Almighty Video Game Designer - Chapter 418
Chapter 418: The improvement plan
Chen Mo’s idea was to make Overwatch into an entertainment game, to maintain the core fun of the game.
First of all, he had to remove the threshold and make the game completely free of charge. He could only make a profit from the skins, avatars, and other value-added services.
This was to attract as many players as possible and expand the depth of the whole fish pond, so that most players ‘win rate and matching experience were close to that of League of Legends.
Many players might think that it was stupid to force a 50% win rate, but in fact, a competitive game that could not guarantee a 50% win rate was a disaster.
Not being able to guarantee a 50% win rate meant that some players who played well could keep winning, while those who played badly would keep losing. This would aggravate the loss of players in the fish pond, which was extremely detrimental to the lifespan of the game.
Secondly, it was to reduce the feeling of winning and losing and strengthen the player’s sense of growth.
For a competitive game, most players ‘main joy came from winning. On the basis of maintaining this, he also had to try his best to make the losing player not so depressed.
In his previous life, one of the problems of Overwatch was that players lost for no reason. You might think that it was because one of your teammates did not play well, or that they did not cooperate well, or that the lineup was not good. In short, the system would not tell you where you lost, and you would not be able to figure it out.
This directly caused many players to feel a deep sense of powerlessness after losing, and the negative feedback after losing could be called explosive.
Chen Mo’s method was to record all the stats of the player’s heroes throughout the game, not just damage, healing, and kill.
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For example, Winston would integrate data such as damage, number of kills, number of deaths, damage taken, critical kills (killing the opponent’s output or healer with better data), critical damage (the amount of damage contributed to the critical kill), the effect of the big move (whether the timing was correct), and so on. He would give a comprehensive assessment for each game.
All the players could clearly see these numbers and could also clearly distinguish which players were carrying and which players were cheating.
At the same time, the kill count would no longer be shared, and the situation of getting a kill count gold medal from killing would no longer exist.
Of course, since all the data was made public and even more detailed, the “gold” setting was removed.
Moreover, this setting itself was meaningless, because most players didn’t agree that winning a gold medal didn’t necessarily mean that you played well.
For players, if they chose the same champion, they would be able to see the change in the champion’s proficiency at the end of each game. This was equivalent to a disguised form of motivation.
For example, if you used Hanzo and performed well throughout the game, even if you lost the game, you would forget the unhappiness of your failure when you saw that you had gotten an S-rank score and performed better than before.
Moreover, the rewards that players received were directly linked to their individual performance, and had nothing to do with winning or losing. As long as you played well, you could get more rewards if you lost than if you won. This would dilute the frustration of losing the game.
For those who were not good at the game, they could also clearly know what was wrong with them through various data.
For example, if a player chose death, the system would send him a notification after the game ended: In this round, his performance was B, and the number of times he used his E-skill to move was far lower than the average. The number of times he used SHIFT to avoid damage was far lower than the average, and the total damage of grapeshot was far higher than the total damage of the short range.
Combining these data, the system could determine that this player didn’t know how to attack from the back. After this player understood this principle, he would subconsciously strengthen his performance in these aspects the next time he played Grim Reaper.
Only by winning with joy and losing with a clear understanding would most players be able to enjoy themselves in the game.
The last point was to open a variety of game modes.
One of the biggest problems of Overwatch was that the 6V6 all-hero selection mode caused some team-enhancing heroes to be far more effective than ordinary Assault Heroes, causing the lineup to be rigid.
Chen Mo was thinking of activating five different modes for the players to choose. The one with the most players would determine the correct choice.
The first was the classic mode, all Heroes 6V6, and could not be chosen repeatedly.
The second was the FPS mode, where players could only choose the assault-type hero. In other words, this mode would return to the original fun of FPS games, and everything would be decided by shooting.
The third was the ban mode, where each side could vote to ban three Champions. If the players generally felt that the hammer and the DJ were not fun and did not want the opponent to get them, they could ban them directly and they would not appear in the game.
The fourth mode was a 12 VS 12 mode with more people, and it was not semi-finals. The meaning of this mode was that the players had more room to stir up trouble, and many heroes had more opportunities to play.
The problem with a 6V6 was that the space was very limited, so for the sake of the team, two tanks and two healers were basically necessary, so there were only two assault positions.
In the competition for the assault position, it was obvious that the heroes with higher damage ability (such as Soldier 76) would appear all year round, while the heroes with lower damage ability would not have any chance to appear at all. Even if you played well, your teammates would not trust you.
In a 12 VS 12 situation, the entire team would be able to give more space to the less popular Champions. For example, while ensuring that they had the basic number of tanks and healers, they could choose 76, Black Lily, Hanzo, Yuanshi, and Grim Reaper at the same time. They could take into account the high ground sniping, cutting to the back, regular damage output, and other damage output methods, allowing more Champions to have the space to fight.
The fifth was the promotion mode. When a hero’s kill count reached a certain number or received a certain number of assists without dying, they would be promoted and choose a certain ability to enhance. In other words, they could snowball with the advantage of the early stage.
Of course, the other party could also achieve a stronger promotion effect by ending the combo kill.
Moreover, all effects will be reset to zero after the end of the current round to ensure the fairness of the initial round.
This was mainly to satisfy the players who wanted to be a hero and experience the thrill of one against five in this game.
On top of that, Chen Mo’s Overwatch would have a more stringent reward and punishment system.
Every player’s performance in daily matches would affect the player’s overall score. In matchmaking, players of similar levels would be assigned to the same match first.
If a player’s score was always very low, he would be matched with a weaker opponent.
If a player was reported by many players for being passive in the game, cursing, etc., There would be a certain punishment. Moreover, this group of players would enter the same game first. In serious cases, they would be locked in a small black room and would only be released after playing a certain number of human-machine games.
Of course, Chen Mo wasn’t 100% sure if these changes would work. However, there was one thing that Chen Mo was clear about. Overwatch was a great game, and it shouldn’t just be as popular as it was in his previous life, it should be better.
Chen Mo didn’t want the popularity of his own game to die down after a period of popularity. He wanted the game to live longer and allow more players to enjoy the game.