Rift battle general discussion

[Ryouhi]

I did a larger write up in my own thread regarding things that are frustrating about rift matches and what could be done to elleviate those issues.

Would be nice if you guys could check it out and leave feedback

 

[Enthasius]

Happy to announce that I did indeed lose my last Rift Battle of the week, despite having one of my better runs, never losing, I lost by a clear 3k since I'm not good enough to best the final three nodes without either taking a bunch of damage, having to bite at any win possible rather than a blockbuster, or losing fighters. With seven losses clean in a row, that feels appropriately awful to duck out for a while as I said I would.

 

[fanghoul]

Okay, so just something I might share here is that I have shared the feeling with being really stressed out by Rift Battles. Something that's changed lately that might be helping is I've started not doing the full battle all at once. I take a lot of little breaks to go read something, go do a less stressful battle in daily or prizefight mode, do a chore, write a post, whatever. I seem to be taking over an hour now on average to clear all the nodes. I know that's probably not going to be an option for everyone, but I thought I'd share it as an idea. Rift Battles make for a lot of very stressful fights all in a row.

Be kind to yourself and don't play in a unfun way because it feels like you have to.

Happy to announce that I did indeed lose my last Rift Battle of the week, despite having one of my better runs, never losing, I lost by a clear 3k since I'm not good enough to best the final three nodes without either taking a bunch of damage, having to bite at any win possible rather than a blockbuster, or losing fighters. With seven losses clean in a row, that feels appropriately awful to duck out for a while as I said I would.

FYI, I'm liking this because taking a break seems like it makes sense, not because I like you getting beat up so much

 

[TonyPartridge30]

Rift battles would be a lot less stressful if the best rewards in the game weren’t tied to it. The whole idea of putting Diamond rewards (keys and shards) to a PvP mode in a F2P gacha game means the rich get richer while the poor stay poor. And that just makes not want to play, because I’m never gonna be rich. I like games that make me want to support them because they’re good; I don’t like it when games make me feel like I have to support them to get the best experience. Like, do players at Trigg’s level really need more diamond stuff than everyone else? With the rate that the top tier players are pulling away from the average player base, it’s no wonder that the devs need to loosen matchmaking parameters to let them match, because no one else can keep up and there isn’t enough of them to be able to match each other all the time.

A PvE mode that granted the same level of rewards, like a Marie boss battle, would alleviate a lot of the stress I feel from Rift battles, because I’d have an alternative to getting end-game stuff that isn’t jeopardized by unlucky matchmaking.

In another game with ranked matchmaking, the devs have shown data that more uneven matches lead to people leaving the game, which then necessitates even looser matchmaking and becoming a self filling prophecy. I imagine that sort of trend holds true to some degree with Rift battles. I like this game and all, but eventually I’ll hit my tolerance threshold and not want to deal with the stress anymore.

 

[xcapibara]

Another suggestion; please remove the 5000 max points cap gained through defense wins: not fair to opponents when i lose 60 times against their nodes only for the opponent to gain a mere 5000 instead of 30000 as it shoul be.

 

[Luke]

I had an idea on match making.

Y can’t it be like pf? Where your base is deposited into the server. When we try to get matched it’s not to the relitive tiny pool of players currently searching at the same time as you but your opponent is chosen from any rift base that’s not currently being modified.

Rift length can stay 2hr, required fighters and ticket number don’t have to change.

defense base would be notified when our deposited base have found a match then the base will be locked once the other player decided to start challenge your base, for 2hr, then unlocked once 2hr is past.

Once a match is found both side have 2hr to complete but they can start from different times. ie: after a match is found either player can click “start” then a 2hr timer will begin countdown. Who ever finishes will have their score stored in the server. Only when both finished will they be able to view match result.

Only one rift match can be active for any player.

Any player who finished a rift way before the other one can start another match.

Frick! (I’m mindful of the censures)

This solves the match finding is difficult and unbalanced but every time a rift is finished the server would have to save the match result for too long if one player goes afk for days. Or have to save a ton of bases for one player if they change their base around.

Since our collection won’t have any drastic changes within 1 week maybe base submituons can be limited to 1-3 changes per week. Once that’s used up we can buy more base modify chances with theos.

And this method would also make rift score “lag”. If an active player gets matched with a streak of not-as-actives they may not see a rift rating change for a few fights, making them get matched to same rank players even if they would win and should get matched with players with higher rift rating.

I’m just tossing ideas around and I lost myself.

 

[Luke]

I think whatever that needs to change the match making MUST CHANGE.

We simply don’t have enough players to do real time match finding.

I’ve experienced the bane of all MMO “need one more!1!11” for years and that’s a problem even popular(over populated) games have.

 

[Xandoss]

I feel the pain here in this thread. Genuinely wish there was more good Rift experiences or at least the bad ones weren’t so devastating.

Unfortunately, the issues mentioned are hard to address. Especially concerning is the issue of less gains being made by those losing, or rich getting richer. It’s hard to know how to fix this as the same rewards you get for being strong are the ones that make you stronger. I feel like this problem may be exasperated by the introduction of catalysts into the mix. Those paying to have a good base are gonna be harder to beat a getting better rewards. Makes sense from the gotcha standpoint but not the balancing or worthwhile mode for player retention. I’d like to hear devs addressing this or at least acknowledging it before 3.2 hits but I feel like the bad situation can get a lot worse by their introduction if things aren’t done carefully to avoid this issue.

 

[chuckey37]

Matchmaking

So far I did 7 battles total, out of them about 3 were more or less evenly matched, about the same amount of weaker opponents and one stronger opponent.
So far it feels like even 2 tier difference is pretty significant and makes boss node near impossible for the weaker party.

Nodes

There are 3(2) important nodes. The rest are just fillers. Single-fighter nodes are a joke. So far the "hardest" single-fighter node I had was 19K FS Diamond SK on immunity node. She was sekhmeted to death with a 6.5K FS Diva. It was a waste of a diamond SK honestly. I suppose something like diamond AF would fare better, but she would fare even better on the boss node. Single and double node main danger is treating them lightly and throwing your worst carries at them. Once I lost an immune node throwing a half-upgraded No Egrets on it against an opponent twice her FS. Forgetting there's the whole immunity thing.

Reactive stun node is so-so. There aren't many fighters that can make you slip into attacking a block. Probably Ms.Fortune (unexpected recovery and generally an epileptic moveset) and Squiggly (far reaching ground combo enders that push you out of range for fast punishing) are the most prominent. Without the modifier it's just your normal moderate PF streak.

Armour node is relatively hard depending on the defender setup. Normally it's weak to Rusty and BHD, but Bloodbath, SG and DoW can make it really annoying. I think I had someone put Bio on it, but IMHO it was a total waste. I also tried Purrfect Dark on offense, but tag in is hard. Honestly if I had 2 decent SGs, on attack I'd use Rusty with SG support here and one SG on Boss node.

Boss node is stupid. Eventually I decided to forgo elemental advantage and meter control shenanigans and went with pure damage and Val support. Dark and Light characters are currently completely immune to almost anything (reports are that Doom from Xeno works). Bloodbath takes reflected bleeds as bleeds, not heal. My lord and saviour is Poltergust with SG support because she feeds on buffs, lands 75K nukes with rage and can lock down enemies with long combos and daisy pusher. Apart from an impossibly high FS team the biggest problem for me so far was AF with SG support. Rusty hurts herself with reflected bleed, Doublicious is too squishy, SK is at elemental disadvantage against a walking brick. Poltergust was still the best choice with AF reactive buffs feeding Rage. I believe a BB3-equipped Bio would be the strongest defender on the boss node. Diamond Buzzkill is also bad news, especially with tainted blood. She does ridiculous chip damage (i took 20K chip damage with pinion dash) and due to the modifier has enough HP to reflect you to death.

General Quality Of Life

There's no interaction with the opponent. You can't talk to them, can't view their profile, you don't know their offensive performance against your nodes and thus don't have feedback for tuning your defense team. There should be a way to communicate with the opponent and a way to get feedback.

Battle duration is questionable too. Or, rather, the fact that it can only end with timeout. I believe that both sides should have other ending conditions - either clearing the whole rift or deciding to give up. And the rift should close when both sides reached an ending condition. Or we should have multirack drifting. The problem is "dedicated gaming hours". You need at least 2,5 of them to fill your daily drifting quota.

Also there's the bonus combo points. Parasoul, Beo and Bella are crying in the corner, especially on single and double nodes, where you can't even build enough meter for BB3 before everyone dies.

 

[Dusty00]

Fought someone just now and thought to use it as an example for discussion.

This player is in Diamond 3. Look at the collection here - full map of nearly level 55-60 diamonds, including 3 fully upgraded Natural diamonds. They are all equalized with lv8–15 moves. What would it take to clear a map like this with my score, 23,417 without any fails?


Here’s a screenshot of my current collection. I don’t cheat and those who have fought me would know that my defense isn’t anything to boost about. Still, I manage to consistently rank in Diamond 2 or 1 depending on how lucky I am to not get matched to top 10 players.

I’m sure I’d lose to this person sometimes when I slip and make mistakes as you can see in the final scores.

This is just to say that those ideas about matching players based on anything other than rift ranking really doesn’t matter, at least in the diamond tiers. Once you have reached a certain basic requirement on offense, it is possible to clear maps much stronger than your collection with the right strategies and composition of teams. Likewise, even with a better collection you could slip and lose.

 

[chuckey37]

Matchmaking

I agree

So far I did 7 battles total, out of them about 3 were more or less evenly matched, about the same amount of weaker opponents and one stronger opponent.
So far it feels like even 2 tier difference is pretty significant and makes boss node near impossible for the weaker party.

Nodes

There are 3(2) important nodes. The rest are just fillers. Single-fighter nodes are a joke. So far the "hardest" single-fighter node I had was 19K FS Diamond SK on immunity node. She was sekhmeted to death with a 6.5K FS Diva. It was a waste of a diamond SK honestly. I suppose something like diamond AF would fare better, but she would fare even better on the boss node. Single and double node main danger is treating them lightly and throwing your worst carries at them. Once I lost an immune node throwing a half-upgraded No Egrets on it against an opponent twice her FS. Forgetting there's the whole immunity thing.

Reactive stun node is so-so. There aren't many fighters that can make you slip into attacking a block. Probably Ms.Fortune (unexpected recovery and generally an epileptic moveset) and Squiggly (far reaching ground combo enders that push you out of range for fast punishing) are the most prominent. Without the modifier it's just your normal moderate PF streak.

Armour node is relatively hard depending on the defender setup. Normally it's weak to Rusty and BHD, but Bloodbath, SG and DoW can make it really annoying. I think I had someone put Bio on it, but IMHO it was a total waste. I also tried Purrfect Dark on offense, but tag in is hard. Honestly if I had 2 decent SGs, on attack I'd use Rusty with SG support here and one SG on Boss node.

Boss node is stupid. Eventually I decided to forgo elemental advantage and meter control shenanigans and went with pure damage and Val support. Dark and Light characters are currently completely immune to almost anything (reports are that Doom from Xeno works). Bloodbath takes reflected bleeds as bleeds, not heal. My lord and saviour is Poltergust with SG support because she feeds on buffs, lands 75K nukes with rage and can lock down enemies with long combos and daisy pusher. Apart from an impossibly high FS team the biggest problem for me so far was AF with SG support. Rusty hurts herself with reflected bleed, Doublicious is too squishy, SK is at elemental disadvantage against a walking brick. Poltergust was still the best choice with AF reactive buffs feeding Rage. I believe a BB3-equipped Bio would be the strongest defender on the boss node. Diamond Buzzkill is also bad news, especially with tainted blood. She does ridiculous chip damage (i took 20K chip damage with pinion dash) and due to the modifier has enough HP to reflect you to death.

General Quality Of Life

There's no interaction with the opponent. You can't talk to them, can't view their profile, you don't know their offensive performance against your nodes and thus don't have feedback for tuning your defense team. There should be a way to communicate with the opponent and a way to get feedback.

Battle duration is questionable too. Or, rather, the fact that it can only end with timeout. I believe that both sides should have other ending conditions - either clearing the whole rift or deciding to give up. And the rift should close when both sides reached an ending condition. Or we should have multirack drifting. The problem is "dedicated gaming hours". You need at least 2,5 of them to fill your daily drifting quota.

Also there's the bonus combo points. Parasoul, Beo and Bella are crying in the corner, especially on single and double nodes, where you can't even build enough meter for BB3 before everyone dies.

Fought someone just now and thought to use it as an example for discussion.

This player is in Diamond 3. Look at the collection here - full map of nearly level 55-60 diamonds, including 3 fully upgraded Natural diamonds. They are all equalized with lv8–15 moves. What would it take to clear a map like this with my score, 23,417 without any fails?
View attachment 3964
View attachment 3966
Here’s a screenshot of my current collection. I don’t cheat and those who have fought me would know that my defense isn’t anything to boost about. Still, I manage to consistently rank in Diamond 2 or 1 depending on how lucky I am to not get matched to top 10 players.
View attachment 3965
I’m sure I’d lose to this person sometimes when I slip and make mistakes as you can see in the final scores.

This is just to say that those ideas about matching players based on anything other than rift ranking really doesn’t matter, at least in the diamond tiers. Once you have reached a certain basic requirement on offense, it is possible to clear maps much stronger than your collection with the right strategies and composition of teams. Likewise, even with a better collection you could slip and lose.

I agree with him as well. I was a diamond 4 and dropped to Gold 4 in a week for all the high lvl math up Ive been having. Im lvl 57 matching up with lvl 65+ players

 

[chuckey37]

Fix the Rift battles match ups! Tired of going from Diamond 4 to Gold 4 in a week. Matching up with lvl 65 players when im lvl 57. Match me up with the same or +/- 3 lvls.
Thats how it should be matching.

 

[Ryouhi]

Fought someone just now and thought to use it as an example for discussion.

This player is in Diamond 3. Look at the collection here - full map of nearly level 55-60 diamonds, including 3 fully upgraded Natural diamonds. They are all equalized with lv8–15 moves. What would it take to clear a map like this with my score, 23,417 without any fails?
View attachment 3964
View attachment 3966
Here’s a screenshot of my current collection. I don’t cheat and those who have fought me would know that my defense isn’t anything to boost about. Still, I manage to consistently rank in Diamond 2 or 1 depending on how lucky I am to not get matched to top 10 players.
View attachment 3965
I’m sure I’d lose to this person sometimes when I slip and make mistakes as you can see in the final scores.

This is just to say that those ideas about matching players based on anything other than rift ranking really doesn’t matter, at least in the diamond tiers. Once you have reached a certain basic requirement on offense, it is possible to clear maps much stronger than your collection with the right strategies and composition of teams. Likewise, even with a better collection you could slip and lose.

The problem with your example is that you have enough diamonds yourself to use one or more on every single node.

I'm D3 and have 10 Diamonds myself (Dead of Winter not very useable on Offense tho) and sometimes get matched with people that have their complete base filled with diamonds and perhaps more to use on offense too.
Can i win this if a play well? Sure. But it's gonna be much harder for me to get a good score than for my opponent with an objectively stronger array of fighters to use.

Usually in a ranked mode both players should be on even ground, otherwise one has an unfair advantage over the other in what should be a balanced match. Maybe this isn't perfectly adaptable for a gacha game, but being matched vs someone that has more tools available lile that feels unfair in my opinion.

If we match only based on rank whats to stop players from dropping ranks to completely stomp others with their superior collection?

 

[Beldr447]

If we match only based on rank whats to stop players from dropping ranks to completely stomp others with their superior collection?

Maybe the fact that you get way less rewards for being lower rank, so no matter the streak you get it is useless if you get less in the end.

 

[Ryouhi]

Maybe the fact that you get way less rewards for being lower rank, so no matter the streak you get it is useless if you get less in the end.

But you very easily get back to where you started at since you get matched with weaker opponents.
So you get your good rewards plus a boatload of extra rift coins from streaks

 

[Beldr447]

But you very easily get back to where you started at since you get matched with weaker opponents.
So you get your good rewards plus a boatload of extra rift coins from streaks

And what is your suggestion? There is no way to make a system that can't be exploited.
Player level does not equal strenght of your collection.
Collection score does not mean anything since it can be inflated by having a lot of fighters or a huge collection.
And highest score fighter means nothing if you only used 3-4 fighters

 

[Ryouhi]

Just gonna dig this thread up again cause i wanted to add something (also @Liam seems to be lurking on the forums a lot currently so hey).

I have noticed that, now that i have gotten the Diamond fighter i wanted the most, and i do not have to worry so much about grinding new diamond essence and diamond keys, my enjoyment of rift battles has grown *A LOT*.

Before it felt like an absolute chore to play, because it was very very stressful, because you wanted to stay in diamond tier to get all the necessary rewards.
Now that i have basically stopped caring about the rewards, i actively go out of my way to play some matches of rifts.
I'm actually having fun with them now (aside from a few catalysts that can be very annoying).

I'm not actually sure how, as a developer, you could take away this stress of losing your tier, but i think this would be a very important thing to focus on if you want people to be more excited for rift battles, considering the amount of work you have already put into it.

One thing could be to normalize rewards between tiers a little, or have all tiers within one "rating", give the same rewards.
For example, no matter if you are Gold V or Gold I, you still get the same rewards regardless, which would make it less painful if you were demoted one tier.

Another idea could be to remove the free and paid ticket system. If you are a F2P-player and dont spend theonite on premium tickets, having only 2 chances a day to make up previous losses could be a source of stress. So perhaps if you could keep grinding in hopes of getting more wins it could alleviate the stress for some players?

These are just examples i quickly made up, but i think the main thing holding back rift battles are how stressful it can feel, so anything to alleviate that for players would be nice in my opinion.

I wanted to write this up because i've spread a lot of salt around this thread and the discord in the past months due to rift battles, but now that i can just play it for fun, it has become so much more enjoyable.

 

[POD_715]

Yeah, i do feel that matchmaking in rift is fairer than it used to be. I'm just annoyed that I'm having to fight such an uphill battle to get back into diamond ranks for the keys. I feel so held back in my fighters for lack of diamond keys, its ridiculous, but because i was so frustrated with rifts before, there were weeks i didn't even play one fight. I'm coming back from 1800 lol. I've nearly made it to 1900 since the matchmaking change was released, but I'm still a long way off the diamond rank i used to hold before they moved it to top 200. Considering how quickly lv 68+ fighters like myself can rack up diamond fighters, the keys should definitely be easier to get. Its been over a month since i last got one. D4 should go back to being top 5% or whatever it was.

 

[Dusty00]

Matchmaking has been better for me, matching me with players with a similar collection rather than rift points. I do feel bad that most matches are against those in 1900 range, but it’s interesting to face not just the same handful of players within top 20 with a much stronger collection.

Got matched with Daisuke just now and thought I was going to lose my win streak for sure, but surprisingly he gave up. Would’ve never thought I could beat any rank 1 - I think the new match making makes it quite luck base on how far over 2000 you can go in a week.

 

[Liam]

There's no interaction with the opponent. You can't talk to them, can't view their profile, you don't know their offensive performance against your nodes and thus don't have feedback for tuning your defense team. There should be a way to communicate with the opponent and a way to get feedback.

Somehow I missed this message from a very long time ago.

We have a ticket for this actually. Not sure if we'll be committing to it for 3.3, but the ability to "DM" your Rift Battle opponent is something we're interested in exploring. It ties in with future social plans and guilds, so it might not make sense to tackle this task just yet.

I'm not actually sure how, as a developer, you could take away this stress of losing your tier, but i think this would be a very important thing to focus on if you want people to be more excited for rift battles, considering the amount of work you have already put into it.

Ladder Anxiety (OW EX, SC EX) is definitely very real, and I'm sorry to hear that you feel that way when playing Rift Battles! Rift Battles are meant to be our serious competitive mode where the stakes are high, but I'm not sure reducing those stakes would be good for the health of the gamemode.

For example, no matter if you are Gold V or Gold I, you still get the same rewards regardless, which would make it less painful if you were demoted one tier.

... and extremely painful if you were demoted from Diamond to Gold, or Gold to Silver, etc. ;__;

Another idea could be to remove the free and paid ticket system. If you are a F2P-player and dont spend theonite on premium tickets, having only 2 chances a day to make up previous losses could be a source of stress. So perhaps if you could keep grinding in hopes of getting more wins it could alleviate the stress for some players?

This is probably a more reasonable approach to take to reducing tension that players get in Rift Battles. These are just my own thoughts, (without consulting with the designers and masterminds of Rift Battles) but with only two chances a day, and rough matches taking two hours to fully resolve, I empathize with the frustration of a sour match taking so long to be over.

I feel so held back in my fighters for lack of diamond keys, its ridiculous, but because i was so frustrated with rifts before, there were weeks i didn't even play one fight. I'm coming back from 1800 lol.

Big mood... I'm coming up from 900 when I was 1700 before, haha. My issues are more about not having time to play during the week though.

I've been having a lot of fun on my climb back!

Matchmaking has been better for me, matching me with players with a similar collection rather than rift points. I do feel bad that most matches are against those in 1900 range, but it’s interesting to face not just the same handful of players within top 20 with a much stronger collection.

Good to hear!

I think the new match making makes it quite luck base on how far over 2000 you can go in a week.

When you have a collection capable of dealing with most defensive shenanigans, and you're matching with players in your range, I feel like that leaves more room for player skill and perfection to flourish.

Compared to last patch, many players in unstable Rift Rating ranges had a lot of complaints about most matches being a dice roll on if their opponent had a bunch of high level Diamonds, and they did not.