Revisiting story mission Challenge Motes, like Hearts and Minds?

[Agent Noun.7350]

Every time you release a new Living World episode, I'm struck by how much effort and attention goes into making really cool solo instances. You all do really, really good work there! And some of them take place in unique maps that we never really go back to unless we're interested in achievements.

 

Have you ever considered revisiting the idea of having Challenge Motes for certain story instances, like "Hearts and Minds" back in _Heart of Thorns_? I could envision some of these turning into great five-player group content, possibly with some sort of weekly reward to encourage players to repeat them. Some instances that I think would be great candidates for "do this with a group" Challenge Motes from Season 4 are:

 

* _Path of Fire, Act 3_: "To Kill a God." That's the clearest "Hearts and Minds" analogue, and I could imagine having some sort of mechanic where whoever wields Sohothin has a special role to fill.

* _Daybreak_: "The First City." Fahranur is a great area and one that would be fun to revisit with new challenges.

* _A Bug in the System_: "The Charge." The fight with Commander Lonai is a really cool boss battle and seeing that translated into five-player group content would be really cool!

* _Long Live the Lich_: "Be My Guest." I mean, who wouldn't want to make fun of their friends as they fall for new traps in Joko's trap gauntlet? We can laugh _with_ Joko _and_ at him!

* _A Star to Guide Us_: "From the Ashes" and "Storm Tracking." The fight with Zafirah could be a nice, self-contained challenge, while "Storm Tracking" would represent a different challenge--an instanced, mounted jumping puzzle.

[MatthewMedina.5419]

Implementing challenge motes are...well, a challenge!

 

Hehe, sorry, but in all seriousness while they do add some amount of replayability and additional difficulty, it does turn a single encounter into multiples, because we would have to balance it for each difficulty level. While it's not automatically out of scope, for a Living World episode it can be difficult enough to balance the encounters we have without multiplying them this way, unless that is desired by the designer up front and can be appropriately budgeted for.

 

Having said that, I do appreciate hearing that some players really like harder content options in the game's story, so hopefully in the absence of challenge motes there's enough to test yourself against in content like Fractals and Raids to scratch that itch.

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

Can you perhaps be more specific about the challenges of CM in say this episode? For example, we can imagine the following possible "hard mode" versions of _The Deadeye_ instance, e.g. one or more of the following:

* Hard time limit, shorter than the current achievement

* Greater damage and/or toughness from the main foe.

* Larger, deadlier AoE on branded explosions, more branded (or other foes)

* Deadlier poison.

* More rapid attacks from the main foe.

 

From a naive, outside perspective, none of these things seem difficult to add: they are all "just" changing numbers on the mechanics (more damage, bigger circles, faster attacks, ...). Whereas, of course, as developers, each of those things must add additional steps to what you have to do.

 

tl;dr can you break down for us how multiple difficulty levels actually adds to development time? I think it would help people understand it's not just the "tweaks", it's what comes with or after tweaking.

[Agent Noun.7350]

> @"MatthewMedina.5419" said:

> Implementing challenge motes are...well, a challenge!

>

> Hehe, sorry, but in all seriousness while they do add some amount of replayability and additional difficulty, it does turn a single encounter into multiples, because we would have to balance it for each difficulty level. While it's not automatically out of scope, for a Living World episode it can be difficult enough to balance the encounters we have without multiplying them this way, unless that is desired by the designer up front and can be appropriately budgeted for.

>

> Having said that, I do appreciate hearing that some players really like harder content options in the game's story, so hopefully in the absence of challenge motes there's enough to test yourself against in content like Fractals and Raids to scratch that itch.

 

I totally understand! I assumed it wasn't exactly an easy, flip-a-switch sort of thing. Thanks for your response!

 

Do you think this is something that might be considered for later patches, not necessarily releasing in time with Living World episodes? Though I understand that developing the next episode certainly has to take priority, I do really enjoy the Living World instances and would love to be able to play through a new take on them that I think would feel notably different from fractals and raids. I think I'm mainly interested in seeing them turned into something that's repeatable, much like fractals and raids are, for another avenue for group PvE instanced fun. Maybe that's more of a job for the fractal/raid team (who I'm sure are already busy enough with the next fractal, huh?).

 

Regardless, I do think they're awesome instances already and I really, really admire all the work you and the rest of the team have done. Thanks again!

 

> @"Illconceived Was Na.9781" said:

> tl;dr can you break down for us how multiple difficulty levels actually adds to development time? I think it would help people understand it's not just the "tweaks", it's what comes with or after tweaking.

 

I suspect a big part of it would just be in making sure all of those things are actually balanced. While it's probably not a huge deal to just go in and crank up some numbers, that has to be followed by testing those new numbers and new challenges, likely with a wide variety of different five-player group compositions, to make sure that it's not just a challenge, but a *fun* challenge that remains both fun and challenging for different group compositions.

 

So yeah, I get that what I'm asking for isn't exactly free or easy to do. But I'm glad to hear that it's not necessarily off the table in the future, at least!

[OriOri.8724]

> @"Illconceived Was Na.9781" said:

> Can you perhaps be more specific about the challenges of CM in say this episode? For example, we can imagine the following possible "hard mode" versions of _The Deadeye_ instance, e.g. one or more of the following:

> * Hard time limit, shorter than the current achievement

> * Greater damage and/or toughness from the main foe.

> * Larger, deadlier AoE on branded explosions, more branded (or other foes)

> * Deadlier poison.

> * More rapid attacks from the main foe.

>

> From a naive, outside perspective, none of these things seem difficult to add: they are all "just" changing numbers on the mechanics (more damage, bigger circles, faster attacks, ...). Whereas, of course, as developers, each of those things must add additional steps to what you have to do.

>

> tl;dr can you break down for us how multiple difficulty levels actually adds to development time? I think it would help people understand it's not just the "tweaks", it's what comes with or after tweaking.

 

If you're basing challenge mote difficulty off of hearts and minds (which is reasonable considering OPs post), then the difficulty of the challenge mote would have to be such that it is designed to be cleared by a group of 5, unlike the current fight which is designed to be cleared solo. Simply increasing the numbers is a way to do this, a very boring way. But ever since the nightmare fractal, it looks like ANet wants to move challenge motes to not only have higher numbers,but also new mechanics. So now you need new mechanics in the fight, which means figuring out how to introduce them effectively, possibly new animations, entirely new numbers to come up with. And then you have to balance it. But now you have to balance the fight twice, once for the regular instance, and another time for the challenge mote, which has additional mechanics (which also makes it harder to balance). This is what takes so much effort, not just changing numbers. You gotta decide how its going to be harder, come up with the new mechanics, come up with new animations, figure out how to convey all of this new mechanics to players, and then you still have to balance it after its all programmed.

 

I personally don't think that is worth stressing devs out over in a LW release. If they have extra time, sure. But if they are pushed for time, this should be one of the first things to go, not least because living world isn't the best place for challenge motes in the first place. Best place for that would be fractals and raids, where they are designed to be cleared over and over instead of just once like the story content is.

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

> @"OriOri.8724" said:

> If you're basing challenge mote difficulty off of hearts and minds (which is reasonable considering OPs post),

I wasn't, which was why I specifically mentioned the Deadeye fight, because it's an obvious candidate for the most simplistic approach to CM.

 

> I personally don't think that is worth stressing devs out over in a LW release.

Again, that wasn't the goal. It was to give the dev that chose to respond to this thread a chance to explain the challenge of adding multiple levels of difficulty to anything in any game.

 

I don't need convincing that it's more complicated than it sounds, but many people posting in the forums, on Reddit, and in game seem to think that it's simple to add layers to the story, to the fights, to the dialogue. I am hopeful that some fraction of those would be swayed by an official response, where posts such as your or mine haven't helped people to reconsider.

 

tl;dr I hope to give ANet an opportunity to share their process with us, so that it helps us understand why we don't have more challenge modes, why we don't have easy modes, even in the most basic instances, let alone in the more complicated ones.

[Teraphas.6210]

I would be interested in more akin to a gambit system for story missions. Perhaps even retroactively added at a later date. First I would use our herald as a focal point and have a "fan club" start that revolves around us and debating over our past exploits. They went there so in the course of their debates things get distorted and exaggerated. When we come by they ask us if we really did such and such. That is the challenge to replay that story step to achieve that outcome.

 

Given the nature of the debate they could be added over time and not be defendant on the major releases and tacked on to any release. So hopefully over time a sub team could test and add over time

[Agent Noun.7350]

> @"OriOri.8724" said:

> Best place for that would be fractals and raids, where they are designed to be cleared over and over instead of just once like the story content is.

 

Part of what I would love to see would be these Living World instances turned into something that is rewarding to do repeatedly--that's sort of the original impetus for posting this. My initial idea was that Challenge Mote versions of these instances with repeatable rewards would be a fun alternative to fractals. They provide a different sort of experience, I think, and in the absence of dungeons, I think having a different selection of non-fractal 5-player challenges would be cool.

 

That said, it might also work out to just have some of these instances and maps reused as actual fractals, sort of like how some Season 1 instances (like Molten Facility and Aetherblade Retreat) were turned into fractals. I suppose the difference there is that those instances would have been gone forever if not turned into fractals, unlike Season 2-4 and expansion instances, but at the same time, reusing maps and bosses that players might not replay often to create repeatable group content makes a certain amount of sense to me.