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Thoughts on Event Leaderboad


Riesz

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I didn't play the event but have heard from friends, would like to understand from others(you).

 

1. Too many berries spawn

Would it be better if items are random from a similar pool, says 1x each choice item, 4x certain berries and 4x evolution item. Would this reduce possibilities of failing dungeon early due to no power item/evolution?

 

And progress to following waves would add more powerful held items to pool so that may appear next wave.

 

2. Leaderboard category

While some may attempt to beat with less members, would it be appropriate to add different category, eg 2-member, 3-member and 4-member ranking.

This is due to full party has advantage over lesser party.

 

3. Reward- percentile

I believed our community is huge and many has made attempt to get Nian hood. It was made clear that it would be back next year. I am thinking if it will be better if reward made to top percentile of ranking, instead of specified number of party.

Leaderboard would still be similar, just that it will have another page states the current percentile holder score and player (your) best score.

 

4. Party / Individual Reward

If party clear with exact same members, maybe it's better for leaderboard to update their score instead of letting the party takes 2 slots.

 

5. Alts

If one knows the trick to event, is it allowable for them to have 4/8 or more characters to occupy the leaderboard?

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I was thinking about making a similair thread but will post my thoughts here instead. I am fairly sure nobody has played the event more then Nevari and I, and we clearly had the most success. So I think I have a pretty good handle on the issues in the event. 

 

Like you said the Item RNG is a big issue, however I think that the runs still need a way to feel unique and thus should stay. However because the run is completely reliant on Evolution stones and Str stones to a less extent these need to be ensured drops. I think 2 of each should drop at the end of each boss wave in the house just like at the start. Doing this would allow you to lower the evo/str charm rate in the normal red bags and maybe add in other items like the gems back in. Since the gems were only usable if u had a ton of the type boosting items which is nearly impossible in the current system. 

 

Ur 2nd point is legit just incorrect though, playing with 4 people has no real advantage besides using 2 people as a glorified PC unit. The core issue with the game mode is that it can only sustain 2 players actually playing, a full redesign would be needed to fix this. The more players increases the overall risk of messing up and losing valuable assets in the run. 

 

Rewarding percentile would comptelely kill incentive to be on the top of the leaderboard. The prize distribution is fine the game mode itself is the issue. 

 

Because the event requires a massive time commitment both to learning and pathing and then the actual run and execution it makes getting a high score for the average player near impossible. In fact some people who asked us to carry them, would have to refuse after we told them we needed them to be around for 8-10 hours. The actual length of the event to get a high score is way to long. I think conceptually they event got the survival and endurance parts perfect and really forced players to use their brains to optimize the entire run not just each round. However I think reducing the wave lengths and increasing the boss difficulty would go a long way in making the event harder and making the run times shorter. 

 

Having a much more difficult boss that always rewards str and evo stones I think would make the event be more consistent and make run times shorter but still reward optimization. 

 

I do not see an issue with the same people taking multiple slots in the leaderboard of they fix the issues around run times. We held 3 top 10 spots but it serves to make the hood more exclusive and in some way rewards us for putting the time into solving the event mode. However for this event I do feel a little bad bumping people out of top 25 and eating up 5 good slots with duplicate accounts/my alt. Most people cannot commit 10 hours to sitting on their PC to get a high score and think this requirement is a bit absurd. A high score run should cap out at 5-6 hours.

 

Overall the biggest changes should all be around Nian itself. First off it should have Inner Focus, intimidates are the core way to beat him and barring a crit he legit never does anything. This makes the boss fight extremely low risk and boring until he randomly crit nukes one of ur mons which is just unfun RNG. We beat boss 8 once exclusively damaging Nian with dragon rage dratini, the current design is easy to manipulate and braindead to beat. Make his spawned partner correlate with the wave that was deleted. For those who do not know the boss wave will consume the zodiac wave it falls on, the boss partner should have a special lunar new year themed mon as it's spawned partner that falls into the deleted wave. This allows for players to still always get mons from every category makes the fight more difficult in many cases and adds more variety. 

 

Another alternative is to make Nian have multiple lives and potentially change type (that relates to the consumed wave, could also give it a move that changes it's type based off of nians) as the rounds go on but I am not a big fan of that. 

 

Overall I really enjoyed the event but the long runs really burned me out and are untenable for majority of the playerbase. The event should reward skill and willingness to learn the event not the amount of free time people have available on any given week. It currently requires both which is why Nevari and I were able to take as many top spots as we were. I should also add that I am highly confident that up to 70 score is very attainable and we did not even hit the upper echelons of what a true efficient run would be. We made mistakes almost every run inting valuable mons or misusing PP and we still had success. If anyone is curious about how we did the event I streamed our last run and it is saved as a vod on my Twitch.

 

Edited by Dontea
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29 minutes ago, Obvi said:

Im gonna guess #5 id allowed because i saw a handful of players using a bunch of alts to rank top 25 including a GM

Actually he is good friend of mine, and I didn't meant to make it difficult for him, that's why 4. was in the list

 

The purpose of 5. Is IF 4. were to be implemented, meaning purposely occupying more than 1 party's slot

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@Dontea wow thanks for your input.

 

I would appreciate if one same character gets multiple slot be addressed, though it doesn't (and probably never) affects me

 

As for the long hours of single dungeon run, I do hope these "experimental" dungeons would contribute input for future legendary/h.a dungeon.

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1 hour ago, Dontea said:

Like you said the Item RNG is a big issue, however I think that the runs still need a way to feel unique and thus should stay. However because the run is completely reliant on Evolution stones and Str stones to a less extent these need to be ensured drops. I think 2 of each should drop at the end of each boss wave in the house just like at the start. Doing this would allow you to lower the evo/str charm rate in the normal red bags and maybe add in other items like the gems back in. Since the gems were only usable if u had a ton of the type boosting items which is nearly impossible in the current system. 

These are mostly my feelings as well. I'm of the opinion that arcadey game modes need a bit of bullshit in order to be really fun.

 

Small correction here: Gems weren't actually removed because they're a dead drop, it was due to an infinite gem exploit which occurred with event parties sometimes.

 

Quote

Ur 2nd point is legit just incorrect though, playing with 4 people has no real advantage besides using 2 people as a glorified PC unit. The core issue with the game mode is that it can only sustain 2 players actually playing, a full redesign would be needed to fix this. The more players increases the overall risk of messing up and losing valuable assets in the run. 

To tack onto this, 4p teams actually take a small penalty compared to 2p teams (-2 score), though it's not obvious. Players eventually decided that the hat / utility of the 3rd/4th characters was worth it though.

 

I'm not really a fan of splitting the leaderboard either. We'd prefer to bias the game towards 4p- It's a coop event, and from a design standpoint, the most amount of social engagement possible should be encouraged.

 

Quote

Because the event requires a massive time commitment both to learning and pathing and then the actual run and execution it makes getting a high score for the average player near impossible. In fact some people who asked us to carry them, would have to refuse after we told them we needed them to be around for 8-10 hours. The actual length of the event to get a high score is way to long. I think conceptually they event got the survival and endurance parts perfect and really forced players to use their brains to optimize the entire run not just each round. However I think reducing the wave lengths and increasing the boss difficulty would go a long way in making the event harder and making the run times shorter. 

It was definitely not meant to run as long as it did. 8-10h is a conservative estimate for a top 25 position; @Rache's 58 run took 17(!) hours, and the very last team to post a score (53, FlorDeCaramelo/GulySilver/Ayzakk/Norkez) was at it for around 16h.

 

In the current iteration, I don't think that reducing wave lengths would actually shorten the event, though it'd make it less tedious. It would just inflate scores and give you more resources to go further. When you're in a wave, if you're playing perfectly, your loss condition is the total banked PP / species. The obvious way to shorten it here would be reducing total PP given / species counts, though that hurts the game in other ways.

 

Increasing the Nian's difficulty based on the wave difficulty is likely something we'll be doing next year. Though, whether that'll be enough to shorten it is something I'd be skeptical about (especially with any proposed post-boss item drops). There's only so many resources the Nian can take per battle.

 

I don't think it's a fully solvable problem without writing a definitive ending to the instance, and adding a score metric against something not related to enemy counts, like time or resources remaining. There's always going to be some guy who's willing to strap on a diaper and sit in his chair for 24h straight because he really wants that hat. It's just sort-of the consequence of an infinitely-running instance combined with gated items.

 

1 hour ago, Riesz said:

I would appreciate if one same character gets multiple slot be addressed, though it doesn't (and probably never) affects me

We agree and it'll be adjusted for next time. It was an oversight which wasn't really possible to be fixed in the middle of this one, once the event started really getting underway.

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37 minutes ago, Kyu said:

These are mostly my feelings as well. I'm of the opinion that arcadey game modes need a bit of bullshit in order to be really fun.

 

Small correction here: Gems weren't actually removed because they're a dead drop, it was due to an infinite gem exploit which occurred with event parties sometimes.

 

To tack onto this, 4p teams actually take a small penalty compared to 2p teams (-2 score), though it's not obvious. Players eventually decided that the hat / utility of the 3rd/4th characters was worth it though.

 

I'm not really a fan of splitting the leaderboard either. We'd prefer to bias the game towards 4p- It's a coop event, and from a design standpoint, the most amount of social engagement possible should be encouraged.

 

It was definitely not meant to run as long as it did. 8-10h is a conservative estimate for a top 25 position; @Rache's 58 run took 17(!) hours, and the very last team to post a score (53, FlorDeCaramelo/GulySilver/Ayzakk/Norkez) was at it for around 16h.

 

In the current iteration, I don't think that reducing wave lengths would actually shorten the event, though it'd make it less tedious. It would just inflate scores and give you more resources to go further. When you're in a wave, if you're playing perfectly, your loss condition is the total banked PP / species. The obvious way to shorten it here would be reducing total PP given / species counts, though that hurts the game in other ways.

 

Increasing the Nian's difficulty based on the wave difficulty is likely something we'll be doing next year. Though, whether that'll be enough to shorten it is something I'd be skeptical about (especially with any proposed post-boss item drops). There's only so many resources the Nian can take per battle.

 

I don't think it's a fully solvable problem without writing a definitive ending to the instance, and adding a score metric against something not related to enemy counts, like time or resources remaining. There's always going to be some guy who's willing to strap on a diaper and sit in his chair for 24h straight because he really wants that hat. It's just sort-of the consequence of an infinitely-running instance combined with gated items.

 

We agree and it'll be adjusted for next time. It was an oversight which wasn't really possible to be fixed in the middle of this one, once the event started really getting underway.

Hmm I guess I just fundamentally disagree with the idea that reducing wave size would not reduce the overall time. And that increasing Nian difficulty wouldn't hurt the overall run. 

 

We beat Nian using less than 3 PP 90% of the time because of how low of a threat level he had. If he actually did damage and getting him down as fast as possible was important u would not only need to risk more of ur mons but also lose them as a result but would def end up using more "valuable" PP. For example wasting 4-5 dragon claws on each Nian drastically reduces the runs potential upside. If every pre evo mon like dratini is gonna get insta popped by a super power or devour then it makes them impossible to abuse as well. I am not sure if u stopped by in our streamed run but I am fairly confident the main advantage we had over most other players was our overall PP management and finding ways to get value out of all of our pokemon, not how safe we played. 

 

I am fairly sure our 58 run was around 12 hours. I am assuming Raches run was able to be that long due to prolonged breaks in between rounds. 

 

I guess I do not see how wave size wouldn't effect overall game length since the majority of our wasted time came form needing to use methods of conserving PP that ate up time such as howl spamming pre evos or mass switching to put everything at -6 before killing etc. If the waves are shorter and you create some some incentive to do them faster (maybe have a high score category for who got to later waves the fastest). 

 

I will also say on most of our later runs we were prepping to be able to beat later rounds from the beginning and thus started conservation tactics very early. Which prolongs the runs quite a bit.

 

Once again though thanks for making a fun event I enjoyed it a lot and hope to see more content like this in the future. If you ever want help testing stuff like this ik Nevari and I both really enjoy trying to beat/solve this type of thing and would be happy to help. 

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Great event, was really fun and with the leaderboard addition was REALLY interesting. I think like Dontea, that so long time on runs was a big filter to common players. That about boss dificult was like "well, we need defeat that round, because againts boss we only need a toxic user and drop their attack to -6". Isnt like a "BOSS", it feel more like free points, some rounds like dogs (omg I hate Snubull) was so much hard, at least for me and my teammates.
Thanks @Donteaand @calidubstep, maybe u dont know how much u helped us letting know about get more and more and more score was possible, on firsts days when we did 38 points I thought "Ok, maybe we can get 41 or 45 points max", and then Cali come and did 54 points, that was like "Ok guys, come on we can do more points, go scout again what we can do better".
 

1 hour ago, Kyu said:

It was definitely not meant to run as long as it did. 8-10h is a conservative estimate for a top 25 position; @Rache's 58 run took 17(!) hours, and the very last team to post a score (53, FlorDeCaramelo/GulySilver/Ayzakk/Norkez) was at it for around 16h.

17hs and 16hs OMG 
 

1 hour ago, Kyu said:

Increasing the Nian's difficulty based on the wave difficulty is likely something we'll be doing next year. Though, whether that'll be enough to shorten it is something I'd be skeptical about (especially with any proposed post-boss item drops). There's only so many resources the Nian can take per battle.

Idk about if that can reduce runs time, but its nice have a good boss, maybe u can do more and more and more stronger, but just a little to take it like a challenge can be interesting imo.

About a possible future lunar new year event @Kyu, u said the Nian Hood come back on future like leaderboard reward, then we can take exactly same item on 2022? Or will it come back with some small difference, something that differentiates having achieved it in 2021 or 2022? 

Again, was a great event, thanks!

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The Event was fun and adding a leaderboard was really something great to set up for event like (and i hope we will get the same for next big event like halloween and christmas)

 

The rng on item was imo the only "issue" to fix for next year , not putting the same item for each run because it will take away the fun and unique aspect of each run but like dontea said just adding like 2 fix item after each boss would be a great thing.

I dont think we can remove the fact some player will run for 10h+ because it has a special reward so people will try to go as far as possible anyway.

 

And also i read that some people want to increase the difficulty of the event but dont forget there are also people who dont want to tryhard the event to get on leadderboard but just want to have a great moment with some friend and not everyone is able to go on 40+ score like some of us did.

 

Cant wait to get the nian hood héhé

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To tell you the truth, this event is very interesting. I like it very much. But I think it's a little difficult.

 

For example, each Sprite can only be used once, which annoys me to think of different ways to get me through the difficulties. But let's think about it. It's super good.

 

An idea of mine:I think this could be changed a little bit, so that if the Pokemon dies, we can get it back in the next round.

 

Finally, thank you for making this event

Thank you for making Lunar New Year 2021. I love it

In addition, my English may not be very good, please forgive me.*⸜( •ᴗ• )⸝*

Edited by wenjunlingkong
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My 2 Pennys:

 

 

 

There where _too_ many runs where i ended up with like 7-9 str charm and just two or three evo's if even. Heck i couldnt even use all the str charms in many runs.  Berrys also feel friggin annyoing. There are enough useful items to spread with RNG, honestly no reason to bring berrys on the table, too. The difference you have while getting a evo stone or useless berry is way too big; Rng had bit too much impact and ended up not beeing entertaining but frustration if you have a few good first rounds, invested already 2 hours to suddenly get fkd by rng. With all the Status spam there was already enough RNG caused by the pkm. (Paralyze, Crits, Confuse)

 

 

And for the ladder: I dont think many ppl have that time to play _12_ hours at once, even if i get the idea from kyu that you need to take effort. Thats effort many people simply cant spend, especialy if they have work or kids. that simple. Maybe consider to do something where you dont need to play 12 hours at once. (edit: Even more hours, thats kinda ridicioulus)

 

However: The items where nice this event. The event itself was, too. It was just too much RNG reliant and impossible for many to participate for the rankings even if they wanted to. Competitio was not about "the best" but instead about "who brings most time". 

Edited by Johnwaynee
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  • 2 years later...

I can see where you're coming from regarding the reward distribution in the event. Shifting the rewards to the top percentile of the ranking, instead of a specified number of parties, could be a great way to recognize the efforts of the most dedicated players in the community. By having an additional page that showcases the current percentile holder's score and the player's own best score, it would add an extra layer of competition and motivate players to strive for higher rankings.

Edited by raan433
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