I asked this in another thread with slightly different wording but it understandably got lost in a sea of other responses as the thread blew up:
Some games feel like they have pretty quick progression whilst others feel like a slog. Zombie Massacre comes to mind as a really good example of something that fits my definition of what the progression rate should be, a game where if you just want to dedicate your evening to playing that one mode, you can knock out a few milestones.
Fishing on the other hand, especially before the hotfix felt exceedingly slow. Some people claimed they spent 12 hours straight fishing and were just about touching one milestone. If that’s to be believed then shaving 3 hours off that time in the latest hotfix is significant, but still results in a milestone that can take nine hours straight to fulfill, which seems far too slow to me. At that point it’s sluggish and the goals feel like you have to burn yourself out over them if you want to attain them in the shorter term.
So my question is this; What is the ideal balanced point for Pixeltail? Are all milestones meant to be sluggish enough to encourage burnout and macroing? Are they meant to be attainable reasonably quickly? (I remember discussion around a prestige system that seemed to indicate this at one point)
Or is the aim somewhere in between? Because the xp rates being all over the place between game modes makes it really hard to tell what the balance aim is.
I’ve noticed that XP for the Plaza itself is extremely slow. I’ve spent hours in there, and I’ve unlocked no milestones; I’m only about halfway through to the first one, if that far. Meanwhile, I’ve already unlocked three milestones in Minigolf despite having spent about the same amount of time.
I think Plaza XP is one of the only things that people say is too slow that I actually disagree with. I’ve been playing here and there since the 0.7.0.0 update and I’m at halfway to max XP which seems just about right imo.
Also, like already stated, if you’re doing ANYTHING in the plaza (bowling, casino, trivia, fishing, etc.), you’ll be getting Plaza XP.
you shouldn’t be grinding them just to get milestones, you can if you want, but that is your own fault if it causes you to get burn out from playing them, you wont get burn out if you dont force yourself to play them just to get a milestone that you are meant to get naturally for playing rather than only working towards the milestones, most of the time i forget about milestones and just allow them to get unlocked naturally for playing.
ZM is too much and too quick of an xp gain, i was playing ZM normally over a week and ended up getting all the milestones at the end of the week, thats too quick imo, needs to be at least halved xp gain or less.
Plaza is just bad, i can play, but i tend to alt tab out to do stuff for a minute then go back to playing, but by that time i have been put as AFK, that causes me to loose xp, they need more ways to get exp other than just waiting around constantly while moving which i cant do since i have to alt tab out a lot to do other stuff. I alt tab out between rounds on ballrace but i still get xp, plaza is just bad for gaining xp.
and i cant say much for minigolf or virus, i just dont play them since minigolf is ehh for me, virus infect is ruined imo, i can hardly have any fun on virus anymore. so i just haven’t played them in a long time.
Milestones are an incentive to play those games past the point that they are ordinarily fun. They add replayability but, space out the milestones too far, and it becomes a massive slog. I had 500 hours prior to milestones, have bought multiple condos, customized them, bought the cosmetics I want, so milestones are my reason to replay games I’ve previously played a ton to the point that they are now stale.
What you keep proposing, is that the incentive I now have to play those games take forever to attain, which just turns my experience into a slow grind. That’s not fun. A grind at a resonable pace however, where I feel like milestones are actually attainable if I dedicate myself, is. I should have that option, as should other players.
Not to mention unique item archtypes such as the first drivable boat for fishing, and guns are locked behind milestones, and no variant of them can be bought for money. So if you want to experience that new content, grinding additional units isn’t going to be sufficient to do so.
There’s a really simple solution that should satisfy both of us without the experience feeling too fast for you, or too slow for me; prestige tiers. Allow players to earn the current milestones at a reasonable pace, then over time, add additional tiers so that the length increases without the space between content being stretched too far for those who aren’t as patient as you. Milestones should serve both types of players.
Milestones are designed to be earned over a long period of time. They are meant to be items you get for playing the individual games for awhile. You aren’t supposed to sit and grind for them all day, but if people want to do that then that’s up to them. And you’re not supposed to get them in just one day of gaming. They are long term goals - a milestone. I’d say you earn them too fast in ZM, honestly.
They are meant to last a long time and represent how much experience a player has in one game.
Yes, if you played the game before the release of milestones I can see how you can get burnt out because you already were burnt out. But, it’s designed for fresh start players.
Plaza EXP is going to be soon tweaked to also fill up when playing Plaza games (if you get Bowling EXP - a percentage of that also gives you Plaza EXP). Same with Casino EXP, it’ll be soon adjusted to be based on winnings.
Developing the milestones took a long time and creating new ones would be a lot of work as well, which is why adding new ones isn’t that easy. Also, just adding more milestones and making the current ones easier wouldn’t help at all as you’d still want the higher tier ones and you’d have the same complaints.
As for vehicles, I do have plans for non milestone versions of some of the items but they aren’t the same theme or they have limitations (like popcorn that isn’t infinite use).
I didn’t think the idea behind a prestige system was identical tiers? I thought that was something else.
Even if for some reason there was something in the prestige system that I really wanted, by using those extra tiers to pad the grind, it would actually feel faster to attain goals which is my point. You could expect people to grind for the same amount of total time as they are now, but the process wouldn’t feel so dragged out as they would be rewarded more frequently.
You do earn them too fast in ZM. But honestly I don’t mind that since in a lot of other stuff you earn it way too slowly, such as Ballrace. You earn ZM exp faster in singleplayer and BR exp slower in singleplayer.
Which you could say “It’s a race, it should have other people” yeah, but it’s still a race because of the leaderboards, plus the desync of platforms gives advantages to others so it’s not a totally fair race unless it’s comparison of leaderboard scores really.
While we’re on the topic of milestones, can these weird gaps between game world milestones be filled with something?
Zombie Massacre and Virus have milestones all the way through, every step from 100,000 to 1,000,000 XP. In my opinion, that’s how it should be for every game world.
However, Little Crusaders has nothing for the 900,000 milestone, Ball Race has nothing for 700,000 and 900,000, and Minigolf is even more special than that:
It just feels inconsistent, especially when the small badges that display next to your name are consistent across all game worlds (700,000 and 900,000 badges don’t exist in all game worlds).
Not to mention that most of the spaced-out milestone items are a pain to earn because there is absolutely nothing for you to get in-between.
That all came down to coming up with milestones for each game and running out of ideas/items that would be possible to make in time. We could try to come back to that at some point and see about adding more.
That would be good. While I have your attention on the milestone rewards, will some of the items receive a polish pass? I feel like some of the items could really use extra polish to justify their high place on the milestone tiers.
Take for example the 1m helicopter vehicle at the end of Zombie Massacre. It controls identically to it’s RC counterpart, yet it can only be used in condos and obviously it’s larger size in a more confined space makes it clunkier to use. Players clip through its interior when they walk into it, and the traditional descend key for helicopters is by default bound to the exit function so every time you try to descend you end up jumping out of the vehicle. It also only features a single seat as far as I can tell.
It just seems that if someone is going to reach the final tier of an activities milestones, the reward should have a certain level of quality that justifies the length of the grind, and I don’t think some of the rewards have that level of quality yet.
