PvE: Progression or Competitive based?

Nellyson

Slarow wrote:

The question that no one advocating for Progression only will answer is this:

New 4*'s are given out to the top 10% of the playerbase via PVE placement. Regular 4*'s are given out to the top 1% of the playerbase via PVE placement. How do you, via progression, ensure that only that small percent of the population gets 4* rewards?

If they make it an extremely high progression reward (unattainable for 90% or 99% of the players), then it will cause people to give up on progression, complaining that it is a complete grindfest. Too low, and they are given out too fast, causing them to have to increase the difficulty next time, angering players.

Placement ensures that the reward distribution stay in check with the playerbase population. You can't do that with progression unless you change the rules after every pve to increase the difficulty, which will only anger players.

And saying "make them attainable by everyone" is a response that shows that you don't understand that the game you are playing is a business and needs to earn money through scarcity. If you want to make a game and give away everything for free then go ahead.

You do know that characters cost roster spots, correct??? How is giving everyone a character so they have to buy a roster spot a bad business model? I believe more people will have the gotta have them all mentality and will fork out some money to get them. Limiting the rewards to the top 10% is just bad anyway. Besides, if they want to only give out 1 cover for everyone, who does that hurt?? Not D3, that's for sure. If anything, it hurts the player that is having problems trying to decide if they should spend money or not. This placement model is a joke and it needs to end.

Nellyson

slidecage wrote:

SnowcaTT wrote:

The problem is I've seen this same poll for almost two years - it always ends up 75% (ish) that would rather have progression - and D3 continues to ignore their user-base on this issue.

This is not the only issue where they ignore their user base, sadly.

People do not understand PROGREESION PVE WILL NEVER WORK If they ever did PROGRESSION it would probally look like this



3 4 star covers Must score 90% of all pts
2 4 star covers must score 85% of all pts
1 4 star cover must score 80% of all pts
3 3 star covers must score 70%
2 3 star covers must score 60%
1 3 star cover must score 50%
2 star covers must score 35%


if you think LT is insane to get to they would make the 4 star even higher

I see no problem with this either. What's wrong with that? It is obtainable by anyone who wants to put in the time. Most top alliances blow by that max progression reward regardless. Progression should be THE ONLY model that will work. PVE is not PVP. Get rid of placements. Get rid of the grind.

Sandwichboy

121 votes for progression, 7 for placement. I dunno, think we might need more data.

slidecage

Nellyson wrote:

slidecage wrote:

SnowcaTT wrote:

The problem is I've seen this same poll for almost two years - it always ends up 75% (ish) that would rather have progression - and D3 continues to ignore their user-base on this issue.

This is not the only issue where they ignore their user base, sadly.

People do not understand PROGREESION PVE WILL NEVER WORK If they ever did PROGRESSION it would probally look like this



3 4 star covers Must score 90% of all pts
2 4 star covers must score 85% of all pts
1 4 star cover must score 80% of all pts
3 3 star covers must score 70%
2 3 star covers must score 60%
1 3 star cover must score 50%
2 star covers must score 35%


if you think LT is insane to get to they would make the 4 star even higher

I see no problem with this either. What's wrong with that? It is obtainable by anyone who wants to put in the time. Most top alliances blow by that max progression reward regardless. Progression should be THE ONLY model that will work. PVE is not PVP. Get rid of placements. Get rid of the grind.

how can you say Get rid of the grind when your going to grind more... How many even put 90% of all pts in the last PVE top 5 if that?

Starsaber

slidecage wrote:

Nellyson wrote:

slidecage wrote:

People do not understand PROGREESION PVE WILL NEVER WORK If they ever did PROGRESSION it would probally look like this



3 4 star covers Must score 90% of all pts
2 4 star covers must score 85% of all pts
1 4 star cover must score 80% of all pts
3 3 star covers must score 70%
2 3 star covers must score 60%
1 3 star cover must score 50%
2 star covers must score 35%


if you think LT is insane to get to they would make the 4 star even higher

I see no problem with this either. What's wrong with that? It is obtainable by anyone who wants to put in the time. Most top alliances blow by that max progression reward regardless. Progression should be THE ONLY model that will work. PVE is not PVP. Get rid of placements. Get rid of the grind.

how can you say Get rid of the grind when your going to grind more... How many even put 90% of all pts in the last PVE top 5 if that?

You're acting like it is guaranteed that they would drastically increase the progression points required. The only examples of non-competitive PVEs we have at this point are the Gauntlet, alliance boss fights, and the Ant Man/Hulk release events, all of which are doable, though challenging.

Druss

erm, 124 vs 7 at the moment - I wonder who will win?

Heartburn

Slarow wrote:

The question that no one advocating for Progression only will answer is this:

New 4*'s are given out to the top 10% of the playerbase via PVE placement. Regular 4*'s are given out to the top 1% of the playerbase via PVE placement. How do you, via progression, ensure that only that small percent of the population gets 4* rewards?

If they make it an extremely high progression reward (unattainable for 90% or 99% of the players), then it will cause people to give up on progression, complaining that it is a complete grindfest. Too low, and they are given out too fast, causing them to have to increase the difficulty next time, angering players.

Placement ensures that the reward distribution stay in check with the playerbase population. You can't do that with progression unless you change the rules after every pve to increase the difficulty, which will only anger players.

And saying "make them attainable by everyone" is a response that shows that you don't understand that the game you are playing is a business and needs to earn money through scarcity. If you want to make a game and give away everything for free then go ahead.

this may have worked when 4* where the top of the food chain, but they are not. and the rewards need to reflect that. we should be seeing at least old 4* where we are currently seeing 3*.

Phumade

Why have two polls that ask essentially same question?

Are people really that intent on the issue that they will keep rephrasing the question in the hopes that the answer changes?

this is just like the verbal exchange between Trump and Anderson Cooper.

Trump - He started it.
Cooper - Thats the response of a 5 year old.
Trump - No its not.
Cooper - Every parent who's raised kids has heard that answer.

I will stipulate that people like a one and done progression system for the following reasons.
1. perceived less effort. i.e. no need to repeat a node unless its for green rewards.
2. Reward once earned can never be lost to another player. i.e. once I've crossed the threshold, the reward is mine and a competitor cannot earn his reward by taking my reward away.
3. Flexibility in how I can adjust my play schedule to achieve the game's top rewards.

I think I will create a 3rd topic focused on just those 3 issues and not worry if its used in pvp, pve, pvd (player vs developer), pvg (player vs God), or PVM (player vs Myself)

wymtime

For all people saying progression I ask you to think about a couple of things. Number 1 look at the test they are running with PVE where they are looking to make all the nodes more difficult. Easy nodes have been above 200 for myself and a lot of people.
If you just go progression how hard are the nodes going to go so only the top X% wins the covers? You are looking at Gauntlet style PVE for every event and to make it so the top X% of players only earn the covers the scaling would need to be fixed for all like in the Gauntlet so 2* players will need to beat level 300+ teams for final placement instead of having an opportunity to beat someone in competitive PVE. The issue with this is players will quite PVE because scaling gets t I hard.
Option number 2 is place the final placement so high that only the top X% can earn the final placement. I have been around for over 2 years and it used to be the top progression 3* was sometimes so high only 1% of players could achieve the 3* reward and they were super grinders. The complaints on the forum is what caused them to sognificantly lower the progression rewards. The CP we get today are not even close to as high as progression rewards were in the past.
Making PVE progression only would make PVE still a massive grind to win all of be rewards. Would top progression be for the players who do each node 7 times? Maybe 6? If you skipped a sub would you have a chance at getting the progression rewards?
The real answer is to take some of the placement rewards and create an alliance progression like the boss battles. This is encouraging game play for the alliance to get progression, but still rewarding the players who truly grind for top placement. The reality is a lot of players do like the competitive aspect of the game and by completely removing it from PVE is alienating that aspect of the game. Change the weighting of rewards but don't remove placement. There is room for both.

Linkster79

Slarow wrote:

Placement ensures that the reward distribution stay in check with the playerbase population. You can't do that with progression unless you change the rules after every pve to increase the difficulty, which will only anger players.

And saying "make them attainable by everyone" is a response that shows that you don't understand that the game you are playing is a business and needs to earn money through scarcity. If you want to make a game and give away everything for free then go ahead.

Make them attainable for everybody, what's wrong with doing that? Hero Points are still needed for the roster slot and unless players are going to be competitive in the follow up versus event the only way to get extra cover is via command points which means kerching!

From a business point of view why do you think it is now a trend for newer authors to make the first book or two in a series free to download? Surely by giving away their product they aren't earning any money? As an avid reader on a limited budget I can assure you that this is a brilliant strategy, read one book and if it is good enough you really do want to purchase more. I download the first three Sanctuary books from Amazon for free and on the strength of those have gone on to purchase a further 4 books in that series. Question is is Demiurge willing to stand by the quality of their product.

Phumade

Linkster79 wrote:

Slarow wrote:

Placement ensures that the reward distribution stay in check with the playerbase population. You can't do that with progression unless you change the rules after every pve to increase the difficulty, which will only anger players.

And saying "make them attainable by everyone" is a response that shows that you don't understand that the game you are playing is a business and needs to earn money through scarcity. If you want to make a game and give away everything for free then go ahead.

Make them attainable for everybody, what's wrong with doing that? Hero Points are still needed for the roster slot and unless players are going to be competitive in the follow up versus event the only way to get extra cover is via command points which means kerching!

From a business point of view why do you think it is now a trend for newer authors to make the first book or two in a series free to download? Surely by giving away their product they aren't earning any money? As an avid reader on a limited budget I can assure you that this is a brilliant strategy, read one book and if it is good enough you really do want to purchase more. I download the first three Sanctuary books from Amazon for free and on the strength of those have gone on to purchase a further 4 books in that series. Question is is Demiurge willing to stand by the quality of their product.

That requires an economic analysis that no one on the forum is willing to provide/perform.

Simply stated show a elasticity of demand curve, and adjust the accessibility of progression covers based on where we are at in the curve.

My concern is that is that it's not a given fact that loose rewards result in better sales and vice versa. It may very well be true for consumer goods, but not necessarily true for digital goods. In fact many studies have show that some luxury goods generate more overall revenue as price begins to rise. See Apple products as a real world e ample of that phenoma

Anecdotal evidence is never a substitute for hard data.

morbo

The poll asks us to choose between progression and placement, but there's no way to choose "both."

Both is what we have now, and it works fine.

There's currently an easy 3* progression reward, a tougher 4* (or maybe 5*) with CP, and a handful of Iso and HP rewards. These are all progression rewards, and they're available in every event. We have progression rewards right now.

We also have placement rewards for those who want to push into the top 10, 5, or 1%.

It sounds like the people who aren't making the top 10% just want someone else's rewards, which makes the 90/10 poll result rather unsurprising.

GurlBYE

The playerbase is the problem, you guys are trying to defend d3 and them making money instead of trying to think of ways in which the game can be fun and profitable.

no arguments made for competitive are based on fact.
They have all been based on theories.

- based on total points possible

There aren't total points possible. In theory (since we're using theory here instead of reality) if someone created a program to run nodes and grind them until 1's until events end there would be no top points. so basing it on some arbitrary number of 'max' points n your head isn't reliable.

-difficult nodes
you mean like the gauntlet, where you have difficult nodes but only need to play them once?
Just like the 4 star node in ddq?
or the antman event?

-can't make money if everyone gets rewards
WHAT? because i can totally dump money into ???currently to obtain a specific 4 star I don't have?

JeffCascadian

I marked "progression" because I'm just not someone who sinks enough money & time into the game to be uber-competetive. If I have the right characters and if I have enough downtime then I can be more competitive. I've even placed in the top ten a couple of times but those are extremely rare circumstances.

With the progress rewards, I stand a good chance of achieving the set goals. As Darwin said in Hudson Hawk, "Happiness comes from the achievement of goals."

Alx85

Others have said it:
Pvp - placement
Pve - progression

Placement in pve should be a bonus for those who want to go for it.

I'm a casual player and it's getting hard to compete for new characters in pve. A 'guaranteed' placement reward of one cover for a new character would not hurt the game balance or d3's pockets. It would give casual gamers and collectors a feel good factor and encourage roster spot purchases. Then let the whales power up. Casual gamers are less likely to spend money on pulling tokens for missed characters, the current system seriously turns me off the game. I'll keep playing for fun anyway and end up pulling them out of a ddq 4* quest legendary token some day.

End the disappointment of 90% of players with a little progression cover.

Smudge

wymtime wrote:

For all people saying progression I ask you to think about a couple of things. Number 1 look at the test they are running with PVE where they are looking to make all the nodes more difficult. Easy nodes have been above 200 for myself and a lot of people.
If you just go progression how hard are the nodes going to go so only the top X% wins the covers? You are looking at Gauntlet style PVE for every event and to make it so the top X% of players only earn the covers the scaling would need to be fixed for all like in the Gauntlet so 2* players will need to beat level 300+ teams for final placement instead of having an opportunity to beat someone in competitive PVE. The issue with this is players will quite PVE because scaling gets t I hard.

Personally, I see no problem with a progression-based Gauntlet style system. It would enable them to stop focusing so much on building a broken placement-progression hybrid system and look more towards actually providing additional rich storyline content.

As someone who enjoys gaming on multiple platforms, there are several styles of games - side scrollers, top-down RTS, FPS, progression/level focused RPG style games, and so forth. MPQ falls into the arcade-style as a match 3 with an element of the progression/level focus. Why shouldn't players be able to play through content that is mostly focused towards building your roster and being able to make it progressively further through content that is increasingly more challenging, with rewards that increase as you get further into the game? Is that not entirely the point of building and leveling your roster?

The prologue missions did exactly as described. Good luck taking on some of those Juggernaut or Daken nodes with the initial roster... but you can build up your roster steadily until you can take it on.

While I will not claim to be smart enough to know the best solution for players, developers, and publishers, there have been several good suggestions. I would not be discouraged by nodes that get so hard I can't beat them. That is how the Gauntlet was for me before, and I do not have the 4* cast to be able to beat it reliably even now. The last run, I managed to run the entire Gauntlet at the expense of some DP whale points, but my time investment was reasonable. I did not spend any time grinding any nodes for rewards except the CP nodes at the ends of each main leg of the subs. I could use weaker teams early on and had to build to the "A" team for the last sub without feeling like I was getting ripped off for rewards.

I personally just don't see the point of grinding nodes into oblivion to double the final progression reward for no extra rewards aside from placement, which people in my bracket seem to be doing happily. Final progression of 156k for EotS was a lot. I hit it, and I still only managed 64th overall in my bracket, missing out on the 10 CP bonus... and that was a massive grind for a casual player like myself.

What is fun about doubling progression for no reward other than placement?

Edit: One final thought. When it comes to PvE, why should someone with a mostly 2* roster with a couple 3* covers, maybe 25 characters rostered in total, be able to out-place people who have 80+ characters and are firmly in the 4* meta?

TLCstormz

Crowl wrote:

There is room for both placement and progression in pve, but the primary rewards should come from progression and with placement being more about iso, hp and cp than the covers.

Yes, plx.

jobob

What about keeping the rewards as is for individual events, but adding some season-long progression rewards like in PVP?

Slarow

Starsaber wrote:

Slarow wrote:

And saying "make them attainable by everyone" is a response that shows that you don't understand that the game you are playing is a business and needs to earn money through scarcity. If you want to make a game and give away everything for free then go ahead.

I don't think anyone saying Progression only is saying to give 13 covers for a 4* in the release event. I think the most I've seen is 3 (like in the Galactus events). That lets everyone get a taste of the character, but they still need to buy/grind for the remaining 10 covers. Injustice mobile does something similar for most of their new character releases

And what about the non-release events? Should everyone get three 4* covers each PVE (plus an alliance one)? Your solution needs to address both the current 10% on new releases, and the 1% on non-release events.

GrumpySmurf1002

Slarow wrote:

And what about the non-release events? Should everyone get three 4* covers each PVE (plus an alliance one)? Your solution needs to address both the current 10% on new releases, and the 1% on non-release events.

FWIW, the devs already have a model for this. Galactus/Ultron are both framed around static difficulty levels creating a virtual barrier for completion, and thus limiting the access to all 3 covers of a new release. It's not like it'd be that hard to transition that type of scaling model to other events.

The problem with his model is that it's a rich get richer model. I'm not sure that's necessarily worse than the current model which rewards players for finding the correct bracket more than their ability to actually play the game.