Event Feedback: Community Vs. Squad Goals, Rewards

[Thor]

There've been a ton of threads expressing disappointment with this last weekend event, and I thought I'd see if I could come up with a better event system to try and address these concerns.

 

Event types

 

So far it seems to me that the two events we've had have been on two ends of a spectrum:

 

• Community-dependent events (As in the Fusion MOA event) require a large portion of the community to all pitch in to reach a shared goal (for example, rescue 1 million hostages [oh god please don't use this idea DE]). If the goal is reached, all participants receive a reward. These events promote a sense of unity and working together, but you also get the issue of "leechers" only doing the bare minimum to receive a reward and assuming that harder-working players will do the rest for them (This was a major concern I saw during the Fusion MOA event), and in the case of the community goal not being reached the players who put in a lot of effort might feel cheated or angry at the "leechers." While I'm talking about these, I'll throw in a quick comment about the progress bar: While I feel that it gives players a tangible thing to aim at, it also encourages "leeching" once the goal is reached. This might be addressed by scaled rewards, to be discussed later.

 

• Squad/player-dependent events (As in the Artifact Defense event) require a single player to achieve a set of conditions (For example, defeat X, Y and Z bosses). The player receives the reward as soon as they meet those conditions. These events 'guarantee' the player a reward as long as they do the work, which eliminates the concern about the community not pitching in (Although for some goals, players may have difficulty finding squads capable of achieving them). However, they may lack incentive to participate further in the event once the player/squad goal is reached (A concern which has been brought up a lot about the Artifact Defense event).

 

What I would like to see is events that have both community and player/squad goals with separate rewards (Reward discussion later on), a la Mass Effect 3's weekend events. One reward would be given as soon as the squad goal was reached, and if the community goal was reached then another would be given at the end of the event (To prevent situations like the Fusion MOA event initially had where the goal was reached before some players had a chance to log on for that weekend). While I'd prefer to avoid having the community goal just be a scaled-up version of the squad goal, one should be able to contribute to the former while achieving the latter. As a simple example, the squad goal might be to defeat X boss on Y planet under Z conditions, while the community goal would be to complete 1 million missions on Y planet (Ideally the goals will be more interesting than this, but I'll leave brainstorming of that to the community/DE for the moment).

 

Rewards

 

Lots to be said here.

 

• Squad vs. Community rewards - Personally I think these should be different rewards. Both should, of course, be desirable, but the community reward should be something bigger to acknowledge the community effort.

 

• Scaling rewards - Could be applied to both types of rewards, though I think it makes a bit more sense for the community goals (as an anti-leeching mechanism). The leaderboards were neat, but only rewarded the very elite players. That's good and all, but assuming players knew in advance about them, most would assume they wouldn't be on the leaderboards and therefore wouldn't bother. Hence the reward tiers should be at least feasible for the average player. For example (And just pulling numbers out of a hat), in a "kill X enemies" community goal, the bare minimum (Tier 1 reward) would be for killing just one enemy, something slightly better (Tier 2) would be for killing 50, and something really cool would be for killing 100+.

 

• Reward exclusivity - I believe that event rewards should be exclusive. However, creating unique and exclusive rewards for each and every event would be a lot of work, especially if we want events to be every other week or so. To that end, I'm going to pull another page out of ME3's book and suggest a pool of event-exclusive rewards for most events, which are rewarded either randomly or using a token system. To dilute it out a bit, the pool could also include other nice things which are always in demand - potatos/forma immediately come to mind. Certain special events could, of course, have their own unique rewards created, but the rest would draw from this common pool and thereby eliminate the "I wasn't here for X event and now I can't get Y ever again!" complaint - though I do think one-time-only exclusives should still exist for very special occasions. The topic of unique and exclusive items is a thread in itself, but I'll list a few things which I think these rewards should/could be:

• Not game-changing. If weapons/equipment they should be sidegrades (Or at the most, very very slight upgrades) to existing equipment.

• Easily identifiable. For example, unique skins for weapons, special alternate helmets, or other unique warframe customization options.

• Since these rewards can be obtained from any event, some or all of them can and should be highly distinct in appearance and/or mechanic. People should see these things and be impressed, making them want to participate in future events.

• Working off of my earlier suggestion that the community reward should be better than the squad reward, I'll suggest that only the community reward should be drawn from this pool. However, if rewards are tiered, all tiers should include a draw from the pool. Squad reward should be non-event-exclusive - for example, a mod pack.

• Duplicates - If the rewards from my proposed pool are rewarded via RNG, there's inevitably going to be the problem of duplicates. This could be addressed in a few ways (Reduce/remove chances of duplicates, allow rerolls, etc.), but here's one suggestion (for weapon rewards, at least):

• First duplicate supercharges if not already supercharged.

• Subsequent duplicates add experience to the weapon.

• If weapon is at level 30, duplicate offers option to polarize weapon & reset to level 1. Repeat from previous.

 

Conclusion

 

*Deep breath*

Okay, so putting it all together, here's an example event (Again, these example goals are simple because I don't feel like brainstorming something fancy - I'm sure you guys have lots of neat ideas for goals).

 

• Squad goal: Defeat [NEWBOSS] on [NEWPLANET]. Squad reward: Falcon mod pack (5 mods, 1 guaranteed uncommon).

 

• Community goal: Complete 1 million missions on [NEWPLANET]. Community rewards (tiered):

• Complete 1 mission, T1: One item from event reward pool.

• Complete 20 missions, T2: One item from event reward pool, Eagle mod pack (5 mods, 1 guaranteed rare).

• Complete 100+ missions, T3: One item from event reward pool, Dragon mod pack (5 mods, 2 guaranteed rare).

 

TL;DR

 

What? No.

[CrownFire]

Awesome... Tiers are the great too.

[Enot83]

Will update as time allows.

 

Initial response as of now, I like the notion that ME3 had to an extent where you had more of an individual/squad goal and a community goal having participated in many of those events.

 

Tracking with leaderboards is also great for not only for the recognition of performance but also, within to community not even as a "thats the rank they got" but awesome these were some key players/clans that helped the community reach its goal.

 

More to come.

[NotBot]

This is a good way of thinking about future rewards in this system.

 

I personally think it would be optimum to have the community and squad goals combined, just to encourage more individual contribution to get more out of the event, as your reward tiers encourage. And maybe scatter other indirectly related incentives to get into the event, such as higher priority for alerts where the event is, or maybe a small chance to earn resources that don't normally occur on that planet/mission during the event.

[WhisperByte]

This needs more upvotes in my opinion. Great and interesting idea. Would love to see it implemented.

Could also be a way to acquire a limited number (like once an event) of direct power increasing items like taters and therefore alleviate the heaviness of potato famine

Edited June 24, 2013 by WhisperByte

[Mickey1779]

Nice well thought out start to an event system.

 

I like the idea of a shared pool of rare non-exclusive prizes and potentially using a token system to buy from that pool.

 

I want to point out that having EXCLUSIVE prizes while the game is still in BETA and not yet released might not be so good.  Once the game is officially released and launched on the PS4 by all means Exclusive Community Event prizes would be awesome.  Let's just make sure that details are made available at the time the event is announced and not afterwards like the Fusion Moa event.

 

As to this past weekends event, a simple leaderboard would have sufficed, since Waves were random make it Missions completed.

 

Tier 1 - Complete 3 Event Mission

Tier 2 - Complete 5 Event Missions

Tier 3 - Complete 10 Event Missions

 

Prizes could even be Mods of the 3 Artifacts once converted over to give participants a head start on leveling them.

[bluehawk1976]

I think this is a good idea, I loved the ME3 events (don't start me talking about the fact they stopped).

Since we have clans here maybe we can add another incentive - clan goals, tiered (thinking resources rewards here).

So, if clan members did 20 [target objective] they get X resources, 40 - Y (Y > X) etc.

[OrokinNoob]

I like what you have. Then again, i also loved the survival wave concept of the event. i think a few too many player ignored that whole suggested difficulty level and some people just don't have long wave concepts/strategy down, yet run in blind and fail over and over again.

 

So I applaud you for not downing players that didn't like it, but also bringing new topics to the conversation.

[Mickey1779]

I think this is a good idea, I loved the ME3 events (don't start me talking about the fact they stopped).

Since we have clans here maybe we can add another incentive - clan goals, tiered (thinking resources rewards here).

So, if clan members did 20 [target objective] they get X resources, 40 - Y (Y > X) etc.

 

Steve already mentioned once the Clan levels are setup they would be able to do Clan Leaderboards based on clan size.  Really looking forward to this (clan sizes implemented) in the next couple of weeks.

[notionphil]

Shared community events + squad event goals + tiers...some has been doing their MMO homework!  Awesome stuff.

 

One thing that was much more interesting about the Fusion event was that it had a sliver of lore attached to it. We really do need more lore. Or Moar Loar, as I will refer to it henceforth.

[Thor]

Tracking with leaderboards is also great for not only for the recognition of performance but also, within to community not even as a "thats the rank they got" but awesome these were some key players/clans that helped the community reach its goal.

 

Yes, definitely. Leaderboards are a great way to highlight the seriously dedicated players and should continue, but I'm also suggesting the tiered rewards as a way to encourage additional contribution for the "average" (so to speak) player.

 

I personally think it would be optimum to have the community and squad goals combined, just to encourage more individual contribution to get more out of the event, as your reward tiers encourage. And maybe scatter other indirectly related incentives to get into the event, such as higher priority for alerts where the event is, or maybe a small chance to earn resources that don't normally occur on that planet/mission during the event.

 

I'm not entirely certain what you mean by combining the community and squad goals - could you elaborate on that idea? The idea of indirectly-related incentives is neat though - I'll bet that even a hint at a slightly raised mod rarity/drop rate in a particular area would get players flocking over there :D

 

I want to point out that having EXCLUSIVE prizes while the game is still in BETA and not yet released might not be so good.  Once the game is officially released and launched on the PS4 by all means Exclusive Community Event prizes would be awesome.  Let's just make sure that details are made available at the time the event is announced and not afterwards like the Fusion Moa event.

 

Well, that's why I'm proposing that all events, current and future, draw from the pool of rewards. They're still exclusive in that you can't get them from non-event play, but post-release players could still acquire them by playing in events. As I said the topic of exclusivity is a thread (or four) in itself so I don't want to go too into it, but personally I do advocate for some sort of exclusive item to be awarded at the end of beta. I'm happy to talk about that more via PM if you'd like.

 

Since we have clans here maybe we can add another incentive - clan goals, tiered (thinking resources rewards here).

 

Yeah, clan goals would be fantastic - I hadn't thought of that! So something similar to the community goal, but scaled to clan size/type (The Shadow/River/etc. stuff that Steve mentions https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/55421-update-8-related-work/'>here)? I think the reward for that should be clan-based - say, a boost to your current/next construction project.

 

One thing that was much more interesting about the Fusion event was that it had a sliver of lore attached to it. We really do need more lore. Or Moar Loar, as I will refer to it henceforth.

 

Absolutely. Lore lore lore. Though I bet the creative team will have their hands full if we're advocating for more regular events!

[Chronodroid]

please, YES, please. 

 

Good work there, God of Thunder (aka Thor)