Hey! I previously did a post that was a bit similar to this one, but wanted to cover this in a bit more detail.
After giving it some thought, I’ve found the biggest problem with challenges is that they are driving gameplay, rather than complementing gameplay.
Let’s do a quick rundown:
Challenges are VERY specific right now. The design intention behind having challenges specifically require certain weapons, modes, etc. was most likely to encourage players to try new things – however, this has been largely unsuccessful.
Players are reporting frustration with challenges due to a variety of reasons – including a lack of genuine agency, and the fact that players will not meaningfully progress in the battle pass / events without completing specific challenges.
Along with the last point, the issue of FOMO (fear of missing out) when it comes to event items, weekly rewards, and such frustrates players even more.
Challenges that players dislike can be swapped out with challenge swaps, but these are limited items which either cost money or must be redeemed from a battle pass – and even then, the challenges they cycle in are random, and may be even more frustrating.
Something which exacerbates this issue is the fact that the current matchmaking system does not allow players to select many modes individually (e.g. Quick Play, Big Team Battle, etc.) – leaving it up to random chance.
Only 3 challenges are active at a time for free players, and 4 for premium players. Combined with these aforementioned issues, along with how players will get repeat challenges, this also causes frustration and dampened progression.
Essentially: Due to the current challenges being very specific, coupled with the lack of a Match Composer system, challenges have felt very unrewarding and grindy – they do not complement the player, but force them to a certain playstyle based on random/situational criteria.
In order for the challenges system to thrive, challenges must complement the player’s gameplay instead of dictating it. Until a performance-based progression system is implemented, this system must be improved, otherwise it discourage people from playing the game.
However, it’s important to note two things:
While the current system needs major overhauls (e.g. a new performance-based progression system to complement challenges), these will take a lot of time to properly implement. If it was just adding a new system, it would be easier, but this also requires a complete and total overhaul of major facets of the game’s systems.
Although a new system will take time to implement, the current system is actively frustrating players and discouraging them from playing the game – as such, there needs to be short term changes.
So, let’s go over some potential solutions!
Change weapon-specific challenges (e.g. “Get 5 kills with Assault Rifle”) to weapon and ammo TYPE challenges! (e.g. “Get 5 kills with Kinetic weapon,” “Get 10 kills with Burst weapon,” etc.) – this allows players to, for the most part, choose what weapons they prefer whilst rewarding them for using certain types. This is especially important when it comes to random weapon placements on maps, etc.
Add challenges which encourage players to use sandbox items in more ways than getting kills – encourage sandbox diversity, teach players game mechanics, and help players train with challenges! (e.g. “Deplete 10 enemies’ shields with Plasma weapon,” “Damage 5 groups of enemies with Shock weapon,” etc.)
Get rid of mode-specific challenges until modes can be chosen – instead, have more general challenges (“Get kills in Team Slayer” → “Get kills in PvP,” etc.) and playlist specific challenges for those with multiple modes (e.g. “Score objectives in Quick Play,” “Get headshot kills in Tactical Slayer,” etc.)
Add a new daily score challenge! Much like the weekly “Get score in mode” challenges, you could have a more general challenge which will reset alongside the “play a game” challenge.
Right now, players can get multiple of the same challenge with different numbers (e.g. “Get 5 kills with Assault Rifle” and “Get 10 kills with Assault Rifle”) – maybe change this so you’ll start out with the smaller number, and upon completion, it “levels up” akin to the Daily Challenges system (e.g. “Get 5 kills with Kinetic weapon” becomes “Get 10 kills” etc.)
Give players 2 Challenge Swaps each week! If the player has used these specific swaps by the next week, they’ll get brand new ones in addition to what they have – but if the player hasn’t used these 2 swaps yet, they won’t get new ones. This gives players the option to switch out their challenges without paying, rewards them for continuing to play, and still has it so players need to pay for more (even if I find that to be a terrible system, this is a better short term solution than redoing the whole system overnight).
I’m not able to edit posts for whatever reason, so if I make any mistakes here, I’ll have to do those in the replies.
This was my third feedback post, and I hope I’ve explained this constructively and concisely! Let me know your thoughts and feelings below, and definitely share this post if you like it!
The problem with challenges at it’s heart is that they present the player with conflicting goals: do what’s necessary to win the match vs do what’s necessary to complete your challenges. Even when you change around which challenges you get to play this basic issue does not go away.
Sure, we can perhaps improve some of the slightly more annoying challenges (specifically mode specific challenges tied to multi-mode-playlists) but until we correct the issue of challenges rewarding you while winning matches (outside of ranked) does not the bad player behavior caused by them does not go away.
In general I like your suggestions. I fear however that there currently are specific metrics built into the game which then trigger the challenges. So in order to introduce most of them they likely would have to write new code to handle those metrics. And if this is the case (and this of course is merely an assumption on my part) I’d rather they work on the performance based XP instead of tinkering with the challenge system.
Overall I think there are lots of good ideas expressed here, that will benefit the system if it stays in place once performance based XP arrive.
I spent most of this weeks playtime on last spartan standing, I hate that game mode, Im sick and tired of the map, bit its the only way to unlock gear and level up with the weekly missions.
I miss big team battle, haven’t tried the new rumble pit, and when I finished my last mission I was so excited to get back to what I enjoy, but the bloody weekly ultimate is play 3 more sodding last spartan standing games.
This is why I need to take breaks from the game, theres no reward for playing the games I enjoy, the way I enjoy them.
The biggest problem is Challenges needing to be a bit more open-ended so that players can have a better chance of completing them on whatever game modes they want. I’m one of the lucky ones where - save for FFA and Ranked - I enjoy all of the current game modes so I don’t mind jumping from Fiesta to Tactical Slayer to LSS to complete my Challenges.
Still, having done a Tenrai Event for one week and then the next week comes around and I still get like 4-5 Fiesta Challenges in that week…it does get a little aggravating.
Would really like to play BTB more often and complete my Challenges there.
Not gonna lie, I just loaded in, walked out in the open, lets some ppl back smack me, then jumped in the lava. You don’t have to finish the game for the challenge to count, so I was done in like 10 minutes with it.
Time is the biggest issue for me. If the weekly item did go away for an indefinite amount of time, if players could try for an on another week if they missed a week, I think many of the symptoms would be alleviated. Why keep quitting matches looking for CTF when you have all the time in the world to find one?
It’s the week long time limit that creates the pressure and thus the stress.
Yeah, that makes sense and I completely agree. The challenges system is inherently flawed due to its unsuccessful design intentions, and it’d be better with a completely better system altogether. Just wanted to give some feedback on what short term changes can be made as a buffer between now, and when the new progression system will be done – since I generally see people saying “add a new progression system” but not understanding exactly how long that’d take.
Thanks!
Doesn’t help they’ve forgotten to re-add the BTB challenges ever since it was broken months ago, haha.
I do understand how their intention behind mode-specific challenges is to encourage players to play them, but feel their design intentions and execution have been unsuccessful and counterintuitive to what they wanted to achieve.
The challenges really need to complement gameplay instead of dictating it, otherwise players are just going to get burnt out and stop playing, and then miss out on a lot of cosmetics and such – the fact they upped the value of weekly rewards, but left the challenges unchanged, exacerbates this issue.
What if the challenges and reward were bi-weekly? They’d have some more challenges as a result, which allows players to progress further – though an issue I can see is the grind just becoming worse for players who come in around the end of the two-week period and just can’t make the grind.
It really is frustrating how these weekly rewards are locked behind a system counterintuitive to player enjoyment, and most likely can’t be achieved any other way – especially how many cosmetics are locked behind a paywall, too.
Then you could rather just decreas the number of challenges from 20 to 10 per week, since otherwise there are less rewards to win with completing challenges.
Changing the nature of the challenges until they add some way of selecting what modes we actually want to play is a solid suggestion, but I feel like we all gotta double down on the “add some way of selecting what modes we want to play” part since even WITHOUT the challenge system, there are simply some modes people don’t want to play and some that do and we shouldn’t be forced to play the ones we don’t just to play the ones we do.
Oh yeah, absolutely. I made a post which suggested something akin to TF2’s social queue system where you can pick what modes AND maps – you’d have each playlist, followed by a dropdown menu of which modes and maps you want to select.
An issue with this system over the current one, though, is that queue times might skyrocket. Right now, queue times are lower since there’s a pool of modes and maps which the matchmaking service determines – but since the player count has dropped so much, it might take even longer to get into games when people pick individual modes, since certain ones will be less populated.
At the end of the day, though, that’s an issue of 343’s own making – driving away players with a terrible matchmaking system, which would make implementing a new one harder on players to find games.
A longer period to do the challenges would help, but I’m all for just eliminating that entirely. MCC introduced theExchange precisely for people who miss out on seasonal rewards. Or people who were late to the party like moi.
Yeah, 20 + 1 is such an arbitrary number. Honestly they could have 10 challenges but the requirements are higher (ex: “Win 10 matches” instead of “Win 3 matches”) or just 1 big weekly challenge like (ex: “Get 100 headshots” or “Play 50 matches”)
Making weapon challenges more generic is essential considering not every game mode might have the weapon you need for a challenge. Same with game types if they aren’t going to allow you to choose game modes.
My favourite suggestion is the score based daily challenge, don’t just reward players for playing the game, reward them for doing well AND playing the game.
They can’t since the multiplayer is free to play and campaign costs 60 dollars. That would either mean that most players would either have to pay 60 dollar to complete challenges or they have to buy swaps over and over again. That defeats the whole purpose of the free to play concept. Campaign challenges are therefore not possible.
A speculation of mine is that it somewhat isn’t an arbitrary number of challenges.
7 days in a week, 21 is dividable by 7, meaning 3 challenges per day on average, which on paper doesn’t seem, feel or sound bad. Manageable to say the least. Functionality of it? Yeah that’s a completely different thing.