Suggestions Grab Bag

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  CTRat Registered Users, Member 13 Posts

  April 2020

  Quality of Life Suggestions/Recommendations:
  
  

  The stuff you should just have, 'nough said.
  

  
  

  1. Consistency of terms. I noticed, at least within the scope of some LTEs, that it seems there are a couple of interchangeable terms for gear, and I think that can be a bit confusing. I know the pieces are called "enchanted gear," but it was not obvious to me that "Enchantment tier" and "Gear tier" mean the same thing. It should really only use one term across the board. (It's possible this has already changed, since I no longer see "Enchantment tier" for the current events -- if so, good!)
  
  Similarly, I don't think the term "rarity" (like it appears in the "Sort" menu in the characters screen) should be used on its own, when talking about stars. It should be "star rarity," or something that communicates it's talking about the stars. In the sorting example, I first thought that option was supposed to sort based on, "How easily can I find this character's tokens/are they only available during an occasional LTE?" Which I just realized only today is not what it is trying to say.
  
  

  2. Effect clutter (in battles). Right now, it seems pretty difficult to see the indicators (and explanations) for characters when there are many harmful/beneficial effects on them at once. You can only see about three before you have to scroll, and I can only sometimes figure out how to scroll in it before the explanations disappear when I stop touching the screen. I'm not sure what the best way to handle that is, but maybe the popup should come up right "under" where you're touching already, so it won't disappear (and you are already scrolling).
  
  

  Part of this also has to do with the fact that, in battle, effects are flying all over the place, and it's pretty common for characters to have more than three effects at once. It might be a bit more of an extreme way to help with this issue, but I think maybe another change to help this might be to make opposing effects cancel each other out (e.g., "Speed Up" and "Speed Down" cancel). I suppose that one is more debatable, but maybe it would be good to help reduce the clutter.
  
  

  3. Distinguishable item graphics. There might only be one example of this, but at least to me, it seems extremely difficult to visually distinguish fire dust from heart dust. I think there must be a couple of shades of color difference between them, but if you show them to me one after another in succession, I couldn't tell you which is which. They need to be more clearly differentiated, even if just for clarity's sake. (Although of course, the more practical reasoning is, to prevent someone from accidentally wasting a bunch of energy grinding for one of these when they actually needed the other to make X powder).
  
  

  4. Disabling notifications. This one is just a minor annoyance compared to those other more glaring issues, but I would like an option to remove notifications. We have an option to remove push notifications, but I'd also like it for all of the phone spam.
  

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  CTRat Registered Users, Member 13 Posts

  April 2020

  Other bonus suggestions:
  
  

  1. Item Drop Rates, and Successive Failure Prevention. As a concern voiced by other players, it does take a very long time to grind for items and tokens, and I wouldn't complain about a general increase in the rates for success for "Chance" tokens and items (when you don't get that many actions per day, < 50% seems pretty low). I do also understand though keeping players grinding is fairly integral to how the game is modeled, as players are not supposed to quickly skyrocket to high star/gear levels on all their characters, so pumping up to a high drop rate of course could be unhealthy to the game in the long-term.
  
  

  That said, as one possible suggestion, I think the thing most prone to causing player frustration is bad luck streaks making one feel like they're just wasting their time; making many repeated attempts to try and get one of many needed things (like, thirty tokens, say), and never even getting one, is a frustrating player experience. There's one way of mitigating this perceived feeling of wasted time (without having to pump the drop rates way up), and I haven't seen the proper name for it, but it's basically successive failure prevention. Basically, in cases where a player is subject to RNG over and over for a success/fail condition (in this case, getting or not getting the item), then the chance of getting it can slightly increase per each failure at that thing. So, even though I still take nearly as long to get all of that item I need because the overall chance is about the same, the fact that the bad luck streaks are more broken up in the middle makes it feel like the grinding is not such a demoralizing waste when they happen. I guess it could take quite a bit of work to implement something like that, but I think it may be worth considering, anyway.
  
  

  2. When Maleficent is fully implemented, she should definitely be the last boss of the grand campaign.
  

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  CTRat Registered Users, Member 13 Posts

  April 2020

  PvP Balance Related:
  
  

  I'll just stick to what I think the most obvious examples are here, especially since I dunno if balance changes are going to be frequent, or few and far between. And I'm just armchair-balancing here, but pretty sure these would at least be some agreeable (desirable) improvements:
  
  

  1. Maui: Out of anything currently visible in-game, he is by far and away the most annoying in my opinion, because of his passive. Automatic, complete invincibility (with no way of even removing via purge, or anything else) for potentially two entire rounds -- and that's alongside the ability to taunt, forcing the opponent's entire team to waste every turn for at least a round while taunting (or if all the other teammates are defeated). Running into him in the dungeon is the worst, because, even if the wave is easy and everything else goes down quickly, he is (normally) a bit too beefy to one- or two-shot, and so that means you're gonna have to sit there accomplishing nothing for a while. It's really obnoxious (and I imagine obscenely overpowered, once he becomes available to players who effectively strategize... I shudder at the thought).
  
  

  My suggestions: I have at least a couple for this guy. My preferred option would be to, instead of complete immunity with no recourse, give him multiple stacks of that immunity, that can be consumed (like evasion). So, perhaps it indeed could still block any attack, purge, spell, effect, etc., but each instance of that block would consume one stack, and it would be possible to actually burn them out and manage to eventually accomplish something. At least then the opposition would have some means of playing against it, if they're burning multiple turns on it.
  
  

  Barring that, if it's too big of a change to simply nerf it like that, I would at least go for a second-best, compromise option, of changing it so that the passive also refills his speed bar immediately upon activation. That way, he'll get an extra turn (a slight benefit to him), but it does partially alleviate the frustration since he can't go more than one full round of wasting a whole team's turns. Though even that is still probably too much.
  
  

  2. Captain Hook. Poor Hook seems to have pretty overall low impact on his abilities, and is pretty fragile to boot. Most notably, I think his "Forty-two degrees" ability is very underwhelming (I am not even sure if it's better to use that in most cases than a basic attack), especially put beside other special abilities, which normally seem to be fairly high-impact for offense characters (e.g., stuns, high damage attacks, AoE, etc.). I'd suggest reworking that ability altogether so it feels more worth using, and maybe even help him out a bit more past that (maybe give him an extra defensive bonus somewhere, a la Aladdin's evasion on his upgraded "One Jump Ahead" ability).
  
  

  3. Simba. I think his passive is a bit over-tuned. If I'm interpreting it correctly, 2% bonus defense per 1% missing health means at half health his defense is doubled, and when very low, nearly tripled. Then, when upgraded, that bonus doubles again (unless I'm misunderstanding)? That seems pretty ridiculous. Considering defense-ignoring attacks and DoT attacks are only available to so many characters, I think him becoming an absolute brick wall of defense when low on health is a bit much.
  
  4. Spells (Bucket o' Soldiers). I personally think spells in general are a little crazy in terms of how much they can do all at once; for example, a lot of my progress in the club dungeon and towers of endurance is largely thanks to spells. That said, the bucket o' soldiers spell in particular is an extra level of crazy (as I see other threads are also pointing out). Key points: the damage is way too high for something that can trigger turn after turn in a row (plus its own turn, good grief!), and it also doesn't make sense that the spell can still charge while it's summoned (unlike Trigger's Tower, which rightly can't). I think several spells could probably use a small nerf, but the bucket o' soldiers in particular really should be brought in line with other spells.
  
  

  5. Turn Order. I agree with the sense in other threads on the site that the completely random turn order for the starting round of PvP battles is not a good system. Because speed is so crucial and a couple of turns can quickly change the course of a battle (indeed, a player getting lucky and having all their characters get their turns before the opponent's equal-speed characters is an enormous advantage that can sometimes decide who will win right off the bat). I think the balance around speed and turn order should be carefully monitored in general, but I do think that a good, modest starting change would be to simply make it so the randomness can't stack more than two (or maaaybe three) of a player's characters' turns in a row for that first round.
  
  (I originally had already posted this comment, and just tried editing it to add the notes on spells, and when I submitted the edit, the comment was deleted, with a "Discussion not found" error... seems like a bug on the forums here)
  

  
  

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