Upcoming Feature: S.H.I.E.L.D. Rank & Clearance Levels!

fmftint

The Herald

To be fair to the devs, they've had a LOT of stick lately over last minute announcements

TxMoose

aesthetocyst wrote:

Underpromise and overdeliver.

sooo many people need to work on this concept...

killerkoala

since no official word of what happens, this is just a guessing game post. so here is my speculation:


Crit boosts become 20 iso drops now, for increased prizes.

Crowl

_Daywalker_ wrote:

FWIW, here's my speculation... MPQ already keeps track of your overall roster progress and determines the difficulty of enemies you see in PVE and opponents you see in PVP -- it's your MMR. I think the SHIELD Rank will be tied to your MMR. As you level up your roster, your MMR gets higher, and so will your SHIELD Rank. This would be relatively easy for them to implement, since it's just creating a visual representation of a number that's already being calculated for every player.

I then think that the "SHIELD Clearance Level" will be putting you into a different prize bracket for events, based on your SHIELD Rank. So there might be a Clearance Level 3, which is a typical 3-Star player, and they would earn more 3-star covers and the potential to win 4-star covers. And then a Clearance Level 4, which would be a typical 4-star player, and they would earn more 4-star covers and the potential to win more command points/legendary tokens. I'd expect (and hope) that each Clearance Level will have higher and higher ISO rewards as well, commensurate with the rank/level of player.

I don't think it will be a restructuring of events themselves, just the prizes you are able to earn from events (hopefully both progression and placement).

That would definitely be a better approach than improves things based upon something as arbitrary as days played which doesn't actually represent the needs of a person's roster anywhere near as well.

Moon Roach

I'm interested in knowing how the player will know how close to the next level he or she is. Will it be like the Ultron-style events, you have to earn so many points to move to the next round / level, but you see how well you're doing.

Ooh, what would make this nice would be if there's a reward for a transition, and a reward for your alliance too. "Congratulations, you've graduated from buckler to riot, have 20 CP."

Crowl

Moon Roach wrote:

I'm interested in knowing how the player will know how close to the next level he or she is. Will it be like the Ultron-style events, you have to earn so many points to move to the next round / level, but you see how well you're doing.

Ooh, what would make this nice would be if there's a reward for a transition, and a reward for your alliance too. "Congratulations, you've graduated from buckler to riot, have 20 CP."

The obvious thing for them to do would be a progress bar between the vip bar and the newly shrunk shield rewards icon.

Moon Roach

Crowl wrote:

Moon Roach wrote:

I'm interested in knowing how the player will know how close to the next level he or she is. Will it be like the Ultron-style events, you have to earn so many points to move to the next round / level, but you see how well you're doing.

Ooh, what would make this nice would be if there's a reward for a transition, and a reward for your alliance too. "Congratulations, you've graduated from buckler to riot, have 20 CP."

The obvious thing for them to do would be a progress bar between the vip bar and the newly shrunk shield rewards icon.

That's one way, but I think I'd prefer a 100/10000 style presentation, so when it goes to 101/10000 the change is visible.

rubix_qube

Linkster79 wrote:

Late Autumn is right into December. I will get a bit more enthusiastic about it then, especially as the official information is vague at best. Sounds like a change that could make me want to play again and I hope that D3 really doesn't stick to its usual SOP and make a right hash of it.

I wonder if their target date could possibly coincide with the 3rd anniversary week? That would be nice. It does sound really interesting thinking about the possibilities, and the devs have made some great improvements to the game at times so they don't always mess up the changes. My biggest concern will be whether or not they bring down some big nerf hammer to another part of the game. That, to me, seems to be what they do most often when we get nice things.

fmftint

One way to make it retro active and fair, rank directly tied to total iso invested in your roster

Pongie

fmftint wrote:

One way to make it retro active and fair, rank directly tied to total iso invested in your roster

That's just the same as roster levels.

To me, I think the shield rank is just a way to restrict and open progress rewards that will be broken into clearance levels. You only have 1* roster, then your rank is much lower and the progress reward only goes up to a certain point. You have 2* roster, you rank higher and progress reward extends to the next clearance level, and so on.

Basically they are increasing progress rewards but restricting access to it by rank (however that is calculated).

Moon Roach

fmftint wrote:

One way to make it retro active and fair, rank directly tied to total iso invested in your roster

And that makes selling champions and using the ISO to rechampion the replacement an even better thing to do. Unless they just look at your current roster and levels, in which case it's a moving target, and theoretically you could drop a rank if you sold someone just after gaining a rank.

thisone

The progression ladders will probably be different based on your clearance level. Same goes for your node rewards.

I'm very interested to see how they will handle alliance based rewards with this system.

babinro

This has some great potential!

I'm envisioning a system similar to Diablo 3's account wide paragon leveling system. I'd like to express some ideas and potential concerns while this thing is still in it's initial stages.

What I don't want to see
- No significant impact on character performance in combat. No buffs to character health, skill damage, or anything that basically gives vets like myself even more of an advantage IN BATTLE to other players.
- Extreme caution if anything benefits the entire alliance. You don't want to create a situation where alliances are breaking up to abuse this feature.

What I hope to see
- Bonuses enhanced by PERSONAL SCALING and perhaps further enhanced slightly by days played. The system should encourage players grow their roster. The last thing we need is something that further promotes soft capping.
- Bonus ISO multiplier based on level
- Bonus HP multiplier based on level
- Bonus to TU levels when TU's are sent or received.
- Bonus number of Boosts or AP earned when game rewards them (4 crit boosts instead of 3!)
- Improved passive character recovery time
- Improved health pack regeneration rate
- Bonus to daily ISO earned per alliance member
- Improved odds of opening a randomly generated rewards (such as 2* cover and 250 ISO vs the 1* cover or 100 ISO)
- Improved skip bonus ISO (Going from 30, 20, 10 to 60, 30, 20)
- Bonus to number of skips before a ISO costs begin

Obviously not everything mentioned above needs to happen but it shows some of the potential of such a system.

ClydeFrog76

Cautiously optimistic.

If I can start crawling out of the 3*-4* transition without grinding I will be very happy indeed.

Dudemon

The biggest question is how will this affect alliance rewards with people at different "levels".

Perhaps some discussion here will yield some creative responses the developers can use. I for one have no clue what might work.


Dudemon

The Herald

Could people please stop pre-crying for retroactive prizes? It's embarrassing.

One thing this might be? Rewards increase for each replay of an event. Answers the recycled content issue by making the recycling a bonus.

slidecage

simple point... remember folks how many other times our hopes were crushed... lets all say nothing is changeing and when it does we all be happy instead of thinking its going to be great and then be pissed when its does not meet what you think it was to be

carrion_pigeons

Taking a minimalist (but optimistic) approach to my speculation, I'm going to guess it's just a currency multiplier applied to your account based on your MMR.

This has the advantage of giving people a reason to want to raise their MMR, since they'll actually be playing for higher stakes as a result, and it has the biggest impact on the people whose gameplay is suffering the most from linear rewards. It also scales into the future without a ton of issue, which is nice. I think that's the most natural place for improvement to the current rewards system.

If they want to pull a little more gameplay out of the whole thing, I think it would be interesting to set up a permanent Gauntlet, where you have to beat each fight once, but every time you complete a sub you rank up. This has the advantage of making it so the game always has challenging, rewarding content (although there might need to be some limits in play [maybe by using essential character nodes for very new characters?] to prevent cheesing it).

The Herald

There's really a lot they could do here, and I will be happy with just plain "more content" so I'm pretty optimistic about this