We’ve been experimenting recently with how long it should take for full mission node points to refresh in a PVE event. As I’m sure some of you have noticed, we’ve already tried a conservative change of 2.5hr → 3hr refresh times. When we tried this change we were on the lookout for a few issues:
Players clustering at the top with the same score
Creating additional grinding, especially for those players
Rubber banding becoming more erratic towards the end of an event
We didn’t see any of those issues and now we want to try something a little bit bigger.
So I’m here to announce that our PVE event, The Hunt is going to be running starting on Tuesday 1/20/15 with 8hr refresh times for missions.
This is a big change! But we think it will really help everyone’s enjoyment of our PVE events.
Why 8hrs? Well there’s a few reasons. We think 8hrs has a good natural rhythm to it, allowing for several satisfying play sessions throughout the day. On top of that, more than 50% of players voted for 8+hrs in this poll from a month ago: https://forums.505go.com/discussion/20373
Also, we’re worried about people feeling like they need to wake up in the middle of the night to play our game. Seriously, we’re super happy that you’re committed to the game, but please don’t ruin your sleep schedule. Sleep is good for you.
This change is only a trial and we’ll be collecting data to decide whether it should become a permanent change, as a result we’ve lined it up so that we’re not testing this out on an event that rewards a new character. Hopefully you’ll all enjoy this new PVE experience!
I assume that point values overall are going to rise for each node to compensate. What’s interesting is that it makes the timing of entering an event, and the last hour of each subevent that much more important.
Also, we’re worried about people feeling like they need to wake up in the middle of the night to play our game. Seriously, we’re super happy that you’re committed to the game, but please don’t ruin your sleep schedule. Sleep is good for you.
The points per mission will look the same, but will now take 8 hours to refresh fully (instead of 2.5h). We’ve tuned the progression rewards for this event to take this into account.
Does this mean that 3 clears will result in reducing a node’s point value down to 1? I could see this being an issue since a big differentiator for the top 10 is who can grind the final nodes most efficiently, and 5 clears makes it so that there is plenty of room for people to pull ahead by doing 5 full clears. 3 full clears is significantly easier, and might result in too much point bunching: keeping it at 5 clears by making it take 1+ days instead of 24 hours to refresh would probably solve this problem.
I’m also worried that an 8 hour clear time will result in issues that you’ve previously mentioned. If this doesn’t work out, could you also test 4 hr refresh times? I think that would be a good compromise between making the PvEs too easy to hit optimally (which will probably be the result of this 8 hour test), and the 3 hour times that simply require way too much time to grind.
To let us sleep and have a job at the same time, please do the same to PVP - get rid of cooldowns - it increases the time interval to rank well too much.
New PVE: - Please do Enemy of the State instead of The Hunt, and pls Doom/Loki purple as progression reward
Good thoughts. 8hrs may be a bit too far apart. Especially when you take into account the length of some subs. A 12hr sub, for example, is only going to have enough time for one full point pass, which means it would proably turn into a grindfest after the first passthrough.
I agree that 4 may be the “happy place” in regards to refresh, since it cuts evenly into all the sub timeframes we typically see and would allow for more than one full point passthrough per sub.
That being said, depending on the adjustments made to Prog rewards, it may not be as much of an issue once it gets implemented.
