Time for trails and task forces needed

[BlackSpectre]

@Oaklahomaman posted some times for trials over in the Guides section,  but we need help from the General forum folks to help list times. If you can help it would be awesome!

 

here’s the link. 

 

Edited June 5 by BlackSpectre
Typo

[Sanguinesun]

Problem with the "times" especially with task force ones is that it doesnt factor many variables:

 

1. Dynamics of the team in relation to AT's powersets, strengths/weaknesses of the drivers etc.

2. Difficulty settings of the tf

3. Down times by players (afk's, running off to level, etc).

4. Recipe of the above and other variables.

 

All those things can heavily skew times and make averages harder to calculate for. So if the goal is to answer someone asking "how long" and that's the only agenda for such a thread like that, then its really going to be difficult with more or less answers needing to favor the longer vs an average time given so as to have a player make a decision that factors those ever present potential variables that can occur.

[biostem]

1 hour ago, BlackSpectre said:

we need help from the General forum folks to help list times

To what end, though?  Is "killing all" any less valid than making liberal use of stealth & ATT/teleport target?  You can look at the time-based bonus challenges to see what the original devs thought as far as approximate completion times would/should be, (not that I'm saying that's a hard & fast rule).

[BlackSpectre]

Time-based bonus challenges... interesting idea!

 

My initial attempt at this years ago was to look at reward merits, as the devs mentioned that the amount of reward merits were based on the amount of time the TF or trial took to complete... but this didn't pan out. It was too inconsistent from one TF or trial to another, and ended up not following that general pattern most of the time. So that idea didn't work and I scrapped it.

 

If I could data mine the times, I'd either determine a range like 30-90 minutes based on the spread of the data plots along a bell curve, determine its mode (most frequent time), or calculate an average, or all three! Of these 3, mode seems the most appropriate, with a mention that it could be x minutes longer or shorter. But alas, I have no access to the mines.

 

The next best option seems to me to be anecdotal data from the folks who do these TFs and trials frequently. I really liked the way @oklahomaman Structured his answer into the most common goals for trials, speed runs vs kill alls. From LFG chat that appears to be the 2 major ways the player base has of doing TFs and trials, so why not use them to answer times? These would necessarily be estimates, but hopefully they'd be reasonable or educated estimates from the experts who actually run these things (or join them)  often. 

 

The goal here is to set expectations on about how long a TF or trial will take to complete. We need this data to set aside an adequate amount of time in our real lives to accomplish the TFs and trials. There have been many times when I found myself stuck in a TF or trial that took much longer to complete than I had time for.  Frankly, I had no idea how long the TF would take when I joined up. This necessitated the entire team to log out so we can log back in at the same time (requires a lot of organization and time management skill on the part of players... definitely NOT a PUG team), log out and abandon my team (I hate to do this), or bite the bullet and stick it out until the end, resulting in various troubles in RL big and small.  And then there's player stamina. We all have different levels of healthiness and fitness, both mental and physical, and an estimated completion time would help people decide whether or not they're up to the task. There are many other good reasons to have an estimated completion time too, but I figure these two are the most common.

 

 And yes, wait times for the team or league to fill would also be very useful, but I'm not currently trying to bite off that lofty goal. I figure an estimated time to complete trials and TFs would be "good enough" to start so players would have an idea of how much time they'd need to set aside. We can always mention that there may be a wait time to start.

 

 

[biostem]

8 minutes ago, BlackSpectre said:

Time-based bonus challenges... interesting idea!

Those already exist.

[BlackSpectre]

Yep. Hopefully they're listed at the wiki. I'll look into it and see if the times seem valid. If they pan out, I wouldn't need anyone else's help. Thanks for that idea.  

 

NOPE! Looking over the Time-based Challenge times, they appear to be just arbitrary and not based on how long the task forces actually take to complete.  @Uun made a list of times over at the guide link at the time of this thread that appear much more accurate and based on actual experience. Unfortunately he didn't list all task forces, but the ones he did list seem authentic. So, I still need players' help to compose a reasonable list of times.

 

Let's continue this over at the post in Guides above. In the meantime, here's the list of challenge times and @uun's...

 

Task Force Name	Contact	Challenge Settings Gold Time (min)	Silver Time	Bronze Time	@uun Player Times
The Rule of Three	Positron	30	60	90	20-30
Dam Heroes	Positron				20-30
The Fall of the Clockwork King	Synapse	90	180	360	60-90
A Clamor for the People	Penelope Yin	30	60	90	20-30
The Sky is Falling	Admiral Sutter	30	60	90	40-50
The Kheldian War	Moonfire	30	60	90	30-45
Citadel's Children	Citadel	30	60	90	45-60
The MegaMech Cometh	Ernesto Hess
A Tangled Plot	Katie Hannon				20-30
Following Countess Crey	Manticore	30	60	90	45-60 (90-120 for kill all)
Soul of the Woodsman	Numina	30	60	90	40-50
Time's Arrow	Imperious	30	60	90	15 (speed run) 45-60 (kill all)
Explorers and Exploiters	Dr. Quaterfield	30	60	90
The Legend of Ruladak	Sara Moore	30	60	90
The Saga of Faathim	Justin Augustine	30	60	90
The Saga of Lanaru	Faathim the Kind	30	60	90
Ms. Liberty Task Force	Ms. Liberty	30	60	90
The Lady Grey Task Force	The Lady Grey	30	60	90
Return of the Reichsman	Dr. Kahn	30	60	90	15 (speed run) 45-60 (kill all)
Alpha Strike	Apex	30	60	90	15
The Praetorian Offensive	Tin Mage Mark II	30	60	90	15

 

 

 

Edited June 9 by BlackSpectre

[BlackSpectre]

Let's continue this discussion over at the post in the Guides forum.