Design-a-PvE Format (Making it fun)

Unknown

Survivor Arena

Each battle becomes increasingly more difficult. Each battle has a reward. At end of event you get reward for highest round completed and all the ones preceding it.

Can only use each character once.

If you lose you go back to battle one with all characters available again.

Would force you to play with your entire roster and strategize how you wish to deploy them.

Unknown

Change the time requirement of PVE to *achiev goal within 7 days* or 5 days or whatever

Then allow people to play at their own pace within that time frame

Remove rubberbanding. Remove scaling.

I want to feel powerful and not trudge through lvl 400 mobs with the only characters you can (and no cmag is not good enough for this despite all those people who cry that he's op in pve with his match 4/5s - I wouldn't even consider him for 400s because you need stunlock or you can't win.

The fact that you practically need Spiderman and MnMags to do 400s is atrocious and terrible planning or greed at hoping people pay money to use buffs.

Please get back to the specifics that make the game fun. More time = better roster = sense of power = feeling good killing stuff faster than before. My lv 50 1* alt account can finish battles faster than my 3* 141s. That's just not right

Please remove the tedious portion of the game (and what is tedious should be obvious)

Let us have fun please

Unknown

Meta-Mechanic Ideas
- Flex starting time: The signup for the event lasts for 24 hours. As soon as the bracket you're placed in fills up, the ending time will be set to the next nearest clock hour 5 (or 7 or 9) days later. So if you sign up at 3:43 p.m. EST and the bracket fills up at 4:17 p.m., your event will end 5 days later on May 6th at 5 p.m. All brackets created after the initial 24 hour starting period will have a fixed ending time. Signing up on day 2 (after the initial 24 hours) means your event will run for a shorter period of time.
- Alliance Progression Bar - Several events have had a global progression bar where <something> happens when it gets filled. Sometimes it has been a special node with a nice ISO reward, sometimes it's been a node that gives part of the story and a cover. Make it alliance-based instead of global based. Whatever the reward, the target number will be based on the size of your alliance. Changes to the alliance members (either size or rotating members) will change the target value. However, only points earned while you're a member of the alliance will count towards the progress bar (so earning 100K points with Alliance A won't count if you switch to Alliance B mid-event). So yes, this is an alliance-only reward, but doesn't unfairly penalize small alliances.

Game-Mode Idea: "Crushing Tide"
- Have around 15 nodes or so spaced along the map. Harder ones to the right, easier ones to the left. Every <##> hours the rightmost node(s) become unavailable as those locations get taken over by <some threat>. The takeover is represented by a darker shading moving across the map and a bright red line at the current front-border. Winning in the available nodes will push the <threat> back towards the right side of the screen, making the more difficult nodes available again. Winning the hardest available nodes will count the most towards pushing the <threat> back.
- Leaderboard points are awarded based solely on the difficulty of the node (no rubberbanding), but limited community scaling will occur at fixed intervals (assuming the flex time system above, it will occur every day at your starting hour). The scaling represents the <threat> devoting more resources to the fight, and having it occur at a fixed time (instead of continuously) means everyone will have roughly the same amount of time to fight at a given level.

Alliance-vs-Alliance PVP version of "Crushing Tide"
- Alliance commanders can sign their alliance up and they are matched against a like-sized alliance (only one sign-up per alliance, matches made on alliance size & average level across all rosters)
- The nodes are arranged in a 5x3 grid, with 3 rows of 5 nodes.
- Seed teams get placed in the nodes initially, but as soon as a player wins, the offensive team is placed in that node instead. The "easiest" nodes (the left-most) can be fought and won 10 times for the defending player, essentially placing 10 defending teams in that node. Each node moving to the right can hold 2 fewer team, so as you progress in a given row, you have two fewer defensive teams.
- The nodes are inverted for the defending team, so the easiest nodes to defend are the hardest for the enemy team to obtain (meaning that the defenders can hold 10 teams on their easiest node, but that is the hardest node for the attackers and they can only put 2 teams there).
- Capturing the final node in a row scores you a point (this can't be done against seed teams; nor can it be done until the defenders have 10 defensive teams there). After a node is captured, it is inactive until the defending alliance again puts 10 defenders there.
- At the end of a 3 day event (b/c this version is PVP), the alliance with the most points with the alliance prize (probably ISO and HP). Normal leaderboard prizes go for everyone else.

Unknown

'Flipped' nodes where you play as both offence and defence in order to get points. Your opponents are exactly the same level as you are, so if you've got 3 x 141's then you face 3 x 141's.

The scenario would have an alternate history timeline using the following two stage mechanic for each node...

Stage 1: Hero Win - You pick your 3 hero characters to fight 3 equal strength villains (no goons in this event) and if you win you get 50% of the node points value.

Stage 2: Villain Win - In the alternative timeline you take control of the villains you faced against your Hero team and need to win to get the other 50% of the points.

At the end of the event, the total amount of points accumulated by the hero or villain win nodes would determine the final outcome of the storyline and the winning timeline.

This structure would both ensure fair matches (opposition exactly matches your level) and a strategic layer where you need to make sure your attacking hero team isn't too overpowering otherwise you won't be able to defeat them in the 'flip' battle where you take control of the villains. That way you'd have to think twice about using Spidey / Mags because you know you'd have to fight them yourself if you do.

Personally I'd reduce rubberbanding drastically so that you need to be scoring points every 8 hours as a minimum or you fall behind the leaders. Hard work should result in reward, and 8hrs should be casual enough for it not to become a grind.

Unknown

There's a ton they could do to make PvE fun again. I'm not getting paid to chuck out ideas for the game, but I do have a few I would gladly like to see:

More enemy variety. WAY more. Right now we have pretty much 2 kinds of enemies: Ones that instantly kill someone on the team, and ones that hurt the whole team. Maggia Dons and Colonels come to mind as one of the few that break the mold, but as it is we are seeing way too few variety in our missions. There's a ton more creativity one could do with the game there - and if people were seeing more prominent and varied threats that aren't just ARES DAKEN BULLSEYE match after match, they'd have fun again. Particularly when numbers aren't just linearly (and lazily) scaled up, and become 'Welp damn, one ability got off, GG' after a bit.

Remember when snipers didn't instakill (still hurt like hell), but instead took out a huge chunk of the board? Stuff like that would be way more fun again. Different board shapes. LESS GRIND (Thick as Thieves was done very well, despite what most people say - their complaints are about balance shifts mid-event, not the event itself). Basically, more variance means more fun. Bigger numbers bores people and makes them quit if it's just the same ****, different hat.

Unknown

I'd like to see a mode where you can use your ENTIRE ROSTER, when someone dies, next in line gets swapped in. Maybe in an epic fight against Apocalypse or something. This would also encourage leveling up everyone.

I was playing FFVI a while back where in the last fight against Kefka required you to use almost everyone on your team to take down...

Unknown

Kamahl_FoK wrote:

Basically, more variance means more fun. Bigger numbers bores people and makes them quit if it's just the same ****, different hat.

I think most people think the Simulators are the best event b/c every couple days you got a whole new mish-mash of enemies mixed together in new and annoying ways. Even that got old though b/c at it's heart, you're still matching colored gems. That event was also good b/c it forced players to vary their roster occasionally. I can only imagine the uproar if there was ever a Sim node of Patch, CMags, Spiderman. Make that the 5K ISO node and you would see a riot.

Kamahl_FoK wrote:

I'm not getting paid to chuck out ideas for the game

The problem with PVE isn't just the lack of variance in opponents (though they could definitely do something to help fix that). It's the lack of game modes and actual thought that goes into playing. After day 1, people figure out the refreshes and rubberbanding and calculate out all the perfect play times and that's it. Go match 3's at the appropriate time and you're done. The idea in this thread is to brainstorm and have fun with the community; not to improve the game but to give the developers a conceptual idea of things we'd want to play outside of the match 3 mechanic. Something bigger and better to work towards. I doubt they'd take any of these ideas verbatim (except for mine of course - it's perfect ), but it could say to them "huh, there's an underlying mechanic there that has some potential" and then the guys who are getting paid for this go do the voodoo that they do.

But ultimately, yeah, this is a "just for fun" thread to be part of the community. Don't take it too seriously.

_RiO_

Riggy wrote:

Meta-Mechanic Ideas
- Flex starting time: The signup for the event lasts for 24 hours. As soon as the bracket you're placed in fills up, the ending time will be set to the next nearest clock hour 5 (or 7 or 9) days later. So if you sign up at 3:43 p.m. EST and the bracket fills up at 4:17 p.m., your event will end 5 days later on May 6th at 5 p.m. All brackets created after the initial 24 hour starting period will have a fixed ending time. Signing up on day 2 (after the initial 24 hours) means your event will run for a shorter period of time.
- Alliance Progression Bar - Several events have had a global progression bar where <something> happens when it gets filled. Sometimes it has been a special node with a nice ISO reward, sometimes it's been a node that gives part of the story and a cover. Make it alliance-based instead of global based. Whatever the reward, the target number will be based on the size of your alliance. Changes to the alliance members (either size or rotating members) will change the target value. However, only points earned while you're a member of the alliance will count towards the progress bar (so earning 100K points with Alliance A won't count if you switch to Alliance B mid-event). So yes, this is an alliance-only reward, but doesn't unfairly penalize small alliances.

I love all of your mentioned ideas, but in particular the quoted meta-mechanic ones stand out.

A flexible start time simply needs to happen to give European and Asian players a fair chance at competition without ruining their sleep schedule. And what you are suggesting with a 24hr signup is a perfectly fitting way of implementing it without getting in the way of players.

The idea for an alliance progression bar in events? Golden! Now that is how you can make alliance rewards work as a 'fun extra' for the game. Hey devs!! Are you taking notes here?

Unknown

Yeah, an alliance progression bar is an awesome idea. We're a team, after all, we should be working toward specific goals together.

Here's an idea for PvE: the story progresses through a couple of chapters, with fight difficulty that increases toward "boss battles" but is set. In each chapter, you have a limited roster determined by the story and some nodes that require specific characters to complete. The nodes themselves could give out the standard rewards, and you could play them repeatedly to earn the ones you wanted. EXCEPT:

There are no points. You're playing for the rewards on the nodes. The boss nodes carry the prizes that would otherwise be on the progression table, and you (obviously) have to play into the later chapters in the event in order to win the better prizes. Chapter 1 has the lowest overall difficulty and the worst reward, Chapter 2 is harder and has better stuff, etc., etc. Finally, the last chapter and hardest boss fight gives you a cover of the new character being introduced. After a certain point you're just replaying the final chapter with indefinitely scaling enemy difficulty--but the "boss" node prizes are refreshed and/or improved. So if you're fighting level 400 dudes, you're doing it for something good (like a 10 pack of heroic tokens or a fat HP prize). If this doesn't prove difficult enough, there could be a certain point after which the story chapters carried extra difficulty modifiers (hard-core mode where a downed character is out for the rest of the chapter, a constant AP drip for enemies, a roster roulette to determine your team, etc.).

But the point is that it would be entirely non-competitive. If there were alliance- and community-wide benchmarks to be met with additional prizes, then it would in fact be actually cooperative. We as players would feel like a team of superheros fighting supervillains, and not like a bunch of individual teams of jerks squabbling with each other for personal gain. This would also allow for a new way to distribute new character covers: 1 as a community benchmark that everyone would probably get, 1 as an alliance benchmark that many dedicated players would get, and 1 as a hard-to-reach late chapter prize that only the advanced and dedicated would get.

Unknown

Oh, I didn't mention: this is just like any other RPG ever created, and to some extent just like the prologue but with alliance and community features (and a time limit). We don't have to re-invent the wheel here.

Puritas

Moon 17 wrote:

not like a bunch of individual teams of jerks squabbling with each other for personal gain.

You would change the entire core concept of this game? :O

_RiO_

Puritas wrote:

Moon 17 wrote:

not like a bunch of individual teams of jerks squabbling with each other for personal gain.

You would change the entire core concept of this game? :O

lol.

In all seriousness though: It's not like the introduction of alliances hasn't already turned the entire game and metagame inside out, so might as well try.

Unknown

1. You only face Goons

2. You can only use Daredevil

Best PVE ever

Unknown

Posted a wordy PVE overhaul idea over in the suggestions forum: http://www.d3pforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=6644#p125761

tl;dr:

Ditch the grinding, scaling, rubberbanding, and point accumulation. Points for nodes are based on performance in that node. Repeated attempts don't accumulate points, they only give a shot at a better score.

Unknown

zaymac wrote:

1. You only face Goons

2. You can only use Daredevil

Best PVE ever

Daredevil, The falcon, and bullseye team up to draw out the match long enough to actually make bullseye's black a useful skill

Unknown

Rather than bland storylines (I can't get excited by Iron Man's 'hilarious' quips) and stupidly scaled enemies, how about something a little different? Something like the challenge tower on Mortal Kombat 9, where you have to use certain characters to complete scenarios and climb to the top of the tower. Getting rewards along the way. Not sure how creative it could be - MK9 added status ailments and buffs, that would be pretty interesting if they could be implemented. But if not, you could just stick to having to use certain moves to finish battles off, or perhaps ban certain powers from use? Handicap matches, etc.

This is something that could be played on a pure single player basis, no brackets needed. Just you against the ladder...

Unknown

The "min-level" event: For purposes of the event, every cover level is reduced to 1, every character level is reduced to the minimum for that * level (15/6/1).

DirigiblePilot

ZenBrillig wrote:

The "min-level" event: For purposes of the event, every cover level is reduced to 1, every character level is reduced to the minimum for that * level (15/6/1).

See, I would actually like this. It would allow you to use pretty much whatever characters you want and not be penalized because they are not a high level.
You'd be able to see a lot more variety!

TheHueyFreeman

I personally support the survivor and "pick 9 to be randomized" ideas.

rixmith

I would definitely like to see play modes that allow me to utilize more of my roster. How about a PVE mode where you get 5 nodes of differing levels and some buffed characters. But once you beat a node with three characters they are not available for the other nodes (from a story point of view all nodes are actually happening simultaneously). So what team do I send to the Level 40 node? My level 41 soft-capped 3*** heroes, or my 1* heroes? Do I save all my buffed heroes to tackle the biggest node, or do I put one with a team of lower level characters to capture the mid-level nodes and forgo the highest one? You could have nodes at levels appropriate for players at any level of their progression, and make the rewards appropriate.

I would just like a PVE that makes all my heroes valuable and challenges me with strategy in figuring out good teams to set up for particular situations.