I posted a few of my thoughts on the game here and there, but I spent some time expanding on the idea and thought I’d make it its own post, especially since it needs expanding to a significant degree from the original subject matter of that thread.
As a bit of background, I’ve worked in the game industry for about 9 years. Now I’m not a designer, but working with game systems every day somewhat changes your perspective.
I’ll be referencing Hearthstone at some point because I got a good look into how that sausage was made and the two games have some basic structure in common.
The game in its current state has some holes in it that development clearly is trying to address, but it seems they’re not quite sure which way this should go as they’ve gone back and forth on the PvP structure a few times in recent history.
Structure is the operative word here. The game’s mechanics as soon as the tiles drop are great. However, the things that happen under the hood and where the magic happens in any game like this is with the structures that the actual gameplay rests on.
To know how we need to look at the structural problems, some basics have to be established.
- Rewards are important
An FTP game hinges to a great degree on rewards being given to the player. They need to
be meaningful enough so that the player tries to get them and scarce enough to make the player feel like they gained something without devaluing the experience.
- Structure is important
Any reward centric game that you sign up for needs to show you what you get, how you get it and how much you need it. Failure to do so breeds frustration.
- There is more than one target audience
Any game with a veriety of game modes attracts players of different mindsets, different goals and different economic means. Because of this, game systems need to be diverse.
- Making changes is difficult
Any significantly popular game will go through backlash over changes. There is always some subset of the playersbase that wants change, one that doesn’t and one that doesn’t care. Each of these have their own reactions to change in a game and you have to make sure you balance that to some degree. Meaning…
- Perception matters
You can make the best changes imaginable but if your playerbase doesn’t “get” them, you’re back at square one. Selling your changes is just as important as making them. Even a mediocre change can appear fantastic if you sell it well.
Alright, so, where are we?
Right now the game isn’t a mess, but it has significant weaknesses.
It is incredibly hard to manage your progress as a new to mid-level player because you have no idea where you’re going. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem, if there wasn’t the specter of decaying covers. So the problem there is that you don’t know what you need, what you’ll get and how to manage it. You get a token you shouldn’t open yet or command points you shouldn’t spend, but you open them and spend them. A bit down the line you get a severe case of buyer’s remorse for all the wasted covers, points, HP etc.
Learnability is always a problem in games with complex structures but here there’s a possibility that you’re spending hard earned cash on some “progress” which has a big potential to get wasted without helping much or anything at all because the choices weren’t clear or their short to long term benefits weren’t transparent.
This is where goal setting comes in. You have a very hard time to find out where you are in the progression and where you might want to go. At first you think that more is better, but then you realise that having everything you can costs more resources than you can afford. Then you have to make choices on what you need to keep and again run into potential loss scenarios. When you have a transparent goal, a place you want to go on your way, you start formulating strategies on how to get there. Formulating strategies is what gives you ownership and ownership is what gets you to come back.
Giving you goals, plateaus on which to rest, is essential to making progression rewarding.
I’ll quickly say a few things on the daily rewards structure and PvE as they’re somewhat well done and should help illuminate where the PvP system falls short.
Daily rewards
Shield resupplies are reasonably paced and give you just enough hope to get something shiny. It’s a well done system.I also appreciate them not doing some stupid wheel spin animation or dangle some super rare reward in your face that you won’t ever get. My girlfriend plays silly amounts of candy crush since it came out and has never won the daily jackpot.
Deadpool Dailies are a good source of daily income and a good incentive to fill out your roster.
It also mercifully limits the number of mandatory minimum one stars you have to roster to Juggernaut.
Daily deals on the shop also are good enough to occasionally tempt me to rip open a cover, even though I’m not sure I should. I’m just a glutton.
PvE
PvE Structure is mostly fine. You have a linear reward track, a competitive reward track and per-game rewards.
You can get your linear rewards and then also pick up some extra bits from the competitive side.
You can expand on your rewards by putting in more timing, time and effort and that in itself is rewarding, on top of the actual rewards.
The different target audiences here can find levels of engagement that benefit them to a comfortable degree
The biggest problem at this stage is the exploitability of the ranking system (tapping) on which there are a couple threads around, but that’s merely a numbers tweak away from solving and does not fundamentally affect game design.
PvE gives you a reasonable impression on where you’re at as far as challenges go and most players likely know exactly what they should be doing when they select challenge levels.
PvE could benefit from more to do, but I won’t get into that here.
Well, this is where things get messy. PvP.
PvP has no linear reward track. It has two rank based reward tracks which just pay out with different mechanics but are based on the same principles. Climb as high as you can as fast as you can and shield at the right time. Also don’t hit the wrong guy. Who is the wrong guy? Well, good luck piecing that puzzle together at first glance and then find your guides on how that actually works.
PvP does a fairly bad job of telling you what your challenges will be due to the open nature of rosters. I ran into fully covered 4*s at CL 3 or 4. I don’t know why that is and the game doesn’t tell you that. You’re now forced into minimum CLs based off your level, but that actually makes the problem worse, not better.
PvP unfortunately has a terrible challenge and reward structure compared to PvE and could stand a significant overhaul both of its challenge level and reward systems because unlike PvE it does not cater to its full potential audience.
Suggestions
The game needs to split the competitive players from the non-competitive players so that the groups don’t feel like they’re being victimized by each other.
The two sides are basically blaming each other for standing in the way of what they want or threatening to take away what they have. That’s mostly a perception thing based on the assumption that in order for someone to have something, it needs to be taken away from soneone else.
Hearthstone did this with giving people casual mode, which came in because people needed a place to just “play the game” without affecting their ranking. If you want to play somesthing stupid, test a new deck or don’t know if your girlfriend is finished getting dressed for dinner before you can finish the next match, you play casual.
The other thing the game needs to do is to cap rosters. The game can’t tell how good a player you are from your roster. You need to be able to have a better understanding of what you’re up against.
There’s ways to do that and I think I found one that could work. I’m not saying it’s necessarily the best one, but I’m sure it’s a decent enough kick-off for some kind of meaningful discussion.
So here we go, first, we put up two different types of PvP events. We’ll call them capped and open for now.
Capped division:
CL1 = up to 1*, max level 50
CL2 = up to 2*, max level 94
CL3 = up to 3*, max level 166
CL4 = up to 4*, max level 270
Open Division:
CL5= up to 2*
CL6= up to 3*
CL7= up to 4*
CL8= up to 5*
Capped division gets win based progression and rewards more in line with the limited natue of the environment.
In turn, as a number of “victims” are removed from the system, the open division which will stick to the rating system as is needs a way more aggressive reward structure to reflect the high risk, high reward nature of the competitivve environment.
You sign up for the open or capped season and the events are all of that type for the duration of the season.
If you have a character over the level for an event it gets forced down to the cap. Your level 130 Magneto is level 94 in CL2 and stays a 130 in CL3 and above.
Unlike getting boosted as it is right now, featured characters now would simply scale to other event brackets and become available there, regardless of their stars. You have a level 200 Mystique and during identity theft she becomes a lvl 50 / 94 / 166 / 270 character for the capped division and a 144 / 200 / 304 / 484 in the open division.
The same applies to boosted characters. They basically become free agents and scale up and down depending on your CL.
All this would offer a number of benefits.
- Clearing up challenge levels
You know what you’re up against. You have a clear understanding of the level your roster has to be to compete in the event.
- Separating player types
The two main audiences can’t be as happy with each other as they would be apart. Let them be split and merry.
- Provide intermediate goals
Satisfaction is gained from reaching goals and making it up to a new division gives you a better understanding of the step you’re at at the time.
- Shaking up the meta game
The meta game is fairly settled as far as I can tell from the posts of seasoned players. I’m not sure what happens when a boost rotation puts a level 370 Ares, IM40 and OBW in CL7, but at least it should be more interesting than what we have at the moment.
- Remove the collection penalty
At multiple points I have seen the warning to not expand my roster to this or that point unless I wanted to hurt my MMR. Because the CL caps what you have available, they don’t have to evaluate your roster anymore to see where you stand.
There’s stuff I haven’t really thought about, like alliance scoring, but I’ll consider that details for now.
Thank you for sticking with me this far and please keep it civil. I’m not trying to take anything away from anyone, I just want everyone to have more for themselves without bothering anyone else.
