Poll: What works and what doesn't for EotS PvE test

Hayek

The purpose of this poll is to find out if people are truly hating this new format or if it's a vocal minority situation in the forums. I waited until the first sub was over so that people could get a taste for what the scoring would be like.

Personally, I think there's a lot of great things going on here. I used to be a top PvE player (I got 1st place in most of the early 4* PvEs including HB), but quit PvE a few months ago because the amount of time I was spending on this game was just insane. Having to take long "bathroom" breaks to go do a clear or plan my social outings around PvE clears was also insane. I have never even joined a venom bomb or heart of darkness event.

But I joined this test because I saw that it was attempting to fix one of my biggest problems with PvE: having to schedule your life around it. Here's my breakdown of what worked and what didn't.


Improvements

+ Truly play whenever I want for most subs (except for the last).
+ Join whenever you want. No more rushing to join as soon as the event starts unless you really care about sub placement.
+ Using chat apps to coordinate joining a new bracket won't be a mad dash most of the time.
+ The point system is a lot easier to understand for new players. You clear the nodes, you get the points. I knew plenty of people who didn't understand optimal play under the regenerating point system and would grind their nodes early.
+ A significant increase in rewards. This to me offsets losing sub placement rewards on must subs since I don't care about the , the token almost always ends up being anyway, and the extra 1 or 2 is not worth the headache.

No Change

The total amount of play time required for event placement rewards is still waaaaaay too high. Please listen D3 - people do NOT like to grind. There's built-in competitiveness in this system with clearing speed, you don't need to add to the number of clears.

Deteriorations

- It's much more difficult and time consuming to get specific node clear rewards like .
- You have to be crazy to or extremely dedicated to want to go for sub placement. Though the loss of top placement rewards is offset by the increase in overall node rewards.
- HUGE grind at the beginning of last sub for event placement rewards.


Please also share what you thought were your pluses and minuses that lead you to vote the way you did.

fmftint

The goal can't be "play whenever you want" and a competition. The 2 lines never intersect

The 2 paths may have the same starting point, but lead in opposite directions

Orion

Wow, that poll is tilting towards the negative side. Only 4 positive choices and 1 has a built-in complaint.

Where's "Wow, thanks for all of that ISO!". I think that it's a better design than what we have, but there's too many people that tied with the top score. We'll see how it turns out for the later subs though before I have a definitive opinion though.

Hayek

Orion wrote:

Wow, that poll is tilting towards the negative side. Only 4 positive choices and 1 has a built-in complaint.

Where's "Wow, thanks for all of that ISO!". I think that it's a better design than what we have, but there's too many people that tied with the top score. We'll see how it turns out for the later subs though before I have a definitive opinion though.

There's 2 null choices at the top, 4 negatives, 1 neutral, 4 positives. With this poling format, it's hard to cover all the reason why you may have liked it or not, that's why the overall i think it was a step forward/backward choices are there.

Tryke

I chose the 2nd last option.

2-3 times as many clears to hit 25 cp? BAD
Dem feels when it takes you 15 clears to get the 2 cp out of the 2-day sub node!
Guaranteed event token from wave node now 1/X chance? BAD
Crit boosts and 70 iso still a thing? BAD

Flexible schedule? GREAT
More large iso rewards? Iso-GREAT

Even though these are tests, they seem to be off the mark. The devs have a sadistic tendency where anytime they give the playerbase something nice, they just HAVE to throw some bad in there.

Devs: "Happy birthday, I bought you this gift card."
Players: "Wow thanks, that's really thoughtful of you."
Devs: "Here's a complimentary kick in the nuts!"
Players: "Umm...what?"
*KABLAMMO*
Devs:

slidecage

i really really hope D3 does not look at this and takes anything from it... They need to do these test on 3 and 4 day events.... 7 day events many people skipped all together

HxiiiK

Voted "step forward overall". Just take that last step D3, you're SO close, just remove placements. You can do it, come on, make us happy!

OneLastGambit

The more I think about it the more I think selectable tiers is the way to go.

I love progression as it means no more watching the clock to grind or finish (it probably means no more grinding).

But having a selectable difficulty would be best way to distribute prizes accordingly.

Easy gets lower quality tokens and lower iso but most hp
Medium gets the middle amount of everything
Hard gets best covers most iso

Crowl

This system would work with less clears per node and getting away from first to finish as a tiebreaker as that totally defeats the idea of play when you want.

They should just work out how many clears they think is acceptable to get 3x 3* and 1x 4* then set the target accordingly and not worry about more people getting one 4* cover compared with a few getting more than one as they are not gamebreaking.

Smudge

I agree with two major points in here. My vote for the record is "This is a step backward," but I feel like this poll should allow more than just one option because several of those are true for me.

The two points:

1. This system is ideal for progression-only rewards as has been noted time and time again since the rollout.
2. This system highlights how a tiered system as described by OLG would be perfect.

The scaling gets about 60-80 levels higher than my highest leveled (or boosted!!) character on the hard nodes by the time scaling has maxed. If you truly don't want lower level rosters from getting better rewards, offer them scaling options that give them better opportunity for more beneficial rewards for them. Give me mid-level scaling that allows me to get more access to the 4* tier since I only have two characters max covered at that level. Give the better rosters more open access to LTs and ISO with even harder scaling.

Or you know, just try testing progression-only rewards one time and keep the scaling higher overall, but for heaven's sake, please lower the number of clears!

wymtime

This test is the closest to play when you want if it is progression only. If you want sub rewards you better be grinding.
For scaling the last couple have been tough but manageable. The issue is the time it takes for the survival nodes. Hitting the hard and essential nodes 9-15 times takes forever. If they go back to 7 that would make a big difference.
48 hr subs could go to 13 max clears. 15 clears is brutal

El Satanno

I'm one of the many "way too grindy" votes. I don't give a rat's **** about placement to begin with. More prizes is nice and all, but I don't want to be playing that long to get them all. I know I don't have to get them all, however when there are still remaining ones that are good...well...I have to get them all.

Oh, and scaling is a nightmare. EotS in particular. Is anyone listening? You've already screwed up the game enough by making Logan the only character that matters. Basing story mode scaling off of him and then locking him out for 90% of the event is cruel.

Crowl

El Satanno wrote:

Oh, and scaling is a nightmare. EotS in particular. Is anyone listening? You've already screwed up the game enough by making Logan the only character that matters. Basing story mode scaling off of him and then locking him out for 90% of the event is cruel.

The issue with the scaling in this one is that there are too many clears where it continues to grow, if they had capped out at less increases and less clears this one would have been okay, but as far as people with oml suffering a bit that is fine for everyone who has not been treated as kindly by rng.

hodayathink

Crowl wrote:

This system would work with less clears per node and getting away from first to finish as a tiebreaker as that totally defeats the idea of play when you want.

They should just work out how many clears they think is acceptable to get 3x 3* and 1x 4* then set the target accordingly and not worry about more people getting one 4* cover compared with a few getting more than one as they are not gamebreaking.

They won't do that anytime because they know no matter how high they set that bar, more people than they want will clear it. The more I look at what they're doing, the more I realize that we're not going to see 4* placement rewards in PvE until they get to the point where they're adding a 5* every 2 weeks.

bobbyfish

I said no better or worse. from what I've played, I like that there's lots of rewards, but people seem to have been playing like crazy because of this. Clearing every node around 4 times would usually get T50 in a normal event. I've not been clearing everything, but I'm sat in around 150th. Hopefully if this is the way it's going then these scores are just a novelty

dsds

I ended up giving up after the first sub. But that's because I am worn out from playing the previous few events. If you consider how many people say they didn't want placement rewards. Then this would work as a compromise. If people didn't expect to hit placement rewards, this would be a pretty good pve event then. To be honest, I think this is the only way to satisfy both sides. People who don't want placement rewards can get a ton of iso, cp, and tokens. People who want placement will have to really work for it.

We will see at the end of the event, how many people actually max cleared all the nodes. I predict, there won't be as many ties as people have predicted. The grind gets ridiculously hard even for me on the first sub. It's better than having the top player grind easy 20 pts nodes forever. Also it's not as repetitive and it is actually challenging. You'd have to work pretty hard to clear everything. Not everyone would be able to do this.

Here are the pros for me:
- Good rewards, almost inifinite amount of iso. So this addresses the iso problem to an extent. I believe iso problem is good. We supposed to be short to make tough decisions (but the current shortage is kinda too big).
- Truly play when you want if you not looking for placement.
- If the goal was to not clear all nodes, you would see how much fun it is. Farming iso is great, there's no other place for you to farm endless iso.
- Easy nodes, you can actually test new combos. Hard nodes tests how skilled you are and how you do with your best team. There is no timer, so you can take your time and actually enjoy the game and not worry about losing points. I am speaking strictly for people who are going for progression rewards only.

Cons:
- Much harder to make top 50 in sub.
- Disappointing not getting the top 50 reward ( I count on the 50-100 hero points per day to add slots)


Suggestion:
Get rid of placement on sub events. Most people will not be able to max clear all nodes in a sub anyway. Use a progression based system for sub rewards. So if you max clear all nodes, you get the 50 hero points and the event token. I said 50 because d3 likes to keep the number of things rewarded on a certain level.

_RiO_

dsds wrote:

Truly play when you want if you not looking for placement.

Well, there's still some rubberbanding in place. Now more than ever, it is more efficient to join a sub in the last hour and grind it out, because you'll have to play fewer matches total for the same amount of points earned towards progression. So even if you're not looking for placement; it's either spread out and longer amount of gameplay or shorter amount of gameplay concentrated towards a sub-event's end if you want to guarantee hitting the progression mark.

dsds wrote:

If the goal was to not clear all nodes, you would see how much fun it is. Farming iso is great, there's no other place for you to farm endless iso.

That, I will agree with.

Hayek

So from the votes so far, of the people who play tested the new system, 35% are having a negative reaction, and 64% are having a positive reaction. I hope D3 sees this and in spite of the very vocal (and justified) complaints, do not throw the baby out with the bath water.

Konman

I swear, I voted for the "only play for the CP" choice, and it changed my vote to the "liked it but too grindy" option...I protest this poll. I demand a recount!

djeternal

Hayek wrote:

So from the votes so far, of the people who play tested the new system, 35% are having a negative reaction, and 64% are having a positive reaction. I hope D3 sees this and in spite of the very vocal (and justified) complaints, do not throw the baby out with the bath water.

Not sure you can count all 46% that chose "I loved being able to play whenever I want, but it's still too grindy." as a positive reaction. I've seen a few ppl that have posted among the various threads regarding this event stating they played during sub 1 and liked that they could play at any time but quit after that sub because it was too grindy. I personally would not call it a positive reaction if ppl are quitting after 1 or 2 days of a 7 day event.

Druss

I fully cleared the 1st sub - but because I played when I wanted I was penalized - 64th placement.

However only plodding along now doing the odd node because too much of a time sink - would have serious burnout if i attempted that many clears & difficulty too high (100 levels over my highest characters is stupid for 70iso & 400 points towards a meaningless placement target).

I'll get to 116,000 purely to justify the slog of the first sub, but no more