Practice Mode improvements
DataShade
Member Posts: 1
I find the Practice Mode in the game to be pretty lackluster and when I did a search there were more than a few other posts about it. I believe that Practice Mode should cost the player nothing but time, and reward the player nothing but the opportunity to practice; but I feel that the current version of Practice Mode in-game is too limited, too removed from actual gameplay, and contains too much friction. Here are some suggestions I have:
1) Improve and clarify the practice menu UI. I think you could do any one of these without having to do the others, so I'll list them separately.
1a) Clearly show who is under player control and who is AI controlled. The current system is not impossible to use, but there's no reason why you can't, for example, click to get Champion Info and review ability details for the character you selected as the opponent, without having to exit practice mode entirely as you do in the current system.
1b) Make both player and AI champion selectable from within the Practice menu UI without having to back out to the Champions list
1c) Permit cycling between star level after you've selected a champion (eg, tap the portrait to change a 6 star to a 4 star, like you do from the Synergy screen).
1d) When a practice match ends, return the user to the Practice menu with the previously selected champions instead of the Champions list. Hitting "back" once to quit after your fight ends is fewer operations than re-launching the Practice UI and re-selecting characters.
1e) Allow players to queue up 3-5 player-controlled and/or AI-controlled champs. Everybody loves Horde Mode, let me see how long I can chain specials with Bishop lol
2) Put a "Practice" option on the end-of-match screen. Load the existing Practice UI with the current defender as the AI controlled champion and let the player pick a champ - new or different - to practice. If I lost, or if I won by the skin of my teeth, give me an option to 'run back the tape' and at least learn from it. You can disable synergy bonuses, boosts, and obviously rewards, but let players get good at one fight that troubles them without replaying the whole quest. Maybe you limit this feature to solo game modes so Incursions don't get bogged down etc.
3) Make Practice Mode a global toggle. For example, when the player starts content (maybe only solo-mode content, as above), either in place of, or in addition to, the button that says "Begin," there's a button that says "Practice Mode." This "Global Practice" mode would disable energy cost, disable the ability to use items or boosts, and disable all rewards: gold, iso, experience points, crystals/shards, titles, and all the quest completion credit that shouldn't count in practice mode already. This would let players practice on nodes with specific hazard conditions, which is something I saw a few posts about — without you all needing to code a whole new interface to let players select hazard conditions when the player is setting up a practice match. Maybe you restrict this to content that's been out for a while (or, especially if you implement option #2 above, that the individual player has cleared at least once), to preserve the challenge of a "world first" on new quests.
1) Improve and clarify the practice menu UI. I think you could do any one of these without having to do the others, so I'll list them separately.
1a) Clearly show who is under player control and who is AI controlled. The current system is not impossible to use, but there's no reason why you can't, for example, click to get Champion Info and review ability details for the character you selected as the opponent, without having to exit practice mode entirely as you do in the current system.
1b) Make both player and AI champion selectable from within the Practice menu UI without having to back out to the Champions list
1c) Permit cycling between star level after you've selected a champion (eg, tap the portrait to change a 6 star to a 4 star, like you do from the Synergy screen).
1d) When a practice match ends, return the user to the Practice menu with the previously selected champions instead of the Champions list. Hitting "back" once to quit after your fight ends is fewer operations than re-launching the Practice UI and re-selecting characters.
1e) Allow players to queue up 3-5 player-controlled and/or AI-controlled champs. Everybody loves Horde Mode, let me see how long I can chain specials with Bishop lol
2) Put a "Practice" option on the end-of-match screen. Load the existing Practice UI with the current defender as the AI controlled champion and let the player pick a champ - new or different - to practice. If I lost, or if I won by the skin of my teeth, give me an option to 'run back the tape' and at least learn from it. You can disable synergy bonuses, boosts, and obviously rewards, but let players get good at one fight that troubles them without replaying the whole quest. Maybe you limit this feature to solo game modes so Incursions don't get bogged down etc.
3) Make Practice Mode a global toggle. For example, when the player starts content (maybe only solo-mode content, as above), either in place of, or in addition to, the button that says "Begin," there's a button that says "Practice Mode." This "Global Practice" mode would disable energy cost, disable the ability to use items or boosts, and disable all rewards: gold, iso, experience points, crystals/shards, titles, and all the quest completion credit that shouldn't count in practice mode already. This would let players practice on nodes with specific hazard conditions, which is something I saw a few posts about — without you all needing to code a whole new interface to let players select hazard conditions when the player is setting up a practice match. Maybe you restrict this to content that's been out for a while (or, especially if you implement option #2 above, that the individual player has cleared at least once), to preserve the challenge of a "world first" on new quests.
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Comments
this may be your single shortest post??? just as astute as the rest, unfortunately… we ain’t seeing that ANY time soon.
There are many reasons why this would be a bad idea, but the one that I think is particularly pernicious is that it would open the door to unscrupulous players "renting" practice accounts players could use to practice against content they had not yet completed. I don't think that's a market Kabam wants to create.
But the one that is fatal to all suggestions like this is the fact that all of them try to simulatneously sell the idea that such a thing would be very useful to players and thus worth spending resources to implement, while also having no significant impact on the difficulty of the game in practice. This is a completely nonsensical pair of ideas to hold simultaneously. Its usefulness is in reducing the difficulty of content. If it didn't, almost no one would use it. The complaint about the current practice mode is that it isn't applicable to real content. Well, yeah.