Cavalier Event Quest Difficulty

Apologies if this has been suggested before or previously addressed, but I feel like a new level of difficulty should be added for event quests when reaching cavalier. Uncollected is not as challenging anymore and rewards for new tier could be more favorable for players to earn 6 and 5 stars.

Comments

Caino1023

It has. Many times. But that does not make your opinion invalid. Many agree with you, myself included.

Kabam has mentioned in interviews that this is something they are looking at/ working on.

StudentOfGroot

Didn't they say they'd have it within a few months?

rascaweb

Perfect! Sorry, came back to the game relatively recently so haven’t been keeping up with what they’re planning on doing! Very excited for this then!

Lvernon15

Yeah it’s been brought up a lot but it is needed, the event quests are dry for endgame players and rewards aren’t anything special anymore

Moosetiptronic

I've a funny feeling that they may not release a new difficulty tied to cavalier.

Perhaps @DNA3000 will comment from a game and monetisation design view point, but I'd personally gate a new level of difficulty behind book 2 access/6.4 completion rather than cavalier if I were kabam.

I fully appreciate that that will not be a popular view, I am not avocating it, am not suggesting it and hope that they do link any new EQ level to cavalier, NOT book 2. But I've a suspicion they won't...

I'd love to be incorrect on this, as I'm cavalier, have no intention of doing the rest of act 6 any time soon and would like to have the requirement for any new difficulty already met.

DNA3000

I've a funny feeling that they may not release a new difficulty tied to cavalier.

Perhaps @DNA3000 will comment from a game and monetisation design view point, but I'd personally gate a new level of difficulty behind book 2 access/6.4 completion rather than cavalier if I were kabam.

I fully appreciate that that will not be a popular view, I am not avocating it, am not suggesting it and hope that they do link any new EQ level to cavalier, NOT book 2. But I've a suspicion they won't...

I'd love to be incorrect on this, as I'm cavalier, have no intention of doing the rest of act 6 any time soon and would like to have the requirement for any new difficulty already met.

Actually, I think it is more likely Kabam would gate the next difficulty up to Cavalier, not Book 2. It comes down to numbers. Uncollected didn't make sense until there were enough players strong enough to justify the expense in making it. Cavalier difficulty doesn't make sense just because the fastest players reach Cav the day after it releases and now they've been waiting a long time. It makes sense when enough of the players catch up to them so that the difficulty tier will be relevant to more than just a couple hundred of the fastest players. The fastest players need to understand nobody cares how long they have to wait, what matters is when enough players catch up to them.

If they gate to Book 2, there will initially be too few players for whom that difficulty will be relevant. Players are only now catching up to Cavalier in enough numbers to even be thinking about making a difficulty tier relevant only to them. Gating to Cavalier means it might come out some time in the next year. Gating to Book 2 means we're unlikely to see it for years. The fastest players will complete Book 1 Act 1 almost immediately. But then they will have to wait until some significant number of players catch up to them, and there aren't enough players that are even Cavalier yet to amass enough players to catch up to that point.

The devs mentioned in the Dork interview that they were at least thinking about higher tier difficulty, which suggests to me it isn't something so far off that it makes no sense to think about. So that also suggests to me they are at least thinking about a Cavalier-gated difficulty, both to reinforce the titling progress system and because there's at least the possibility that the number of players reaching Cavalier status is high enough to start thinking about it.

Moosetiptronic

Thank you @DNA3000 .

Mine was a pondering of financials; does it make sense to set a new gate behind a wall that almost necessitates spend?

However, your point of not disenfranchising a huge part of the player base carries more weight. I'm hugely crossing fingers for cavalier difficulty personally and given prior comments, perhaps by next cyber Monday if I were to put a finger on timescales.

It was more a muse on the possibility of it being a higher gate and whether game design norms would lead to that. Glad to hear not!

DNA3000

Thank you @DNA3000 .

Mine was a pondering of financials; does it make sense to set a new gate behind a wall that almost necessitates spend?

However, your point of not disenfranchising a huge part of the player base carries more weight. I'm hugely crossing fingers for cavalier difficulty personally and given prior comments, perhaps by next cyber Monday if I were to put a finger on timescales.

It was more a muse on the possibility of it being a higher gate and whether game design norms would lead to that. Glad to hear not!

When it comes to content that's going to be around forever, like the story quests or things like the Abyss, there's the presumption that they are only expensive to do now immediately after release, and they will get progressively easier over time as players gain access to greater arsenals of power. ROL was considered a mandatory spend content: that seems quaint nowadays. The point to these increasing ladders of difficulty from ROL to LoL to Abyss is players have the option to push as hard as they want to. You could spend and do them now, you could wait and spend less, or you could wait even longer and spend nothing. So game developers don't see things like The Collector or 6.1 as paygates, they see them more as time gates instead. The stronger you are and the more you want to spend, the faster you can get past them. The weaker you are or the less you want to spend, the longer it will take for you to get past them.

From a financial perspective, you'd think that the higher the difficulty and the higher the rewards the stronger the incentive to spend and the more money a F2P game would make. But from what I understand, that's not the case. You can't dangle a carrot two miles in front of someone: it has to be close enough that they think they can *almost* reach it. You have to place difficulty hurdles close enough to people that spending becomes less a case of deciding whether to buy a new car and more like picking up an extra bag of Fritos while in line. Not necessarily in terms of the amount spent, and more in terms of the immediate gratification.

Releasing Book 2 and then releasing a Book 2 gated difficulty tier might seem to be a way to "force" people to spend to race up to that level, but it is equally likely to backfire and cause people to stop spending because if you're currently at 5.3, it can seem pointless to spend to reach 6.1. Gating to 6.1 means the next tier up is more enticing to more players, which means there's more incentive for more players to spend to push ahead. Remember there's probably dozens of times more players currently working their way to Uncollected right now then there are players currently working to complete Act 6. You want to encourage them to progress. You don't need to encourage the Cav players to progress, because they are self-selected to be the players that are pushing themselves pretty hard (relative to all other players) all on their own.

Moosetiptronic

Awesomely insightful. Can't click both options...

Funny, that's core motivation theory, I'd just never thought about it in terms of monetising games!