Suggestions for making Invasion more cooperative

Eclipse · February 13, 2021, 10:48am

PB talks a lot about Invasion being a cooperative game mode, but in reality the meta is (and will continue to be) a solo meta where the guild score is 90% the result of a handful of dedicated players, and where those players are actively disadvantaged from helping their guild mates.

The meta right now (and for the foreseeable future) consists of chaining quick fight one shots over and over, as fast as possible, tens of thousands of times over the week. The change to remove the Fire Bonus reminder screen was a huge QoL bonus, but 2 major problems remain.

Only 1 player can attack a bot at a time. This strongly discourages attacking the guild bot because of how much it slows you down. If I take 5s per bot on my own, but tagging slows me down to 30s per bot, then I can only reach a level 10000 bot instead of 60000. The difference is astronomical. We shouldn’t ever be in a situation where we resent our team mates for trying to help.
No guaranteed Fire upgrade for killing guild bot. I can’t see why this is necessary with invasion how it is. Again, this discourages working on the shared team not and incentivises selfishness.

Fortunately, these can be fixed. A bit technical because I want to explain how it could be implemented in the game design:

Allow multiple people to attack the bot at once. Do not track bot HP server side and don’t worry about synchronising bot death. Instead, track bot HP on a per player basis (so each player can deal a max of 100% of the bots starting HP), and on the server side track total damage done to the bot. Once total damage done exceeds bot total HP, flag it as “defeated” and start a grace period (eg 5 minutes) for people to continue to attack the defeated bot for points.
Give a guaranteed Fire upgrade for defeating the guild bot (or maybe any bot at all?)

This would remove 90% of the frustrations with Invasion. No more being unable to attack because of guildies chaining attacks. No more bots being locked out by disconnects. No more deliberately hiding your bot from guild mates. No more insane time pressure to tag before a bot is killed.

Please think about it.

Cozta · February 13, 2021, 11:19am

Agree with all the points raised here would stop all the arguments and make the mode more cooperative.

Carr4 · February 13, 2021, 12:46pm

@Polaris totally agree

Pipsqueak · February 13, 2021, 2:06pm

would this not open up the possibility of people hacking it to just set the bot HP to 0? It would be a faff but seems possible

aside from that yeah, receiving flames for the guild bot would immediately make it more cooperative - flames are needed for all current bot teams to work (not including the bugged one), so as it stands pushing up your own bot is the only way to score big points

Eclipse · February 13, 2021, 5:10pm

I don’t think so - I don’t really want to talk about hacking but I’m sure that if someone wanted to hack now, they could do so in a very similar way. It’s not exactly hard to one shot a bot anyway.

Pipsqueak · February 13, 2021, 6:29pm

Another thing I’d like to see is some sort of UI change to prevent players using macro software to drive their bot up automatically using “one shot” teams.

It’s not fair at all when people can spend hours & hours battling their bots honestly, with the same teams, but have their score absolutely eclipsed by trillions of points by people running computer software.

The top of the rank leaderboards is dominated by players doing this, and the majority of the ranks who remain in Challenger is made up of their guildmates who can tap the Uber bots.

A little change to the UI to prevent it would make invasion much fairer for all players.

(and no, I don’t want to hear any complaints against this. It’s effectively cheating and it’s not as if it’s difficult to hit the progress tiers without it. Battle for rank with effort, not PC programs…)

Eclipse · February 14, 2021, 6:24pm

100% agree with this. I’m not sure if the best way to combat it is to make it more difficult to do (eg changing the UI), making it more risky to do (catching/banning people who do it) or simply making it unnecessary (re design invasion so it’s not a 60 hour grind every week). Personally I would prefer the last option.

The_Real_Numi · February 18, 2021, 6:17pm

Another possible change would be to cap solo bots at 1000 and let guild bots scale infinitely. That would impose a certain kind of limit where you couldn’t go further up without your guildmates helping you.

Eclipse · February 19, 2021, 12:51pm

A bit of a blunt instrument. I suppose they could also cap personal bot at the level of the guild bot, but would prefer if they just made the guild bot more rewarding/less punishing.

Ozi_swag · February 19, 2021, 2:00pm

Yeah because now that robot is crazy

Warden_Fidget · February 22, 2021, 4:19pm

Server 16 has one person who regularly abuses the computer programs to run up crazy high scores. Nobody has the time to do this week after week. It would be nice to have people like that stopped from running these programs.