Once again, once more, EU players got screwed

Unknown

dreamwanderings wrote:

Tonny4ever wrote:

I'm an European gamer and I suffer from the same problem.

However I kinda understand why developers keep the PvE events that way. If you noticed the majority of people who play this game is from America. So it's normal to benefit who give them "more money".

But it would be a great mistake for D3 to focus on the American market, because the largest potential market is abroad. I couldn't find statistics of international sales from the American comics industry but :
- up to 70% of Marvel movies income is foreign;
- in 2013, figures for sales of comic book type products in a single European country (France) was 70% than in the whole of the US. Granted, most isn't American comics, but I couldn't find figures for other countries and that's only one country.

(not to mention D3 already charges purchases a bit more in Euros than in Dollars, even taking AVT into account)

The thing is, we're not talking about comics here. D3 has exact sales information to see how much money is coming from each region, so they don't need to extrapolate from movies or comics to figure out what their sales will do. If Europe was so important to their bottom line, don't you think they would have arranged some sort of accommodation already?

over_clocked

^ Indeed. Marvel is something to do with comics, right? Which in Europe get to be called graphic novellas and to NOT be about superheroes in tights?

* cheap sarcasm but still, I tend to agree with ZenBrillig right now. Absolutely most of MPQ's revenue should be coming from the US.

simonsez

locked wrote:

What were your levels like at the end of Unstable Iso-8? o.o Maxing your points inevitably leads to maxing your scaling, too!

They were in the mid 300s, but it really doesn't matter a whole lot if we're talking goon levels. It might take a few more minutes to finish them all, but once you get past a certain level, you've got to kill all the timers anyway, so 250 or 350, not much difference.

over_clocked

simonsez wrote:

locked wrote:

What were your levels like at the end of Unstable Iso-8? o.o Maxing your points inevitably leads to maxing your scaling, too!

They were in the mid 300s, but it really doesn't matter a whole lot if we're talking goon levels. It might take a few more minutes to finish them all, but once you get past a certain level, you've got to kill all the timers anyway, so 250 or 350, not much difference.

Yeah, but most good points were concentrated in villain battles where match damage is a thing. I believe that keeping adequate scaling for the most of an event is much more important than trying to max points early or even midway through an event.

Unknown

all events maybe 2 selection one is europe, one is usa time and we select time area

and its fair last pve my rank #3 and i sleep ( 3 hours before finish) i wake up #95

its not FAIR

Unknown

papa07 wrote:

white1 wrote:

i can't see the devs rushing to change anything, so maybe the eurozone will have too play a bit smarter, i know it's not a solution to the problem, but you could join a alliance with mostly U.S players, that way if you can't compete for the player rewards a good alliance should still get you 1 cover, which you will need for the main nodes for the next pve, and you feel like your getting something for your points, or use pve just to farm iso and pick up covers from pvp,

As a US player who hates (but can work with) midnight/1am finishes, I am offended by this statement. Basically you say that Euros need to eat a tinykitty sandwich, but if they join a US based alliance they can at least add a slice of wilted lettuce to it for better flavor.

was not trying to offend, i'm not saying join a US based alliance sit back and watch the rewards roll in, i'm saying make a valid contribution for the greater good of the alliance you are in, and everyone wins.

over_clocked

white1 wrote:

was not trying to offend, i'm not saying join a US based alliance sit back and watch the rewards roll in, i'm saying make a valid contribution for the greater good of the alliance you are in, and everyone wins.

Worked for us in Unstable Iso-8. 2 of our members are European. They still played to the best of their ability, and most of the rest were able to play in the last hours and we climbed from well outside of top 100 to a modest #73.

dreamwanderings

ZenBrillig wrote:

The thing is, we're not talking about comics here.

Even though the product is different, the culture and customer base is the same. Which is why D3 sees Comicon as the place to be and make key announcements.

ZenBrillig wrote:

D3 has exact sales information to see how much money is coming from each region, so they don't need to extrapolate from movies or comics to figure out what their sales will do.?

Saying that present customers are in the US is not proof that the whole or even most of the market is there.
Even if most of their income is domestic, the reason can just as easily be that the company inefficiently markets MPQ abroad (intentionally or not).
I presented the game 5 times to people who were interested this week. It went this way:
- classic gem game with -Oh look!- Marvel characters and their powers and levels! (...interest rises)
- with a competition approach (...so?)
- for which the only two solutions are gambling for covers -gambling, not purchasing, as you are statistically paying for covers that are otherwise free, but that's an issue for another post, and setting your alarm clock at least once during the night to play during key hours at least twice per week, and taking half of Wednesday afternoon off . (...interest is gone)

ZenBrillig wrote:

If Europe was so important to their bottom line, don't you think they would have arranged some sort of accommodation already?

I agree that Europe is probably not important as things stand to their bottom line, but because they are not tapping the market. I also think it's possible they haven't found a satisfying solution, as any other than rotation of end times would probably entail complications. Or quite simply they are working on other things.

Just saying the larger the market D3 addresses, the more money they'll make. And the present formula just right down shuts away the European market.

Unknown

dreamwanderings wrote:

Even though the product is different, the culture and customer base is the same. Which is why D3 sees Comicon as the place to be and make key announcements.

The customer base is *not* the same. It may have a large amount of overlap, but assuming it's the same is just wrong. D3 goes to Comicon because there's a large overlap, and because it's extremely economical advertising.

dreamwanderings wrote:

Saying that present customers are in the US is not proof that the whole or even most of the market is there.
Even if most of their income is domestic, the reason can just as easily be that the company inefficiently markets MPQ abroad (intentionally or not).

Again, you are making assumptions. They know where their *current* market is. Everything else is just speculation. There's a pretty good history in online games of people saying "If company X would just do Y, the gamers that like/live/do Z would play." Then in the rare event that X does Y, what happens? Nothing. Turns out if Z were interested in playing they'd have been playing all along.

Ignoring (or in this case antagonizing) your existing market in order to chase some hypothetically larger market is a great way to go out of business.

Unknown

Going back to the original topic, no question that European players get screwed over. I can't understand why these events finish at 5am on a FRIDAY MORNING! (Give or take an hour depending on your time zone). At the very least surely it could finish over the weekend.

Just for the record I was 7th when I went to bed with just over 3 hours to go, woke up to a 137 place finish. Though I did get to work on time

Unknown

In my alliance only 2 people actually read Marvel comics...

scottee

warcin wrote:

scottee wrote:

People are complaining about rubberbanding, so they want it eliminated. But without it, the placings would come down to grinding. There was significant complaining about how much grinding this game required before rubberbanding was in place.

Please explain in what way is it not fair that the people who put in the most effort get the biggest benefit. Rubberbanding tied together with scaling makes it best to not play the game except only at the very end and then screw over those who want to or are willing to play your game the most. Yes casual players will not get the big rewards but they shouldn't be getting them over top of people spending 2-3 times the amount of effort.

With no rubber banding, it would simply be a matter of playing more. In a single event, yes, this is fair. But what will happen is, what separates 1st place from 100th place? Playing more. You'll get lots of crazies playing nonstop all day. To compete for decent prizes? You have to do the same. The game becomes a full-time job. Then players will complain that D3 is not being fair, because they set it up in a way that requires too much grinding.

This isn't hypothetical. It has happened before.

warcin

scottee wrote:

warcin wrote:

scottee wrote:

People are complaining about rubberbanding, so they want it eliminated. But without it, the placings would come down to grinding. There was significant complaining about how much grinding this game required before rubberbanding was in place.

Please explain in what way is it not fair that the people who put in the most effort get the biggest benefit. Rubberbanding tied together with scaling makes it best to not play the game except only at the very end and then screw over those who want to or are willing to play your game the most. Yes casual players will not get the big rewards but they shouldn't be getting them over top of people spending 2-3 times the amount of effort.

With no rubber banding, it would simply be a matter of playing more. In a single event, yes, this is fair. But what will happen is, what separates 1st place from 100th place? Playing more. You'll get lots of crazies playing nonstop all day. To compete for decent prizes? You have to do the same. The game becomes a full-time job. Then players will complain that D3 is not being fair, because they set it up in a way that requires too much grinding.

This isn't hypothetical. It has happened before.

And that may have been true before scaling but now with scaling and to a lesser extent true healing there is an upper limit to the amount that can be played. In fact most major changes to the game have actively worked to force people to play less which seems to be the most backwards way to design a game I have ever seen

Bowgentle

warcin wrote:

scottee wrote:

warcin wrote:

scottee wrote:

People are complaining about rubberbanding, so they want it eliminated. But without it, the placings would come down to grinding. There was significant complaining about how much grinding this game required before rubberbanding was in place.

Please explain in what way is it not fair that the people who put in the most effort get the biggest benefit. Rubberbanding tied together with scaling makes it best to not play the game except only at the very end and then screw over those who want to or are willing to play your game the most. Yes casual players will not get the big rewards but they shouldn't be getting them over top of people spending 2-3 times the amount of effort.

With no rubber banding, it would simply be a matter of playing more. In a single event, yes, this is fair. But what will happen is, what separates 1st place from 100th place? Playing more. You'll get lots of crazies playing nonstop all day. To compete for decent prizes? You have to do the same. The game becomes a full-time job. Then players will complain that D3 is not being fair, because they set it up in a way that requires too much grinding.

This isn't hypothetical. It has happened before.

And that may have been true before scaling but now with scaling and to a lesser extent true healing there is an upper limit to the amount that can be played. In fact most major changes to the game have actively worked to force people to play less which seems to be the most backwards way to design a game I have ever seen

Scaling doesn't stop those people with 1* rosters who lucked out on the featured char from grinding.
If you turn off rubberbanding, the t100 will be filled with new players, and you will have zero chance at the t20.
With rubberbanding they get pushed out of t10 by the vets who know what they're doing.
Without RB they can happily grind their hearts out because they mow down their level 30 enemies with their single cover Patch buffed to level 100+, and no one will be able to catch up.

Unknown

Well, another week another wall of silence and another PvE due to finish at a terrible time for Europe that'll necessitate players getting up in the middle of their night to get a decent finish (baring in mind that the bonus hood cover is 10th place, probably twice during the night).

The best suggestion I've seen in this (and other threads in the last week) was having 3 nodes on the first event screen you enter and each node puts you into a different event finish bracket so you choose by doing the one that best suits you. Hell, it might be the case that someone in the US wants the Asia time or someone in Europe wants the US time... anyways - I've seen other games do this so I'm not sure why it should be so tricky to implement.

Maybe if someone from Demiurge/D3 actually responded then we'd find out? Little frustrating to see them happily answer just about any other question but completely ignore this again.

Unknown

Start/End time rotation does not work (especially if you want 3-4 end times).

- Event1, 6 days, "US-Friendly" end time, reward: new character
- Event2, 6 days, "EU-Friendly" end time, reward: Loki

See what I mean?

shuusin

I think the solution to this is pretty simple, just have the event not refresh for the last 8-12 hours or so with a big warning thats how its going to work. This way, nobody has to "wake up" before the end of the event to consume the last refresh/rubberbanding. Even as a US player, I don't enjoy having to play until the early morning just to finish an event, it's stupid.

_RiO_

shuusin wrote:

I think the solution to this is pretty simple, just have the event not refresh for the last 8-12 hours or so with a big warning thats how its going to work. This way, nobody has to "wake up" before the end of the event to consume the last refresh/rubberbanding. Even as a US player, I don't enjoy having to play until the early morning just to finish an event, it's stupid.

Disabling rubber-banding and node refreshes for the last X hours of an event will simply move the finale push X hours earlier and if you are not able to play at that time, you'd be screwed just as much as you are now when you are not able to play at the event finishing time. Disabling one and not the other will either make it optimal to save your nodes to the very last moment to maximize rubber-banding or to keep playing and grinding for more points (even if it means just increments of 1; people are mad enough to do it). Whichever way, it will still be optimal to play for the last of those X hours rather than finish in the first few.

The problem is endemic to the system; there will simply always be a 'last call' at which you can rush optimally for points, before the event switches into a mode of flat points and/or freezes node refreshes. And anyone capable of hitting that sweetspot because of convenient timing will always be at a distinct advantage over everyone else.


For solo placement, the best (and probably only) way around this is still to distribute players over brackets by major timezone and to put in place filtering on PvP match-ups so that you can only be matched up against players from the same major timezone slot.

That does compromise alliances somewhat. Alliances would have to take into account shifts in scores occuring until an event has closed for the very last timezone. It doesn't directly mean alliances need geo-bracketing as well. A slightly more intelligent scoring system can go a long way to providing compensation. A system can automatically add alliance points from members in earlier timezones (for which an event has already closed) at the average rate of earning those members have shown during the entire run of the event. E.g. if I'm an EU-based player who has on average scored 6000 points/day in a PvE event, then after said event closes for the EU and until the event closes for the US, the scoring system will add an additional 250 points each hour (6000 per day distributed at an hourly rate).

However, it may not even really need that kind of scoring compensation. Infact, it could be considered outright unfair. One must keep in mind that US players would also not able to generate any points in the early phase during which EU and Asia players could already be active, so why should EU or Asia players contribue 'bonus' points? A true solution would need a bit more tuning, but as it operating on aggregate numbers it is much less susceptible to statistical anomalies than the single-player situation is. I wouldn't worry too much about this.

A more directly visible and actually worrisome problem is that some players may have to wait half a day longer for their rewards, which means characters earned from an event cannot be directly used as essential/boosted characters in the next event in the chain. Arguably, this is actually a good thing. In the spirit of fairness, it will force D3P to not run events back to back that offer a new character as a prize and subsequently make that character the essential character. One way to tackle this is to keep an empty span of time between events, which could provide some incentive to play Shield Sim for season scores, or some other as-of-yet-unconceived game mode. Another way would be to run one or more events in between with a different essential character; events that can possibly offer the same new character from the first event, if they want. (Or just re-run the first event, if it is not that long.) More and better chances at new characters before they are used as essential characters is also something that is often cited as a solution for the essential character debacle some people trip over. So, it works out nicely that way too.

(Also; perhaps as a bit of QoL enhancement to assist with bookkeeping alliance status, the devs could place an 'open' or 'closed' indicator over individual team members in the listing that shows the point distribution. It can take the place of the gold/silver/bronze trophy, which is just useless noise anyway.)

shuusin

_RiO_ wrote:

shuusin wrote:

I think the solution to this is pretty simple, just have the event not refresh for the last 8-12 hours or so with a big warning thats how its going to work. This way, nobody has to "wake up" before the end of the event to consume the last refresh/rubberbanding. Even as a US player, I don't enjoy having to play until the early morning just to finish an event, it's stupid.

Disabling rubber-banding and node refreshes for the last X hours of an event will simply move the finale push X hours earlier and if you are not able to play at that time, you'd be screwed just as much as you are now when you are not able to play at the event finishing time. Disabling one and not the other will either make it optimal to save your nodes to the very last moment to maximize rubber-banding or to keep playing and grinding for more points (even if it means just increments of 1; people are mad enough to do it). Whichever way, it will still be optimal to play for the last of those X hours rather than finish in the first few.

If you disable refreshes for an extra 8-12 hours there is still a significant benefit of allowing the players who didn't maximize at the 'end' to rubberband those refreshes to reclaim lost positions, ie not going from 3rd to 75th overnight, they would get back to say 15th. It is not a perfect solution, but is one that exists within the current framework and wouldn't require an obtuse multi timezone events or special alliance scoring.

_RiO_

shuusin wrote:

_RiO_ wrote:

shuusin wrote:

I think the solution to this is pretty simple, just have the event not refresh for the last 8-12 hours or so with a big warning thats how its going to work. This way, nobody has to "wake up" before the end of the event to consume the last refresh/rubberbanding. Even as a US player, I don't enjoy having to play until the early morning just to finish an event, it's stupid.

Disabling rubber-banding and node refreshes for the last X hours of an event will simply move the finale push X hours earlier and if you are not able to play at that time, you'd be screwed just as much as you are now when you are not able to play at the event finishing time. Disabling one and not the other will either make it optimal to save your nodes to the very last moment to maximize rubber-banding or to keep playing and grinding for more points (even if it means just increments of 1; people are mad enough to do it). Whichever way, it will still be optimal to play for the last of those X hours rather than finish in the first few.

If you disable refreshes for an extra 8-12 hours there is still a significant benefit of allowing the players who didn't maximize at the 'end' to rubberband those refreshes to reclaim lost positions, ie not going from 3rd to 75th overnight, they would get back to say 15th. It is not a perfect solution, but is one that exists within the current framework and wouldn't require an obtuse multi timezone events or special alliance scoring.

There is no benefit. You are simply swapping the scoring characteristics from the last 8-12 hours and the period of 8-12 hours before that. If anything it will be detrimental to total scores as you will be missing out on the 2,5hr node refreshes during the last period when refreshes are frozen.