PvE rewards have not always been better than PvP. PvP rewards blew away PvE rewards for a long time. For awhile, new 4
were only available as PvP season rewards for alliances.
Currently, I believe PvE rewards are better than PvP because BCS redid the PvE rewards when they did the new CL10, and didn’t bother doing anything to PvP.
I’ve been playing for 12 years and PvE rewards have virtually always been better than PvP rewards.
I remember what you are talking about from my early days playing but that’s so long ago as to be almost a different game. Certainly PvP hasn’t been close to PvE since pre-2017.
KGB
So we have a situation where the game design is built around rewarding the fastest clears but the devs want to create a more challenging game, apparently, that you can’t clear quickly.
To fix this is to overhaul, entirely, PVE.
If you make nodes clearable once and done, you need to build some kind of measure of success in (losing less health or what have you) and probably assign a star rating to your play (many many games do this, the DC match 3 which is now shut down did this). To me that would be the best way to approach this change, not by leaving in place the same game design.
But instead they are just tweaking things. Maybe from one perspective that makes sense but it just feels incoherent to players and frustrating when the game locks some rewards behind clears you now can’t do.
I don’t really think they can overhaul the game successfully to create a new style of play with new incentives and new ways to evaluate play, just due to code mess and whatever. But if you wanted to push the game into that model the correct way would be to make whole new event in that style, something like a 7 day event with nodes once a day or something. Phase it in, perfect it as much as possible, push it into PVE with new PVEs or adapting old ones. (or just make Tower play that way for now)
I do not know if the game economy and currencies etc support a model like that tbh. The DC game had a mess of various currencies and things you could level up and you’d collect this or that thing to make better gear. etc etc. Our game is blissfully simple. Roster toons, collect covers, use iso to level up until you champ, add more covers. The gear is also simple, just level up the support and use risk to level it up.
TLDR: I do not think the base game design or economy supports their project of slow hard clears you cannot fully do/collect the presented rewards and possible points. It explicitly rewards the opposite. They have broken the loop of play grindy, collect stuff, incrementally improve and do better.
BUT the old guys kind of did that already by making new toons not matter due to OP meta. I do not envy the devs trying to keep the plates spinning and somehow incentivize more spending.
Unless their goal is pushing in new toons that are faster or redesigning the whole PVE mode in the very near future they have created an environment where the players will just en masse feel frustrated by now being unable to accomplish goals the game has presented to them. They have not modified reward structures or added new rewards (outside Heroic nodes) in any way to make up for this. This is why people are getting fed up and engaging less.
I think even that is debatable. We get more PvP events than we get PvE events, so you’d have to adjust rewards out and not just compare event to event.
Sure, PvP events are 3 days and PvE are 3.5 (some 3, some 4).
But the rewards aren’t even in the same ballpark
PvP CL10: 28 cp, 50 support shards, 1 4 cover, 625 4 shards, 160 hp + assorted ISO, 3 star and below stuff
PvE CL10: 55 cp, 6 shards (didn’t add them up), 800 5 shards, 2 4 covers, 525 4 shards, 330 hp + assorted ISO 3 star and below stuff.
That’s just event progression (PvE has daily progression rewards too for each sub that add more HP, ISO etc that I didn’t add in).
And yes, I’m excluding the rewards of the individual battles (of which you can do practically infinite of in PvP to earn some ISO or covers) in both. But it’s no comparison of where you get the better rewards and MUCH easier (easier fights, no MMR hell if you roster a single 5 and so on).
I’m also excluding placement since it’s not guaranteed in either event and only a handful of players get anything meaningful.
KGB
They’re not in the same ballpark now because BCS redid the PvE rewards last year, and the PvP ones haven’t been updated in forever.
If this was their intention, why does PvE have multiple fights at all? Why go to the trouble of creating multiple events? Why are some fights more difficult than others?
If their design goal for MPQ PvE was “create a mode where players can earn rewards by doing the same thing over and over forever” why does it contain all these attempts to create variety (obstacles that nobody wants, that only serve to anger players and detract from the devs’ own design goals?). Wouldn’t it just be a single node in the middle of the screen, with 3 1HP enemies, that you beat over and over again? Why put in all this work for no reason?
PVP rewards have been worse than PVE for many years. The last redesign was whenever they decided to add wins and finalized that table. Other than when a 2 releases, and they have a ton of tokens they add to PVP, and the support shards you get now.
If you stretch it you get more covers (1s and 2) from PVP than before because they turned the dial that way, intentionally or not, and now we get no boosts from PVP matches.
I believe you get relatively worse rewards because playing PVP is essentially “showing off your roster” to a significant degree and they don’t care to improve rewards when it’s mostly the same people with advanced rosters winning most of the brackets time after time.
As far as PVE design it’s of course the case that the devs built it to challenge players as they start and develop their roster, and that they kept releasing more powerful toons to make it more and more trivial to earlier players. That did impact, possibly, some whales’ interest in spending. But the point is making players feel like progress is being made. It is probable that they are surprised to an extent how long some players have played past the point of really making significant roster progress. Most players of mobile games are done after at most a few years and those of us still playing after a decade or whatever are extreme outliers in the general population of gamers in that regard.
The game design is meant to allow FTP people to always be able to grind different parts of it and make some progress. So some is always trivially easy. Spending is a way to skip some play or make faster progress. It would be silly to design a FTP to require spending, always, to feel like you’re advancing because then you’d only have whales and the game would become a ghost town.
The final point is the game does not, beyond PVP matches, allow you to make progress from infinite grinding. Even those pvp matches run out of cover rewards eventually. This is another part of the design that encourages spending; if you do the presented content, and want more rewards, your options are to spend or feel frustrated or make peace with what you got.
In this thread ,and the many others, there are lots of great ideas ,conclusions, etc. Lots of different valid points of view on “fixing things”. I wish someone had the time (I’m not that guys) to comb, through find the various ideas and those which are similar to others and make a sheet for a Q&A with the devs to pull from. You know…I think I just feel like the Devs should be communicating at this point. That could solve a lot.
I think they’re just lazy and haven’t bothered updating the rewards. It’d be worth asking in a Q&A if they’re even aware of the discrepancy in rewards between modes – I’d bet a decent amount of money that they’re not.
Hanlon’s Razor is probably the correct approach to apply to most things related to this dev team.
The decision to leave PVP alone is essentially a constant one being made. The devs have a quest that gives you credit for playing PVP every day. PVP is the endless engagement mode. I do not think IP2 made the decision to leave PVP alone. I think prior devs did under direction of the publisher.
Aha! I remember that SCL10 is 6 years old and that’s really the last time anyone touched PVP rewards. Also we don’t need to wait for a Q&A to ask if they are aware of the discrepancy.
The decision to leave PvE alone was also a constant one being made! How long did Demiurge or BCS leave it untouched once they updated all the events to the 3 easy/3 hard/essentials format? How long did they run all the same events over and over again? How long were rewards untouched until BCS did 6?
For years, the game was neglected. Devs didn’t care about new content besides characters, and everything just stayed the same forever because they were too lazy to do anything. Meanwhile the playerbase shrank and kept shrinking.
Now we’ve got people saying that laziness was a strategy? That stagnation was the goal all along? I don’t buy it. I’m glad IP2 is being active and changing things up.
I mean ok, fine.
Changing rewards is fairly straightforward. It’s just updating a reward table.
But, someone has to decide where the game is, what the economy is like, what engagement is like etc. What rewards are appropriate for what level of play? All of that.
PVE has updated rewards because it got harder. SCL 10 was added. The raised the enemy levels when 6s came in in October. Heroic was added and node rewards are higher if you choose it.
PVP doesn’t change whatsoever other than the meta changing. Always the same otherwise; it’s your fellow players. The max opponent has been the same for years and years; 672 for a boosted 550.
So maybe the simple answer is “why would we raise rewards when nothing changed?”. It’s at least something that you would think, if you were running a game, you would ask a question about when you were going to change rewards. “Should we change PVE? What about PVP?”
OK yeah maybe it’s not a thing they ask every week or month but I dunno, it seems like a logical question to ask at least periodically, like at least annually or every 6 months. Assuming no one asked that on some kind of regular basis seems a bit silly. SCL 10 was added in 2020, years before BCS.
If not then sure, a pox on those lazy bums for not thinking about how to manage the game making millions of dollars a year to the basic degree of evaluating whether rewards seemed set at the appropriate level in all parts of the game.
PvE was the logical continuation of the Dark Avengers story mode in the prologue (the hook to get players playing and presumably spending to get through the entire story line). The initial events all revolved around that. Over the years new events got added that have totally unrelated story lines since we needed new content in 13+ years of the games existence.
Obviously the harder nodes and fights in PvE were to encourage players to level up their roster by a combination of lots of repeated playing and of course spending.
But ultimately the whole PvE experience is essentially the basic ‘quest’ element of World of Warcraft like games where you get a quest to go get X amount of skins (or whatever) and that requires you do do X amount of fighting to obtain them) to get Y reward to improve your character. Each node (easy, hard, essential) in a story line of an event substitutes in for a quest like ‘get X Giant Rat skins’ for easy quests to ‘get X Black Dragon eggs’ for the hard quests and so on.
KGB
I don’t understand how any of what you’re saying here squares with what you said in the post I replied to. If the mode was designed to be mindless trivial wins where anyone can easily accumulate rewards for doing nothing, why have they designed all of this variety into it? Wouldn’t that contradict their goal (according to your statement about what their goal is)?
I’m sorry, but have you not read any of the Q&As with the various dev teams? They are absolutely not asking questions like this on a regular basis.
Most of the q&as assured us they were “looking into” reward reworks when it was addressed.
I just assume if full time people work on the game at the publisher, or did, they at least occasionally consider ways to adjust rewards to incentivize spending.
But maybe you’re right and they just sit in meetings talking about how cool Spider-man is or something instead of how to manage the game.
Sorry if I didn’t answer your question. Now I’m not even sure i understood what you were trying to ask several posts back. Can you rephrase it maybe with an example of another way to let players mine rewards through repetitive play?
KGB
It’s ok, I think I’m pretty lost too!
I do enjoy our debates, for what it’s worth – we come at the game from totally different directions.