Some design thoughts

carrion_pigeons

I know that asking for sweeping changes to the design of the game isn't actually going to do anything. But I thought it would be fun to talk about other ways the game could be designed that would make it more fun for you. I'm not talking about balance changes or flow rate changes or bugs that need fixing or faults in the UI. Just broad design decisions that don't seem like they would suck the fun out of the game the way current ones do.

For me, I would like the game a lot more if they:
Removed competitive rewards from PvE
Removed progression rewards from PvP
Made it so every PvE match filled your characters HP to max with fake health (like you get from burst healing)
Removed point refreshes on PvE nodes
Introduced rewards for having a high MMR
Made covers colorless (i.e. you can choose which color to boost with them).

All of those changes are aimed directly at the moments in the game where I say to myself "why does this game have to suck so much? It didn't have to be this way."

Any moments like that, that you guys have?

Unknown

Honestly, if you want to avoid a lot of that, get the console version of the game.

It's amazing how much frustrating things are part of this game's design that's tied to the Free to Play aspect of it.

You only get power upgrades/covers that you need. You fully heal after every node. You have one roster slot for every character you have for free. You only do grinding for (much quicker) leveling up and guaranteed covers. You do not have to grind for ranking at all. You don't have to worry about constantly running into PVP walls and losing progress while winning matches. (As a matter of fact, going into Versus gives you automatically maxed out versions of any character you've unlocked!)

Only problem is that it doesn't get nearly as many updates, because man this version of the game probably makes approximently one bajillion times as much money as a traditional release does.

Crowl

carrion pigeons wrote:

For me, I would like the game a lot more if they:
Removed competitive rewards from PvE
Removed progression rewards from PvP
Made it so every PvE match filled your characters HP to max with fake health (like you get from burst healing)
Removed point refreshes on PvE nodes
Made covers colorless (i.e. you can choose which color to boost with them).

I don't think they need to go as far as your first two suggestions, but pve needs to shift its rewards more towards progression rather than placement e.g. for new releases they could give one cover for roughly LT-level, 2nd at 1.2x LT and 3rd at 1.4x LT, this will increase the amount of people with covers, but hardly gamebreaking now covers are not readily purchasable for most people.

All F2P games have some form of energy to limit play or get you to spend money, so to save them finding another one maybe your fake health suggestion goes too far, a better compromise would be characters having separate health pools for pve and pvp, so you could readily participate in both a little bit without having to spend all the time on healthpacks.

Point refreshes should kick in after the first 7 clears, this would allow people more flexibility to fit in those clears and then you could have a 2 hour period before the end of the sub where you get reducing points per clear so there is a tiebreaker as needed.

As far as covers, they could even wait to unlock them as colourless once you had maxed at least one colour on a character, you still have some randomness as they prefer but without the players being needlessly penalised for the rng hating them.

carrion_pigeons

colwag wrote:

Honestly, if you want to avoid a lot of that, get the console version of the game.

It's amazing how much frustrating things are part of this game's design that's tied to the Free to Play aspect of it.

You only get power upgrades/covers that you need. You fully heal after every node. You have one roster slot for every character you have for free. You only do grinding for (much quicker) leveling up and guaranteed covers. You do not have to grind for ranking at all. You don't have to worry about constantly running into PVP walls and losing progress while winning matches. (As a matter of fact, going into Versus gives you automatically maxed out versions of any character you've unlocked!)

Only problem is that it doesn't get nearly as many updates, because man this version of the game probably makes approximently one bajillion times as much money as a traditional release does.

I like that there's competition in the game. I like being in an alliance and working together to accomplish stuff. I just want there to also be a noncompetitive mode that encourages people to just play their game. The fact that health packs are necessary even when you're screwing around with experimental builds is fundamentally punishing people for enjoying the game. I don't think *every game mode* needs to be endless grinding.

PvP is already the main reason people whale out. I'm not saying that part of the game ought to be removed. I'm just saying that there are an awful lot of people who quit because there isn't a "for fun" way to play the game. DDQ is the closest thing to that in the game, but even that still tries a lot harder to annoy the player than it should.

I'm also not saying that there should be no punishment for losing, even in PvE. Characters who are dead can stay dead for a while if you don't want to use a health pack. That's fine. What I don't like is the way that characters at partial health make you want to try to gamble with your time. "Do I blow a health pack on this character who's at 40% health, or risk him getting blown up by an unlucky cascade." Or worse "oops, I forgot to heal that guy, now I don't stand a chance." I'm not thinking about making the game easier, just less tedious.

It's in the developer's interest to make the actual gameplay engaging. They've obviously shown that they *can* design a game that works because of its progression elements alone, and screw the idea of fun. But the actually successful FtP games also have elements of fun to them.