Sentient caches are ruining the anomaly missions

[Steel_Rook]

26 minutes ago, Oreades said:

Like I said you can only really fix the event by getting rid of the cycle. Because anything else is just going to religate everyone to the bare maximum of once chance per cycle and that's going to suck harder than having people jump ship every other game. 

Honestly, I'd rather do that. Restrict the drop to once per cycle, boost the drop chance accordingly. That way you don't have to cancel your life for the 30 minutes the event is up. You show up, take as long as you need, do your one and only one role, then move on with your life. The problem with the way the event works right now is the same as with Tridolons - if you let people optimise and do multiple runs, they'll optimise and try to get as many runs as they can so as to improve their chances. Limiting the number of attempts but boosting the drop chance prevents people from trying to optimise and removes the primary reason to rush.

If we're going to have time gates, I'd rather they came in the form of "caps" rather than "uptime."

[Cerikus]

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

Honestly, I'd rather do that. Restrict the drop to once per cycle, boost the drop chance accordingly. That way you don't have to cancel your life for the 30 minutes the event is up. You show up, take as long as you need, do your one and only one role, then move on with your life. The problem with the way the event works right now is the same as with Tridolons - if you let people optimise and do multiple runs, they'll optimise and try to get as many runs as they can so as to improve their chances. Limiting the number of attempts but boosting the drop chance prevents people from trying to optimise and removes the primary reason to rush.

If we're going to have time gates, I'd rather they came in the form of "caps" rather than "uptime."

You reminded me of a quote from one developer (I do not know which one it was unfortunatelly). This person said:

"Players, if given a chance, will optimize all the fun out of a game."

Game devs have to make sure, that players cannot do exactly that and DE is failing at this sadly.. 

[Steel_Rook]

16 hours ago, Cerikus said:

You reminded me of a quote from one developer (I do not know which one it was unfortunatelly). This person said:

"Players, if given a chance, will optimize all the fun out of a game."

Game devs have to make sure, that players cannot do exactly that and DE is failing at this sadly.. 

Yeah, that's the quote I was going for 🙂 And I agree - the onus is on developers to PREVENT players from optimising the fun out of the game, and one easy way to do this is to prevent us from optimising in the first place. That's why I'm a fan things like Daily Standing Caps. Intuitively I'd like to be able to earn Standing faster and progress faster... But intellectually I know that the game is preventing me from binging on it and so keeping me from burning out. It ensures that my desire for a specific reward doesn't monopolise all of my time, and that I have room for both chasing rewards and playing for fun.

Personally, I'd rather get rid of scheduled cycles entirely and go with the "Payday 2 Safehouse Raid" approach. In PD2, your safehouse gets raided 3 days after the last time you defended it, whether you succeeded or not. No schedule, not set times, just a cooldown on how often you can repeat it. I'd personally prefer that approach to Day/Night, Hot/Cold, Up/Down cycles like what we have. Make the Anomaly its own node similar to Mutalist Alad V, let players run it once, then lock it for 1/2/3/however many hours, and only then let players repeat it. Because it's a separate node, you can still matchmake with everyone else for whom this is up.

But I don't know... Maybe DE realised just how sparse the Railjack playerbase would be, so they used this kind of scheduling to funnel people together for matchmaking purposes? But even if that's the case, just limit it to one attempt per cycle and up the drop rate. Don't make people feel compelled to optimise.