Only 5 Attempts at Aphra 1/Hondo
and I feel like quitting SWGOH entirely. Seriously, CG, this is ridiculously terrible. What is wrong with you?
Forum Discussion
@CG_Tusken_Meathead
Because complaining without constructive criticism is of little use, here's what I came up with.
Although I object to events structured so as to depend on RNG, even if I accept for the purposes of the argument that the right design choice is to pin player success or failure to something beyond the player ability to control or even mod (evasion in this case), the event need not be frustrating AND the event need not be entirely out of control of the pleyers' hands.
In this case where you just feel absolutely compelled as a design team to force the player to rely on RNG and multiple attempts, you add a buff -- call it Luck of the Pirate King, or The Will of the Force, or just Plot Armour (since that's what it is).
Then make the bonus from this buff something that directly counters the frustration of the RNG. In this case, it gives a boost to evasion.
Set the baseline amount at something reasonable, and then allow the bonus to increase in an arithmetic progression with something that the player controls, but which also encourages that player to spend resources (and thus will encourage at least some players to spend money).
Here it's fairly simple:
Luck of the Pirate King: +1% evasion, arithmetically increasing, per relic level of the character. For those who don't understand the mathematical statement here, that's +1% at r1, +3% at r2, +6% at r3, etc.
Since Hondo doesn't qualify for the event until r5, this grants a minimum of +15% evasion. Since Hondo's dodge in this event is 27%, this grants a substantial buff and thus can be expected to reduce the total number of attempts, but without ever changing the fundamental nature of the event which requires dodges otherwise outside the player's control to complete.
And yet!
It is RNG. People can still get frustrated. But of course they can r6 their Hondo for a 48% dodge chance, or r7 for 55% up to r9 for 72% dodge chance.
At al levels there is a meaningful chance to dodge and a meaningful chance to be struck, but at r9 the chance to be struck is 28% -- very much the inverse of the chance to dodge we currently have without this hypo ethical buff.
in other words, you still depend on luck, but the player has meaningful choices available that can tilt the odds in the player's favour (and even when not taking them, the odds of mission success are not quite as bad as they were originally).
And yet some of those choices depend on giving cash to you, the game developer, for quick access to high relic tiers.
Why is this better?
It does not change the fundamental nature of the event: you want an event that depends on dodges and you still have it.
It reduces the number of attempts for players, decreasing frustration.
It returns a sense of control back to the players allowing them to make a conscious choice between More attempts while saving relic materials or spending relic materials and expecting success in fewer average attempts. Even though no matter what you do you are required to get some level of RNG, attempts vs relic tiers is now a strategic player choice, giving the player the sense that they are beating the level.
It increases CG's income by encouraging spending resources and thus ultimately cash on improving a specific, required toon.
There have been many events that are heavily RNG dependent in the past. While most of them have the option of minimizing RNG through raising your gear/relics to overpowering levels (as bad as many people believe GAS to have been you always had the option of taking your full squad to r7 since r7 existed at the time, and the damage and survivability of r7 did in fact make a meaningful difference in your chances of success), this event which requires multiple dodges to succeed will never feel satisfying to the player. It's a bad design choice. But you can make it better. And if you feel the need to design RNG-heavy events in the future, an arithmetically scaling buff can be crafted to those events as well.
Personally, I prefer more direct control. You could, for example, grant the enemies much lower offence but much higher crit damage. With enough enemies on the field, you can keep their crit chance low (no higher than 45%) but still come close to guaranteeing a critical hit for every turn the hero takes. Only now a Criit Avoid arrow reduces the chances of a critical hit to 0% to 9%. At this point you're testing the player's knowledge of the game and investment in their mods rather than pure RNG.
That said, even here you have a similar option: Insanely high crit damage with moderate offence can be combined with a CritChance of, say, 80%.
With a critical avoid arrow you still get smashed.
Drop in the Plot Armour event buff, using the same progression as above and you still get absolutely smashed unless you combine it with a CA arrow.
Combined the CC% of the enemy falls to 29% as your CA has reached 51%.
now add in the encouragement to arithmetic progression and you see that an r6 toon has only a 23% chance of being critically hit, an r7% has a 16% chance, an r8 an 8% chance, and an r9 will be immune to the critical hits of the enemy.
But even with r9, if you don't have that CA arrow your chance of being critically hit would be 35%, which might be frusttatingly high and cause a player to require a number of restarts.
In short: you've designed a really poor event, but you can do better. it's not even that hard.
Because complaining without constructive criticism is of little use, here's what I came up with.
Although I object to events structured so as to depend on RNG, even if I accept for the purposes of the argument that the right design choice is to pin player success or failure to something beyond the player ability to control or even mod (evasion in this case), the event need not be frustrating AND the event need not be entirely out of control of the pleyers' hands.
In this case where you just feel absolutely compelled as a design team to force the player to rely on RNG and multiple attempts, you add a buff -- call it Luck of the Pirate King, or The Will of the Force, or just Plot Armour (since that's what it is).
Then make the bonus from this buff something that directly counters the frustration of the RNG. In this case, it gives a boost to evasion.
Set the baseline amount at something reasonable, and then allow the bonus to increase in an arithmetic progression with something that the player controls, but which also encourages that player to spend resources (and thus will encourage at least some players to spend money).
Here it's fairly simple:
Luck of the Pirate King: +1% evasion, arithmetically increasing, per relic level of the character. For those who don't understand the mathematical statement here, that's +1% at r1, +3% at r2, +6% at r3, etc.
Since Hondo doesn't qualify for the event until r5, this grants a minimum of +15% evasion. Since Hondo's dodge in this event is 27%, this grants a substantial buff and thus can be expected to reduce the total number of attempts, but without ever changing the fundamental nature of the event which requires dodges otherwise outside the player's control to complete.
And yet!
It is RNG. People can still get frustrated. But of course they can r6 their Hondo for a 48% dodge chance, or r7 for 55% up to r9 for 72% dodge chance.
At al levels there is a meaningful chance to dodge and a meaningful chance to be struck, but at r9 the chance to be struck is 28% -- very much the inverse of the chance to dodge we currently have without this hypo ethical buff.
in other words, you still depend on luck, but the player has meaningful choices available that can tilt the odds in the player's favour (and even when not taking them, the odds of mission success are not quite as bad as they were originally).
And yet some of those choices depend on giving cash to you, the game developer, for quick access to high relic tiers.
Why is this better?
It does not change the fundamental nature of the event: you want an event that depends on dodges and you still have it.
It reduces the number of attempts for players, decreasing frustration.
It returns a sense of control back to the players allowing them to make a conscious choice between More attempts while saving relic materials or spending relic materials and expecting success in fewer average attempts. Even though no matter what you do you are required to get some level of RNG, attempts vs relic tiers is now a strategic player choice, giving the player the sense that they are beating the level.
It increases CG's income by encouraging spending resources and thus ultimately cash on improving a specific, required toon.
There have been many events that are heavily RNG dependent in the past. While most of them have the option of minimizing RNG through raising your gear/relics to overpowering levels (as bad as many people believe GAS to have been you always had the option of taking your full squad to r7 since r7 existed at the time, and the damage and survivability of r7 did in fact make a meaningful difference in your chances of success), this event which requires multiple dodges to succeed will never feel satisfying to the player. It's a bad design choice. But you can make it better. And if you feel the need to design RNG-heavy events in the future, an arithmetically scaling buff can be crafted to those events as well.
Personally, I prefer more direct control. You could, for example, grant the enemies much lower offence but much higher crit damage. With enough enemies on the field, you can keep their crit chance low (no higher than 45%) but still come close to guaranteeing a critical hit for every turn the hero takes. Only now a Criit Avoid arrow reduces the chances of a critical hit to 0% to 9%. At this point you're testing the player's knowledge of the game and investment in their mods rather than pure RNG.
That said, even here you have a similar option: Insanely high crit damage with moderate offence can be combined with a CritChance of, say, 80%.
With a critical avoid arrow you still get smashed.
Drop in the Plot Armour event buff, using the same progression as above and you still get absolutely smashed unless you combine it with a CA arrow.
Combined the CC% of the enemy falls to 29% as your CA has reached 51%.
now add in the encouragement to arithmetic progression and you see that an r6 toon has only a 23% chance of being critically hit, an r7% has a 16% chance, an r8 an 8% chance, and an r9 will be immune to the critical hits of the enemy.
But even with r9, if you don't have that CA arrow your chance of being critically hit would be 35%, which might be frusttatingly high and cause a player to require a number of restarts.
In short: you've designed a really poor event, but you can do better. it's not even that hard.
