New goals 10/2/12

[Cipher_Peon]

I want everyone to have the ability to see the goals that I have completed, including the ones that have vanished.

There.

[espher]

Hey gang! Popping in here to ask a genuine question.

Is it more preferable for a goal to be achievable on the first one or two tries, or for it to actually give you a challenge? My personal feeling is a goal with a HARD badge should actually be hard. With these new goals I'm more able to gauge a hard success condition than I have been with previous ones that just set star thresholds or whatever. I think this process I see you all doing of figuring out different playstyles is actually great! That was part of the intent of these goals, and of rebalancing some of the power-ups. RB Blitz has more depth to it the more we can find different ways to use its power-ups.

Also, if you're wondering how I came up with these win values, it was just a matter of Aaron, Nick Chester, and myself each playing each song with said power-up, and figuring out a fair point value based on a sort of middle ground of how we did.

Hi Pope, I appreciate you taking the time to solicit some feedback on this topic. Let me throw my thoughts down.

I think it depends on whether or not hard badges are meant to be exceptionally challenging to players in the middle end of the spectrum, or exceptionally challenging to players at the top end of the spectrum.

If the intent is to challenge players at the middle of the spectrum, some of these challenges have the potential to be exceedingly frustrating (for example, the Child in Time 5* that was part of the long songs goal -- you're spending up to ten minutes per attempt, and it's incredibly hard). If the intent is to engage players at the top of the spectrum, I would say that none of the challenges strike me as over the top. I don't consider myself a "top" player -- because I break combo enough to not be able to take advantage of Jackpot -- but I'd like to think I'm at least above the median, and I've only really struggled on three songs -- "Holy Wars" for gold (three attempts), "Child in Time" for five stars (four attempts), and this one (seventeen attempts). I have cleared every goal put forth (except for a couple of community challenges that ended before I got my hands in the cookie jar or were failed by the community).

Cherry Shockwaves is probably an outlier on the difficulty curve, to be frank. It has several traits that make it a suitable "very hard" challenge (so, hard for players at the higher end of the spectrum), in that it requires thought on how to approach it, it requires careful powerup selection (you're not going to get it without taking Blast Notes for extra OD), it requires accurate play and lane switching (to hit every piece of OD and hit any purple gems sitting on unisons), and it requires astute planning for Shockwave deployment.

The problem is that this level of strategy is marred by the addition of a big luck-based element, in that you need to play everything perfectly and get a bit of favourable RNG with Blast Note placement to clear the goal. Admittedly, it might be easier and less frustrating for someone who approaches it with the initial gameplan -- it only took me two (or three?) attempts playing a "pure overdrive accumulation" approach to secure it, but I also didn't make any mistakes in playing and happened to hit a plausible path to get enough note ticks to squeeze past 50k. I don't know if the 50k was calculated with a "vanilla" (only Shockwave) run, but I'd be curious as to the path you guys selected if that were the case, as it seems to be exceedingly tough.

Going forward, I think we need to maybe have some expectation of what to expect from Hard goals. If the expectation is that we'll see a couple of moderate difficulty, moderate time sink goals -- throwback challenges, album challenges, "gold this subset of not insanely hard to gold songs" -- along with one or two "grind potential" challenges, that's pretty reasonable. Really, seventeen attempts of Cherry Waves is still under two hours of grinding, and with an MMO/FPS/RPG background that's pretty minimal. I think it was more the required change in style and fact that it differed from the norm that was off-puting and frustrating. If you do deploy more "hard" challenges like this one, try to take into account how chance impacts the... chance... of success.

Of course, it could always be worse. You could have asked us to gold Child in Time.

[bigmf]

Anyway, I think hard goals should take a few attempts, or have a big number of songs to do. I was slightly surprised that I completed one of these new ones in one shot, and I don't think that should happen often.

I think the easy (whatever) goals are about right. If you have good runs on two songs you're done, if not one more song will do it.

[GNFfhqwhgads]

I want everyone to have the ability to see the goals that I have completed, including the ones that have vanished.

There.

Except for the part where you can't see someone else's list, only the numbers of each category.


So on top of the pathetically small amount of people that would go to your profile(read: no one), you'd then have a smaller subset that go back and forth, counting out Goals and comparing to your total numbers(read: less than no one).



Way to go, Headache. You really have your priorities straight.

[bigmf]

Except for the part where you can't see someone else's list, only the numbers of each category.


So on top of the pathetically small amount of people that would go to your profile(read: no one), you'd then have a smaller subset that go back and forth, counting out Goals and comparing to your total numbers(read: less than no one).



Way to go, Headache. You really have your priorities straight.

There's at least one person who would go and view Cipher's profile.

[HMXPope]

I think it depends on whether or not hard badges are meant to be exceptionally challenging to players in the middle end of the spectrum, or exceptionally challenging to players at the top end of the spectrum.

Therein lies my ever-present existential quandary. Because RB World doesn't have a HARD and an EXPERT level, we sort of have to lump both of those groups into Hard. What I've been trying to do is create a mix of Hard goals that more aimed at those more advanced players and some that the "middle end" players can also achieve.

For example, I don't believe it's too hard to get 5 stars on most any song in RB Blitz. If you've got a full power-up loadout, you should be able to land on 5 stars without too much headache. Gold stars, though, are another level up, especially on crazy metal songs, so that's a benchmark I try to use for those harder Hard goals.

I think it will continue to be a balancing act, but your point of me (or somebody) giving a heads up as to whether a goal is REALLY hard, or just normal hard is something I'll think about. I may start doing these power-up specific goals in tandem at HARD and MEDIUM levels, to give people a choice.

[GNFfhqwhgads]

Crazy metal songs are probably the easiest to Gold, just because of sheer note density.

[espher]

I think it will continue to be a balancing act, but your point of me (or somebody) giving a heads up as to whether a goal is REALLY hard, or just normal hard is something I'll think about.

I'm not even sure it necessarily needs to be at a goal-specific level; rather, I just think that we would need to know what our expectations for these goals should be. If the expectation is that most of the hard goals will be fairly challenging to, say, the top 40%, but there will be the odd extremely hard goal that's more or less meant to challenge the top echelons, there's nothing unreasonable about that. I think that we (or at least I) just need to know that is the intent, so that if we DO hit that one goal that "seems impossible", it perhaps becomes a hint that we need to sit down and sketch out our plan instead of employing our "usual" strategies.

Given that that seems to be your intent, I don't think you have much to worry about. We just need to be cognisant of it.

The one thing I do want to emphasize is that fair consideration needs to be given to the susceptibility of specific goals to other powerups (and, for anything purple, chance). At some point things start to lean more towards "being lucky" than "being good".

Though all three Overdrive goals do stand to benefit from being paired up with Blast Notes, Band on the Run and Message in a Bottlerocket can more or less be reached through "normal" play (thanks to tempo in the former and likely note density and overdrive phrase quantities in the latter). Cherry Shockwaves is seemingly the one exception this week. I had a score that was 6th (out of probably 300 at the time) on I think my fourth play using Shockwave/Blast Notes/Super Drums, but it took another thirteen (and, admittedly, a little shift in strategy) to get the right purple gem placement to hit the goal, and even then I only cleared it by 700 points (or about 10% of one "typical" activation in that run, meaning if I'd missed a pair of OD notes I may have missed it altogether.)

Frankly, I probably need to take my own concerns with a grain of salt -- despite all my angry ranting and complaining, I /did/ still manage to complete all of the powerup goals within about a two and a half hour span. :/

[SheSaidSheSaid]

Hey gang! Popping in here to ask a genuine question.

Is it more preferable for a goal to be achievable on the first one or two tries, or for it to actually give you a challenge? My personal feeling is a goal with a HARD badge should actually be hard. With these new goals I'm more able to gauge a hard success condition than I have been with previous ones that just set star thresholds or whatever. I think this process I see you all doing of figuring out different playstyles is actually great! That was part of the intent of these goals, and of rebalancing some of the power-ups. RB Blitz has more depth to it the more we can find different ways to use its power-ups.

Also, if you're wondering how I came up with these win values, it was just a matter of Aaron, Nick Chester, and myself each playing each song with said power-up, and figuring out a fair point value based on a sort of middle ground of how we did.

They were fine this week. I don't have the song for the Shockwave goal, so I can't speak to that one, but the others were all very much like a boss battle. You get your ass kicked the first time, the second time you figure out a method, and the third time you slay the monster. Maybe it takes a few more than three tries, but it's nothing I was staying up all night trying to clear.

I wouldn't make them any harder still, though.

[HeyRiles]

I think that the most difficult goals should be achieved either with a great path or a lot of luck, but I don't think the most difficult goals should be achieved with both a great path and a lot of luck. It's pretty frustrating to know you're doing everything right but just can't get a good roll