I just joined and grinded down a couple nodes. I’ll say I actually prefer doing the same node over and over in a row rather than running in sequence, so as far as that bit goes, this is nice (although the game still kinda punishes you if you want to use the same team over and over).
I don’t remotely plan to grind out everything, but then I never planned to do that before, either.
Psychologically speaking, it bothered me that I was giving something up by playing anytime other than optimal times. I know that’s not rational for someone who never competed for top placement and I also know there’s still an optimal time, but I still like it better this way.
That is not to say I actually think it’s well designed. Getting rid of the timer might remove some of the psychological discouragement about the old design, but the timer was also a strategic element. With that gone, there does still need to be some actual strategic element to how you attack a sub, otherwise the game isn’t disguising the grinding well enough.
The current design divides players pretty starkly into “sane” players willing to grind for progression (or less) and “insane” players willing to grind for placement. There’s no point where a person can go “if I want to place well, I need to do x” where x is anything but playing until their eyes bleed. If there’s nothing to exploit about the game’s structure, then all you get to do is kill time in the game while acting like a robot.
I like the scaling. For my roster, it’s in a good place, and suits the amount of time I’m willing to devote to the game. There are still plenty of artificial barriers in the game I don’t like that are related to scaling, but as far as specifically scaling goes, I think you’re largely in a good spot here. I’ll note, though, that the people most likely to have scaling problems are the people with the most uneven rosters. If you based scaling on the 4th-10th spots on a roster instead of the first several, people would be a lot happier with you in general.
The increased rewards are welcome. I was idly looking through some of the nodes’ rewards and didn’t notice any crit boosts. If those are gone for good I’ll be very pleased. Those are the most useless boost imaginable. If the long list of rewards just made me less likely to notice them, well, that’s a good thing too, I guess.
That said, putting those rewards in nodes is encouragement for grinding, which I thought you were trying to give people reasons not to do. I’d much rather see the quality of the rewards degrade as you grind, and the way to do that is to put more of that extra Iso in progression rewards instead of node rewards.
I don’t actually hate this design (relatively speaking), even if it’s unpopular among forum-goers. Grinding nodes in PvE has always been boring and now it’s slightly more boring, but also more granular and less discouraging, both of which are good.
