Campaign Rank Decay is poor design

[Okuza]

...for a long time IS was a complete joke too

Just sayin

[btw, decided to post this in a separate thread -- seemed like too much of a derail from Besieged vs Campaign]

Yep. And if rank didn't decay, I'd definitely spend time ranking up. I'd be able to put my ranking effort on hold at any time and go do some other fun activity -- then come back to it when it sounds fun again. As it stands now, if you rank up under the current situation, you can't move on after you're done. You can't even pause. And, when you finally cap, your just left holding a great deal of worthless AN; you've seen it all and done it all and don't want to do it any more. But, you're hopeful that SE is going to add something nice for AN purchase. When? 6 months? 12 months? You're STUCK. You now have to waste your time doing something you don't want to do just to keep your rank while hoping SE makes it worthwhile.

At least half the fun in an MMOPRG is the sense of progress you get by working toward a goal, achieving it, then moving on to another goal. Decaying rank not only denies you of that progress, it prevents you from moving on and it tries to dictate what your actions in game should be after you've had enough. There's not even a goal to work toward -- anything you achieve in campaign will be decayed and lost when you decide to move on to doing something else.

Think about decaying rank and apply it to the past. What if your city rank decayed? Your assault rank? Would you really not mind at all that you have to continue to repeat Zilart missions? What if you had to repeat FL missions to keep your captain rank? What if your COP-ring had a rental cost -- so many sea-critter organs per week or it's potency fades away. Does that sound fun to be stuck doing old events you've moved beyond?

It's like salvage and assault. Once you're done with assaults, it becomes a chore to do more. It's not fun anymore. Your fun is in salvage (or at least in hoping your drop will fall), but you're unable to truly move on because the two are linked. It's just plain bad design to prevent people from moving on to newer activities. People have a finite time available for a game. The more gating events that they add like this, the less fun people can have: they're increasingly chained to the past.

Onerous annoyance is not the only way to make things "hard" in MMORPGs. That's the worst kind of difficulty. Challenging effort is what makes things fun, not being forced to repeat old content ad infinitum. By the time you cap your campaign rank, campaign will be as old and tired for you as repeating all your assaults from PSC.

So, I'll just be ignoring campaign missions and ranking until they add something worthwhile at the end of that trek. Then I'll rank up, get it, and not care afterwards if the rank decays. If I did it on speculation, I'd just tie myself into something I'm going to come to seriously resent having chained to my ankle.

[Karny]

There is a lesson to be learned here. Everything WoW does is not good! This is like straight copy from WoW PvP ranking system which they have removed because it is stupid and unfun.

[BRP]

Players with higher rank have more power in tactical assessment. This has a major effect on Campaign Battle and Ops. It really does make sense that people who are active in Campaign get more power to pick how it's done compared to people just doing it occasionally for some random exp or the lulz. Additionally, one has 30 days before they get demoted, giving them quite a bit of time to relax.

[Kimiko]

Simply put, war is hell. War does not take breaks, nor does it care for your past triumphs. War only cares for the here and now, and if your not willing to succede in the here and now you have no reason to be part of that war.

[HAcoreRD]

I see no issue, if anything, further Allied note rewards will hold more value if people get demoted or stripped of rank.

It's motivation. Even if they added items like, "Gold muskateer" armor or w/e 12 months from now, you'll have so many points you can buy and sell multiple pieces on AH.

[Ish]

Simply put, war is hell. War does not take breaks, nor does it care for your past triumphs. War only cares for the here and now, and if your not willing to succede in the here and now you have no reason to be part of that war.

Are you fucking kidding me. Enjoy camping the laggy /cmap so you can rank up. Guess I have no reason to be part of the war since I'm not willing to be INSANE ABOUT CAMPAIGN! Yeah, it rhymed. At least with besieged we get a warning to get your ass to Al Zahbi.

GG, SE, the best part of the expansion outside of the 2 jobs has been ruined for absolutely no good reason.

[Zekyr]

Simply put, war is hell. War does not take breaks, nor does it care for your past triumphs. War only cares for the here and now, and if your not willing to succede in the here and now you have no reason to be part of that war.

Yes, but wars end. It's perfectly feasible if a general decides to say "Hey, screw this, I'm not planning any more of these missions anymore" and disregards his duties for a few months he'd be demoted. Hell, there's a war going on, and shit to be done, and this leader isn't taking care of it? Perfectly understandable.

But wars end. When the sides stop fighting, and ceasefires or treaties or just one side decimating the other happens, the war stops. The war duties aren't required like they were. That same general can spend years behind a desk not doing anything remotely close to what he had to do during war, but retain his position.

I think that's all Okuza is trying to say. When the expansion is over, all the missions are done, the war is over (or however this expansion ends the plot) that he doesn't have to continue to do random campaigns to maintain a top rank, which for all we know will require some absurd amount of time dedicated to even earn, much less maintain.

I can completely understand, while it's true that during wartime duties must be continually carried out to even maintain your rank, much less improve it, after war is over there shouldn't be the same requirement. While we'll have to wait and see where the story and missions of WotG leaves off, it may be that one of the rewards is a non-decaying rank.

I will also be in the boat of "maxing rank at the end, getting what I need, then never doing it again" if it isn't. I'm one of the people who likes to work hard for something until it's finished and not have to worry about dealing with it again. Hopefully, if the decaying ranks are forever like this, than the benefits of a higher rank will only affect things in Campaign and other events related to having the rank.

[Dammerung]

Simply put, war is hell. War does not take breaks, nor does it care for your past triumphs. War only cares for the here and now, and if your not willing to succede in the here and now you have no reason to be part of that war.

Are you fucking kidding me. Enjoy camping the laggy /cmap so you can rank up. Guess I have no reason to be part of the war since I'm not willing to be INSANE ABOUT CAMPAIGN! Yeah, it rhymed. At least with besieged we get a warning to get your ass to Al Zahbi.

GG, SE, the best part of the expansion outside of the 2 jobs has been ruined for absolutely no good reason.

It's been out for a week. Was besieged perfect one week from implementation?

[Sasarai]

At least half the fun in an MMOPRG is the sense of progress you get by working toward a goal, achieving it, then moving on to another goal. Decaying rank not only denies you of that progress, it prevents you from moving on and it tries to dictate what your actions in game should be after you've had enough. There's not even a goal to work toward -- anything you achieve in campaign will be decayed and lost when you decide to move on to doing something else.

What game are you playing? A vast majority of people playing the game are still doing activities after years, either not achieving the goals they set out for or doing it for other reasons, like (gasp), enjoyment factor.

Basically a good tl;dr summary of your OP would be that you have a problem with Campaign Ranking because you only want to get shinies. Campaign doesn't offer these right now and even when it does, you don't like the idea of having to comit to it to be able to get said shinies, correct?

Are you fucking kidding me. Enjoy camping the laggy /cmap so you can rank up. Guess I have no reason to be part of the war since I'm not willing to be INSANE ABOUT CAMPAIGN! Yeah, it rhymed. At least with besieged we get a warning to get your ass to Al Zahbi.

GG, SE, the best part of the expansion outside of the 2 jobs has been ruined for absolutely no good reason.

LOL @ you talking about Campaign being a failure after one week. Clearly you have not been playing long.

[Ish]

LOL @ you talking about Campaign being a failure after one week. Clearly you have not been playing long.

I didn't say it was a failure. I said they had ruined it after one week for no clear reason as you clearly did not read. It was happening constantly, it was enjoyable, the mobs were not of an insane difficulty level and noticable progress could be viewed relatively quickly. The experience bonuses per tag were great with multiple tags, and it gave people who don't have a lot of time something to quickly do before life happens and you have to log off.

Now then, I totally understand where you guys are coming from with reference to Besieged, and really it is a semi-fair reference. I realize you're choosing to give Square the benefit of the doubt, allowing them to work out the kinks as it were before they get it to a "reasonable" level of difficulty versus time invested versus reward.

I don't choose to give any such leniency. When Besieged was released it was touted as a new mass battle style of instance etc. etc. I was patient with SE and remember it's release pretty well. The mobs were too easy, it was too laggy, and sometimes the mobs were bugged. The rewards were ridiculously bad and you could lose experience points. Oh boy! There weren't a ton of NPCs but that's ok because Al Zahbi wasn't capped so you had 1000 people murdering mobs at the speed of, well, it was really fast.

Now do a mental checklist with me if you will? Campaign released as a new mass battle in zones. Mobs aren't exceedingly easy, but not too difficult. The lag is dealt with by spreading the playerbase out over three nations and constant campaign happening in multiple zones at once. You don't lose experience points, and the Allied Notes can be used to purchase decent gear (based on some of the info relayed by .dat miners). Hypothetically, that gear would get better as you rank up through Evaluations, based on a combination of Campaign performance and Campaign Ops. It's outstanding! Most if not all of the problems with Besieged were solved in Campaign with the exception of NPCs disappearing inside indoor zones.

So yeah way to make an assumption that I don't know what I'm talking about.

[Builttolast]

I'm with Ish there. It appeared to be a pretty good alternative to Besieged without all the inherent problems. But alas it has been changed so that the time/reward ratio is skewed, and you’re spending most of your time either sitting down waiting for something to happen, or camping the warp NPC to try and make the next battle just so you don’t get bored and log off. It is clear that they were not happy with how it was running before the update, which is a shame because it seemed to be exactly what people wanted. Who knows how it will end up now, that is up to SE. But I’m afraid that it may never be as fun again. There is a lot of potential for campaign, please bring back the longer battles and shorter wait times.

[spooky]

Sooner or later they are going to run out of content to add. Even if people keep playing and there are a decent number of people on each server, they arn't going to develop forever. There’s only so much you can fit on a PS2 after all.
If they want people to keep playing even after major development has ceased then goals the decay overtime is the only way to do it.
If you're capped on everything and there's nothing left to do, you would move on to other things or another RPG. If SE is thinking long term (I'd be very surprised if they weren’t), then they are probably testing the water right now to see what people's reactions are to self perpetuating content (stuff that decays).

[Sasarai]

The bottom line is it has been available for a week, look at most aspects of FFXI that were introduced prior to WoTG and you will see that very very few of them are the same currently as they were after just one week.

It's pretty obvious Campaign still needs tweaking, noone denies that. It also needed tweaking before, however SE just went several steps too far. Thats how they roll. They will hit balance somewere along the line, but the enduring point is that as a concept and for potential Campaign is a seriously good investment of time.

[Gilthas]

I'm with Ish there. It appeared to be a pretty good alternative to Besieged without all the inherent problems. But alas it has been changed so that the time/reward ratio is skewed, and you’re spending most of your time either sitting down waiting for something to happen, or camping the warp NPC to try and make the next battle just so you don’t get bored and log off. It is clear that they were not happy with how it was running before the update, which is a shame because it seemed to be exactly what people wanted. Who knows how it will end up now, that is up to SE. But I’m afraid that it may never be as fun again. There is a lot of potential for campaign, please bring back the longer battles and shorter wait times.

Um, before the update you could wait for 30 ****ing minutes for mobs to finally appear. While the current system isn't perfect (they really should just give us ETA's of mobs on the Campaign map) I'd rather warp to an outpost with a battle already going on than being able to take a nap before any mobs show up.

[Xanthe]

I don't see how we can already have a thread about this only 8 days the expansion went live. It takes a whole 30 days before your medals have a chance to expire. You'd have to do absolutely nothing with Campaign and refuse rank up for that entire 30 day period to find yourself being demoted. I haven't done any Campaign battles this week and only a few Ops, but I'm not worried about demotion because I can just blow my stack of Op credits and do some battle hopping this weekend and pass my second evaluation without issue.

[Max™]

Yup, even with it being 5 Days that you can decay, I wouldn't have minded much, it's fun, I can do it on my own, at will.

If assault did this, it would suck, you must find 2-5 other people, you must have tags, you must be able to beat the missions.

Campaign is basically getting assault ranks for doing Besieged and random Quests.

Wow, shit I've been doing since AU came out? Cool.

You have 30 days before medals expire, and again, unless the higher rank medals decay very rapidly, you could maintain a medal within an hour or so of Op spamming and a Campaign battle or two, and then just ignore it for another month if you so wished.

You'd be pretty lax as a soldier, but hey.

[BRP]

I would compare Campaign's medals to Ballista's chevrions rather than mission ranks.

[spooky]

What's Ballista?

[Kael]

I never liked Besieged to begin with.

Even as it is now Besieged < Campaign. I've been actively going to different Campaign battles as they sprout up. It's more fun, less laggy, and it's pretty consistent which I liked. Bastards that said it was too frequent should stop fuckin' QQing and stay in Aht Urghan.

[oxx2]

QQ