RotGP should be the standard for PvE coalition events

Kresgwyr

First of all, thanks a lot for bringing back RotGP this weekend. 

I know we got weary of this event in the past, because of the endless repetition of it. But it's a great event, and I'm having a blast revisiting it with IXL and RIX this weekend.

Most importantly, it made me realize that the RotGP format should really be the standard of PvE coalition events. It's the most well balanced event out there.

3×3 nodes, 2 charges for the start, balanced recharges schedule ... It's a delight and a blast to play, especially compared to the grindfest that is Bot4T.

Please, consider doing more events like that. And for people who want more grind, just schedule a solo PvP at the same time, that should satisfy everyone.

joerginger

Seconded, but a day shorter and with normal 8 hour recharges it would be even better.

fiirst

joerginger said:

Seconded, but a day shorter and with normal 8 hour recharges it would be even better.

And soooo exceeded Boss's HP to make sure we know when the event finished.

ZW2007-

Crazy idea here, since the event has a boss health that seems to be completely useless, why not make it have a use? Suppose the boss has 1 million health and the event has a 3 day timer. After the three day timer is up, the event ends and it's still at 20% or 200k health. Maybe reduce the bosses health by 150k so that the players could potentially kill the boss before the 3 day timer is up. Here's the twist, if we actually kill the boss before the event ends, every single player that participated gets a pretty nice reward. So instead of the boss dying and people getting mad that they potentially missed out on a certain progression reward or their coalition got a rank lower than they could have, they get a nice bonus for being part of killing the boss that offsets those other loses or compliments their gains if they already hit full progression and their coalition ranked high.

IM_CARLOS

Bosshealth is pretty useless unless there would be a bonus reward for killing the boss befor end of event. 

Volrak

ZW2007- said:

Crazy idea here, since the event has a boss health that seems to be completely useless, why not make it have a use?

get a nice bonus for being part of killing the boss

We've already seen that it's very difficult to balance the boss health at a level that doesn't end the event too quickly, or too slowly.  It'd be an order of magnitude harder to balance the boss health on the knife-edge required such that it wouldn't be obvious one way or the other whether the boss would be killed before the event timer ends.

I think boss health as implemented really is useless.

Kinesia

I'd previously thought I'd love to play RotGP as Legacy just to see what I could do, but I realise now that'd only work as a once off whereas keeping it standard makes it interesting over and over again. "What new tools do I have to do this _now_?", not just cards but new planeswalkers, new strategies, it's great.

Mainloop25

Kinesia said:

I'd previously thought I'd love to play RotGP as Legacy just to see what I could do, but I realise now that'd only work as a once off whereas keeping it standard makes it interesting over and over again. "What new tools do I have to do this _now_?", not just cards but new planeswalkers, new strategies, it's great.

On the other hand, I'd like to play old PvE events with forced restrictions as well. Not that I couldn't do it myself but there is something more entertaining when the game makes you not play legacy cards. 

span_argoman

Volrak said:

ZW2007- said:

Crazy idea here, since the event has a boss health that seems to be completely useless, why not make it have a use?

get a nice bonus for being part of killing the boss

We've already seen that it's very difficult to balance the boss health at a level that doesn't end the event too quickly, or too slowly.  It'd be an order of magnitude harder to balance the boss health on the knife-edge required such that it wouldn't be obvious one way or the other whether the boss would be killed before the event timer ends.

I think boss health as implemented really is useless.

That's not actually true. It's only very difficult to balance because they have fixed it such that the boss health only goes down when players clear nodes on the event.

As an example, say the boss for RotGP currently has 2.5 million health. This week's RotGP ended after 10 charges (including the starting 2). So that was an average of 250k of damage dealt per charge.

Of course realistically more damage would be dealt early on when everyone had not hit max Progression yet, but let's use a fixed rate for the calculations. The conclusion is the same either way.

Players being 10% more active would cut the event timing short by 1 whole charge, whereas if we were 25% more active the event could end 2 whole charges (16 hours!) earlier. And as I recall, that was what happened with the second ever ToZ which finished blazingly fast after the first one wasn't anywhere near finishing even after 5 whole days.

Now let's take an alternative system where the boss health goes down when either players clear nodes or when time passes. Say the boss starts with 10 million health but loses 1.5k health every minute which is 720k every charge (8 hours). Together with the 250k damage from players per charge, that's 0.97m per charge. In this system, the event would end some 2.5 hours later than the first scenario.

The difference comes when we vary the player activity. Let's bump up player activity by 50% for 375k damage per charge. Combined with the timed health loss, that's 1.095m damage per charge which leads to the event ending around an hour after the 9th charge comes in. In the original system, a 10% increase in player activity would have shortened the event time by as much.

Likewise, halving player activity "only" increases the event time by 12 hours. The ratio between player-dealt damage and time-dealt damage can be varied by the developers depending on how long they want the event to last and how variable they want the event duration to be.

And if we're talking about bonus rewards for taking the boss down, it doesn't have to be one fixed reward if everyone manages to take down the boss. It can be a reward for taking down the boss, and then a small reward if we managed to take it down with 8 hours to spare, and another small reward if we did it a whole day earlier, etc. The rewards can be graduated like our Progression and Ranking rewards are.

Volrak

span_argoman said:

Now let's take an alternative system where the boss health goes down when either players clear nodes or when time passes.

I like the way you think.  This kind of approach could make the balance easier.  But it would remain a problem IMO.  The takedown point still depends on the number of active players.  If we got a significant increase then without tuning it'll tend to make the boss predictably beatable, and vice versa. If it's a new event with new Standard format and win rates are low, then without tuning, the boss will be predictably unbeatable.  In either case, even if proactive tuning occurred, it's still hard to see why they'd always be able to get it right (despite the odds being shortened significantly via your approach).

Personally I think there are much more interesting things they could do with a boss health concept (and which don't require perpetual re-tuning), such as having a boss health target per coalition.