I loved the addition of Patrols, but after several attempts and one success at the platinum crate, it’s been made clear that the combination of a 100 daily alliance limit and random point value patrol spawns is a flawed design.
We were on a solid path to reach Platinum in most of our attempts with only moderate rerolls, but always feel short until we did a massive reroll push. The math just doesn’t work out without spending an obscene amount of gold.
This is either explicitly designed to manipulate the end game oriented alliances (and/or whale milking) or it just wasn’t thought through and needs to be adjusted. I’m an optimist when it comes to these things so I’ll assume it was the later.
Please remove, or dramatically increase, the daily alliance limit to make it reasonably possible for a motivated alliance to achieve the top reward with minimal (preferably zero) rerolls. If that’s not possible please remove the random nature of the patrol spawns so predictable calculations can actually be made and alliances can properly estimate how much gold it will take to accomplish their goals and plan accordingly. If it stays as is, I’m afraid you open yourselves up to accusations of predatory practices.
It’ll probably be easier when people start reaching level 75 hence can send an additional hero out patrolling. However, the chests take like a week to open. It’s not HARD. But I can’t keep my hype for an entire week since the rewards aren’t that spectacular. I’d like to see other rewards in the Patrol chests.
However I read on the VIP chat yesterday that the bonus item thingy is broken at the moment and they’re looking into fixing it. I haven’t received a bonus reward from Patrols for a week or more and I was afraid they’d cancelled the feature, so I’m glad to learn it’s just temporarily broken.
@yojimbo, you do understand that as much as this is a free to play game, the devs do need to make a living right ?
Achieving gold crate is simple. As long as the team is well coordinated and discipline. To push for plat crate, IMO is for bragging rights and the amount of gold used to reroll to reach it is not worth it. Having said, it is still possible to get plat crate, as long as everyone plays their part, but that is usually not the case.
So it all boils down to your priorities. The extra 10 universal frags are good to have but not worth the rerolls for my team that is.
Lastly, I feel one should not feel so entitled in this matter.
Nobody is forcing you to spend gold in rerolls. You can just go for the gold crate, which may be possible without spending a single gold piece as long as the alliance coordinates (I don’t really know)
The plat box takes double the effort than gold box and rewards are only increased by 33%. Is up to you and your alliance if you want to push for it using that obscene amount of gold.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree with you that daily limit should be increased or even totally gone, since having so many limits makes them redundant (why would I rush a single patrol if I can’t do more than 100 a day?)
But I don’t think “predatory practices” is the best way to describe this mechanic. It just something new that needs some testing, feedback and tuning.
Without the daily limit you would reach the Platinum crate within a day. SUre, with the limit its next to impossible to reach Platinum without resets. But as Cool_hand statet before, the devs need to be paid. You can reach gold easily if you coordinate your ally and the Platinum rewards aren´t gamechaningly higher.
Seems that the bonuses are working again. If you are saying that the patrols aren´t rewarding enough, remember that you get free gold, energy and frags that way as a bonus for free.
And it’s for the whole alliance, if everyone pitches in it helps, don’t forget that it’s elementles frags, so the weaker guys can upgrade whatever they want
Do patrols scale with the Alliance’s power? I’m in a mid-level alliance and Platinum seems impossible even if we were aggressive about rerolls.
You don’t really need rerolls though, my experience is that the most important factors for maximizing patrol values are:
Having people active during off-peak, we lose good patrols at night because nobody is playing.
Simply waiting for the reset if there’s only crappy patrols left. You only need about 4 patrols an hour to hit the cap, so you can be strategic about letting it reroll naturally.
@Sogui, the patrols do no scale with alliance power. It’s all random generation. Plat is possible, like I say, provided everyone reroll aggressively. But gold can be bette use elsewhere. Getting to gold is easily achievable. How you guys play I do not know.
@cool_hand Thank you for your reply. I’ve re-read my feedback to look for a sense of entitlement in it and I’m not seeing it. There are a whole host of things I imagine I would have complained about if entitlement were remotely a factor here. I’m well aware of the profit incentive, and I myself have contributed a significant amount to Hot Head in encouragement of their continued development. It’s disappointing that you would dismiss legitimate critiques of a single mechanism they’ve implemented in order to promote a more general idea that “it’s OK to gouge” in ways that would typically be considered predatory so the “devs can eat”. They are converting plenty of areas of their game into income and this area is no exception.
My complaint is that they could do so in THIS area in a way that encourages participation and eliminates the uncertainty on our part as both consumers and players.
I never claimed reaching Gold was an issue, and given the measly increase of rewards for Plat, it is indeed what most of us have settled on achieving and is completely doable without spending any gold at all. Spending or not spending gold is not remotely the issue being focused on in my feedback. My complaint focuses on improving it so that the top reward is achievable in a predictable manner without the requirement of spending lots of gold on rerolls. The operative word being “requirement”. How people spend is entirely up to them, and I encourage them to contribute as much as they are comfortable with to promote the game’s development, but it should be their choice to do so and they should be able to do so knowing what the tradeoffs are.
The current implementation of Patrols makes getting to Plat (the goal of any alliance that’s doing everything they can to get the best rewards whenever possible) fails in that. We do not know what the tradeoffs are as we can not predict with any accuracy when, or even if, we can reach Plat. The multiple restrictions in place make it extremely difficult and it needs improvement or players will reduce their engagement with it and spend nothing on re-rolls. I am in fact suggesting a fix to do the opposite of what you’re assuming my motivations are, but thanks for the discussion to clear that up.
“Without the daily limit you would reach the Platinum crate within a day. SUre, with the limit its next to impossible to reach Platinum without resets. But as Cool_hand statet before, the devs need to be paid. You can reach gold easily if you coordinate your ally and the Platinum rewards aren´t gamechaningly higher.”
@WalleWu This is why the implementation needs to be improved. The key point I’m making is that there is ZERO incentive to go for the Platinum reward because of the multitude of factors acting as barriers to getting it. It’s costs too much for the rewards, the rewards are insufficiently better than Gold for that cost, and the daily limit on top of the random nature of the patrol spawns makes it impossible to properly plan a strategy of achieving it via any other means than spending a crap ton of gold. It does NOT work as is and no-one, once they’ve realized this, will engage with it resulting in LESS gold being spent on it overall thus contradicting the “devs gotta eat” platitude.
I WANT the devs to eat. I want them to continue being motivated to create engaging content. This is the Feedback forum specifically for that purpose and I’m trying to outline some suggestions to make this one feature accomplish what I arguably have assumed to be their goals.
I didn’t say that they were deliberately engaging in “predatory practices”, I said that if it’s not improved in some way that they are at risk of being accused of doing such. It definitely needs some testing and this is feedback to that end. If it remains unchanged then it is absolutely accurate to describe it as predatory. I never suggested anyone is forced to strive to achieve Plat, and yes Gold is perfectly easy to achieve without spending any gold, but neither of those are the point nor are they arguments against any of the suggestions I’ve made. My one and only goal in this feedback is to provide them with information to help improve their feature so everyone benefits. That’s it. No handouts, no demands, just feedback to make something work better while still providing revenue. If everyone goes for Gold, they gain nothing and the feature flops. Are we all OK with that? I personally like the idea of patrols and want to see it succeed, but it’s current implementation falls flat and there’s a decent chance it will be scrapped in the long run as a result.
You want the Patrols either to be an event you dont`t have to spend gold on to get the top reward. Or it should be a bigger gap between Gold and Platinum, so it´s worth or even mandatory spending gold?
I think both of it is a bad idea. This game has a great balance of rewards given for spending money and to stay competitiv without spending. Same is with the Patrols. You can reach most of the rewards for free and just have to spend gold for a little extra. If you would make the gap to Platinum bigger the free or low spending players would fall behind to much. If you would take out the barriers, you could just give everyone the max reward for free once a week, because it get´s to easy.
Not really suggesting either actually. I don’t care if gold is needed to achieve the top reward, but it would definitely be best if it wasn’t “required” to achieve it. If it is “required” then the reward should definitely be equivalent to the average gold needed to achieve it.
In the case of patrols you have to spend A LOT, and I know because we’ve done it, to get a “little extra” and it simply isn’t worth it. What that means is that, ultimately, everyone will figure that out and no one will spend any gold on patrols at all.
My suggestion lies strictly on the barriers making it impossible for us to accurately predict a coarse of action, whether it’s spending to reach the goal or not. 100 daily limit + random patrol values makes it’s impossible to determine whether you can accomplish an average 1429 points/patrol that everyone would have to adhere to for the platinum reward. It has currently shown to be impossible without rerolls in our attempts. That’s what my feedback is focusing on. The barriers preventing proper planing.
There’s nothing worse than being < 10,000 points away from the top reward and having no recourse to correct for it even on subsequent attempts.
I can help you with that. You can´t reach Platinum without spending. As far as i noticed, we didn´t do much rerolls this week and are already about 50k behind the needed Points.
@Yojimbo, I would have it disagree with your view. If every aspect of the game becomes easily achievable than it defeats the purpose.
As far as am concern to reach gold is easily done by few rerolls in 7 days comfortably. At the moment of mid point we have achieved gold crate. To achieve that by being disciplined and team effort be it in picking patrols and helping out in rerolls as a team. We get bout 40 gold free from daily task, why not spend it there.
To reach the plat crate it takes 1B points with 100 patrols per day, which means 150k each day, which is achievable. Some patrols are 1.5k and more or even 4K.
I do not think rerolling is a barrier to achieving plat. I hate to say it, you have quite the narrow point of view.
Where my team is concern, getting to gold is a Breeze. Going for plat is great, but needs team effort and discipline. Besides, my team is a 24/7 presence.
1, gold patrol crate is easily achieved
2, to go for plat is good but not necessarily, the extra alliance store gems and universal element frags are good to have but not necessarily. It all boils down to priority.
3, rerolls are needed and
4, most important a cohesive n discipline team
5, that is as much planning and thought process my team put in
@Cool_hand same here, we’re an international alliance, guys from North and South America, Europe and Asias, we always have people only at the most weirdest hours
@Cool_hand Again, you’re assuming my view is limited to just the rerolls. I do not care one iota that re-rolls are involved in reaching plat. It is not even a barrier, it’s intended to reduce one of the barriers for a price, just like paying for energy or buying a crate. Patrols currently leverage 9 restrictive barriers to gate reaching the maximum reward; 100 daily alliance limit, 7 day limit, 1,000,000 patrol points requiring an average point value per patrol of 1429, class requirement on patrols, power level requirement on patrols, specific hero requirement on patrols, random point value on spawned patrols, 2 hour natural refresh rate on patrols, 5 new patrols per refresh. The grand average so far of spawns per refresh is well below 1429 and if you do nothing but take the 5 patrols every 2 hours you can get 12 refreshes or 65 total patrols per day. You can force a refresh by taking all the spawns, or re-rolling, but taking all spawns will rarely ever meet the 7145 value needed for 5 patrols, even on the average over many refreshes when you get the rare 3000-5000 spawns. We can use re-rolls to eliminate the low value spawns, but in order to get enough high value spawns to meet or exceed a 1429 points/patrol it requires more investment of gold than the rewards for Platinum are worth (approximately 2 hero crates or 600gold in my estimation). That gold can be invested elsewhere for greater returns.
You’re accusing me of a narrow point of view, but your responses seem to focus on aspects of my complaint that are not core to the complaint which demonstrates that you aren’t understanding my motivations to improve an aspect of the game and are trying to contradict it in a way that is argumentative simply because you don’t think it’s a big deal or because you think I’m somehow trying to make it easier for us to achieve something without spending anything, neither of which is true from my perspective.
My feedback is focused on the architecture of the feature and more specifically how the 100 daily limit restriction alone prevents the feature from reaching it’s full potential. Why put a top tier reward that no-one will feel like investing in to acquire?
The feature, as currently implemented, requires, based squarely on the math, too much investment to justify the reward and as such is flawed. I’m suggesting some ideas that I think will address that. If you have another suggestion to achieve the same goal, I’m all ears, but this back and forth on, “it’s not broken” without providing anything that explains why my suggestions will not work to address the flaws that have been detailed adds up to being unconstructive. Maybe you don’t personally find value in this kind of feedback and that’s fine. From my experience developing games and software however, I know it’s valuable feedback to the developers that they can determine if they want to act on or not even if they don’t agree with my proposed solutions. I encourage everyone to contribute their ideas to that end, including you, but dismissing it out of hand is doing the exact opposite of what this forum stands for. You seem to agree that the Platinum rewards just aren’t worth the price of chasing it, but if it’s not something you care about getting fixed, why comment on it at all?
