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.
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.
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.
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.
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.If we match only based on rank whats to stop players from dropping ranks to completely stomp others with their superior collection?
But you very easily get back to where you started at since you get matched with weaker opponents.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.
And what is your suggestion? There is no way to make a system that can't be exploited.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
Somehow I missed this message from a very long time ago.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.
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.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.
... and extremely painful if you were demoted from Diamond to Gold, or Gold to Silver, etc. ;__;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.
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.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?
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 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.
Good to hear!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.
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.I think the new match making makes it quite luck base on how far over 2000 you can go in a week.