"Supposed to lose"

carrion_pigeons

Why do people keep saying this in quotes, as if it wasn't a true statement?

Of course you're supposed to lose. It's a competitive game. If you aren't supposed to lose then the game is nothing but a boring grindy clickfest where it doesn't really matter what you do. The entire point of any competitive game is that, about half the time, you're "supposed to lose". Is that something people aren't clear on?

If anything, I'd say the game tries way too hard to keep you from losing, since it very often *is* a boring grindy clickfest where it doesn't really matter what you do.

GurlBYE

carrion pigeons wrote:

Why do people keep saying this in quotes, as if it wasn't a true statement?

Of course you're supposed to lose. It's a competitive game. If you aren't supposed to lose then the game is nothing but a boring grindy clickfest where it doesn't really matter what you do. The entire point of any competitive game is that, about half the time, you're "supposed to lose". Is that something people aren't clear on?

If anything, I'd say the game tries way too hard to keep you from losing, since it very often *is* a boring grindy clickfest where it doesn't really matter what you do.

It's in reference to something said last anniversary event last year.

Also, it'd take too much effort and and text you likely wouldn't read to explain to you why competitive is different than pvp being set up as a roster check based more on how much you spend or when you joined as opposed to how strategically you play.

And everyone knows there's not much strategy involved in the game play.

GrumpySmurf1002

It's in quotes because it's a running joke from the first run of Galactus, when the devs explained why it was so damn hard to beat, using that exact phrase.

wymtime

GrumpySmurf1002 wrote:

It's in quotes because it's a running joke from the first run of Galactus, when the devs explained why it was so damn hard to beat using that exact phrase.

You had to beat Galactus in 3 moves or less and if you didn't he killed your whole team.

"Your suppose to lose!" And they felt this would be fun for the players

Linkster79

It's not competitive, hence the alliance families, alliance truces and out of game shield check rooms and battle chats.

JVReal

It's a carry forward from the first run of Galactus... you were here for that one right?

You had a very slim chance of beating him, and the devs came on (ICEIX) and said "You are supposed to lose" as answer to people wiping every time they fought Galactus... this had horrific back lash for them and they pretty much stopped communicating.

The challenge of the game isn't to lose 90% of the time. It isn't to lose 80%, or even 50%. The challenge is to pick the best team you have in your roster to fight the team that is presented to you. Every fight should have a decent shot at winning. Progress should still be possible.

So when people see outrageous scaling, increased difficulty in scoring progression, and backwards momentum when playing PVP, they go back to the developer mantra they design the game by and inadvertently made us aware of: You are supposed to lose.

Granted, they have made a lot of changes that are positive since then. But whenever someone sees something they don't like they revert back to that old dev comment "You are supposed to lose", even if it really doesn't apply.

GurlBYE

Linkster79 wrote:

It's not competitive, hence the alliance families, alliance truces and out of game shield check rooms and battle chats.

Technically speaking it's just not strategic in case anyone gets semantic with you, but I'm on board.

Fightmastermpq

wymtime wrote:

GrumpySmurf1002 wrote:

It's in quotes because it's a running joke from the first run of Galactus, when the devs explained why it was so damn hard to beat using that exact phrase.

You had to beat Galactus in 3 moves or less and if you didn't he killed your whole team.

"Your suppose to lose!" And they felt this would be fun for the players

And not to mention the total points available in boss events decreases with every loss - meaning that if you lose as often as you are supposed to you cannot hit progression.

It's said in quotes not to be sarcastic, but as a specific reference to a design that the devs made harder than it ever should have been.

The Herald

Placement will always have winners and losers as that's a direct contest.

When personal progression is gated off to prevent you progressing, it's time to sarcastically throw the devs words back in their faces again

It refers to them hand waving when they screw up and make it too hard, stomping on more than 90% of their playerbase.

Sharing some CP out early is a great move that will really help people, but the defensive points are still broken. The devs are not yet calculating correctly after using the player's exploit as a crutch for a year to avoid dealing with their flawed system that can't handle tiers of play.

GurlBYE

JVReal wrote:

It's a carry forward from the first run of Galactus... you were here for that one right?

You had a very slim chance of beating him, and the devs came on (ICEIX) and said "You are supposed to lose" as answer to people wiping every time they fought Galactus... this had horrific back lash for them and they pretty much stopped communicating.

The challenge of the game isn't to lose 90% of the time. It isn't to lose 80%, or even 50%. The challenge is to pick the best team you have in your roster to fight the team that is presented to you. Every fight should have a decent shot at winning. Progress should still be possible.

So when people see outrageous scaling, increased difficulty in scoring progression, and backwards momentum when playing PVP, they go back to the developer mantra they design the game by and inadvertently made us aware of: You are supposed to lose.

Granted, they have made a lot of changes that are positive since then. But whenever someone sees something they don't like they revert back to that old dev comment "You are supposed to lose", even if it really doesn't apply.

The reason you're supposed to lose is being brought up is being people mistook pvp scores being lowered and defensive teams being selected based on level was an attempt to spread the points more evenly.

They were unfortunately mistaken in their assumptions and thought pvp was being made friendlier for a wider variety of rosters after the pve changes.

Moon Roach

Here's the link to the original post, from October last year.

The relevant paragraph (with my highlighting):

Galactus is different. The "minion" fights against the villains are relatively simple. They're there as minor hazards but relatively easily winnable. Galactus on the other hand is a massive threat. He's not going to be stopped by gnats. Iron Fist punching him in the toe isn't very painful. So he gets bored and swats them away. In game terms, this means that players are going to be beaten. Winning a round against Galactus is an achievement. You're supposed to lose. Every time you do, you're still chipping away at his life. It's an exercise in damage in aggregate. Over the 3.5 days, hitting him over and over to finally bring down the big bad is somewhat slow, but certainly effective.

Jam_Adams

hard to believe this quote is 1 year old now

JHawkInc

Change in emphasis mine.

Moon Roach wrote:

Here's the link to the original post, from October last year.

The relevant paragraph (with my highlighting):

Galactus is different. The "minion" fights against the villains are relatively simple. They're there as minor hazards but relatively easily winnable. Galactus on the other hand is a massive threat. He's not going to be stopped by gnats. Iron Fist punching him in the toe isn't very painful. So he gets bored and swats them away. In game terms, this means that players are going to be beaten. Winning a round against Galactus is an achievement. You're supposed to lose. Every time you do, you're still chipping away at his life. It's an exercise in damage in aggregate. Over the 3.5 days, hitting him over and over to finally bring down the big bad is somewhat slow, but certainly effective.

That's basically how it's functioned for every boss fight. I mean, isn't general strategy for Civil War for the alliance to push one side, and when people stop being able to effectively win one side to switch to the other? That's direct acknowledgement that those people are "supposed to lose" the higher rounds, and taking advantage of the dual boss fights to continue making progress.

That's kinda the point of boss events, to get the alliance to work together to persevere in order to cumulatively reach a success where it is impossible for an individual to do alone. (kinda reminds me of the "If we can't protect the Earth, you can be damned well sure we'll avenge it." line from The Avengers)

You're "supposed to lose" in a boss event to give you reason to try new teams and new strategies to work your way around it. It's meant as a challenge, not as an SOP that says "If the players win, we failed as devs." But people get all up in a huff about it anyways, despite working exactly as intended (and they've even tweaked and adjusted things to maintain that challenge, lowering difficulty spikes in Round 8, and tweaking Civil War and Ultron to up the difficulty once we'd gotten good at those events).

And now it's being applied to PVP, for some reason? I'm not exactly sure what the phrase even has to do with PVP, other than it gives people something to shout at the top of their lungs while running around like any of the rest of us care about their pro/anti cupcake agendas.

GurlBYE

JHawkInc wrote:

Change in emphasis mine.

Moon Roach wrote:

Here's the link to the original post, from October last year.



You're "supposed to lose" in a boss event to give you reason to try new teams and new strategies to work your way around it. It's meant as a challenge, not as an SOP that says "If the players win, we failed as devs." But people get all up in a huff about it anyways, despite working exactly as intended (and they've even tweaked and adjusted things to maintain that challenge, lowering difficulty spikes in Round 8, and tweaking Civil War and Ultron to up the difficulty once we'd gotten good at those events).

And now it's being applied to PVP, for some reason? I'm not exactly sure what the phrase even has to do with PVP, other than it gives people something to shout at the top of their lungs while running around like any of the rest of us care about their pro/anti cupcake agendas.

I feel the thread more than sufficiently answers all this but a recap.

1- galactus round 1 there was no strategy.
Hit his Ap number? You're dead.
Had an invincible character?Also dead,
One relevant use of Electras black? Dead
The list can go on.

Strategies were literally not allowed because galactus operated in a roster check way,.

No matter the team, no matter the strat, it was beat him in 3 turns or die, less the more round it went on and the damage from his ap gaining tiles was high enough to kill most characters. 4 star was endgame.

3 turns is 9 ap. You'd need a 9 ap attack that did 5 digits of damage to beat him successfully. There are few combos that can do that. That's not so much strategy as it is a roster check. Strategy is being able to use what you have, not what is potentially out there, especially when its tied behind rng.

2- I already mentioned why its being brought up in reference to pvp.
Making this about cupcakes is literally ignoring half the problem about not knowing what your defensive team is, cupcakes were only relevant to the upper crust of the game.

Criticism isn't whining because you don't agree.
This forum is really funny in that regard.

" it doesn't effect me, so it's whining" is not even borderline trolling. it just is

The Herald

Whinging about other people whinging about cupcakes, is still whinging about cupcakes.

If they haven't been mentioned yet, maybe don't mention them at all?

Personal progression is walled off to the people who need to progress. That 4* cover is just iso8 or a Champion level to the people who breeze past it on their way to fight over placement rewards (the true competition), but it represents a widening gap to the people being mauled by late climbers as they breeze up the rankings.

It isn't quite working right.

It's only a short season, so there's plenty of time to tweak it and this is more an active test than anything else, but personal progression should be about how much effort you put in. How engaged you are with the game. PLACEMENT rewards, the better rewards, are where the best rise to the top, which is where cupcakes had to die because it got degenerate at the top.

(P.S. The top are still merrily baking, it's the majority who need a little more tweaking to help out).

TetsujinOni

The top are merrily trying to find ways to not get bored.

Homogenization of what you show behind a gating function just means the interesting gameplay for explorer personalities is "what can I get through the gate".

Blahahah

To be fair, their logic was solid. You SHOULD lose to Galactus, but that doesn't work so well on a game with limited resources to work with in addition to lock outs.

Most players mistake the idea that if something is hard, it's a "You're supposed to lose" moment, but that often makes light of the fact that during the pre-galactic event discussion, several strategies with good merit came through. These strategies were quite literally patched out of the event mere hours before it began, making the event as a whole much more difficult to play.

It's this combination of heavy difficulty and the removal of counter play options that caused the most backlash, as some players felt slighted and more hesitant to discuss strategy before events in the forums now. They amended it and the event is rather good now, BUT once bitten twice shy as they say.

Dragon_Nexus

Blahahah wrote:

To be fair, their logic was solid. You SHOULD lose to Galactus, but that doesn't work so well on a game with limited resources to work with in addition to lock outs.

Yeah, thematically that's fine.
Where it made no sense at all was to still require you to pour health packs into your dead characters. If Galactus simply swatted you away and you were locked out, but still at full health, that would be frustrating but you could make the argument of a war of attrition. The execution of their theme was horrendous and it made it feel like they'd deliberately designed the fight to make you spend money on health packs. Regardless of how true that was, it made the boss fight feels incredible cynically motivated. It was just one more nasty taste in the mouth during an already disappointing anniversary.

Thing is, it's a video game. And the player is meant to feel empowered in a video game to where they should win if they feel they made the right choices. If it feels more like you're fighting the system to *force* it to let you win then the player doesn't feel like they accomplished anything. It's incredibly bad game design to make the player feel like they can't win because if you're put into a situation where the only winning move is not to play, guess what they'll do?

Blahahah

Dragon_Nexus wrote:

Blahahah wrote:

To be fair, their logic was solid. You SHOULD lose to Galactus, but that doesn't work so well on a game with limited resources to work with in addition to lock outs.

Yeah, thematically that's fine.
Where it made no sense at all was to still require you to pour health packs into your dead characters. If Galactus simply swatted you away and you were locked out, but still at full health, that would be frustrating but you could make the argument of a war of attrition. The execution of their theme was horrendous and it made it feel like they'd deliberately designed the fight to make you spend money on health packs. Regardless of how true that was, it made the boss fight feels incredible cynically motivated. It was just one more nasty taste in the mouth during an already disappointing anniversary.

Thing is, it's a video game. And the player is meant to feel empowered in a video game to where they should win if they feel they made the right choices. If it feels more like you're fighting the system to *force* it to let you win then the player doesn't feel like they accomplished anything. It's incredibly bad game design to make the player feel like they can't win because if you're put into a situation where the only winning move is not to play, guess what they'll do?

One could argue for the malicious intent, actually. Again, giving consideration to them patching out the player ideas given just before the event.

Xenoberyll

Blahahah wrote:

..These strategies were quite literally patched out of the event mere hours before it began, making the event as a whole much more difficult to play..

That was a huge middle finger towards the players. The devs designed their event without knowing how the players might beat it but when the players discuss and come up with fairly easy solutions on this forum the event got patched to ruin these strategies leaving an almost unbeatable boss and the 'you're supposed to lose' quote.

It's a little bit of a wonder this forum didn't die that week and that people continued rewarding the Devs with paying and playing. Fortunately a lot of things have improved since then but we're still waiting for a good communication and relationship between devs and community.

DeNappa

Dragon_Nexus wrote:

Blahahah wrote:

To be fair, their logic was solid. You SHOULD lose to Galactus, but that doesn't work so well on a game with limited resources to work with in addition to lock outs.

Yeah, thematically that's fine.
Where it made no sense at all was to still require you to pour health packs into your dead characters. If Galactus simply swatted you away and you were locked out, but still at full health, that would be frustrating but you could make the argument of a war of attrition. The execution of their theme was horrendous and it made it feel like they'd deliberately designed the fight to make you spend money on health packs. Regardless of how true that was, it made the boss fight feels incredible cynically motivated. It was just one more nasty taste in the mouth during an already disappointing anniversary.

Yeah, I agree. While it's not very frequent, there are more games that employ some 'unwinnable fight' scenario, but it's generally used as some way to drive the plot. Like, facing an endgame boss that kicks your **** early on in the game, only to have them return further on when you *can* win. So I feel it'd have been a lot better if they had come up with some way of forcefully losing the match *without* the health loss.