guys... this is a great product and a fun game but it falls short in some pretty senseless ways. Rethink some of the problems you guys have been re-addressing a thousand times and look at them from a higher perspective. I promise you that doing so will be worth your while.

Pentagoon

<claps>
I'd like to add that the balancing changes have made a direct impact on my ability to compete at the upper levels of PvE events (not specifically a Ragnarok rant). While your intent of having more character variety may nudge your player base in the direction you want on PvP, you've teetered over the edge into an abyss where I can't complete the full suite of missions anymore - VERY discouraging.

--Pentagoon

Unknown

I don't think the criticism in this post goes too far: I don't think it goes too far enough.

I've been playing this game for several hours a week since I downloaded it to my phone. In other words, I think I'm well past the "casual player" label. That said, the difficulty increase and scoring model in the new PvE has essentially locked me out of the entire event. In past PvE events grinding away in low-point battles was a legitimate way to increase your score, but in this iteration I ruined my experience by grinding. I played so many one-point battles that now even the first mission in a new sub-event is too difficult. Unless the difficulty level is reset, I can't play the event anymore.

I'm incredibly frustrated about a lot of things: I'm going to miss out on the event rewards, I won't be picking up the new Daredevil, and I'm pretty much going to have to stop playing. But the most frustrating part of all of that is I had no idea that the battle choices I made would have this impact. Good player feedback is a staple of game design, but the scoring system in Thick as Thieves didn't provide any. At all! I mean, there's that "Event Rules" tab in the scoring system and it doesn't provide any input on how scoring and difficulty work with each other. That wouldn't be such a bad thing if it was consistent with past events or if I could figure it out through trial and error -- but if the error part of that equation is prohibitive, that's a really poor way to educate players.

I'm absolutely incensed that the higher levels apply to ALL of the sub-events, not just each one individually. That is an incredibly indefensible solution, because that's not a scoring problem, that's a player participation problem. This is the first FTP game I've put any amount of money in, and I'm at about $20 so far, but you absolutely DO NOT want FTP players to get locked out. If you can't keep me coming back, you can't depend on my revenue. That's completely unacceptable. To be clear, I'm not making one of those empty "I'm never playing again" threats. I'm just saying, if I stop playing a few hours a day, then I won't be coming back as often, and I guarantee there is at least one player out there who will quit the game entirely over this.

Something else I want to make clear: I think the increased difficulty levels in the events is a fantastic idea. It's the execution that is incompetent. If I knew that for a single event point I would increase the difficulty level of all of the sub-event levels significantly, I wouldn't have done it. The players who could afford the additional challenge would, and their score would be higher, and that's fair.

TLDR version:
* Provide players with feedback about how scoring and difficulty impact each other so they can make the right decisions on each battle.
* Reset difficulty levels at each sub-event so that players don't lock themselves out of further participation.
* Figure out how players should be rewarded: for playing battles more frequently? For fighting over a longer period of time? Make that decision, communicate it, and then your players will have a fair experience.

Dragon_Nexus

Well the opening post was kind of pretentious (Spend half your post on a meandering tirade with some suggestion that you're desending from on high to offer your highly prised advice) but whatever. The point that was being made is sound at least.

Like the above post said, I did the same thing on the first sub event, grinding away at single points trying to stay at number 1. (For some reason I was at number one when the event closed but eded up getting the top 5 prize. Whatevs).

Then...I opened the next event and enemies were *still* at a higher level. Not too bad, around level 80ish, I managed it. I played the missions in order, assuming the levels only went up if you replayed the same level over and over. got to the last area and...two missions were taken up with a team of three 230s.
I've since learned that you can reduce this level by repeat retreats. 5 retreats will lower the level stack.
Is that really how you want this design to work? Those with a large roster throwing their weak supers under the bus to lower the levels and grind a few event points before waiting an hour or so and doing it again? Because that's what I've ended up doing in order to get *anything*. Killed off all of my characters except the 5 I rotate through in order to drop the enemy levels down to something I can actually attack.

As said in the opening post, simply having the enemies being a percentage level above or below yours to convey difficulty would have been fine enough. Still a challenge while not shutting out the newbies or the people at low levels.
How are new players meant to drop the level of the enemies, exactly? I thought the stacks would reach a planteux somehow, but they keep going up with every win. That very quickly becomes unbeatable.

Unknown

Some good points here. Raising the difficulty level has made it prohibitive to do the missions without yielding...how does that make any kind of sense? Did someone think it would be fun? Which is of course why we're playing in the first place.

Im all or having harder missions to separate the wheat from the chaff so to speak but how about doing it in a way thats fun?

Mindboggling...

Unknown

A tangential concern: If the story is important, it needs to be available to everyone.

That's a big "if", I concede, but when you're banking on the Marvel IP, and big events seem to have a storyline, having a system that rewards progress with punishment and exclusion isn't Good Design.

Unknown

I think there's an even bigger overall problem with the design - lack of transparency.

We still don't really know how matchmaking works. We still don't really know how MMR works and why MMR hell happens. We still don't really know what tanking does or doesn't do. Changes get made, numbers get futzed, algorithms get rewritten...and we have no idea what is going on.

Even things which are accepted as common knowledge here (the way PvE sub mission reset every 8 hours, rubber banding, etc.) are completely obscured from anyone who isn't on this forum. All of sudden the difficulty of missions goes up to the point where it's impenetrable...but oh, if you happen to retreat 5 times you can lower the difficulty?

This means that, in order to compete in any meaningful way, I have to have "secret knowledge." Instead of rewarding players for skill (ideal), money (I get it, it's a business) or time, they are rewarded for coming on the forum and finding out the best way to abuse obscure idiosyncrasies and penalized pretty heavily for not doing so.

Hiding all the numbers behind a shroud of mystery doesn't build intrigue or interest; it tells the player base that the design isn't robust enough to withstand scrutiny. It basically says, "We know there are ways to abuse this system, but instead of fixing it, we're just going to hide it and hope only a small minority of players discover it."

Unknown

Yeah, this new mission change is BRUTALLY unfun. It makes no sense for enemies to scale from lvl 45-212 in the SAME event, when my characters don't magically progress from lvl 30 to 140 over the same span of time. It is *embarrassingly* poor level design. Whoever greenlighted this idea of decoupling risk from reward needs to take a step back and go play some good videogames for a while to recharge and regain their senses. It's not even pay-to-win because players aren't facing an incremental challenge that can be addressed through some additional resource: they are facing a gating challenge that they have no obvious means of overcoming regardless of tactics or expenditure. I can only assume that you're done even trying to attract new players, or graduate beginners to intermediate players, or intermediate players to advanced players, and only catering to the crowd that already has their leveled 3*** toons because these events are not otherwise remotely approachable.