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1) If you already "earned" the map then you know a game was a waste of your time before the match event began. This in turn caused players to play badly, disconnect, suicide rush, etc... Players felt powerless to improve their chances.
2) The rewards are basically all-of-nothing. If you never get the map you need, you earn nothing. Players feel like the entire weekend is a waste of their time unless they can complete the entire challenge.
3) I call this problem the Long Tail, which I'm going to be describing in more detail below. Basically, for the unluckiest mechwarriors this challenge takes significantly longer than average to complete. And there's nothing you can do about it.
Compare the above to a popular event like Trick-Or-Treat:
1) Every match has the potential to earn a great reward (even though good rewards are rare), so players are encouraged to fight to the bitter end
2) You can play as much or as little as you want and still earn some rewards
The Long Tail
Ignoring the minimum score requirements for this event, how long does it take to visit each of the 9 maps? The median is 23 games; half of players will get it done quicker, and half will take longer. That doesn't sound too bad on the surface, assuming you reach the score threshold pretty regularly.
But what about the far end of the bell curve? The "unluckiest 5%" are going to have a very rough weekend, because it will take them 45+ games just to see every map once, let alone reach the minimum score on all of them. The poor 1% at the very tip of the bell curve will need a startling 58 games to see all the maps!
If you only reach the score threshold half the time then you can double the numbers above to see how long the "unluckiest MechWarriors" must play to complete the challenge. And unfortunately a success rate of 50% is probably being generous.
But 5% and 1% sound like pretty small numbers, right? Not really, because MWO has several thousand players. Even if only 10,000 people were seriously attempting the challenge, those numbers represent 500 and 100 people, respectively, who must work double the median length of time to get the same reward regardless of skill.
The problem is that our bell curve (the cumulative probability distribution of the amount of time to complete the challenge) has a long tail. The median isn't too bad, but the outer edge sucks.
It doesn't have to be this way. Compare this challenge to something like "Achieve 10 scores of at least X value". If you set X such that players will hit the mark 50% of the time (higher is better) then you get a much narrower bell curve. The median might be 20 games, but the unluckiest 5% only need to play about 9 more games to earn their reward. A mere 50% luck premium, compare to the 100% seen in the Territorial Challenge event.
Anyway, I hope PGI considers statistics when designing events like this in the future. Don't make it too rough for the unlucky games.
Edited by Shlkt, 21 September 2015 - 05:16 AM.
