Suggestion: Selectable Difficulty for PvE Events

Dayv

What if a PvE event, instead of trying to be "one size fits all" with rubberbanding and other mechanics trying to level the playing field, had a selectable difficulty on entry? Leaderboards and brackets would be separate, and the levels and power sets of enemies would vary appropriately?

The key that would make this work is that rewards would increase with the difficulty setting.

Select "Beginner" and be more likely to be rewarded with standard tokens, boosts and 2* covers.

"Intermediate" sees a greater proportion of heroic tokens, small hero point payouts, and a couple more 3* covers.

And "Expert" sees large ISO caches, a better chance of a 4* cover, and extra challenges such as more required characters and possibly even disallowing the use of boosts at all. There could even be special challenges like having one character from the player's roster randomly selected and revealed only after the fight begins, or having only one or two character slots instead of three. There's a lot of room to experiment here.

Players could select any challenge level they want, but they would be steered to one appropriate to their roster, similar to how the "Trivial" to "Impossible" ratings on battles seem to be calculated.

Once you select a difficulty level, you're locked in 'til the end of the event.

Thoughts?

Dayv

Of course if the event is introducing a new character, that character would still be in the reward mix at all difficulty levels, though not necessarily in equal proportions.

Unknown

Not a bad idea although I don't like the idea of being locked in. If it is too hard then you are screwed.

Of course it is too hard for me to play the current Maggia and I am screwed there too so I have only played the PVP

Not sure whether they just catered to higher level rosters which is fine or what happened. Usually I can compete in the PVE style tourneys as well as the PVP this was the first that left me in the cold.

Dayv

justaplayer wrote:

Not a bad idea although I don't like the idea of being locked in. If it is too hard then you are screwed

People shouldn't be able to earn progress at one skill level (completed missions, rewards, whatever) and then switch levels and continue the event. It would open it up to a ton of abuse, I think. Even if it reset their leaderboard there might be weird edge cases where it turns into an unexpected and abused meta strategy.

Unknown

DayvBang wrote:

justaplayer wrote:

Not a bad idea although I don't like the idea of being locked in. If it is too hard then you are screwed

People shouldn't be able to earn progress at one skill level (completed missions, rewards, whatever) and then switch levels and continue the event. It would open it up to a ton of abuse, I think. Even if it reset their leaderboard there might be weird edge cases where it turns into an unexpected and abused meta strategy.

All you do is downgrade the rewards to the lower level you compete at. If I go halfway through at hard and then switch to beginner why should anyone care if I am only getting rewards for beginner. I fought a harder fight than someone only fighting beginner.

Dayv

justaplayer wrote:

DayvBang wrote:

justaplayer wrote:

Not a bad idea although I don't like the idea of being locked in. If it is too hard then you are screwed

People shouldn't be able to earn progress at one skill level (completed missions, rewards, whatever) and then switch levels and continue the event. It would open it up to a ton of abuse, I think. Even if it reset their leaderboard there might be weird edge cases where it turns into an unexpected and abused meta strategy.

All you do is downgrade the rewards to the lower level you compete at. If I go halfway through at hard and then switch to beginner why should anyone care if I am only getting rewards for beginner. I fought a harder fight than someone only fighting beginner.

I wasn't just thinking of different placement rewards, but different rewards per mission and different progression rewards as well. Basically, you get your pick of three versions of the same event:

Padded nerf bat to the shoulder for newbies.

Hollow bamboo stick to the face with time to react for seasoned players.

Spiked mace to the nether regions for the hardcore OCD metagamers.

The harder your fight, the better your rewards throughout the event, not just in the final reckoning.

Unknown

DayvBang wrote:

justaplayer wrote:

DayvBang wrote:

justaplayer wrote:

Not a bad idea although I don't like the idea of being locked in. If it is too hard then you are screwed

People shouldn't be able to earn progress at one skill level (completed missions, rewards, whatever) and then switch levels and continue the event. It would open it up to a ton of abuse, I think. Even if it reset their leaderboard there might be weird edge cases where it turns into an unexpected and abused meta strategy.

All you do is downgrade the rewards to the lower level you compete at. If I go halfway through at hard and then switch to beginner why should anyone care if I am only getting rewards for beginner. I fought a harder fight than someone only fighting beginner.

I wasn't just thinking of different placement rewards, but different rewards per mission and different progression rewards as well. Basically, you get your pick of three versions of the same event:

Padded nerf bat to the shoulder for newbies.

Hollow bamboo stick to the face with time to react for seasoned players.

Spiked mace to the nether regions for the hardcore OCD metagamers.

The harder your fight, the better your rewards throughout the event, not just in the final reckoning.

I was referring to all rewards being downgraded to the lower levels. In reality though anything you win should be at the level of difficulty you were on when you win it and the final reward scaled down to the lowest level you competed on. This would make it where you try to go higher but if you can't hack it it isn't a total loss assuming you win on some level.

Dayv

justaplayer wrote:

I was referring to all rewards being downgraded to the lower levels. In reality though anything you win should be at the level of difficulty you were on when you win it and the final reward scaled down to the lowest level you competed on. This would make it where you try to go higher but if you can't hack it it isn't a total loss assuming you win on some level.

You have a good point; it could probably be made to work either way.

I just think the need a better solution than all these broken attempts to level the playing field on PvE events. My core idea is to have more playing fields, and not just based on who joined the event the same time as you.

Look at PvP events. Nobody expects a newbie who joined this week to have a chance at number 1, but they're constantly hacking PvE to try to make team experience and roster less meaningful to placement than scoring puzzle metagames.

Unknown

You know , this is one of the posts that actually seems like a good idea. I back this up 100%

If you want to downgrade to a lower tiered difficulty then perhaps adding a penalty? that removes it over time , say if you want to ninja a place at the end, being on hard downgrading to normal to get a higher spot with maybe better rewards , you would get a certain point penalty. However if you do so earlier you would start to regain those points as you really thought that Hard was too......hard and that you think normal is where you fit at , you lose nothing at the end and still get to play at the difficulty you are more comfortable with.

This would also add something to look forward too. As you start out you can only go on easy since you don't have high leveled enough heroes, but you see that when you do level up , you can switch over to the next phase. You would get people to have something to look forward too which is always a good thing.

Unknown

Good idea.

Dayv

If switching difficulty were to be allowed but they really wanted to prevent abuse, they could invalidate you for placement rewards when you change brackets.

Unknown

Great idea if you can switch difficulties. If you move to a higher difficulty you lose a certain percent of your points, whereas if you go down you gain points.

Unknown

Typhon13 wrote:

Great idea if you can switch difficulties. If you move to a higher difficulty you lose a certain percent of your points, whereas if you go down you gain points.

Not sure why you would lose points for trying a more difficult fight. I was suggesting the opposite. If the points are tied to the mission and the end result it cant be abused. The missions will give you the true result of your effort the end result will penalize you for starting or going lower during the match. Unless of course you were only referring to the end which wasn't clear

Unknown

The way I pictured it was three completely separate events, easy medium and hard. eachone gives the same number of points per battle, just different rewards. If you move from easy to med or med to hard during the middle of the event, you lose some points initially because you could have began the game yesterday, got a few points in easy, and just jumped to hard at the last second for better rewards. If you go down, you should receive points initially because while you were punching above your weight other guys were cruising below you, so you are rewarded for taking the chance.

Unknown

Typhon13 wrote:

The way I pictured it was three completely separate events, easy medium and hard. eachone gives the same number of points per battle, just different rewards. If you move from easy to med or med to hard during the middle of the event, you lose some points initially because you could have began the game yesterday, got a few points in easy, and just jumped to hard at the last second for better rewards. If you go down, you should receive points initially because while you were punching above your weight other guys were cruising below you, so you are rewarded for taking the chance.

Right but if you started on easy and got points based on easy you shouldn't be penalized for trying something more difficult you didn't gain anything at least at the mission level. Now at the Overall level that is different the reward should be based on the lowest mission level played at to avoid exploits. This would be much fairer to the player and encourage them to try a harder mission.

Unknown

Or get a combo. Like if you got 12000 points, 10000 points on easy and 2000 on med you get the rewards based in what rank the 10000 would put you in on easy and the rank the 2000 would put you in on med.

Unknown

Typhon13 wrote:

I get what you're saying, just think people would take advantage of it at the last second, moving up to get rewards they didn't earn.

They can't take advantage of it. How would that happen? The missions you get are at the level you compete. If you don't stay in a category you get rated at the lowest. No way to get over on that that I can see. You jump in at the last second you still get what you play at and you are still rated at the lowest level you competed at overall.

Unknown

I read you're post wrong originally when I said that sorry

Unknown

Typhon13 wrote:

I read you're post wrong originally when I said that sorry

No worries man I figured you had overlooked something

Dayv

I think the continued TinyKitty on Heroic Oscorp right after Thick as Thieves is showing that a completely new model for competitive PvE is needed. I hope they consider my suggestion.

NorthernPolarity

This is a good idea in theory, but would take too much work for them to implement in practice I think. The thing about games like this are that all the changes are incremental: adding all of this and testing it would probably be a nightmare for the devs to deal with, as they would have to have 3 separate reward systems, add a new interface to select these difficulties, etc.