Improve PvP Rewards

[Sharlank]

I'll try to organize this suggestion as well as I can, mainly because I really hope every staff member can look through this one without being blocked by the classic "text wall, TL;DR" or being annoyed by a shabby post with "hey make this better xD".

 

1. Problem & Reason of the suggestion

 

Short version:

PvP rewards are not proportionate to the effort needed to being eligible to get them.

 

Long version:

I'll just talk for myself, but honestly I lost a lot of motivation since I saw what the rewards were and that they were given only to top 25 players in the whole server. I'm currently around 250 pvp rating, and I'm pretty sure i win more than 50% of my games, so technically would be possible for me to climb a bit more, maybe another 100 rating points. The point is, why should I bother? I already know I won't make it to the top 25, and that my rating at the end of the season will matter exactly as much as one guy with 0 PvP rating. That. That I find very frustrating, and it's the main reason I'm making this suggestion.

 

2. Suggestion

 

Short version:

Improve the reward PvP system, making it so it differentiates people who achieve a certain rating from the ones who don't play PvP at all in the very first place.

 

Long version:

Again, only my opinion here. I played many different games with a structured PvP system (League of Legends mostly, KingsAge, ecc...) and the satisfaction of achieving a better ranking and being rewarded with a different "tier" (in LoL) or with some kind of loot (KingsAge) was enough to keep me wanting to improve and to play to get the next reward.

With the current PvP system in PRO i feel like there's a lack of that component, that "ingredient" which makes a PvP experience really enjoyable and competitive, in my opinion that eventual addition to the game would boost up at the same time both the fun of playing against other players and the motivation to improve with better strategies (and honestly the motivation to play PvP at all).

 

Now how would a structured, healthy PvP system look like in PRO? Let's see where are we starting from.

 

3. Analysis of the current PvP System

 

Before starting to analyze eventual possible other PvP Rewards systems, let's start from the very concept of "reward" inside the context of a MMO PvP environment.

 

What a "reward" should do in the first place?</SIZE>

1. 1. Incentivize the usage of the PvP system.

• 2. Motivate players that are already using the PvP system to "stay" in the said system.

• 3. Grant a sense of achievement into the players that are dedicated to the PvP system.

• 4. Ensure a clear differentiation between "really remarkable achievement" and "not so special achievement".

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The current PvP system is "structured" in the following way (to my knowledge):

1. - Rating system grants the player + tot. points for winning / - tot. points for losing a game.

• - There's a ladder, which displays players from the one with the best rating to the 25th best player.

• - Rewards are granted by "end of the season" which usually last around 1 month to the 25 best players in the ladder.

• - Those rewards (to my knowledge) are masterball and PvP exclusive clothing (changing colours each season).

 

3.1 What are the main flaws of the current PvP system?

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1. - Lack of Transparency & Accessibility

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In the very first place, for a reward system to work, it must be known by the players. The current lack of transparency about the rewards is in my opinion a very significative issue that's easy to tackle as well.

Now I get that during the very first PvP ranked season the "surprise effect" of not knowing what the rewards were might have been a good incentive, this is not possible or sustainable with a constantly growing population of PvP players (and their demands) and the natural progression of the MMO environment (even though a surprise component of the rewards could stay very well).

It took me way too much time in game to get to know (and i'm yet not 100% sure) what the rewards are and to whom are given (that at least i'm 100% sure), and I've got the information through a guy who received them... Not the best channel to communicate to a wide population of PvP players.

 

A clearer duration of a single "season" with the end date made public (either in the forum or the official site) at least 2 weeks before the ending (or even at the very start of the season, e.g. 1st of each month or 30 consecutive days) would be a great improvement.

 

The accessibility is an issue as well, the current ladder page ( https://pokemonrevolution.net/ladder.php ) is very messy and it mixes up 1. non-ranked players, 2. ranked players and 3. total hours of gameplay. It gets even more annoying if you're playing on the blue server having to scroll down all the way to the bottom of the page.

 

As of how to improve both the transparency of the rewards and the accessibility at the same time, a really simple and not time consuming solution would be a different layout in the official ladder page with a text or link to a post in the forum for the rewards. But on how to improve the system we'll get on later on on the post, thanks for reading it all the way till this point anyway, here's a penny :3

 

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• - No sense of achievement

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On this point I'd like to be as much objective as possible since I consider it to be one of the most important current issues.

 

Now let's talk about "sense of achievement" both in the top 25 players and in the whole rest of PvP population.

 

Let's start from the top 25 players, the reason being that there's a bit more to write and might be less intuitive (no sense of achievement in the top 25? woot?).

 

Now it gets a bit mathematic-ish, professional deformation sorry :(

As of the date I'm writing this post (1st June), the season should be close to ending (I think), first one has 757 points, 25th one has 578 points (Red server). 179 points difference between the first one and the 25th one (similar 2nd - 24th), but that's not a significative measure. What could be significative is that those 25 players might be (don't know for sure since I don't have the datas) a really "large" part of an eventual gaussian "tail" (extreme values on the right) considering a gaussian curve on which you distribute all PvP players points.

 

Now what does it mean?

Cutting short on this technical part, it means there *might be* a really different amount of effort put in PvP between the top 25 players.

And how are those players rewarded?

Everyone with a masterball and clothing. Let's be completely honest here, the masterball is as useful as the G.S. Ball after you catch celebi = cool looking item in the bag you'll never use. Every pokemon in PRO can be caught with a false swiper / status effects + amount of pokeballs or great balls. Ultraballs are not even used that much in the game, I don't see any scenario in which a masterball could be used (if not on a shiny magikarp all 01 ivs or some other sort of "trolling"). The clothing is cool, nothing to say about that one (part from the fact that there are already so much clothings in the game, PvP rewards could focus their attention on something else).

For the amount of constant effort put to stay into the top 25 of ALL the PvP players it seems to me that there's a discrepancy between the rewards given and the sense of gratification expected considering the amount of effort given. "Hey! I've got a cool looking item in the bag + a clothing that tells all the other people in the server what I achieved!" First part of the sentence should be something else in my opinion :)

 

Big sorry for the wall text I promised I'd avoided :(

 

The 26th player.

 

You. This post is for you, this whole time I'm spending on writing this post, for you. But you don't even know you were the 26th, probably saw yourself as 24th before going to sleep peacefully, woke up the next day and boom. The dreams of a whole month spent playing PvP shattered, the efforts done to keep playing even after those 3 crits in a row or 95% accuracy moves failing twice in a row, all for nothing. Such a sad story, I'll take a break from writing to cry a bit.

 

Back at it, jokes apart, the 26th player getting nothing as someone with 0 rating is just sad, nothing much more to add and this seems a pretty obvious flaw of the system.

 

All the rest of PvP players

 

Again, pretty intuitive stuff, a 500+ rating player getting the same "treatment" of someone who doesn't play at all is the main reason many players don't even care about PvP. Biggest issue, no differentiation between PvP players and players without a single PvP game.

 

• - No incentives to keep playing PvP for the whole duration of the season

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Now a bit of a personal story. When I saw the winner of the Suicune tournament with a really low PvP rating (might be for 1000 other reasons, just assumptions I've made) I thought "holy, one of the best players in PRO isn't even playing in the PvP system?". Now cutting off the person interested in the example, why should one even play PvP? Assuming one does not have the time / wish to be in the top 25, PvP at the moment is giving 0 incentives to the "really good" players who aren't planning since the start of the season to be top 25.

 

Considering myself as an example: I'm around 250 rating, but usually when I go into some PvP with my very best team I win the majority of the games I play. The end of the season is coming. Why am I not barely moved by that fact? Why am I not playing as much PvP as I could? Why am I writing this post? :p Because win or loss, 250 or 500 or 0 rating, it's all the same. Nothing.

I can't see myself progressing in a ladder, I can't see the eventual rewards I would get, I can't see any incentive to play PvP.

 

<COLOR color="#00BFFF"><SIZE size="120">4. Possibilities for a new PvP Rewards system

 

On this part of the post (congratulations if you've made it so far, another penny :3) I'd like to explore as many eventual possibilities as I can think of, not focusing & analyzing a particular solution (or considering the amount of time needed to be implemented), consider it as a big brainstorming of ideas out of which pick with the amount of time needed the best possible one.

1. - Dividing the PvP players population based on the <COLOR color="#00BFFF">amount of ladder points acquired at the end of the season with different rewards for each "goal" reached, e.g. 100 rating / 200 rating.

1. - Dividing the PvP players population based on a Gaussian normalized curve, rewarding each "part" of the gaussian in a different way based on 0 rating and the max rating at end of season (would be the most "correct" approach to divide a population of players, e.g. top 0,5% gains this, top 2% gains that, etc...)

1. - Dividing the PvP players population based on the ladder (e.g. top 10 gains this, top 25 this, top 50 this, top 100, top 500, etc...), would imply a public ladder on the website that updates with every refresh

1. - Dividing the PvP players population by making a "tier" system (similar to League of Legends), would be an additive system on which you "climb the ladder" though defined steps, then assign rewards to each tier. (slightly different from first point said, both additive but this one not punishing eventual decreases in points at the end of the season, you would be rewarded by the max "tier" you reached during the month).

 

Those are the principals methods that come to my mind when talking about dividing the players.

 

What could the rewards be?

Again another big brainstorming, nothing proposed as "final optimal solution".

 

Let's say we have already divided the players into 5 "chunks", let's call them 1 (played a lot, almost impossible to reach), 2, 3, 4, 5 (played a bit, kinda easy to reach).

Note: no cash involved because inflation, values would have to adjust each season.

 

In the spoiler some ideas of what the rewards could be, but that's not the important point of this topic :)

 

Tier 1

- Surprise reward (might be a single random 100% shiny spawn in a said location, an ornament for guild bases - if coming)

- Exclusive Shiny Mount (or legendary shiny mount, e.g. suicune/entei/raikou mount)

- Exclusive Clothing

- Exclusive Medallion that grants free access to EV-training safari area (there are already so many sink-holes for cash, one less for very few players won't hurt the economy)

- Eventual mega-evolution stone (if coming)

- Eventual fixed price item (e.g. rare candies seem stable at 15k, certain amount of big nuggets, and so on...)

Random unobtainable pokemon (would be non tradable)

- Evetual access to exclusive area with unobtainable/untradable pkmns

- Eventual consumable item that increases the spawn rate of rare pokemons (or eliminates common ones, or both, could be called "Expert boost" and attract all the rares pkmns in a way).

 

Tier 2

- Exclusive Mount (or legendary mount, e.g. suicune/entei/raikou mount)

- Exclusive Clothing (could be different one, maybe with the "stem" of the tier reached well visible on the clothing)

- Exclusive Medallion that grants free access to EV-training safari area

- Eventual mega-evolution stone (if coming)

- Eventual fixed price item

- Random unobtainable pokemon (would be non tradable)

- Evetual access to exclusive area with unobtainable/untradable pkmns

- Eventual consumable item that increases the spawn rate of rare pokemons

 

Tier 3

- Exclusive Clothing (could be different one, maybe with the "stem" of the tier reached well visible on the clothing)

- Eventual fixed price item (could be around 4-8 nuggets)

- Random obtainable very rare pokemon

- Eventual consumable item that increases the spawn rate of rare pokemons

 

Tier 4

- Exclusive Clothing (could be different one, maybe with the "stem" of the tier reached well visible on the clothing)

- Eventual fixed price item (could be around 2-4 nuggets)

 

Tier 5

- 50 pokeballs with the system message "at least you tried" :p

- Eventual fixed price item (1 nugget)

 

 

 

Those were my thoughts on the subject :) Waiting for some feedbacks, my goal was to start a discussion about this topic after all :) If you managed to read all the topic, congratulations and thanks for the patience, now give back my 2 pennies for the time I've put into this :3

[Atlow]

Also add a surrender button, loging off not only results as dc, but also locks you out of the game for a while.

[Solo]

Nice thoughts :Exclam:

 

Well, I think not all players attending to PvP do so to gain rewards, actually. Agreeing with you in almost every point tho.

Plus, more people would play PvP if they knew they get rewards more easily.

[Godlv]

i didnt exactly read all of it but i agree that there should be some more rewards and give me a reason to play pvp lol

[Singham]

The current ladder is just for test, as we are trying for change it to PVP points which for each of those who has participated and they could buy items/clothes/etc., from PVP shop which are only available to players who have battled in the ranked ladder.

 

This might not be the exact plan as I have described it, but we are working on ranked PVP rewards and the ladder itself. We are just a bit busy dealing with Hoenn and some other stuff but rest assured, we are working hard to improve every aspect of the game :)

[Bong2015]

174246 The current ladder is just for test, as we are trying for change it to PVP points which for each of those who has participated and they could buy items/clothes/etc., from PVP shop which are only available to players who have battled in the ranked ladder.

 

This might not be the exact plan as I have described it, but we are working on ranked PVP rewards and the ladder itself. We are just a bit busy dealing with Hoenn and some other stuff but rest assured, we are working hard to improve every aspect of the game :)

This info made my day.

:Heart:

[Riverbaby]

Support from someone who is at "End game" and primarily plays to PVP, Rewards would give more people incentive to PVP resulting in a broader amount of people to fight, as the current system has you fighting the same 5 opponents due to lack of popularity(Speaking on behalf of the blue server).

[Kurushiimohamed]

I agree with you in most parts but there is a little problem about the prizes.

First:

this is a free to play game. shop items is the only way we can support them with money to get/add things to the game for example the Blue server. giving them as rewards, will make people play pvp to get them and will reduce the donations.

second:

they can't use pokemons, because most of them will be sold in market for a lot of money, so there is no point they could just give them money from the start. if they can control it and will make them like mew and celebi untradable, then there is no problem, which actually I think it's hard.

third:

as you said some people isn't interested in pvp, like me for example I find them boring because of the stalling and all people use nearly the same pokemons (I'm in day care service and I raised several pokemons I know they nearly use the same). clothes is a good prize it doesn't give a pvp player the edge on non-pvp player.

 

the last thing, I have played FFXIV. pvp players get points on winning. they spend these points to buy items. this could be better than just 25 players getting rewards.

[Tro11z]

174304

the last thing, I have played FFXIV. pvp players get points on winning. they spend these points to buy items. this could be better than just 25 players getting rewards.

 

Read above what Singham said.

[Kurushiimohamed]

174309

174304

the last thing, I have played FFXIV. pvp players get points on winning. they spend these points to buy items. this could be better than just 25 players getting rewards.

 

Read above what Singham said.

I read it. and cause he wrote that doesn't mean we can't give ideas. :Question: