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dfnce

Spec Ops Full Playthrough Event (split from Time Spent in Queue)

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I think it was just stupid to spread whole population across 20 missions. Yes, i know the delay timer is inaccurate, but when you get average of 20 missions, it becomes fake information.

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The last Moscow mission is blocker for many players, so many will have delays to start AD campaing.

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Edited by dfnce (see edit history)

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Yea I'm currently showing 14min queue time, with 6 average, but will be longer because that takes into account ALL spec ops missions running atm.. 

Edited by Azdule (see edit history)

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I finished Caribbean Crisis, Black Sea Incursion, and Arabian Nights last night.  So I'm about to start Moscow Calling some time later today and will see how it goes.

I don't personally think that MC4 is all that hard, but I know that it's a blocker for a lot of people.  You'd think that anyone doing it now through this event would have played it before and should know what to do... but I guess the first 3 are easy enough that complete newbies could get carried to MC4 and have zero awareness.

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I think it was a nice idea, just the way the game runs didn't make it work well.  Which is a shame.  I was lucky that I 'picked up' a group that were running on the same spec ops as me, but when I missed their game, it was 40m wait times.  Due to it taking 6-7 hours on the lower tiers (under 8) I decided against even trying the tier 9/10 as the mission failures you get on those would result in me smashing my face into a wall...and I kinda like my walls to be in one piece

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Maybe a better idea for next time (if there is one) is to let folks start somewhere in the middle of the series (or randomly start them on Ch1 somewhere) and go all the way around if they want. Kind of like a shotgun start golf tournament. That way if a group starts on CC, and 1 person drops after the last chapter, a player could fill in the hole for starting BSI... etc etc.

I had to be time efficient this past weekend, so just stuck to PvE to get the contract missions done.  The SO playfest looked like a cool idea, just didn't have the time to sink into it.

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I really enjoyed playing Caribbean Crisis, Black Sea Incursion, Arabian Nights, and Moscow Calling through in order.  Queue times were a couple of minutes for most of those matches, possibly has high as 7-8 minutes during Moscow Calling.  So long queues, but not interminable.  It was fun to get the story re-told to me in real time, so to speak.  Unfortunately I hit a brick queue wall after Moscow Calling and was never able to get even one mission of American Dream.

I was also a little bummed to discover on Sunday that War Games is only Friday-Saturday.  I assumed it would run all weekend... I probably should have read the announcement more closely.

So I think the concept was great.  It was just queue times that caused problems, and I don't really have any ideas to solve that.

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UiXmn1p.png

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.


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UiXmn1p.png

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.

Edited by Mercenary_W (see edit history)

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Idea was good but it blatantly showed the main weakness of this game.

Actually it was already an accomplishment if you even managed to get the whole series done solo because the waiting times were horrendous. The "rewards" were basically a joke given that you needed to do twice as much to get a box compared to the usual 4 battles or even only 1 battle in Labyrinth. Would have been way better if there was some prem time or special avatar/camo or whatever.

It doesn't seem like lots of people were tryharding the damage contest like me. Currently there are even only 4 submissions for T6. Understandable because I can't really recommend this waste of time. 

It was fun to replay the specops in the intended order but other than that it was not worth it.

Maybe give away a Magnus avatar next time for completion of a run :sealofapproval:


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So if I understand your feedback correctly: under the current circumstances, the event made no sense because of long waiting times. Got it.

But imagine if the waiting times were instant.

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

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

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

 

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i think the main reason its because rewards are not worth it. putting aside the queue times, two boxes for all those missions are not worth it.

so overall its a fun idea, too bad for mc4 tho, but thats my personal taste, and i prefer playing normal pve than this event, because the rewards are not worth it. im not touching SH because its literally not enjoyable for the mix of bad fps and artificial difficulty. (and even if its offtopic, let me express my perplexity since i have a 6950x, 32gb ram and a 2080ti and in some chapters of SH i touch around 40fps, without counting autocannon spam, that dips it even more, like 30fps)

Edited by Pesa_ (see edit history)

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21 minutes ago, Silentstalker said:

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

I would say no, but I'm heavily biased because I'm thoroughly burnt out. Spec ops can only be played so many times before it becomes a chore, because the maps require far more time and effort than standard PvE while not having any fun special mechanics to keep it interesting. Having air or "boss" targets to shoot down isn't fun, it's just a big time sink requiring me to hold down my left mouse button. MC3/4 with the delivery mechanics are actually mildly fun, but it's too easy for one player to grief the entire team that I don't bother playing them without a full platoon.

A full playthrough of all the spec ops CAN be fun if I don't have to invest so much time and effort into it.

30 minutes ago, Silentstalker said:

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

I definitely only play it for the rewards, and only the boxes that give me BP coin coupons. In fact, I consider the boxes to be the only rewards, I don't even care about achievements anymore and I certainly don't feel any pride and accomplishment.

33 minutes ago, Silentstalker said:

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

Assuming no first win multipliers (x2/3/4), I'd rather play standard PvE. It requires far less effort on my part, takes far less time AND have higher asset rewards (XP and credits). I can earn more in 10 minutes of standard PvE than 20 minutes of Spec Ops, largely due to the standard PvE missions having higher objective multipliers than Spec Ops.


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40 minutes ago, Silentstalker said:

So if I understand your feedback correctly: under the current circumstances, the event made no sense because of long waiting times. Got it.

But imagine if the waiting times were instant.

1) Would something like that be fun, such playthroughs? It could be fun, but I think locking it to a pre-made would be a better idea.  Much like heroics, getting a group of players together would be the best way to do it as you can go at your own speed, take a comfort break when needed and then not have to queue for 40m+.  Plus when you fail MC chapter 4, you can easily yell at somebody to express your frustration :)

2) Or would it be something you'd do just for the rewards?  Rewards are nice, but for me in the version we had it didn't make sense.  It wasn't worth the effort put into it.  8 hours+ of gameplay / queueing resulting in 2 boxes, when you'd normally get those 2 boxes for 2 hours (average) gameplay.  If it had better rewards, I'd be willing to put more effort into it.  Perhaps a battalion mission related to it?  Much like complete heroics, but complete spec ops chain on 9/10 for X contribution points or something.  As Has has pointed out, in its current form it's around 18 hours (2 gaming days) for two runs for 4 boxes was not great.  

I think currently most of us here have completed the spec op's hundreds of times and have most of the cheeves for them.  I'm nearing completion of a few of them aswell (Curse you CC for only counting SPG on the final chapter!) so there isn't really much incentive to play them, other than the boxes.  The story line of them is something I have listened to hundreds of times.  

Quote

3) If the rewards were the same, would you rather play (current) standard PvE or (current) Spec Ops?  If rewards were to stay the same (1 box per Spec ops chapter per tier) I'd prefer to run just the normal ones at the weekend. The chain, in the form we've seen, didn't add anything to my gameplay experience.  It was a slog of just grinding through things for a reward that was normally given out for less work.  

Also not sure why this has become a sub quote section..

 

 

Overall I think it was a good idea, but execution was flawed.  It could do with some improvements overall.  A thing I heard some while ago - was the juice worth the squeeze?  In this case no.  But there is potential for it to be.

 

*edit* I also thought - the reason I did slog through the chain was because it was easier to farm the raid event - often Spec ops are required to stand a chance of completing event missions or some of the harder contract missions

Edited by Azdule (see edit history)

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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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1 hour ago, Silentstalker said:

So if I understand your feedback correctly: under the current circumstances, the event made no sense because of long waiting times. Got it.

But imagine if the waiting times were instant.

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

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

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

 

My opinion

- Rewards for weekend SO ( 1mission=1container) were fine and leave them in peace. 

- Fun factor cannot be good with very long gameplay. Having ideal waiting and boot times up to 1 minute, the average time to complete four SO missions (one season) with 100% WR is usually just below or about 1h. But from my random experience considering all delays and failures, it usually takes no less than 2 hours to finish a single SO on tier 10. 

- PvE vehicle damaging potential was and is in imbalance. Making all sorts of damage competitions in PvE with expensive prizes rewards serves to the pretty much same group of players playing on same meta vehicles. I think it is very counter-productive to PvP mode and its community as you show big finger to them, and makes angry players who either get these vehicles in BP with real effort or has to pay insane price for lootboxes.

- Standard PvE is utterly boring and poorly balanced vs high DPM meta which is now granted to all main classes. Even most of SO (except SH and MC) are in limbo of previous assumptions how much damage every player could produce. And we have shitload of Bradleys and other light armored trash everywhere which makes up to huge dominance of AC vehicles. 

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53 minutes ago, Silentstalker said:

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

The idea is great so if I got rather fast waiting times like < ~5min I would have liked the event. I prefer Specops to normal PVE so maybe that's just me. However, there's no point in doing such events often but rather once in a year or so to make it something special and justify the time it requires to actually complete it. That being said it might be a good idea to make the duration a bit longer than just a weekend. Like a week or so. 

Of course in order to fill the queue and make people actually play it the rewards need to be better. Otherwise only mad people like me end up doing it.

1 hour ago, Silentstalker said:

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

As I said I like the general idea of doing a full playthrough of all Specops when I got the time for wasting dedicating a whole day  to just play games. It's not something I'd do every weekend but occasionally it's fun. (especially in those damn corona times where you can't do shit anyways)

The rewards need to be better tough as I'm quite sure lots of people don't want to spend so much time while getting less rewards than normally. Quite sure most of the people would do it for the rewards. 

4 hours ago, Silentstalker said:

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

Why not both. I hardly ever play normal PVE so it might motivate me to play some of those missions, as long as I don't have to do the same ones over and over again.


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10 hours ago, TeyKey1 said:

Why not both. I hardly ever play normal PVE so it might motivate me to play some of those missions, as long as I don't have to do the same ones over and over again.

A PvE playthrough might be interesting - chain a series of PVE missions together so you play through all the maps, instead of being stuck in the rotation getting funneled into the same 3-4 maps in a session.

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On 11/3/2020 at 1:43 AM, Silentstalker said:

So if I understand your feedback correctly: under the current circumstances, the event made no sense because of long waiting times. Got it.

But imagine if the waiting times were instant.

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

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

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

 

1) Yes!  I liked the concept of this event, it just didn't work so well in reality due to the way the queues work.  Even so I still managed to play through 4 of the 6.

2) No, if the queue times were decent (they wouldn't even have to be instant) I'd probably play through this event over and over a couple of times in an event weekend.  It's a fun event.  Even if this were always available, I'd likely play it periodically simply because it's fun.  I usually enjoy Spec Ops missions more than PvE missions, but that could be due to the fact that I've played every PvE mission so many times that they're practically rote now.

3) TL;DR I'd rather have both.  It's a difficult call for two reasons.  First, the rewards aren't currently the same and it would depend on what "the same" meant.  Does that mean the same on a per mission basis, or the same on a missions per hour basis?  Remember that there's well over a minute of "wasted" time involved with every mission just to join the mission and get connected, do the 30-second countdown, and then exit back to the garage at the end of the mission.  If you add in even a small amount of time waiting in queue, the "wasted" time per mission approaches 2 minutes.  So "the same" can't just be based on time spent in mission, it has to include all that wasted time also in order to be valid.  Second, I believe that I currently prefer Spec Ops because the Spec Ops missions are less familiar and ergo more fun.  That said, they're also much more channeled and so would likely get boring faster.  I think it would be interesting if PvE gave better rewards of one type while Spec Ops gave better rewards of another type.  Just as an example, PvE could give better XP while Spec Ops could give better credits.

16 hours ago, Quantum_Ranger said:

instead of being stuck in the rotation getting funneled into the same 3-4 maps in a session.

Bluntly, that's just user error.  There are 10 PvE maps active at any given time, and it's trivial to get to play all of them instead of the same 3 or 4 over and over.  All you have to do is wait for the next mission instead of insta-queuing as soon as you complete a mission.

And if you use Haswell's queue tracker twitch stream, it's even easier because you can plan which missions to play when.

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On 11/4/2020 at 1:07 PM, knutliott said:

or.  There are 10 PvE maps active at any given time, and it's trivial to get to play all of them instead of the same 3 or 4 over and over.  All you have to do is wait for the next mission instead of insta-queuing as soon as you complete a mission.

And if you use Haswell's queue tracker twitch stream, it's even easier because you can plan which missions to play when.

That was the point - having a playthrough would allow you to insta-queue into the next mission without having to sit one out...

And yes, @Haswell is god. 

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