Aww, I only get to choose 3? Kidding, I know pretty clearly what I personally want, though these are all good things that I would like to have in the future.
SGM start date: Late August? ( Maybe early September ) 2019
Player account level: 70
Catalog count: 148/166
Highest rift 2.0 rank: Diamond 3
I'm a big fan of adding variety in the 'pieces' that can be used to build more challenging fights - Fighters, variants, catalysts, and match modifiers. That said, new content in these areas can only keep things going so far without adding or improving other game modes to use them. (I still think it would be nice to remove the pf golds from the gold relics and add in new gold variants to replace them - it's always a disappointment to get pf golds from the relics you've up shards for instead of something more special.)
Plus, the current method of adding new pfs and dailies every time a new fighter is added can only go so far before the pfs for certain characters are pushed too far apart and the dailies pile up to the point where grinding them becomes tedious, so I'd like to see these things refined somewhat, to reduce the grind and possibly add some higher difficulties to increase the challenge and rewards. That said, it's been a while since I was a newb, and there needs to be a good balance found between challenging for veterans and accessible for newbs.
Possibly tweaking the existing difficulties for dailies while adding a new mechanic to make things quicker for veterans is the way to go?
Tweaks:
- Basic: Leave as-is, for the folks just starting out. Maybe include the occasional Silver move in the drop pool to help newbs climb quicker.
- Advanced: Bulk up some of the later fighters, somewhere between the current Advanced and Expert difficulties, with rewards to match. Maybe make one of the completion rewards and the boss node reward a gold move to balance the rewards for the boosted difficulty.
- Expert: Basically, make it much closer to the current Master difficulty in terms of fighter tiers and levels (except *maybe* leaving the match modifiers as-is), and move the rewards over from Master.
- Master: Marqueed fighters, much higher FS, and maybe some nat Dias. Something much closer to AE in terms of difficulty (which is still easy enough for veteran players), and rewards to match. Maybe a chance at a fighter relic / guaranteed bronze relic for completion, or some more silver relic or essence shards. Maybe the moves that drop could be pre-leveled a little, to increase their sell value and reduce the amount of investment required to make them useful in high level play.
As for the mechanic to make things faster for veterans; who here remembers Earthbound? Basically, in that game, if you were a certain level above the random encounter enemies, to the point where they didn't stand a chance against you, you could 'auto-win' encounters without even having to fight.
Something like this could help streamline grinding dailies by quite a bit. Say, if your team's FS was more than 3-5x the FS of the node, you could choose to auto-win without even having to enter the battle. To balance things though, maybe choosing to auto-win would mean that it would take all of those fighters' current yellow energy and not give experience, but it would still give the other rewards of the node. So it'd still be worth it to fight normally in some cases, like if you were leveling Bronzes or only had a few strong fighters to use, but still make things overall faster for veterans who have built up a large collection of high level fighters. Defense variants would gain some extra usefulness here too, since it's based purely off of FS totals!
This auto-win mechanic probably should only be available in Dailies (though the new Master would probably have FS's high enough that this wouldn't be an option) and *maybe* Prize Fights to help veterans get to the challenging and fun battles faster, but it might exacerbate the grind for top 10%, so eh.
I'm not too sure about what to do about Prize Fights though; I used to think that adding a Diamond PF would help reduce the 10% cutoffs on the Gold PF by splitting people's attention, but now I'm not so sure that adding *even more* grindy content is really the way to go. I'm sure a lot of people would just choose to grind both Diamond and Gold PFs anyways if they feasibly could, which would mean *more* grind, not less. I would like to see some tweaks to the current PF system to streamline the grind a bit, but I'm not sure of any way to do that that wouldn't result in drastically higher cutoffs as people take advantage of the streamlining to boost their numbers while putting in the same amount of effort as they do now.
