Adventure "reset" mechanic discussion

Continuing the discussion from Balancing & Changes:

It has long been assumed that the “reset” option on adventures was intended to allow us to loop the desired parts of adventures, at the cost of gems for energy. With the announcement above from @Mother_Morgz, it seems that you have confirmed that this is not the case. All of the other adventures indicate the reset mechanic was well in mind when they were designed.

While it was certainly needed to fix the bug in “The Deep Mine”, it does not change the fact that many non-repeatable adventures were, or at least appear to have been, designed with the “reset” mechanic in mind.

You guys were aware we were buying multiple glyphs and other items with gems and gold, using this mechanic? right?

The complete removal of this mechanic has changed the entire collection timeline for many game items. I hope you have plans to rethink this change for existing adventures as they rotate back into the calendar. You can fix the bug in The Deep Mine by eliminating the conversation stops after the reward selection phase, so it functions like Flametree Expedition and other similar adventures.

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Agreed, this was a good feature that didn’t feel at all like a bug.

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Id be really surprised to see a dev comment on this thread regarding this

Can you share with the community how you were made aware of this “bug” please @Mother_Morgz

Many thanks.

In my opinion the adventure reset feature was an essential part of this game. PQ3 is a heavily grindy game, with really slow progression pace even for players ready to spend money on the few sensible offers available. The reset feature of some of the non-replayable adventures and some of the replayable adventures have always been a great way to give a boost to our progress by allowing us to farm resources that are otherwise extremely scarce. This farming still had a balanced cost in terms of time and resources so it wasn’t by any means broken. Furthermore, it is clear that the dev team was aware of that feature, we have openly discussed it in the game chats, and they even promoted it by creating gong’s song (which makes no sense without the ability to reset adventures) and making it easier to do the reset with the new adventure navigation system.

I understand that making it possible to farm glyphs in this adventure was not intended, probably an oversight of making the reset available whenever we press the continue button. Being able to farm glyphs for a reduced cost such as in To Your Doom, Dreamhold Expedition, or In the Summertime is reasonable, but being able to farm them at nearly no cost it isn’t. So we are not complaining about you fixing that. The issue is that the method you have chosen for it is, in my opinion, a terrible idea. Removing the reset mechanic from the adventures is yet another tough blow against players, another decision that will make the game much less enjoyable.

I will use myself as an example of what this change will mean. Before the summer event I was losing my motivation, no longer enjoying playing the game. The gear and crafter rework had given me new goals to pursue, but soon I felt that the path ahead was too slow and arid. I saw that I had to farm 8 or more hours every day and still would need several months to advance and I was not enjoying playing myself. So I decided to just play enough to do daily tasks but keep playing since I still enjoyed the interaction with other players, helping them and managing our kingdoms. When the summer event and the new adventures came, I was gripped and started enjoying the game again. I played a lot of hours but at least I could see how that time invested gave me fast returns. Then came flametree expedition with the loot tickets, and coin collector… I have really enjoyed the last months of PQ3.

And now? No more reset feature means going back to the painfully slow progress. Even after using tons of loot tickets I see myself hardly advancing at all due to the mix of terrible drop rates and RNG. My experience with the loot tickets have made me sure that the terrible rewards from chests makes it not worth to spend hours farming every day. So, without adventures to enjoy I guess I will go back to play just enough to do the daily tasks and not much else, hoping that I don’t get bored of time passing and getting nowhere.

Maybe the decision to remove the reset feature has been done because it was the easiest and quickest way to fix the glyph farming issue. But then, I really believe you should think of alternative ways of making sure we cannot farm what it isn’t balanced while giving us back the reset mechanic to farm what it is balanced. Without the ability to farm adventures we will be required to play lots of hours everyday and still require months to reach our goals, or play just a bit every day and require years for it. Not many players have the patience for this.

Many newer players are concerned about how much they can acomplish in the game. My answer has always been generally positive, saying that even being F2P you could go really far with a bit of patience, and by doing reasonable purchases you could get to the top pretty fast. But that was considering the ability to farm adventures and boost your progress through them. Now, this is no longer true. F2P players can forget about most end game goals unless they are ready to spend absurd amounts of time for a really long time. Even players ready to pay reasonable amounts of money will see that they are not really getting much from it. It seems that the game is going towards a path where only by spending literally thousands on awfully overpriced offers will you be able to progress at a decent pace. If that is your goal, fine, it is your game. But it will surely have a price.

I really ask you to reconsider the removal of the reset mechanic of adventures and try to find other fixes to the “unwanted farming” issue seen in this adventure. If not, I hope that you reconsider rebalancing current and future adventures to fill the void that has been left. We need ways to be able to farm important scarce resources such as runes, scrolls, loot tickets, aether, spell dust, glyphs… Adventures are a great way to do so because you can control how often they come around (to limit availability) and can still make them cost enough so that they are good to farm but don’t break resource balance. The system worked great until now, but now that system is broken and the game has suddenly become much worse. I really hope you realize it and take actions so that we can again enjoy of this game we like so much.

As always, thanks for your time and help.

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I’m also a little confused by Mother Morgz’s post whereby changing a hero will no longer reset the adventure, ever. This ability has been in the game for so long and it has been brought up on the forums here before so we thought it was by design. Maybe not originally by design but was accepted as part of the game. Part of the reason we thought it was by design was that some adventures had a great reward right before the end (Like the Deep Mine) but because there was no battle in between the reward and the end you could not get the reward and then reset the adventure.

I can see there was a “bug” with this adventure as the recent and good QOL changes to adventures no longer required an actual battle to occur to reset.

Sometimes the reset was used to farm extra ore, food, relics, runes, slightly cheaper glyphs (obviously not free) etc and may have cost us a good deal of gems and time for the ability do do so. People would chat about the upcoming adventures and get excited for them for this very reason.

Please bring back the ability to restart adventures without there being a bug like this one. Without it the only thing to farm in the game will be either dungeons or XP. Maybe hunts for some people too.

Other Ideas:

  1. Make more adventures replayable. Final gem awards could be first time only as not to mess that up by being replayable. Although this would reduce the farmability of many adventures though as sometimes the desirable thing is right near the start.
  2. Have a point past which you can’t reset and mark it on the map.
  3. Go back to the “there has to be a battle” to be able to reset mechanic.
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I understand that being able to get glyphs almost for free had to be fixed (was it this bad though? Different topic) but it’s been done in the worst possible way, it’s like amputating someone for just a rash…
Because, yes, resetting adventures is/was probably the best feature of the game even if it was not a game design decision but rather a happy accident, bug becoming features have always been a thing in videogames, but the devs and their managers have to be open-minded for it to happen.
Also without this I don’t know how we’re supposed to get epic runes and scrolls now, besides abysmal luck on chests? This has got to be the only game I’ve ever heard of where low lvl resources can keep hindering your progress when you’re at endgame.

One more thing, resetting adventures was my favorite way of farming XP because doing the same archives story mode gets very monotonous, at least when an interesting adventure popped up I felt compelled to keep lvling because it came along with some interesting rewards.

I hope the team can reconsider the nerfhammer they just did, after months of positive changes this feels like a huge step back.

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While I agree with everyone’s comments, it’s a waste of time writing them, they don’t want us to progress without buying crowns.

I really thought the Adventure Reset was a nice feature of the game. I enjoyed it. When it was added onto the Continue option to make it even easier to do, I was certain it was a planned feature to give flexibility to players with extra time to play options.

There are many posts in this thread that explain how it benefits the game being included in it, so there is no reason for me to type out a long post.

I will miss it.

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Don’t need to fix what ain’t broke Dev, ya drongo! I picked up that phrase from watching Les on Aussie Opal Hunters. I think it applies here, maybe reconsider your bug fix.

hey everyone,

I’ll try and get a proper response in here when I can - this change went out much sooner than I expected and I was not around to making a post to address it
In part, some misunderstanding and miscommunication on my side meant that this ability to replay adventures that were never intended to be replayed went on and felt intended.

Adventures were always intended to have set replayable Adventure’s and then non-replayable Adventure.

In this case, the most recent non-replayable had a free Glyph in it which when farmed causes an unbalance to the resources of the game - thanks to feedback I have shared from everyone, we are adding more ways to earn Glyphs in 3.3 onwards. I understand that’s not much consolidation now, but is something we have been working on along with other ways to earn valuable resources.

Before the change was made had raised a number of the points shared in this thread but more specifically adventures are providing access to many hard to find resources.
But removing this reset cannot be applied to one adventure, so we could not just apply it to The Deep Mines adventure

As mentioned, I’ll do what I can to get a proper response in here when I can and hopefully, after I can chat to the team a bit more about the feedback shared across the threads that have appeared.

And again, I’m sorry that in part my misunderstanding and miscommunication meant this was not resolved/handled differently earlier.

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Understandable, but I do think that because the adventure was cut midway, that compensation should be given to any players who bought Gong Song for this. In my case, I bought it for the minion shards and ore, even though the glyphs were a nice bonus. Normally you can’t character swap and start over unless there is at least 1 battle left, so most of the adventures are actually pretty balanced even with Gong Song. We actually thought the dev team was leaning into the exploit by making Gong Song in the first place.

Going forward if these changes do remain in place, besides the gylphs which you’ve already mentioned, I’d personally like to see at least one adventure that is replayable with minion shards and some minion glyphs in adventure as well (the glyphs don’t neccesarily need to be in a replayable one). Also the unblock 100 paths order is a bit ridiculous at the moment, it would take like what…10 years maybe to complete? A replayable adventure for that would be appreciated to make progress on it a little more realistic. That or just tweak the numbers on the goal maybe?

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If people can’t grind here and progress, their gonna go somewhere else. Bottom line. Question is, will this be fixed properly and quickly before it’s too late? Seriously, this is some Devs fault, not the players who love the grind of this game. So why are we being punished for someone else’s oversight, ignorance or whatever you consider it? Things to look forward to in PQ3, for me atleast are Seasons, daily bazaar and mostly the grindy adventures. Now the season chest drop are outright bad, unless I’m the only one? I buy platinum every season and for quite a few seasons, haven’t been very overjoyed, honestly. Bazaars have some great stuff, bit alot of bad offers and sometimes most are bad. The bazaar level up to 10 obviously means absolutely nothing. You said it draws from a pool per level? Well the pools need more water imo. As for the Adventures, everyone looks forward to them and if you take one of the best parts of this game and handcuff it we all know the end result. Please think, and do the right thing. If you tell me the swap character was never intended, I’d say I don’t think so, %100. No way none of the devs didn’t know. You play the game lol fast fix

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What was the purpose of gong song booster being added if the character switch wasn’t intended? On replayable adventures you lose your booster Everytime. So not worth the crowns every time. I buy gongs alot, now not a chance in he double hockey sticks

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Are they at least going to refund the crowns for gongs song? Eliminating the reset ability mid adventure was wrong.

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Not a comprehensive reply, just to respond to a couple of the questions/points raised here:

  • The intention of allowing Heroes to be swapped but for the Adventure to restart on Non-Replayable Adventures was so that you wouldn’t get stuck somewhere with a Hero that turned out to be less-than-ideal, or too low-level etc. We also wanted to make sure that if you didn’t lose any Energy because you can top up the Energy with Crowns. So didn’t want that lost just because you needed to make that change. I can see in retrospect how we’ve been at cross-purposes with the reasons for, and communication around, some of this stuff (and not on @Jeto’s part, of course).

  • There are a number of Adventures intended to be one-and-done. I don’t think we realised on our side that that wasn’t necessarily as obvious as we thought it was because @Dr.dispair might be right. We may, in fact, be drongos.
    We’re listening to all your feedback here and fixing this bug has actually brought some really good points to the surface (Jeto has also been making a bunch of fun recommendations). Rather than a sort of busted way to work around something that’s not working well, might be better to have some not-busted, very on-purpose solutions.

  • One thing we can do regardless of other QOLs we might want to do moving forward, is make sure that in addition to the non-replayable Adventures on our calendar, that we’re also scheduling replayable Adventures regularly.

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Ok, that said, boosters in replayable adventures should be kept the duration of the entire adventure correct? Not just 1 play through, because there’s no value in it if we have to buy w crowns every run. The adventures that won’t be replayable aren’t worth buying any booster if the switch character is gone, so there’s that. There definitely will need to be more replayable adventures. Can some of the non replayables be made into replayables? Also, what’s the eta on the new adventures? To tease us pre season w new adventures and endless dungeon wasn’t cool.

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It might be worth considering some adjustments to the adventures themselves. Take Gong’s shop in this adventure (the Deep Mines), for instance; the food trade for shards is way overpriced. Before the 3.0 update, the food costs were reasonable, but now that food is hard to come by, players are unlikely to pay those steep prices for just a few shards.

Another example, is coin collector offering a legendary relic for 1,250 gems. If the price were more sensible, players might actually be tempted to buy it during their runs. As it stands, that price tag feels pretty outrageous, and it’s hard to justify spending that much.

Also, what happened to the extra rewards at the end of adventures? Those additions really improved many adventures that used to be pretty dull, like Borderlands Bash. The extra 50 ancient coins at the end made it way more interesting and kept players coming back for more.

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Couple of more things I can address:

  • Extra rewards at the end or during an Adventure are usually tied to a bigger event happening at the same time.
    • For example, Ancient Coins as a bonus reward was after we had the bonus Ancient Coins event - think there was also an issue with that initially so we added in extra ways to earn the Coins.

That said, changing and updating the rewards for adventures is part of the feedback I have shared.

  • All refund requests are handled through our Support tickets: https://bit.ly/3UhZmQH

  • Having more Adventures be replayable and adding new replayable Adventures is on the list of things that have been discussed.

  • I’ve already mentioned elsewhere but including that there are new Adventure nodes in the 3.2 patch notes was to update that the capabilities are now in PQ3 but that the Adventures are still being worked on. We want to include as many, if not all changes made in an update, whether you can interact with them yet or not.

  • Following up on Boosters in replayable Adventures, as there has been conflicting information on our side about how they are intended to work.

    • But investigating getting boosters to be persistent for all attempts, within a replayable Adventure. They will obviously not carry over to the next time that Adventure circles around.
  • The cost of the offers in the Adventure Shop nodes have also been raised again

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"new Adventure nodes in the 3.2 patch notes … still being worked on. "
Jeto, more than a month has passed since the 3.2 update. Still no new adventures…

Can’t you even give us a more general idea of when those will become a reality ?