Tweaking the challenge schedule

As evidenced by two user polls in the general discussion thread, 2 challenges a week is widely unpopular. The chief complaints are that 2 a week damages guild participation, those that wish to remain competitve in the challenges have little time to play the rest of the game, the reward targets were moved too high, and we miss the day off. That said, the addition of the new maps and humans are changes most players like.
It is pretty clear that 2 challenges are here to stay. So, a few minor changes may help improve participation and user satisfaction.
INSERT EDIT: THERE ARE MANY threads dedicated to returning to the 1 challenge a week system. THIS THREAD IS NOT FOR THAT PURPOSE. This thread is for offering suggestions to improve the 2 challenge system. Since it looks like we are going to be stuck with it, we might as well offer constructive suggestions for improving it. If you want to demand a return to 1 challenge a week, please go find one of the many threads that already exist for that purpose to comment on. DO NOT HIJACK or derail this thread. (end edit)
1) Extend the down time between challenges to 12 hours and run each for 72 hours. This would effectively give players 1 day off a week. Run Monday 9a (US Eastern) - Thursday 9a and Thursday 9p-Sunday 9p. That also allows a 12 hour window twice a week for maintenance breaks and updates without interrupting the challenges. We recognize that starting a challenge at 9p means someone will have to be in the office late. Many areas of the tech field have people on call if servers go down or issues arise outside of nornal business hours. I am confident NG can work out a fair means of having someone available at 9p Thursday launch time.
2) Since human enemies are more difficult to kill than Walkers, it makes sense to only run New Maps with humans on the weekends. Currently, the 3 day challenge runs Monday 10a to Thursday 9a. These are weekdays when players have work, school, and other life responsibilities that limit their time to play. When we encounter human enemies during this challenge, many just don't participate due to the higher difficulty. The devs spent far too much time building these maps to have people ignore them due to poor timing. Run the harder challenges on the weekends when more players have free time to enjoy the game.
3) Put the reward levels back where they were when there was 1 challenge a week. Scaling up the difficulty made those goals harder to attain. Increasing the star count as well created animosity towards NG in the player base as it was widely viewed as targeted to discourage low and mid-level players and force them to spend money to level up faster. People that spend frugally on games tend to leave games when they feel pressured into spending more money by game developers. Gaming companies want to attract new players and retain existing ones. Changes that create animosity in the player base has the opposite effect.
It is pretty clear that 2 challenges are here to stay. So, a few minor changes may help improve participation and user satisfaction.
INSERT EDIT: THERE ARE MANY threads dedicated to returning to the 1 challenge a week system. THIS THREAD IS NOT FOR THAT PURPOSE. This thread is for offering suggestions to improve the 2 challenge system. Since it looks like we are going to be stuck with it, we might as well offer constructive suggestions for improving it. If you want to demand a return to 1 challenge a week, please go find one of the many threads that already exist for that purpose to comment on. DO NOT HIJACK or derail this thread. (end edit)
1) Extend the down time between challenges to 12 hours and run each for 72 hours. This would effectively give players 1 day off a week. Run Monday 9a (US Eastern) - Thursday 9a and Thursday 9p-Sunday 9p. That also allows a 12 hour window twice a week for maintenance breaks and updates without interrupting the challenges. We recognize that starting a challenge at 9p means someone will have to be in the office late. Many areas of the tech field have people on call if servers go down or issues arise outside of nornal business hours. I am confident NG can work out a fair means of having someone available at 9p Thursday launch time.
2) Since human enemies are more difficult to kill than Walkers, it makes sense to only run New Maps with humans on the weekends. Currently, the 3 day challenge runs Monday 10a to Thursday 9a. These are weekdays when players have work, school, and other life responsibilities that limit their time to play. When we encounter human enemies during this challenge, many just don't participate due to the higher difficulty. The devs spent far too much time building these maps to have people ignore them due to poor timing. Run the harder challenges on the weekends when more players have free time to enjoy the game.
3) Put the reward levels back where they were when there was 1 challenge a week. Scaling up the difficulty made those goals harder to attain. Increasing the star count as well created animosity towards NG in the player base as it was widely viewed as targeted to discourage low and mid-level players and force them to spend money to level up faster. People that spend frugally on games tend to leave games when they feel pressured into spending more money by game developers. Gaming companies want to attract new players and retain existing ones. Changes that create animosity in the player base has the opposite effect.
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Comments
I really want it to be changed back to one a week.
A) reducing gas prices across the board for each mission so that we can play more each time we are on before running out of gas and lower the time before we can replay a mission
Option B Would be my preference as even at low levels, the first 3 rounds are stupidly easy. As the difficulty would increase much faster, many players would be able to max out their stars in a day or two leaving time for other activities. For higher level players, I can tell you that the first 5-6 rounds are simple and become monotonous. The race to 100 stars is not challenging and is limited only by time and gas. There is often no need to even worry about walkers...let them hit you....they won't hurt you. With less stars available, players might be more willing to try very hard levels just to get 1 more star
IF they scrap the first 3 rounds, that is 54 stars we can't get. Considering people that used to get 210 stars are now stopping around 140, that would mean they would only be getting around 90 stars and completely missing 2 rewards. They would have to scale the reward requirements WAY back to compensate for those 54 stars. Also, those first 3 levels exist primarily for new players. I started playing after my husband did, so the day I started playing, I joined his guild. My third day playing saw the start of my first challenge. My survivors were all level 4 and 5 by then. I needed the level 3, 5, and 6 challenges in order to get 43 stars and 3 tiers of rewards (under the new system, I would have gotten about 38 stars and only 2 tiers of rewards). We all have to start somewhere, so I personally can tolerate the easy rounds to give new comers a chance at some rewards.
That might be a good suggestion even if they go to one a week. As it stands now, it doesn't really matter if you go all out on a challenge as hard as you possibly can, injuring all your players if the difference between doing that and comfortably getting all the stars you can without killing yourself is a difference between getting 172 and 174 stars......but the difference between getting 38 vs 40 stars might be huge.
As a Mod, I know you cannot really take a stance as to if this idea will be considered or not. I know you have to be guarded with what you do and do not say.
Can you tell me if the ideas have enough merit to take to the devs, or should I work on them a bit more?