light design analysis on overwatch's "anima strike" event
overwatch season 3 brought a new hero, shion, and a new event called anima strike to celebrate. visually, you complete missions to make progress on a “map” of nodes that unlock cosmetics and story bits. by and large tho, you just play the game and make progress.
here’s an example of the daily missions – play the game. if you win, you make double progress. easy enough. this is a pretty common setup in overwatch missions.
however,
here are the weekly missions – play the game, but only get double progress if you play shion (the new hero) or sojourn (her lore rival i guess?). don’t need to win, just need to play as them.
this is where, imo, the math doesn’t work out for two reasons.
- shion and sojourn are both damage role, so if you’re playing in role queue (the most populated mode), immediately that’s only available to people queueing as damage (as opposed to tank or support). the problem is that damage role is already the most popular role, making it have the longest queue time. pushing more people into this role for double progress greatly increases the time it takes to find a game. (there is a “flex” queue that slots you into whatever is needed and it’s very rare during this event to ever get damage since that role is rarely ever needed)
- the common mission setup of “if you win, make double progress” means that after any given game, one team gets double progress and the other team gets regular progress. it’s a team-wide bonus. that means 50% of the players involved, 5 out of 10 players, always get the bonus. in the case of these weeklies where you have to play shion or sojourn, that means 0 players at worst (nobody on either team picked them) and 4 players at best (both teams picked both heroes) out of 10 will make progress. the best case scenario is still less than half the players involved.
it’s ultimately not a huge deal, just some cosmetics and flavor, so not the end of the world just makes for a grindier grind than players expect. we’re coming off the back of the 10th anniversary event that, over its course, nerfed the amount of games you had to play multiple times and even extended the time limit to do it in. it gives the feeling these retention event tunings could use a bit more love before being shipped. but considering things like weekly time limits on progress and a player-base that is known to specialize in specific roles, it makes for a bit of bad friction. i’m curious to see if week 2’s weeklies are any different as a result of this.