Mercenary_W

This is fantastic.

Just shared. I do hope this can be heard.

44 minutes ago, Silentstalker said:

1) Would something like that be fun, such playthroughs?

If it had secret changes and minor changes throughout the marathon to the Spec Ops missions, it would've taken players by surprise and feel a bit engaged. The idea is sound but it was poorly executed without taken consideration of what would possibly happen if players are just jumbled across all the chapters and will have a hard time to queue for the same chapter. One factor that could've saved this possibly was lock it as a Platoon only instance like Heroics, where you can play it with minimum of two players if you want, but it would need to be it's own mode without replacing the usual weekends Spec Ops.
 

48 minutes ago, Silentstalker said:

2) Or would it be something you'd do just for the rewards?

I possibly can't answer this with a sound response as I could not determine it for myself as I was stuck in queue in CC for the whole weekend. If two crates are awarded for fulfilling 10 chapter completion, that's completely two extra runs in comparison to doing both Hardcore and Extreme which total 8 chapter runs to get two crates. Would do so for rewards as well but the effort that is needed for the crates are just not in par with the rewards in ratio, if the 10 chapter completion rewarded an extra THIRD crate for 10 runs vs 8 runs (both HC and EX total), it would've done a bit of justice.

But in standard terms of weekend Spec Ops, most people who would be done or either not bothering with achievements would only do so for the rewards, which are the crates.
 

1 hour ago, Silentstalker said:

3) If the rewards were the same, would you rather play (current) standard PvE or (current) Spec Ops?

Would play standard/hardcore general PvE if I have fulfilled my needs from Spec Ops, otherwise if there's weekend event that makes it worth it; i.e 4x consistent throughout the weekend, I believe people would play weekend Spec Ops more for that continued extra bonus. This could've also been a good factor for the Marathon that would've made people queue up for more if it had 4x as well just for the heck of the special change. But going back a bit, general standard PvE would be seen being played more if weekend Spec Ops only has crates to award players.

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The idea of playing through all the spec ops in order back to back is great, but reality of the game is that all the missions are essentially the same old "kill everything and wait" format. This burns people out very quickly, if they haven't given up because of the queue times already.

"Play during prime time" is NOT good advice when there are players all around the world across different time zones. If a game mode is touted to be available on demand but only actually playable during a narrow time window in practice, this is comparable to visiting a 24/7 restaurant but being told there won't be any service outside of normal dining times. This is the exact same issue that plagued PvP.

 

The limited availability of weekend War Games is also a major contributor to this flop, having only 72 hours in total to slog through 20 missions (or more) and not even factoring in queue time. I'll try to break it down in terms of time commitment estimates:

• CC: 1.5 hours - lots of waiting time in CC1/2 making speedruns impossible; CC3/4 have long drawn out caps.
• BSI: 1 hour - BSI1/3 have lots of "wait for the defense timer to finish" moments; BSI2/4 compensates with good speedrun viability.
• AN: 1 hour - AN1/2 are slightly annoying because of the defense timers; AN3 has speedrun potential; AN4 is a slog.
• MC: 1 hour - All the chapters are good for speedruns, assuming pubshit don't grief you to hell and back in MC3/4.
• AD: 1 hour - All except AD3 are good for speedruns; be prepared to carry hard in AD4 if you are the only dakka.

That's 5.5 hours of active play time, I'll range that into 5-6 hours for wiggle room. Note that this doesn't include losses and retries, so for less experienced players this will likely drag out to 7 hours or more. Assume an average of 10 minutes for loading and queue times between each mission, that's 200 minutes (over 3 hours) of waiting time over the span of 20 missions. Total is now up to around 9 hours of sitting in front of the game now.

War Games is only available for 3 days each weekend, that's 72 hours assuming queue times are equal throughout the entire period and for all the maps. But the queue times are not equal, you'd have to play during prime times to even hope to get into a game. I will be generous and assume 8 hours of prime time every day, so that gives 24 hours of prime time.

24 hours (over 3x 8 hour segments) to shovel in 9 hours of work tedious and repetitive work. That's only for ONE tier and not two, if you want to do both tier 8 and tier 10 you'd have to invest 18 hours into this. This isn't a casual game anymore, this is a full-time job with overtime but without any compensation for your time and effort.

 

It's not hard to see why the event flopped. Many people (including myself) play weekend War Games for the boxes ONLY and have zero interest in the story that we've heard hundreds of times; this past weekend we've been asked to put in 5 times the effort for only 2 times the reward. I didn't participate in this event at all, I'm sure I wasn't alone to share the "fuck this shit" sentiment.

 

I'm not able to relate with the lengthy run as I was stuck in CC waiting for random queues, I definitely agree that the effort was definitely not worth the rewards in ratio.

But yes, my primary issue with this idea of a mode was that there are more chapters so number of players to queue for the same chapter are likely so low that you will likely spend more time waiting for a random team to be on your chapter you need than running through it as whole marathon and with the added issue of time zones as some players will really miss out when queue times are better such as I.