[Suggestion] MP incentives re-think

The issue of rewarding actual losses and recognizing instant resigns have been discussed since Oct last yr (iirc when timer penalties for quick resigns abuse was installed). While impt, its not a simple 1 line coding effort. The 'correct' implementation would be to look at the game state, ie, cards played, turns, chars lost etc to classify actual battle vs a dud and then give out the participation reward to the loser. Since bandwidth is precious in an online game, a lag free experience is the highest priority for QoS...adding in codes to monitor game state is expensive...that does not mean the devs are not looking at the problem. Its just trickier than just 'oh, implement this or do that and the problem will go away'. Hope it helps.

 

Not really, since it affects the winners only. That still leaves SP as potentially safer and better grinding space because you know that if you spend x time you'll get somewhere between y-z gold out of it. With MP you can't never be sure and if you're fighting the clock to get that last bit of gold you will rather play SP instead of MP.

Fully agree, but this doesn't help in bringing MP on par with SP in terms gold acquisition.

Couldn't agree more, but that not the problem at hand - the issue is that there's less of those epic fights taking place because MP players aren't playing MP. Instead, they grinding SP because the moment they start playing CH they need to answer the question - do I want to have fun or gold? I'm not saying SP is boring, I'm sure majority of MP players have beaten the campaign, but if you're into MP and end up playing SP than there's something wrong with the incentives you're offered.

Absolutely brilliant!

 

Maybe 1 gold for every 20 seconds though? But a great idea. Also then it could be considered to have MP chests not include treasures like shop/league chests?
Actually, the more L items Randimar's offers every week, the higher value gold has so actually it might be ok to get even more gold and leave the treasure drops there.

 

The Final Doorman's idea is awesome. I hope BM understands that giving more gold to MP players will not dwindle their pizza income, after all if MP is poor gold-wise people just farm SP, which in turn makes the MP experience poorer, which in turn affects MP player retention and finally pizza business goes bust.

 

Though I still think that the easiest and most logical solution is just to increase the cycle rate of items, these do seem like positive alternatives.

 

What I also like about it is that it's an incentive to play the game, not only winning. MP meta would be much healthier if we were given incentives to experiment with MP, getting half-baked ideas out there and trying new exciting stuff, not only the obvious and popular solutions.

 

This is not a bad idea, but it would disrupt the reward balance between MP and SP. In this thread http://forums.cardhunter.com/threads/feedback-mp-vs-sp-rewards.6002/ we arrived to the conclusion that MP rewards were already better than SP rewards. Now, if MP has easy acces to gold, even easier than SP, then the balance between both would be even more uneven than what it is now.

You are looking the issue from a MP perspective, but how fair is this proposal for only SP players? If you say that you fear that MP players will be "forced" to play SP to grind gold with the Randimar's change, then with this suggestion I could say that SP players would be forced to play MP even if they aren't interested, just because it would have a much better gold ratio per time played. MP would also be the new "safe place", because you would get guaranteed gold, while you have to get lucky in SP to get some worthy treasure.

 

Thanks for saying this, Jacques. I wanted to bring something akin to this up, but I couldn't tell if my SP biases were coloring my conclusions. Guaranteed gold like that would be very tempting.

 

Thanks for the link, I'm behind like a year or so of forum content.

However, from that link it's not very clear cut that MP is already better than SP at farming gold, to be honest a lot of people are saying the opposite.

Of course there are leagues (played only 1 and got second place, got only rubbish to be honest, but I know that people are supper happy about it) but not everybody can play at a specific time or during the day. Also, assuming you're an average player (i.e. have a few hours during the day for games, not 6 or 8) you won't manage to go for the purple chest. We also shouldn't forget about the two chances a day to target the loot fairy...

I don't try to make MP the 'new safe place' for gold acquisition, I just would like to see it more or less on par with one another and it looks like SP is the way to go if you're short on gold.

 

Or....... we could have both! Shinies for everyone! Moar loot, moar gold! Then we'll be forced to play what we want to play!

But seriously, here's a summary of the MP vs. SP thread, which I referred to much earlier in this thread:

"Better" rewards are relative to your goals (complete collection?, special builds?, max elo?, 100% quests?), but MP rewards tend to line up more closely with SP-oriented goals, while SP rewards (specifically farming the Kobold mines, which can generate 1000+ gp / hour) tend to align with MP-oriented goals, like purchasing specific items from Randimar's.

 

Just want to step in to say a couple things.

1. We definitely want to better incentivize fun grinding than boring grinding. That is to say, we want to make sure people who want to play MP don't get forced into SP because it's more lucrative; we also don't want SP players to be caught grinding the same two levels over and over again just because they are far and away better for gold farming.

2. Just because leagues are a good deal doesn't mean that ranked MP doesn't need some kind of boost—our always-on match-making system needs to be rewarding players adequately or else the health of the playerbase and environment deteriorates.

3. We are working on these issues.

4. Thank you all for your suggestions, they give us more things to think about as we work on said issues.

 

And hopefully also on the converse problem, that of a SP end-game which involves more than gold-farming and shaking down the loot fairy?

(*cough* randomized weekly challenge quests *cough*)

 

I'd say that's part of problem #1. It's definitely on our radar. As you know our team is limited in resources. Priorities at the moment are definitely balance and coop, but you can bet we want to make the game as good as possible in as many ways as possible. Also, I'm an obsessive forum reader. You're being heard.

 

Jacques, leagues are the ones giving too much loot, regular MP queue gives far less loot than SP.

 

In some ways (note I did not say all), I think the new Quick Draw mode addresses a lot of what is at the basis of this discussion. It could be said that it is what is at the core of multiplayer play: grab some figures, some cards and a board and go play with a friend.

• It eliminates item disparity because everyone has the same chance at the same cards - no need to go grind for that all important legendary, all the cards are already at your disposal.
• It eliminates deck building from collections which while a part of MP, is such a foundational part of SP I suspect it doesn't nearly appeal as much to those who just want to play MP (otherwise they would be drawn to SP also) - again no waiting around for Randimar to drop that one last item you need for your deck, just quick draft and play.
• And lastly it results in quicker more unique games which has no possibility of a stagnate meta which requires specific items.

This is not to say the concerns that have been noted shouldn't be addressed, but I think when Quick Draw hits live it will provide a uniquely refreshing means for those who just want to enjoy the "fun of MP."

 

How about getting rid of the special loot tables for those levels? All they do is encourage excessive farming of those two levels (and mess up the Loot Fairy there and also at Slub Gut).

 

Yup. And those are part of MP, right?

 

Herm... this is a very messy conversation, and I'm not really grokking what state-of-the-game everyone is trying to reach. I also have no expectation of reaching my perfect CardHuntrian utopia either.

That said, I really don't think that taking away things that currently exist is a good solution. Also, I think our standard for "reasonable grinding" has been skewed a little by the extraordinarily-generous rotation of leagues at present.

Here's what *I* want from CH, broken down further into strategies for reaching these goals:

1 - a reasonable chance of completing a collection in a year or so (with some amount of daily effort)
1A - gold farming; ultimately necessary to fill in the last gaps of a collection
1A.i - if you check daily, post-update Randimar should offer a reasonable chance of seeing an item within a year
1A.ii - SP gold farming already nets ~1000gp/hr, but is utterly boring; probably can't expect similar output from any other strategy
1A.iii - MP gold farming is not possible, unless something like The Final Doorman's proposal is implemented
1A.iv - a better pizza conversion rate could fund a handful of items, but would be prohibitively expensive at scale

1B - opening lots and lots of chests; boring and futile... unless they're epic chests!
1B.i - there's no way to repeatedly obtain epic chests in SP
1B.i-a - randomized challenge quests could make that possible!
1B.i-b - loot fairy and quests offer approximately a gold chest, but perhaps could be upgraded?
1B.ii - leagues presently offer the highest probability of obtaining an epic chest
1B.iii - the daily MP ladder requires an unreasonably large investment of time, but could be changed not to reset daily
1B.iv - post-update, purchasing epic chests is viable for starting up, but not for completing a collection

2 - new content to keep the game challenging and interesting
2A - randomized content
2A.i - coming to MP in the form of Quick Draw, apparently. hooray!
2A.ii - nothing in SP... but randomized challenge quests could make that possible!

2B - new campaign sections released monthly!
2B.i - MM does quite a bit towards furthering this
2B.ii - new leagues also contribute, but seem much harder to churn out than single player scenarios
2B.iii - maybe an MM-like expansion can let you use your MP party?
2B.iv - clearly, I should just start churning out leagues and scenarios ^_^

3 - an in-game neon pony, just the right shade to match me
3A - pay off Flax; *whistles nonchalantly* <_< >_>


And sorry about helping the thread descend further into chaos... here's a cat:

Spoiler: Cat Picture

 

2014,

not using bots to farm,

all of my what

 

Hmm didn't even notice that resigning did anything to your match timer, course I have two screens and seldom care if it takes a while to get a match or someone else stalls/times out. The only time those really seem to bother me is when the person you are going against is preforming normally for the whole game and then 5 stars in when all they have to do is pass and you win ......... they go for the 2min timeout..... but that is probably something for another thread

Seems to me like the game could probably implement some sort of scoring system, X points for damage dealth, Y points for damage received, figure in Stars somehow. Possibly some style multipliers for executing combo moves or properly flanking somebody with who could have otherwise blocked (tho I wouldn't actively show bonuses like that during the game lest it give away a hand). Throw in some other multipliers for average time taken per turn etc. Maybe even assign individual card values to give a quick and dirty way to compare the decks. There has to be a fairly strait forward (note I did not say easy ) way of quantifying how a game went. Then use that number to award a gold payout to the loser.

I want to say don't award anything for resignations but I'm not sure if even the prospect of a gold payout could keep me from resigning a game that was terribly one sided, generally unfun and would ultimately be a waste of time to see to the end. Certainly nothing should be awarded for timeout losses.