Making Missions Less Punishing Without Decreasing Difficulty, and Increasing Player Enjoyment.

I think Churchill said it best:
A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity.
An optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

So yes, as with anything in life, push through it, learn, get better. Learning to fail is not failing to learn.

Playing other adventures aren't going to teach them how to beat the one they are having trouble with any better than actually playing the one that they are having trouble with. The benefit (item wise, but not learned tactics/skill) is the loot.

Which I've agreed with you on (with some limiting factors). Not sure why you're focusing on debating about the tools/Itemization.

 

No I'm not debating that actually I'm simply re emphasizing. Remember I don't want the difficulty lowered either.

 

You have to pay to unlock the geomancers, which is why you might see fewer complaints about them. This is all so very anecdotal, though.

It would be an interesting query. I didn't quit on the Troggs but almost did. It drove me to the point of quitting, and then my next mission was the Geomancer one, which I basically did quit over. I might have completed a quick, dumb, low level module that I'd already played after that, but when I realized how incredibly unprofitable grinding was, and how little I actually wanted to play the game anymore, I quit.

Which is to the game's credit. That said, I only have two missions available to me at my level that I haven't played yet, and one of them is Core.

Case in point: me. Reading these forums and talking to people about the struggles I've had has made me go from basically being done with the game to wondering why I ever bothered with it or gave it any of my money, from showing it off to people to recommending they stay away from it. Honestly, if there had been a banner on the loading screen that said "THIS GAME IS FOR THE HARDCORE, YOU ARE NOT GOOD ENOUGH", I would have said, oh, well, signing up for this was a mistake, off to something else now.

I've kind of been banging the same drum a lot in various threads recently, so I'm probably repeating myself, but I swear I'll try to make this my last big post on the issue.

I was raised on stupid hard Nintendo games. I've been playing turn based strategy games since Shining Force, or maybe something earlier. I got a platinum trophy on Dark Souls, i.e. beat the hell out of a game that is widely considered to be very hard, and that requires plenty of strategy adjusting. I beat the new XCom without reloading my game to re-try missions (I avoided actual hardcore mode for fear of bugs, and incidentally, did encounter some). I've been gold ranked in League of Legends. I don't know what you'd consider me - casual, non-tactical, or hardcore, tactical. Personally, I'd say I've grown out of being hardcore, and just don't have the time or patience for it anymore, but I'm plenty aware of strategy, and I have enough hardcore in my background that I'm still better than most players.

In my opinion, Card Hunters is more frustrating than fun.

I rolled through some of the early missions. I lost a few matches eventually, but was always ready to go back for another try. Oh, I guess that armored pig is a bigger deal than I thought, so maybe I should focus on him. Oh, I guess those skeletons really are too hard to kill, so I should delay them and win via holding the important ground. When I got to the Trogg missions, though, things really changed from fun but difficult to frustrating, and I think it's because the game is punishingly hard rather than actually hard.

There are far too many things that happen in the game that are frustrating, and they all add up. I attack a Trogg for the first time, and then I see that he has 4 - no wait, 8! - armor. Frustrating. I lose the mission, replay, and now he has 0 armor, so I attack him, and I kill him, and I kill a friend. Am I supposed to approach this fight head on or not? Now he has 8 armor again. Frustrating. I try to flank him and attack, but I only have one attack card on my fighter, and one on my cleric. I get behind him with my cleric and hit him for 3 damage so that my fighter can hit him with the big blow, but he turns to face my fighter. I'm out of options for the turn. Frustrating. He's only one hit from dead, so I attack him anyway, hoping I'll hit. His armor saves him. Frustrating. He attacks me, and I have enough armor to save me, but I roll two ones, and my fighter is dead. Frustrating. My cleric is in position to kill him, and draws all movement and heal card. Frustrating. It happens again next turn and I die. Frustrating.

I could give the same sort of summary of the Geomancer mission that did me in. I know that I can grind to get better gear, but I don't want to be forced to grind. I stopped playing MMORPGs for a reason. I know that I can spend real money to buy the power that I need, but that rubs me the wrong way, and I don't want to do it. I go on the forums and I see a ton of veterans saying, "if you can't hack it, you're not good enough for this game." I get frustrated, and I flat out quit.

As I've said many a time, the game is not mine, and the devs can target whatever audience they choose. If it ain't me, it ain't me, and that's fine; I have five or six dozen games sitting around that I've yet to play. I'm not hurting for entertainment.

That said, I am under the distinct impression that in order for an online video game to tread water financially, you either need a really dedicated fan base that will spend lots of money, or you need casuals. I've spent probably around $300 on LoL, which manages to cater to the casuals, the hardcores, and the guys like me who are in between. I'm so dumb with my money when it comes to games that I've already spent $10 on this game, a game still in beta that I ended up dropping after a week and a half or so.

I don't have metrics, and I don't have market research, but I have a vague notion that people like me are people that are good for the financial health of the game. I also don't have any official word from the devs, but I the distinct impression I'm getting from the forums is that people like me - people who find the game too difficult and / or frustrating to be fun - are welcome here, but not really wanted. Again, I am not insulted and do not mind moving on, and no game can appeal to everyone, but I think it's worth thinking very hard about who will be pushed out of the game by certain aspects of it.

 

What I think the devs should do is try to give the player enough decent items to progress. Not the best gear by any means, but something less random and more suited to the party. Either through adventures (not the locked ones) or through always having something in the highest shop which is good yet affordable. This may be a challenge considering that they want to make money and if you want gear, well, there's always the subscription! Yes, yes, there is. And if that is necessary to enjoy the game, I will opt not to play it at all, thank you.

-edit- Okay, that last bit sounded a bit passive agressive. But I am unsure what the correct solution is and that also has to do with how the devs see the game and what they'd like to see happen.

 

It seems you are not, when it comes to Card Hunter. Very likely you could be, but for some reason you don't wish to work on developing the skills you need for this particular game, as I assume you must have done for those other games.

Probably if you were better than most players at Card Hunter, you would not lose more than one or two campaigns in the first ten levels. [Blue Manchu could tell you the exact metrics.]

I think you would find Card Hunter easier if you thought about why this is the wrong question.

I recall you saying something about Dark Souls, which I haven't played, suggesting that there was a fixed tactic that you needed to get right for every boss fight. That is simply not how Card Hunter works. You build your own deck, so you may be approaching the scenario with a wide range of potential decks. And cards are dealt at random, so at any given turn it is impossible to predict which cards will be in your hand.

Whether or not you have an overarching strategy of approaching the fight head on, retreating to a bottleneck or whatever, you will have to modify it on the fly depending on the situation, and you will have to modify it turn by turn depending on the cards. No attack cards? No dead trogs this turn, then. The immediate question becomes how to minimise injury to the party so that they will be around to kill the trogs when the attack cards do come.

When you were playing Dark Souls, would you have been pleased if there was an easy way to win every fight for those not bothered to figure out how the game actually works tactically?

 

Dark Souls and Card Hunter are very analogous in this regard, except for one key difference, which I'll hit in a bit. In Dark Souls, the situation you're walking into is more or less fixed, as is the behavior of a given enemy. It's the same as Card Hunter. This room contains three of those guys, four of those - figure out how to tackle it. This boss behaves this way, reacts that way. Figure out how to tackle it. There are an incredible number of ways to "build your deck" in Dark Souls, as it were. There are tons of weapons, which break down into classes, with the classes behaving differently, and weapons within them similarly but sometimes not the same. You can upgrade your weapons in different ways, focusing on different stats. There's magic, and there's pyromancy, and there are miracles, and you can create characters that are hybrids, or ones that are pure. Everyone I know that has played the game has approached it in a remarkably different way.

The big difference is that nothing in Dark Souls is random. If the amount of damage you did when you attacked was random, the game would be infuriating. It would be in no way the success that it is, critically or commercially. If that attacks available to you at any given time were random, the same would be true. The game thrives on being difficult because it is painfully, horribly, reliably fair. It creates rules, sets them up in the first few minutes, and then obeys them throughout.

I have absolutely no problems with that whatsoever. In fact, there's such a mechanic built into the game. The devs were well aware that the game they were making was hard, and as such, they created a back door of sorts for players who were having a great deal of difficulty. In brief, you can summon other players to help you through certain parts of the game. There are actually NPCs you can summon, too, in case you're not online. There was foresight and understanding on the part of the designers. Most everyone uses the summon feature at some point. I could not, for the life of me, beat goddamn Smough first and Ornstein last. Vice versa, sure. But not in that order. I called in help. The fact that I could was the difference between me quitting the game (and breaking the disc over my knee) and going on to beat it and love it.

Which do you think is better?

I mean, look, man, I don't care about you or your experience with Card Hunter or Dark Souls, nor do I care about that guy's, or this guy's. I care about mine. If the game is painfully easy for you, fine, whatever. If you need to type in the code for god mode to beat this mission, why do I care? The single player part of the game is single player. Your experience does not interfere with mine. All I care about is my experience.

 

I fully agree with you on this.

Three repeats per day wouldn't really allow that much farming but it would certainly help the players who are stuck.

 

I disagree with this. It's there to prevent people from figuring out which adventure is the easiest, and simply farming that one over and over again with a specialized party composition.

Removing the the "once per day" limit would make this the most efficient way to farm for more gear, and people always gravitate towards the most efficient way to do things. Always. And this is a lot less fun than playing through a variety of adventures.

I suggest a different solution to this problem, which I've posted in a separate thread here.

 

Maybe constant total number of adventures per day, divided evenly to open adventures?

Currently once you've finished campaign you can replay 40 adventures (quick count) and treasure hunts. New players probably should have as many replays. Just limited to adventures they've beaten. So at low levels you could replay same adventure many times, but as you progress it evens out. Halfway through it's max 2 replays.

If they won't distribute evenly, just allow certain number of adventures (first ones to reach X) be played X times and rest X-1.

 

But this would create the weird scenario where it's most efficient for a new player to farm all the lower level adventures several times before proceeding on. And since new players are unlikely to know this, they wouldn't realize it until much later on, when they're now allowed fewer replays on the adventures.

Perhaps the solution is much simpler than this - perhaps we just need more lower-level adventures. If they doubled the number of level 2-6 adventures, would that be enough? (They could even cheese it a bit like they do right now on some, and include a guaranteed item drop for first completion in all of these adventures, so you if you complete them all you have some guaranteed nice loot).

 

Depends on how you define efficient. Certainly not for multiplayers, where you'll want atleast some items with tokens. As for campaign, still probably not. Higher level is generally better, and you don't lose the ability to grind lower tiers at any point.

But yeah, there might be some sweet point adventures that yield critical level loot (non-token). But they are more than 1/3 into the campaign, so not that big of an advantage.

 

Right, so only do it for the lower level adventures to help players ramp up their options and experience without the ability to start stacking hugely powerful items for multiplayer.

Can we stop with the absolute talk? Yes, as I have stated people to TEND to gravitate towards the most efficient way of doing things, unless there is effort made to not do so. This is not absolute, it doesn't apply to every individual and is just a generalization. Let's not bank our entire argument on generalizations that we are framing as absolutes because it just waters it down.

 

An easy mode does what I am not yet attempting to do. I can't say for sure how fair, easy, or hard the level 16 to 18 missions are. I have not even face the dreaded war monkeys yet, but to me, creating an "easy mode" would feel like the game creators gave up on creating what should be an overall fair experience for the widest audience plausible.

This is not to say an easy mode is a bad idea, xcom eu had interchangeable difficulty within the missions themselves if need be, and I barely beat classic in that one.

Some of the problems when comparing the two though is xcom is more fair by being more consistent. Yes you have the occasional critical hit, but in comparison to card hunter if the enemy got all their best cards in the first three rounds it essentially makes all their hits critical hits.

This game may currently be allowing constant critical hits to be happening too often with its randomness, which might not be so bad if all the characters on your side being there didn't feel as vital. And when the enemy can wipe out say your cleric or wizard first turn at times perhaps there could be other approaches.

 

Exhaustion doesn't stop farming because it only happens when you beat the final battle; you can replay the earlier ones as often as you like. I've started collecting stats on what you get for grinding different battles (I did first map of White Skull Canyon 10 times on Saturday and did the first three maps of Wizard's Workshop three times last night).

Preliminary results: low level battles are not worth grinding.

 

As we've discussed difficulty, I've gravitated toward this more and more. I don't think difficulty isn't the problem as much as it's the fact that the game has so much randomness that it can be extremely frustrating when you bump up against something difficult. I honestly don't see Blue Manchu making the changes necessary to alleviate my complaints with randomness being so critical in the game. It would be too much work and not enough people are unhappy with it (as far as I can tell). Sucks for me?

It's like Magic the Gathering would be if a lightning bolt did D3 + 1 damage, or your counter spell only worked on a 4+. Not an issue if you win, but maddeningly frustrating when you don't.