The Silence

Unknown

I remember somewhere was a poll on the age distribution of those who frequent the forums. 30's was the largest demographic with 20's, 30's and 40's vastly dominating the pie chart. These are adults, most seem fairly educated. We appreciate being treated like such. Being told things like 'people enjoy when we lower the odds on tokens and buy more' or 'prologue healing was boring and no one actually liked doing it so we fixed that for you all' screams of tinykitty.
-We can look at the odds and tell when we are getting screwed
-We understand the ways to make things more addictive and we don't necessarily appreciate when we are manipulated by them. Monkeys in a cage might keep pressing the button for more treats indefinitely but some of these monkeys understand what you are doing and why.
-We can make our own decisions about how we want to play a game even if that means doing annoyingly repetitive things because we get a small amount of benefit.
-We can handle the real reasons behind changes being made even if that is 'we wanted to try something different and see how it works out'
-We like when we are acknowledged, even if that means a dev dropping into a chat and saying 'neat idea, but will likely never get implemented'
-We like data and information we find it helps us make good decisions, and the lack of such is very troubling to us.

Part of me wants the devs to actually say to my face that their target demographic is teenagers with their parents credit cards and poor impulse control because they spend more than most rational adults, and make up 70% of the playerbase but never come to the forums. I would understand completely and leave the game to those types. We see so much potential in this game and we want it to keep improving, even more we want to help it reach that goal. If those driving are heading in a different direction than I thought, I need to know so I can catch a new ride going the places I want to.

I just cannot understand how there is so little communication. So much silence. The only possibilities I can think to explain it is those who work on the game are held to silence by some internal policy, there is so much disorganization that no one has time or authority to communicate with the community, or they just don't see the point and we aren't worth the time to reply to. I can't say which reason I listed here makes me most disillusioned, and I hope the answer is none of the above, but I am still waiting to be proven wrong.

Edit I have been proven wrong

Demiurge_Will wrote:

Cryptobrancus wrote:

...those with healers could play indefinitely and those without were severely disadvantaged by this, and these changed were made to make the game more fair across all players for the long term health of the game.

That's closer to the mark - play changed too significantly when people got their hands on Black Widow (Original) & Spider-Man (Classic). When unlimited healing is available, the playing field shifts away from strategy and towards sheer number of matches finished. Before the change, we heard a lot of folks say that they felt forced to play too many hours in a day to be competitive. The changes to Anti-Gravity Device and Web Bandages help to address that (alongside some other changes, like the recent rework of placement & progression rewards structures).

The fact that using prologue missions to heal was busywork that most players find un-fun and the change eliminated it was a side benefit. But the problem was team healing everywhere, not just in the prologue. Turning team healing off in the prologue wouldn't have worked (as well as being quirky and difficult to explain clearly). You'd still be able to track down an easier PvE fight (or an easier PvP fight, depending on what you're up to, event-wise) and heal up there, and you'd still have odd incentives to make a fight that's already been decided drag out for longer so you can heal back up to full while you keep the last enemy stunned.

The OP's mechanic would be an interesting way to extend play time, but that's moving the game in an opposite direction to lots of player feedback. (Bear in mind when evaluating that statement that folks who post on these forums are much more likely to be interested in playing for long periods of time in one sitting than most players (including a lot of serious, dedicated players) are.)

I think we booched the explanation of this change, and I'm sorry we didn't do a better job of explaining our motivations and the benefits of it.

Demiurge_Will wrote:

wymtime wrote:

So Will are there going to be anymore changes to the true healing or additions to allow players to play longer?
a. more health packs
b. increase regeneration on health packs
c. another increase on everyone's regeneration time.
d. more character tweeks to increase shields

No changes are currently in the pipeline (i.e., being implemented or tested right exactly now - as always, we're actively watching the impact of the changes and talking about them, and that could change at any time) in that department.

The next thing we'll probably evaluate is whether the health granted by team healing needs a boost: healing is currently more expensive, AP-wise, than damage, by about 20%. You typically do want a cost bias toward damage in a combat system, or you can end up with stalemates (or just bad pacing), but the amount of the bias might need to change now. The design team here has some intuitions about that, but we need to take a closer look before making a change.

Demiurge_Will wrote:

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

1. Can the AP costs of the most overpriced powers be lowered?
2. Can the worst fifth covers in the game get a modification?

This doesn't directly answer your question, but I wanted to say how much we've appreciated these polls and the analysis in the threads. Super useful feedback as we decide how to prioritize future balancing work.

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

3. Can anything new be added to the sparse historical listing of all buffs? The game has had no major balancing buffs since 2013.
4. Will the long series of nerfs end any time soon?

So I'm going to say something very controversial, but true, so I'm putting on my flame-retardant pants for a diversion into game-design-philosophy-land: Dividing changes into buffs and nerfs doesn't really make sense when you're evaluating whether and how much a game has improved or not.

For one thing, the terms aren't necessarily clear or useful. A buff for one character/ability/mechanic/strategy is a nerf for everything else in the game, and vice versa. Any change can be interpreted as a buff or a nerf. Team healing not lasting between missions? Clearly a nerf, right? To Black Widow (Original), Spider-Man (Classic), and those poor long-suffering hot-dog vendors, you bet. But it's also a buff to health packs, Protect tile generation abilities, strategic play (vs. volume play), stun, users that play in typical mobile patterns (vs. those that play all at once), characters with self-heal, and so on. And it's a nerf to a bunch of other tangentially related things as well.

Players, particularly expert players that are well-represented on the forums, gravitate toward optimal strategies, even if they make the game less fun for others (usually even if they make the game less fun for them). If you make a balance change and do it exactly perfectly (which I certainly don't claim to do all the time - assuming the idea of "balancing perfectly" even makes sense), there are two possibilities:
1) You take something overpowered and make it perfectly balanced. This is most likely going to change the way the expert players are playing, and make the way they were playing before less effective. And there's some adjustment involved in that, and expert players notice big time.
2) You take something underpowered and make it perfectly balanced. Expert players are not likely to care or notice, or they'll think of the change as minor, since the optimal, overpowered strategies haven't changed.

So even if we were doing everything perfectly (which we're not, of course - we're human), an expert group of players is always going to feel like changes are biased towards nerfs, even if there were the same number of both. But even then, there shouldn't be the same number of both: if you take another look at those two possibilities and weigh them against each other, you'll usually find that fixing something overpowered is more urgent, since it's having a bigger impact on the experience. Most often, a very underpowered thing makes the game smaller, with fewer possibilities than it might otherwise have, while a very overpowered thing makes the game broken.

I'm not saying this to defend the design decisions we've made, but to criticize listing a game's nerfs as telling us anything about the quality of a game or how it's changing. I'm always interested in y'all's "things I love about MPQ" and "things I hate about MPQ" lists, and I care very much about putting lots more eggs in the first basket, but I try not to pay too much attention to balancing out what particular players think of as a nerf vs. what particular players think of as a buff. Also, while I am interested in both, I think it makes sense to give more weight to the experience afterthe change than the experience ofthe change: temporary pain can be vital to the long-term health of the game.

(The lists you've linked to are also missing some things that I think most forumites would classify as substantial buffs (like the PvP rewards rework) and the nerf list includes some things that are pretty questionable as nerfs (writing patch notes in fiction? we might do that again when it makes sense and can be clear, but we got a lot of complaints that the fictional language made them unnecessarily hard to understand, and I don't think you'd usually call something like that a nerf) but for the reasons above, I'm not going to spend time hashing the details of those lists.)

Now returning from game-design-philosophy-land; hope the diversion has been interesting.

Unknown

Call'em or visit their respective Facebook pages. That steaming pile of Demiurge_Al also has a "talk to me" link on his dormant tumblr. See what happens!

Unknown

Nah, they know where we are. If they really are willfully ignoring us that answers my questions just the same.

Unknown

Speak infidels!

Unknown

I just reread my post except interpreting it as some hobo all alone using the royal we and ranting at a dead squirrel.
Just be quiet crazy hobo, he will never answer you...

Unknown

Cryptobrancus wrote:

Part of me wants the devs to actually say to my face that their target demographic is teenagers with their parents credit cards and poor impulse control because they spend more than most rational adults, and make up 70% of the playerbase but never come to the forums. I would understand completely and leave the game to those types.

Wizard's Rule #5

“Mind what people do, not only what they say, for deeds will betray a lie.”
―Soul of the Fire: Chapter 28, page 205

Why you want them to tell anything -- be it truth or the usual lies? The series of actions speaks for itself. It is more than evident the game is meant for the public in your description. So it leaves you to do the action -- or just admit it's easier said than done and looking for excuses is the replacement activity.

Welcome to the club.

Unknown

Well, so this seems serendipitous in so many ways.

Recently LOTRO's community manager made public some interesting facts about their player-base and the proportion of raiders and PvPers therein. What followed was a great deal of back-and-forth hostility and accusations of lying.

Massively: http://massively.joystiq.com/2014/07/10 ... tatements/
Original LOTRO thread: https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthread ... the-future

It brings up the question - why do people think that the devs should talk to us when their default position is that the devs are lying?

(Also, an interesting side-point, raiders and pvpers together make up less than 10% of LOTRO players, and yet make up the overwhelming majority of their forum posters. Showing conclusively that the forum is not representative of the community as a whole. The same is true here.)

Unknown

I suppose it is a self fulfilling prophecy if the rational adult says 'maybe I should stop spending until they make changes that would actually improve the game', while the poor impulse control crowd keeps spending all the changes will be geared towards those still spending.

Unknown

Hey, I was happier when we actually paid for complete games. But apparently a large part of the world decided that they were going to get games for free, and so here we are.

Nonce Equitaur 2

I worry what might happen to them if their break room caught fire.

(apathetic voice): "Guys, I noticed the breakroom is on fire. Should I go put it out?"
(accountant): "You dare ask a question without referencing METRICS? To ME? We closed the non-revenue breakroom, you imbecilic coder. Back to work!"

** alarms start going off **

(worried voice): "We really should put that out. Who has the key?"
(accountant): "That room was for fun, which is NOT going to help our revenue per player." *cracks whip at impertinent coder's face*

** smoke fills the hallway **

(PR rep): "The building across the way sent us a message that the left half of the building is an inferno. Maybe we ..."
(accountant): *TAZES the PR rep* "Our policy is to IGNORE all messages! Put down that fire extinguisher and write out a new excuse for delaying the X-Force buff!"

** programmer runs by on fire **

(accountant): "Assistant -- get a picture of that guy for our Human Torch redesign."
(harrowed assistant): Yes sir! Please don't taze me again, sir.

** assistant tries to take a picture, but the heat causes the phone to explode in his hands, before he collapses **

(accountant): "My word .. I'm melting or something. So many injuries ... can't breathe ... need to ... reach computer."

And with one last brave action, the accountant cancels all employee health care and insurance benefits before the building explodes, saving D3 a lot of revenue. A true hero.

jojeda654

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

And with one last brave action, the accountant cancels all employee health care and insurance benefits before the building explodes, saving D3 a lot of revenue. A true hero.

<insert True Healing™ remark here>

Unknown

They don't have a community manager.

That's why communication is not great.

FaerieMyst

Why don't the devs talk to us directly? It isn't their jobs. They are not customer service or public relations or social media. There job is to develop a game along the guidelines they are given.

The majority of customers for any consumer product is non-vocal. You can't assume the people here represent the average user. If they tell us something, it isn't believed - whether it is metrics or reasoning behind a change. Why would they want to keep beating a dead horse?

Interacting with a user base is at best a means to an end. At worst, it is a resource suck with no tangible yield.

Forums are a place to interact with people sharing an interest. It's a diversion. It isn't a way to communicate to developers or management. Thinking it should be doesn't make it so.

DP3 makes it clear that this is a user forum.

Unknown

IceIX has been bashed so hard he must be reluctant to come back to the forum to announce anything.

They must be analysing the consequences of the latest changes they made.

A game like this with no announcement is weird. Even if this is not the case, I feel as if they are sulking because we have been nasty to them. Do you feel the same way ?

Even the forthcoming tourneys are no more announced with pop ups.

I am so curious to live the moment when I open MPQ in the very beginning of Season 4, discovering the next Top 100 reward, as nothing would have been announced priorily.

It will have a sour taste though.

I've been supporting this game financially for 5 months now and feel totally disrespected. As I said previously, I just hope for the best to come.

Unknown

FaerieMyst wrote:

Why don't the devs talk to us directly? It isn't their jobs. They are not customer service or public relations or social media. There job is to develop a game along the guidelines they are given.

The majority of customers for any consumer product is non-vocal. You can't assume the people here represent the average user. If they tell us something, it isn't believed - whether it is metrics or reasoning behind a change. Why would they want to keep beating a dead horse?

Interacting with a user base is at best a means to an end. At worst, it is a resource suck with no tangible yield.

Forums are a place to interact with people sharing an interest. It's a diversion. It isn't a way to communicate to developers or management. Thinking it should be doesn't make it so.

DP3 makes it clear that this is a user forum.

I guess i have been here long enough to be spoiled by how they used to communicate, and am puzzled as to why that has stopped. Even patch notes seem to have all but stopped... Maybe we did flame IceIX one too many times and he melted.

Unknown

When the odds of winning the jackpot on a slot machine in a casino are lowered, people pay more money. They know what they're doing, it's very sound business logic, and I'm willing to bet that the metrics show increased purchases as people try to win covers for a growing number of characters, each with lower odds than when there were more characters. It's not about enjoyment in spending, it's based on the premise of a skinner box.

When you win tokens, you cash them in hoping for something good. When that gold card comes up announcing you've won a 3*, you get excited. Maybe it's one you want or need. The rarity of this happening makes it more exciting when it does, and reinforces the desire to open more tokens. When the tokens are all gone, but you didn't get the reward you were after, psychologically speaking, you're at the point where you are most likely to buy more tokens, since you CAN control the number you want.

We're not privy to their financial records or the decisions made by management, and you shouldn't expect them to come to you and be like, yeah, lower chances means more sales, and here's why. IceIX isn't authorized to speak for management, and the management isn't going to explain themselves. It's no different here than it is for any other business that's doing extremely well.

Right now, they are the number 48 top grossing app on Google Play. They're making bank. They're just a few places behind Zyngas poker game, which is absolutely pure gambling.

Unknown

FaerieMyst wrote:

Why don't the devs talk to us directly? It isn't their jobs. They are not customer service or public relations or social media. There job is to develop a game along the guidelines they are given.

The majority of customers for any consumer product is non-vocal. You can't assume the people here represent the average user. If they tell us something, it isn't believed - whether it is metrics or reasoning behind a change. Why would they want to keep beating a dead horse?

Interacting with a user base is at best a means to an end. At worst, it is a resource suck with no tangible yield.

Forums are a place to interact with people sharing an interest. It's a diversion. It isn't a way to communicate to developers or management. Thinking it should be doesn't make it so.

DP3 makes it clear that this is a user forum.

Well, it was their choice NOT TO develop a website dedicated to MPQ so they could announce news on it. It was their choice to use Facebook, as a cheap way to make announcements.

It was their choice to implement changes they knew would lead to a riot.

They could have announced True Healing some other way :

"We have found out players are oversusing some characters in the game because of their healing powers. We would like to make some changes to Healing and see how that can enrich player's experience with a more diverse use of one's roster. The change is temporary but could be definite if the experience is positive. Meanwhile, we decided to shift the power of characters so that 3* and 4* are more valueable for the money invested in them. Because the characters' life will be higher, and so as to avoid long waiting times for healing, we will speed up the healing time by X for 3* and Y for 4*. We hope these changes will bring more fun to the game. While we are making this experience Health Packs will be sold with a 50% discount. If the experience proves to be negative for you, we will think about a compensation."

Unknown

arktos1971 wrote:

FaerieMyst wrote:

Why don't the devs talk to us directly? It isn't their jobs. They are not customer service or public relations or social media. There job is to develop a game along the guidelines they are given.

The majority of customers for any consumer product is non-vocal. You can't assume the people here represent the average user. If they tell us something, it isn't believed - whether it is metrics or reasoning behind a change. Why would they want to keep beating a dead horse?

Interacting with a user base is at best a means to an end. At worst, it is a resource suck with no tangible yield.

Forums are a place to interact with people sharing an interest. It's a diversion. It isn't a way to communicate to developers or management. Thinking it should be doesn't make it so.

DP3 makes it clear that this is a user forum.

Well, it was their choice NOT TO develop a website dedicated to MPQ so they could announce news on it. It was their choice to use Facebook, as a cheap way to make announcements.

It was their choice to implement changes they knew would lead to a riot.

They could have announced True Healing some other way :

"We have found out players are oversusing some characters in the game because of their healing powers. We would like to make some changes to Healing and see how that can enrich player's experience with a more diverse use of one's roster. The change is temporary but could be definite if the experience is positive. Meanwhile, we decided to shift the power of characters so that 3* and 4* are more valueable for the money invested in them. Because the characters' life will be higher, and so as to avoid long waiting times for healing, we will speed up the healing time by X for 3* and Y for 4*. We hope these changes will bring more fun to the game. While we are making this experience Health Packs will be sold with a 50% discount. If the experience proves to be negative for you, we will think about a compensation."

Your other way of announcing it includes a lot of stuff that wasn't part of the decision that was made. Your proposal would have been them lying to us, which is worse.

Spoit

ZenBrillig wrote:

Well, so this seems serendipitous in so many ways.

Recently LOTRO's community manager made public some interesting facts about their player-base and the proportion of raiders and PvPers therein. What followed was a great deal of back-and-forth hostility and accusations of lying.

Massively: http://massively.joystiq.com/2014/07/10 ... tatements/
Original LOTRO thread: https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthread ... the-future

It brings up the question - why do people think that the devs should talk to us when their default position is that the devs are lying?

(Also, an interesting side-point, raiders and pvpers together make up less than 10% of LOTRO players, and yet make up the overwhelming majority of their forum posters. Showing conclusively that the forum is not representative of the community as a whole. The same is true here.)

10% raiders? That seems ridiculously high for a MMO

Unknown

Spoit wrote:

ZenBrillig wrote:

Well, so this seems serendipitous in so many ways.

Recently LOTRO's community manager made public some interesting facts about their player-base and the proportion of raiders and PvPers therein. What followed was a great deal of back-and-forth hostility and accusations of lying.

Massively: http://massively.joystiq.com/2014/07/10 ... tatements/
Original LOTRO thread: https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthread ... the-future

It brings up the question - why do people think that the devs should talk to us when their default position is that the devs are lying?

(Also, an interesting side-point, raiders and pvpers together make up less than 10% of LOTRO players, and yet make up the overwhelming majority of their forum posters. Showing conclusively that the forum is not representative of the community as a whole. The same is true here.)

10% raiders? That seems ridiculously high for a MMO

No, raiders + pvpers < 10%, and raiders < pvpers. So less than 5%.

(Backstory: around the beginning of the year, they announced that there was no new raid content forthcoming for the foreseeable future and the raiders have been in a tizzy ever since.)

orionpeace

fidsah wrote:

Your other way of announcing it includes a lot of stuff that wasn't part of the decision that was made. Your proposal would have been them lying to us, which is worse.

He was writing and executing the announcement the way he would have done it, wrapping all the changes together and including a discount on Health Packs.

He isn't suggesting that everything in his announcement is consistent with reality or something that D3 is doing or plans to do.