Questdesign hurts the game

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So i played 6 more games today. 4 of those were random concedes for quests. So in total...
Out of 10 games i played today - only 3 were actually playing the game. Just think about that.
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I just played 4 matches of gwent for dailies. Out of those 4, 3 of them were people instantly conceding, 2 with shupe ->concede and 1 with scoia -> concede.
Ive met an intolerable number of guys like that in the last few weeks. People just spamming random terrible artifacts for quests. Random spells. And so on..

On the other side there are always quests for the seasonal reward tracks that require you to play seasonal mode.
Seasonal mode is generally horrible. There is 1 optimal way to play and its figured out like 1 or 2 days after the start of the season. Then its just the same deck over and over and over. If you dont have those exact cards you cant win. If you dont enjoy playing the same exact damn thing over and over you cant play at all.
Please just dont force people into that mode. Id love to see the stats for it when people arent forced into it.

How do we fix those? The seasonal is simple enough. Just dont have that. Gets you better stats on seasonal mode as well. See what people actually want to play.
The daily (and other) quests need to be designed in a way so they dont stand in the way of gameplay at the very least. Playing 30 or wat artifacts is totally unreasonable considering the state of artifacts. Playing shupe like 30 times is totally unreasonable considering how unpopular shupe decks are.
It would certainly help if all of these were tied to winning as well - as in - play shupe AND win the game.

The ones that actually waste time are worse than the ones that dont obviously. Sitting in a match with a guy who only plays stupid artifacts to get the quest done, is just 100% a complete waste of time.
 
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Over-dramatizing.

The game does not force you to do that "Play X artifacts" quest (or any other daily quest). You can ever re-roll it if you want.

The "play Shupe 30 15 times" quest is far from being unreasonable in its current form -- but requiring 30 15 wins with Shupe would be really pushing it when the challenge is only one week long. Also, the challenge is entirely optional.

Seasonal does not require having specific cards; you can play it with whatever deck you want. Sure, efficient winning may require a highly streamlined deck, but going for the highest efficiency is entirely optional. The seasonal modes can be fun with less than optimal decks -- and they are entirely optional.

Lastly, only looking at things from a "here and now" perspective isn't the best idea when the game is getting updates and receiving new content. Artifacts for example may well become a lot more popular in the future, there's no way to know.

(Edit: Checked Shupe quest requirement and fixed numbers accordingly.)
 
Over-dramatizing.
Fully agree.

Trying to play Gwent. 4/5 Games in a row are people playing 1 Shupe card and then surrendering. Then one normal game followed by 4/5 1-card games.
Basically, the last 2 times i tried playing gwent for around 30 mins i could only get one or two normal games and A LOT of 'shupe' games.
 
The game does not force you to do that "Play X artifacts" quest (or any other daily quest). You can ever re-roll it if you want.

The "Play X artifacts" rewards RP, which is the most valuable resource. While it's true the game doesn't force you, it does push you towards it. The quest design is inherently flawed by being too simple and too boring. However, at the same time, CDPR probably doesn't want to alienate newer players who cannot play every type of deck. With artifacts, in particular, this holds true because, after the nerf, there aren't any decks left that focuses on artifacts. This results in playing an artifact deck whose sole purpose is to complete the quest, rather than to win. This highlights the flaws of such a quest design.

Personally speaking, I dislike the artifact quest, but I am not going to re-roll RP quests. So, yes, I also play a crappy artifact deck not meant for winning. Incidentally, it's pretty funny when I do actually win with it.

The seasonal quests have the same issue, it being generic and bland. What makes matters worse is that you are forced to play seasonal for some of them, while not every seasonal mode is fun for everyone.

In conclusion, the quest design does hurt the game. Maybe not as badly as the OP says, but there is definitely some truth behind it and, at the very least, room for improvement
 
The positive side of quests like this (play xy artifacts) is that you can complete it with any faction. I personally like these ones better than 'Win 5 games with thisNthat faction' because you can play the faction you like. I usually focus on one or two factions and reroll the other ones.
 
Obviously they could then just reduce it to something reasonable like play shupe 5 times AND win.
Which would still be fixing what isn't broken, especially when it's only a one-week challenge. Plus, winning five times with a Shupe deck might turn out to be more difficult and time-consuming than merely playing 15 full (i.e. not "play Shupe and forfeit") games.


Quests in general are still a relatively new feature, even just the daily ones. They're not a core part of the game, IMO; it doesn't matter that the system is not ideal. I re-roll five out of six faction-specific daily quests, Arena quests, and even some Reward Point ones if I don't feel like doing them. And I don't care if my "quest log" fills up, which it often does (especially when I keep having more than one quest I want to re-roll). No big deal, doesn't affect how much I enjoy the game.

I have a very laid-back approach to the game and see no real issues with the quests as they currently are. I just ignore/skip what I'm not interested in. (I'm guessing many do not have such a "casual" attitude, for example due to being (far) more competitive than I am.)
 
So i played 6 more games today. 4 of those were random concedes for quests.

Thats pretty dumb all things considered.

Out of 10 games i "played" today - only 3 were actually playing the game. Just think about that.

Which would still be fixing what isn't broken, especially when it's only a one-week challenge. Plus, winning five times with a Shupe deck might turn out to be more difficult and time-consuming than merely playing 15 full (i.e. not "play Shupe and forfeit") games.
Yes maybe but you would ACTUALLY PLAY THE GAME! (hence what is happening now is very much "broken")
You know.. not just log in to waste time for rewards. Like i value my time. When i play i want to play. Not sit around so people can farm their rewards.
Thats borderline mmo levels of boring.
 
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hence what is happening now is very much "broken"
A system, especially a system that's in use for the very first time, without loopholes is a rare system indeed. But imperfect =/= "broken". I feel the latter term gets thrown around way too often, and too lightly, these days.


In any case, the quest system has already seen improvements (re-rolling, additional types, RP rewards) since its initial launch. I see no reason why it couldn't be tweaked further if objective, collective data shows changes would be beneficial.
 
Agree with TS. The devs hurt their own game with these awful quests. How do you not forsee people forfeiting matches after playing Shupe? That's so obvious.
In my view that is just bad behavior of that players. As long as there are a lot of players, who are more interested in grinding rewards than in playing a good match this will not change regardless of the quest design. I had a lot of fun with my crappy Shupe-decks after I skipped the first days of the seasonal, when so many players forfeited after playing one card.
 
In my view that is just bad behavior of that players. As long as there are a lot of players, who are more interested in grinding rewards than in playing a good match this will not change regardless of the quest design. I had a lot of fun with my crappy Shupe-decks after I skipped the first days of the seasonal, when so many players forfeited after playing one card.

Seems like an easy thing to account for when making the quests though.
 
The biggest problem with faction challenge is that it always has forced a portion of the playerbase to play decks they either don't like or have little experience with. This causes problems in many areas. In unranked, it disrupts what little variety already exists there. The format first gets flooded with decks from the challenging factions one week, then the winning factions the next.

This is not so much of a problem with this latest challenge, but it does come with another problem. People finding ways to maximise their time on task to grind the quests faster. Where challenges require one condition to be repeatedly met in order to progress to the next stage, then the most efficient route often appears to be build a deck around it and meet that condition as early as possible in R1, forfiet and move on to the next game and repeat the process. Simply, spending time playing 3 rounds with a deck that the player doesn't like, doesn't know, or knows has no possible chance of actually playing out a game, is not an efficient use of time. This is a problem we also see in the daily quests and in some seasonal modes that enable contracts to be filled. Players meet their condition and forfiet, leaving their opponent high and dry. The idea that the game awards them the win and that, along with 'GG', compensates them with scrap and other items is fair is just plain worng. Those rewards don't really do much to create a positive win experience, especially when the opponent is also trying to use their time to complete their own quests.

As to what CDPR does about it, personally I think there's not much they can do with faction challenges except move them into seasonal mode. At least that way, some of the more easily solved seasonal metas would get some variety toward the end of the month. I just don't see CDPR implementing faction challenge as a seperate game mode with it's own ladder and reward tree (an idea suggested by Merchant a long time ago).

As for insta-forfiets, it has been suggested in the past implementing a system where the forfieting player leaves the match as soon as they hit the button, and the game passes the turn to the other player. Part of this includes a cooldown period so the forfieting player would be unable to immediately queue to another game. The length of the cooldown could be determined by the amount of time played before forfieting. That might shift the balance a little toward playing a more substantial part of the match when calculating the most efficient route to quickly grinding out rewards.
 
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My main problem with the quest is that Shupe is just not competitive. I played with Shupe Mage in ranked during the 4th goal of the challenge and quickly went down to the bottom threshold.

I set up the board state 5 or 6 times where I had last say, and my opponent usually started round 3 with a good engine or defender. Every time I led with Shupe, I could not get the move a random card to the other side which would have given me an excellent start...it was as if if was programmed to appear less. This would be even better if given the original wording of "Charm a Random enemy" but that was one of the options that removed because made Shupe tournament competitive.

Wherever I placed Shupe it was inferior to the high provision card I replaced it with...be it Portal, The Great Oak, Dandelion: Poet, or Blue Dream... it just blows.
 
Over-dramatizing.

The game does not force you to do that "Play X artifacts" quest (or any other daily quest). You can ever re-roll it if you want.

The "play Shupe 30 15 times" quest is far from being unreasonable in its current form -- but requiring 30 15 wins with Shupe would be really pushing it when the challenge is only one week long. Also, the challenge is entirely optional.

Seasonal does not require having specific cards; you can play it with whatever deck you want. Sure, efficient winning may require a highly streamlined deck, but going for the highest efficiency is entirely optional. The seasonal modes can be fun with less than optimal decks -- and they are entirely optional.

Lastly, only looking at things from a "here and now" perspective isn't the best idea when the game is getting updates and receiving new content. Artifacts for example may well become a lot more popular in the future, there's no way to know.

(Edit: Checked Shupe quest requirement and fixed numbers accordingly.)
Those are quite some bad arguments. Everything is optional, including playing Gwent. You see how that doesn't really work?

CDPR should be thinking about creating some serious and high quality alternative game modes instead of these badly executed quests and seasonal modes. That may truly spice up and lift up the game.
 
My main problem with the quest is that Shupe is just not competitive.

Winning with Shupe was not the goal. It was a quest with a uncompetitive funny part. I would like to see more of that, because I like to play meme decks. There is little opportunity to do so in a quest. Please let me have this, you can play competetive all the time.
 
Everything is optional, including playing Gwent.
Twisting others' words is a really bad argument.

Winning with Shupe was not the goal. It was a quest with a uncompetitive funny part. I would like to see more of that, because I like to play meme decks. There is little opportunity to do so in a quest. Please let me have this, you can play competetive all the time.
Agreed 100%.
 
Twisting others' words is a really bad argument
Nothing is twisted. You clearly state that several things that OP doesn't like are optional. It's right there. When too many things in Gwent become unlikable, the game as a whole becomes unlikable, with the option to not play Gwent at all. Optional indeed.
I think, it shouldn't until the core problems are solved: dark dirty design, slow and too controllable order-like mechanics, boringness, senselessness of rows, leaders and cards.
True. You cannot build something great on a weak foundation. First the core problems need to be solved.
 
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