Kill Quest Difficulty

[Zarox]

The purpose of this post is to show the evolution of the way challenge scrolls have changed over the almost three years they have been added and how it has changed TTT at FRG. I want to talk about three main things in this post; How challenge scrolls work, updates that have affected scrolls, and my opinions on how I think scrolls can be handled slightly differently.

On February 16th, 2018 FRG added what I believe to be one of the most important updates in its lifetime[1]. This update added the Challenge scrolls to the server of varying difficulties. Soon after the expert and professional scrolls were added. It was an exciting time to see MicroBoss And The Community complete the first expert or Alex Summers completing the first Professional Scroll. These events were exciting to almost everyone on the server and for months after the addition of scrolls many people wanted to see the loot drop it even went as far as every scroll from all difficulties was posted in #general until the much-needed #scrolls was added.

The way challenge scrolls work is when you use a scroll you are given a challenge and after you complete that challenge you receive another until you have done enough challenges to satisfy the difficulty of the scroll you used. The challenges that you can expect to encounter are; Kill Quest, Word Scramble, Riddles, Collection, and Sliding Puzzle [2]. Once you finished a scroll you received a chest that rewards you based on the difficulty of the scroll that you completed. Of the quests, I think it could be unanimously decided that Kill Quests are the biggest deal when it comes to scrolls. It is the most common quest and it not only affects the player completing the scroll but it is dependent on the other players in TTT also. The Kill Quests require you to use varying weapons and get kills with a specific base weapon or tier. The combination of these two allowed kill quests to have about 50 different varying challenges that pushed players out of their comfort zone and made them use different tiers and guns[3]. This was a big challenge and it often defined how long and if you even decided to complete that challenge scroll.

FRG updates quite frequently and it is always a big deal the community bands together in excitement everyone hops in General voice chat and there may be some spam in the text chats. One occurrence of this is when Crafting was added to the server on 06/23/2019 [5]. Crafting added two traits that had the ability to help you with the kill quest. The first of the two being the Gilded and Half-Gilded traits. These traits allowed you to double the reward you received from getting a kill on your challenge scrolls. Many players of the community loved this idea as it allowed them to get weapons that improved their time to complete a scroll if they so happened to be able to get a hold of a gilded or half gilded weapon that aligned with their kill quest. Overall I think gilded was an amazing addition at this time and many others would say so too, but with the addition of gilded weapons and a small change that was added on 12/12/2019 the way some people do their kill quest entirely [6]. This small update added a new element to kill quest, when you get a kill with a weapon that is not of the tier or base weapon you would be rewarded half credit. This change allowed players the ability to create gilded weapons of their favorite guns and tiers and be awarded a full kill credit without the use of the tier specified in the kill challenge.

With all of that said I think it can be compounded into my opinions on the matter. When challenge scrolls were added they were new fun and gave great loot what was there not to love and it still holds up today you get challenges that give you a reason to play TTT and it keeps players on the server for longer. A problem I think has arisen from updates and additions to FRG since scrolls were added. This problem is the so-called gilded “sweat weapons” that have the ability to be crafted have taken away from the difficulty of a kill challange. These weapons take the challenge out of challenge scrolls because the most common and most diverse quest is no longer different and unique between every scroll. Before the addition of half kill credit, you were forced to use weapons that were different. That was the intention of the kill quest to push players onto a different weapon and challenge them to get those kills with it. Unfortunately, this diversity of weapons and tiers is no longer needed once you obtain a strong weapon(often gilded). I do not think this should be the case. I do not want to see kill quests to devolve down into superweapons being the only way people complete them. It is no longer a challenge in a challenge scroll to use one of your best possible weapons to complete a kill challenge with relative ease. I would like to make a note that I am not opposed to superweapons in the server, the crafting system has allowed players to spend many hours leveling and attempting to make such strong weapons. It is a great long term system that lets players set long term goals and achieve them, but these items should not be used to strip what is suppose to be the challenge in challenge scrolls. I would like to propose a change that will bring back some challenge to the difficult Kill Quests. In the higher difficulties Scrolls, specifically Expert and Professional should not give half credit for using a weapon of a different type. Kill quest should not just be seen as a suggestion in the difficult scrolls. You would still be allowed to complete kill challenges in lower difficulty scrolls, but this would allow the difficult scrolls to be just that, actually difficult.

I know nostalgia trumps all emotions but I would like to see the more difficult challenge scrolls to have an ounce of excitement they use to had like when they were first being completed. I feel if we make them more difficult it will be more hype and rewarding when someone completes an Expert or Professional scroll.

Do you think that Kill quests are in a good place with gilded weapons? Are challenge scrolls too easy, too hard, or just right? If you think scrolls are too easy or hard how would you change them to be easier/harder?



[1] https://frg.gg/forums/showthread.php?tid=6436
[2] https://forerunner-gaming.fandom.com/wiki/Challenge_Scrolls
[3] https://forerunner-gaming.fandom.com/wiki/Kill_Quest
[4] https://forerunnergaming.org/forums/showthread.php?tid=8588
[5] Forerunner, Gamming, Discord, #changelogs 12/12/2019

[Nyte]

So while I do agree that gilded and half gilded is sort of, how should I put it, overpowered? I don't quite agree with your proposed solution. One of the major reason why the half credit change was added was because challenge scroll had become common to the point of players being able to have one up 100% of the time. This lead to players simply never having the chance to use a gun they wanted on TTT because they'd be losing out on literally ALL challenge scroll progress. This was a bummer since there's no point in having cool guns if you're basically bound to using challenge scroll guns. If I were to propose a change it would rather be to overhaul Gildeds and Half Gildeds to something completely different and also change kill challenges on scrolls. So what changes would I then propose? Well for instance, how about gilded is a trait that instead increases the rarity of the things you get from a loot orb. It would still hold relatively high value as a trait (at least when loot orb rework happens some time after Xmas). And instead of specific weapon types or tiers the scrolls would instead offer purely more broad kill challenges. This way Gilded doesn't completely become irrelevant as a trait and people will be more free to use whichever gun they want for their scrolls. Gilded is simply in too dominant of a place due to how the trait functions and me personally I would love to see an overhaul of that system.

[2bias]

Jesus its almost been 3 years since i made those? That's crazy how time flies. Props for citing your sources as well.

Anyways, I was absent for all the updates that changed the way challenge scrolls fundamentally worked. I think that the addition of gilded/half gilded was a good idea when it first came out. It made the lower tier guns a lot more valuable and cool, however, the real problem started when kill points came into play.

Challenge scrolls use to take upwards of about 2-3 days to complete, even after everyone finally figured out how to "speed run" them. Kill challenges were so predominate in scrolls due to how it added a somewhat artificial delay, it was the same reasoning with map challenges. All the other challenges could be done in a matter of seconds, word scrambles, puzzles, etc.

Now, you can have a double gilded gun and get the same amount of kill points no matter what gun you're using which is pretty stupid. Its not longer a challenge once you get a double gilded heroic****. I personally don't have fun playing TTT at all now due to this, everyone is a sweaty try hard using a gun with 6 traits that just gets them more loot, its aids. I played a few weeks ago for about an hour, and in that time a single person completed about 2-3 easy scrolls, which isn't unreasonable, but god damn it should have at least taken 2-3 hours per scroll. TTT is no longer TTT, its just a deathmatch grind simulator using the most broken, overpowered bullshit you can.

Might finally be time to introduce master scrolls, which back in the day i had the idea for them and they were gonna be 10x harder than professional scrolls, but now that all these changes were added they might as well be "pre-nerf" pro scrolls at this point, where you have to use a specific weapon to get kills and gilded doesn't work.

[Nyte]

(11-22-2020, 03:30 PM)2bias Wrote:  Jesus its almost been 3 years since i made those? That's crazy how time flies. Props for citing your sources as well.

Anyways, I was absent for all the updates that changed the way challenge scrolls fundamentally worked. I think that the addition of gilded/half gilded was a good idea when it first came out. It made the lower tier guns a lot more valuable and cool, however, the real problem started when kill points came into play.

Challenge scrolls use to take upwards of about 2-3 days to complete, even after everyone finally figured out how to "speed run" them. Kill challenges were so predominate in scrolls due to how it added a somewhat artificial delay, it was the same reasoning with map challenges. All the other challenges could be done in a matter of seconds, word scrambles, puzzles, etc.

Now, you can have a double gilded gun and get the same amount of kill points no matter what gun you're using which is pretty stupid. Its not longer a challenge once you get a double gilded heroic****. I personally don't have fun playing TTT at all now due to this, everyone is a sweaty try hard using a gun with 6 traits that just gets them more loot, its aids. I played a few weeks ago for about an hour, and in that time a single person completed about 2-3 easy scrolls, which isn't unreasonable, but god damn it should have at least taken 2-3 hours per scroll. TTT is no longer TTT, its just a deathmatch grind simulator using the most broken, overpowered bullshit you can.

Might finally be time to introduce master scrolls, which back in the day i had the idea for them and they were gonna be 10x harder than professional scrolls, but now that all these changes were added they might as well be "pre-nerf" pro scrolls at this point, where you have to use a specific weapon to get kills and gilded doesn't work.

But see, the original concept didn't make things more "fun" it just gatekept players into using boring shitty tiers. The current state isn't all that good either, but going back to just having it be the zzz challenge tier guns wouldn't be an improvement.

[2bias]

(11-22-2020, 06:10 PM)Nytemart Wrote:  

(11-22-2020, 03:30 PM)2bias Wrote:  Jesus its almost been 3 years since i made those? That's crazy how time flies. Props for citing your sources as well.

Anyways, I was absent for all the updates that changed the way challenge scrolls fundamentally worked. I think that the addition of gilded/half gilded was a good idea when it first came out. It made the lower tier guns a lot more valuable and cool, however, the real problem started when kill points came into play.

Challenge scrolls use to take upwards of about 2-3 days to complete, even after everyone finally figured out how to "speed run" them. Kill challenges were so predominate in scrolls due to how it added a somewhat artificial delay, it was the same reasoning with map challenges. All the other challenges could be done in a matter of seconds, word scrambles, puzzles, etc.

Now, you can have a double gilded gun and get the same amount of kill points no matter what gun you're using which is pretty stupid. Its not longer a challenge once you get a double gilded heroic****. I personally don't have fun playing TTT at all now due to this, everyone is a sweaty try hard using a gun with 6 traits that just gets them more loot, its aids. I played a few weeks ago for about an hour, and in that time a single person completed about 2-3 easy scrolls, which isn't unreasonable, but god damn it should have at least taken 2-3 hours per scroll. TTT is no longer TTT, its just a deathmatch grind simulator using the most broken, overpowered bullshit you can.

Might finally be time to introduce master scrolls, which back in the day i had the idea for them and they were gonna be 10x harder than professional scrolls, but now that all these changes were added they might as well be "pre-nerf" pro scrolls at this point, where you have to use a specific weapon to get kills and gilded doesn't work.

But see, the original concept didn't make things more "fun" it just gatekept players into using boring shitty tiers. The current state isn't all that good either, but going back to just having it be the zzz challenge tier guns wouldn't be an improvement.

Its not really meant to be fun, to be honest. Its a challenge scroll. You're being challenged. Its not required content either, its completely optional. If you don't like having to use lower tier guns, then just sell the scroll.

They're not called "free loot scrolls", they're called challenge scrolls because its meant to make you work for your loot instead of just opening a crate.

[Zarox]

(11-22-2020, 11:22 AM)Nytemart Wrote:  So while I do agree that gilded and half gilded is sort of, how should I put it, overpowered? I don't quite agree with your proposed solution. One of the major reason why the half credit change was added was because challenge scroll had become common to the point of players being able to have one up 100% of the time. This lead to players simply never having the chance to use a gun they wanted on TTT because they'd be losing out on literally ALL challenge scroll progress. This was a bummer since there's no point in having cool guns if you're basically bound to using challenge scroll guns. If I were to propose a change it would rather be to overhaul Gildeds and Half Gildeds to something completely different and also change kill challenges on scrolls. So what changes would I then propose? Well for instance, how about gilded is a trait that instead increases the rarity of the things you get from a loot orb. It would still hold relatively high value as a trait (at least when loot orb rework happens some time after Xmas). And instead of specific weapon types or tiers the scrolls would instead offer purely more broad kill challenges. This way Gilded doesn't completely become irrelevant as a trait and people will be more free to use whichever gun they want for their scrolls. Gilded is simply in too dominant of a place due to how the trait functions and me personally I would love to see an overhaul of that system.

This is a very interesting solution but I do feel like changing gilded entirely could have negative backlash because as Brassx put it "Crafting is progression based, and meant to be a long-term addition to the server, with relatively long-term goals."[4]. This has held up for the most part and people who are super into crafting have spent many resources leveling and attempting to obtain gilded weapons and such. I think reworking the trait could damage the developer player relationship because why craft something strong if it could be completely changed later. Also, I think gilded at its core is still a great idea. The ability to have guided on the specific challenge weapons (as originally intended) would still offer people a great way to finish a kill quest faster while making them use a different gun that is not their best gun possible.

I would like to point out when you say "One of the major reason why the half credit change was added was because challenge scroll had become common to the point of players being able to have one up 100% of the time. This lead to players simply never having the chance to use a gun they wanted on TTT because they'd be losing out on literally ALL challenge scroll progress." I absolutely one hundred percent agree with you. I am all for the idea of allowing people to be rewarded for using the guns they enjoy to use. There are people that dont "sweat" on scrolls and use fun weapons and godlikes they enjoy. I feel as if this is a minority though. The people who really want to do their challenge scrolls are not going to use there whirlwinds and drifters with wacky traits. They use their Gilded Galil/mac10/ak with 4 dots and 2 gilded traits. I do not want people to be "slaves to the scroll" and only use the challenge weapons but I feel like we are coming to the point where half kill credits main use is to absolutely shit on the people using their tathenens and conquers judgments. You can correct me if I am completely wrong but even the challenge scrollers are not 100 percent of the time on expert and professionals? I wanted my change let people still use their strong/fun weapons without needing to slave over easy, medium, and hards, but once you take on the challenge of a high difficulty you should be challenged. I think if a change like this was made it would also be important to update the kill challenges to make them less infuriating because I remember getting m1911 or noodler kills and you just wanted to abandon no matter what scroll. These tiers and weapons I think should be adjusted or removed entirely from the kill quest pool because there is a difference between getting challenged and being forced to use noodler.

[2bias]

Maybe kill points should only be on hard and below scrolls, that would be the better solution to me to be honest.

Either that, or possibly make it so event mobs count toward scroll progress? Each kill would be like 1/8th of a point, but it would make survive worth doing a lot more, and would bring more balance back to TTT.

[Nyte]

(11-22-2020, 06:21 PM)2bias Wrote:  Maybe kill points should only be on hard and below scrolls, that would be the better solution to me to be honest.

Either that, or possibly make it so event mobs count toward scroll progress? Each kill would be like 1/8th of a point, but it would make survive worth doing a lot more, and would bring more balance back to TTT.

That is actually a pretty good compromise I'd say! Hard+ scrolls are rare enough where everybody doesn't really have one up all of the time so it would overall decrease the amount of people feeling forced to use omega guns, and the event idea isn't bad either. Basically providing an alternative for TTT where grinding scrolls makes the experience overall more enjoyable. Boss Rush has been suggested as this potential replacement several times as well but Brass hasn't really had the time to work on it, nor the motivation.

EDIT: Should probably also made easys and mediums more rare in this case since they'd be done super quickly and in droves.

EDIT 2: Oh and to what you said up above a bit about challenge scrolls supposed to be a challenge and not being fun, isn't that a really bad design mentality? And I get the argument that people don't HAVE to do them, but they've become such a staple of player coin/crate/rare_shit generation that you'd be losing out big time economically by not doing one. I think that there are defo ways of making it both fun AND challenging at the same time and I'm glad this discussion is happening!

[Tarrasque]

Honestly I don't see how this helps with the tryhard element. It's just gonna be people stacking buff items with crappy tiers with the change. It doesn't actually change any of the problems with people taking ttt too seriously. Like what does limiting guns for higher scrolls actually do to improve the enjoyment of anything?

edit: Just to add some constructivism. Scrolls should have more things to encourage varied gameplay instead of just pigeon holing people into a single thing. There should be a far larger variety in things you do in challenges.
Here a bunch of just rapid fire ideas of more challenges. There is a lot of unexplored space for scrolls other than changing the metagame of what gun people are gonna cheese to the fullest extent.

Get x kills with t items.
Deal x fire damage
Deal damage whilst falling
Kill x whilst at full hp.
Kill x from behind.
Get x kills with grenades.

[DONGERWEED29266602592O3852309764]

being able to use your cool guns = cool.
challenge scrolls have never been legitimately challenging moreso than effort based, since inception. the most challenging part is sliders, and they aren't.
i think you are confusing the fact that people have seen all the drops inside them and they have been piling up since release being the cause of scrolls becoming less exciting moreso than the fact that people can complete them more quickly.