Still No Dev Commentary On Boosts Change

Unknown

I pointed this out weeks ago.

The devs have still not commented on the fact that boosts no longer drop. This is a horrible stealth nerf to the game and if the devs are serious about transparency they should comment on it instead of staying silent.

Unknown

Link to first post:

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=13727&p=201525&hilit=jozier#p201112

Unknown

Demiurge Will actually did talk about it a little:

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=14122&start=60#p205402

Discussion followed from there.

Unknown

Ben Grimm wrote:

Demiurge Will actually did talk about it a little:

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=14122&start=60#p205402

Discussion followed from there.

Ah I see, buried in a post and not really ever added to announcements. Great for transparency.

I'm glad this game is stale as **** now so I don't care if it keeps getting worse. Yay for a Yellow X-Force as a prize for a month of grinding!

Unknown

It is funny. Better communication. Community manager. Few weeks later. Zzzzzzzzz.

I wonder what they're so busy with. I hope it's a Groot/Rocket Raccoon combo character. If it is, I rather they with on that than communicate

Kelbris

jozier wrote:

this game is stale as tinykitty

Yup. Don't really have much else to say about Marvel Groundhog Day.

Kelbris

stephen43084 wrote:

It is funny. Better communication. Community manager. Few weeks later. Zzzzzzzzz.

I wonder what they're so busy with. I hope it's a Groot/Rocket Raccoon combo character. If it is, I rather they with on that than communicate

If literally everyone could stop doing that, the world would be a better place

Spoit

stephen43084 wrote:

It is funny. Better communication. Community manager. Few weeks later. Zzzzzzzzz.

I wonder what they're so busy with. I hope it's a Groot/Rocket Raccoon combo character. If it is, I rather they with on that than communicate

Showing a couple minutes of video at cons, obviously

Unknown

Kelbris wrote:

stephen43084 wrote:

It is funny. Better communication. Community manager. Few weeks later. Zzzzzzzzz.

I wonder what they're so busy with. I hope it's a Groot/Rocket Raccoon combo character. If it is, I rather they with on that than communicate

If literally everyone could stop doing that, the world would be a better place

???? I do not understand what you mean.

yogi_

jozier wrote:

Ben Grimm wrote:

Demiurge Will actually did talk about it a little:

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=14122&start=60#p205402

Discussion followed from there.

Ah I see, buried in a post and not really ever added to announcements. Great for transparency.

"The theory there was that Team-Ups are much more interesting and flavorful to play with than boosts, and boosts feel "cheaty" to many players. We know some folks find boosts strategically interesting, or have built teams around them, so we don't want to retire them entirely if we can avoid it. Plus, boosts are a good way to add a little bit of variety to loot tables."

Another poor dev justification.

You say, people felt they were "cheaty" - is this actual people or the opposite of your theory on why you removed them? I read a lot of the forums and can't recall this being a concern for almost anyone.

So, you just removed most of them because they are "cheaty" but hold on... some people use them because they are strategic or built teams around them? But you just said that's "cheaty" but they're staying. Right. Oh, now you mean there are only a few boosts left, so it's not as "cheaty". Gotcha. And is adding a slight boost to my damage in a random game really "strategically interesting" or do you mean "True Healing" strategically interesting?

You've removed them from drops but they are given as progression rewards. How did you decide which boosts to keep? You mean the ones structured into the rewards tables already? That's a sound reason. Is the genuine truth that ideally you do want to retire them and this is the first half of your goal?

Another terribly communicated and frustrating decision with questionable justification.

Was it that you wanted to avoid more explicit outrage on the forums?? aka. True Healing. Yes - no one can organise a common thread about their disappearance if you don't make one and just sneak an explanation in the middle of a long other thread. Way to respect your playerbase. Says a lot about your company - not much of it good.

Unknown

I thought boosts are pretty cheaty but I'm not sure why having them drop is cheaty but buying them is totally legit. If anything, boosts feel considerably less cheaty when you've to earn them as opposed to just shell out HP/iso8 for them. Imagine if you got 5 of those +50% damage to all heroic boosts at the start of a heroic event and you don't have any Magneto bailouts so you have to decide when to use 1 of those 5 boosts. That'd actually be pretty interesting. On the other hand, buying those boosts at 500 HP per 5 is... not very exciting, that's assuming anyone ever bought those boosts that wasn't the result of an accident.

Unknown

This week be the dumbest thing I've said.

Things would go smoother if we would remember we are players, we play whatever version of the game they present is with. We're not their bosses, colleagues, or stockholders. They do not have to justify their decisions or communicate them to us.

Now, I'm going to go be sick for saying that.

atomzed

stephen43084 wrote:

This week be the dumbest thing I've said.

Things would go smoother if we would remember we are players, we play whatever version of the game they present is with. We're not their bosses, colleagues, or stockholders. They do not have to justify their decisions or communicate them to us.

While they have no responsibility towards us, it is good business sense for them to communicate to us.

However, I do not know how they can communicate *any* type of changes to us. *All* the changes they proposed are either seen as a cash-grab-thru-more-health-packs or raging-you-just-nerf-my fave-char...

Even a Jessica-Alba-ish community manager won't help against this kind of community rage.

Unknown

atomzed wrote:

However, I do not know how they can communicate *any* type of changes to us. *All* the changes they proposed are either seen as a cash-grab-thru-more-health-packs or raging-you-just-nerf-my fave-char...

Even a Jessica-Alba-ish community manager won't help against this kind of community rage.

This is why *reputation* is an important concept in describing how people deal with each other over time. It is possible to recover from having a bad reputation, but it is very very difficult. The best method is to try to maintain a good reputation from the beginning, and this is something the MPQ devs utterly failed at, despite being told time and again that their terrible communications/CS skills were a snowballing problem.

The devs might be able to recover, and consistent/reliable communications would be an absolutely mandatory part of that, but their efforts to date have been slipshod and half-assed at best.

Unknown

Vairelome wrote:

atomzed wrote:

However, I do not know how they can communicate *any* type of changes to us. *All* the changes they proposed are either seen as a cash-grab-thru-more-health-packs or raging-you-just-nerf-my fave-char...

Even a Jessica-Alba-ish community manager won't help against this kind of community rage.

This is why *reputation* is an important concept in describing how people deal with each other over time. It is possible to recover from having a bad reputation, but it is very very difficult. The best method is to try to maintain a good reputation from the beginning, and this is something the MPQ devs utterly failed at, despite being told time and again that their terrible communications/CS skills were a snowballing problem.

The devs might be able to recover, and consistent/reliable communications would be an absolutely mandatory part of that, but their efforts to date have been slipshod and half-assed at best.

Err, no, if you go like that no gaming company would ever have credentials because it'd all be gone when they nerfed your favorite character or screwed up somewhere. Diablo 3 burned a ton of Blizzard's goodwill but it still sold like 20 million or whatever, so reputation clearly doesn't mean much. Maybe when Diablo 4 comes out 10 years later it won't be doing as well but that's a long time to be paying for burning your reputation.

I remember a guy said that if you run a dictatorship you can either kill everyone or bribe everyone. A gaming company's reputation works quite similarly to this. Unlike real life, it costs almost nothing for the company to bribe everyone, but D3 seems to prefer the 'kill everyone' path so far.

Twysta

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

Vairelome wrote:

atomzed wrote:

However, I do not know how they can communicate *any* type of changes to us. *All* the changes they proposed are either seen as a cash-grab-thru-more-health-packs or raging-you-just-nerf-my fave-char...

Even a Jessica-Alba-ish community manager won't help against this kind of community rage.

This is why *reputation* is an important concept in describing how people deal with each other over time. It is possible to recover from having a bad reputation, but it is very very difficult. The best method is to try to maintain a good reputation from the beginning, and this is something the MPQ devs utterly failed at, despite being told time and again that their terrible communications/CS skills were a snowballing problem.

The devs might be able to recover, and consistent/reliable communications would be an absolutely mandatory part of that, but their efforts to date have been slipshod and half-assed at best.

Err, no, if you go like that no gaming company would ever have credentials because it'd all be gone when they nerfed your favorite character or screwed up somewhere. Diablo 3 burned a ton of Blizzard's goodwill but it still sold like 20 million or whatever, so reputation clearly doesn't mean much. Maybe when Diablo 4 comes out 10 years later it won't be doing as well but that's a long time to be paying for burning your reputation.

I remember a guy said that if you run a dictatorship you can either kill everyone or bribe everyone. A gaming company's reputation works quite similarly to this. Unlike real life, it costs almost nothing for the company to bribe everyone, but D3 seems to prefer the 'kill everyone' path so far.

I realize that "resident contrarian" is your shtick, but Diablo 3 is an excellent example in support of my point, not a counterexample. As far as I'm aware, Blizzard has made exactly two (and only two) very serious errors to date: failing to capture what made D2 so beloved in making D3, and failing to anticipate that DotA would spawn a ridiculously lucrative new gaming genre. Missing DotA was "merely" an epic-scale missed opportunity that Riot (and Valve) took advantage of instead, but D3 actually did significant damage to Blizzard's brand. Immediate sales were massive, but they were based on Blizzard's pre-D3 reputation for quality, which was very good. Most of the negative press that D3 got related to mid/late-game issues and the RMAH, so the buzz took a little while to develop, but it was substantial and nasty when it hit.

That said, Blizzard started off with a deep well of goodwill based on the Warcraft/WoW, Diablo, and Starcraft franchises and its generally excellent customer service. From what I've heard, the Blizzard devs made a sustained effort to improve D3, and many of the valid criticisms of the release version have been addressed in subsequent patches. Future sales (especially day-of-release) will probably take a minor hit due to the fact that many Blizzard fans felt burned by the D3 release, but I think the damage has been largely contained by the hard work on the part of the developers and CS reps.

MPQ has nowhere near the resources of Blizzard, and it would be silly to hold them to the same standard, but there are many other gaming companies of similar size that have managed vastly better customer relations. The MPQ devs don't seem to believe that good customer relations is worth the effort; it remains to be seen whether they're right about that.

Unknown

Vairelome wrote:

Phantron wrote:

Vairelome wrote:

atomzed wrote:

However, I do not know how they can communicate *any* type of changes to us. *All* the changes they proposed are either seen as a cash-grab-thru-more-health-packs or raging-you-just-nerf-my fave-char...

Even a Jessica-Alba-ish community manager won't help against this kind of community rage.

This is why *reputation* is an important concept in describing how people deal with each other over time. It is possible to recover from having a bad reputation, but it is very very difficult. The best method is to try to maintain a good reputation from the beginning, and this is something the MPQ devs utterly failed at, despite being told time and again that their terrible communications/CS skills were a snowballing problem.

The devs might be able to recover, and consistent/reliable communications would be an absolutely mandatory part of that, but their efforts to date have been slipshod and half-assed at best.

Err, no, if you go like that no gaming company would ever have credentials because it'd all be gone when they nerfed your favorite character or screwed up somewhere. Diablo 3 burned a ton of Blizzard's goodwill but it still sold like 20 million or whatever, so reputation clearly doesn't mean much. Maybe when Diablo 4 comes out 10 years later it won't be doing as well but that's a long time to be paying for burning your reputation.

I remember a guy said that if you run a dictatorship you can either kill everyone or bribe everyone. A gaming company's reputation works quite similarly to this. Unlike real life, it costs almost nothing for the company to bribe everyone, but D3 seems to prefer the 'kill everyone' path so far.

I realize that "resident contrarian" is your shtick, but Diablo 3 is an excellent example in support of my point, not a counterexample. As far as I'm aware, Blizzard has made exactly two (and only two) very serious errors to date: failing to capture what made D2 so beloved in making D3, and failing to anticipate that DotA would spawn a ridiculously lucrative new gaming genre. Missing DotA was "merely" an epic-scale missed opportunity that Riot (and Valve) took advantage of instead, but D3 actually did significant damage to Blizzard's brand. Immediate sales were massive, but they were based on Blizzard's pre-D3 reputation for quality, which was very good. Most of the negative press that D3 got related to mid/late-game issues and the RMAH, so the buzz took a little while to develop, but it was substantial and nasty when it hit.

That said, Blizzard started off with a deep well of goodwill based on the Warcraft/WoW, Diablo, and Starcraft franchises and its generally excellent customer service. From what I've heard, the Blizzard devs made a sustained effort to improve D3, and many of the valid criticisms of the release version have been addressed in subsequent patches. Future sales (especially day-of-release) will probably take a minor hit due to the fact that many Blizzard fans felt burned by the D3 release, but I think the damage has been largely contained by the hard work on the part of the developers and CS reps.

MPQ has nowhere near the resources of Blizzard, and it would be silly to hold them to the same standard, but there are many other gaming companies of similar size that have managed vastly better customer relations. The MPQ devs don't seem to believe that good customer relations is worth the effort; it remains to be seen whether they're right about that.

Not sure why LoL was brought up given Diablo 2 had nothing in common with the MOBA genre. Missed opportunity? Sure, but it's got nothing to do with Diablo 2 or Diablo 3 at all. As last reported Diablo 3 sold 20 million. If this is failure what is success supposed to be? 50 million? So is it a failure because they failed to take over the world? And how would you even know this stuff? Just becase you said so? If selling 20 million copies of a game is a failure a lot of company would like to release more failures. Since we can't check with our counterparts in another universe where Diablo 3 wasn't designed from the ground up to funnel RMAH to see how well it'd have done all the data we have is that Diablo 3 turned out to do pretty well financially, despite an egregious breach of trust where you've a game whose primary draw is getting new loot being redesigned to funnel RMAH sales, but that didn't stop it from selling 20 million copies. I remember there was a lot of grassroots movements for people to get out to tell people not to buy Diablo 3, but apparently that didn't work all too well unless your theory is that it could've easily sold 50 million if it didn't average a 3.5 or so user review on metacritic. While that is certainly possible, it's also completely beyond the realm of verifiability.

Reputation is something nobody really knows, and whereas I know I don't know how people react to reputation issues, you don't even know that you don't know. Take something like FF14, which utterly sucked and it had a strong brand to support it but that didn't stop everyone from quitting the game en masse. 2 years later, you got got FF14:ARR, which is still very bad but did pretty well even though it was working from a massively damaged brand. What helped repair the damage in just two years? The game still isn't even very good and it's about 10 years behind in terms of gameplay, but it was somehow well received by most players. Yes it wasn't anyone's list of super successful MMORPG either but it showed a tidy profit based on the account books. Shouldn't people remember just 2 years ago it was one of the worst MMORPG in history?

atomzed

I seen many ppl complaining about the poor corporate comms on D3 part.

Maybe because my prior experience with games had been bad, but D3 comms effort is typical of a company with their resources and I see it as decent.

Can anyone tell me a company of similar size, with a gaming population of over a million (I don't remember true numbers, just a random guess), having a forum AND able to provide good comms? I really like to know and read more about it (no sarcasm here).

(This far, my best experience is with Cryptozoic for their kickstarter project Hex. The CEO talks a more to the community on the forum, but it is still in beta phase).

Unknown

atomzed wrote:

I seen many ppl complaining about the poor corporate comms on D3 part.

Maybe because my prior experience with games had been bad, but D3 comms effort is typical of a company with their resources and I see it as decent.

Can anyone tell me a company of similar size, with a gaming population of over a million (I don't remember true numbers, just a random guess), having a forum AND able to provide good comms? I really like to know and read more about it (no sarcasm here).

(This far, my best experience is with Cryptozoic for their kickstarter project Hex. The CEO talks a more to the community on the forum, but it is still in beta phase).

Their communication isn't bad at the forum level, but it's bad overall. I shouldn't have to come to a forum to know what my random update I downloaded does. For that matter I shouldn't have to go through a bunch of spam posts on the official board before finding discussion on the game itself. I'll bet that if the next update deleted Magneto from the game, you'll have to come to this forum to find out this is what happened and you won't even get a popup message like "We decided to get rid of Magneto from the game because we can't figure out how to balance him". That to me is a lot more important than whether there's a guy giving some generic 'we're listening to all feedback, seriously' speech that you know is never true.

I checked some random sites that estimate revenues and they estimate MPQ pulls around $30K a day, so that's about $10 million a year, so they're not exactly in the poor house here. Nemek's chart is higher than the site I checked, so I don't have reason to believe this estimate is totally off. For that kind of revenue, I at least expect to be able to find out everything I need to know about the game within the game itself.

Kelbris

Phantron wrote:

Vairelome wrote:

atomzed wrote:

However, I do not know how they can communicate *any* type of changes to us. *All* the changes they proposed are either seen as a cash-grab-thru-more-health-packs or raging-you-just-nerf-my fave-char...

Even a Jessica-Alba-ish community manager won't help against this kind of community rage.

This is why *reputation* is an important concept in describing how people deal with each other over time. It is possible to recover from having a bad reputation, but it is very very difficult. The best method is to try to maintain a good reputation from the beginning, and this is something the MPQ devs utterly failed at, despite being told time and again that their terrible communications/CS skills were a snowballing problem.

The devs might be able to recover, and consistent/reliable communications would be an absolutely mandatory part of that, but their efforts to date have been slipshod and half-assed at best.

Err, no, if you go like that no gaming company would ever have credentials because it'd all be gone when they nerfed your favorite character or screwed up somewhere. Diablo 3 burned a ton of Blizzard's goodwill but it still sold like 20 million or whatever, so reputation clearly doesn't mean much. Maybe when Diablo 4 comes out 10 years later it won't be doing as well but that's a long time to be paying for burning your reputation.

I remember a guy said that if you run a dictatorship you can either kill everyone or bribe everyone. A gaming company's reputation works quite similarly to this. Unlike real life, it costs almost nothing for the company to bribe everyone, but D3 seems to prefer the 'kill everyone' path so far.

I was more upset they took a game that was kind of free and open but still had a natural path to follow (D2)

And made it so ridiculously linear that after the second playthrough there was really no reason to play the game again (D3)

"hey, I'm in NPC. Follow me through these 26 checkpoints. Oh, kill something sometimes. Hey, there's a boss coming up! You'd better be ready for it. We need to load this completely separate room."

there was never a pants **** moment like the butcher in Diablo 1. felt like somebody put go karts on a track. sure, you are driving the go cart, but you don't really have any control over where the hell you're going.