WoM was on sale by 50% so I bit the bullet and bought the DLC, my friend made me play Weaves, even though I didn’t really want too.
My initial thoughts, is the game mode isn’t that bad, but there’s no incentive to play it.
You don’t get loot or rewards, and your progress resets weekly/monthly? it adds to the grind but offers no value to it. Now Weaves does have some pretty cool skins, skins you can’t actually use in the main game. Personally I don’t really see what FS was going for here, a lot of work was put into something that doesn’t really compliment the game.
Still, it left me wondering what could be done to make this game mode more enjoyable, and I’m curious to see if the community has any ideas to make the game mode enjoyable and rewarding, or if this game mode is destined to be dead.
what I’d want out of weaves would be making them not such a scripted grind that ranges from extreme boredom of the lower weaves to the extreme annoyance that is the higher weaves
like in the marketing it was sold to us as an “endless endgame” and instead we got…160 weaves of which the rewards/incentive stops at 120 and the weaves effectively repeat themselves every 12 or so with a different modifier that also eventually loops. Some of the stuff on offer in weaves is interesting for sure but the mode itself is just such a pain to invest time into and also requires having a consistent group to grind with. Also can’t say I much care for the scripted nature of it; scripted content is fine if it’s something you’re only gonna do once or maybe a couple times like Fortunes of War but for a supposed “endgame” you really can’t have it be that set on rails without it causing massive burn out for the playerbase.
The fundamental problem with weaves is that people want to complete ranked weaves for the frames/progression, but there are so many weaves that the player base becomes hopelessly divided. There is also zero incentive to replay ranked weaves. Basically if you need weaves 11-18, 23, 25, 43-46, and 60-75 it’s going to be a complete pain in the ass to find one, let alone a team of people who want to do these exact weaves with you.
I think that quickplay weaves should be integrated into ranked and you should be playing for something outside essence. Essence is a closed reward that only applies to weaves and can also be acquired from just normal matches. Something like maybe shillings or chests with a red dust chance would work. That way it wouldn’t be a total waste to replay weaves and you would slowly get through most of the weaves, especially if quickplay can bias you into weaves you haven’t done before, or take into account the whole team and bias them towards a new weave. The rewards shouldn’t be good enough that people complain the game is pay2win, nor should they be the only good way to attain these things (shillings), but they should at least sweeten the deal and make weave replaying not a waste of time.
This also boosts quickplay weaves which at the moment is basically 1) a quick way to get essence until you beat one ranked weave and get it through normal play for the rest of your v2 career and 2) good for 40 grinded matches for the frame.
Honestly with a decent solution to the fragmentation of the playerbase and a boost in rewards weaves could be pretty successful. I get the complaints about how they are scripted but I think that’s a personal taste thing more than anything, I’m sure fatshark could add a weave-random mode which has unscripted spawns but keeps all the modifiers (in fact, that sounds pretty fun).
In the range of 80+ weaves, weaves are actually really interesting. And then, near 110+, it becomes unbearable again.
I’m still not sure the scripted part is such a bad things.
But difficulty being inconsistent between boredom and annoying, I do feel the same way.
To ask players having completed previous seasons, to grind 1-20 again is a loss of time, basically.
That’s indeed one of the numerous main issues. As I have my team, I don’t face this issue, but some do. Solving the playerbase though, won’t make the game really enjoyable.
I still think that the Weave maps for most part are done very well and they need to concentrate on the presentation and accessibility of the Weaves.
Still saying that something like Weave Boards would be the fastest way to generate some more interest and to increase replayability.
Another thing they could do would be to give us something like a Weave Editor and make the mode community driven although that would increase the need for a pre-made team which decreases accessiblity even more.
At least more interesting then Twitch Mode -_-
Minor help would be to allow us for joining Ranked Weaves midgame again. Just let people not appear on the leaderboards if that should be an issue.
The basic problem with weaves is the matchmaking. Quickplay weaves get boring quickly because you keeping playing the same weaves over and over again and the spawns are scripted, so there is no novelty. The ranked weaves provide a difficult challenge that can be solved with effort exactly because they are scripted. Ranked weaves are great for pre-made teams but after season 1 (if I’m not mistaken) there is no match making, so if you aren’t in a pre-made team you quickly hit a ceiling and can’t make any further progress.
Weaves are designed for pre-made teams and they provide a couple of weeks of challenge and then you move on because scripted levels provide little replayability. If you aren’t in a pre-made team (like me and I assume most of the current players) you just avoid them altogther because there is no way to find a team IN GAME. Really I think Fatshark got seduced by the concept and ignored the reality of how most people play their game, so we got a well made badly implemented mode (just like Deed portraits with no deed lobby and no way to craft deeds and Twitch mode with no way to find Twitch games in the lobby browser).
I can assure you that our premade teams do not really enjoy the weaves “that much”. Despite being fast to complete them (and that this is the case for numerous teams, even if some do, indeed enjoy them). There are others issues than “matchmaking” alone.
What do you call “Weaves Board” exactly ?
(I do enjoy Twitch mode a lot, but that’s a bit unrelated =p)
Weaves would need to be way more popular and the game would need more than twice as many average players to get them to a level where they can be quickplayed into.
Even if you randomized weave spawns and order with greater variety and made quickplay weaves the only part of weaves, that’d still be 5+ separate matchmaking queues.
I’ve had some fun with them during the short windows of time since WoM’s release when I actually had people to run them with, but matching with random strangers was dead within the second week after release.
If there were enough players I could do Quickplay Weaves at least, but for what? Variety maybe, but other than one frame per season there’s not much in terms of rewards. I already gained all the essence I’ll ever need by NOT playing weaves, ironically. Bots are mostly useless thanks to Wind modifiers, as well. And there are no bots or late joining in ranked weaves, either.
A major rework of the whole “fixed spawns, set order of weaves, leaderboards” concept is probably not on the cards this late into the game’s lifetime and with a different expansion on the horizon. Maybe they’ll add some way to acquire the weave weapon skins outside of weaves, okay. That would be nice but doesn’t solve the issue that you need people to actually PLAY weaves, and once the initial rush for those skins is over you can guess what will happen…
So due to various circumstances, leaderboard-driven weaves are a failed concept aimed at too few players and the chance to fix them has, realistically, long passed.
Admittedly, there were two very good ideas stuck between the aforementioned problems:
The gameplay and visual variety brought on by weaves, meaning running through slightly different levels with some crazy modifiers that shake up gameplay.
The Athanor’s concept of being able to progressively upgrade and switch builds around relatively quickly and with more freedom to combine stats than the base game
The actual execution didn’t really work out that way, but I want to point out the merit of these two parts. Keep this in mind for Chaos Wastes, which from the rough description in the anniversary stream could pick these ideas up.
Indeed you point us the strong points that are currently not that strong the way it has been executed.
In my opinion, some winds are inherently fun (storm weaves even if it could be better does allow you for some fun stuff to happen, either killing a huge pack of enemies with the storm after the cooldown, or your unfortunates teammates), and some winds are just a mess (gold weaves, all enemies have now armor & superarmor, woooho this is so fun).
It is interesting to also note that despite differents modifiers, you don’t really change your loadout that much. Which means that winds kinda fail into what they should do in the first place, trying to get player to adapt his loadout to the situation he’ll face.
Let’s note that we see a pattern with how Fatshark tackled weeklies events modifiers, bomb rats, and/or beastmens archers, etc. A good idea which becomes “too much” and therefore frustrating.
A bomb rat sometimes mixed within a horde would have been great, even in the normal game, but no they have to annoyingly comes every 10 sec, a horde of them, not exploding when pushed, and coming back at you. That’s the same for weaves. Sometimes good effects, but pushed beyond a point of frustration that makes them not enjoyable.
On the other end of the spectrum you have twitch mode. That, by allowing people to tweak a bit to their liking, does a perfect job as giving people what they want to do (when they like twitch mode of course) but also add a lot of variety which prevent the boredom issue.
I agree with you. I thought weave quick play would solve this problem. I cannot see why weave quick play should be seperated from ranked weave.
Playing with 4 from start to end is too much . This isn’t raid on mmorpg.
I don’t care spawn is scripted or not if it is harsh enough.
Playing cata3 weave quick play should give portrait regardless which stage you played.
But number can increase. Maybe 60~80 clear?
So that i can join other and play with or help another.
I want more powerups, its a magic realm, things were supposed to become crazy, i would like some weapon infusement with extra effects like chain lightning or fire damage, i see the potential, i have fun with weaves (the starting ones that is) until it later on becomes cheese or die, replace the cheesing requirement with op weaponry and we re good to go.