Let me start by saying I don’t like Bounty events. I don’t find them as much more than a chore. I think I like them a little better than Raid Boss, but I don’t particularly like that event either. But if we’re objective about it, I think the premise of some of the complaints is not conducive to the design. Let’s take a deep dive for the titty babies.
This is not “Gems of You Are an Awesome Undefeatable God”. Bounty is not here to hand out trophies for managing to successfully use the toilet. That’s what Arena with Dawnbringer is for. It’s easy to get this misconception if you’ve been farming Explore for months or rocking PvP with one of your meta teams: they hand out rewards like candy for tasks like “zipping your pants” or “forming a three-word sentence”. You can practically play other games while you do them. Those are where you should be if you want to be able to feel like a god. GW, Raid Boss, Invasion, and Bounty are modes where you’re meant to feel like a mortal.
To that end, they all have something in common: you have sigils. That means you can’t decide you’d rather use an easy, grindy team and take 10 hours as opposed to a more optimal, slow team in 1. Your performance is limited and you have to figure out how to get the most points per match. Even if you decide to buy more sigils, it’s true that you will eventually spend more than the rewards you get back, so it is crucial to keep a balance in mind.
In the Bounty mode, you can increase your points per match by using more Bounty Hunter troops. They are more effective if they’ve been ascended, which costs other resources. So people who rush to brag and be the first to mythic every new troop are at an advantage over people who spend frugally. We can also see that most of the Bounty troops are not S-ranks on the order of Infernus: they’re mostly niche roleplayers and filler.
That means we see a challenge or, in game design terms, a tension: “If I use more bounty troops, it’s harder to win, but I get more points.” Each level, you have to evaluate your performance and decide if a higher win rate is worth losing some multipliers. This takes some complicated math and a bit of gambling. Believe it or not, many aspects of this game are tied to gambling and there is nothing new about that.
We need tension in our games, because tension is what creates optimization challenges. These decisions are what is fun for addicted gamblers who are most susceptible to spending money. When you play an F2P game, you have to understand it will be designed to cater to addicted gamblers.
There are many troops in the game with a natural advantage vs. Naga. Immunity to poison is not rare. “Being a generically good troop” is not rare. You can build a Naga-killer party and breeze through all of the matches… at the cost of having a very low modifier. Remember when I said you can’t get a trophy for successfully using the toilet? Reaching the highest reward tier of Bounty with a Pet Rescue team will cost you more than it gives back. It’s easy but stupid. Tension.
So you can take that Naga-wrecking team and start to compare each slot to the available bounty troops. You might find that some bounty hunter has similar characteristics to a Naga-slayer. So that’s one you can put on your team. You lose a little bit of power and, thus, win rate. But you gain a points multiplier. Tension. This is still not going to easily get you to the “end”, and is still likely to cost more than it gives back.
So you can handicap your team even further, deciding to use bounty troops with no real natural advantage vs. Naga. Maybe you use the captain, who isn’t particularly strong this week. In return, you get the highest possible multiplier. So if you can still build a useful team around that guy, it’s potentially stronger than a different team with 2 bounty hunters. Tension.
To that end, getting some kind of Naga-slayer troop this week would dramatically lower the difficulty and reduce tension. You wouldn’t have to ask, “Is it even WORTH using it?” This is how Raids and Invasions lose some of their tension: that is NEVER a question, you have to essentially build a 3-member team and arguably a 2-member team since Mang is so useful.
SOME DAY, in theory, there will be so many bounty troops available we’ll have “slayer” type troops from the past that will help. That’s going to be a long time from now. Bounty will be a bit more boring then, but still have a built-in tension: the captain with the doubled bonus will not be that suddenly-relevant slayer troop. So you will STILL have the tension that the slayer has to use a slot that could be filled by a more generally-powerful troop.
When we build teams, we like to start with something really powerful like Infernus. But Infernus has a problem: it costs 22 mana, and that’s a lot of matches. So when we build an Infernus team, we want to answer, “How do I get more than 3 mana per turn consistently?” Ishbaala is one answer: she cuts the cost of the first cast to 11 mana, which is much eaiser to obtain. Diviner is an answer: she can generate yellow mana in a way that typically yields 10+ once she’s full. Both Ishbaala and Diviner can enchant Infernus, which also reduces the cost. Mercy is also popular. Hence we arrive at the Infernish team, which lets us consistently cast Infernus almost every turn, and certainly every other turn.
But that has zero bounty hunters, doesn’t it? And none of the bounty hunters really help fill Infernus consistently fast. So if we take Diviner and/or Mercy off the team, Infernus gets slower and thus less powerful. Eventually it’s so slow and clunky we wonder why Infernus is on the team at all, so we seek something better. Tension!
In short: this is working as intended, even if it’s a frustrating slog.
I compare it to the snotgem events, and I have to say it’s more appealing. There is zero tension in a snotgem event. Even if I suck at Treasure Hunt, it’s very likely I can’t NOT get everything with a predictable amount of treasure maps. When it’s a PvP snotgem event, all I have to do is make sure I play an extra 50+ PvP matches. When it’s an Explore event, I accidentally get the gems when I’m already traitstone farming. These are participation trophies and they barely even matter. Yawn.
Bounty is like a snotgem event where you can lose miserably if you don’t think very hard and balance “putting yourself at a disadvantage” vs. “getting lower scores”. That’s a bit more interesting than “play 400 Explore matches and it’s statistically impossible to not win”.
In shorter:
I think the complaint was initially valid but has been taken to an extremely entitled conclusion: “If I can’t effortlessly reach the final reward tier this event is a failure.” Sorry, this is a mode where even A.W. “I mythic every troop within 10 minutes” Ryan has to stretch a few neurons to get his prize every week.
I see this in Bounty/Raid every week, too. Some events, my guild reaches the final portals early in the week and we all complain about how the rest of our sigils feel wasted. Other weeks, we start to worry late Saturday that we’re all going to have to buy extra tiers if we want to get that sweet, sweet last portal. This is a mode with a particularly advantageous troop on our team. Two of them, if you count Mang. So it follows that Bounty, a mode where you are encouraged to consider using zero OP troops, might take a bit of finagling if you want to see the final rewards.
