Skill level rebalance

It’s not like you’re getting more rewards for SSH the way it is now,anyways. Yes,the keys spawn more often,but:

  1. The chances of you not killing the enemy that is carrying a key are extremely high due to the amount of shots enemies can take. Not to mention that these chances are even higher if enemies are able to escape.
  2. You could easily not end up picking up a key because of just how many bullets there can be on the screen,or if you’re for example surrounded by enemies,and the key goes where they are.
  3. Because of how many enemies you could miss,getting food is also harder,as well as because just like keys,it could go where the enemies are. And don’t forget that less food also means less keys.
    So yeah. And once again,ssh isn’t hard,but rather time-consuming. So are you even getting any profit? You’re wasting more time,and you’re missing most of the keys and food.(and also score,since,once again,enemies can easily get away) Where’s that reward?
    Sophodot’s idea is very simple. Revert things to how they were before the update. The end. So why not do it? It’ll actually make skill levels worth buying. Otherwise,who’ll play with the harder skill levels like ssh? People will get tired of spending such a huge amount of time on it. A regular mission would take 20 or 30 minutes. Imagine a weekly challenge…yeah,that thing was 100 waves long last time. The amount of time it would take to complete…I don’t even want to imagine it. People won’t bother with it,and the harder skill levels will become useless,even for short missions.
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I gotta be honest, I’m kinda against turning these into damage amplifiers. Score bonus? Yeah, whatever. How about we just put a modifier on keys as well (I mean one applied after the mission is over, like the current +300% bonus)? It will be worth playing on a higher difficulty if the modifier’s high enough.

Also, personally I don’t think difficulties should have to be purchased. The player should start on the tourist difficulty and harder difficulties should be unlocked by progressing through tiers (with superstar hero maybe around 10-15 million points).

Didn’t seem like a huge issue in the episodes, at least to me. At this point the waves are not balanced properly, it should be a lot more bearable once that’s done. Though I wouldn’t mind if we could save our progress on the weekly challenge, considering how long it is.

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I’ll keep reiterating on what I believe it’s right. These first few days can make or break the final game. It will be easier to fix things now than later in development.
If something is purchased with keys it should offer some sort of improvement, or at the very least not a handicap. SSH at the moment without a doubt decreases your performance, even if it increases your rewards. Think about Gold Digger in CI5, that was a decent upgrade. You paid 300 keys and got the rest of the unlockables 25% faster. It was worth it, without making missions more difficult. Anything that makes missions harder should not cost anything so you can play at any difficulty you desire, and select the one that suits your skill and equipment.

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There are several approaches here. Let’s go back to the original justification behind skill levels for a minute. People who played the game over long periods of time eventually got so good at it, they needed a greater challenge. But, at the same time the game needed to still be approachable for first-time players.

So, ‘Veteran’ (2x enemy health) was born. ‘Superstar hero’ (3x enemy health) was created because even Veteran got too easy after a while. Fast forward to today, and there are people that can finish the game on SSH without losing a single life.

CIU already has a built-in mechanism to control difficulty: mission difficulty (roughly speaking, the number of orange squares next to a mission). The reasoning behind it is that each player can choose to play the range of missions that they feel most comfortable with. It’s entirely possible to progress playing just the easiest of missions. At the same time, you’re free to tackle harder and harder missions until you reach the limit of your ability. In contrast with previous CIU episodes, there’s no real expectation of being able to complete EVERY mission, or even to successfully complete the ones you attempt. Sometimes the randomizer will screw you over, no matter how good you are.

But for those rare brave souls that (eventually) will find a way to easily surmount even the hardest missions on offer, the game also offers the capability to manually apply your own difficulty multiplier in the form of skills.

So it’s really two different mechanisms to control difficulty that can be overlaid as each player sees fit.

Having said this, yes, the SSH cost will be lowered, and yes, the SSH key and score multipliers will be tweaked, and yes, it’s possible to skill to also control other parameters besides enemy health (e.g. attack rate).

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Which is why I think ‘skill levels’ shouldn’t be purchasable, but instead unlockable through tiers.
Clearly the more points someone has, the longer they’ve been playing. The longer they’ve been playing, the more experienced they are. And if they’re experienced enough, they should be able to handle higher difficulties. And playing on said difficulties would increase their earnings.

Basically “get better, earn more”.

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I’d keep arguing,but since IA already decided,guess there’s no point. I’m sick of this,anyways.

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I think that there ſhould be a few more (higher) miſſion difficulties, juſt to make it ſo that the higheſt one’s only doäble by the beſt players on a good day.

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Hmm…so a difficulty with even more insane waves? If chicken roulette with 5 gatling guns isn’t enough,how about chicken roulette with 5 gatling guns,barriers replaced with egg barriers,and all other chickens replaced with chickenauts

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I’m enjoyïng this though. It’s more fun with the occaſional level that’s a challenge juſt to ſurvive.

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It just adds RNG. Do people really enjoy RNG this much?

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Yes… except when you have 3 Power and you face against bubbled up rows of deadly enemies… on a hard skill level…

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Then you either ſurrender or die fighting! :grin:

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Not really. It would be if you had no warning, but you do have a little.

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I feel like sometimes hard waves just come out of nowhere. And that is no good for me. I think they could fit more in more dodge heavy missions. And about dodging. I feel like in those kind of situtations it’s just a tad too precise. Atleast there are good hitboxes for the most part :slight_smile:

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Yeah,only a little. You can’t really know where those chickenauts will fire,or even when,so there is that bit of RNG. That RNG isn’t too bad,though,unless the screen was actually filled up with them or something(same goes for any other enemy),which would happen if they decided to put in some even more insane difficulty levels. Oh,you know what? What do I care. They can add them,and you can go play it and keep dying in it,I simply won’t play missions like those. The end.

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I wouldn’t say that I’m sick of this, but I am frustrated with the outcome, if a bit angry. I didn’t ask for fantasist “can we get mobile release now” or “can we get more varied waves/bosses” or “can we get a wave editor”. Reverting to how skill levels originally worked is a change that could be performed in a matter of days and I genuinely believe it would improve the experience. It could make it a bit unfair (for the chickens), but I would not say it was more unbalanced than it is now (in detriment to the player).

I stand by everything I said. Nothing purchased with keys should decrease player performance, even if it increases rewards to compensate for it. Buying Superstar Hero should make you be a Superstar Hero, not deal three times less damage than when you started. The way it is now, it’s just a stupid name for a difficulty, when they could simply be called “easy, medium, hard” and so on. The conservative view that “SSH was always the hardest difficulty and that’s how it should be for all eternity” is disadvantageous to everyone. Some future players might buy skill levels expecting from their name and the gauge icon to be an ability that improves damage and find that in fact it is the exact opposite and possibly worse, a total waste of their keys.

I get that the game needs to be challenging for experienced players, but there are much more creative, engaging and generally not-cheap ways to increase the difficulty than simply increasing enemy health to ludicrous levels. You could decrease the pause between waves, make enemies use their attacks more often and so on, while letting players kill them as fast or faster than they did before. That example I gave was the most appropriate: a top 10 player should be able to Clean Sweep almost any wave (such as High Speed Chase, Three by Three, Raise the Curtain or Shoot and Scoot) with max power Utensil Poker and maintain a 90-95% kill ratio even on hard missions, if they also have the appropriate upgrades. If players want to handicap themselves when beating a game, they can do it without having to rely on a thing bought with in-game currency, like me and Orandza did for the ↯0 challenge. Any other score-increasing handicaps, like the ones seen in CI5, should be available by default, and not as an option that requires keys to unlock. Players can decide for themselves when they are ready to enable them and if they are worth the extra difficulty.

@InterAction_studios said that “Sometimes the randomizer will screw you over, no matter how good you are.” The one thing I want to avoid with this game is making it more RNG based. Getting killed by a random chick dropping waste just as you pass beneath it every once in a while is unavoidable, but it shouldn’t get much more random than that. If you are in top 10 players, the randomizer shouldn’t be able to screw you over on any regular mission. On endeavours that are near the edge of sanity, like the Hardcore mode we played in CI5 (which is SSH with all handicaps enabled), yes, you could get screwed over multiple times, since we had like 10 attempts before finally completing the entire game.

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Maybe @InterAction_studios could rework it to some kind of “mission modifiers”. Those include skill levels (increase health slightly, faster enemy fire rate etc.) which raise your points and keys, damage amplifiers which lower your score but make it easier, handicaps from ci5 which can raise your points and score again, and special modifiers like “frenetic mode” (everything is 2x faster, imagine speedhack) which is another massive score boost (2x speed is very hard!). What do you think about it?

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The trouble with how it worked before was that at harder levels the only difference really was that it took longer to get anything done. It waſn’t really any more exciting. If you don’t like the harder miſſions, you don’t have to play them (as far as I know there is no penalty whatſoëver), but I don’t think they ſhould juſt be gotten rid of.

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That’s what I’m trying to fix. SSH before the update was exciting, right now it’s more like a test of your patience. I’m not saying to get rid of the hard missions, what I mean is to make the hardest missions available in the galaxy impossible for a new player, but becoming much easier for someone who equips many upgrades. Fighting many threatening enemies at the same time while you yourself being powerful enough to quickly destroy them as they get within range is what I think gives the excitement.

For those who already have all of the upgrades and can beat any mission in the galaxy without breaking a sweat, sure, we can have modifiers that increase enemy health, as well as some new ones that are designed to increase difficulty, with or without handicapping the player further. However, the modifiers that increase difficulty and rewards for playing with them activated should be available to all players, and not purchased from the in-game store. This is so that if a new player is already very skilled, he can progress much faster by adding difficulty modifiers starting from his first missions and profit from the increased rewards. Before they buy it, SSH should encourage people to keep playing and get better at the game, and after they buy it, it should make them feel rewarded for finally being able to get it, instead of having them find out that they’ll have to put even more effort into killing chickens with SSH enabled.

Me and Orandza have already given all the arguments we could possibly think of to support our case in our previous posts. If people are too stubborn to accept the idea that SSH can be something different in CIU from what it was in previous games, then even the best arguments in the world won’t convince them.

Lastly, I’ll try to summarize the guidelines that I would like CIU to follow:

  1. Purchasing skill levels should offer an upgrade to your capabilities, not a trade-off between difficulty and score; reverting them to how they originally worked accomplishes that goal
  2. Nothing that needs to be bought from the in-game store (usually with keys) should decrease the player’s performance, regardless of whether it comes with better rewards for equipping it or not
  3. Modifiers to increase difficulty and rewards should be available by default, so that new players can also rank up faster if they have the skill to play with said modifiers
  4. The power of your ship should be determined by the upgrades you purchase and equip; the difficulty and rewards given in-game should be determined by the mission you choose to play and modifiers that you choose to turn on
  5. The base difficulty of the hardest missions, without any modifiers, should be so that fully upgraded players can get 95% kill ratio
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Can you explain your point? Are you saying that people should miss out on missions, just because they are unnecesarilly hard? And what does that have to do with difficulty? If they are to remain, they will stay useless and boring :frowning:

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