The False Dichotomy of the "New" PvE System

hodayathink

Stax the Foyer wrote:

The developers have had multiple goes at the the PvE rework, and they haven't even addressed the players concerns about the real issues, let alone made any effort to change it. Don't ask us to choose between the old PvE and the "new" PvE, because the right answer increasingly looks like no PvE at all. Almost all of us realize that the best option is the one that the developers aren't giving us, and we deserve to know why that is.

If I had to guess, it's because they have data that shows players are playing less often in the Gauntlet style PvEs than they do in the current placement/progression hybrid PvEs. Think about it, even if you complete it for most people Gauntlet is run once and be done with it, while the new/old PvE is run through it multiple times, either to clear out rewards or to shore up placement. The only way I see that keeping the same engagement numbers is if they change up the Gauntlet (and the rewards) every day or two.

Varg138

I'll keep bumping this until Stax gets triple digit upvotes and/or someone in red answers at least some part of this

wirius

Right with you Varg.

fight4thedream

While I wholeheartedly support Stax and his OP, please refrain from bumping this thread. It violates rule 12 (found here: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=4). Thank you.

With that said, hopefully we get a dev response sometime in the near future. #fightfornewgamecontent (preferably tiered, non-competitive and more puzzle-y)

Redrobot30

I 100% agree with this post as well as everyone else. As much as we'd all love for these kinds of changes to be enacted they probably never will. As long as the major concern is to push out new characters (at a ridiculous pace...) these ideas will never really hold any traction for change.

It's time to just simply lower any expectations...

It'd be nice if I woke up and my wife and kids were putting together a waffle bar for me every day when I wake up for work but realistically it's just going to be cereal. And I'm fine with that, our "Waffle bar" ideas are maybe just too high of an expectation.

I believe we as a gaming community will always ask for the game developers to give us more, not out of entitlement, but out of wanting to have an even more enjoyable time out of any game that we have spent time and money into.

Bottom line is that we love/like this game and just want it to reach its maximum potential.

Stax the Foyer

hodayathink wrote:

Stax the Foyer wrote:

The developers have had multiple goes at the the PvE rework, and they haven't even addressed the players concerns about the real issues, let alone made any effort to change it. Don't ask us to choose between the old PvE and the "new" PvE, because the right answer increasingly looks like no PvE at all. Almost all of us realize that the best option is the one that the developers aren't giving us, and we deserve to know why that is.

If I had to guess, it's because they have data that shows players are playing less often in the Gauntlet style PvEs than they do in the current placement/progression hybrid PvEs. Think about it, even if you complete it for most people Gauntlet is run once and be done with it, while the new/old PvE is run through it multiple times, either to clear out rewards or to shore up placement. The only way I see that keeping the same engagement numbers is if they change up the Gauntlet (and the rewards) every day or two.

Good thought! That may very well be the case, but if so, what's probably driving that is the legendary token available in PvE. Gauntlet doesn't have a centralized award for doing multiple passes.

If they value significant play, and want to encourage it, continue giving progression points for X number of passes in a Gauntlet-like event before locking the node, and set overall progression awards accordingly. Don't make the rewards dependent on the specific group of people that you were randomly grouped with in a bracket.

If it's coming back to the game every day that the Gauntlet isn't providing, don't release all the subs at once. Just like a normal PvE. Or lock nodes after one pass but release them after 24 hours for further progression and play, just like the Ultron/Galactus/Civil War side nodes. But let us play those whenever we want within that time period, and let our progression dictate the awards.

When you see the exact same effort in a PvE event earning some of your alliance members top rewards and others middling rewards, it really illustrates the stupidity and randomness of the current system. (The same thing happens in PvP, but it hurts less because the progression awards are good). The game doesn't need yet another layer of RNG. It already has plenty.

Stax the Foyer

Redrobot30 wrote:

I 100% agree with this post as well as everyone else. As much as we'd all love for these kinds of changes to be enacted they probably never will. As long as the major concern is to push out new characters (at a ridiculous pace...) these ideas will never really hold any traction for change.

It's time to just simply lower any expectations...

It'd be nice if I woke up and my wife and kids were putting together a waffle bar for me every day when I wake up for work but realistically it's just going to be cereal. And I'm fine with that, our "Waffle bar" ideas are maybe just too high of an expectation.

I believe we as a gaming community will always ask for the game developers to give us more, not out of entitlement, but out of wanting to have an even more enjoyable time out of any game that we have spent time and money into.

Bottom line is that we love/like this game and just want it to reach its maximum potential.

I understand those feelings, but I'm hopeful that this isn't the case. One reason is that the development efforts have already been made along these lines in the boss events. If that wasn't the case, I'd be a lot more pessimistic.

Much of the discussions in the PvE test threads comes down to people preferring a particular version because of unrelated factors. That is, people who like the PvE tests like the ability to play at any given time, and people who don't like it don't like the regression or the lack of progress on the grind for top position. Those design factors can and should be discussed outside of the context of the specific tests, where people are going to have drastically different results based largely on bracket luck (which is by far the determining factor in PvE results), skewing people's perceptions.

If we can discuss these design factors in the context of broader revisions to the PvE structure, we can hopefully affect developer direction down the road.

Eichen

What if they just tripled the points the 4* essential was worth? I always thought it was strange that the 2, 3, and 4* essentials were all worth the same amount.

mohio

Eichen wrote:

What if they just tripled the points the 4* essential was worth? I always thought it was strange that the 2, 3, and 4* essentials were all worth the same amount.

This doesn't solve the crux of the problem, which is that "PvE" is really just PvP in disguise. Part of that is our problem for calling it PvE in the first place and not "story mode" which is what they like to call it. It creates certain expectations which are obviously never met.

My solution has been to give up on competitive PvE. I make my clears when I can and I do a half-hearted "grind" mostly just to get the CP and maybe a few extra points to reach t50 if I'm close for the extra rewards. As brought up before the effort required to reach certain rewrad thresholds is just out of touch with reality. Think about it like this...to reach full progression, which will get you a 3* cover and 25 CP (we'll call it roughly equivalent to a 4* cover), you need to do 3 clears a day. This will probably net you t100, or at least close to it. To get t10, which is essentially the next meaningful cutoff, you need to at least do 5 MORE clears than that. That's 166% more than is needed for full progression, and all for ONE extra 4* cover. No thank you.

Ducky

aesthetocyst wrote:

Give the players somewhere to go, and a reason for going there.

They're giving people a place to go. That's why more and more people are quitting with increased frequency.

Gryffle

Great post. The problem with the reward system is that at a certain point you don't get anything for having a better roster. I remember back when I discovered I could finally beat the Big Enchilada, and being excited about the massive potential for building up my three-stars that I had unlocked. Not co-incidentally, my current favourite part of the game is Crash of the Titans (even though I barely get to play it with a hope of completing it!), because I have about four or five four-stars that are just covered enough that I can puzzle my way through it and earn a great reward.

The rest of the game, especially PVE, has fallen way behind. Tiny iso rewards, three-star covers for prizes when I now hardly need them except for championing, out-of-reach four-star covers. I've never, ever earned a four-star cover for placement that wasn't in a release PVE event.

If I have a three-star roster, my rewards for doing well should be four-star covers. It's that simple.

firethorne

Eichen wrote:

What if they just tripled the points the 4* essential was worth? I always thought it was strange that the 2, 3, and 4* essentials were all worth the same amount.

To what end? This thread is about fixing a very broken rewards system, where only a select few can get a meaningful reward. Stacking the deck in favor of one tier just exacerbates the problem. We need a better system for meaningful progression at all levels. One to two to three to four to five. Not a system where getting four star rewards without four star characters is even more limited.

Argon Flame

I don't understand why they aren't trying different scoring modes like:
Increasing the 8-h refresh time to 12-h or even 24-h(!!)
Changing the points decrease per completion from -1/6 of max points.

The math isn't that hard for them to work out what decent round scores would be for progression.

Eichen

To what end? This thread is about fixing a very broken rewards system, where only a select few can get a meaningful reward.

I want very clear. I meant they should change essential rewards to make the progression only rewards work. That is the piece that is missing to make the reward scheme work for progression only. If moved to progressive only a 2* roster shouldn't be able to get the top reward, be it 4* cover, CP, or whatever. They should only be able to get a 3* reward and the way to do that easiest is to make essentials worth different amounts. Make it where 3 clears of each day with only the 2* essential gets you the 3* reward. 3 clears a day with 3* essential earns a 4* and 3 clears a day with 4* essential gets CP.

(And throw a bunch of ISO in the middle cause god knows we all need it no matter what level we are)

like1tiger

I couldnt agree more. The reward structure needs a complete overhall.
Most people love the Galactics events and the Civil war was fun as well as everyone worked together to get actual rewards that helped improve our rosters. numinous 3*s and also 4 star covers it is much better designed and doesn't feel like a grind fest.

It doesn't matter how often they change the format as grinding is always the best way making it imposable to get into t10 without spending hours grinding the same node.

The format has changed so much and the rewards have not.
Iso is so hard to get for anyone trying to move into 4* land and we still get those same **** crit boosts every time its frustrating as hell.

Melevorn

The number of 'likes' the OP has gathered (123 as of right now) should send a strong signal to d3 regarding the value of Stax's points.

Vhailorx

Melevorn wrote:

The number of 'likes' the OP has gathered (123 as of right now) should send a strong signal to d3 regarding the value of Stax's points.

I strongly agree with stax's points about the current state of PVE and PVP rewards. This has been true for the better part of a year and I have been saying so for almost as long as the amount of time I spend on the game has dwindled.

But, unfortunately, I am not sure that 123 people is enough to have any effect on demiurge/d3. How many people are on this forum? and how many people play the game? 123, even 500 is a tiny fraction at best.

rewards will change when player engagement drops low enough that more rewards become a necessity to get people interested in playing again. No idea when that will happen but I hope it's soon.

LordXberk

Well, at least double ISO is a start, right? Hopefully it becomes the new norm (unlikely). I do think the 7 day event w/ double ISO and a new release that is needed to win the upcoming special event is going to be a helluva grindfest.

firethorne

Eichen wrote:

I want very clear. I meant they should change essential rewards to make the progression only rewards work.

Ah, then in that case I agree. I misunderstood, and thought you were talking about increasing points for 4*s in competition. My mistake. Sorry about that.

Under a progression only system, yes, that would be a good way to route and gate progressing. Having characters at one rank making it far easier to get progression points for a reward at the next higher rank is a way they could go.

Stax the Foyer

LordXberk wrote:

Well, at least double ISO is a start, right? Hopefully it becomes the new norm (unlikely). I do think the 7 day event w/ double ISO and a new release that is needed to win the upcoming special event is going to be a helluva grindfest.

Double ISO is a fantastic thing, but it's tangential to these issues. It's a great benefit, and it helps everyone across the board, but it doesn't address the different needs of people at different stages of the game.

Your PvE rewards shouldn't be as dependent as they are on bracket luck, and trying to create a level playing field for four to five different tiers of players is a waste of the developer's time at this point. The old PvE structure is stretched impossibly thin at this point.

Scaling difficulty has to come with scaling rewards. The best way to do that is to eliminate personal scaling, and have events with fixed difficulty and appropriate rewards that reflect the difficulty of a given task. Double ISO is needed as the game has moved beyond the old ISO needs at every level, with the cover gain for new players being much greater than it was, but it doesn't mean that it fixes the other aspects of PvE.