Quote
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.