Challenge event pointless

Back when starting out I used to find Challenge Events quite exciting as with a developing roster they were at the time a genuine challenge to complete. It’s taken awhile for me to realise it but now they seem to be a bit of a yawn fest once you have a roster that can breeze through completing all tiers of each of them. Yes I still go through them for the emblem rewards but they have certainly lost their specialness and given the opportunity right now I would totally loot ticket them if I could for no points but the completion rewards having done them all before.

Now I know some would say well why don’t you try and compete in them then? Well I’ve seen the strategies for competing and they appear to me to be classic examples of a game encouraging people to “optimise the fun out of the game.” Endlessly starting a level and backing out if there isn’t a great match within 2 moves is really tedious and it’s only because the best rewards in the game are for top ranks that there are players willing to do the in-game equivalent of banging their head against a wall. Forget adding new heroes to the events as their specials won’t have any impact on these strategies, for any Challenge Event overhaul there needs to be an overhaul of how scoring works.

Personally if I were re-designing Challenge Events it would be along the lines of an endurance competition where levels keep getting more and more difficult with the aim to be how many stages people can clear. Each time you complete the ten stages of one of the Rare, Epic and Legendary tiers it would unlock a higher difficulty version of each stage (like normal and hard tiers in Atlantis but with more than 2 difficulty tiers) with each difficulty tier adding an additional mob wave, adding an additional mob to each wave and +25% health to bosses over the previous difficulty of the stage. Points being awarded for completing progressively more difficult stages and penalty points issued for each item used. With a different set of completion rewards each time you pass stage 10 of a difficulty tier people would need to decide between whether to use items to get more completion rewards or rely on just their heroes and skills to get a higher ranking. I would imagine there would still be a lot of world energy used up by top ranking players chasing the higher ranks but in this case they would be playing more (which isn’t playing the tiles you get more in the spirit of a match 3 game than fleeing until you get a good board) but you’d also have others who may not have been competing before using energy to get to 2nd, 3rd or 4th Completion tier rewards… Anyway that is just how I would do it but I do think there needs to be a more significant change than just new heroes so I’m hoping there is more that Beta hasn’t seen yet.

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Okay, so compasses were rare rewards or am I imagining that?

Finish first place and :boom: - a legend, 4* mats and many more cool stuff. You sound like you’ll be able to compete with tons of useless shields and 100s of compasses. :wink:

Btw, you’ll just have to wait and fight to get good items for free. What do you do with your world energy, which is more worth?

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hear hear!

I hear you absolutely, though what I would change is the point system.

I agree 100% that the way to get to the top places is not just extremely monotonous, but really expensive (and I see why they have not changed it yet).

There should be a flee limit, or otherwise a penalty for every time you do it.

At least that would give everyone a more fair chance to get to the top and get better rewards.

Unfortunately introducing a flee limit or penalty to either the current design of Challenge Events or any new form of Challenge Event in which the state of the opening board is a major factor in scoring immediately makes the competition less fair.

It reduces the competition down to how lucky you were with the quality of the boards served to you within your allotted limits. A highly skilled player could get knocked out of contention for a good finish because of a bad streak of being served junk boards for their limited number of plays on a given stage. And likewise a streak of a couple awesome boards on some of the later stages could propel someone over other more skilful players with average boards.

The lack of a flee limit essentially limits the impact opening board RNG has on the rankings by allowing people to keep playing until they can get a decent enough board to work with. It doesn’t totally negate it but reduces it significantly.

Hence why I prefer my option for increasingly more difficult stages with a “how far can you get” scoring system and various tiers of completion rewards. You’re not playing the same stage over and over again AND no artificial limit is imposed that would allow the likes of opening board luck have too much influence on the end result. I would also imagine more players that currently don’t refill to compete currently would be more willing to do so for the next set of completion rewards for that difficulty tier which may counterbalance concerns SG may have from lost revenue from changing the current system.

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The mechanism to reduce the impact RNG has on bad initial boards is already in place, since all the levels are still available once you complete them, so you can go back and improve your score.

Also, RNG factor is everywhere in the game, we are supposed to deal with it and progress in spite of (or thanks to) it, I prefer to take my chances against it if that helps me get al least in the emblem winning level.

The way it is now, it’s just an auction, not a challenge.

Up until you reach the predefined limit you have set. Once the limit is reached you can’t improve it and plainly people can have streaks of bad luck that would prevent them getting a good board on a number of the levels. The lower the limit you set the more pronounced the effect becomes.

Furthermore it has done nothing to make competing any more interesting, you’re still repeating the same levels over and over with no changes just that the number of potential iterations has reduced from infinity to a set number.

It’s not just an auction. You still need the skills to exploit the good boards when you get them and to make the right decision of when or whether to go for it. Spending more is not a guarantee of finishing higher. Furthermore it is possible for people to sit out an event or two and stockpile flasks to run an event on the cheap.

Whilst an element of luck is a factor in most competitions most gamers want their in-game competitions to test their skills against others and you can’t make luck/RNG the determining factor in a competition if it is to be skill based. We can assume there are a lot of players of equivalent levels of skill in this game such that the imposition of any replay limit with a scoring system that is heavily influenced by starting boards would then make RNG the deciding factor in players rankings. Once player rankings are primarily determined by RNG it is not much different than a form of lottery.

I would never advocate pushing the luck-skill balance further towards luck in a competition of this nature so can’t support your proposal. In my view it makes the competition less fair and does little to address the monotony of competing in the current form.

I love the events as they are but I think the rewards should be brought to more peoples. Only 30 peoples get 4 star material and only three get a hero (only two 5 star). We have over one million active players here.

Like you say, the challenge event is not just an auction. Most of the time you see the same 5 ppl win and those are not necessarily the ppl spending the most money.

A limit in trys would just make the top positions as random as in the weekly tournaments.

Still some sort of a limit can bring another challenge. For example we can have two challenges parallel. One has a limit of 5 trys per stage and the other challenge has open end trys.

By the way. Is it sure that Guardian is coming again next @zephyr1 ?

I’m not sure, I’ll ask.

They don’t need to open the top rewards up to more people, they need to make the lower reward tiers more appealing. There should be way more epic tokens and emblems in those lower rank tiers. Basically, finishing top 1500 is a Top 1 or 2% ranking and you get, what? A world energy flask and some farmables? It’s just a chore for very little reward. Get the stuff for completion and move on…

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They will told you, wait and see Alchemy Lab :rofl: