Custom hives don’t even reward time played stars for whatever reason. I guess I understand not getting XP or cards because it could be easily abused by creating simple map designs, but why not time stars?
Framerate drops are a big deterrent for me in custom hives as well. Sadist creators think it is a necessity to put as many enemies as possible in particular sections and it makes the hives unplayable a lot of the time.
I’ve been watching you play quite a few of the custom maps on twitch. They look fun but I th8nk lack of rewards ruins it. If I were to host a map nobody would join.
Also, some of them looked pretty hectic even while you guys, who are good players, were using meta characters for the most part. I actually had 2 friends I played master escape with quit the game because of the split. Just aren’t enough good players in the game for tough maps
I’m getting an overall consensus that there aren’t enough rewards for doing it. I figured that may be the case but I’m not saying you should play custom hives daily or all the time- I’m saying people can’t really take an hour a week to check out a hive someone else created? I personally don’t think that is an overall good reason to not play ANY of them.
I’ve never put a whole lot of value in the whole XP/Card system or even players with high re-ups. Or at least not enough value for it to control my gaming but I guess I understand that if I had a re-up 50 goal or something like that, any distraction like playing a custom hive is still a distraction.
I’m probably generally sympathetic to fellow creators as a creator myself. It is just disappointing to me that plenty of well-thought out challenging hives can slip through the cracks but cake-walk hives (over 90% of them) will get played on a regular basis.
Um… they do?
Only within the context of the “map sharing” section.
There’s no rewards what so ever. We don’t wanna play 50 wave horde as it’s too time consuming with very little rewards. You know that everything in this game is a grind.
I don’t mind the grind if there’s something at the end of it.
This is on TC for making it this way. We all want rewards of some kind. The community has complained since the game launched about the lack of EVERYTHING!
Operation 5 is good but once again it’s more GRIND. Level 20 classes and more re-ups to come.
What I’m trying to say is most people play for completion of some kind. Re-ups, Achievements, Class lvl or Maxed cards. No one really wants to play if they get nothing at the end. Time wasted if your playing towards any of the things mentioned above.
The community made hives deserve better but TC ain’t gonna do anything about it…,I mean they would by now if they cared for it.
Kudos to some of the Custom Hive Creators for their efforts. It takes a hell of a lot of patience.
Which I don’t have. I made the shortest one possible for the achievements and never went back.
Sadly, you are right.
It’s a shame honestly. The culture needs to be severely revamped.
Sorry for the short response…too disappointed to say much more.
I think this should be a moment of reflection for TC and developers generally. Is grinding for crazy ranks truly a good thing to include in their games to retain the player base? What about making the game more fun? I used to play and replay games for the fun factor. Nowadays it doesn’t feel like that.
It’ll probably be a while, and require several AAA franchises to change their approach and to move away from grindy gameplay before the players themselves can readjust their mindset. It’s arguable that developers have created this problem themselves.
I am highly curious if they do any self-reflection at all.
I pretty much have gotten back into only playing for fun. If I have the intention on building characters on any level I usually clear 2 or 3 master hives then me or my friend group immediately start to check custom hives now. The reward focused gaming is not enjoyable. Especially when the rewards are mediocre at best. I can’t get involved in this endless race when the bar is going to continue to increase with more cards or higher levels.
I get personal satisfaction when I a creator of a hive is pleased that his creation is now on YouTube. That is infinitely more than anything TC has done for me.
As has been mentioned, the lack of rewards for completing custom hives is a major deterrent when we’re all trying to build our classes up to 20.
I tried custom ones in OP1, but they all felt so bland an uninspired that I stopped trying them. Maybe now that there are no more official Hives being introduced, more people will try the custom ones?
heroic skins is a mediocre reward for countless hours /days of gaming. I think that is why its easier for me to shift to playing custom hives.
The lack of “reward” remains though so superior or more challenging hives will go disregarded. So people will continue the clock, the surge or the descent runs.
To each his own I suppose.
My frustration is with the culture that TC has created.
Even now, in operation 5, I can’t open a public lobby and get players who know how to win every map on master. Because the culture is to grind characters (without actually improving) as fast as possible so playing a map like The Split as an example is a forgone conclusion.
So if something doesn’t have an obvious reward attached to it in terms of coins, XP, skill cards or whatever. It is deemed irrelevant.
Edit: As an example, if someone truly enjoys playing horde but they also have a goal of getting all characters to level 20, they may completely skip playing horde just because the pay-out isn’t as good as escape, The grind has been made priority over there own enjoyment. I’ve seen it many times.
This. You’ve hit the nail on the head. Escape is definitely getting the short end of the stick in sharing classes and cards with horde.
To be honest, Escape isn’t my favorite thing to play, but I have absolutely played more of it to get the extra cards. I’ll get matched up with people, though, who seem to have never played that hive before and are using a lvl.5 class. That’s grating, having to cycle through those on public matchmaking because people want to be carried.
I feel the game has been out long enough where people should know what they are doing in escape at least conceptually. I had a lahni on ice queen take two large boxes of ammo to fill up her Talon and my buddy didn’t have enough bullets to snipe.
The lahni wasn’t out of ammo because the player just died before the saferoom…just wanted more for…reasons…
I’ve gotten lucky over the course of the last few months (maybe longer) to have really good players on my friends list but it took awhile to get to that point.
I typically only do really easy maps in public lobbies. If its even remotely complicated I just wait for a buddy to get on.
Even on todays daily hive (Onslaught) there was a player who was a level 17 Nomad who didn’t pick up the lancer in the first room…I simply don’t understand why. He preferred overkill and sniper which would be okay if he wasn’t Nomad…
Yeah I had a friend who wanted help to master The Split close to the end of Operation 4 as he wanted to complete the TOD medal. We tried it but he really struggled. He then spent alot of time levelling up some character’s skill cards from level 5 to 6 thinking it would help. I kept saying that it wouldn’t make a difference and the he already has more than the bare minimum in terms of skill cards - and that he needed to practice and play Escape properly beyond grinding The bloody Surge. Needless to say he ran out of time.
This is what happened when the rewards became cards and XP. The daily/weekly hives are now used for people to try and level up their crappy characters. When Last Stand was the daily hive, it was pretty excruciating to complete with randoms.
Sad thing about the Featured Community Hives tab in Escape. The same three hives have been there since the pre-release days. The feature is completely abandoned.
Even a while back , TC was asking for “spooky hives” submissions for Halloween to be featured and nothing happened.
But anyway, if OP or anyone would like to try custom hives, I would like to shamelessly promoted one I made a long time ago (and reworked a good handful of times). It’s called The Capital. If you do try it out, tell me what you think.
What characters do you recommend and what weapons are available?
Where do I begin? I made this hive to be as universal as I could. There are three paths: left is CQC focused, with many Sires and Grenadiers. Middle is focused on though enemies. The right path has a lot of Snipers.
No matter where you go, you end up in the same third chapter. Along the way you will find just about every weapon in the game, so just play whoever you like.
Okay cool, I’m about to play it right now.