Endless 'Crucible' Type Mode - Rough Concept

[Pipsqueak]

Just pulling this out of a general game improvement thread as it will get buried & I quite like the idea. Other ideas around this theme could also be discussed here for @Polaris to peruse and maybe pass on to the design team!

This would be an endless wave mode based around something like a COD Zombies or Darksiders Crucible.

Everyone would get maxed heroes to use - like the ones in Hero Spotlight. We can pick a few starting mods to distribute among them.
Each week we get a random choice of 10, from which we can select 2 at a time.

There’s only 1 battle, with endless waves - this reduces the faff of clicking around that we have in Breaker quests. The battle can be paused at any time and resumed on the same wave.

• I admit to not knowing the technicalities of this or whether it’s feasible - indidivual battles/waves would be much more tedious to play, but possibly easier to develop.

The waves are composed entirely of creeps (not heroes) of increasing number & strength.

The goal is to reach as high a wave as we can over the course of the week without our heroes dying. Once we’re all dead, the game is up. At wave intervals we can receive upgrades that we can apply to our heroes such as bonus healing, extra damage, more mods, other stats boosts etc or (very rare) revives - these can either last for a limited number of waves or be permanent for the week.

We also receive permanent rewards every X waves to be used in general play.

At the end of the week, we get rewards scaled based on how far we’ve got. The mode should be designed in such a way that no strategy exists that could beat an infinite number of waves, and general play rewards should be scaled to the player’s Team Level.

Manual skill activation is possible (ie. not like Arena/Coli).

This would be fun and also of financial benefit, as people would get to use heroes they’ve not tried before and see their potential - and might then spend resources to use them in general play too. There could also be a subscription-type deal like the Daily Diamonds for this mode, that delivers a perma-boost to the upgrades received during the mode and can be purchased weekly. It should not be possible to purchase deals that boost the general play rewards directly - only the mode consumables, which indirectly enable more general play rewards to be received.

[Champion_David]

@Pipsqueak

And might then spend resources to use them in general play too. There could also be a subscription-type deal like the Daily Diamonds for this mode, that delivers a perma-boost to the upgrades received during the mode and can be purchased weekly.

And…this is where I disagree. Adding something like this gives P2P an advantage in a game mode designed to level the playing field. Unless there is no competition within, which seems unlikely.

[Jody_Caviness]

@Champion_David

Adding something like this gives P2P an advantage in a game mode designed to level the playing field. Unless there is no competition within, which seems unlikely.

The impression I get is that the proposed mode would be a solo-play mode, like City Watch, rather than a competitive mode, like Arena or even Invasion. P2W players would still be able to gain something of an advantage for PvP modes through their purchases, due to advancing farther and getting better rewards, but it’s not like PerBlue could expect them to spend money on deals that don’t give them any lasting benefit.

This seems like it could be a fun addition to the game, as well as a way for PerBlue to make a little more money. I would hope they could make it so that a Brute or a Skeleton couldn’t block your progress in the mode because you ran out of heroes that could deal Fantastic or Normal damage but the overall premise looks solid.

[Pipsqueak]

It wouldn’t be expensive or make a significant difference. Something like (for example) $5 for the week gets you +30% effectiveness of upgrade items and a bonus mod, or a premium $10 gets you +50%.

There’d be no competition between players other than ‘what wave did you reach’ - the hero choice would be totally RNG so that makes any competition redundant. There could be a Hall Of Fame for those who care. Some weeks you might get a sour batch that you can’t do much with, other weeks you could get lucky with some really well suited heroes - and then you might choose to get the booster deal to really go for some more rewards (or equally, you might get it on the bad week to help balance the odds). There’d be quite a bit of strategy in which 2 to pick at a time, where & when to distribute upgrades and mods, trying to balance getting through tough waves while keeping your best heroes alive. I don’t think such a booster type deal would make it a P2P mode at all, just increase the potential to enjoy it for more of the week and be able to pick up a few extra rewards at the end.

(and increase the viability of developing such a mode for PB )

The idea of only being able to purchase boosts to things that you already get means that you still have to put in the effort and can’t just buy your way through it. The general play rewards scaling would also be pretty tight, ie. they would increase very gradually, so you’d have to do a lot of waves to get a significant increase over someone who did little.

@Jody_Caviness

a Brute or a Skeleton couldn’t block your progress

There could be a few interesting ways around this, something in the hero RNG could reroll if you don’t have both damage types. Maybe an upgrade consumable could swap all damage done by the assigned hero to the other type for X waves. With those and maybe a couple of other things, if someone got stuck in such a situation it would ultimately be their fault for poor strategy and having let all their sources of that damage type die

Maybe like in those arcade racer-chaser games, there could be an “insert coin to continue” for similar cases that’s only available once and grants a wave skip for a (fairly high) Diamond amount.

[Champion_David]

Oh, it sounded like it was competetive to me. Never mind then.