An Ask to Simplify the Contest

Firstly, I want to state from the get-go that I do love this game as a whole, and its champion-collecting, screen-tapping madness helped me get through a difficult couple of years. I've spent a little $$ on occasion, but treat the game as a good time - to try different champion matchups, get fun characters from the Marvel Universe, and stretch myself with the challenges. Beating the Collector and fully exploring LoL felt like true and fun personal accomplishments.

But today, between the AW "Duel on Mustafar" superbug, and trying to work my way through Cav monthly and the node salad that is every. single. fight, I really want to address an increasing frustration creeping in with my playing of the game (more and more recently, and outside of the scope of the ongoing dex/parry and memory leak issues), that I can see is shared with my alliance community.

It's too complicated.

And every seeming fix that has been proposed recently seems to be like additional toppings on the top of outstanding issues, while the core gameplay mechanics that need the fix don't seem to be addressed, complicating complications. It used to be I could run through a chapter of monthly EQ on my lunch break to blow off some steam in between work stress; now I have to prep, and schedule a few dedicated evenings a month, to even understand what is going on and play through the content in a batch, because the gameplay is so unwieldy. Instead of war being a five minute session here and there during the day, I have a personal Google Sheet to refer during gameplay to even understand what the heck these interactions are doing (interactions not guaranteed). The recent (over)reliance on layered node lasagna has made each individual fight its own business flowchart. That's not fun, challenging problem solving. It's crisis management.

Simplicity is the mark of a good product. Please go back to the basics and core mechanics of the gameplay - not treat complexity (through node combinations) and challenge as the same. The characters (2020 and 2021 included) are fun. The animations are notably excellent recently. The December Sinister side event feels a bit like a step in this direction. Create alliance events that are collaborative and encourage us all to be creative, not create performance anxiety, especially for new alliance recruits, in an inherently antagonistic mode of gameplay. (Yes, I know it's a fighting game. But it's also a team-building exercise.)

I really want to see the game succeed. Playing the Game for many (casual Thronebreaker, myself) is becoming a punctuation of daily experience - a task or effort, using resources of time, *money,* and/or skill that are fast outpacing the rewards / return. The dictionary definition of Game is, "activity engaged in for diversion or amusement". It may be a diversion, but it's becoming far less amusing.

Comments

BigBlueOx

Well said

DNA3000

The dictionary definition of Game is, "activity engaged in for diversion or amusement".

By this definition, basketball is not a game. Neither is chess, or Space Invaders, or World of Warcraft. [insert "what lexicographers actually do" here]

I agree with some of your feedback. I do think complexity and challenge are not synonymous. I do think this game has far less collaboration than it ought to have. But everyone wants different things from their games, and I don't think everyone wants a game punctuated by widely spaced five minute spurts. Everyone doesn't want simplistic game play. The game has to balance these widely separated desires while also evolving the game forward. Even if some people want the same thing forever, the game cannot be the same thing forever, or the thing it will be is gone.

I want the game to succeed for as long as possible, but that doesn't mean giving me what I want any more than it means giving you what you want. It has to find a balance point that is not going to be either thing. The key to complexity, in my opinion, is not to dumb the game down but rather to give the players the right tools to manage that complexity. Someone recently said they didn't want a game where they had to read: the implication being they wanted the game to be something where they could just enter the map and fight and figure it out on the fly. That's way too low of a threshold for complexity. But a game where the node mechanics were easier to look up and figure out would be helpful, a game where it was easy to filter champions based on the kinds of nodes the content contained makes sense, and a game where new mechanics and interactions were created based on what's logical to explain, not what's practical to implement also would make the management of complexity less unwieldy.

The game is never going to stop evolving, or changing, or progressing forward in some direction. Asking the developers to stop, or reverse course, is both impractical and fruitless. That's simply never going to happen. The only way forward is to identify what the pain points are, and demand that the game give players the right tools to deal with those pain points so that the players are always in a position to meet the future challenges of the game. As the game adds challenges moving forward, it should also lessen the burden of earlier challenges with better tools to deal with them.

Hilldar

I think this is really well said. I don’t really know what they are trying to do, but it’s definitely causing a lot of people to scale back and even quit. I scaled back to only doing story content and EQ, but it seems like even that is a chore now. It’s gotta be fun, and it’s just not right now for many reasons.