A few QoL changes to regular Grabs/Bursts/Smashes

Let's be honest, the regular three Alert types could use a little bit of TLC, especially as over the years our playerbase has steadily grown smaller. There's reasons wired into each of these types of alerts for players to not run them, which is, you know, bad when there's only a hundred and fifty people online and a type of alert that nobody likes is eating up one or more of the three spots. (Or less than a hundred online even.) To that end, I'd like to suggest a few tweaks for each type. As follows.



For Grabs:

- Implement a Smash-esque scaling Resource reward at the end so that level 40 characters are slightly less discouraged from running what otherwise has no reward for them whatsoever outside of completing APB and Grab dailies whenever those come around.

- Fix the Grabs that give less XP than they're supposed to. I've heard others saying it's based on what type of Grab it is, though I've personally noticed it to be based on which exact boss is at the end, but sometimes, the extra spike of XP given upon killing the boss but before picking up the reward circle's XP is missing, leading to some Grabs just arbitrarily only giving something like 2/3rds of the XP if even that.

- Implement some sort of Burst-esque active buff for low-leveled players queuing for Grabs so that characters of very low levels (especially below 15, though really most-any below 25 to 30) aren't almost always dead weight outside of janky leveling builds. Just as an example, something like "10-14 gets a 20% buff to base damage and health, 15-19 gets 15%, 20-24 gets 10%, and 25-29 gets 5%."



For Bursts:

- Change (fix?) the Burst mod drop buff so that mods scale with level, whether player level, or mob level identical to natural mod drops. (Potentially reduce Burst mod drop rate to compensate?) Currently, the Burst buff aggressively floods player inventories with almost exclusively R3 mods and very rarely R4 mods, the former of which- being just stat mods and vehicle mods- nobody cares about and everybody hates having to clean their inventory repeatedly because of.

- Change mod drops from Burst completion to scale to player level. As stated above, R3 stat/vehicle mods are of no worth to anybody except maybe sub-40 players still leveling who also aren't using Heirlooms, and the all of five people using Legion secondaries. At the bare minimum, level 40s running Bursts should be provided R4 mod drops with a chance of R5s instead, to match the random mod drops provided by enemies near, at and above 40.

- Swap out the bonus XP dropped by Pyramid Power Bursts for bonus Resources instead. Pyramid Power is hated by practically everyone for good reason: since you get flooded with R3 mods for doing Bursts you only ever run them for APB and Burst dailies, and now for Mindslayer Hair drops (and Mind Slayer only shows up for Rad Rumble anyways.) Which leaves us with the choices of Rad Rumble (which takes 1 to 2 minutes to complete, only slightly longer than a Smash) and Pyramid Power (which usually takes 6 to 10 minutes to complete, similar to one of the longer Grab varieties.) Effectively, both have worthless rewards in their current states, and give identical rewards, but Pyramid Power's XP buff serves to... entice... underleveled players to play the infamously slow and boring Burst that nobody cares about? Which only makes it take even longer, except they still don't run it for that very reason themselves? Exchange the bonus XP for bonus Resources to encourage higher-leveled players to run Pyramid Power. This in tandem with the other two changes would make even Pyramid Power- the waste of an Alert that it is- bearable.



For Smashes:

- Fix the Trainstopping bug. This has been asked for for years, and the problem (and solution) is simple. The problem? Similarly to killing any of the four patrolling drones in the sewer section of Resistance too early; the "Kill 20 mooks and the boss" Open Mission the Alert is tied to only activates after all five players zone in and the opening cutscene plays. However, some enemies are within 100ft of the spawn bubble, which means that while waiting for all players to zone in, not just Focused Shot and Sniper Rifle but all 100ft attacks can be used to aggro and kill several of the mooks below, resulting in Trainstopping becoming impossible to finish and getting stuck below 20/20 completion. There are a myriad of ways this could be fixed, of course. Move the spawn point and "spawn bubble" back from the edge so ranged DPSes can't attack and kill early, or move the mobs directly below the spawn area further back so that they can't be attacked, or add more mobs further back so that there's more than the exact minimum 20 required (similar to some Grabs having more than the entry requirement,) or make it so that the open mission becomes active as soon as the instance is created instead of only after the cutscene plays, or adding a debuff to the spawn area that makes attacking while inside it do zero damage, or setting all the mobs to Immune until the cutscene plays, or... you get the point. A mountain of easy solutions to a long-lasting problem that's made Trainstopping PUGs easy to troll for anyone with a burner account and a bone to pick.

- Add a 1-hour XP-gain buff to Smashes, similar to Grab XP buff but distinct/allowing for both to be active at once. This might seem a bit out of left field, but consider: players are encouraged to run Smashes as low as level 20 thanks to APB and Smash dailies, but at the same time the rewards for doing so are about as worthless until pushing those very last few levels where the full 3G/run is credited to any would-be runners. After all, when just running leveling content, the bulk of your Resource gain is going to be from gear drops both from mobs and from completing missions, unless using Adventure Packs or Serials to level (and in those cases your Resource gain is still not particularly big.) The Resource gain buff from completing Smashes is primarily for continued Smash spamming, or for Special Alerts (like Harmon Labs) that also give Smash-esque Resource rewards at the end, or occasionally for squeezing a tiny extra bit of money out of a Therakiel's Temple run. Consider giving Smashes an XP-gain buff separate from Grabs to reward sub-40s for occasionally running by helping them actually reach 40 slightly faster, which also serves to help keep Smashes being run more frequently, especially during the wee hours of the night where even they don't pop at all. This, instead of just making Smashes give full Gs at all times, makes them desirable to sub-40s without flooding even more Gs into the economy.

- Set Smashes- both player level sync and mob levels- from 30 to 40. While there's points to be made about how Grabs are meant for sub-40s and Bursts are meant for both sub-40s and 40s, Smashes are very clearly intended almost exclusively for players at level 40 despite quests directing sub-40s to them as early as 20, and it might seem small, but the superstat difference between 30 and 40 can impair some extremely precisely-tuned builds, as well as builds that might/still need to upgrade their gear to perform optimally, like the jump from Merc R5s and cheap 15SCR secondaries to Justice R7s-R9s and Onslaught/Cosmic/Determination R5s or Eidolon R9s. This does also, admittedly, mean enemies present in Smash alerts would be using their full roster of abilities, and not just the ones available to them at level 30, but as Smashes are meant for primarily level 40s, this doesn't change much in effect except create a contained environment where most of the game's various factions are encountered at 40, even the ones that usually practically never are, while giving all queuers the benefit of level 40 stats instead of 30.




For all regular Alerts:

- Add a "vote to skip cutscene" button with a requirement of one vote/player to the dead center of each spawn area. While not exactly a necessity, being able to skip Dr. Ka taking 8 minutes looking for his dentures in Pyramid Power would be a breath of fresh air, or the jarring pause that is the cutscene jumpscare in (if I remember the name correctly) the "Stitch in Time" Grab.

- Allow Alerts to start with only 4 people in the queue. During late-night hours, Alerts almost never happen because we just don't have enough players to keep things going polar opposite of prime-time any more. If Rampages can pop with 8 players while having a max of 10, then it feels like letting regular Alerts pop with 4 while having a max of 5 would be good. Implementing some kind of base damage and health buff on an incomplete team similar to what I mentioned above could work if there are concerns of four low-levels not being able to clear a Grab with a tougher boss or enemy faction and similar.

- Make Alerts automatically cycle out after a fixed period of time, like 30 minutes or 1 hour. The queues break often enough to generally see anywhere from 3 to 10 cases per week where players are forced to fix it themselves, which in prime hours usually takes 30 minutes to an hour but late at night takes several hours, and in the case of some alerts people just don't want to run at all can even push over a day straight. There's no reason not to implement a failsafe in which Alerts automatically rotate out every given period of time even if they "haven't been run enough" for the nebulous spaghetti code behind Alerts as they are now.



These are but a few tweaks of many that could greatly improve the Alert experience in ways that isn't just "make them give me more rewards so I have to run them less" or "just remove them from the game entirely because they're stupid and cringe and I hate them." Frankly, I'm surprised that at least some of these aren't in the game already, but, all the more reason to raise them here considering they aren't. Others? More... out there, but I'd still argue something of a necessity with where we're at now.