Battle Bay - design problems & possible solutions

I'd just like to preface by saying that I love Battlebay, I've been playing it for many months now and will continue to do so. I am not a game developer at all, just a fan of game design and would just like to share what could well be poor or misinformed personal opinions about the game. So please, no one here needs to get angry or defensive over some of my personal criticisms.

GEAR SCALING
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So we all know what everyones aim is in Battle Bay in regards to gear. A complete set of fully upgraded Tier 5 Legendary gear. This in itself isn't a problem even though its largely unobtainable even for a lot of whales. What is a problem is that the way the gear scales renders nearly everything else redundant. I'm sure I'm not the only one here who has thousands upon thousands on unused common and uncommon powercells just collecting dust not doing anything. Why is this? Because common and uncommon gear are rendered almost obselete by the time you get your first rare item, which isn't very long at all, even for a new player. Since how far you can level gear is governed by your Crew upgrades you can only ever make an item a certain level regardless of rarity. So a new player who only been playing for a few weeks could easily have a few rares and maybe even an epic or two in their inventory giving them no real incentive to upgrade uncommons or commons.

The items themselves scale horribly, meaning there is no point upgrading lower tier gear over higher tier gear. Just for an example to explain this point better. Lets say you just got your hands on an Epic Blast Cannon, At level 1. Upgrading this to level 10 it is nearly as powerful as a level 30 (thats max Tier 3) Uncommon Blast Cannon. It gets even worse when you factor in Legendary gear. A level 1 Legendary is more powerful than a Level 50 Rare. All that time you spend upgrading items just to be made obsolete so quickly depreciates the value a player has in their progression. Essentially for most people what ever gear you have on right now will be made redundant at some point in the future.

A solution to this is increasing the max Tiers of items the lower down the rarity chart they get, and have all max Tiers across all rarities reach a closer parity in power when fully upgraded. So for example Legendaries stay with a max of Tier 5. Epics can now be upgraded to Tier 7, Rares to Tier 9, Uncommons to Tier 11 and Commons to Tier 13. Now I'm not going to say a Tier 13 common should be as powerful as a Tier 5 Legendary, but why can't it say be as powerful as a Tier 1 Legendary. Uncommons at Tier 11 could be as powerful as a Tier 2 legendary. Rares at Tier 9 as powerful as a Tier 3 Legendary and Epics at Tier 7 as powerful as a Tier 4 Legendary. I feel a system like this would solve a lot of problems.
A. It gives items a chance to achieve closer parity in power
B. All those common and uncommon powercells now have a purpose
C. Players are no longer at the complete mercy of obtaining Epics and Legendaries to increase their power.
D. Items not so quickly becoming obselete, devaluing player progression.

It could also create problems, but mainly from a financial perspective since Epics and Legendaries won't be quite as necessary as they are now. Before anyone points out that crew upgrade barriers for Tiers its easily resolved with a similar scaling method (if you need me to explain it i will, but I think most of you can work it out for yourselves). But that doesn't mean upgrading a Common to Tier 13 will be easy. It could take say 1000 powercells plus 10 extra copies of the item to go from Tier 12 to Tier 13 then cost thousands of upgrade parts to upgrade just 1 level at the top end. But it does give players more options for achieving power and making progress in the game. This leads me on to the next point.

PROGRESSION
=============
Progression in Battle Bay for me at least works like this. You get nice new shiny item allowing one of your weapons to go up a tier which you promptly do and then fully upgrade it to its new max level as quickly possible. Then you wait weeks/months patiently upgrading your crew so to increase your max level so you can unlock new crew upgrades all the while getting an endless stream of useless gear you have no intention of using. This creates long lulls in real progression with shot blips of quick progressions. When progress is so minor for long periods it can make the game feel stale as it just becomes a grind. There either needs to be more instances of big progression for the system to feel good, or there needs to be revamp in how progression works so real progression feels more constant.

Since I've already addressed the scaling of items as means of improving progression, I'll look at some of the other areas, crew upgrades and ship MKs

Crew Upgrades, other than upgrading items is where you spend your sugar. Having upgrades is a great idea in principle, but only if they are meaningful. Unfortunately the crew upgrades are done in a way that are there to hindrance the player more than anything. Since crew upgrades main function other than giving small bonuses here and there and unlock new tiers for your items are to give you big doses of XP so you can increase your Captain Level, which in turn allow you to increase the MK level of your ship at certain milestones.

How many times have you had to do a crew upgrade that gives you no benefit whats so ever other than to give you XP or to unlock the useful upgrades that are beyond it. This should never happen. its purely a hindrance mechanic. Every choice should be meaningful, should potentially pose you a problem with which way you want to go and should give a noticeable increase in whatever you picked. Make those 5 day waits mean something, give you something to look forward to, make you uncertain whether or not you picked the right option.

I would like to see more options per crew upgrade available, with bigger bonuses, but don't be afraid to throw in a few drawbacks that come along with those bigger bonues. You want that 10% increase in speed, well its comes at the cost of -5% turret agility and - 5% ship agility. You want that 10% bonus damage for a weapon, well its going to come with -10% projectile speed. Get rid of all the single options crew upgrades, everyone should have choice bar the Tier upgrades. You could even go one step further and have multiple branches, but thats probably going to over complicate things.

If i could remove MK levels tomorrow I would. Just set everyone to MK6 or 7 level and be done with it, but I think that would upset too many people, plus we got to take a step back and see why MK levels are a problem anyway, at least in the way they done in BattleBay. The problem with MK levels is that for most levels too much power is hidden behind them. They give a big boost in power by opening up additional slots and slot points for boats. In my progress to glory, I've found myself stagnating at an infamy levels for a few months with the only things blocking my progress to higher infamies other than the lack of better gear was my MK level. Everytime I increased my MK level all the way up to 6 i experienced a big increase in infamy. This shows that MK levels are taking away from skill in a big way which I why I'd rather see them removed. But an alternative would be to increase the number the MK levels with less gains with each one so not as much power is locked behind each one.

CURRENCY CAPS
===============

Capping Gold and Sugar is another hindrance mechanic. I can see why Sugar is capped as its innately tied to crew upgrades, stopping people progressing down one crew member to unlock the most powerful bonuses as quickly as possible which could potentially create some unbalances in games with people who have spread out their upgrades. But a better way would be tie crew upgrades with captain levels. So even if you have enough sugar for an upgrade you still need to above a certain captain level to do the upgrade. I hit the caps fairly often on both currencies and at that point the only thing i am achieving by playing more games is guild quests and weapon achievements really. Then when a good shopping spree in the shop happens or a big crew upgrade is ready to start i suddenly find myself without either currency available since it all gets spent so quickly. What this does is encourage me not play when I hit the caps as I know I will have to spend a few good sessions to grind them again when I'm low after spending them very quickly. And I can't spend every waking hour playing the game so in effect it sort of dictates when I play and when I don't play. And anything that makes not want to play probably needs to go. This is a pet peeve more than anything else as i realise people will happily play at full currency.

 

SHIP ROLES AND CAPTURE ZONE
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Since Battle Bay likes to think of itself as a "moba" (i don't agree), the lack of clearly defined ship roles is a bit perplexing. Only 3 out of the 5 ships are clearly defined. The Shooter - ADC/DPS, Speeder - Assassin, Fixer - Healer. Defender is meant to be a Tank and Enforcer is meant to be a some kind of Control type which is more of an mmo thing than a moba thing. But both arent really played like that by anyone. Defenders don't have enough Health or any special aggro/tanking abilities to fulfill its role so most are running high DPS close range weapons with as many shields as they have acting more like a brawler. And Enforcers which I imagine where meant to come along with frosts bolts/frost launchers/Tesla bolts to control the enemy are coming with Tesla Shields/Overboosts/Nitros and playing like an assassin ducking in out of cover making themselves hard to hit while protecting themselves with tesla sheilds when in the open.

What this does is make 4 out of the 5 ships all about either dealing damage or scoring kills on vulnerable targets which isn't healthy for a moba type game. This makes the game focus mostly on Damage and kills rather than actually capturing zones. How many games do you win or lose by the capture zone compared to which team got the most kills.

How do you fix this? Do you buff Defender in HP while reducing it's damage output? If so why would anyone ever bother destroying a Defender since it has a low threat level and is difficult to kill. Its needs abilities and mechanics which help it be a tank. An annoying barrier that a team needs to get rid of so it exposes the teams juicer parts. One option would be give the Defender a radius of control around it. Any teammates shot at in that radius, the Defender absorbs a certain amount of that damage so the actual target receives less. Or Maybe when a Defender passes by a smaller ship, it slows them down and drags them towards the Defender, disrupting the opponents movement, making the Defender an even better target for friendly Torpedoes. Enforcer is a trickier proposition since it shares its yellow items with Speeder so its hard not to affect one without the other. Nerfing Tesla Shield and buffing frost launcher/blaster would seem to be a good start though.

The Capture Zone itself needs to be a better win condition. It needs to be something that even a team at a disadvantage (eg, 1 ship was destroyed at the beginning of the battle very quickly/overall less power) can use the win game. Maybe add multiple Zones and the team with the map control wins. Or as soon as a team enters the capture zone, it captures it and the winner of the game is determined by the team who held it the longest. Something needs to be done, as in its current state, the zone plays very little effect in most games.

QUESTS AND DAILY LOGINS
=======================

The current quest system isn't very fulfilling. For completing a weeks worth 18 quests you get rewarded gold or sugar depending on the quests, plus 2 uncommon boxes and 2 epic boxes ( i beleve its only 1 epic box at lower levels, but my memory is fuzzy). You get a new quest every 8 hours so 3 a day giving a total of 21 quests for the week. There are different level of quests as some reward more than others. I think this can be made more exciting for the player though. Give all the days quests in 1 go at the start of the new. This way the quests can be completed in 1 sitting at the players convenience at any time of day. Once again I have found myself not playing sometimes at my preferred time since I might as well wait an hour or 2 for the next quest and start my session then. Next would be give different rewards for quests. Maybe Pearls, power cell, etc for some quests.So for example if a quest had perks, materials or item pieces, then it would use the same percentage chances of getting certain rarities. Next I would remove the 2 uncommon boxes, they are pointless, you already get plenty of uncommon boxes from stars, replace it with 1 epic box so you get 3 for the week through quests. Then finally at 21 quests completed (all quests for the week), you get a random legendary perk.

With Daily logins, other than the occassional free pearls and epic loot box at the end of the week, there is nothing exciting going on, there needs to be something going on to make people log in every day. Even something as simple as an end of month reward of a legendary perk, or a special loot box that comes with a guaranteed legendary piece and a epic item. Throw in the odd epic item every now again on a regular day.

GUILDS
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Guild Rivalry is a mess at the moment. People are guild hopping all over the place to get easier rivalries. The distribution of tokens at the end of the rivalry are unfair as they are not proportionally distributed. Whats the point of grinding away all week just to get the last place prize of 1000 tokens when you are only a few quests behind the leader. Playing in guild should present you with an opportunity to play as part of team directly against another guild. There is little strategy in current system other just grinding as much as possible, so hopefully my suggestion below adds at least a little of strategy for a team to get into making the rivalry more engaging.

I would revamp guild rivalries so that its a head to head with both guilds sharing the quest board. Meaning you are all completing the board together. This should make the rivalry itself much more even since there are only 2 guilds to matchup. Both guilds get the board clear bonus of 12K, but individual quests are won by the guild with the most contribution. At the end of the rivalry, the number of quests completed by each guild are added up and that's your final bonus (1k per completed quest). I feel this gives incentive to try and complete as many quests as possible even if you are the losing guild since it affects your final bonus so much, as well as adding a layer of strategy on trying to win the rivalry by trying to steal all the easier quests, leaving your opponents to tackle harder quests.

CONCLUSION
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Well I've rambled on for a long time here, and while there is more to be said I feel like I covered most of the major points I had planned. I know I will remember some more just as soon I post this but they can wait for another time. Once again everything is just my opinion, if you think everything I don't like is awesome then good for you. I feel like i pointed out some things which i perceive as flaws with the game, while presenting some possible solutions. I am super interested to hear what other people have thinking about with regards to same topics.

Long Live Battle Bay!

 

Yesss no more gold cap! Me want to save all gold in the world!

And yeah, sure, let's make commons and uncommons more powerful

 

Add a TL;DR

 

TLDR: (part 1)
1: Allow lower rarity items to reach higher levels, so that all rarities are closer in power once fully upgraded.

2: Crew training should be more meaningful, and ship mks should be divided up into many more mks, so we have a smoother and more even progression.

3: Remove gold and sugar caps.

 

Sorry guys, this is only half of what I wrote, I'm still waiting for moderator approval to post the 2nd part.

 

I really like the idea of removing the evolution cap on lower level items. I did the opposite of what many do and T5'd my Rares instead of jumping immediately to Epics. Had I stuck with Epics I'd still be T2 or T3 Epic for every item I like to use because RNG is a bitch. Waiting for duplicates or power cells has stalled out my progress in this game 9 out of the 15 months I've played it. I'm seriously contemplating avoiding any P2P/RNG game in the future, and without any real progress in the next couple months, walking away from Battle Bay.

So yea, one very excellent solution to avoid this stalling out is to allow further evolution of lower level items.

 

Great Post @N1mzor ...
Loved the idea of tiers and No cap.
I think there should be more for capture. But not too much .. Dealing dmg and killing all over the match is more fun.
Maybe more capture points and over all capture percentage added to final score along with damage n kill someway. This could open a lot more statergy. For example there is 3 cap points and 1 team went of straight attack and pulled more damage but one of team 2 capture some other far side cap point uninterrupted and team 2 scored more overall.
What we need most is better communication. Its just too random now. Hard to understand how team gonna play. Even if we could see teams weapon before we could understand some what.

 

Good taking care of Battle Bay makes me cry!!!

 

Yesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss!

Totally agree with everything I just read. I am a fairly new player (lvl 9), but I already have some epic weapons and perks, and I am fairly OP in comparison to most of the other players I compete with, and I get the feeling that has something to do with the fact that I have no infamy. I really don't understand infamy at all, and don't even know how to get it. I have more wins than losses, and an approximate 1.5 wins per game, but still haven't received any infamy. If somebody could please explain to me how to start earning infamy, I would highly appreciate it. The current situation I am in is just like you described: waiting on crew upgrades to level up. I think crew upgrades should be a lesser form of xp income than battles. In my mind, xp from battles should be determined by comparing your performance in the battle to your teammates. Please tell me what you think, and whether that even made sense.

 

you're in "protection area" until captain level 10, till level 10, you won't face enemies based on your infamy
be happy, lower/mid infamy is cruel area for anyone, you will know why once you reach level 10

 

To review your thoughts...
1. By the time your Crew training gets high enough to tier up your Uncommons, it's too late, because they're so easily outclassed by even low-level Rares or Epics, which are getting easier to collect.
2. Your suggestion is to allow much higher tiers of Commons, Uncommons, or even Rares.

My thoughts...
I agree that rares and epics are collected early enough that they almost immediately outclass whatever tier Uncommons you have.

I'm not sure it’s a real problem, but for the sake of thought-experiment, let's pretend it is...

First, allowing tier-7, 9, 11, or 13 means how tiers are unlocked in the crew trainings will need to be completely re-worked... doable, but likely confusing.
Second, that idea doesn't really "solve" your problem, it actually just kicks it down the road a bit... In other words, in the end, leveling a Tier-13 Common is still probably a bad idea, except now it's an even bigger noob trap...

Instead of all that, let's actually solve the problem, and create rarity-conversions that work like this:
- Commons into Uncommons of comparable level
- Uncommons into Rares of comparable level
- Rares into Epics of comparable level
- Epics into Legendaries of comparable level
- These rarity-conversions would require lots of power cells (think hundreds), so I'd also make power cells not required for regular tier upgrades anymore.

Now there is no more "waste" for upgrading something, because everything is in a long linear progression.

But again... I'd only do any of that if I agreed that there was a real problem to solve...

To review your thoughts...
1. Progression is characterized by short bursts followed by long lulls of waiting for the next progression to unlock.
2. Most Crew upgrades are marginally beneficial or not even something you want, and single-option trainings are dumb.
3. Your suggestion is to re-work everything to create more meaningful choices.
4. Ship mk upgrades are blocked by crew training, which is unpleasant.
5. Your suggestion is to get rid of ship mk.

My thoughts...
1. You're exactly right, but not for rookies. At the beginning, upgrades and progression are flying around so fast. Things really only slow down after a few months of playing, so I'm not sure this is a big problem. You also need to consider that faster crew training is one of the primary reasons to purchase VIP status.
2. I agree... there are few meaningful choices to be found.
3. But if you consolidate into fewer but more meaningful trainings, they'd each have to take even longer... which works directly against your feelings in #1... Short of a complete re-work I don't think it's that bad how it is now... But maybe we need a complete re-work...?
4. I completely agree, this is one of the worst aspects of the game.
5. I've thought a lot about this too. It’s bad that slots take forever to open up. It’s bad that some stats decrease upon leveling up. So I would do this:
- Keep MK levels 1-7
- All slots are now available at all levels
- Speed, Ship Agility, and Turret Agility are now set (to current mk7 levels) at all levels
- That makes HP the only thing to change between MK levels

To review your thoughts…
1. You want to play less when you have a resource capped.
2. But caps are necessary to limit certain progression access.
3. Your suggestion is to eliminate resource caps, and use Captain levels to limit certain progression access.

My thoughts…
You’ll never be able to completely get rid of resource caps, but I would agree to making the caps slightly less restrictive (I remember feeling really held back at certain points)...
But I’d probably rather just do that than re-work progression to be based on Captain levels.

To review your thoughts…
1. Defender is more brawler than tank, but you can’t increase HP and decrease damage output.
2. Your suggestion is to give Defender a way to absorb damage for nearby teammates, and slow down nearby unfriends.
3. Enforcer is more assassin than control, but it’s tricky to fix because it shares yellow items with Speeder.
4. Your suggestion is to nerf Tesla Shields and buff Frost items.
5. Having 4 out of the 5 ships focused on damage and kills means most ppl ignore the other win condition (capturing).
6. Your suggestion is to re-work capturing into multiple zones where duration held becomes the win condition.

My thoughts…
I agree Defender is more brawler than tank, but I think that’s okay.
I also think Enforcer playstyle is distinct enough from Speeder too, personally.
So, I guess I don’t share your gripes about roles…

But your re-worked capture concept seems really cool, and could make for a really fun experimental event!

To review your thoughts…
1. Make all 21 quests available at the start of the week.
2. Allow quests to give different rewards (not just gold and sugar).
3. Give 3 epic boxes + 1 legendary perk for doing all 21 quests.
4. Give better rewards for logging in every day.

My thoughts…
If you give all 21 quests at the start of the week, people would be done by day 1 or 2, and the rest of the week would feel really bland. Spacing them out (as they do) gives more incentive to log in each day, which is exactly what you ask for at the end of your paragraph. Remember, we also get an epic box at the end of the week for logging in 7 straight days, so there’s that too!

Different daily quest rewards could be good I guess, but to me, I’d just make it straight gold 100% of the time. There’s always something in the shop I can buy!

Your best idea is moving to 3 epic boxes for doing all 21 quests… but there’s no way we should get a free Legendary perk each week!

To review your thoughts…
1. People are guild hopping for easier rivalries.
2. The distribution of tokens isn’t properly distributed, and thus unfair.
3. Your suggestion is to make rivalries head-to-head, where even each quest is a race to completion.

My thoughts…
Guild hopping is rampant, and should be dealt with by the Devs.

The wildly unbalanced distribution of tokens across 1st – 6th place made at least a little more sense when guilds were matched by total infamy. But since rivalries changed to match 6 guilds with nearly equal quest completion, the unbalanced distribution no longer makes as much sense. I go into some lengthy arguments about the problems & solutions in several posts in the following thread:
https://forum.battlebay.net/threads/guild-matchmaking-is-destroying-guilds.19429/#post-139414
(See my posts: #16, #18, #19, #21)

Thank you for posting!

I really enjoyed thinking about new fresh ideas, and I hope my feedback is helpful.

Cheers!

 

I like that you put your thoughts down in a detailed and intelligent manner .. with a good attitude too.

So, I'll try to give you my feedback (as best I can recall).

GEAR SCALING

I think your perspective will change somewhat as you advance.

Having to scrap common, uncommon, and rares grows very tiresome. Personally, I don't want more tiers and I don't want to spend more time housekeeping or scrapping these items. Like someone else said, epics are supposed to be better so it would just be a noob-trap .. And, eventually, you'll stop noticing power cells completely.

PROGRESSION

I completely agree that the crew training should be entirely revamped.. but in a different way. After I give it some thought, I'll make a post about it.

CURRENCY CAPS

I agree they can be annoying..

But no matter what it's capped at, people will still hit it. Get used to playing with your sugar capped. And buy everything you can from the shop if your gold is full - attach perks to every item in your inventory (like a savings account). I usually refresh the shop when I cap out on gold.

It's also a psychological thing that makes people spend pearls - so they can keep playing without feeling like they're wasting resources. Since the game costs money to develop and maintain, I don't mind people spending money on time-saving stuff .. rather than buying things unavailable to everyone else (as it is in other games).

SHIP ROLES AND CAPTURE ZONE

I prefer using the entire map to battle. And using the capture circle to only bait out camping teams or a hiding speeder. So, I don't want the capture circle to be the center of attention in infamy matches - where each skirmish would happen in the same spots on each map.

However, it is more fun as a win condition in events where it's a quicker-paced, more aggressive mode.

It could be improved if the slightest damage didn't zero out your completion percentage but took off say 10-15% for each solid hit .. but I don't see it as a big issue as it is.

As far as ship roles, I'm not sure how other moba's do it, but I like how they're set up for the most part. I wish there was a bit more variety in how you could customize your ship, but I don't have a strong opinion about it otherwise.



Anywho, everything I commented on was where I had a difference of perspective. I agree with most everything else.

It was a good read. Good post.

 

I've always thought it was a questionable design to have the training tiers I-V be so quickly obsoleted by higher level items. For example, no one actually upgrades to a T5 Common because: 1. T1 Epic surpasses it in power, and 2. It requires T5 Training. By the time you train T5 it will be at least a Rare. Then there is the Legendary T1 item which gives you more than the power of a T5 Rare without requiring any Captain training. It was justified as a P2P progression path... but that's no longer the case as everyone is getting Legendaries.

So at this point early-game progression has improved but it's now time for re-evaluation of Item leveling vs Captain Training vs Progression Speed, particularly progression in later game. Personally my progression has been stalled for 6 months... which is when I first went T5 Rare. My items have only been slightly improved by earning a single Legendary copy of my T5 Rare items. The game is really frustrating for me at this point, and I'm going to step back and evaluate if I'm just wasting my time with an RNG system that consistently works against me.

The only real solution to this problem is if Raffles/Boxes/Crates/other RNG-based items scale up with the player.