Journey to Perfection

[Penumbra]

Let me start off with saying I absolutely love these missions. They rely on a completely different strategy than anything else in the game. Very compelling and interesting.

That being said, I think there are two problems with them. One, of the three upgrades you can have, only one of them gives any benefit to completing the mission, mana. Second, the penalty for losing is very harsh.

These two things combined almost require the player to glyph-swap to either an expendable character that has a lot of mana or a specially upgraded one.

The harshness of failure is part of what makes this mission so much fun, it makes you play carefully and cautiously. However, the "lose the character that is important" is easily mitigated by the glyph-swap. So the real penalty is mission failure.

Having to figure out which person in town is expendable isn't that much fun.

In a regular mission, like a battle ground or boss tower, the only way to judge failure is the same "culmination of mistakes" behavior that eventually leads to character loss throughout the whole game. This seems fair to me since the player is given many opportunities to reassess strategy.

The "rescue survivor" missions have already added the concept of being given only one shot at success. There, failure can be defined as losing the NPC. Here, the players wants the survivor and play carefully because they don't want to lose the opportunity. Because these missions never come back, there isn't even the simple mitigation of the glyph-swap.

If the "Journey to Perfection" missions where modified to act in a similar manner, they would be much more fun. First, being required to glyph-swap would be removed. Second, a real penalty of losing the mission would be imposed.

I believe a similar concept to be moved to "Lava Escape" missions as well, as that is another favorite mission of mine that I am forced to glyph-swap before attempting. The penalty of loosing the character outweighs the fun I have in playing them.

[x4000]

Basically, make it so that if you are "knocked out" you lose, but that you don't lose the character.  That's what you mean, yes?

Others have suggested that for the lava escape, and I think it could work well here.

[Penumbra]

Yes, that's it exactly. Being prepared for loosing a character is no punishment at all, since you can pick which one you loose.

[keith.lamothe]

Would it help or hurt if the ability to glyph swap were rarer?

[x4000]

Would it help or hurt if the ability to glyph swap were rarer?

Well, I think that's a bit irrelevant, really.  You should:
a) need to take a character with you that you care about not losing when there is risk of losing the character; or
b) not have a super high risk of losing the character.

If the lava escape and journey to perfection just knock you out, then there's no risk of losing your character.  And that seems fine.  But when you're assaulting a dangerous keep, or going through a heated battlefield mission, you're going to want to have a solid character with you.  There you're at risk of losing your character, just not in a way that is sudden and arbitrary.

[KDR_11k]

Maybe you could trigger a mission failure if the player gets hit but keep him alive and expect him to leg it back to the entrance if he wants to keep his character? Obviously the one hit kills would be disabled then.

[x4000]

I like the idea of "knocked unconscious" and getting saved by the Ilari (ie, forcibly ejected from the mission).  There's no reason to have a time penalty.

[Terraziel]

I think this swings the balance too far the other way, it automatically make these missions even easier than normal missions.
If there is literally no way for me to die in them, then there is no risk to these at all. They would remain difficult from a skill perspective but in practice I can just keep trying them for no penalty.

Currently the only missions that can be failed (rather than abandoned) without "Death" are battlefield missions, and that's fine, because it is dependent on things beyond your control
The rescue survivor mission is different in that it's the death of the other character that is the concern, not getting a lumbermancer is a lot more of a problem than not getting a couple of arcane ingredients.

Personally I'd say if you did this you need to lower the reward for these missions as well, low risk low reward.

[tigersfan]

I think this swings the balance too far the other way, it automatically make these missions even easier than normal missions.
If there is literally no way for me to die in them, then there is no risk to these at all. They would remain difficult from a skill perspective but in practice I can just keep trying them for no penalty.

Currently the only missions that can be failed (rather than abandoned) without "Death" are battlefield missions, and that's fine, because it is dependent on things beyond your control
The rescue survivor mission is different in that it's the death of the other character that is the concern, not getting a lumbermancer is a lot more of a problem than not getting a couple of arcane ingredients.

Personally I'd say if you did this you need to lower the reward for these missions as well, low risk low reward.

Won't the mission disappear if you fail it? If not, it should, then your risk is losing out on the rewards altogether.

[Penumbra]

Won't the mission disappear if you fail it? If not, it should, then your risk is losing out on the rewards altogether.

Yes, you should loose the mission entirely, along with any potential reward. Loosing the time it took you to do that mission instead of another one is the penalty.

I think this swings the balance too far the other way, it automatically make these missions even easier than normal missions.

In that regard it is already easier. Since your upgraded character isn't beneficial to succeeding (or, at most marginally so) a glyph-swap removed the penalties altogether. It only took two scrolls, no matter how many times you needed to attempt the mission. You swap once to march "Ensign Jimmy" to his death, and are given a fresh new Red Shirt^tm whenever needed. Your super character would be waiting patiently back at home.  It's was a time-sink instead of a penalty.

[x4000]

What tigersfan and Penumbra said.

Lava escape is inherently an easier sort of mission in general, because if you can do it at all you can do it fast.  But the journey one is "more expensive" no matter what, because if you can do it at all it probably takes way longer than your other sorts of missions.

Either way, I don't think there's a way to get around this sort of thing without the unconsciousness thing.  The simple fact is that this game isn't built around instant-death being much of a factor (but, again, death over time).  So either these remain niche content that almost nobody does, or they require lots of glyph swapping.  These are bloody fun for some of us, so I wouldn't want to just not do them.  But no way am I risking my main character on them, either, so that adds a time tax to all of them.  And for lava escape, I can't just do them when I find them while exploring, unless I'm exploring with an underdeveloped character.  So that wastes even more of my time as a player.

Having the mission literally fail and disappear if you make one mistake in these things is still pretty harsh: you didn't get anything from your time investment with that mission, and you can't even try it again.  But on the other hand, it's not got all that over-harshness of the current system.

[KDR_11k]

Also with secret missions you need to locate another secret mission entrance which introduces a bit of risk as well.

[BobTheJanitor]

What tigersfan and Penumbra said.

Lava escape is inherently an easier sort of mission in general, because if you can do it at all you can do it fast.  But the journey one is "more expensive" no matter what, because if you can do it at all it probably takes way longer than your other sorts of missions.

Either way, I don't think there's a way to get around this sort of thing without the unconsciousness thing.  The simple fact is that this game isn't built around instant-death being much of a factor (but, again, death over time).  So either these remain niche content that almost nobody does, or they require lots of glyph swapping.  These are bloody fun for some of us, so I wouldn't want to just not do them.  But no way am I risking my main character on them, either, so that adds a time tax to all of them.  And for lava escape, I can't just do them when I find them while exploring, unless I'm exploring with an underdeveloped character.  So that wastes even more of my time as a player.

Having the mission literally fail and disappear if you make one mistake in these things is still pretty harsh: you didn't get anything from your time investment with that mission, and you can't even try it again.  But on the other hand, it's not got all that over-harshness of the current system.

This is all great, and I'm glad you're saying it. I like high risk missions that you can fail instantly, but I don't really like losing characters to that instant failure. A happy medium is exactly what's needed. I have found exactly one of these new missions so far, and I sat there invulnerable watching a few espers float around my head for a minute or so, and then just ran off screen and left the mission area. Too much risk, especially at tier 5 where as soon as I move each esper will fire 3 projectiles at me. That's a lot of dodging.

If having some penalty between character death and being knocked out with no long term effect is desirable, you could introduce something that removes just one upgrade level and forces you to repurchase it. Call it 'wounded' or somesuch thing. This still gives you the option of using a non-fully upgraded character, and then you're not losing too much, whereas taking your max upgraded character in and failing means you may have to spend 64 or 128 upgrade stones again. But at least you don't have to spend 500 stones or whatever the average amount is to fully upgrade a new character.

[Penumbra]

If having some penalty between character death and being knocked out with no long term effect is desirable, you could introduce something that removes just one upgrade level and forces you to repurchase it. Call it 'wounded' or somesuch thing. This still gives you the option of using a non-fully upgraded character, and then you're not losing too much, whereas taking your max upgraded character in and failing means you may have to spend 64 or 128 upgrade stones again. But at least you don't have to spend 500 stones or whatever the average amount is to fully upgrade a new character.

This would have the exact same effect as losing the whole character, as I would just glyph-swap to avoid it. The upgrades really don't have much to do with either the Perfection or the Escape missions on purpose. Forcing the character into a lava suit for the escapes and the "don't fly" towers for the Perfection missions are there to normalize their difficultly as well.

 

I can't just do them when I find them while exploring, unless I'm exploring with an underdeveloped character.  So that wastes even more of my time as a player.

Any sort of character penalty that causes more time lost than glyph-swapping will discourage play of these awesome missions. 

[Terraziel]

Any sort of character penalty that causes more time lost than glyph-swapping will discourage play of these awesome missions. 

Personally, all that argument does is make me want to remove glyph-swapping.....

Alright, I generally try to avoid restating my opinion, but let me put it like this.

Losing at worst 15 minutes of my time means nothing to me.
Losing a few resources that will quickly spawn elsewhere means nothing to me.
Losing the mission means nothing to me (I mean if we take battleground as an example I purposefully lose those so that something worthwhile will spawn)

If you remove the risk of death I probably won't play these missions. They will be boring rather than tense. If my reaction to failure is "meh" and searching for the next one then all the fun of them has been sucked out. For the record this is also the reason that I don't switch characters before trying them.

The problem I have, I think, is that changing it will only effect people who like these missions anyway, if you can't do the missions removing the risk isn't going to make you play it, you will continue to avoid them, at best you might try two instead of one before giving them up as too hard. And If you are choosing to do a mission that threatens instant death then that is a choice you made and you should accept the risks associated with it.

...the more I think about it the more farcical it sounds....we are removing death arbitrarily for two missions, if the Illari can save me from these why can't they do it at other times? Are we going to change the death message to "The Illari decided not to save you this time, shame you weren't being chased by lava....."

Now having finished being snarky, obviously I don't expect this to have changed anyone's mind as clearly we have different mindsets, my reaction would be to remove the ability to avoid the risk not simply remove the risk.

And it doesn't even have to be through limiting transfers, if the death of a character actually made a difference to your settlement that would be something, as it stands you have your main character and then a nigh infinite number of sacrificial pawns whose deaths mean nothing. Which is I suppose a separate issue.