New Mission Difficulty Test: Enemy of the State *Updated

wymtime

Here are a couple of suggestions to make things better.
First reduce max clears to 7. 9 is just too much for 9-10 nodes.

Make all Survival nodes lock after the first clear. This was what makes this event so grueling the 6 wave nodes you have to clear 9 times. If you lock these nodes after 1 clear then you can make the others 9 clears since you will have 3 less nodes.

Lastly make a tie in points a true tie and award those rewards. This will truly make play when you want. If I score max points then I get max rewards and no one is punished for not clearing at a certain time.

madok

mrPuzzleQuester wrote:

Seriously, WAY TOO MUCH time to complete all the nodes! (i.e. Insanely scaled up wave nodes)

Just to get the crit boosts reward.

smkspy

D3 needs to suck it up and dole out the same rewards to everyone that tied for whatever their placement. They screwed the pooch by not seeing the blatantly obvious and players that worked their butts off on their test shouldn't be penalized cause we played at our own pace just like they wanted.

For everyone that tied, I hoped you sent a ticket to CS complaining about this.

bluewolf

I agree with pretty much the rest of the people.
Like:
1. No timer affecting points. Less pressure to play at a certain time, helped me out.
2. More rewards, more clears were nice up to a point. Then it became fatiguing.
3. Scaling starting low and going up - no strange top rankings for underlevelled rosters this time.

Don't like:
1. RNG rewards for increasingly difficult battles. If you play PVP, you can expect to face harder teams as you make progression and earn better rewards. This just makes sense. Why is PVE different with the scaling?
2. With this event, not getting the best prize on the wave the first time. I actually don't mind the usual format of this event, where you get a top prize first and then get no rewards for subsequent clears; only placement players are hitting the wave after the first time. Or just give the best reward first then randomly give the rest, maybe.
3. Too many potential clears. It just seemed like work to look at the possible clears, think about scaling, etc. I felt demotivated at times.
4. The time to clear everything was too much. If the idea of the game is (at least theoretically) that you play PVE to build a roster, and play PVP to test your roster, then you need to consider whether to limit PVE play to create a richer experience overall. One thing the alliance events get right is a limited number of play possibilities in each 8 hour period, which this PVE was closer to, but needed too much time to do.
5. Max scaling was crazy. Maybe that was the point, that's how you limit winning/differentiate players, but was not fun, especially if you wanted a good reward (token etc) that hadn't dropped yet.

Suggestion: I think that if the nodes gave rewards for the first few times, then there were a few more possible harder clears (up to a max), it would be interesting as then you are only playing for points (maybe to catch up on progression, maybe for placement). What would players do then without the double carrot of rewards and points? It would probably make a lot of players happy to be able to clear rewards at a reasonable scaling level, then the motivated folks could keep clearing 2-3 more times. The last reward (maybe for the 3rd or 4th clear) COULD be the best one, I think, and people would accept that as long as it was fairly achievable.

It seems like this event seriously fatigued the users, who were motivated by the possibility of "completing" an event for the first time. I greatly increased my ranking on the last day (I had more time and wanted iso, and yes, some MoStorm covers) due to people stopping playing. I also think that the subsequent event, the Hunt, is getting a lot less interest after this event. I think that setting a "reachable" goal, which requires this much effort, creates a burnout situation, especially on an ongoing basis.

Gmax101

I actually enjoyed it, but I think that was only because I realised early on that I wasn't contending for placement (although I ended up top 100, so that was nice) and just played when I wanted...

Likes
- No schedule..... could just dip and do a few games when I had some time
- Rewards for every clear
- Max Progression set at a sensible level for normal casual gamers 3 clears is about right, assuming all essentials.
- Trivial Nodes and starting difficulty across the board.
- Early sub scaling, not too high a jump from lowest difficulty to highest.

Dislikes
- SO. MANY. CLEARS... no single day should need more than say 6 clears to get everything.
- Multiple WAVE Node clears... just NO. They used to be the best thing about EOTS, you get juicy rewards and didn't HAVE to grind them, but choosing to just made progression easier. Do them once, make them a challenge and give out the decent rewards
- Burying the good rewards under 7/8 or even 12 poor ones. Given that CP/High ISO/Event Tokens are the real development rewards, I should not have to grind a node that is 50 levels above my highest single character repeatedly to try for an Event Token, utter rubbish. While I get that just handing out the cool prize on the first clear of relatively easy scaled nodes is not necessarily ideal (Other than WAVE nodes), have two tiers of prizes. So that by the time I have done my progression clears I have the cool stuff (and the rubbish stuff) and grinding just gets me ISO.
- Max level of Scaling on Hard nodes. Still do not get what the goal of scaling is.... if its to limit who gets to do the most clears then fix the difficulty so people can see what they are meant to achieve. If it is to ensure that all players, regardless of roster strength, can have a similar experience then you re wildly clear of the mark. But no node should be 50+ levels above your single max character.... and certainly not if you have to clear it another 3 times to get the best rewards.
- Handling tied scores... although it didn't not affect me, seriously, first come first served is ridiculous... especially given the work that they put in.

If you capped the clears at 6 per day, maybe 10 for a 48hr sub, made Wave nodes 1 and done, had a sensible approach to scaling where the maximum levels make stuff achievable and sorted out the cool rewards so they didn't require insane scaling then it would have been a lot of fun.

Jezequel

Hmm...

MarvelMan

Not saying I liked it (Ive stated elsewhere it sucked) but there were NO TIES. It was designed that the tie break was time finished so there was differentiation. If you had the same score but placed lower...that was because you LOST ON THE TIE BREAK WHEN YOU KNEW WHAT IT WAS GOING IN.

I had a perfect score....but I missed T10 in just about every sub. Which was my own fault for not doing my grind at sub open. Im okay with that, I knew it would be the case. They do need to address it from a design perspective, but we knew it would happen. Heck it was pointed out in the FIRST post after the announcement went live it was so obvious.

Razamataz

liked being able to play when I want was good,but if you wanted placement you had to clear as soon as possible which is unfair to all
playing nodes so many times got very boring and repetitive
scaling was ok 1st cple subs but after that got stupid especially a way overpowered gorgon being fed then jumping up 30-50 levels per clear
extra rewards weren't that much better especially when you had to fight such overpowered teams


what happened to the quality of life changes that were mentioned months ago,
having to grind nodes endlessly for twice the time it would normally take is not helping any1s quality of life

Cthulhu

Thank you all! Really appreciate the feedback. Feel free to keep adding and we will be discussing the results today.

Cthulhu

fanghoul

As someone that's been playing for only 80 days now, the Enemy of the State mission setup was by far the most entertaining one to me so far. Having the opportunity to work on making points when I had the time, rather than feeling like I was on a bizarre schedule of playing every 8 hours to maximize my points was nice. I felt like I was getting more rewards, and more opportunities to get them. I also liked all the multiple wave missions, since those mix things up a bit. They can be more careful planning and resource management, rather than straight up hitting a wall of level 270 enemies.

Also managed to end up being in the top 50 for the event, and most of the days, which is not something I regularly get, even when I have the right characters.

Overall, going back to the standard mission format has felt like a huge let down after that.

This seems to have been a very different experience for the long term players, but figured I'd also throw in my to cents as a newbie.

vaportrail

I for the most part found the test OK. My feedback on the wave nodes is this: They should not be repeatable, they should be one and done like nodes in some of the other PVEs. At the very least, there shouldn't be multiple wave nodes to grind per sub. Especially when you're fighting 480+ level characters like I am, the attack/strike tiles get quickly out of hand from the dead ninjas.

smkspy

MarvelMan wrote:

Not saying I liked it (Ive stated elsewhere it sucked) but there were NO TIES. It was designed that the tie break was time finished so there was differentiation. If you had the same score but placed lower...that was because you LOST ON THE TIE BREAK WHEN YOU KNEW WHAT IT WAS GOING IN.

I had a perfect score....but I missed T10 in just about every sub. Which was my own fault for not doing my grind at sub open. Im okay with that, I knew it would be the case. They do need to address it from a design perspective, but we knew it would happen. Heck it was pointed out in the FIRST post after the announcement went live it was so obvious.

Which absolutely contradicted their goal of letting people not play on a fixed schedule. So instead of play when you want, it was play for six to seven hours straight as soon as the sub opened or give up hope of placement. And pretty sure.not everyone knew about it, and obviously the devs didn't account for so many ties so they didn't even really take it into account.

They love their catch 22s, and tightwad reward system.

Perhaps in this one case, they should extend a little goodwill towards the players that spent hours playing wave after wave after wave for pretty much nothing considering there is no difference between 11th and 50th place.