Title. Takes too long to get qp games going for it as people don’t have an incentive to play it other than the challenge due to not giving any better loot than legend and it also costing more money to access.
Incentivizing people to play it just means people will try it who are not ready for it and muddy the pool of players who are actually capable of playing it and ruin the experience for those players. It already happens in legend where people think they need to play it for better loot but can not hold their own at all.
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Already happens anyway without loot so not a valid argument.
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Aye, the entire point of not having Cata give a better reward (a system that was, in fact, suggested exactly as-is) is so that the only people in Cataclysm are the ones that want the extra challenge, because Legend is not enough. Adding an extra reward will just make everyone go there even if they’re not ready.
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Then their incentive must be to complete the challenges and get the portraits, which isn’t a permanent incentive, it’s gone once their challenges are complete.
It is a valid argument. If Cataclysm becomes part of the loot progression you can be sure that some special people insist that it should be made easier. Just so that all those casual players with 500 hundred hours can complete it. We had this very discussion just recently with 2.0 where people insisted on keeping to play Legend because of the loot although they said that Legend was to hard for them to have fun (and despite Legend having actually become easier with 2.0).
With the current setup players can always say: “It is just for the challenge” and most of the time people will accept it. Let’s keep it that way.
If you have trouble finding lobbies try the lobby browser. At least for me the quickplay function does not find the best or even good games … or sometimes at all although I see games in the lobby browser with good ping. Matchmaking is … improvable.
Also no to Cataclysm being free. At least for now I enjoy that I know that Beastmen are part of every Cataclysm match (minus Into the Nest) and that the challenge is the same for every match. They might have to adress this in the future with new maps/races coming out. But for now it works and should stay that way.
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No, it doesn’t work. The V2 population is very small and FS keeps adding new ways to split the playerbase further. I can hardly find Cata lobbies anymore thanks to this content drought, add a paywall on top of that and it just kills the mode entirely. Beastmen AND Cata should both be free additions to the game.
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We as a community asked for a higher official difficulty and we got it, splitting the community is one way of looking at it, having more options is another. If you have trouble finding cata games and your friends aren’t on, maybe play (or host) a legend game and ask people if they wanna play cata, if they seem good enough.
Except I’m not talking about Cata splitting the playerbase, I’m talking about the paywall.
Lol you realize most people that are playing legend don’t own WOM, right? Which goes back to my original argument, the paywall.
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Just let Cata give a small amount of the cosmetic currency, whatever that is. A little bonus for those who are up to the challenge but not enough to be worth farming.
Also, if Cata + Weapons were their own DLC I’d be happy to pay 5 bucks for it. I have no interest in epeen contests (aka Weaves) and will never be paying full price for the two minor components of WOM I may actually use.
Lastly, the playerbase split is real and it’s a problem. Pugging Legend these days is a nightmare, most of the skilled players don’t play it anymore and most runs fail badly. People are going to hit the legend wall and just drop the game, not good if FS wants to run a micro shop.
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I am a firm believer in Cataclysm not having loot. I personally have never liked collecting books, as they completely ruin the pacing of the game imo. Having to wait for a player to jump around on some random pieces of geometry in the same place every playthrough breaks immersion and adrenaline production. In Cataclysm, people tend to ignore the books, since everyone who plays it is just there for the gameplay. Let loot grinders stay on Legend, and leave Cataclysm for those of us who just want to play the game.
I’m not opposed to some extra skins or something for beating levels on Cataclysm, but it’s not the kind of thing that would make or break the experience.
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Just no its dumb, cata is already endgame content that is OPTIONAL you need a lot of hours into game to be ready for cata its already enough to give some money to fatshark counting that they dont have yet microtransaction and dlc only, its not very profitable for them.
Cata rewards should be same as legend but just in cata boxes for cata deeds nothing more
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I think the real problem is that gameplay rewards can be expressed in gameplay power, as in: red weapons. Because of the not very optimal crafting system, having a bunch of reds is more powerful than having a bunch of oranges. Therefore, people feel they need red items. (Even though in actuality the power difference between an easily obtainable decently rolled orange and a red is effectively nil, but that aside.)
Then, because people feel they need reds, they will feel they also need to play the difficulty level that rewards them most. That is regardless of the actual difficulty of playing that. We’ve seen this, and the problems tied to that, as was mentioned in thread before: When 2.0 dropped, for most people difficulty increased per difficulty level. (Old legend becoming comparable in difficulty to new champion, new legend being harder than old legend, etc…) After that, people were complaining a lot. Normally, you’d ask: why? You can just drop down a difficulty level for the time being, right?
Well, that would have worked, were it not for the fact that reds are rewarded more in legend than champion! People felt they needed to play legend to get proper gameplay rewards, but since difficulty was increased they felt shafted. Droping down a difficulty was not an option because of the decreased rewards, and thus people hated 2.0 changes. (I know there is also a component of ego that made people resent having to drop a difficulty, and that people sometimes straight up disliked gameplay changes in 2.0 even though they could handle difficulty just fine, but my earlier point simply was one of the most important reasons 2.0 was disliked.)
Thus, with the current system of rewards = gameplay power, if you increase rewards in cataclysm compared to legend, people will feel they need to play cata even if when they aren’t ready yet, resulting in those problems people had when 2.0 happened all over again. And for this reason, I feel increasing cata rewards in the current reward system would be a bad idea.
HOWEVER: It just is counterintuitive that higher difficulty does not give better rewards. So, how to solve that? My suggestion (and I have advocated this a lot of times before so most of you probably already know what I’m going to say…), is to first seperate gameplay power from RNG gameplay rewards. Make weapon power something earned by leveling. The Athanor or something pretty much exactly like it would be perfect already. And then you make rewards purely cosmetic. And then you can have cata give better rewards, without causing the trouble I explained earlier in this post. Make cata reward more Shillings, or more cosmetic rewards per run, or whatever. I feel that these changes together would solve several problems at once.
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It is not counterintutive you have weekly challenges that dont give anything more how thats different ?
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That’s another topic, but the same issue, really. My point shortly summarized is:
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People right now feel they need to play the difficulty that rewards the most, because currently rewards = gameplay power.
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Thus, people feel they need to play the gamemode & difficulty that rewards best, regardless of whether they are ready for it, or if there are other gamemodes more fitting / fun for them.
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If rewards weren’t tied to gameplay power but purely to cosmetics earn rate, however, you could have any more difficult modes (cata, weeklies, etc.) reward more without people feeling they need to play those when it’s not optimal for them.
If it was done like that, people who could handle Cata would play Cata, and you could actually find a group through Quickplay to play the weeklies, and people who can’t handle Cata yet would be content to play Legend while earning the same rewards eventually. Everybody happy.
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Well right now you do still earn the same rewards eventually through playing champion compared to legend. For some players who aren’t very successful in legend, playing champion still nets them more rewards for their time spent, and that’s why I don’t understand this need to play ‘the highest difficulty for best reward’ thing. When 2.0 rolled out and legend was really frustrating to play, I dropped to champion because I could actually consistently complete those. Like @Perteks said, Cata is optional end game content, if you make it that far and want more difficulty, why not drop some money on the devs to support their game and help them make more content? As for the need to get better loot in cata - unless you got really good at the game really fast, I don’t see the need to get more reds from it because you probably already have enough of them, and good players don’t need the best items to survive anyway.
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I don’t know that I’m totally on board with that mindset. Specifically that its about the power. I’m not running Legend over Champ because I need to get more numerically effective weapons, I’m running it because I’m trying to collect cosmetics. If I had to do more Champ runs but they were an effective way of unlocking character/weapon cosmetics than I would be running a lot more champ ( I do enjoy legend too but Champ is a lot of fun and I play it less because of rewards) This is evidenced, for me anyway, by the 100 helms that you can run Champ or Legend to unlock. I did run a good number of those runs on Champ because it was fun and those would still allow me to get hats.
I do agree that rewards will guide gameplay and I think that’s fine. Its fun to play content and unlock things. Right now its just that all of it is so strongly tied to legend there’s not a lot of merit in playing anything else.
Your third point is what I really agree with here. If higher difficulty granted QUICKER rewards and that of course being predicated on being able to effectively clear the higher difficulty, it would still reward playing at a higher difficulty while allowing those with an abysmal cata clear rate (aka me) to not feel forced into said higher difficulty.
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I guess we agree in essence for a big part. People currently feel forced to play Legend for rewards, regardless of whether that is the difficulty they’d want to play (whether it’s too easy or too hard doesn’t matter). If reward scaled with difficulty, but it was just a matter of speed of aquisition and properly balanced, people would play the difficulty they actually wanted to play instead of one they’d feel forced to play, which would make everybody happy.
As for the part about power: You said yourself you already have numerically good weapons, so that isn’t a factor anymore in what difficulty you play. I know, as I also have enough gear and resources to be able to play any build I want or would want to play in the future, so I’m not motivated by gear anymore either. But now imagine you wanted to play a weapon you didn’t have yet: If you then decided your next personal goal would be to play that weapon, you’d feel forced to play the gamemode that rewards best to achieve that. And that forces you into full book Legend Quickplay runs, even if you’d rather play the weekly or Cata because the gameplay challenge appeals more, and even if you feel more comfortable playing Champion as well. You saying you don’t feel forced to play a certain difficulty because you already have the gear you need (gameplay wise), was exactly my point.
And now let’s say you are hunting for a specific red illusion you don’t have yet? Again, currently, full book Legend Quickplays is the best way to achieve that. So one could feel forced to play those. I’m hoping the upcoming Lohner’s Emporium will mitigate that somewhat. Another factor in play here is the RNG-based nature of rewards, but that is another topic altogether so I won’t rant about that here.
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Might be unpopular but good at champ doesnt mean good at legend the only way to get good at legend is to play on legend, same for cata. If you play in cata you will get better in cata, honestly to get better at champ I played in legend, then when i felt decent in champ i switched to legend but when I became good on legend it was from the things I learned on legend. The same will be true on cata but I’m actually disencentivized from improving my skills by spending time on cata because I get better loot on legend.
I think the argument that we dont want players in cata because they will be less good is not valid, and we should reward overcoming greater challenges with greater rewards, maybe an extra commendation chest or automatic emp vault.
This will drive more people to play cata which will increase active players there, who will get better, and the increase in less good players will add to the challenge for the better cata players who can coach less good players. After learning the right way to play They will be better on legend which will help the legend playerbase. It’s all connected.
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I agree with this mentality.
I’m not particularly loot-driven, but I do think Cata should be free–it’s a little sad to say “let’s do cata” and learn someone in your party doesn’t have WoM (worth noting you don’t have to complete Dark Omens to open Cata [at least iirc you need to finish DO for them to show up on maps], which then skews some of the Cata difficulty–but that’s a whole other issue). I would like more people playing Cata in general; or otherwise separating Cata into a smaller, less expensive DLC so people who want Cata can afford it ($20 is a good chunk of change for an expansion I only play half of [not a fan of weaves]).
Cata, inherently, has differently weighted scaling and specials, etc. so legend doesn’t necessarily adequately prepare you for it; as you’ve mentioned. You get better and learn to play Cata by playing Cata or above.
The big debate, I remember, about rewards was the argument, “I don’t want to carry bad players who want free loot,” which is honestly the wrong approach to take. I don’t want or need Cata loot, but that attitude just scares budding players off who could, with some development, be quite good at Cata given the chance (and the salt of carrying pubs seems to exist within some circles anyways).
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