PvP Tournaments (long, technical)

It's an awesome idea for a system, but I feel like there are some pretty serious flaws in it. I say this as a guy with a background in behavioral economics and system development - but since I'm not working on anything competing in the mobile space right now, I feel perfectly happy giving some friendly advice!

Opponent Selection

There is currently no penalty for hitting "skip". Your player behavior incentives are to maximize the following: ( Points Earned / Resources Expended ). This means that your players are going to be obsessively hitting "skip" until they find a relatively weaker opponent with a relatively high point potential. With limited Heal Packs and slow healing, you want to be able to make the most of your time and resources.

The outcome is that players that are fighting "above their level", which is to say succeeding despite having a numerically disadvantaged team, are constantly targeted for attack, and perform poorly in tournaments for reasons that are invisible to them. These players are going to experience dissonance - they feel competent because they are defeating tough players, but feel that their competence is not being rewarded, as the overall outcome is negative.

A minor tweak that would help would be to simply put a -1 cost on skipping an opponent. Now a player has to deal with tougher opponents (and not just continually punish weaker ones) or pay a small price to do so. Players that play "above their level" will still get picked on more than average, but should have an easier time climbing the ladders.

Reward Scaling

If you check your logs, I'd wager my Spider-Man that nobody has ever earned the 1500 event point reward. The Thor Versus tournament has been running for 5 days now, and the top-rated players are somewhere around 1100 points. During the much shorter weekend tournaments, the top players also end up somewhere around 1100 points. It's possible that someone once squeaked up to 1250 points, but I suspect not. 1500 has definitely never been reached, and you have a whole six tiers of unearned rewards above that!

As the number of active players increases, you will see a very slow increase in the cap that people reach. But as that happens, the band of players who can reach that equilibrium point will also widen, which makes the top 5, top 30, and (assuming continued success) even top 200 slots be extremely volatile. The closer you are to the top of the pile, the more points you lose for losing and the fewer points you win for winning. I reached the top 30 of last weekend's tournament, and it felt like a literally Sisyphean task of earning 15 points and then losing 20 while I played. The ultimate user experience upshot is this:

The more players you have, players will be rewarded less for performing better. This is probably not what was intended, but it is the ultimate user experience. A larger number of players will be competing for the same number of rewards, and will feel less satisfaction for doing so.

Ultimately, I think you've successfully identified the axes you want to reward players along - you want to give goodies to the best players, and you also want to give rewards to players that play a lot. Right now, you are kind of succeeding at the first, but with increasingly frustrating competition for relatively fewer rewards, and you are not succeeding on the second axis, as no amount of play can be sufficient to earn your 1500 point reward. (Let alone your 3000 point reward!)


I think a small penalty on "skip" would help with the first problem, but the second one is much thornier. You could just remove the penalties for losses, and then your game becomes more of a race. In that world, the most skillful players would be able to compete on par with players that have assembled a numerically stronger team. In that world, your most enfranchised players would definitely have a shot at reaching the top rewards, but you lose the inherent catch-up mechanic for players that start the event late. I'd probably test a variety of variants. It's tricky.

Thanks for listening!

Tesla

Comments

  • Good points and something I've felt while playing as well.
  • I kinda like it...I played other games where ya do not loose points for loosing but then it is all for the payers. At least now the non payers can tag along.....a lil....I too reached #30 and then tought...."oow shoot. ..this is gonna hurt"....now cruising just below 200 and managed to get to 750 for the 100 gold...
  • It should be changed so the top % of players in the tourney get certain prizes, like say the top 1% gets the top reward, 2-3% get the next prize, 4-10% the next, and so on, so forth.

    As for the point goal rewards, the seriously need to be lowered. I've seen a few hit 1250, but once you're at the top, people can take a lot more points from you when they beat you, so it's hard to climb anywhere after 1k pts.
  • I just lost over 100 points for making the silly mistake of going to bed at night. That's about as many points as I had gained the night before.

    The emotional impact of this experience is not to want to start pushing the boulder back up that hill. The emotional impact is soul-crushing despair.
  • Tesla wrote:
    I just lost over 100 points for making the silly mistake of going to bed at night. That's about as many points as I had gained the night before.

    The emotional impact of this experience is not to want to start pushing the boulder back up that hill. The emotional impact is soul-crushing despair.

    Agreed; the current system is broken for casual players and non-payers as they cannot spend their way out of the negative loss penalties.

    @ArchJojo - This system still greatly awards the payers as they are the hardest to beat and also are able to constantly heal their characters and thus battle more. I don't see that being a fair trade off for the steep penalty that Tesla is talking about. At the end of the day it means people lose interest quicker as they aren't able to retain any forward momentum (or at least not substantial, enjoyable momentum) and thus aren't rewarded for their time and effort. That's bad news for the devs as well as the players.
  • Tesla wrote:
    I just lost over 100 points for making the silly mistake of going to bed at night. That's about as many points as I had gained the night before.

    The emotional impact of this experience is not to want to start pushing the boulder back up that hill. The emotional impact is soul-crushing despair.

    yeah there should be a cap on how many times u can get attacked per hour or login or something. not to mention the attacks my the same ppl multiple times things. i step to do laundry, come back, in 30 minutes i've been attacked 5-6 times for 150 point loss. in a night i'd expect that, but jeebs
  • Tesla wrote:
    I just lost over 100 points for making the silly mistake of going to bed at night. That's about as many points as I had gained the night before.

    The emotional impact of this experience is not to want to start pushing the boulder back up that hill. The emotional impact is soul-crushing despair.

    This drives me insane. As someone who has spent money on this game, when something like this happens, it makes me want to give up on the tournament and doesn't exactly get me excited to continue to play the game. They need to do something about this. For example, last night playing the One Star Tournament and trying to make the push to the next progression reward tier, I was constantly moving backwards because in the time it takes to play one match, I was attacked by TWO people. So I was in a constant loop of Win One, Lose Two. Frustrating. And yes, god forbid you go to sleep, you wake up to find that you were attacked over and over again.
  • I would love it if penalties for losses are abolished. As the best strategy right now for me is to wait until the last one or two days before even participating in the tournament. In the previous weekend even (Captain America), I consistently placed top five for most of the day. Two hours before the tournament ended, I woke up and had a -170 point loss and dropped from #1 to #17.
  • I would love it if penalties for losses are abolished. As the best strategy right now for me is to wait until the last one or two days before even participating in the tournament. In the previous weekend even (Captain America), I consistently placed top five for most of the day. Two hours before the tournament ended, I woke up and had a -170 point loss and dropped from #1 to #17.

    I don't think they (the penalties for being beaten) should be abolished as then you could pretty much buy your way into the top by fighting nothing but underpowered opponents (right now that is not a wise strategy as if they attack you back and win, you take a huge hit). I do think the penalties need to be adjusted and lowered by as much as 75%; that way it's still part of the strategy but players aren't devastated by going to bed and being knocked back 100's of points; also it would make reaching the upper point reward tiers more achievable.
  • Out of simple curiosity, anyone noticing muted losses? i woke up today to a bunch of losses, but they were all minus 4-10 range. This probably is because i'm only around 225 lp currently but if i remember correctly, i never took losses that low, even with ppl 200 lp above me beating me into the ground. wondering if others are seeing the same thing (this is a great change if it is)
  • Great original post.

    The constant back and forth of the same person attacking you gets pretty dull after a while. I messaged support to suggest that you can only attack somebody once per hour - that would cut out the getting picked on constantly that I observed over the weekend. Thankfully, didn't stop me achieving the top 2 finish, but has added a few grey hairs. Not the effect the devs are looking for, surely?
  • As of now, the tournament needs to revamp the following:
    1. The points reward gap between hitting a low ranked, versus a high ranked player. It takes too many points away from top ranked guys, such that the top 10 or 20 positions change too fast. A tournament should be a marathon, not a sprint. It's fine to drop a few places overnight, but not 100 over places. A week long tournament needs to reward players who keep pace.
    2. The way opponents are chosen. I'm not sure how the whole "tournament rating system" works, but I'm tired of attacking the same guys, or guys who offer me 0-3 points. Or ex-top players who aren't serious in the current tourney, but were serious challengers in past tourneys. The tourney rating system keeps pairing me with them, and they offer no rewards.
  • So post-patch this problem remains (not that I expected otherwise since the patch didn't mention any changes to the PvP system). I logged back into the game after 7 hours of down time (sleep) and had lost at least 6 battles for 97 points. This was all while my main/"A" team was defending. The minimum amount of fights this will take just to even back out is three very hard battles or 9-10 easier ones. As such I can expect I will need to use heals 6-9 times or swap out my "A" team for "B" team members (and thereby increasing both the difficulty of the battles and the likelihood of losing more defensive battles). That seems very excessive and sucks the joy out of playing the tournaments.

    This is not a tenable situation and, like so many have posted before me, needs to be addressed post-haste as it is a real problem. icon_e_sad.gif

    Edit: grammar