Alliance Quests & Advancement

Rito_The_Rito

As the game develops, new Alliance quest maps are released in order to help players advance their rosters and grow through the map crystal rewards after completion of the map. Past the map 5 threshold, Alliance quests have surfaced two major issues for a lot of players. Those two issues are tedium and investment.

Lets face it. Alliance Quests are dull. They are repetitive and the only reason people do them is to advance their rosters by obtaining catalyst and alpha crystals. The AQ content doesn't promote alliance and player growth enough past the map ceiling of that content. A map ceiling is when players no longer gain benefits from their current map completion rewards to advance their roster and are stockpiling crystals due to no benefit from opening. The time, difficulty, and most importantly, coordination required for the next tier of progression are not scaled well past a certain point. In my eyes, the most tedious ceiling for a lot of players is currently map 5.

In order to promote that will to grow and lesson the tedium of the current state of AQs, I have a few suggestions that would be beneficial for all players and alliances: Map Scaling.

Progressive Map Scaling takes in the three main factors:
1. Difficulty
2. Rewards for completion
3. Time & Coordination for completion

In order to scale difficulty based on new content you have a base line with higher difficulty nodes. So my idea to compensate for this growth is to add in a simple new feature: Substitutions. A map's roster is limited three characters at the moment. The substitutes would allow players to have an open roster space when a map starts and when they want, they can select their sub and replace them with a member on their team but be unable to change the champion they replaced back into their 3 champion team unless they had additional substitutes. This allows flexibility to avoid bottlenecks on existing maps based on the number of lanes required to complete the map with no players in reserve to run as backup. The only other way to avoid that issue is to redesign the previous maps when new content is released so the standard of top tier map's number of lanes is equal to the previous.

As an example we can use the current content as a guide for how this would all work.

Map 7 is the current top content. Since the beginning of Alliance Quests the top map required the highest cost, was the highest difficulty, and required the highest coordination across the board. This is progressively accurate and should remain unchanged.

Map 7: Unchanged in cost, rewards, and time for completion of map.
Map 6: 10-20% of map 7's cost, map 6 crystal, and 50 minutes per energy recharge, and 1 substitute.
Map 5: 20-40% of map 7's cost, map 5 crystal, and 40 minutes per energy recharge, and 2 substitutes.
etc etc.

When the next top tier map is released, the scale would shift to reflect the current top content. That would allow all the main factors to scale with new content and would help alleviate the tedium(time) and efforts(difficulty) required to progress individuals and alliances to avoid a map ceiling and help with progression as the game continues to grow.