[2022] Operation counting for Personnel Challenge

Hiya!

So we choose game modes for each new event / challenge we release based on a combination of how hard it should be to complete each level vs. how difficult it is to complete said level in each game mode.
Thus, @Ahskance and I have lobbied hard to make sure that Coop players are able to achieve certain thresholds in some of the more recent events. Obviously players can't achieve ALL thresholds in coop, because then there is no incentive to play other modes. However, we understood that there is a sizable portion of our NA group that enjoys coop primarily, so we felt that at the very least SOME of the thresholds should be achievable in coop. Hence, you see in Personal Challenges that the first two XP thresholds are 200 BXP and 600 BXP - the first being easily obtainable in Coop, the second being plausibly obtainable in Coop. @AdmiralThunder you're welcome .
Operations are a niche game mode. That means that there are some events and challenges that will not be available for them.

There are multiple games modes in World of Warships and sometimes there will be certain ones that will be excluded from events and challenges.

I can ask tomorrow if there were any specific instances. That being said, Narai is capable of consistently giving a single player over 3000 Base XP. While that may not be something which can be performed on all the ship types/nations in the game, it's something extremely repeatable. The nature of Personal Challenges is grounded in data pulls which show that X amount of Base XP is achievable Y% of the time.

To make up some numbers, this could look like:

200 Base XP - 95% Random, 92% Co-Op
600 Base XP - 92% Random, 45% Co-Op
800 Base XP - 65% Random, 15% Co-Op
etc...

While this is a Personal Event, there is still a measure of achievement in actually hitting a number that a player could set for themselves. Operations can be planned out and executed to give very specific rewards which does remove the randomness/variability of going into a battle and seeing what you'll be able to do.

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Co-Op's ability to take part in the event was brought up very directly by the NA Team. We made sure there was a path to victory available.

There are 29 different Nation/Types available in Personal Challenges and the event Maxes Out at 50 Tokens over the course of 2 Weeks. After that it resets. The 200 Base XP should be extremely achievable in Co-Op. 600 Base XP will likely be achievable in Destroyers and Cruisers, though Battleships may have a rather hard time depending on their Nation/style. The 800 Base XP should also be doable, but that's going to be an honest-to-goodness challenge that should keep players engaged in trying to push across the finish line before the 2 weeks is up.

Ideally our events are achievable but keep up a level of player engagement over the duration. While Random Battles may allow players to hit higher individual milestones more easily, the event caps at 50 Tokens per 2 weeks session. How you get to 50 Tokens is up to you. Further, if you'd like to collect either the Premium Ship Dido or Canarias, you only need 35 Tokens per week. Both ships cost 70 Tokens and 70 Tokens should be extremely doable across all the Nations and Types available.

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One last thing, please keep an eye out for a forum event <3 It will likely peak your interest while you hammer away at some personal challenges~

Currently, our Technology isn't set up to provide two different paths, so we're making do with a single path at the moment for Personal Challenges and Random Battles.

The Base XP bar is set low enough that Co-Op can be completed. Unfortunately, that bar is forced to be so low that Randoms can seem trivial, so we're stuck with a situation that is quite a challenge on one side and overly completable on the other.

The best solution that I've seen and spent time iterating on is to make Naval Battles/Personal Challenges into an "or" style setup with Base XP numbers in Randoms and Co-Op being tuned so that each Tier of challenge has the same %chance of being completed in a mode-relevant sense. Doing this would require coding time which is never, ever easy to find. That being said, I'm personally on the lookout for if any ever shows up because this Naval Battle/Personal Challenge pain point won't likely be resolved in any other way (that I can think of).

I know things aren't going as fast as the PvE Community might like, but please understand that you do have a team that is pushing to make sure you are heard and included.

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The post is hidden now, but it should appear a little later today <3

https://forum.worldofwarships.com/topic/251607-contest-uphill-battles/?tab=comments#comment-5691305

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The Base XP you earn in Co-Op fluctuates wildly depending on the circumstances. You might have an all bot team, you might spawn with few bots nearby, you might have a yolo-DD on your flank that sponges up XP. These are things that are out of your control and cause your earnings to change and never be certain.

Operations are literally repeating scenarios that have same/similar spawn locations with same/similar bots doing same/similar things. While queue for an Operation with a random group of people can certainly lead to different experiences, you can farm Operations like a machine with a dedicated group that just does the same things repeatedly. It can remove the variability (outside of shell RNG).

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Aporthos has some YouTube videos of him doing silly things in Narai. Here's one of them.

Direct Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgTb_671-es

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I recognize this is a years old situation that needs to be worked on. It's going to take time because anything worth doing takes time, but please believe that we're pushing to move forward.

Brother you're not being "Forced" to do anything.

In-game challenges are set up to be just that: a challenge. They have varying degrees of challenge, but having goals in-game that require no effort to accomplish is not fun.

If XP thresholds for challenges were set up so that all game-modes could acquire them equally, no XP bar would be above 500 and PvP players wouldn't even have to think twice about how they play - they could just play random after random and not be concerned. That's not realistic, pragmatic, or interesting

Specific data pull information is guarded, so I'd have to have a special authorization to give highly specific information like that.

We do release data in our Dev Blogs at times, though. If we're ever able to make a Dev Blog about Naval Battles/Personal Challenges, we might be able to get some specifics into it.

Honestly, there's no sense of desperation or concern over whether PvP players will feel forced to do Operations or anything of the type.

Our Naval Battles format uses data that shows X "win condition" occurs Y amount of the time. The levels are tuned to these Win Conditions in a tiered format. The goal of the system is not just to be a grind, it's supposed to be a challenge which provides an ability for game knowledge to show via limited attempts.

The Personal Challenges format uses our Naval Battles format but removes the limited attempts to allow a player to set their own goals to achieve. While this results in a different situation, please remember that the code being utilized is either the same or extremely similar. Changing the code is not a small task, so at the moment please understand that it's Co-Op and Randoms (and Ranked which is a different form of Randoms in a sense).

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I stated before and will say again, Operations do not have the variability of Co-Op/Random play. There is a % chance of a person achieving a metric in those two modes. In Operations, it's about finding a team and executing a plan to allow one or multiple teammates to reach set metrics through a repeatable formula. It's fundamentally a different concept in terms of player engagement.

If a player simply looks at this challenge as a grind, then the answer is "What is the best/easiest way to get through the grind?" Operations is the easiest because it's consistent, repeatable, and gives a solid amount of Base XP which would achieve multiple tiers of the Personal Challenges format.

Please remember that we are not using this format as a grind. While yes, a player playing the game repeatedly to achieve a win condition is a "grind" in and of itself, it's still a system rooted in "challenge missions". The "Pass or Fail" format requires inconsistent results to actually provide a "Pass or Fail" experience.

Then we disagree on this. I'm expressing the intent that the company has, not the view of the event from the perspective of a player. Please note, the event is literally called "Personal Challenges"

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As a Community Manager, I have one foot in the Community and one foot in the Company. My job is to bridge the gap and see that information passes correctly both ways. I have given you the literal vision of why our company has done the event in the way it is being done.

As a Player, I analyze the situation and find the easiest way through, hence I described that concept to you in the prior post. I fully understand what you mean in regards to your frustration. The Player in me will often disregard any "theme" or "backstory" and just look at the raw situation and chart a path from start to end-goal. On the other hand, casual players (note: I am not a casual player by any means) are very invested in the basic themes and concepts of events. The "challenge" aspect is actually a banner which is taken up by those players and they enjoy passing benchmarks and goals.

Weird story, but stay with me~

I once had an argument with an ex-girlfriend over her using "the hook-up man" to buy bootleg DVDs. We had a full blown argument until I finally understood what it meant to see the same thing from two completely different perspectives and have different takeaways because of it.

She looked at it practically, "I paid for the movie".

I looked at it ideologically, "You purchased stolen goods".

In the end, I recognized that just because I saw it from my perspective didn't stop her from seeing it from her perspective.

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We sell a game experience, yes. However, please understand that it is up to us what we want our experience to be. If we decide that the Challenge portion of the experience is important, then understand that we will go out of our way to make the challenge aspect functional. We have set an expectation of what we want our product to achieve, and then we set out to achieve that expectation.

As a product we take a lot of pride in how beautifully done our ship modeling is. We take pride in our sound design. We take pride in the diversity of ships and events that we have. We also take pride in our ability to offer long-lasting experiences which contain a lot of variety. Some events will be grindy, others will be challenging. Some will be long, others will be short. We are extremely committed to diversity as a long-term player engagement strategy and you can see how effective it is simply by seeing how many people play battles not in the hundreds or thousands but the tens of thousands.

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As a player that has played many, many games, I understand how easy it is to reduce everything down to its fundamentals. Movie critics can do the same thing. To a very experienced gamer or movie critic, the thrill might be more in the execution than the fantasy, but to the casual audience member the theme and fantasy is incredibly important.

Please don't assume that "just another grind" is in fact "just another grind" to the overwhelming majority of our playerbase which is casual in nature.

Take "Art" as an example. You are correct in the sense that "Art is in the eye of the beholder", but that doesn't mean that the artist isn't allowed to feel justified in executing on their vision. It might be appreciated in a way the artist never intended, but it's wrong to say the artist has no stake in their creation.

I knew this would happen before we ever announced the specifics. I understand that 600 Base XP isn't normally seen and 800 Base XP is rare/hard. However, we don't have dual-pathing on this style event at this time, so the low numbers required for Co-Op distort the experience towards very easy when considered from a Random Battle angle. The best solution for both parties is to have relevant difficulty content for both modes, but that requires coding time that we haven't found yet.

I know you have years of frustration over this, but please understand that we are advocating to help the PvE community. It may take time, possibly a lot of time, but we intend to help. The best thing you can do is continue to be vocal to make sure this stays at the forefront.

There was a time where Operations were thought to be mainly enjoyed by only a niche. If I understand correctly, NA has the largest PvE-style audience of any server cluster.

Operations were re-assessed around the time we made our Statement last year and were made a priority again as the depth of their importance to some players was discovered. We announced last year that we are looking to return old Operations in 2022. We also reset the rewards on all current Operations back during our 7th Anniversary event as a way to see how much rewards would drive player engagement. I haven't followed up on the numbers from the reward reset, so I don't have any news to share there.

As for promoting them or coming up with a larger Operation strategy, I have no information on that. Mostly, we're just busy grinding away at getting Update after Update out. I imagine there could be some form of highlighting Operations when old ones return, though.

My primary focuses have been (in the order of time/focus):

NA Forum Moderation

Standards and Practices


Responsiveness


Player Interaction and Information Transfer

Player Behavioral Initiative

Customer Support Ticket information push


Positive Outcomes to promote further use of the system


Strengthen any areas found which need attention

Co-Op Experience

Analysis of Pain Points and Relay of Findings


Screening for Apparent Issues when Able


Backend Data to Assist with Points/Assertions

The biggest thing I have to note is that there are days I work 12-14 hours and I have moved the needle only a little. It's a massive task just to understand things before there's even an ability to interact with something. Also, the Forums are a massive investment of time and attention, so that's also a thing.

As for looking into game-stuff that's more than... 1 week away? I'll be honest in that I don't even want to look. The things I wrote about above are more important than my idle curiosity, so I'm grinding away to try to get these things to a point where I'm happy enough that I can start to just enjoy the job for what it is.

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Fun note, I made a hat with blinders because I constantly feel overwhelmed <3

It's helped me grind away at a Moderation Guide I'm currently re-coloring to allow for more intuitive readability.

I would recommend Tier 8 or 9 when trying to farm Base XP. They get bonus XP when dealing damage to higher tiers.

I used a lot of Tier 8 expressly for that reason when I did the Dockyard farming in Co-Op.

This goes back to the Grind vs Challenge concepts that we spoke about before. That would destroy the Challenge aspect by just turning it into an "X amount of Battles" grind.

I believe that an ideal situation would have these Challenges be as hard to complete in Randoms as they are in Co-Op. That would require a change to the coding on the event, though.

The concern isn't about Weimar, it's that Operations are "non-random" in the repeating of their content. While a player can expect a fairly random outcome from queue'ing for the weekly Op with random teammates, there is still a formula to the experience that can be dialed in when a player knowing the Operation. If players for a Division, the experience becomes non-Random as players just play their part in a known-outcome situation.

The Challenge aspect of Personal Challenges requires the randomness be present to make completing the challenge constantly relevant.

We're glad we can help~ Anything worth doing takes time, so please bear with us as we keep pushing.