PvE droprates are too low

I'm so glad I came back to have a look at the last couple pages of posts. This thread has become so much more entertaining. Thanks for the chuckles, folks.

 

As a primarily SP player I don't think the MP and SP rewards should be similar per time investment.

- MP requires a time commitment during which you can't go AFK. SP can be paused at any time.
- SP you have much more control over the type of opponent you want to face. Some people find facing certain MP builds to be a miserable experience.
- MP runs the risk of encountering obnoxious players.
- You spend a lot of time waiting for games to begin and your opponent to move in MP.
- SP provides more gold/time than MP. Gold allows you to choose the items you get from Randimar/Daily deal.

For me, SP will always have advantages over MP so I'd expect the reward/time of MP to be significantly greater than SP.
I think it comes down to what variable you are trying to control. If you're trying to make all game experiences similar in terms of reward per time I think you should explain why that's a desired outcome.
If you are concerned about the MP game, we had an experiment before the MP loot buff where the loot/time between MP and SP was closer. That resulted in a too few MP players.

I find SP very rewarding and only play MP when I can commit an hour (which rarely happens). Doing the loot fairy twice feels like better reward / time than one MP win (no league). I've been lucky with the bandit recently so I often do him twice as well.

TL;DR reward per time doesn't have to be the same for all game modes.

 

This goes mainly to Valimont,, who feels that MP rewards significantly overshadow SP.

So you say you're a a PvE player? That's fine, but then why would the rewards of MP effect your gaming experience? There is and never will be an implemented trading system between players, you won't be battling other players since you only do SP, therefore you never have to worry about how much more lucrative MP is if you never have to interact with it or its players.

 

I would need to see some actual numbers on this. SP gives you items much faster, but MP chests have much higher rarities and much better chances of getting treasures.

 

Maybe adjusting the club reward to hit a higher rarity more often would balance things up a bit.
SP would see more club slots due to finishing maps quicker.
MP would also benefit but not as much.

 

Especially the likes. Anyone else remember likability?

 

Yeah unfortunately creating a 100+ post FAQ & Glossary kills your rating on the likability leaderboard! Oh well, guess I'll play "Forums" another time.

 

Okay, I missed this one. @Flaxative - When you refer to speed farmers, do you mean completing adventures in a timely fashion (and by your report of an average of 6 minutes per module for the entire campaign you've done this much faster than I ever have), or repetition farming of a single level? I hope it's the former, and I hope you calculated using more of an "average experienced player" time for completion. Also, since BM has the actual drop tables, I hope you calculated for average loot. Which is a long-winded way of saying, "Don't be bogus to buff MP." I don't think you did, 'cause you're better than that.

I think the chance of an upgrade from rare to epic is actually <5%. Of course, this applies to each guaranteed rare.

The points you enumerate after this statement are part of what I was trying to get at. For MP it isn't just the time spent playing. It's having uninterrupted time, plus the time spent waiting to play, and the other irritants you mentioned. This makes it a bit of an "apples and oranges" comparison.
I respectfully disagree with this quote, though. I think rewards for the two modes should have at least a rough equivalency. Given the differences in modes and players, I suspect "rough" is the best we'll be able to get.

That kind of gets into Pay-2-Win, and I applaud BM for avoiding that.

 

We were going by average adventure completion time, and given that more players aren't super good farmers than are, yeah, the numbers we were working with should be quite a bit below what folks were doing on single levels with super-focused parties. Don't remember why I put "speed" in that sentence.

 

So, Flaxative, would it be correct to state that the SP loot drop rarity and quantity rates were designed according to the observed adventure completion rate of an average player? Would the word "farming" even be needed in the sentence at all?

 

I was starting to feel like I was being a bit of a troll... and then I read

I have asked at least 2 or 3 times WHY? It is OBVIOUSLY obvious to you, but it is not obvious to myself (and I would estimate I am not alone).

WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT??? I often only get 1 win in a night opening the first gold chest and it is NOT 50-50 to get an epic. If it were I would have collected every Epic item by now.

PvP victories are fairly easy for a certain time depending on how far along your collection is when you start and how good you are at MP. But you hit a pretty nasty plateau somewhere around a rating of 1200 and boy howdy unless you improve your game easy and win will not be uttered together for a while. I can play for an hour and get 0 victories I play for an hour in SP and get multiple legendaries (only happened once) in one chest (thank you Loot Fairy).

I see the Loot Fairy and Bandit as the boosts you are asking for. They are both limited features and since the Loot Fairy is well tracked you can use that 1 hour a day you have to reap the Fairy's rewards and then play on as you wish.

Finally, I think you should simply say, I think the SP rewards should be higher. Not base it on MP rewards (since you say you are not interested in MP) or some equivilancy that you think you understand better than people who developed the game and who have been playing the game for much longer than you have. If you think MP gives more rewards then play MP and show us how much more rewards you are earning.
I will give you the general advice most vets give new players. The best way to build an inventory is to chase the Loot Fairy and enter leagues. Even if you have no desire to play for 50 gold you are guaranteed 3 Gold Chests you don't have to do anything other than join and be put in a pod (so joining in the last 5 minutes of the sign up period can be hit or miss). The average sell value of the loot from 3 Golds is less than 50 gold, but if you are trying to build an inventory and need rare items it is awesome.

 

In terms of time to completion, you're right. But the treasure stats we used were not for first time completion--they were for subsequent non-quest play, often known as grinding or farming, IDK. Sorry if my diction hasn't been precise enough.

 

Man, this thread. I doubt any good will come of it, but here goes anyway:

I am mostly in interested in single player. (Like several other posters in this thread, I find MP on the stressful side and logistically difficult to do very much of, but I do try and get one gold chest from MP each day.) Having recently, and at long last, beaten the Mauve Manticore #3 Supplement module, I have now successfully completed every SP module available at least once. According to neoncat's tools, I have collected 80% of all the items in the game since I started playing a few months ago. That last 20% is almost all epics and legendaries, and will clearly take a lot longer than the first 80%.

The question of what PvE drop rates should be, or even if they matter much at all, depends greatly on what the point of playing the SP campaign is in the first place. At first, there were certain cards that I wanted because it seemed like they were key to beating certain modules (e.g. Arrogant Armor for the Secret of the Elder Mind). By now, though, I have at least one source of every card (apart from outliers like Pulverizing Hack), even if I don't have enough of every kind of card to make some of the really extreme builds. At least in my case, getting to this point felt like it took a reasonable amount of time. The aspiration made for a pleasant goal, not a frustrating grind. Even with what I already have, I know I can beat everything the SP campaign has to offer. (Well, as long as I stay in the realm of sanity and don't try to complete all the 1 HP quests.) New epics and legendaries may make things easier or faster, but it's hard to make the case that I need more items for SP success.

So why do I keep playing at all? Gotta-catch-'em-all OCD is one factor. But the thrill there is in the journey, not the arrival. The game is Card Hunter, not Card Haver. If I ever get to the point where I have one of everything, there won't be much reason to play SP except the most important one, which is this: I just plain enjoy playing CH modules. If playing stops being something I enjoy doing, no amount of drop rate juicing would draw me back. I don't grind for loot. Every day I play a couple of favorite modules and accept the nudge from the Loot Fairy. Sometimes the fairy sends me to another favorite and sometimes to a module that I have neglected for one reason or another. In the latter case, I am often pleasantly surprised to find that a module that used to be very challenging has gotten easier for me, either because new items have opened up new options, or because I am just a better player now. Either way, I get a nice feeling of progress. Seeing that little yellow exclamation point on a drop is something I actively pursue, of course, but it's hard to say whether seeing it more often would materially change my enjoyment of the game.

The Blue Manchu guys seem much too focused on making the game fun to play to have spent a lot of time doing precise calculations of the optimal drops rates to promote maximal long-term player retention. I'm sure they looked at the data and thought about it, but I suspect they then made up some numbers that seemed about right and went with them rather than busting out the psychologists. So I don't think there's anything set in stone about the current drop rates. But with a small dev team, development time is an extremely scarce resource. At least for a player like me, time devoted to making new SP content or adding new wrinkles to existing content is better spent than time fiddling with drop rates.

 

Yeah the bit about "speed farming" threw me off for a while because I read it to mean repetition farming. Anyway...

Regarding the matter at hand, there are really two basic schools of thought about all this:

1. It should be setup so everyone, no matter competence, receives similar reward levels.
2. It is fine if people receive different rewards depending on their competence.

Interestingly, MP currently employs #1 (ELO guarantees most players arrive at a point where they go 50/50 and therefore have equivalent rewards though at different skill levels) while SP employs #2 because item drops don't scale to your proficiency. Leagues go back to the #2 model though, since we throw everyone into a pool to battle against various skill levels. So while regular MP matches are more or less fixed in terms of items per time (once you've played up to your correct ELO, that is), SP and leagues are allowed to reward quite varied things based on player skill/speed. I'm curious why they were designed with such different ideology.

 

Great post, Mr. Magnifico, really great! Thanks for taking the time to write it!

 

Ah, we're still uncovering new information, very good, the conversation is leading us to better understanding of Card Hunter! By the way, I like your choice of stats very much and find them very suitable!

So would the following then be a correct statement of how the relative total values of the SP and MP loot drops were designed?
"The design basis was the average SP adventure completion time and the average value of loot drops in the second and further SP adventure playthroughs."

(An aside: I wouldn't personally automatically call the second+ playthrough of adventures grinding or farming. Whether it is farming depends on if it was done at top speed with the intention of gain maximization with little or no regard to actual play enjoyment. If not, why then it's just regular SP play intended mainly to be pleasurable. In my opinion.)

Also, your diction is fine, it's just that absolute precision comes very handy for the matter at hand, that's why I wish to make very sure. We've spent quite some time already in the thread quibbling over very fine points and having the facts be absolutely straight will hopefully save on the wear and tear of keyboards and nerves in the future. Sorry if all this seems very tedious and nitpicky.

 

I think SP is a simple "piece work" concept. Finish x, get a drop. Completing maps faster bumps your per hour reward, but doing it any other way would be difficult and probably abusable. Since level 1 and level 18 items all have the same resell value I think SP still primarily falls under ideology 1. Some of the post-campaign challenges in SP approach ideology 2.
The first instance of ideology 2 I saw was tournaments. ELO was not a consideration- may the best player win. I suspect the popularity of tournaments was a factor in developing leagues. The use of pods dampens the ideology 2 effect in leagues, so to me it seems ideology 1 is still somewhat dominant.
Just my opinion, of course.

 

Magnifico, I totally agree with you .. I felt the same first few months. Game is great, the journey is much more pleasant then .. even with drop rates .. every rare, and ever epic is a new item and warmly welcomed into your inventory.
But .. after few more months, you're going to be around 88-90% and then the SP problems start to emerge .. you have all the rares, almost all the epics .. and that arrival is nowhere to be seen, journey is still the same - rares, epics .. but now
you own them all..
I played my favourite maps for 6 months (after I done 88%) .. and with time it becomes quite non-rewarding ..

 

Would it be more rewarding after you reached 100%. Because I don't see any other difference between having completed or not completed your collection, it's not like SP is gonna suddenly get more interesting once you fulfilled your long-term goal.

In fact, things like owning a copy of every single item are called "long-term goals" exactly because they are what keep you going. Chances are you already own almost every legendary/epic you would want to use in a real game (those are usually the once you save up gold for buying when they finally show up at randi/daily deal).

I'm not a SP-only player, and yet I'm in a similar situation. Been playing the game since september 2013, owning 88% percent of items. The vast majority of what I'm missing, is not something I really need in any significant way. The items I'm actively looking forward to dropping/purchasing are very few at this point. I don't have a particularly marked hunger for finally completing my own collection. I play at my own pace, maybe 2-5 games between the fairy and my fav SP modules, maybe a couple MP matches if I can. I do not farm SP, because after many months I do find it a little boring (which has like nothing to do with how low or high the droprates are).

So yes, I'm slowly working towards completing my collection. The "slowly" part doesn't bother me at all.

 

Well you're at 88% now, getting there was not "slowly", you'll see after 90% what's slowly .. but ok..

Btw:
- I dont have all the items I need
- and that about 100% .. that's philosophical thing ..