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Showing content with the highest reputation on 03/18/23 in all areas

  1. -1 points
    This won't be so much a as guide on specific cheesing strategies for contract missions and such, but rather a discussion on the philosophy of expending bare minimum effort and time to satisfy whatever requirements or goals you may have. Contract missions and BP stuff will be used for examples because of their high applicability, but they are by no means the only candidates for minimal effort gameplay. I shall define minimal effort gameplay as a playstyle, in which the goal of playing is to satisfy specific requirements that do not demand continuous effort or contribution throughout the full length of games. This usually goes against the common philosophies of playing to win or playing as best as you can, assuming winning or high performance gameplay are not your goals. It will take far too many words to explain this in detail, so I'll start by using an example from the previous BP: Here, my goal is to achieve 6000 assist damage in 10 battles. There are no other requirements, nor are there any bonuses for achieving beyond the goal of 6000 assist damage. I do not earn extra progress towards the mission for farming more than 6000 assist damage per battle, and I have to do this 10 times. Why then, should I bother to stay any longer in that particular battle after I am certain that I have hit the required 6000 assist damage? It is not time efficient for me to waste time to continue the battle, I could have simply died and went into another battle to progress through the 10 battles faster. For tasks of which I am limited by time (either through mechanics or real life), time itself becomes a limited resource and a metric for efficiency. My goal becomes not only to satisfy whatever requirements I may have, but also to spend as little time as possible to complete the tasks. For example, in order to farm 2000 infantry damage for 10 batles as fast as possible, I can use the method of not staying in my battles any longer than it takes for my infantry to rack up 2000 damage. I can pile in 10 battles and complete the mission within an hour this way. Average active playtime in each battle: less than 3 minutes. The most common rebuttal to my minimal effort gameplay tends to be that you are not being a team player, or that you don't support other players in your battles. While that may be true, the mission requirements of which I'm exerting minimum effort to satisfy do not require any sort of teamplay. As I said above, the goal is time efficiency and not actual gameplay performance, there are no incentives or duty to carry others if it means allocating more time in each battle, time that could be spent finishing missions faster. Another argument is that minimal effort gameplay is against the rules... somehow. This one is easy to refute: there is no rule mandating anyone to play at any competency level. If playing poorly is against the rules somehow then over 90% of the playerbase would be liable to punishment. The goal and execution of minimal effort gameplay also isn't intended to grief other players, so anti-griefing rules also don't apply. In a nutshell, there are no rules against playing poorly intentionally or otherwise. The biggest challenge to minimal effort gameplay is that you are not playing as well as you can, and that your stats will suffer as a result. This argument is easy to address as long as you don't fall into the trap of assuming stats reflect personal performance. Stats don't matter, there is no competition in the game and the stats can easily be rigged, all that matters is how well you can perform when you are required to perform at high skill levels. As long as you can play well when you are needed, who cares if you play like crap when you don't have to play well? You may feel bad for not playing as well as you could, but remember the goal here is about time efficiency not gameplay performance. Playing well doesn't mean squat if you have to spend more time than it is necessary to complete your missions. There is one subjective factor in minimal effort gameplay, that is how much fun you get out of it. Minimal effort gameplay is grindy and not really fun, but neither is having to spend a lot of time to complete grindy missions like doing repetitive tasks for 10 battles. Sometimes the game feels like a chore and hardly fun at all in any way, you may want to complete your tasks as fast as possible so you can spend extra time doing other things you truly enjoy. The fun factor is something players have to address by themselves: how much fun or suffering do you want while grinding through tasks that are hardly fun? How much time are you willing to invest into the game as opposed to doing something else, potentially more fun than the game? I for one, prefer to exert the bare minimum effort required to complete my tasks as fast as possible, so I can get on with doing other things that I actually enjoy. If I have to grind out 10 games of 10000 damage each, then I will do exactly that and no more. This apply to contract missions, BP missions, anything that require repetitive grinding where I don't progress faster by playing better. TL;DR: play smarter, not harder.
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