Feedback on minimum points change

keitterman

I don't understand this change.

You guys recognize that players are grinding easy nodes for points to win the bracket, so you made this change. It makes me think you've never attempted to score in the 1-10 position in a PvE event.

The whole thing is grind-y as hell. Let me explain it to you:

First, you have to be part of a large enough group with info. The info you need is when a group (ending time + shield level) has passed 1000 participants. Once it has, you are in the best position to win the grind race.

You join said group, and grind 4 wins on all nodes in a specific order to maximize your points. You are literally racing at this point. Story doesn't matter, game crashes cause anxiety, etc. This takes about an hour.

Once you get four clears, you stop, and don't touch it again until ~1 hr before the selected time, you grind out three more clears. With the remaining time until reset, you start smashing your way through the easiest node for 1 point per clear to get a slight neck ahead of everyone doing the same thing. (With this change, it will be one of the later nodes you do this with, that's all.)

Now, as soon as it resets, there is no "yay i got X place" b/c you have to smash through four clears of the next day's nodes. So every day, for 2 hrs (1 hr before, 1 hr after), you are grinding a minimum of 9 nodes 7 times.

Do this once or twice, and you begin to hate this game. A lot. It's also very unforgiving. If you fall asleep and miss your slot, don't bother. You're too far behind to ever catch up.

In my opinion this change does nothing to solve the problem of slowly training your die-hard players to dislike the game a lot.

That's the end of my feedback, but I don't like giving problems with no solutions, so here's one way around it:
Let players put a score on the event, and then try again to override said score.
For example, suppose the last node of every even was a boss node where the boss us unlimited health. The node is over when your team dies, and there are mechanics in place to make that happen quicker than normal. You score points based on damage dealt to the boss, and only your best score is used for placement.

Yuu could even make it more interesting and less flat with something like:
Venom Bomb boss:
new tiles on the board have X% change of dropping as a civilian tile. Boss (Venom or Carnage) adds 3-4 symbiotic tiles every turn.
a match that includes civilians + regular tiles = People saved = points
a match that includes civilians + symbiotic tiles = People turned = no points, minion added to the enemy team, or aoe dmg, something very bad.
matches that include symbiotic + regular tiles = Evil topped = AOE dmg to the enemy team, or something good for the player

Then for fun, every 10th civilian is Mary Jane/Aunt May/ JJ Jameson/Stan Lee, saving them heals your team, stuns the boss, or something.

People saved = placement on the leader boards. No grid, and you are rewarded for playing the event by getting to play an interesting (my opinion) version of the game.
If you don't like your score, play it again, only your highest score adds to the leader board.

elwhiteninja

it seems to me that the best/craziest solution would be to make the final stage of a pve event a true survival that never ends but gets harder and harder. and every time a team is beat the board is reset in order to ensure that you cant just use a special tile buffer to make it simple. then just change every node to a max of 6 clears. It would eliminate the need for playing at a specific time and eliminate the grind.