I wholeheartedly support the idea of dropping rankings and instead earning rewards based on your final score out of the maximum possible score.
Am I understanding it wrong or does your solution sound awfully like removal of the competitive aspect of the game altogether?
- Make AI Great Again
- Drop ranking based awards, install final score based rewards
- Consider buying less stuff wrapped in plastic
- Give us the possibility to play all charges whenever we want, and not the last one between 2am and 8am
- Fix bugs
…surely not regardless of skill, tho?
I totally agree with this.
Do we also think that the progression awards should be doled out in small increments over the whole points range? Case in point is The Dragon Wars: At 125 points, you have full progression today. At 540 points, you have the best possible score and max prizes. At 538 points, you maybe have top 50 or whatever. But should there be prizes at 150 points, 200, 250, and so on (somehow adding up to the total you would get today with perfect scores?).
One thing about TDW which should also be considered is that each win grants 12 points instead of the usual 7 or 9, and thus contributes to the apparently inflated points total, as compared to other events. (In addition to there being 5 nodes, of course)
So you basically want every event to be treated like PvE with nothing but progression rewards?
I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing (although people will definitely complain that you need a perfect score for the last tier), but I’m not sure its definitely better. The competitive aspect of PvP is one of its main draws
I don’t mind ranking rewards, per-se. But I do think the 3k bracket format is a bit too punishing. And I say this as someone who tends to consistently rank 50 or better (and witness many coalition mates do a whole lot worse with not too different performances).
…but a ladder system wouldn’t change any of that. You still have to compete. You still have to beat the same opponents. You still have to earn your points by winning.
It simply reduces the randomness of prize distribution and instead places it in specific pre-defined tiers.
The perfects will still get the best rewards, the close-to-perfects will still get the second-best rewards, and so on. It would solve the problem with the random “Joe gets 12 extra points” type of bugs. The only people it would affect are those that score less than perfect, because they’d be grouped into buckets. Considering the randomness of this game, I’m hard-pressed to say that someone scoring -11 deserves significantly more rewards than -12.
Individual events would still have scoreboards. Coalition events would have scaled rewards that go to max. Not exactly like PvE, but close.
There is also no reason why the event couldn’t still have a scoreboard for those who want to see their rank. Prizes would just be equitable.
The previous Dragon War, I had 2 losses in the first 15 matches. That’s all. Those 2 losses put me at rank 1076. For the entire remainder of the event, regardless of how well I played, I wasn’t coming back down from the 1000-3000 rewards range. It wouldn’t matter if I had finished without a single additional loss. I put in just as much effort as anyone else that played this stupid event but because the ranking system is built the way it is, my rewards were garbage. The only reason I kept playing was because of my Coalitions score.
Now instead of an individual rankings system, what if the rewards system at the end of an event was determined by your score out of the total possible score. Use The Dragon Wars 540 as an example.
Bracket 1 - 540 (or above in the event of bugs or dare we say it, possibly cheating)
Bracket 2 - 500 - 539
Bracket 3 - 400 - 500
Bracket 4 - 300 - 400
Bracket 5 - 200 - 300
Bracket 6 - 100 - 200
Bracket 7 - 0 - 100
You’d still be personally driven to complete progression but if you stop there, you’re only going to walk away with the rewards from Bracket 6. You can push for a higher bracket; and, you will want to keep going without the perceived notion that a single loss will have the possibility (I say perceived but we all know it’s a strong likelihood) of driving you down 3 or 4 brackets in the rewards. You’ll still push for your coalition to achieve a better rank and you’ll still push because one or two losses doesn’t stuff you down into the bottom rung of the events rewards and you won’t feel like the effort you’ve put into the event is wasted.
No one is saying to eliminate the tiered rewards and rankings entirely. We’re saying the system should be altered to avoid the negative perception it has garnered; a perception it earned.
^^ This.
I think this could also improve the perception of really “difficult” secondaries. They could make the game harder.
There are a number of ways in which this could be fixed . It would be nice to see some effort. I still don’t really care about rewards , but I’m losing faith in the devs . It feels like they’re just oblivious . They give us a standard event that gives legacy rewards. We universally complain . They give us another one . We ask for better event scheduling. We get a ridiculously bad start time for the next event. Rather than saying ‘my bad , we made a mistake’ we get ‘brigby put the wrong start time on the schedule’ . It’s really hard to prioritize what issues are more important . Everything is running suboptimally. Beyond things like start times , we need the dev team to do more .I’m done giving Brownie points for intentions. They’re not doing a satisfactory job .
I don’t think they are quite as bad as you’re making them out to be.
I think the biggest issue is communication. The changes they made to land supports, for example, was really beautifully done. They just didn’t tell us they were doing it until the release notes, leading us to believe that nothing was being worked on (especially since all of our requests for information on what they were working on were ignored).
I think from a game perspective Oktagon is doing a mostly satisfactory job (most of the issues are either minor and not a high priority or extremely complex to deal with). Obviously the buggy events and the incorrect pack rewards are a big issue, but I still have some faith that they are working on it and just not telling us for whatever reason
I will be frank: As much as I hate the blue and black objectives in Nodes of Power, that one event is the only one I can think of where I can regularly get top 25 even when I regularly miss out on the secondary objectives.
But having said that, my point still stands in that this Ranking-based reward can feel so punishing that I still feel it has to go (and be replaced by Score-Tiers-based rewards, like what Brakkis offered as example below:)
I love competition and leaderboards. My issue with the game is that the leaderboards are very unforgiving. Once I lose a match, either due to SWW, bad RNG or a wrong decision made during the match, then I’ve basically bowed out of the race. There is no way for me to make a comeback. I would like the game to allow me to take risks and reward it with higher scores to allow me to whittle down the gap between me and the lead pack and stage a come-from-behind victory (crowd cheers!) ;P.
My suggestion is simple, instead of awarding fixed number of ribbons for met objectives, it should be a range. For example:
- Win with only cards that cost 8 or more (1 ribbon), 10 or more (2 ribbons), 11 or more (3 ribbons), 12 or more (4 ribbons)
- Win with common and uncommon only (4 ribbons), win with no more than one rare (3 ribbons), win with no more than one mythic (2 ribbons), win with no more than one MP (1 ribbon)
- Deal 10 damage within a turn (1 ribbon), 20 damage (2 ribbons), 35 damage (3 ribbons), 50 or more damage (4 ribbons)
etc, etc. Other people might be better at coming up with the objectives than me but as a rule, the objectives should reward deck-building and not be affected too much by RNG or what Greg would do (e.g., kill 1 or more creatures, finish the game in x rounds or less, etc)
Some people might find this more work (have to constantly tweak deck with no deck slots to help us with this exercise), but I think it will be more work because of the challenge, not because of the grind. Also, it helps to have good / appropriate rewards also for finishing first (I’m looking at you HoR)
Yes, first it was “get rid of the less-active coalitions” and now it’s “get rid of competition in general.” It’s a teensy bit unseemly from a moderator, for sure!
Another issue with the leaderboards is that they never really reflect the current state of the event, since we do not know how which people have completed their charges and not. That means it not that interesting to follow along.
I actually like the events with contradicting objectives where people have to choose… Perhaps it’s a bit mean with only two, but if you have 3 objectives and it’s pretty close to impossible to get all 3 every game then that becomes really interesting in deck design and decision making.
That’s because the competitive rewards are so bad that most people stop playing after progression.
I was -8 in HoD this weekend, 2nd platinum bracket. I finished 32. That’s one loss, and one missed objective out of 39 fights. The same score in the 1st bracket finished outside the top 50. That’s crazy.
You know what else having absolutely no margin for error does? Makes losses due to bugs or bad luck seem way, way, way worse. You know what would be easier than fixing SWW? Making brackets less insanely competitive for rewards. 