Rising Tensions Needs a Redesign

Magic: The Gathering - Puzzle Quest MtGPQ General Discussion
1

There are several elements that are bogging this event down.

First and foremost, its totally stale. Its very similar in structure to the Ixalan daily event. Moreover the 5 nodes are the exact same across the five different guild events. I have 5 PW’s picked out and just play them over and over again. Couple suggestions: Restrict the league to only allow those color decks. Izzet league can only use blue & red, Dimir blue & black, etc. Also, event objectives that encourage us to play the new cards. I might actually use Mentor cards if there was a benefit or progression reward tied to them.

Timing & Node Recharge: I live in the Pacific time zone, which means the event begins at like 8:PM and ends at 6:PM. The 2 hour window where the event cycles is my prime time to play the event. I understand that this window has to fall somewhere and maybe its finally my turn, but is there a better way to handle events so there isn’t a blackout period?!? Additionally, and this is a huge point of contention, when I start the even at 8:PM and I lose the first event to the AI getting a game-changing cascade I am basically locked out of the game for over an hour. This happens fairly regularly and is infuriating. PLEASE LET US START WITH 2 CHARGES AND NOT 1.

Its super cool that the final reward is an exclusive mythic, but at this point I don’t even play for it anymore. Again, due to time constraints, I often only play until I get all the crystals & gems and then stop. I don’t find the last leg of the event worthwhile. Maybe it’s time to switch that to a rare booster pack like in the Dominaria events? I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m in the minority with this, I know the free orbs are pretty chase. Still though, this is another thing adding to the staleness.

Last, why can’t these run during the weekend? Weekends are so dull in this game! We get one big grindy event every weekend we’ve played tons of time before plus the dull-as-dirt Training Grounds. I would totally have time to play this event during weekends, and getting locked out for an hour due to a loss would be much more digestible.

This event has the potential to be a fun daily challenge, but at the moment its kind of a drag. Fixing the timing and node charges seem like the easiest first step and would go a long way to making it more fun.

2

Why not play one game in each node every day?

Maybe RT has been designed specifically to encourage this behaviour?

3

I try to play it every day but due to the timing of the event, as well as frequently scrubbing out on the first node, I often don’t get to play it to completion. I sincerely hope it was not designed to infuriate players.

4

The real issue with Rising Tensions is that the nodes after the first don’t refresh until after you have played your first match on them. If I get a late start and lose once its really difficult to get full completion before it ends.

If the event would just function like EVERY OTHER EVENT EVER then it would be fine (since you’ll have plenty of charges banked when you unlock the later nodes to finish at any time)

5

I can speak to this, also living in Pacific Time Zone. If the event starts at 8pm, you maybe get one match per node before it’s time to be getting yourself to bed. Maybe two. If you fail even one of them, you’ve now locked out of those later nodes until morning, and if you drive into work you’re not really playing again at all unless you can play during a break at work, or if you take mass transit in.

With Across Ixalan this was less of a problem since all your nodes started banking charges as soon as the event started, but with Rising Tensions one of the biggest issues is if you fail on Pacific time zone, you’re potentially screwed out of rewards for the entire event, which is even more of a problem considering you paid to enter it in the first place.

A fix for this would be letting all your nodes start banking charges as soon as the event begins rather than when you unlock the node, and ending the event an hour later so people in this time zone have another window to play.

As for the event itself, I feel like it would have been more interesting if the guild highlighted with each event was the one who’s colors you had to use rather than the one that was eliminated from the nodes. For example, keep all the 5 objectives as they are, but on the Izzet days, you have to play with only red or blue decks. On Selesnya days only can use white or green decks, etc. This would encourage people to use different decks rather than just building 5 that can meet the node objectives and playing those every time.

6

I live on the east coast and so the event starts at 11 pm. I rarely get to join the event until the next morning. If I’m busy or forget, I usually don’t get a chance to play the event until after the kids are in bed. The event ends at 9 p.m. which leaves me a very short window to get my games in. The first TG starts at (I don’t even know) o’clock and ends at 5 p.m. I often forget to sneak this one in before work ends and miss out on the 10 crystals. The second one still ends at the old time so I can usually get that in while making dinner.

I do think the RT design is to encourage players to play more than just the first node and be done. I actually appreciate that fact and will acknowledge that if it were different, I’d only play the first node (unless it were the cast 3 creatures with power 6 ore more and 3 with power 3 or less node; in that case I’d move onto the next node.)

Wouldn’t it be something if instead of tying ribbons to objectives and rewards to ribbons earned, they tied the rewards directly to the objective? This could open up some new design space. Take RT for example: Instead of 1 charge on node 1 and the rest locked, you have unlimited tries on node 1 but node 2 doesn’t unlock until you complete the quests (all objectives) of node 1. Objective 1 is still win (which is pretty much a given), Objective 2 is [whatever, something easy] and rewards runes, Objective 3 is harder and gives something better than runes (a few orbs, crystals, or jewels in RTs case). Node 2 the rewards scale up, and so on until node 4 gives the exclusive card for objective 3. They could be completed in multiple tries or all in one game but this way you are still forced to play all 4 nodes for full rewards but you aren’t restricted in when you are able to actually play the event. This would even speed up the slow loading because it would skip the ribbons ticking up animation and giving rewards after you go back to the event screen.

7

I’m torn on this one… I’m in Oz and RT starts in the afternoon, I try and win a fight on the first node as soon as possible so the 2nd will start filling up, but then I put it down and ignore it till later, sometimes I play a bit more in bed just before sleep, but often I don’t finish it until going to work in the morning on Public Transport only a few hours before it finishes…
If I hadn’t already unlocked nodes I would NOT be able to reliably finish it at the time I normally play, but I know how it works and I PLAN based on how it works and I have a system that makes it workable…

The quandary for events like this is…

TotP you wanted to win on the early nodes because it got harder and harder, so avoiding the final node when you could was actually an AIM.

But on AI and RT the different nodes are not about difficult but content. They are different. Ideally you want to FORCE people to play at least one game on each node so they see more of the content and have more diversity. But every single thing I can think of to do that fails in some manner, either locking out people who are having a bad day on the first two nodes, or letting people easily finish just by playing the first node, or something else…

I’ve thought similar things about some of the coalition events with rings too, because it’s frustrating to be stuck on a boss you can’t beat (but there at least you’re actually meant to be fighting through a boss to get to the next one!)

One idea is, if you lose and have no charges left, letting you pay a potion to replay that node. It helps beginners a little bit and doesn’t hurt oldtimers at all. Might need tweaking though.

And/Or…

As well as being able to unlock nodes by winning the first one ALSO have a timer on them when they auto-unlock. So the 2nd node starts gaining charges 8 hours in no matter what, the 3rd 12 hours in and the 4th 16 hrs in.
Still doesn’t encourage people to play all…

Or make it a cycle of some kind where, win or lose, you get to move to the next node, if you lose it recharges in an hour, but when you win it takes 4 hours to recharge, encouraging you to play every node,.

Any other ideas welcome!

8

Frankly, my only big problem with Rising Tension is that they insist on using Trial of the Planes’ node unlocking structure. I would’ve been able to tolerate them even when each node starts with only one charge, provided that ALL nodes are open from the start. With the current system, if you, like maybe what OP implies, can only start the node when there’s only a few hours left, losing on the first node (which is far from impossible) will set you way back and potentially prevent you from getting full daily progression, wasting your 20 gems in the process.

With Across Ixalan, the node unlocking structure, as much as it feels kinda lame in hindsight, was (and is) in a way justified by the fact that the nodes from first to fourth are always the same day in and day out, and frankly, the old fourth node indeed was relatively hard to double-fulfill (as in, it’s very difficult to complete both secondary objectives, which, back then, was take < 15 damage and have < 15 life, which were just plain absurd). On top of that, each node are unlocked with full charge, so as soon as you lose your first match of the first few nodes, you can immediately retry.

But Rising Tension? The fact that the first node is rotated every day gives the implication that each node is of the same level of difficulty, so the node unlocking is just nonsensical. Add to the fact that each node opens with only a single charge means that losing your first battle on each node will force you to wait for 2 hours for you to try again, which is annoying and time-wasting.

Basically, I have said this somewhere, but I personally would propose (futile as it is to hope) that either all nodes are immediately open from the get-go, even if only with one charge, or do it Across Ixalan style, that is, each unlocked node immediately starts with full charge.

9

Wouldn’t prolonging the event by 4-6 hours (thus making them overlap) solve a bit of the timing problem?

10

I do not see any gain here granted you can already get a non-dupe , non-setlocked rare in 2 days … It is way better than a setlocked rare that would become a dupe rare (instead of a dupe mythic) after one month of event?

11

It does seem like the intent of Rising Tensions (and the prior Journey through History series) is to get players to play “broad”, in that they should be playing a lot of different nodes to progress through the story and achieve full progression/rewards. It also seems like the node refreshing is their way of introducing “risk” into the event, so there is some legitimate downside to losing.

What most people seem to be suggesting is essentially the current PvE model but with PvP matchups. You can only progress to the next node once you beat the prior one, but the nodes aren’t tied to any unlock timing. The flipside is that you can’t just replay the first node over and over again to farm the ribbons, which would presumably force the gameplay into the “broad” completion across all nodes to achieve full progression.

I feel like this was somewhat of the intent with the first and second phases of the Duel Decks event: that you are always facing a “live” opponent but you must meet certain achievements before being able to move on to the next, so the concept isn’t unheard of…

12

They could unlock all the nodes at the start?

13

Unlocking them all to start could help too, but even if they did just the Across Ixalan method of letting all nodes start gaining charges regardless of if they’re unlocked would really help.