Beat all raid bosses but didn't get exploration rewards?!?!
jdschw
Member Posts: 432 ★★★
My alliance just finished this week's raid with 8 people. We beat all 10 bosses in the raid, but didn't have "full exploration" because we only had 8 people, and so one of the routes had only 2 roles taken instead of 3. The people on that path made the herculean effort to clear all 3 of their bosses anyway. Now we just received our rewards...and we didn't get exploration rewards!
Does this make sense to anybody?
I understand that one node was technically not "explored" because of the missing role. But we beat all the bosses! Indeed, the people who had to fight down a person expended a lot of extra resources to do so. Shouldn't the team be granted exploration rewards for clearing all of the bosses in the raid?
Does this make sense to anybody?
I understand that one node was technically not "explored" because of the missing role. But we beat all the bosses! Indeed, the people who had to fight down a person expended a lot of extra resources to do so. Shouldn't the team be granted exploration rewards for clearing all of the bosses in the raid?
2
Comments
This isn't AW, where you score attack bonuses for empty nodes, and so path coverage is an important differentiator. This is the Alliance Raid mode, which is a mode specifically designed to encourage cooperation from groups of people to take down 10 bosses.
Teams should not be penalized for completing the entire challenge with a team of less than 9 people. There is no good reason for it. The fact that it's "how the game is built" is an explanation, but not a good reason.
The rewards are incentive to achieve 100%, not to achieve everything you're able to. If you don't have the members to 100%, then go get them or accept that you won't be able to access all the rewards. It's not a penalty for not having enough people, it's a reward for having enough people.
That being said, I am not demanding Kabam compensate me for my lack of knowledge. That's on me, not on them. What I *am* saying is that it is fundamentally dumb that these nodes count for the purpose of exploration in this mode.
From the replies I've seen so far, and the lack of agrees on my posts, I can see that I'm apparently in the minority here, or perhaps alone in my opinion. Fine. The game is what it is. None of you have changed my opinion that counting these nodes towards exploration in this mode is bad design, and I obviously haven't changed any of yours, so I guess we'll just have to leave it at that.
The exploration rewards are there to reward the players who do literally everything. They are not there for players who decide to do things in the hardest possible way, and they aren't there for players who manage to overcome deficiencies in not doing everything as intended. When you say you believe this is bad design, you're saying you believe players who actually fully explore the map shouldn't get anything for that. Players who do less but ultimately defeat all the bosses should get the same rewards. If that's your preference, that's fine, but I don't see how you can say or believe that is "bad design." You're saying the designer has no discretion to add extra rewards for players who do everything. They are a bad designer if they do, in your judgment.
I don't see how you can justify that stance.
You fully explore an AQ by completing all the fights in it. The touching of all the nodes is just a straightforward way to track that fact.
We completed all the fights in the raid. In my mind, that should logically align with full exploration. We *did* do everything, in the sense that we won all the fights in the map. The only thing we didn't "do" was have another person to do it with.
That's a mischaracterization. We didn't "go in with 8 people", we just joined the raid, and in the end, only 8 people from the alliance were willing and able to join.
Though honestly I don't see what that has to do with anything here. Again, I am *not* claiming that I should be compensated for not realizing that node counted toward exploration. I have argued that it shouldn't count toward exploration, in principle.
The principle is 9 nodes to explore, its the same in other game modes as well. If an opponent in war lefts a node open you don't get exploration even jf its empty.. you don't go thru that empty node and you lose exploration along with ABs... Its the way it works.
Before starting raid your alliance should have communicated and figure out that you have at least 9 players to finish 1 raid BG
If a lane serves no purpose to the goals of the quest, why should it count for exploration?
Just because “that is always how it has been” is not a good reason.
On saying that I doubt it will change.
Addressing some specific points made in other posts:
* Regarding AW: I don't see AW as being the same situation as this. In AW, all of the paths *could* have opponents on them. In my view, exploring empty paths as attackers is a way of saying "I showed up for the fight, and the defender didn't", and therefore it makes sense to me that those paths are necessary for exploration. In the alliance raid, there is no opportunity for any fight on that path. It is a mechanism for setting a role.
* Regarding ticket usage: I could actually turn this argument on its head. I don't control 9 accounts. I only control 1. For my 1 account, I paid 180 tickets, won all my fights, and got some rewards for it. If your alliance fully explored your raid, then you paid 180 tickets, won all your fights, and got a lot more rewards for the same price. So the person in this example getting "full rewards for less" is you, not me.
* Regarding the argument that the node really is intended for exploration: I suppose that could be intentional. It's obviously the way the code works. My argument isn't that it *doesn't* work that way, it's that it *shouldn't* work that way.
All that being said, as @BlueSmirn pointed out, it's clear to me that nothing is going to change here, so this whole discussion is purely philosophical. As I keep saying, we're just going to have to agree to disagree on whether it makes sense.
If you want Exploration rewards, you have to fully explore. Now you know. Play accordingly.
While it may not be like AW or AQ entirely, the nature of an alliance is all the same among the game mode. Stronger, active and well structured alliance get the best rewards while casual and more prone to mistake alliance receive lesser rewards.
Even though you say there is no equivalent in other quests of a totally empty (extra) node on another segment/path in which to compare.
Well, like Popcorn already said, there is.
In AW against a partial alliance, entire segments left without any defender.
Some teams might assume “great, we don’t have to move across those segments then”.
But you do, else you lose out on some points, and potentially the War itself.
**Counter-Point**
Kabam had to build in extra code (from what it was originally released like) in order to prevent you from taking a Role Path that does NOT match the Role of the Champ you brought.
(before that, someone could have taken a wrong path, and not gotten a Role Boost).
It would be nice if Kabam can just adjust things so that there are NOT those 3 separate Role Paths. Just make it 1 path (obviously 3 separate sections though still).
And make the Role Boost Select node be intelligent to know *WHICH* Role Boost options screen to give you, based on the Champ you brought.
They already have code to base things on which Champ you brought, so why not make it a single (intelligent) Selector node.
Then there wouldn’t be this issue of not bringing enough people, or having too many doubled up in the same L/C/R sections (so only 1 or 2 traveling in another section).
Every month Paragons get extra rewards for completing the Paragon monthly gauntlet without using choice nodes. Even though avoiding the use of those nodes serves no purpose to “the goals of the quest” if you define the goals of the quest as “kill everything.”
But that’s missing the point to the content. Every game limitation is in some sense an arbitrary limitation. Why is the summoner so stupid he or she only brings five friends to defeat important enemies? Why doesn’t the summoner bring *everyone* to do that? Why are we limited to teams of five, or three, or even one? None of those limitations serve any purpose to the goal of the quest, which is to kill the boss.
The game decides the parameters of how we do content to implement a certain level of difficulty and effort. If you do less, you might get less rewards. If you do more, you might not get more. The lane served a purpose, a purpose some alliances can choose to skip and still complete the quest. But the fact that they didn’t need it doesn’t make it optional for fully satisfying the requirements for full rewards.
Once you decide that path is “unnecessary” and thus “shouldn’t count” you basically throw out all the design discretion the game implements, because all reward requirements are arbitrary. The lanes count because all lanes count for exploration, because exploration is *defined* to be taking all the paths on the map. This comes up in Alliance war when the opponent alliance doesn’t place a defender on a node. There is thus no specific *combat* reason to traverse that path, because there’s nothing to kill. But you still have to do it to get the exploration points associated with that path, and the attacker points associated with that node, because that’s what it means to explore the map. You don’t get to decide it doesn’t matter, so it shouldn’t count against you.
If this genuinely didn’t make sense, just because it always worked this way doesn’t mean the developers can’t be convinced to change it. Lots of game changes have happened that way. But this one is not one where there is a logical argument to support it. It is just preference, and preference requires overwhelming support to change anyone’s mind, particularly the devs, and there isn’t any such consensus here. It does *not* take such consensus for logic to win. Logic can effect game changes even in the face of majority opposition.
What’s your answer? Because your design rule “only paths with fights should count” mandates this. To me, as a designer, I would explicitly disavow such a rule because it creates arbitrary constraints on what I can design. I can’t make a mandatory path with no fights, because it violates someone’s sense of what “good design” is. But I can trivially bypass that rule by adding more fights. This would make the content harder and longer than I originally intended, but that’s not my fault.
Design rules only makes sense when they promote good design behavior. This rule seems to explicitly mandate bad design behavior: adding extra fights for no difficulty balance or economic balance reason.
This may seem like a contrived example, but this kind of conversation happens all the time in actual design groups. Although we like to joke that something is or is not in the Game Design Textbook, there really isn’t any such singular textbook everyone follows. Everyone has their own ideas of what good game design is, and most people happily run through life without having those ideas challenged. But when you find yourself in an actual team doing actual game design, these rules will get challenged in precisely this way. Does this make sense in the context of what we’re doing? If we were to follow that rule, where might that rule cause problems. What rules should we adopt that seem to lead to the right places?
This rule says “you cannot make a path in content where the requirement on the players is to answer a question. Only paths with actual combat fights matter. If you do, it will not count as exploration. So if you want nine paths required, you need to have nine combat paths. If you want nine players required to explore but less than nine mandatory combat paths, you must add more.” I don’t see how it can be a matter of opinion whether this is a good rule for designers to follow.
Or have those new fights be a little more involved, making them like an INDIVIDUAL TUNE-UP fight, prior to jumping into the Role Charged common mini-bosses,
@DNA3000 I agree with 90% of what you're saying. But there is one key question that is missing here: did the designers put those extra paths in because they wanted to require 9 team members to explore it? Or did they have those extra paths because it was simply the easiest way to implement the role benefits? And if the latter, was the fact that it ended up requiring 9 team members for exploration just an accepted side effect of the way exploration is implemented?
My post was founded on the presumption(!) that it was the latter case: these paths were just an easy way to make role selection in the existing quest framework, and the 9-member requirement was simply a side effect. IF I'm correct about that presumption (notice the capital IF), then the point of my post is that the side effect is unreasonable, because we completed all of the tasks that were *designed* in the raid, and got bit by the (accepted but unintended) side effect.
On the other hand, if my presumption is wrong, and the design was intended from the start to require 9 members to achieve full exploration, then I would concede the argument. The designers certainly have the right to put whatever requirements they want on the quest, and our choice is to either play by the rules or not play.
Now, I have absolutely no relationship with anybody at Kabam, so I have no idea which of these possibilities actually represented the designers' intent. @DNA3000 I know from your other posts that you do talk with the designers occasionally, so perhaps you actually are in a position to determine what their intent was. Anyway, I would genuinely be interested to know what their intent was in this case, and the answer to that question would settle the argument in my mind.