Adaptive prestige points anyone ?

[HeinzG]

Let me explain where I get my idea from. In stock trading, it is not unusual to let a trading system adjust itself to market behaviour. Well, what if the prestige points would adjust to a players behaviour, i.e. how well he is doing? That way, we could overcome two critical steps of fixed prestige awards.

The main concern seems not to be with those players doing fair. It rather seems to be the players swimming in prestige. This is where the adaptive system jumps in. As long as a player stays within the boundaries the game was designed for, nothing happens. But if a player is too smart and accumulates a lot more prestige, he is assigned less and less prestige the more he has until he is back within the boundaries. That way, no one could amass such an amount of prestige to buy/upgrade all the best equipement.

On the other side, people really struggling could get more prestige to catch up with the game (as normally a lot of people refuse playing on a lower difficulty level).

My suggestion would be to implement this adaptivenes more in therms of slowing down people that outsmart the system rather than helping struggling players. Else everyone plays on FM level!

As I dont have a clue wether such a system can be done for PzC nor if the developer agrees with my quintessence take this as a contributtion to make an already outstanding game even better.

[Kerensky]

I actually suggested something like this a long time ago, not just adaptive prestige but a whole adaptive campaign. Might be something nice in the future, this idea plus some more randomization and variables, but it's out of the scope of the current DLCs. That is, creating a maximum of content using only currently existing features and assets.

In the end, we put balance in the hands of the players. Not only are there 8 difficulty settings (5 standard and 3 bonus), but it's possible to change your difficulty setting during a Grand Campaign.
You can start 1939 on Colonel, find it too easy and continue 1940 on Manstein, decide that was too hard and go back to Field Marshal for 1941.

It's up to the player to find the setting they're most happy (balance between fun, challenge, and difficulty) with, that's as adaptive as we're going to get for the time being.

[Rudankort]

I can tell that it all depends on what exactly you are trying to achieve. If you want the campaign to progress the same for all people, no matter how well they are playing, this solution would work great. But our design goal was different.

We actually want to punish the player for bad performance. Even if this game is easy to get into, it is still a serious wargame. We expect our players to think and learn from their mistakes. If they don't want to do it, they can play on lower difficulty or use cheat codes, but this is not what we consider a normal play mode.

And we actually want to reward the player for good decisions, and even give him an option to buy all Tiger IIs if he can afford them. When this happens, people who like it hard will switch to a higher difficulty, while the rest will just enjoy themselves and have fun.

Your suggestion might work well as an option though, some people might find it interesting.