It’s an awesome idea for a system, but I feel like there are some pretty serious flaws in it. I say this as a guy with a background in behavioral economics and system development - but since I’m not working on anything competing in the mobile space right now, I feel perfectly happy giving some friendly advice!
Opponent Selection
There is currently no penalty for hitting “skip”. Your player behavior incentives are to maximize the following: ( Points Earned / Resources Expended ). This means that your players are going to be obsessively hitting “skip” until they find a relatively weaker opponent with a relatively high point potential. With limited Heal Packs and slow healing, you want to be able to make the most of your time and resources.
The outcome is that players that are fighting “above their level”, which is to say succeeding despite having a numerically disadvantaged team, are constantly targeted for attack, and perform poorly in tournaments for reasons that are invisible to them. These players are going to experience dissonance - they feel competent because they are defeating tough players, but feel that their competence is not being rewarded, as the overall outcome is negative.
A minor tweak that would help would be to simply put a -1 cost on skipping an opponent. Now a player has to deal with tougher opponents (and not just continually punish weaker ones) or pay a small price to do so. Players that play “above their level” will still get picked on more than average, but should have an easier time climbing the ladders.
Reward Scaling
If you check your logs, I’d wager my Spider-Man that nobody has ever earned the 1500 event point reward. The Thor Versus tournament has been running for 5 days now, and the top-rated players are somewhere around 1100 points. During the much shorter weekend tournaments, the top players also end up somewhere around 1100 points. It’s possible that someone once squeaked up to 1250 points, but I suspect not. 1500 has definitely never been reached, and you have a whole six tiers of unearned rewards above that!
As the number of active players increases, you will see a very slow increase in the cap that people reach. But as that happens, the band of players who can reach that equilibrium point will also widen, which makes the top 5, top 30, and (assuming continued success) even top 200 slots be extremely volatile. The closer you are to the top of the pile, the more points you lose for losing and the fewer points you win for winning. I reached the top 30 of last weekend’s tournament, and it felt like a literally Sisyphean task of earning 15 points and then losing 20 while I played. The ultimate user experience upshot is this:
The more players you have, players will be rewarded less for performing better. This is probably not what was intended, but it is the ultimate user experience. A larger number of players will be competing for the same number of rewards, and will feel less satisfaction for doing so.
Ultimately, I think you’ve successfully identified the axes you want to reward players along - you want to give goodies to the best players, and you also want to give rewards to players that play a lot. Right now, you are kind of succeeding at the first, but with increasingly frustrating competition for relatively fewer rewards, and you are not succeeding on the second axis, as no amount of play can be sufficient to earn your 1500 point reward. (Let alone your 3000 point reward!)
I think a small penalty on “skip” would help with the first problem, but the second one is much thornier. You could just remove the penalties for losses, and then your game becomes more of a race. In that world, the most skillful players would be able to compete on par with players that have assembled a numerically stronger team. In that world, your most enfranchised players would definitely have a shot at reaching the top rewards, but you lose the inherent catch-up mechanic for players that start the event late. I’d probably test a variety of variants. It’s tricky.
Thanks for listening!
Tesla
