To Polaris:
First of all this is mainly meant as constructive feedback and help you at PerBlue better understand the players’s perspective. I hope you Polaris and others at PerBlue can find the post of mine helpful.
Unfortunately, to me it is hard to quickly extract the important information between all the padding, making me having to read extra careful to not miss anything. By padding I mean text that doesn’t explain the feature or the improvement.
Like an example, I the first time around when I read I didn’t noticed the part with the Power Craft Upgrade given the fact that there were so much text around and as such making it harder to quickly extract important information.
While technically not that hard to spot I see now, but still the fact that I missed on my first read through shows that the writing format could be improved in order to make it easier to extract important information.
The August 2020 State of the Game post would be the best example of what we players would like from a State of the Game post, a lot of interesting and reassuring information, easy to read and extract information, as well as easy to screenshot for reference later. Examples:
This post also include a section on “What we are working on” and “What they hear we players talking about”.
This format from February 2020 State of the Game post would also be a good alternative if the August State of the Game format time is a bit much to write, lends itself also to easily able to extract important information:
While we do technically have the roadmap now, I still think formatting would be helpful still for a State of the Game post.
I understand if formatting the already posted State of the Game post to the other 2 formatting types is a bit much, but if you could make a simple bullet-point type summary of important information mentioned in the State of the Game post from today it would be really appreciated.
Hope this feedback can be of help Polaris and yeah, thanks for the 3 years and looking forward to see what we get in the game in the future :-).
Invasion: Didn’t change anything for most players. Needs quick fight and fewer bot levels (I don’t want to spend hours going 5 levels at a time). Needs more benefits other than slowly adding easy tier levels.
Epic CW: Yah this is not clear. And in general, the gap between maxing the four skills vs Red skills is like the gap of a hut vs a mansion. Too many hero chips and skill chips.
RS: Sounds like just a slider like we have for White to Purple… zzz
Hero Management: Sounds good, but probably took a lot for a small QoL update. Just please add a search bar.
Resources: Huge and the main problem, because PB is set on riding power creep. We are forced to choose only 5-15 heroes.
Also, badges need to be fixed. We use 20% of them most of the time while we have thousands of the rest of the 80%. It’s secretly trying to force us to need more stamina and it’s really sinister.
Reworking the invasion tier levels has been one of the best changes in the game over the past year, though I thought that happened before the previous State of the Game post. The other changes, while nice, also have drawbacks; in particular, tying Invasion Difficulty Scaling to a player’s team level still leaves a lot of players unable to participate meaningfully, since few people are able to promote a sufficient number of heroes to keep pace with their team level.
To be honest, that’s caused me to lose interest in the campaign story, since it’s now clear that PerBlue views the campaign solely as a mechanism to keep increasing level caps and has no plans to actually conclude the story.
IMHO, the added time commitment for the Yellow Rank is minimal; the added resource commitment is substantial, especially if one wants to enhance more than one or two Battle Badges.
This sounds moderately useful to me, though I won’t be able to promote anyone too many ranks before I have to stop to farm more bits for Love Bug or Wicked Beats or any of a myriad other low-level badges in constant heavy use. Should be a tremendous time saver for the top 1% of players, though.
@Polaris, quick question: Are the Hero Spotlight and the Anniversary Spotlight two terms for the same thing, the trial where we’re teaming up two maxed heroes with Fozzie? If so, it’ll be nice to see that coming back, and it would be even more fun to have it as a permanent part of the game.
Which is nice, as having more tools to sort and organize ~150 heroes could be a time saver. Although I want to ask about this line from the December State of the Game:
Are there still plans to work on improving resource and reward scaling? Because the rewards for many game modes are still languishing at 2018 levels, and costs are continuing to climb faster than resource generation, at least when it comes to hero XP, hero chips, and stamina. Even the newest mode, the Codebase, already has scaling issues with its rewards.
Unfortunately, I find this state of the game very disappointing.
Unfortunately, it only shows again that Pb tries to present itself well.
But if we are honest, this work that was done over a year was done. That is really not much, in other companies something like this would have been implemented within two or three months.
The worst part about it, unfortunately, is that Pb doesn’t care what the players say, no matter how well they explain it. Pb reads it (if at all) and ignores all the good suggestions.
Unfortunately, it shows how little emphasis is placed on players and how little has changed over the three years.
A lot of work would have to be done on the QoL, but I have already said goodbye to this hope.
Who says there wasn’t anything done? U see in invasion, they changed the reward system. So now, it’s simpler for almost everyone who can play invasion.
And please don’t be pessimistic, maybe there are other big surprises in store?
Please read it correctly too. I didn’t say that they didn’t do anything. Regarding the invasion, they only repaired what they had previously broken themselves.
I have watched the game and its progress for 3 years, I think I can give you this conclusion about it.
And if you had read the roadmap, you would know that “big things” are not coming. 🤦
It seems like the Hero Management update only mainly mean “Hero UI Management” and not “Hero Cost Management” unfortunately.
While we do know we are getting some time reduction for the time it takes to level up Red Skills, but what that mean specifically I don’t know.
In terms of the stamina issue Polaris didn’t mention specifically as far as I can see in the State of the Game post, so yeah not a good sign unfortunately.
I would like to talk about the current stamina situation and address how dire the stamina situation is for us players. Given what I notice most players seem to be exhausted by the high stamina requirement in order to rank up characters, which is an unhealthy sign and should be addressed in order to increase player interest and motivation.
I made this chart in order for us to actually show the stamina costs and how dire the stamina situation are for us players. These numbers are specifically based on Sulley so they may vary a bit between other characters, but should be mostly correct even if the numbers might be a few hundreds off it doesn’t overall affect the overall sum that much:
The Monthly Stamina includes stamina regeneration, 3 bonus time stamina, buy more stamina and Weekly Quest stamina, so no extra from Video Crates or Stamina packs.
With the amount of stamina we get we can only keep up with 1-2 characters if we have no extra badge resources, with extra resources we can maybe keep up with 3-4 characters, but how many more characters than 5-6 we can keep up with if we only get stamina for about 1-2 characters?
The question of how many characters we players can give up with a valid and important question, especially as it relates to us players own motivation and interest, which also affect spending.
Lets separate this how it affects the player types: Achievers: Likely need to be able to keep up with at least 15 characters in order to be satisfied, also the potential highest spender type as they like mastery.
Explorers: Depends, but likely need to be able to have been 5-10 characters at least for strategy variation to be satisfied even if wishing for 15. Not necessarily that interested in spending a lot.
Socializers: Hard to say as it depends on the type of Socializer, but like the Explorers they likely need to be able to 5-10 characters at least in order to be satisfied. Spending wise depends on what type of Socializer it is, like if it is chatter type then likely not spending that much, but if it is the community resource supporter then they may spend a lot.
PvP-ers: Similar to the Achiever, but for a different reason as they want mastery over players more so or at least focus player vs player interactions. Spending wise depends I think, but like the Achiever they likely want to keep up with 15 characters at least for competitive reasons.
So in order to actually satisfy the spenders as in the ones who keep the game alive mainly they need to be able to keep up with 15+ characters at least not too difficulty, given that Coliseum and Guild War require 15 characters, and their own want for the feeling of mastery.
Given the fact that PerBlue only give enough stamina for players to keep up with 1-2/3-4 characters, such are likely to exhaust the spenders in an unhealthy way and more likely lead to them boycotting spending rather than actually spending.
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This is why players voted for “Hero Management”, they wanted to be able to keep up with more than 3-5 characters, it was cry of help for “Hero Cost Management” as we players more so thought it meant, not “Hero UI Management”. Here is the link to the old poll:
Unfortunately, the fact that it wasn’t specifically stated whether “Hero Mangament” meant “Hero Cost Management” or “Hero UI Management” has likely lead to confusion between us players and developers interpretation of “Hero Management” meant, and has likely hurt the game in the sense of progression of features.
While yes, the tags and being able to more easily see what characters do what will be helpful, but it isn’t necessary even if it is convenient.
Like in my old Feedback Poll here on how many characters we players can keep up with badge wise from around level 215 era, over half of the people who voted in the [lv.201-215(Max)] poll voted that they could only keep up with about 1-5 characters at once.
The fact that over half of the people voted that they can only keep up up with 1-5 in my view is really telling how dire the situation is. given the fact that the game technically want us to keep up with 15 characters for Coliseum and Guild War, which means that players can only keep up with 1/3 of the intended characters for Coliseum and Guild War.
For player motivation and player interest the Stamina and Badge situation should be looked into as soon as possible, the longer the wait the more likely it is that more people will leave, which may more likely be spenders than F2Pers as the spenders don’t get a high enough sense of mastery to feel like the spending is worth it as the game gives them so little in return for the value they have to spend in order to keep up.
There is a delicate balance between giving players enough to that they are satisfied and happy to spend, and players not feeling they are given enough value back for their work/hours of play and may instead boycott or quit rather than further spending in order to keep up.
Right now I think Disney Heroes is unfortunately too much on the side of the spectrum where the game doesn’t give players enough resources in return to keep up the amount of characters they optimally should be able to which is technically 15 characters given Coliseum and Guild Wars.
Resource balancing is needed for players willing to spend and spend time in Disney Heroes, it isn’t likely to reduce resource by being more generous towards players rather it will likely increase as players are satisfied and as such willing to invest in the product they like.
One has to invest in something in order to expect returns, same goes for a gaming company investing in the players in order to expect returns/revenue.
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I hope this can be an interesting post for both PerBlue and us as players, and be something for us to think about and keep in mind in terms of how resource amount affect player interest and motivation.
TL;DR version:
Perblue doesn’t give us players at Y1 enough raw stamina to keep up with much more than 1-2 characters a month, maybe generally only able to keep up with 3-5 a month with additional free resources.
Without spending, getting 15 maxed badge characters is basically impossible for most players.
Anything to reduce the COSTS of red skills? As far the things mentioned above are sweet but if the farming takes anyways 3 months the slider won’t be that much used as “dreamed”. @Polaris
With Drakken event where skill chips were doubled it felt much more lighter and better, so I would suggest to double skill chip drops from epic CW.
It would be also good to consider updating red skill crate or creating improved version of it where it will drop 100-200 skill chips per drop (instead 50-100).
There are too many good red skills (heroes), little resources and it takes way too much time. And more heroes will be added, and after cap rise the game is asking for another 600 skill chips while the drops only increase by 5, it’s very unfair.
