Why was kat event designed to make you hate Spiral Knights?
Fri, 09/20/2024 - 05:13
Most of the time a game event tries to emphasize an experience you don't ususally have. Winterfest offers tough battles or just the winterfest mood. Casino and Pumpkin events make you run arcade more and explore the vast clockworks.
Kat event tells the story of a man so unlucky that centuries later his grudge still haunts the clockworks. It has successfully made me experience this, but why?
When it launched, Kat event had a the poor foundation of being a horrible RNG check, but it was made up for by how many ways you could cooperate with your guild mates. It turned a 4-player co-op game into a guildwide co-op game. We'd split up and constantly communicate cats, and everyone would join as quickly as possible before the spots were taken. I've never seen this game be engaged so actively.
This is gone. The event, taking place in a co-operative action game where the main draw is combat, is focused on making you avoid combat to spawn kats as rapidly as possible, and for the same reason you do it alone because there's no simple way to swap missions as a squad. You have to start a mission, load, then be joined. The loading screens are about as long as the runs, so everyone just splits up and says nothing to each other because there's no point.
So there's no point talking about the event, and definitely no point talking about strategies for the event: If any are discovered, they're patched out. I can only talk about two things with my friends playing at the same time as me in silence: How much I hate this event, and all of the other games out there that are much better and don't do this. The only for of social engagement left is trading for margel spots, which is trading currency for a promise. The game's policy says you shouldn't engage in trades like this.
Gray Havens made us do this. The event is designed to make you play along, avoid combat, trade currency for promises, and only talk about other things we could be doing instead of grinding for books for nearly a decade without ever having a book dropped.
I don't understand why the event was designed to specifically make us do these things.
Wed, 10/02/2024 - 01:29
#2
An alternate approach that devs could use to completely eliminate "kat duping" is to have the spawn rates so reasonable that party-splitting shenanigans would be a waste of time compared to simply playing the game.
Fri, 10/25/2024 - 11:16
#3
before the event was tolerable because you only need 1 person running around find a kat, once got it call guildies / friends join in kill the kat and get the loot and someone eventually would get lucky, now you cant do that otherwise you get nothing from the kat. so that killed the cooperative aspect of the event.
now the only way to make it work its to have everyone run the map from the lobby or previous depth in a party and if a kat spawn, find a safe spot and everyone in the party leave, then people take turns: player 4 kill it kat and join player 3 which will not kil lthe kat until 4 join to him, then 3 and 4 kill their kat and join player 2, and so on. that way player 4 get more chances for a book but sadly can only be done once per depth, also it take time and coordination to do it, and thats something people dont want to do anymore in this game so is not surprise why everyone just want to run solo.
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the game took away some of it cooperative aspect: reviving friends with health? that was cool! and something i liked a lot because i liked to carry the team, but some of the promimnet forumers said "no i hate it reviving someone who died a lot, im glad they took it" well dont revive that person? you are not forced to do it anyways.
sure that took away the revive using energy and now there are spark of life, BUT IN A GAMEPLAY ASPECT the way spark of life are implemented just dont work with this game because you have to touch 2 times the body and then confirm you want to revive which put you in danger because you get fixed in a place until you confirm your action, it could be tolerable if i soon i touch the body and just press 1 time the action to revive and get up my friend and consume a spark of life without give a cheap hit for the enemy just because i have to double confirm my action. so no wonder why people dont want to revive players and when you dont they leave because they not going to be there wasting time doing nothing (this is a pretty bad bad aspect for a new player perspective).
i think missions are part guilty for this change on players, missions let you land on the most profitable level with just 1 click it dont have restriction so a tier 1 player can do vanaduke if a tier 3 players leave them in the lobby, sure this happened before in arcade if they invite 1 depth after city gates, but at least someone have to get trough some levels first to reach those profitable levels. now with just 1 click you land there. and this of course broke the player progression way more than before, and now since there isnt anymore energy consuming levels of course the price of energy would sky rocket thanks to vanafarming, and from here no wonder why new players dont wanted to be patient and learning the game because the costs of upgrading and advacing trough the game were easy with someone taking you to vana (and yes im aware this happened before but wasnt easy spammeable as is now).
its a shame we werent able to see Nick vision with the game, making missions only for the lore and arcade the profitable sandbox that it deserved to be.
Mon, 10/28/2024 - 00:40
#4
I agree with that, it's the crux of the post really. Kats suck more than they used to, and so do revives.
I'm also of the mind that mist was good for the game (because it was designed around it). While there was mist, I'd play every day, fairly consistently. When I ran out of mist I was still left wanting to play, so I did: I'd hang out in Haven or even play Lockdown despite not liking Lockdown that much.
With the removal of mist, we weren't granted the freedom to play all day long, we were burdened with the obligation to do so. Doing a single T3 run used to be enough to heat your whole armor set.
Sat, 11/16/2024 - 10:29
#5
other item handling is not so bad
The cooperation discussion is interesting, but I'll confine my post to the items.
The handling of the Black Kat helmets seems good to me. It's not very hard to get the 3-star version, and after that the higher-star helmets are basically status symbols.
The handling of Darkfang Shield seems good to me. It's a rare random find (and it used to be hyper-rare), but it's not especially powerful. It's an amusing status symbol.
The issue with the Black Kat suits is that even the 3-star version is difficult to get, AND it's the most powerful suit in the game.
In general, I would like to see de-randomizing options throughout the game. For example, the developers know what the odds are, of Punch giving you a CTR+4 on your Torpor Tantrum. So they can compute the expected (average) cost of getting that UV. So Punch should offer you two options: try randomly for the UV (for 20,000 crowns per try) or simply pay a super-fee (the expected cost, maybe around 2,000,000) and definitely get the UV.
The event's problem is the community, people playing now use a really awkward "Speedrun" strat that.....mostly doesn't actually work exxcept over LONG periods, and they do that because they're almost all people that have been playing for a long time and don't like joining random groups unless they're in charge. The kat event works fine IF runs are prone to filling quickly and they very much aren't anymore because people only do runs solo for the post part or private their runs anyway. sadly there's no solution to the problem without a big cash infusion to the game to make content to lure new players in bulk and this economy won't support that.
it's hard to make a social-based event work when the players are largely anti-social which most veteren knights are now. i mean look how many open event missions you see during the event. almost never and the ones you do see are mostly people that don't have the gear to solo it yet.