If you must have PvE placement rewards...

DrDoMe

First off, I think a lot of people would prefer to see PvE move to a progressiononly- model, and I'm all for that, if that's the way you choose to go.

That said, if you must have PvE placement rewards, then you have to come up with a better way to compete for them. Right now, top ten players are hitting every node until it's worth almost nothing. Every top ten finisher in my latest event had over three times the max progression points! This turns the game into a competition over who can ensure the most monotony, and who can afford to devote 4+ hours per day to a single event in a casual game.

If you decide to stick with placement rewards, I'm all for a challenging game and stiff competition for good rewards, but that competition needs to be a fun challenge, not a contest of who is willing to jerk off until their fingers bleed.

simonsez

DrDoMe wrote:

competition needs to be a fun challenge, not a contest of who is willing to jerk off until their fingers bleed.

Deeply disappointed you said "fingers", but I'll +1 you anyway...

rb8888

DrDoMe wrote:

who can afford to devote 4+ hours per day to a single event in a casual game.

+100 to this. I spend more time in this one game than all my PC and console games combined. If I haven't spent so much money on it, I would have given up on it by now.

BraneDedDev

I think it's less about the hours spent and more about the hours-straight spent. Funny that one of their reasons for the change was to encourage less time spent...

Do they realize that, in order to achieve their ranking rewards, those of us that don't have max champed 4 and 5* rosters are spending over 2 1/2 hours clearing 4 straight times to start the points timer and at the end of a sub into the beginning of a new one we have to clear 7-8 times straight in excess of 4 hours? In what realm is that considered fun? I am honestly falling asleep before I complete the full clear through (every day since the change to 4x), it is that mind numbing...

I have been all for ranking rewards but waking up the next day with a low battery, mid match of an expired sub is getting old quick.

WEBGAS

BraneDedDev wrote:

I think it's less about the hours spent and more about the hours-straight spent. Funny that one of their reasons for the change was to encourage less time spent...

Do they realize that, in order to achieve their ranking rewards, those of us that don't have max champed 4 and 5* rosters are spending over 2 1/2 hours clearing 4 straight times to start the points timer and at the end of a sub into the beginning of a new one we have to clear 7-8 times straight in excess of 4 hours? In what realm is that considered fun? I am honestly falling asleep before I complete the full clear through (every day since the change to 4x), it is that mind numbing...

I have been all for ranking rewards but waking up the next day with a low battery, mid match of an expired sub is getting old quick.

I will repeat infinitely.....PROGRESSION REWARDS ONLY is the solution

moss04

The current way of the world is that the better your roster is the more elite your competition is. The more elite competition plays harder and longer making it increasingly difficult to get the top rewards. This has the effect that the more veteran you are and the better your roster is the worse your rewards are, or at a minimum you must play significantly more to have a chance at maintaining the same rewards.

This is backwards.

However, the recently teased SHIELD Clearance levels, may possibly be addressing this issue (if implemented well/properly). So, I'll have to wait for more details on that before commenting more with regards to poor progression rewards for PvE.

DrDoMe

I'm glad this issue is getting so much attention, finally. This is a literal repost of my comments in the general discussion, but I think it's worth repeating.

I hope the developers can now see the flaw in their new design. If they truly want to make PvE a play-when-you-want event, they need a better way to determine placement!.

My preferred solution would be to have each node only playable 3 or 4 or 5 times, getting harder every time and giving full points every time. Once you clear the whole sub, you unlock a tie-breaker node that gives points based on something other than when or how often you do it. This is essential to making placement work with the goal of letting players play when they want. Some ideas for tie-breaker node point systems include: you select an enemy level and the higher the level, the more points the node gives; it's an endless wave node where each wave gets harder and you get points based on what wave you reach before being beaten; it's a normal wave node and you get points based on how few turns it takes for you to clear it. I'm sure others have more good ideas for fun rules. Ideally, the rules for the tie-breaker node points could be themed to the event, which would add some fun variety to the PvE challenge.

Regardless of how points are determined, you can try the tie-breaker node as many times as you want, but you only get points for your best single performance. This is essential to avoid punishing days of good play with a single fight with bad board luck.

To those who advocate for progression only PvE, I also think that's a fine solution, but I want to make it clear that it's possible to have placement rewards without turning the game into a horrible grind.

Also, in case this isn't obvious, people adjust their behavior according to the incentives you give, but that doesn't mean they like it. So metrics of participation or people not yet rage-quitting are no defense for retaining a broken system.

Crowl

DrDoMe wrote:

That said, if you must have PvE placement rewards, then you have to come up with a better way to compete for them. Right now, top ten players are hitting every node until it's worth almost nothing. Every top ten finisher in my latest event had over three times the max progression points! This turns the game into a competition over who can ensure the most monotony, and who can afford to devote 4+ hours per day to a single event in a casual game.

Not sure what it was like in other time slices, but the one I was in took 7 full clears a sub to hit t10, not even perfectly optimal clears either, while a lot it is still better than it used to be.

Ideally though, they should shift all covers and tokens over to progression and just award iso/hp/cp for placements.

Nellyson

Crowl wrote:

DrDoMe wrote:

That said, if you must have PvE placement rewards, then you have to come up with a better way to compete for them. Right now, top ten players are hitting every node until it's worth almost nothing. Every top ten finisher in my latest event had over three times the max progression points! This turns the game into a competition over who can ensure the most monotony, and who can afford to devote 4+ hours per day to a single event in a casual game.

Not sure what it was like in other time slices, but the one I was in took 7 full clears a sub to hit t10, not even perfectly optimal clears either, while a lot it is still better than it used to be.

Ideally though, they should shift all covers and tokens over to progression and just award iso/hp/cp for placements.

That's my thoughts too! All covers should be a progression based reward system. If they want to keep the placement rewards, make them desirable amounts of the super rare resource we never get in this game....ISO! Like lots of ISO! 10K ISO reward for 1st place. People will still grind like crazy for that, but then it's just about ISO lust and not the need to feel like you have to play non-stop to place well to earn covers.