The Archives – gameplay impact

Tenebro
Tenebro Member Posts: 89
in Feedback and Suggestions

And here it comes, again, another Archives tome. What does it mean for me? Another week or two where many games get destroyed by survivors/killers doing their Archives quests, ruining the game experience for everybody. Someone can say it’s players fault to try to complete their quests at the expense of the final game outcome. For me instead it’s a bad game design, and while people can be stupid anyway, many situations could be avoided with proper design.

The core problem is that Archives challenges promotes bad gameplay overall. The causes are substantially two:

  1. To quickly achieve normal challenges objectives players can throw a game, ruining other players experience, without getting punished … instead they get rewarded for this.
  2. To achieve master challenges objectives players must wait certain outcomes to happen randomly or, to speed up the process, sacrifice optimal gameplay (or playing with only the Archives in mind) to force certain conditions until the challenge requirements are met. This promotes even more very bad and annoying gameplay.

Solutions:

  1. Balance normal challenges objectives with the precondition you have to pip in order to earn progression for that challenge.
  2. Balance master challenges objectives with the precondition you have to pip and escape to earn progression as a survivor, and to pip and 3K to earn progression as a killer.
  3. [OPTIONAL] Don’t make the Rift time limited. This require a major overhaul of the business model, I know, but at least there will be less people doing quests as if there is no tomorrow, ruining the fun factor to everybody.

I don’t have to much time to play, I usually do only 10-20 games a week at best. This means that Archives aren’t a feature for me, because you have to play a lot to earn some good rewards … instead they are more than an annoyance, because I can feel the bad effect they have on games. Sometimes, when a new tome is available, I prefer to play other games for the first week, waiting for people to reach at least part of their objectives … otherwise the game experience is a complete mess (it could be fun at first, but after it’s just bad).

Ironically, Archives that should provide a new level of challenge during games, they actually diminish the ordinary challenge level in a good portion of games.

Comments

  • Milo
    Milo Member Posts: 7,383
    1. Okay i guess that would make sense? Would encourage players to play. But i would rather it was bloodpoints based
    2. And no. It's already difficult to do those masters challenges. Now if you have to also make sure you survive/3k while doing it will make it even less enjoyable experience.
  • Tenebro
    Tenebro Member Posts: 89
    1. Ye, whatever solution can be a lot better than the actual state 😛
    2. I forgot to mention that I'm against the prerequisite of doing all the master challenge in a single game (this is one of the biggest design problem that leads to wasted matches). So you can split the progress of the master challenge across multiple games ... the difference with the normal challenges is that you have to play even better to gain progress.