Discussion of losses and impact on player engagement

ClydeFrog76

Tanis, you've got it backwards. Dark Souls 2 has unfair difficulty, Dark Souls 1 is fine.

And Bloodborne is the most perfect of them all.

Unknown

People play the game despite health packs, not because of them. Anyway, I don't know how much more I'll be playing. Barely played last season at all (by which I mean I didn't even place the couple times I actually tried). First PvP I entered this season - boom: death bracket. Really starting to think about one of those rage quit videos where I delete my whole roster, though less for rage reasons, and more so I'm not tempted to ever come back. It's the same **** that made me quit a year ago, and they still rely on this awful competitive system that a minority of their player-base actually enjoys.

atomzed

Thanks for all the responses. Kinda happy to see different view points as (constructive) discussions are what makes forums worth visiting.

As I am on mobile, it is difficult to do quotes, so I will just gives my two cents responses without quoting anyone.

1) Someone mentioned that failure is not essential for game enjoyment. And that variety is essential. I do agree... You can have a game that you win everytime, but as long as you are challenged each game, you will enjoy the game. Similarly, I can lose a game many many times but if I enjoy the process, that's good enough for me.

What I am suggesting is that failure is part of the way to generate content(as stated by the article). Failure forces the player to reexamine their strategy, their options etc. Such cerebral process keeps the player engaged. This is why games ought to be balanced enough to have different play styles and strategies.

Unfortunately in MPQ, the obvious goal is to "win the node". That's it. While I argue that there are many secondary goals (like conservation of health, play as many nodes as possible, play as many nodes as fast as possible, strategic usage of health packs), these secondary goals are not immediately obvious.

I think MPQ should nudge the player away from the primary goal, and structure the games such that the secondary goals are made explicit.

Examples I can think of include:-
1) Achievements. This should include status like exiting the game with full health, winning the game with 10 protect tiles on board, winning the games with match damage only, using all female team, etc etc.... Achievements is a cheap way of leading people to play the game in different way. Mpq can tie the achievements to another type of progression reward, say 10 achievements unlock a roster slot/ gives you a cover of choice.

2) Track statistics. Give people the ability to know their in game stats. Like how many capt shields they have launched, how many CTS thor has summon, how many health groot has healed.... These allows the players to set their own challenges. It will be fun if there is a global board for such kind of stats. Maybe limit it to the avengers first then slowly expand it out.

Regarding about comments about health packs being a bane for the game, I am neutral about it. I think health packs are better than energy system, but I also know that running out of health packs are also irritating.

The thing is that with or without health packs, there must be a way to make losses count for something. If every loss is treated by the player as nothing, and he just restart again, there is little imperative for him to try something new.

Someone brought up about timmy spike and John. I think there's an excellent topic to raise. For those who don't know, read this interesting article. http://archive.wizards.com/Magic/magazi ... ily/mr220b

Essentially it says that there are different types of players enjoying different things. The trouble with MPQ now is that it only rewards the Spikes. It doesn't reward you winning in style, with full health, chain many interesting combos together, denying the opponent AP and stop him from firing any abilities.... All that matters in MPQ is to win fast, win quick.

This is not a problem of game play because the characters have different style of playing. It is a problem of reward structure; it only rewards the wins and not the manner of wins.

Players can devise secondary goals... Veterans are especially good at resource management and playing to the meta. But I think MPQ can do more to make it explicit for the veterans and newbies.

Phew, a long post... Any way these are just my musings. I hope to see the game improves, and this is my way of inviting people to share their view points. Hopefully the dev will see this and consider changing stuff (primary goal).Even if the primary goal is not met, the secondary goal of a thought provoking conversation can still be met.

Unknown

As long as the game is tied to health packs you're not going to have failure received very well. But even if people somehow didn't care about spending money to buy more health packs, MPQ is too much of an all or nothing game. You don't get a medal for downing a guy in Gauntlet. It also doesn't teach you anything about how to beat this encounter better next time, so whereas a 'we want to see people suffer' game like Ninja Gaiden seems to be focused on just slapping you silly, at least you know that if you beat this boss this way and you can do the same thing you'll be able to do it again. You can't say 'last time I beat Ultron I had no bomb exploding so I'll just do the same thing this time'. There is simply too much randomness in this game for that to ever be possible.

In PvP your opponent used to take persistent damage so you get 3 tries at beating them and if you downed a guy and lost that guy stays downed the second time. I don't know why they didn't do this for PvE (or why they ever did this for PvP). Gauntlet seems to be the perfect event for this kind of stuff. There will still be an incentive to play well since it will take a lot time if you're just hoping to randomly make moves and beat a level 395 that way even if the damage is persistent. It'll also reward roster diversity since any extra guys you can throw at the encounter is just free damage. Currently most of your extra guys are just free kills for the enemy barring a miraculous board, and sometimes even that isn't enough and you'll feel like you totally wasted a miracle opening by throwing some weak guys when your A team definitely could've won. Ironically I had the most fun with roster diversity back when losing lowered your scaling, since what I would do is take the weakest guys possible to try to beat an encounter. If they lose the scaling goes down, and if they somehow won that's good enough too since the point of lowering the scaling is to win later but if I can win now, I'll take that too. Granted that was clearly not intended but there should be some reward for trying new stuff. I think persistent damage would work well since you can take your B team to try to soften up the enemy and of course if you somehow won with the B team that's even better, but you wouldn't feel like you just wasted your time for nothing when the B team gets curbstomped.