I was thinking about why I like Galactus so much more than other PvE events, and I realized it’s largely due to the more relaxed schedule. You still have an every-8-hours commitment, but it’s anywhere within the window rather than exactly on the stroke of 8 hours. This motivated me to think about how to make PvE more enjoyable and less like work.
Problem: Extremely rigid schedule SUCKS!
Solution: Refresh subs by 1/6 every 8 hours on the clock, rather than every 8 hours after each play. Still subtract 1/6 of points each play.
This creates a situation where you still must play in every “window”, but not exactly every 8 hours. Infinitely more manageable and enjoyable! However, it creates a new issue.
Problem: Too many players with same score.
Solution: Differentiate scores based on efficiency. One could choose to reward fastest match times, but I prefer least health lost.
The idea is just to differentiate scores, not to really add or subtract any real value towards progression rewards, so take, say, 10% of max node points and make them dependent on your teams’ health loss during the match. So no damage = full points. One toon left at 1 health = only 90% of total points. No big impact, but enough to reward players that play “better”, and to separate out scores for placement. This would also create an interesting dynamic in terms of doing well to score high, but therefore increasing your personal scaling. So truly better players (or rosters) would rise to the top, as desired.
You could even factor temporary healing into this 10% score metric, if you want to encourage people to use more defensive burst-healing characters. Personally, I think that would be a good idea because otherwise burst healing sucks and by doing this you would also add to the “puzzle” element in order to try and get high scores. But it’s not really important either way.
The final grind would no longer be a solid 3-hour “sprint” (followed by the 1st clear of next sub), and instead be a bunch of clears over the final 8-hour window trying to play as well as possible. Slightly different, but I think much more interesting. And the benefits of being able to play the rest of the event on a normal-person schedule (while still requiring commitment and excellence for top placements) would be HUGE!