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Breaking up the Onslaught Blob
pantagruel01
Posts: 7,091 Arc User
By now, Onslaught has evolved into a reasonably consistent pattern: there is a gigantic scrum going on somewhere (usually Westside #1), and nothing at all elsewhere. You mostly don't have things like five heroes facing off against one villain (it sometimes happens, but mostly not). This isn't really the most compelling of game play, so why do people do it, and can or should we change things to work otherwise?
We'll start with the simple one: hero tokens. If five heroes take on one villain, they each get 50 hero tokens. This probably takes ~10m, depending on the firepower of the heroes and the villain's interest in kiting. If, instead, ten heroes take on two villains, it probably takes ~9m (because they'll damage each other), and every hero gets 100 hero tokens. In general, the bigger the ball of heroes and villains around, the faster the token gain. Thus, if you want tokens, you go to where it's hopping. Also, well, OVs aren't all that easy to find, the sky pillars aren't visible from all that far away.
Now, because villains don't share tokens, the situation is a bit different, but even so, villain mechanics also support the giant scrum, for two reasons. First of all, you go where the targets are. Secondly, because heroes heal, two villains actually defeat players more than twice as fast. If a hero can heal against half your damage output and it takes you thirty seconds to down him, two villains will drop the same hero in ten seconds, so even sharing you're better off together. That assumes that you can defeat a hero solo; sometimes, help is the only thing that makes defeating a hero possible.
So, if we want to break up the blobs, two things are needed: locating fights needs to be easier, and the rewards have to be structured so that the smaller fights are sensible.
For locating fights, I suggest showing Onslaught villains on the map (the same way enemy players show up on the map if you've got an appropriate minimap radius). Reward structure is a harder problem, because of a couple of competing issues: you want to encourage people to try, but you still want to make the content appealing to people with less optimized or lower level characters, and you also want to avoid people getting upset about leeching.
For hero players, the easiest way to make it so rewards don't encourage ganging up is to have villain rewards be flat: instead of 50 tokens per foe, X (say, 300) total tokens split between your foes. Unfortunately, if you split the rewards evenly you will get complaints about leeching (My reward was dropped from 60 to 50 because that guy over there fired his energy builder a couple of times), and if you do it on a performance basis (1 per 10,000 damage, for example) support and people with less potent toons are discouraged from participation. You can mitigate that somewhat by having it be performance-based by team and then split evenly within the team, but that's an imperfect solution at best. You can do something time-based but that doesn't specifically encourage splitting up and means there's not much incentive to do a good job.
A secondary problem this reveals is that hero tokens are, frankly, not particularly valued, because the only thing you can do with them is use them to play a villain. At a minimum, I would suggest adding an xp and resource award to hero points. Depending on how that was adjusted for level, it could easily give low levels a good solid reason to fight villains.
For villain tokens, leeching already isn't much of an issue since your kills are personalized. Either reducing the tokens per defeat based on the number of other villains around, or applying debuffs to villains who stack up, might help. Also, a modest number of villains is fine and interesting, it's just when you have seven and eight villains that it's not much fun on the hero side.
I don't claim to have any final solution, just some thoughts.
We'll start with the simple one: hero tokens. If five heroes take on one villain, they each get 50 hero tokens. This probably takes ~10m, depending on the firepower of the heroes and the villain's interest in kiting. If, instead, ten heroes take on two villains, it probably takes ~9m (because they'll damage each other), and every hero gets 100 hero tokens. In general, the bigger the ball of heroes and villains around, the faster the token gain. Thus, if you want tokens, you go to where it's hopping. Also, well, OVs aren't all that easy to find, the sky pillars aren't visible from all that far away.
Now, because villains don't share tokens, the situation is a bit different, but even so, villain mechanics also support the giant scrum, for two reasons. First of all, you go where the targets are. Secondly, because heroes heal, two villains actually defeat players more than twice as fast. If a hero can heal against half your damage output and it takes you thirty seconds to down him, two villains will drop the same hero in ten seconds, so even sharing you're better off together. That assumes that you can defeat a hero solo; sometimes, help is the only thing that makes defeating a hero possible.
So, if we want to break up the blobs, two things are needed: locating fights needs to be easier, and the rewards have to be structured so that the smaller fights are sensible.
For locating fights, I suggest showing Onslaught villains on the map (the same way enemy players show up on the map if you've got an appropriate minimap radius). Reward structure is a harder problem, because of a couple of competing issues: you want to encourage people to try, but you still want to make the content appealing to people with less optimized or lower level characters, and you also want to avoid people getting upset about leeching.
For hero players, the easiest way to make it so rewards don't encourage ganging up is to have villain rewards be flat: instead of 50 tokens per foe, X (say, 300) total tokens split between your foes. Unfortunately, if you split the rewards evenly you will get complaints about leeching (My reward was dropped from 60 to 50 because that guy over there fired his energy builder a couple of times), and if you do it on a performance basis (1 per 10,000 damage, for example) support and people with less potent toons are discouraged from participation. You can mitigate that somewhat by having it be performance-based by team and then split evenly within the team, but that's an imperfect solution at best. You can do something time-based but that doesn't specifically encourage splitting up and means there's not much incentive to do a good job.
A secondary problem this reveals is that hero tokens are, frankly, not particularly valued, because the only thing you can do with them is use them to play a villain. At a minimum, I would suggest adding an xp and resource award to hero points. Depending on how that was adjusted for level, it could easily give low levels a good solid reason to fight villains.
For villain tokens, leeching already isn't much of an issue since your kills are personalized. Either reducing the tokens per defeat based on the number of other villains around, or applying debuffs to villains who stack up, might help. Also, a modest number of villains is fine and interesting, it's just when you have seven and eight villains that it's not much fun on the hero side.
I don't claim to have any final solution, just some thoughts.
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So, for villains, instead of villain points on kills, give them points every minute if they are fighting, based on the number of heroes fighting them, and decreased by the number of villains present. This encourages them to actually fight those unkillable 40s instead of go looking for level 6s who accidentally tagged one with an AoE attack. (We all know that's why the onslaught mob will never move from south of little italy, even if the guy does). If there are villain tokens per kill, they should be lower.
For heroes, give them a guardian token every ... let's say 10sec if they hit any onslaught villain in that 10sec. (Assuming a single villain lasts the full 15 minutes, that's a possible 90 tokens from a villain - that may be too low still!) That doesn't scale per number of villains. You can keep the guardian token awards that presently exist too, as a bonus for finishing the villain, but now they aren't the dominant token source. (You'd probably want to keep rewarding tokens to a dead player for a reasonable period of time after death so they can respawn and get back to the action without losing tokens. We want players to be willing to fight).
That would directly encourage villains to spread out (their token gain would go down substantially with more villains), and would not penalize players particularly for fighting solo villains.
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Wut you mean this guy?
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I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
The reticle on the map is unfortunately not going to work since its based on team technology that I don't think the devs can ever be experienced enough to butcher the team system to get that mechanic to work on every player in zone. We all know how laughably, painfully broken the team up system was for open missions.
I know what OP means about the scrum (which is a very accurate description, lol). Want to do it to veteran players, fair play, I'll tank for a bit, no worries. The regular players shown here are mostly New Champions.
The scrum issue...I absolutely agree. I also think the biggest problem is when such scrums gank newcomers. While I understand Onslaught Villains can only attack those who hit them 1st, many new players may have missed that memo. They don't get a briefing to the Onslaught system until around level 10 (as I found when I started a new toon).
For what it's worth, I made a post about this in the PTS General Discussion forum. I'm not asking for your support for my humble suggestions, but everyone, please consider what it's like to be a new player in this time.
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Even if you are able to get the full 50-100 tokens that is still a lot of grinding. If villains escape, log out, or something prevents you from getting all of the tokens from a fight it will be even longer.
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Beats heroes and villains turning it into a mechanized grind where they simply stand in one pre-ordained spot and kill eachother for the most tokens possible.
the term nauseating comes to mind and that's a s a villain.
as A hero, if I have acrobatics, immediately jump backwards and keep pushing back.
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Welcome to business, you must be new.
Silverspar on PRIMUS
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The optimal price is therefore the one which maximizes price*buyers, not price alone. Has anyone used a key just to get an Onslaught unlock? I find that doubtful.
And in this case, the ridiculously high price is just going to discourage f2p silver players, who will *stop playing onslaught entirely*. As the purpose of having f2p players is it increases the number of participants in activities for paying players (ie, creates value for the paying players), this is counterproductive.
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