Development Manifesto: Betrayal as a Core Game Mechanic

gg ggg

Cartography Scarabs, Divination Scarabs and Sulphite Scarabs have all been reduced in power. Cartography and Divination Scarabs are around 50% less effective, while Sulphite Scarabs are 60-70% less effective depending on tier.


I get the nerf to sulphite scarabs, though this feels a bit heavy, but my experience with divination and cartography has been very underwhelming. out of the 5 gilded cartography scarabs I manged to get and use so far, I have only had 1 that felt like it actually did something. the others all had terrible results when compared to not using a scarab at all.

adding this mechanic isent bad idea its just bad idea how to add it. for example. if you play the betrayl seriously you want to arrange all members to right place and run them. then they say they "buff" this effect by not reseting whole board just removing 1 rank from all members AND SUFFLE whole board again. this makes nobody to want to run mastermind if you result is RESUFFLE the board... even if you lose all ranks to members people would run mastermind if the board stays at the same place (haku at transport etc. way you want. about scarab nerf i dunno becouse i used 5x gilded elder scarabs with 0 elder item drop(all maps where 70+q).

in the end i liked betrayal league but dint like the Masterminds Resuffle the board making it pretty league braker. hope they learn from this mistake and rise up from it

hi hi

best thx

after giving some thought i believe that the best course of action is to implement betrayal as core after synthesis...
even though betrayal is fun, as the way it is now it isnt very rewarding because the intel/member is too low and also some combinations are very deadly for HC players (try taking on tora+aisling+ITF in fortification t16)
even adding more syndicate encounters per map when the betrayal triggers is too low in the current formula
my suggestion for GGG is:
1-limit the simultaneous Spawn of syndicate members with the same "archetype"
2-nerf the damage of members proportionally to the number of members spawned (1 member full damage, 2 members 70% damage and so on)
3-triple the intel gathered through decisions for each member
4-revamp or remove the ranking system, like members can only be soldiers or captains and captains are Always safehouse leaders, you can only have 1 captain per safehouse (make the rewards more RNG to soldiers)

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klokwerkaos wrote:

I think nerfing scarabs for delve is super bad, very much against that. Delve is already overly expensive as is and gets worse each pass.

Additionally, nerfing the breaches is also terrible as well.

Making level 100 inside a league will change from a possible goal to push for if you really hunker down, to "why even bother to push past 95?" and that sucks as a player.

I get that there is a decided factor that GGG wants to slow progression, but at 96+ even with breaches it's so damned expensive and slow that it's literally already insane even with breaches for NON CASUALS. Unless you're the 1% that trades in bank of exile for 1000+ exalts in the league, you aren't ever going to see that as a possibility, and even then, maybe not because you're spending so much time trading you might not be able to grind the 200x worth of breaches you need to at the lower levels in order to make 100... it's just insane overkill imho.

Making it worse, means only the hardest core that no life the game every day of the league will have any chance of touching 100, and that's kind of crap.

Yes, you do want people to push and keep player retention, but I guarantee at least 95% of those people hitting 100 aren't going to stop playing once they ding 100, because they have other goals too, those people that push that hard aren't the folks that just bail on the game because they reached their first set of goals...

Both of those are really really bad moves imho.

GGG think that bad RNG Will make players play more

wrong!!!That's not how you do it

definitely not 40 challenges In the upcoming league,From the way I see it

The most important changes for me would be

* Ensure that Betrayal Encounters give as much XP as skipping them. This way people would not completly skip them during leveling just to not be slower when leveling through Act 1 to Act 10. The bonus loot from Betrayal encounters is then just the cherry on top. I dislike skipping content, but currently doing those encounters is way worse than skipping them until maps.
* Ensure that the cycle time/reward for all end game content is approximately the same. Especially if a player does not skip some content on purpose and invest it's time all areas should be approximately balanced (with respect to the corresponding iLvl, obviously it is a difference if I run low level or high level maps/delves)
* Mapping
* Uber Lab
* Delve
* Betrayal Encounter/Safehouse/Mastermind

The main reason to focus on one of those should be to specialize in the rewards, less than just one beeing simply way more profitable than ll others. Obviously perfect balance will never exist and it will always shift with current meta but just tie those system better together. I am very happy how this is already in the process right now, but I can see how they could be tied together even better, s.t. they don't exist so strongly side by side.

And while the following is not 100% focused on "Betrayal as Core" it does fit into the whole "Core-Game" topic:

I still do not like how Bestiary as it is implemented. Please make it less annoying to use. I do like the loot and love Einhar but always having to go to the Bestiary, checking out what I could do from time to time is not that much fun. Also those fights are stupidly annoying. Integrate the Bestiary Recipes into the new crafting UI and remove the necessity to fight the beasts again. I doubt I'll ever get the second request, I am aware of that, but I think it would be so much more fun when it would just directly into the crafting UI. When I click on craft it should open a portal to the arena to enter it, fight the mobs. I really dislike having so many different UI's and menus taking me out of the flow and in the case of the bestiary even having to go to the Menagerie, fight the beasts at the altar after I already catched them. And with regards to crafting:
* Integrate Bestiary Crafts into the craft UI
* Integrate resonators into the craft UI (I don't say I know how this could be done easily, but there should be a single UI for crafting)
* Integrate possible suffixes/affixes into the craftign UI. I know there are third party sites, but I want to have all that in the same UI, navigate it, explore it, see what I have and see what I am missing. Especially having the connection: This would be possible if you have XYZ and that is possible because you own UVW in the crafting UI would be awsome. This is especially where resonators would come in handy: Let me reduce the list of possible affixes/suffixes for the Item I am exploring my crafting options and fade out/strike through/remove from the list those I am blocking right now.

I've said it before and still do not like how cumbersome the Incursion League Mechanisms are. Yes they are easy to drop in while doing other stuff, but as with all those league-mechanics which became core they feel attached to the side instead of strongly integrated.

I do love how they are now integrated into the atlas and I wished they would be integrated even more into it, s.t. the Atlas is the single end game content menu.

* Show me on the atlas which maps I own and and let me open the map directly from the atlas.
* Also let me craft the map before clicking "Open Portal" directly with this flow: Open Atlas, See available maps, Choose target map, Craft Map automatically taken currency items from stash/inventory, open the map and teleport into it. Do not let me go through all those different menus for something I am supposed to repeat thousands of times.
* Let me access the labyrinths directly from the atlas, including teleport (if I am in town/hideout) directly into the chosen lab, again taking resources from the stash/inventory.
* Let me access delve directly from the atlas: Click delve, choose delve, automatically teleport to the start.

I have been a big supporter of GGG and how they go about things. I only hope that they realize that Betrayal was good but it was flawed in many ways.

And I say this as someone who didn't even bother to "manipulate" the board with the slight exception of avoiding the dude who gives the 7 second decision on how to upgrade. I still have no idea how people got more time - I have seen videos where people got (if I am not mistaken) 15 seconds.

Frankly I will feel the same way about Betrayal mini as I do incursion mini - I like the extra content. I don't mind the scarab nerfs because most of them end up being used by the 1%. I do care about the amazingly overpowered syndicate toons past map tier 10ish that insta kill lame ass players like me. That is not good design - and it would be much better if I could actually see what was attacking.

Generally I can say that I playing many hours everyday to 21-02-2019 until I read this announcment - from yesterday I lost the desire to continue playing this league with 150 pure breachstones in stash...Reason :League almost end and I dont have time to level new character and won't playing 12+ hours per day..With this announcment about scarabs(good for making cash) and breachtones(I spend over a month for farming them for next chracter leveling later)...

It all looks like everything back to old boring status where ppl must using boring like hell double chaos recipe instead of farming valuable scarabs and cant play any serious bosses or trying hardest things in game when leveling to not die(when leveling - this means whole league)...

Reason why I loved Betrayal was a possibility of playing everything and dying without pain until get enough pure breachstones to leveling whole single level,farming scarabs and selling them ,playing any content without any stress of dying until get another ammount of pures to make single next level...I get lvl 100 significaly fast when I understand how syndicate works and after that I was free to play any content - no stress about dying and that was a real pleasure...

If you really want to nerf pure breachstone so heavily - just double the exp needed for lvl 99-100 and remove penalty...or do something like in "Grim Dawn" game - after die we lost 10% exp but this exp is on the ground for 60 seconds - if we can pick it up we get back 9% and loosing only 1% - if we die again before pick it up or time will pass(those 60 seconds) we loose pernamently 10%...

This is better solution than current frustrating one...

Pls think about it...Now I going watch movie - I do not want to play in this league anymore after this announcment...That was like a blow in perineum...