The problem is very simple.
Crafting mats are only good for newer players. Newer players won’t get very far in havoc. Havoc attracts the better players and crafting mats are no rewards for veteran players. We knew this when it was released but I wanted to wait until I saw the numbers.
I reached rank 33 and got around 55K ordos, 10K dia and 20K plasteel. These could’ve been 10 or 100 times higher and I wouldn’t have cared at all. They weren’t even compensation for missing out on the mats if I had played regular damnation missions so why are we getting them delayed and calling it a “reward” if “compensation” is already a reach?
The drive of the mode is the challenge and the competent teammates. Once I’ll have the penances done for this mode, I’ll probably not return unless a buddy asks me for help and even then I won’t get anything out of it.
There needs to be something better in these weekly chests than crafting mats or your new mode doesn’t have a retention hook. How about premium currency? 20 Aquilla per reward level would be kinda worth it.
Anyone else got better ideas? What would make you come back week after week? What would you deem a worthy reward for completing a hard run each week?
It’s inherently a Fatshark moment to create content for bored endgame players and then making the rewards completely pointless for endgame players. I’d be surprised if there was a single person getting to ranks 35+ who actually still needed crafting materials. Dockets maybe, but they also put an extremely small amount of dockets in the reward. 0 thought or care was given.
Aquilas, it looks like, will unfortunately not happen. This was THE opportunity to let players earn them.
That much for the cope that Aquilas are a thing (instead of more transparent direct purchases) so that they could be used as rewards. Nope, it’s just to hide prices and to create bundles.
The rewards seem pretty good to me, considering that after the initial journey to your personal threshold you just have to complete one mission there a week to grab those same rewards.
I wanted Aquilas or a red weapon-related endgame currency to be part of the rewards (and they still could be, I suppose), but I like the no-mats-in-missions setup. Changes the feel immensely. And if the solution is to give materials weekly, I think this works fine for players across the skill spectrum. And it should definitely work fine for end game players.
If you have the ability to get past the level after which the enemies have Damnation stats, you don’t need mats anymore. AND EVEN if you did, playing regular missions would be more efficient. Why wait for the mats for a week at a time, if you can get more, immediately in shorter runs?
If I got 1 to 5Mil a week EXTRA (not as compensation) that would be worth it, IF the free to earn cosmetics were good.
I fully expect them to never do it even with the perfect opportunity already implemented into the game.
I wanted to put “good-looking” cosmetics as a replacement reward but we all know those are only to be found for actuall money.
I guess this is where the whole retention mechanic hooks. Now you just have to play one and get those rewards weekly. Please keep playing Havoc! Please don’t abandon it!
I don’t know if the rewards are even worthwhile for lower ranks but at rank 40 I have absolutely no reason to bother even doing a single weekly game. I guess I’ll decay if I don’t? It’s hard to care
And thus is good design made: When the target audience for the new gamemode doesn’t have an actual reason to keep playing it because every mission feels the same and the rewards are trash (materials they don’t need)
We know new modifiers and levels are coming, so that should go some way to addressing half of your concerns. It’ll definitely make a difference for players who settle into lower levels of Havoc.
The materials, we’ll see. There’s an endless discussion about where/how the endgame should be played out. Should the most valuable things be locked behind the highest difficulties (like reds and rare cosmetic drops in VT2), causing people who aren’t in it for the “love of the game” to sour the highest levels of difficulty? I tend to think no, but I also like the idea of being rewarded for high level play.
Personally, I will relish getting the bigger caches as I push towards 40. I think that’s probably closer to the average experience than conquering the new hardest difficulty in less than a week, and I suspect the rewards have been structured around a wider skill spectrum than the top 1%.
Same. It’s a great decision for the chalange mode.
But you have to wonder; why give us the correlating mats in a “reward” chest, if the maximum amount of mats could just be the immediate reward for completing the mission?
Calling mats a “reward” is an insult to your intelligence, considering the circumstances.
I don’t have the numbers for T3 or T4 equivalent havoc levels but if Level 33 is anything to go by, these are not even 1 missions worth of ordos, dia is dia and 20 missions of plasteel.
Ordos are the most important currency.
These numbers are whatever as an additional mat source a week, let’s be real.
The plasteel number actually looks nice but it’s not. I could’ve gathered much more than that in regular damnation. The balance here seems to be heavily favouring the lower levels. That’s good because those are the people needing the mats. That’s also bad because the target playerbase for the mode, get’s less than nothing.
There is nothing stopping them from adding something else to the weekly rewards that the 1% care about.
I’m enjoying the challenge too, don’t get me wrong. A lot of it is artificiell challenge but oh well. At least I have to play and communicate better and have to respect shooters. It’s also fun to see the support abilities be meta for the mode. Coordination is somewhat needed to succeed, it’s a great change of pace.
What I describe here is a novelty. Novelties wear off over time.
Once I’ve beaten the challenge, what other reason do I have? It’s not a bad reason, for now but that will end.
Getting Aquilas every week for free will never lose it’s value.
I never said it wouldn’t. Suggesting I did would be dishonest.
All I ever said was that I would actually call that a reward.
It would benefit their bottom line more to have a good shop and to have a hook for people to play the new mode to earn some Aquilas for free. That would have more people care about the game, it’s cosmetics and the gamemode.
The impossible question is “what reward would end game players want that average players wouldn’t?” Because if end game players want it, then everyone will. If everyone wants the rewards, then high Havoc ends up full of people who don’t really belong there, don’t even want to be there, and are just hoping to be carried to their reward. By having trash rewards it means only those of us who actually enjoy the challenge will play, which is an ideal outcome imo. I know playing a game because you enjoy it is a novel concept these days, but I’m glad Fatshark at least understand.
I am curious about this design choice. My thought is that delaying the reward means there’s absolutely no incentive to run a somewhat- (and sometimes-) harder mission without having to worry about collecting mats to immediately receive them. But I don’t know for sure.
But again, I do think the mats aren’t really the point. It’s just nice to get (a scaling) something for your effort.
Disagree, the way Havoc is balanced 99% of the difficulty stems from the hidden internal modifiers and the emperor’s dying light which were made specifically to counteract some of the OP builds in the game. More modifiers won’t really change it significantly. They’re completely irrelevant even in my opinion, other than the blight one making zealots run beacon. That’s literally it. I’m sure you’ll experience this as you push higher too. It’s one part of why I hope they either completely redesign the difficulty of the mode instead of adding more mutators that will all feel the same because the sole challenge doesn’t stem from the mutators.
I’m sure there will be some amount of tweaking. All of the different levels of hidden modifiers just live in an array or arrays, so shifting them around is trivial. As is, I imagine, changing their effects. But I also think this mode has been fully conquered by the top players already, and the difficulty these modifiers provide are likely to be crucial to the experience at whatever the top level of difficulty ends up being.