Prediction: Breach will have the hardest player falloff

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Nykken wrote:

You seem to think developers should design content so any build can succeed without trying.

Can you quote the part of my writing that leads you to believe this simplistic take? Perhaps I can explain that part for you?

Let me recap: Breaches design is binary pass/fail a dice roll with no information on which to base a choice. The reason Essence was better designed was that you have information to base a choice. If there was 3 essences you know it would be harder, if you used a remnant you knew it would be harder. I agree that many essence fights were too easy, but it also had better balance from the standpoint of being able to make an informed choice, as opposed to "riiiiip, welp this one was one I should have skipped".

Breach fails from this standpoint, and it will be interesting to see how many people are still playing in a few weeks when the novelty has worn thin, and the paltry rewards and extremely binary risk are taking their toll.

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alhazred70 wrote:

Breaches design is binary pass/fail a dice roll with no information on which to base a choice.

You know the level of the zone you're in, you can guess the difficulty range of the enemies you will face. If the breach looks bad when you open it you can simply leave without clearing and expanding it. If I fear a bad Breach I generally dash out of it at the start and look at how things are going.

If all else fails, you can always logout macro.

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Nykken wrote:

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alhazred70 wrote:

All the goals in games are just excuses to enjoy the process of playing. Once you feel
entitled to the rewards without playing, once you want the obstacles removed or the goals made trivial to achieve what you're really saying is you no longer want to PLAY.

That quote is not related to this, though I can see how it may have confused you. It's about long term goals in games (like doing Lab, or just getting rewards of Lab without doing it). My OP states clearly that I am in fact losing interest in playing Breach (a temp league not a long term goal) and may no longer want to play it (nor am I trying to remove it for you or others or even asking for it to be modified), I am critical of the design, based on better designs they have used ion the past (not withstanding level of challenge)

Unfortunately this is another poor correlation you're making, as I am not asking for breach to be removed or even modified, I am speculating on how fast the league dies, and stating reasons why I think it will be short lived. I am comparing it to better designed leagues like essence (again without respect to overall challenge level).

You and others for whatever reason have chosen to portray this as me "not wanting challenge" when my argument is more nuanced than that. I want gameplay choices that are not uninformed rolls of the dice. Binary pass/fail mechanics are not good game design.

So just to get this straight you ARE waving the white flag on your previous statements which I countered and you apparently have nothing to bolster with (granted it's hard to bolster empty claims of popularity and highly implausible correlations of things players couldn't have known beforehand like how challenging breach would be).

All of this is ignoring that initial popularity is no indicator of how well designed something is, surely you've played a game that was massively popular and hyped that turned out to be poorly designed? Well do me a favor: apply that experience to this temp league.

Just to get this back on track:

Essence could have been harder but that has no bearing on the argument at hand as this isn't about easy versus hard. Essence did have information with which to make a choice, and it had at least arguably better rewards (you always got the equivalent to at least an alch).

Breach is very spikey often being a pass/fail binary mechanic it presents you with no information to make an informed choice and so for players who fall in the middle of the pack or lower ranks of skill and build the best tactic at least until "leveled" may be to simply avoid all breaches. I predict this will be commonplace, I expect the popularity of the league to fall off sharply due to it.

Both farming while overlevel and avoiding Breaches during the course of play are not things a game designer is going to be trying to accomplish. The idea of a temp league mechanic is to engage the players organically in replaying the same base content not incentivize them to over level farm, or avoid.

Finally this idea that binary challenge is actually desirable challenge in a game is a side top worthy of discussing. Lots of people feel that bosses "one shotting", volatiles or detonate dead, or off screen reflect one shot, are cheap mechanics that provide the wrong sort of challenge. They only test your ability to read map mods and avoid, or abuse narrowly defined build mechanics that make you resistant or impervious to that cheap binary mechanic, or follow someone elses build that "can do reflect" or "can face tank even the rippy breaches".

Gameplay is not improved by arbitrary pass/fail mechanics, reflexes aren't tested by this, game knowledge is not tested by this, tactical responses are not tested, cooperation is not tested, the only thing tested is: is your build (or someone elses build) able to live through almost anything? pass or fail.

Nope, wont happen. Perandus will always have that because you cant just get free loot now and fuck off after a few weeks of playing.

But it's not a binary mechanic, you can leave the breach.

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Nykken wrote:

But it's not a binary mechanic, you can leave the breach.

Drawing an arbitrary distinction based on the degree of failure doesn't make the mechanic not binary. It's a yes no choice to open it or not based on zero information, and the breach is often binary (rippy huge spawn with bad rolls, or not). and often the massive spawn kills you immediately before you can leave anyway. You either chose to not do it or to do it, based on zero information and knowing you might die instantly or not. More importantly the mobs in higher difficulty have multiple ways to freeze/stunlock/slow/silence, and I have been killed outside of breeches by mobs inside breaches as well as mobs that are still invisible or becoming invisible as the breach collapsed.

In my experience the edges of a breach are maybe the worst place to be, I'm not sure but it almost feels like they have an enrage style mechanic towards players outside of the beach. Which I could see being designed in to try and cut down on people cheezing in parties, but hard to tell, could have just been extra rippy mobs.

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alhazred70 wrote:

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Nykken wrote:

But it's not a binary mechanic, you can leave the breach.

Drawing an arbitrary distinction based on the degree of failure doesn't make the mechanic not binary. It's a yes no choice to open it or not based on zero information, and the breach is often binary (rippy huge spawn with bad rolls, or not). and often the massive spawn kills you immediately before you can leave anyway. You either chose to not do it or to do it, based on zero information and knowing you might die instantly or not. More importantly the mobs in higher difficulty have multiple ways to freeze/stunlock/slow/silence, and I have been killed outside of breeches by mobs inside breaches as well as mobs that are still invisible or becoming invisible as the breach collapsed.

In my experience the edges of a breach are maybe the worst place to be, I'm not sure but it almost feels like they have an enrage style mechanic towards players outside of the beach. Which I could see being designed in to try and cut down on people cheezing in parties, but hard to tell, could have just been extra rippy mobs.

I don't know what you're talking about. I've died to breaches but never instantly and before it happened I always felt like I was pushing content with gear and levels that weren't high enough to guarantee my safety, and I'm pretty sure I could have gotten out of those situations with my movement skill if I had played it right instead of trying to milk the breach..

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Nykken wrote:

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alhazred70 wrote:

Breaches design is binary pass/fail a dice roll with no information on which to base a choice.

You know the level of the zone you're in, you can guess the difficulty range of the enemies you will face. If the breach looks bad when you open it you can simply leave without clearing and expanding it. If I fear a bad Breach I generally dash out of it at the start and look at how things are going.

If all else fails, you can always logout macro.

It would be cool if you could see the type of breach, exspecially while leveling you might not want to do the Lightning one with not capped lightning resists, this would allow you to make a decision.

Just avoid breaches until you're confident enough you can make it.
It's not like you have no choice, some will say: YOU made the decision to open the breach, now deal with it.

You can always avoid it and for that reason alone, breaches difficulties are justified.
Remember Beyond where we had no choice but to fight ? I think Breach is fair enough.

Essence was one of the worst league ever made. No challenge, easy monsters, just boring.
1/3 of my HC guildmates left after one week of essence. Right now most of my friends/guildmates seems to enjoy Breach more than any other league.

I predict your prediction to be horribly wrong ;)