The current way to get basic ingredients such as silver is rather mundane and let’s face it - lame. It’s not a challenge and it just takes the motivation away as you are just grinding against the clock.
What I propose is that we use the waves approach.
The more waves a player can take on, the more silver / ingredients they get.
Players are guaranteed to walk away with some goods because the first wave will be super easy to beat. And each wave they beat will get increasingly hard.
Obviously this approach will enable players to bypass the annoying ticket/key time limit. Which is a great thing imho.
I do understand, devs will want players to hang around. So to counter this, I recommend removing the tickets and requiring keys per entry. This will work out to be about the same as the current ticketing system without the boring demotivating grind system currently in place.
Honestly, the only change I’d like to see is for the odds of getting each ingredient changing based on what you get. For example if someone seriously needs an aquamid, but doesn’t get one in like 10 tries (true story ), the game can adjust the odds of getting each element to ensure that the distribution is at least relatively even. It doesn’t have to be a drastic effect, just enough that people won’t get majorly screwed over by the RNG, which does happen rather frequently.
I personally feel like the silver, fruit and ingredient missions are nicely balanced for the early-game. You’re constantly choosing where to use your tickets… silver, fruit, ingredients, limited-time event, progressing story or farming hero exp. Between the keys and the tickets you have to make these choices about what you play and the rate of progression in the game is a good slow pace. Later in the game you’ll have practically all your monsters fully evolved so you’re not pressed to play these different things. You can take your time farming an excess of silver and ingredients and focus your tickets on the limited-time content and farming the story for hero exp.
Each of these missions become very easy and mundane later on when your team becomes strong, but that’s like farming in any game and to be honest it doesn’t take a huge amount of time due to the increased battle speed and ticket restriction. So I don’t think it needs to have any challenge given to it. As for the ingredient missions giving the particular one you want that can be a bit irritating but with the rate we get tickets back now (1 every 6 mins, instead of 1 every 10 mins) you can do the missions lots of times quite easily so can get anything you want or build up an excess of ingredients quickly.
Players still choose the mission they want to go on and they have 3 keys of each to use, with the same time restrictions.
And like I said, the first couple of waves will be easy like it is at the moment. So beginner players don’t miss out on anything.
In fact better for beginners in that they don’t have to wait for their tickets to return. They can use all 6 keys at once if they choose.
The change also helps long time players because they won’t have to go repeating the missions until their tickets run out.
So in reality, the change makes no difference to the current mechanics.
For beginners:
Currently: they have limited tickets, so can only attempt once or twice. Get 1 or 2 ingredient
Proposed approach: they not strong enough to get past the first couple of waves. Get 1 or 2 ingredient
For long to,e players:
Currently: they have more tickets, so can attempt several times. Get 4 or 5 ingredient
Proposed approach: they strong enough to get to level 10 or whatever the limit is. Get 4 or 5 ingredient
Sure. For long time players, it’s a bit of a disadvantage in that you cannot use the rank up trick to get more ingredients in that single hour time slot. Or are guaranteed 4 or 5 ingredients for using all your tickets and 1 key. But after you do it for a few times, what fun is that? Wouldn’t be more fun to have a chance to obtain the extra ingredients thanks to one’s strategy and skill vs mindless grind?
Cyptimids don’t appear in the valley anymore I think. If you look at the rotation of ingredients on the landing screen. Cryptomids don’t appear at all.
Also, I’ve been trying for past couple of weeks and god knows how many tickets I’ve thrown at it and got nothing. Now I have a bunch of the other pyramids. At least I won’t have to grind for pyramids for a wee while. That grind is starting to be mind numbingly boring.
Just quickly first… I got a Cryptamid just yesterday from the pyramid mission. They’re still in there!
I don’t think what you said made any sense…
You want to stop the “mindless grind” that older players have to do on the ingredient missions and your proposal is each time we go in we fight many battles in a row with each getting harder, reset back to lvl 1 each time we open it. Basically the only difference there is that if we want to farm something we’ve got to face increasingly tough enemies and it’ll probably take us longer to do the battles. It might be more fun but in reality most of the “10” battles will be quite easy and will be just as much of a grind, simply taking longer.
For newer players the main difference is they no longer need any tickets to enter the ingredient missions. Basically it’s a straight-up benefit for new players. As I said in my last post, things are balanced in the early-game with ticket costs for all the different bits you could want to do. In fact, new players got a HUGE help recently with the ticket replenish rate being reduced from 10 minutes to 6 minutes. I don’t believe they need any more of a boost… as a new player you simply get enough tickets.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of making the fights a little more interesting. Anything we grind is always better if it’s fun to grind. But when we’re talking about missions which brand new players (under 1 month) need to do then level 1-3 will probably be incredibly easy and the slope in difficulty will be gradual (to allow hero rank 50, 75, 100 players to do up to level 5-7 or whatever). The end result would be a large number of very easy missions for old players and then with the difficulty ramping up high for the last few. You’d probably need about 15 levels of difficulty to get it right. That’s A LOT of ingredients to be earned every 12 hours! I don’t think there’s any way to make it work using your initial thoughts on a design.
So I disagree with your idea for the two reasons:
removing the ticket cost upsets the early-game balance, making it too easy/quick to develop
tricky to actually make it enjoyable for old players without making it a huge grind and/or giving way too many ingredients
What I’d propose instead is the following. Unlocking an ingredient mission brings up a map (as it does already) with a selection of levels (1-15) you can choose from. Completing a level gives you one ingredient guaranteed, with a chance at obtaining more (similar to how it currently is). The higher difficulties give you more guaranteed and more as a chance too, but cost more tickets. When you gain more than 1 from the guaranteed (in higher difficulty levels) they are always different types of the ingredient, i.e. in the highest difficulty you will get 1 of each element automatically. The ticket cost goes up drastically with the difficulty levels, so you can be high hero rank but do just one fight to use all your tickets. The amount of ingredients per ticket is carefully balanced so doing the higher difficulty levels gives you, on average, slightly more ingredients for your tickets but ultimately not loads more so it’s more down to whether you can handle the high difficulty and want a fun fight / use all your tickets in one go.
That’s pulling together both of our thoughts, but still keeping the ticket entry cost. You could have fun fights (hopefully) as well as using the tickets fairly quickly if you choose to and it even means you can get a more guaranteed drop rate across the elements once you’re high hero rank (and strong). The thing here is that we would sadly lose the fun “capturing” part of the ingredients missions. Personally I think the missions are fine how they are because they’re balanced for the early-game and when you’re late-game the battles are very quick to do. I have 127 tickets and can burn them in 8 minutes doing the pyramid mission (what I’m currently doing to level up for smallest effort) or more like 15-20 minutes in the other missions. I actually find them quite fun because I can vary which mission I do when I want a fresh battle to face and the capturing element of it is reasonably engaging. I would rather the Devs continue working on limited-time events, designing new monsters, etc. instead of altering the farming. However, the idea I said above might be an interesting way to change it if they want to do it differently or people think it will make the day-to-day playing of the game a lot better.
What I want is a single battle. Each ‘wave’ is made up of 8 monsters and each wave will contain an ingredient monster. Once you defeat the ingredient monster, you get the ingredient.
If the number of waves are limited to say 5. Then at most, one can only get 5 ingredients per key. This will remove the over supply of ingredients.
As to the early game balance. To me, it sounds like jealousy from a long time player. Or at worse, fear that new players will start beating them in PvP so the grind to get those VPs will no longer be a walk in the park for them.
Lol really?? First, you assume that top players are motivated by greed. Second, you assume top players have no skill, Third, you want to speed up the early game(which everyone has to play) to the point where you can spend a couple tickets a day to amass so many ingredients that you will never have issues ultra evolving things. May as well remove the effort it takes to ultra evolve a legendary.
The early game balance is there to prevent people from just skipping to the endgame. In your opinion, we may as well just get rid of it then right?
Mate. If you had a bad day, go walk it off. Don’t start attacking someone on a forum with false accusations. Where in this thread have I said anything about top players? And where have I said they have no skill?
Hm. What is this skipping to endgame? In fact, what is the endgame?
Dude, I read your other thread about bad players complain… great players adapt… dude… go read up on what complaining really means. And from your own statement, doesn’t sound like you are a great player…
Anyways, happy for you to reply to my “complaining” threads. But let’s drop the negative pretences.
The current way to get basic ingredients such as silver is rather mundane and let’s face it - lame. It’s not a challenge and it just takes the motivation away as you are just grinding against the clock.
What I propose is that we use the waves approach.
The more waves a player can take on, the more silver / ingredients they get.
Players are guaranteed to walk away with some goods because the first wave will be super easy to beat. And each wave they beat will get increasingly hard.
Obviously this approach will enable players to bypass the annoying ticket/key time limit. Which is a great thing imho.
I do understand, devs will want players to hang around. So to counter this, I recommend removing the tickets and requiring keys per entry. This will work out to be about the same as the current ticketing system without the boring demotivating grind system currently in place.
See I’m fine with this in the earlier levels, where you have limited tickets and leveling stuff up is very awkward and time consuming. There I can see the logic of it. My question is whether it’s necessary past those levels. In addition, the current system delays you long enough to get to grips with the mechanics of the game, speeding it up might require some adjustments to the difficulty curve to account for the altered learning curve.
Like I know I’m kinda playing devil’s advocate here, but if you actually want this to happen then it’s a lot of programming, almost an event from scratch in itself since there’s no existing event that’s similar to piggyback off. There has to be more of a reason why the game NEEDS it rather than just “it’s slightly easier for early players”.
This change isn’t for earlier levels. It’s for players with a high hero rank. At the moment I don’t need any of the basic ingredients. But when I do. Such as needing some silver. I have to reload the mission 5 or 6 times in a row and you already know the outcome. Single shot all the monsters.
It’s a mind numbing exercise. Games are supposed to be fun, entertaining, and make you feel excited. Not make you feel like you’re doing a chore.
I am unsure where everyone is getting the idea that this change will help earlier levels significantly progress faster. Sure the the change means they can use the tickets for other things. But realistically, how many more things can they do with that extra 20 tickets? Attempt a couple more missions? And what’s bad about earlier levels rising up faster? Why are people even concerned about other players not learning the game’s monsters, etc. It’s their choice, their life, whether they level faster, get to really understand the game or not makes zero difference to you or any other player.
Any changes will require additional programming. A better way to think of the required programming is, your building a new foundation in which you can create new events based off.
Update: Finally figured out why the long time players don’t want the change. Once someone has finished all the stories and there’s no events on. They can use the ingredient missions to get XP to level up.
Having realised this. It’s not a bad way to rank up. Boring, but effective like the sleep lock strategy.
I think this statement shows you really aren’t understanding the bigger picture here. Also, what you said to Zardecil and me was incredibly rude in my opinion. I am no longer going to give any input on this thread. The last big post I wrote was a waste of my time if you’re going to say make it 5 waves (which will be WAY too easy) and that it sounds like I’m a jealous old timer. Listen to what others are saying and understand that you are in your own individual position being hero rank ~90 and playing for roughly 2 months. You have also made numerous posts asking for things to be sped along like labyrinth of the 4 guardians to be made once a week rather than once a month and now asking for ticket cost to be removed from ingredients farming. Clearly this is one such opinion and it differs greatly from the way they game is currently designed.
I think it would be great to have actually harder levels for silver and youth fruit. I would even be willing to do a 20 ticket level 2 and 30 ticket level 3 for more challenge unlocked by higher hero rank. Currently I just spam AOEs on the silver mine 4 times and that’s it. It would be cool to face a little more challenge. But I get that it would be a programming change and probs more effort than it’s worth for the devs.
I stand by my comments. Nothing rude in my comments. I guess you’re more sensitive than most. Take a moment, step back and reflect on your posts. Or ask a friend for a third person’s view and hear what their views are on the posts in this thread.
You keep mentioning a bigger picture, etc. But cannot describe or explain what the bigger picture is beyond, this is what everyone had to go through and the time delays are their to force new players to learn the game.
Every game has its own unique way of playing and it’s own learning curve. Most people finish this learning in a matter of minutes or hours. Everyone has a different learning speed. If someone does not master the fundamentals of a game they would never get far and certainly not reach a point where they’re stuck because there’re time limits.
Another “big picture” point I want to make is: not everyone wants to be a neo monsters guru or master of every trick, monster, skill there is. A lot are playing the game for what it was designed for: relaxing and having fun - enjoyment.
Re-read my previous paragraph above. I have no desire to be the “best” or be great at the game. I just want to have fun and complete the game to the best of my abilities. I feel sorry you guys had to go through those months or years grinding and waiting. Obviously you guys feel bitter about it. Hence are voicing your disagreements to new players requesting the speeding up of certain events.
Now, let me address the other parts of your post.
Earlier you mentioned that it was designed to be easy for farming. Now you are saying my waves approach is far too easy. Then you start to judge me by the amount of time I have played the game. If that isn’t jealousy from an old timer, I don’t know what is.
I maybe alone in this request, but I am happy to voice my opinion. If you like it support it. If you dislike it suggest something else or ignore my posts. But don’t slam the door on others.
Games like this one ultimately revolve around the “end-game” as the way to earn money. They produce interesting content to keep people playing and having fun while offering new items (monsters) for money as well as other routes for more regular sources of income (the eggs between). So that may be the core focus from a business perspective but you need to get new players hooked if they’re ever going to make it to the end-game and hopefully be a consistent spender. How you do this is with the early-game content. The longer this is, the more effective it is (in general). If you can give someone goals to reach and a consistent, slow progression then they’ll (hopefully) enjoy themselves for this time so that once they reach the end-game where everything slows down and it becomes a case of maintain stuff, saving up gems, etc. then they’re either so invested in the game or enjoying the various parts of it so much that they choose to stay despite the limitations of end-game content. Slowing the early-game with “play X mission once per day” is irritating and can put many players off but it’s a very effective way of drawing out the early-game to give the best possible result of players sticking around later. Furthermore, I think Neo Monsters actually has a lovely balance between the limited-time content, online story, PvP and main story to keep newer players engaged with things to do if they want to sit down and play. The end-game has a fairly decent amount of time-consuming things to do most of the time (varies a lot depending on the events) and you find the removed irritation of farming ingredients, youth fruit, etc. as the fights become very quick and you only need to do them for any new monsters you get.
So your ideas here have credit except you seem to completely disregard the point of keeping the early-game spread out over a longer period of time. When anyone has brought it up you jump to accuse us of being “bitter”, “jealous” or whatever other words/phrases come to your mind rather than actually considering that our points may have some credit. In my last post I started making points about your limited time playing this game compared to others and how your viewpoints on other topics have been similar. This was not to judge you, it was to try and make you realise that you don’t necessarily know how everyone else views these topics and you may even change your perspective later. I tried discussion my viewpoints with you first but you threw them aside and insulted me so I tried to point out that you don’t know it all but clearly you didn’t get the message there either.
You’re too volatile for my taste. Remember just a week ago when I was supporting you about making some of the game mechanics better explained and even messaged you saying others were being too harsh telling you to simply “git gud and learn”? I haven’t ever come looking for an exchange of mild insults and that is why I wanted to drop out. If you want productive conversation then you’ve got to be ready to listen to others and adapt your ideas. That’s why I disagreed with the way people responded to your thread a week ago but today I’m disagreeing with your reaction to my comments on your ideas.
P.S. I wanted to make a slight correction to one of the previous things I said. I was saying that you’d need something like 15 levels of difficulty but this was me confusing myself. You would probably need only 5-10 (a bit more than SCB has). It’s just if you have them done as “waves” (healing between?) where you’d need lots of waves because of the number of ingredients you’d need to give away to the range of weaker players. If they were repeatable difficulty levels (as my idea suggested) then they’d need ticket cost entry and there wouldn’t need to be so many levels because no one would be forced to do the higher difficulties.
P.P.S. I quoted the bit you said about learning speed because I wasn’t quite sure what you were getting at. Like something to do with a player not needing to be held back in their playtime with ticket costs because of their rate of learning, they should be free to play and learn at their own speed? Either way, when you say “minutes or hours” it immediately made me think about how I don’t think any experienced player would disagree with me saying it takes a good couple of months to learn how to play this game. Even then, it’s mostly through getting the various legendaries yourself and using them in a mixture of strategies that you can actually learn how it all fits together. Each legendary you earn adds a new dimension to the game and that’s what makes it fun for people… you get evermore strategies and combinations building up over time. In many ways that’s what the end-game here is and we continue learning more with every new monster we get.
Accusing top players of being motivated by greed, and wanting easy wins.
Endgame is defined as when you have multiple legendaries, and coming up with teams that could be high-level pvp viable is more possible. Accelerating people to this endgame, where you have multiple ultra evolved legendaries is a terrible idea, ultra evolving legends/other monsters increases the power of your team, therefore making harder events possible earlier. Being able to complete these events means you get more gems, therefore accelerating the early game and leading to more legends faster. The early game is meant to teach you all of the strategy in the game, and if you don’t learn it because the early game came to fast, then people will get stuck at a wall where in order to progress, you need to know more about the game. But they didn’t have that opportunity, because the opportunity passed before they had time to learn. Then they will quit, claiming the game is P2W.
If you have a monster you want to ultra evolve, then the ingredient collecting will be fun. Not a grind.
Okay, let’s look up the definition of complain:
Complain: to express dissatisfaction or annoyance about a state of affairs or an event.
Looks to me like you are expressing dissatisfaction with the current state of ingredient farming, and then when you are told it is fine, what do you say? “Zard has no skill, you sound like you are a bad player”. You are talking to top 50 F2P player here that has been playing since the start of the game, I know exactly what I am talking about, and I am telling you that the early game is the way it is for a reason, speeding it up is a bad idea, and you have yet to give any reason otherwise, other than saying that it would be more fun for you. However, the learning curve doesn’t go with your suggestion.
Not everyone wants to be a top player, I get it, I also know that there is a difference between learning the game, and exploiting every single thing you can in it. Top players learn everything they can, and use it to win. not everyone wants to do that, but when you are playing against super challenge battle level stuff, before you have learned to think ahead at all, then there are issues.
Bitter? Lol, the game is the way it is for a reason, if there were issues with the early game, then we would have voiced them long ago and the devs would have found ways to make it better. You are one of the first people to complain about the early game in a long time, say, 7-8 months.
You are fine to voice your opinion, but watch what you say, you called me a low-skill, greedy, win hungry pvp player that doesn’t want people to progress. This is very rude, and you called killerdog it too, along with all the other top players out there.
Thanks for the long explaination Killerdog. That confirms exactly what I’ve been trying to say indirectly. The delay isn’t about teaching people the mechanics of the game. Or to make them a better player as such. It’s as you said, to get people invested in the game. Why? Cos time is our most precious resource.
I should also be a bit more clear on the wave approach. It’s a single battle. No healing. No exiting the battle screen. It will be like one of those horde levels with 40 monsters (if 5 waves is what they went with). All attacking one after the other. Therefore, for new players with weaker teams. If they are good, they can get more than one resource per battle. Otherwise they just get the easy first wave. The key will only allow one battle. Hence why I was saying it’ll make negligible difference even without the ticket requirement.
Zard. I’m already in the so-called endgame. Your points are so off. Skill was never mentioned nor was it inferred. Not every long time player is a top player. Heck, take me for example. I’ve been playing Hearthstone for years. Am I a top Hearthstone player? Hell no. Not by a long margin. And as I mentioned I could careless about your ranking or the ranking of anyone. Let’s be honest. Once someone has ultra evolved their monsters, they’re much harder to beat. This was all I was referring to. I had no interest in your greed.
I’m sure there were tons of others who disliked the early game. Though, most probably quit before they said anything. Have a read of Killerdog’s post. He explains the reasons why pretty clearly.
As to complain… you need to ask someone what complain really means. You may also want to ask them the definition for feedback.
Finally, I wanna say. This thread has gone off track. From being a thread about changing the way the ingredients section works to long time players talking about skill, etc. please use Zard’s complaining thread for that.
Now you’re tripping over yourself. Defending your point that you still think I am a low skill player, and even if you didn’t care about greed, you still insulted every top player out there. Even if you don’t care that you did, you still did, that is what matters, and why people aren’t happy with you.
Okay, I will ask you, if complain doesn’t mean the dictionary-defined version of complain, what does it mean then. Feedback: Motivational statement of something that needs to change, Complaint, demotivation statement that something is wrong. Sure, you could be giving feedback, however, as soon as I give you feedback on what you are saying, you start personally attacking me on the subject of skill, you brought it up. not me.
If this isn’t a direct insult to my standing as a player, then I don’t know what is. You directly stated right afterward that you don’t care about my standing, and this means you still hold your standing that you think I am a terrible player, and you don’t seem to want to actually listen to what I have to say from a purely analytical point of view.
As a counter example, take a look at other games. First, they let you progress fast, leading you to having a sense of accomplishment, then they slow down, and give you the option to pay in order to speed it up. How many play those games? Far more than the number that play neo. They have a far worse early game then neo’s, so I doubt that that is even a factor in quitting rates. The real thing making people quit is duplicates/ running out of legit options for teams.
), the game can adjust the odds of getting each element to ensure that the distribution is at least relatively even. It doesn’t have to be a drastic effect, just enough that people won’t get majorly screwed over by the RNG, which does happen rather frequently.