Anyone trying to get the new white costumes for specific characters has likely already run into this issue. The Okris for “5 amount kills” and “kills in specific expedition” I think are great, but requiring specific parameters from an RNG system I think is a mistake. It can turn a fun reward that you get as you play into something you have to grind for, conversely making runs where no bosses you need show up feel like they were wasted – even compared to just before the update, where you had no overt reward at all.
This is heavily compounded by the weird selection of which grudgemarked boss shows up, and why the Minotaur is locked to only the Finale instead of being able to appear from any Chest of Trials – meaning you’d have to roll+restart for Skaven/Beastmen on the end of your Expedition to even have a chance, at which point he could still not show up.
I was playing with a group and we needed a Troll, eventually we just got fed up and rerolled the first tile on Cata until we got to the Chest and wiped if it wasn’t a troll, since we hadn’t got a troll in the previous 3 expeditions we played properly. It took us grinding that first tile for 40 minutes (5-6 rolls on opening the Chest of Trials) before we got a Troll.
The skins are a fun reward, rewarding players for fighting Grudgemarked bosses is fun, requiring players to get specific outcomes from an incredibly unpredictable, uncontrollable RNG system is not fun. (Not to mention, having to do it 17 times for all classes…)
This. I can understand that these end-all-be-all skins require a huge amount of grind, but the rng just feels like a kick in the head. Take the black skins for comparison; complete these 30-minute-ish thirteen maps with the desired character, no questions asked. They can be obtained within a reasonable timeframe, and a completed map is always one tick towards completion. Whereas CW runs can take up to an hour, and in essence you are grinding to maybe have a chance to take one or two ticks off the fourteen needed. The “kill a grudge-marked monster on all expeditions” -challenge is the only reasonable of the three sets, because you can count on one appearing at the end of the challenge.
Game design wise this is about the best thing that can be implemented, because it binds the player to run the same old content again and again. The user experience in the other hand… getting four trolls from the slot machine when you wanted a chaos spawn isn’t exactly good for the nerves.
A few friends have already got all purity skins.
They rerolled the 1st map for Cata forbidden trail or Holsher’s Tower
found the boss chest, killed it and made a mad dash to the end.
(Trail and Tower have no “survive” or “barrel” events)
They did this on courage, fortitude and determination for each career
(Citadel was done start to finish on Veteran for each career)
Most bosses were done along the way but some cleaned up after.
This took them 3 - 4 full days, it’s tedious and I can only imagine how long it will take obtaining all skins regularly.
I also want to say they’re pretty much done with Chaos Wastes now, they’re happy for more difficult bosses but a lot of the attributes feel very cheese/anti fun and more of a damage check rather than skill check.
This. I may put down more elaborate thoughts after I play the updated expeditions a bit more, but one thing that I can already say is that the 20% health increase is kinda rough at the start of a Cata expedition. I’ve already been in multiple situations where the entire group simply couldn’t kill a grudgy troll due to the increased health in tandem with its given attribute (good luck with invulnerable if it triggers during his downed state, for instance), and eventually people started being chipped down. If feels like people will prioritize monster damage even more together with ledging. Even if grudgies are highly resistant to stagger, unless they roll Relentless the best option is generally just to bait to an edge, focus staggers and have them yeeted so that you don’t have to deal with them.
Making chests of trials really risky is something that makes sense in my opinion for the second half of the expedition (assuming of course that the citadel chest for which you’ve just battled Elfeater Moonhowl Relentless Shadow-Step Rampart doesn’t reward you with Healer’s Touch, Home Brewer and Grenadier ), but right at the start when you have no tools to work with anyway and you need something just to have a chance to make it through the map it feels a bit overkill. The requirement between skill and just having overall a lucky run feels shifted a bit too much towards the latter in my opinion.
I’d also like to add (even if it is a bit off-topic) that fighting grudged monsters with bots is one of the most infuriating things I’ve ever had the displeasure of doing. Crippling + Vampiric + %anymodifier% chaos spawn sweeps the floor with bots in a matter of seconds, leaving me to get slowly slapped to death. It’s even funnier if it’s one of the maps that are 90% air and I get blasted to oblivion before landing a single hit.
I am not sure math is much on your side here. Assume you are able to do the Legend Adventure Missions in about 20 minutes. This would mean for the black skins you would need a total of 260 minutes per career. This is equal to about 4 expeditions. If you play Legend (equal to Black Skins in Adventure Mode) you in average get you first Grudge Marked Monster on the second map. This means 4 expeditions equal about 16 Grudged Marked Monster fights if we assume one monster in the end of expedition arenas (and I think the Citadel has two guaranteed so it would be 17).
So playing 4 expeditions guarantees you both the challenge for killing one GM monster per expedition-type as well as killing a total of five GM monsters (surprisingly even killing Illusions count for this). Which leaves killing one GM monster per boss-type the only problematic quest. However, fighting 17 GM monsters it is very unlikely to never see a Troll, Stormfiend, Rat Ogre or Chaos Spawn (it is possible, just not very likely). So the only annoying one is the Minotaur because he is so rare (people say it can appear in Chests of Trials, personally I only encountered them in end of expedition arenas), especially if he is the last missing monster. But grind-wise the Purified Skins are faster to obtain than the black ones.
Also, just play the game normally. I would bet that most people don’t even use 80 % of these skins mainly because most people do not play all characters and even when their fancy might be different. Complaining about a grind which can apparently be done in three days for ALL skins seems a bit silly to me. And yea, if you play the game that way it will obviously end up unfun.
At least the Grudge Marks enhance the standing of defense orientated players and teams. From all the games I have done the defense orientated have been far more succesful while the usual dps addiction did fail more often.
Never really understood why people complain about challenges takng too long to complete. They are supposed to, aren’t they? So people don’t complain that there is nothing to do.
Also it’s not like you need skins anyway.
I can personally see both sides of this argument. Farming for those skins can really start feeling like other red weapon farm but to lesser extend while for other its just extra content to aim for in the coming months.
Personally I really don’t feel like spamming recruit to gain access to these skins but if you do it that way you can pretty much get them in couple days of boring farming. While for those who mainly play legend/cata its going to take significantly longer.
Well who cares? If someone does not enjoy actually playing the game - only then the challenges become a chore and a freakin’ crusade that the person undertakes every update in order to satisfy some completionist idiosyncrasy of his that is totally secondary to the gameplay.
In other words, if you only play VT2 in order to complete everything there is to complete, the issue is not the challenges
meh personally I don’t care about okri’s at all but I can certainly understand the frustrations
it’s like imagine the 100 game hats were only 50 games but games only had 50% chance of counting; you’d spend probably the same amount of time but it’d feel worse
Well personally I wouldn’t - I don’t have them all completed anyway IIRC.
But then again, no matter how you do it, people will complain. It’s the nature of the challenges themselves - they are supposed to be an entertaining sideshow to the base game and not a goal in itself. In the latter case, VT1 bounties were better executed - their appearance was random, but the quest requirements were fixed, which felt like you were just browsing ebay for something you might want and then just getting exactly what is described.
That’s the problem with RNG, though, isn’t it? You can say based on probability what is likely, but ultimately some people are going to get shafted and get stormfiends and chaos spawns over, and over, and over again (which is literally what happened to us – 3 expeditions, no troll, no mino).
Ultimately we were playing the game normally, but we had also hoped to make some progress in those achievements. When we weren’t making any progress whatsoever, we gave up playing normally to make progress in those achievements.
That dichotomy is created by that specific achievement expecting an RNG system to give us deterministic, non-RNG results – which is not what it does at all.
If we just had finer control – say we could vote for a specific kind of monster, or specific tiles in the overworld were like “den of trolls” etc so we could maneuver the team’s path towards etc, there’d be no issue. But as it stands it’s just “roll dice and pray”.
Alternatively, something like “Kill 10 Skaven Grudgemarked Bosses + Kill 10 Chaos Grudgemarked Bosses” would be a perfect replacement. That is much more RNG agnostic. You wouldn’t get outliers who hunt for days for one boss that just refuses to show up.
Gating to RNG is terrible. Open 15 chests, all Beastmen maps, no Minotaur ever. I don’t understand the train of thought with this kind of achievement. Complete waste of time.
So why don’t we make the challenges take 500 grudge monsters for each skin? Let’s add it so you have to deal the killing blow too.
People have jobs. Families. Lives. Destroying any incentive to strive for a reward you create as a developer is counterintuitive. The replayability of a game comes from how long you can keep a customer entertained. Rewards are like a cherry on the sundae for such replayability. If those rewards aren’t reasonably attainable then people don’t care and they don’t enjoy themselves, cutting at the root of replayability: enjoyment and entertainment.
It’s like when you play games that give you the best weapons at the very last mission/boss. You don’t really care because you don’t get to have them for any meaningful duration. Same applies to cosmetics. There is no point in an unlockable that will only unlock at a point well beyond the time a player burns out on a game and no longer cares.
Well put. It has often been demonstrated that players of video games do not like true RNG at all. That’s why there is often the illusion of RNG in many games, when the reality is the results for certain systems are actually weighted in order to meet people’s perceptions of what something should be. Helps achieve a more enjoyable experience.
That is kind of funny reading about this on a video game forum.
Yes and what I’m disagreeing with is that you seem to think that replayability comes from some kind of milestone achievements or challenges while I think the replayability should stem from the very core game loop itself being fun. If it’s not fun for you to swing a huge-аrse sword and cleave those ratmen buggers in half feeling like a million bucks every single strike you land than the achievements won’t help you stay and keep playing. Not for long anyway.
Well, I personally think that just because some people decided to shape their lives in a particular way does not mean that the game progression (and dedicated players) should be penalized for that. It will just take them longer to get there… or maybe it’s not the right game for them to play.
It really depends on the type of people though. If you can achieve everything easily in a few hours or days… even weeks, it diminishes the overall value of the reward (plus you will need a regular supply of them unless you want constant “reward draughts”).
I see your point but again, I would argue that long-term rewards are for those who are trully dedicated and such people do not burn out easily. Sure, that may be a minority, but still… Also you could argue that some people will just stop playing once they acquire the reward, because there is nothing for them to strive for anymore. Plus, you can always come back after the burn-out, maybe when a new expansion drops, and you will still have that fancy thing you worked for so hard.
Both of these sides need to be adressed in my opinion. That’s why the game needs both short, and long-term rewards.
I mean sure, this is a fair point to make, but said rewards shouldn’t be locked behind RNG, they should be skill-based or at least predictable outcomes- RNG is not predictable if you don’t know the chances, and even when you do, some people may have such bad luck that they may never receive the right numbers to succeed, because that’s how percentages work.
LMAO isn’t exactly too far from angsty teen levels of debate either, but it is what it is. Are people with major commitments in their lives not the main targeted audience for this game (or games in general)? Probably. While I can sympathize with OenKrad’s statement, I also find it understandable if it’s not anywhere in the list of priorities when such challenges are designed.
But yeah, given how they look it’s probably best not to think about them and just play the game normally until they mostly complete themselves, which I imagine is what they had in mind when they tailored them.
Edit: not sure why this was flagged by inappropriate.
I think the solution is pretty simple, just make the Chest of Trials spawn ‘restricted RNG’, using the map faction labels.
As far as I understand the current system, a chest of trials can spawn a rat ogre, stormfiend, chaos troll or chaos spawn on any map, but no minotaur. The probability of a monster being grudge marked or not is determined by the difficulty you are playing on (recruit…cata).
Outside of the chests you can get ambient monster spawns in most maps but these creatures are only grudge marked on the final arena of an expedition. For the expedition to the citadel of eternity, you get 2 grudge marked spawns 1 of each type for the map factions on the final arena - beastmen, skaven or chaos. For expeditions of Fortitude, determination, courage, you get 1 grudge spawn in the final arena which has a 50% chance of being from either faction that is assigned to the map.
So, if the final arena in an expedition of courage is labelled “beastemen/chaos”, you have a 50% chance of a grudge marked minotaur spawning or a 50% chance of either a grudge marked troll or chaos spawn. (It might actually be 30% for each of the 3 creature, I’m not certain). Anyway, the point is that you never get a rat ogre or storm fiend spawn in a final arena that doesn’t have the “skaven” label. It doesn’t work this way with chests of trials- anything except a minotaur can spawn regardless of the faction labels for the map.
TL;DR, I think Chests of Trial spawns should work similar to final arena spawns - the only monsters that can spawn from them must belong to one of the 2 factions that the map you are on is labelled with. This way there is a possibility that a minotaur will spawn on any map labelled “Beastmen”. Whether the creature is grudge marked is still determined by the difficulty you are playing on. With this restricted RNG system players could increase the chances of getting a spawn they want without completely losing the element of randomness. It would also make the maps more thematically coherent.
The first faction is always Skaven. So you can only ever get Skaven/Chaos or Skaven/Beastmen. But that aside it does indeed feel weird to get a mismatched monster in regard to the local population of enemies, as far as chests are concerned.
), but right at the start when you have no tools to work with anyway and you need something just to have a chance to make it through the map it feels a bit overkill. The requirement between skill and just having overall a lucky run feels shifted a bit too much towards the latter in my opinion.