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Nighthawk Cooldown
areee
Posts: 850 Arc User
Right now the cooldown triggers when you turn in the quest. I tend to pick up the quest for all the characters doinig it all at once. This different cooldown style compared to other events can lead to RL interruptions causing all sorts of grief with waiting to pick up the quest the next day.
Could you make it on pickup like it is on other events?
Could you make it on pickup like it is on other events?
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This is my cry for help
It's supposed to force daily/consistent log-in and play to make for better-looking player statistics, so that the only way out is to burn Drifter Salvage, which goes back to lockboxes (whether you opened them or someone else opened them) and thus real-world money. No backlogging dailies in case you can't play a day or your schedule's totally broken for whatever reason, no grace period, no grabbing dailies at the start of your day and completing them at a casual pace throughout the day, etcetera. You log in as soon as possible and don't do anything else unless you want to lose days to your cooldown period rotating forward, and if power goes out around the block for twelve hours? Your router stops working because your ISP pushed an update it was incompatible with so you had to get it replaced, eating up a day and a half of time where you just couldn't log in? Well, uh, that's your fault buddy, you should learn to predict the cosmic rays better.
Sadly, we've been hit with a "this is how it is now, deal with it" that... doesn't seem to take into account people refusing to attend daily out of spite even if it means they lose out on completionism. But oh well. What're we gonna do about it, you know?
This is my cry for help
I have over 100 characters personally. If it's something in the per character item list. All I gotta do it log into each character one by one. I get around 150 per character. 150 x 100 = 15000.
i just complain because after all these years I use events to level characters since GRAB grind is so damned boring.
Personally, I'm a massive fan of this change overall. Being able to pick and choose who I want to do these with has been great for leveling alts, and has let me pick up a decent chunk of my wanted cosmetics as someone new to doing this event, while also making me feel like I have plenty left to strive for, with the bags and mods providing some extra if I do run out of costumes and other things I feel I need to grab.
Except that being done with the entire event "on day 2" was just as impossible with the old on-pickup system as the new on-turn-in system... in fact, it was more impossible then, because back then event currencies weren't account-wide. Back then, wrapper missions tracked your progress per-character and so effectively followed the same route no matter what: do all dailies on the minimum number of required characters for your completion quota, or the easiest/fastest dailies on the maximum number of required characters plus one doing full dailies to check off all available wrappers, since you only needed to complete costume wrappers on one character. An example would be: if your dailies net you exactly 40+80 tokens a day and you need 8 purple costumes and had two weeks to do it, you could choose to 40+80 on 2 characters for 10 days to get the 2400 tokens necessary for all 8, or you could do the 40 alone on 6 characters for 10 days to get the 2400 necessary. And keep in mind, the old wrapper system being per-character meant that you couldn't abuse it for instant completion like you hypothetically could if the new wrapper system was CD-on-pickup/one-token-for-each-daily-no-matter-what and merged with the old CD-on-pickup dailies. Back then? The only way you could blitz the wrapper unlock was by just burning Drifter Salvage (and thus, either your real-world $$$ or someone else's real-world $$$) on it.
Now, though? It's the exact same, except account-wide event currency means that each individual character doesn't have to reach a minimum threshold of 300, 400 (now 500, have fun getting all 50-or-something different gold Anniversary unlocks) or (IIRC for certain things like TPs and anniv hideouts but it's been a while since I had to care about those so I'm not at all sure) 750 to actually get something, allowing you to blitz dailies for one day on as many characters as needed for non-wrapper unlocks and not have to slog through lots of random mob-drop event token grinding just to try and reach one of those lower thresholds on each taking several times longer than just doing a set of dailies on another character. Let's use that made-up number though: exactly 50x500=25000 tokens, and you have 4 weeks to complete. Let's focus on the easiest of all the dailies: if I recall correctly, the easiest daily (ignoring the save-the-cats which drags its heels due to travel-time) is the Destroid mooks that come in at week 2, having a daily that provides, what is it, 35 tokens a piece? To pass 25000 tokens, you'd need to do that 715 times. Or let's say... a week of 102 characters a day, consistently, with an extra character at the end to break even. Let's say it only takes you 3 minutes per, because Champions Online loves its loading screens and its Anniversary lag; you now wind up with 2145 minutes of play-time across the week, or ~35.75 hours of playtime split across 7 days. (~5.11 hours/day.) That's, uh, normally pretty fine! But here's the thing: because you're doing that many dailies, any snag whatsoever, whether it's a ten-minute bathroom break or your ISP dropping for half an hour, is going to ripple out to your daily completion times, and now it's your turn-in that matters rather than your pickup, which means you will be forcibly rotated forward if you don't do that mandatory 5 hours of nothing but punching and shooting Destroids endlessly at the very start of your day so that schedule interferences from real life (which exists despite what whoever it was whose genius idea it was to change event mission CD timers seems to think) won't throw you off. This is understandably unpleasant, but also raises a point: not everyone has that many characters to burn themselves out on grinding full event completionism with.
So, mandatory para break because that was getting messily long, but, what happens when you don't have 103 characters to do all that in a week? Well, you're likely going to resort to other, longer dailies; maybe 5 minutes per cat daily unless you have a vehicle that cuts down on travel time for each character (since you'd lose that time swapping one single vehicle via your account bank anyways) and, oh, let's say ten minutes per Qularr Invasion Sim if you're awake during the day for US players, but 30 minutes per if you're only able to get on late at night (personal experience, NOBODY queues in the dead of night.) This is assuming you don't have to re-queue, as maybe not ALL your characters are beefy enough to solo Black Talon and sometimes you'll get a dud team of level 20 Behemoths and Radiants who don't know how to block, use heals or anything and die instantly the moment laser drones come out. Ah, and then you're probably also gunning for DRA at the very least, which'll usually take 15 minutes counting gathering time each but gets choked up when too many people are online during the day forcing you to get into every OTHER run rather than each and every one, and inversely can't get enough people to run more than once every half an hour to an hour (or even more) late at night. And maybe, just for good measure, you're doing DRF too since that one has anniversary tokens tied to it too, and that's more manageable late at night because it only takes 5 people but you can actually ask in in-game chat and get people for it a bit more readily than Qularr Sim for some reason or another I have no idea- and then... well, uh, then, you're playing the Anniversary as intended! Which is fine if you're doing it on just one character, as things won't take so long that you're forced to roll forward due to spending more than four hours attempting dailies. But good luck doing that on, let's say, 10 characters, whether at prime-time or during the dead of night. Even optimally, it's going to take you a lot longer for the same amount of tokens because the missions that require other players will drag their heels due to gathering time or queue time requirements, failed attempts and more. And...
... there, right there, is the problem with how the cooldown timers work now. Tell me, how do you have optimally six hours of dailies get stretched to over 12 hours due to queue times, gathering times, failed run attempts and more and not be forced to start much, much later the next day, when your cooldown timer now cares about turn-in rather than completion, meaning that last batch of dailies at the bare minimum has to be picked up in the first place 8 hours later? Is it just a matter of doing characters in the same exact order as before and picking up and turning in one set at a time? Well, kind-of, but, if it drags even longer than it already did one time in particular, you're stuck with that sort of timing until you give up an entire day. Ooof course, this isn't an issue if you're only showing up for one or two costume pieces, but that's the problem.
- 1.This breaks roughly even for QoL if you either do not care about any unlocks but the one or two you want.
- 2.This is a QoL decrease for anyone who can't afford to play reliably every day due to it now being much easier to miss days because of no more daily backlogging (which wasn't broken in the first place because you were still playing the exact same amount of content for the exact same rewards, you were just moving a block of grind-time from one day into another and doubling down on that second day, and unlike the current system did not stall your wrapper-mission (now wrapper-token) progression because oops your power went out for a day due to a power line blowing.)
- 3.This is a QoL Julius Caesar's Forbidden Acupuncture to anyone who wants most of the unlocks or all of the unlocks, doesn't already have them (anyone who's a new-ish player or an infrequent player (both of whom won't have fifty characters to grind only easy dailies with as a result) and who can't afford to swipe their credit card like a rabid beast to catch up. Random costume drops from OMs can only go so far in catching up there, and anyone who can afford to catch up that way is either A. swiping like crazy, or B. the kind of rich you only get as a non-swiping player by being good at the game and playing a decent amount, which by then, well, they'll already have all those unlocks except whatever new stuff was added during any given week in the first place, and for that, well... doesn't that just go back to the "intended" route of doing all the dailies, or at least all the dailies with wrapper missions, on one single character or maybe two since that's all you need to keep up? And that.
That right there. My complaints are rooted primarily from the perspective of "how do we not chase new players away from the game by making it even more inaccessible for them in the name of forcing what few players we still have to log on slightly more often?" Unsurprisingly, making it much harder for them to catch up without obliterating their wallets for content that isn't worth a wallet obliteration does not do much to invite any potential new players to stay. Because, I'm going to be blunt, this complaining isn't for my sake. I have everything event-wise on my main account already. I have almost everything event-wise on an alt account as well, and a decent portion from various events on a few others from years back that I don't really use for anything any more except remembering "huh okay I actually wasted way too much time emote-spamming myself in 2017 lol." I have a relatively stable ISP, the power grid where I live doesn't go out often as much as the wires and transformers do love to give off their ominous pops from time to time and when something goes wrong it's generally quickly fixed, meaning I'm not often afflicted with forced missed days. I'm not some multi-Global-millionaire lockbox mogul but I can build up in-game money quickly enough in a pinch that if for some reason I miss something important I can usually throw Gs at the problem to fix it the way new players and old-but-inexperienced players wouldn't really be able to do. My sleep schedule is made of well-burnt potato peels which means that in many cases for something like the wrapper missions (now wrapper tokens) I can easily afford to go awake 20+ hours straight to get that mandatory Premium Token so I at least don't fall behind in attendance, and now that all event currencies are account-wide I can always make up for lost time by using an extra character I wasn't planning on using for a single day. I'm not adversely affected by this system outside of minor annoyances. But.
How do you go about making this approachable for new players who don't have a lot of experience and who don't have a lot of characters to cheese the daylights out of account-wide event tokens?
How do you go about making this approachable for old, returning players who might have a little more at their disposal but are woefully out of shape as far as gameplay skills go and who will lag behind almost as badly as a result?
How do you go about making this approachable for players with inconsistent schedules who might have an entire day free one day but have 30 minutes of game"time" (if we even acknowledge something so small as a measurement of time) the next?
How do you go about making this approachable for players who live in environments where their perfectly valid play-time is taken away by circumstances out of their control on the regular; see ISP-down and power-outage examples above plus things like particularly nasty storms, living in places with such remote and sluggish internet that too much exciting weather makes the game just a bit too laggy for them to do things requiring snap reaction times to not get instagibbed?
How do you go about making this approachable for players who have strict schedules on when they can't sit down and play, who used to be able to grab all the dailies in 5 minutes at the start of their day, go to work or go to school or anything else like that, then do those dailies once they get back home and actually have time to play, but might now as a result be forced to miss some of their grind-time that would have gone to events due to, oops, here's an emergency call back in to work because somebody borked the server again, or, pause the online game and come downstairs and socialize with us honey you're too addicted to that screen, so on and so forth?
If the answer to any of those is "bruh why are you complaining just swipe your credit card if you actually care about this game and aren't some pathetic freeloader" or "dude just shut up and buy somebody's Drifter Salvage if you actually want to catch up instead of just whining" (both of these I've heard while, yes, complaining (heugh) about this awful game decision in-game) then that's... kind-of the problem: this design change and mindset milks a liiittle bit more money out of old players but might as well be chasing away new players with a twelve-gauge and a mouthful of colorful profanities. And, honestly, I'd like to see this game grow more of a playerbase so it has more of a chance of living longer than it would otherwise, but this is the kind of short-sighted "but moooooom, I want my 5% extra paycheck from these unthinking unfeeling sentient bags of money NOW!" change that goes directly against that, and that's what worries me.
... God, I just don't want to see this game go under because the folks upstairs got so hungry for money right now that when the right now money dries up the future money already got the "please do not play our game, we don't respect you at all" memo. but oh well. Like I said in my prior post, what are we gonna do about it, really?
This is my cry for help
So much yes.
I know we like to joke about the devs and the spaghetti code, but I'd like to think they're not incompetent to the point that they can't create a check that would prevent this from happening.
Admittedly, from my rough pseudocode (and an assumption of how the game handles cooldowns), it definitely is simpler to just not to. On the upside, the type of check I've thought up would open up a framework for a way to stockpile daily missions. Downside, there's way too many loose variables that needs to be cleaned up.