**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
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High attack =/= fun
Niche content that needs quake and ghost =/= fun
Challenging content that makes you think, strategise and doesn’t punish you too much without rewarding = fun
And when Act 6 got reduced attack values, most of the endgame players started complaining that it's too easy. Don't understand what exactly is challenging content. V7 isn't challenging as such I agree, but what is? Some say Act 6 pre nerf. But that was just boring in terms of attack values. But those same people count reduced attack values as easy.
act 6 really challenged me as a player, how to intercept, how to improve my skills.
As a general rule, I didn’t like niche fights that were like ah well I’m gonna have to ghost this. I didn’t know how to quake when I 100%ed act 6 and in a way I’m glad, as I know I would have used her a hell of a lot.
I think the reduction in attack values was a good idea, but I don’t think many of the fights needed changing personally. The nodes were largely challenging, the biggest problem was you could play perfectly and block damage killed you. Parrying too much killed you etc
I'd be up for act 6 level pre nerf fights, if and only if
-they limit the # of paths to 5 runs per chapter (6 tops but that still gets boring)
-make the paths boss rush style with no wasted energy nodes
- have some nodes that benefit the player for working in their skill or counters (like variant to an extent) so it's not all punishment
- scale the rewards accordingly with nexus selectors for t5cc and champ crystals
Variant 7 is on par with the other variants which the dev diaries already addressed. It was fun and rewarding enough for the effort. I'll take too easy over too hard any day if the rewards are the same. Why struggle more if you're not getting more for the effort?
Everyone will always have a different view. People say that nodes are what makes it challenging. But they complain if attack values are reduced. It's just a never ending cycle.
Abyss Darkhawk, Bishop, Korg, and Karnak. These fights either taught me something new, or tested a skill like intercepts, timing, slow-rolling combos, etc.
Grandmaster, the whole fight but specifically the final enrage phase which encouraged multiple rapid intercepts.
John Mulaney Challenge. Not perfect, but still enjoyed it quite a bit and would be happy to see more of it.
Big Head Mode: this is just fun and I want more of it, thank you.
There's two versions of the "too easy" complaint. The first one is "I'm a mobile gaming god and I can do everything playing with my feet." And some of them might even be telling the truth. But they have to understand the game devs have to balance the game for mortals. It can no more target any significant amount of content at that level of skill than they can adjust the amount of ability description text to my reading speed.
The other one is a different kind of complaint that is more understandable. Many players need aspirational content. They need both content that is so hard they cannot even do it, so they can work up to it (of course, they generally need it to be *just* out of reach so they can reach it on reasonable time scales) and they also generally need commensurate rewards to make the chase worthwhile.
This kind of content is actually not unreasonable to make on its own. Making content only a tiny percentage of players will ever be able to play is impractical: dev time is not unlimited. But making aspirational content is more justifiable, because even though only a tiny percentage of players could do it today (that number might even be zero) eventually over time a larger and larger percentage of players will be able to do it. Whether they actually do it or not is a separate question, but at least all that dev time isn't going into something almost no one will play.
The problem here is the rewards. For rewards to look reasonable to most players, it has to be, if not proportional to, then at least scale in some way with the difficulty. And the game balance problem for developers is that the rewards have to be high enough to entice the top tier players gunning for it today, but those same rewards have to be reasonable in a year or two when much less strong players will eventually reach it and attempt it. In theory someone might think that the same rewards should work fine for both groups, but in practice that's not true. Sometimes those rewards are way too high, sometimes they are anemically way too low, depending on how long it takes before a certain kind of player feels comfortable tackling that content.
There's also the separate issue of any rewards you try to give the first wave of people tackling that content become very problematic for the devs trying to manage when the progress ladder extends upward. cf: Abyss rewards.
While the first type of complaint probably has no solution, the second one I think can theoretically be addressed to a point. I can think of two ways to tackle that one, although whether the playerbase will accept them is a separate question. The first solution is to introduce very high difficulty content like the Abyss, say, but layer time limited objective rewards on top of it. So the intrinsic rewards for the content are balanced for the long term, but for players strong enough to tackle it when it launches, which means they cannot readily adjust to or try to "outlevel" it, there are bonus rewards for pushing to complete it immediately. This allows you to balance rewards for the initial case where the content is explicitly tuned to the strongest players that exist at the time it is launched, and the downstream case where players are, or at least can be much stronger than that (and thus the difficulty will be lower).
The second possibility is what I originally suggested for Act 6. Although I made the case very strongly that Act 6 (and Act 7 beta) difficulty was completely broken compared to the game's progress curve, I did not suggest nerfing it. Since the devs already went through the trouble of making that content, it seemed counter-productive to spend time basically removing higher difficulty content from the game. Rather, I suggested layering into Act 6 an "easy mode" completion option to prevent it from being a roadblock to player progress. If it is not a roadblock to progress, its difficulty can be almost anything because players now have an opportunity to do it whenever they want to. It becomes more optional. The mechanism I suggested was to use boosts explicitly crafted to lower the difficulty in that content in specific ways, such that if you use them the game detects this and disqualifies you from the higher tier rewards, but that's just a technical detail. There's lots of mechanisms that would ultimately do the same thing.
Instead of having to make easy content and hard content, which is time consuming and limits how much the devs can make of either, you just make hard content and then you pseudo-nerf it with player options, which is much easier and quicker. This allows the devs to spend more time on hard content than would otherwise be practical. It doesn't completely solve the problem of balancing the rewards, but it offers a partial solution to eliminating the problem of one-size-fits-all rewards.
What boss from the last 3 variants was in the least bit challenging, memorable or fun? They make cav eq bosses look like abyss collector.
Stuff like:
Champion
Grandmaster
Hydra Adaptoid
Bane xbones
Abyss cyclops
Cav eq Jane foster
Nameless thanos
Show up surfer
Cav eq void
Variant 2 venom
Variant 4 electro
For me there’s been nothing exciting in variants lately just cheese upon cheese all nicely laid out on a plate with full instructions and bosses that are more vanilla than the path fights.
@Wicket329 had the best suggestion but the type of content he wants takes a lot of thought and I don't think the devs can make it at the level of consistency that we would want.
That said, what champs did you use for the bosses in V7 though? Did you choose to use your best champs / cheese counters?
Or did you take someone like Sentry, JoeFixit, OG Cap, OG spiderman, or electro to give yourself more of a challenge against the Venom boss? His powergain could be managed by baiting specials, but the AI doesn't always cooperate so you still have to be on your toes. And that is a fairly tricky SP2 to evade every time. With a usable champ, but not the stun cheese ones, it does open up the fight to be more challenging and skill based, even if not at the highest caliber.
I understand when people counter the suggestion of not using lower 4* champs to challenge themselves since we work so hard to develop our rosters (although it's still a viable option for those really looking for a challenge), but using less optimal 6* R1/R2 or 5* R3/R4 or just less spicy possible options is a legit way if making the fight more challenging whikle actually using more of our roster to challenge ourselves.
Ultimately, if the player has a great roster, with the best counters, big rank ups and chooses to use them to make it as easy as possible, they're part of their own perceived problem. They just refuse to admit to it (not talking about you personally, just in general for those complaining it was too easy.)
People complain it's not challenging, but then bring all the cheese options to make it as easy as possible. That makes no sense at all.
Now I already hear what you’re saying, that’s a lot of dev time and resources, and you’re right. Developing four of these big boys per year would be a Herculean effort for sure. Which is why I suggest that they repeat. Spring EQ will always be Spring EQ. If you weren’t able to beat it the first time it came through, that’s okay! It’ll be back next year and you’ll be in a far better place to tackle it. Minor tweaks can be made year to year if it’s starting to feel dry or there were particular aspects of it that just didn’t meet design intent, but the goal would be that once it is set, then there’s no need to invest further dev resources into it and now we’ve got a self-refreshing piece of pinnacle content.
Rewards could be done either through the standard Completion/Exploration paradigm or Kabam could use path rewards to further target player difficulty. You want big rewards? Take the hard path. You’re just trying to play through to see the boss? Okay, here’s an easier path with some 5* shards on it. There’s a lot of potential here, in my opinion. If Kabam wanted to get *unnecessarily fancy* with it, there could even be a Seasonal EQ Currency that drops on paths. But that’s probably excessive and over complicated.
Anyway, those are my ideas for creating content that (hopefully) addresses the valid concerns of @DNA3000 and @TheTalents , if y’all have any critiques or other ideas, I’d love to hear them.
But then you have the same problem again, only at higher magnitude. What do you do with the Season of Pain series when 99% of the players can't even begin to scratch the surface of it, but the top tier players are bored repeating it (or can't repeat it because the rewards are not repeatable)? You could just keep tweaking it higher but keep the lower difficulties as difficulty tiers, but then you have the problem of difficulty tiers proliferating and causing problems. And the separate problem of how you manage the situation of one player doing multiple difficulty tiers and overstacking the rewards.
Some people think more difficulty tiers is always better, because the more you have to more likely it is some difficulty tier more closely matches any particular player. But there's a counter-problem. If you want difficulty tiers to act as aspirational goals to achieve, they can't be too many of them too close together. Because then each jump upward offers very little benefit by itself. If the jump between tier 3 and tier 4 is big, there's an incentive to make the jump. But if you're deciding whether to move up from tier 187 to 188 out of 300, the incentive dilutes for a large percentage of players. We already see this now where many players do not attempt to fully explore all the content: they complete it and then move on because the incremental benefit of exploration compared to completion is lower. In absolute terms all exploration rewards (generally) are better than completion so you wouldn't think this would be a problem, but given the higher amount of effort required combined with the fact that exploration rewards *look* like only a small incremental jump from completion causes their value to depreciate. Having too many difficulty tiers can have the same effect.