Juggernaut Heroic - the PVE problems in a nutshell

Bowgentle

I'm reposting this from the Juggernaut event thread to give this more visibility and maybe get Demiurge to take notice.

To me, this event was everything that's wrong with PVE in MPQ right now.

1) Scaling
This needs to go. Obviously some people weren't getting scaled out because the enemy levels kept rising right until the bitter end.

2) End times.
Live in Europe? You better be satisfied with a single cover, because there's no way in hell you'll get t20.
Unless you're a vampire or a student/jobless person who can bend their lives around the final 4 hours of PVE.
Next time I'll just accept that D3 doesn't want me to be competitive and stick with t150 from the start.
I tried for t10 this time. I really tried. I was 4th 6 hours from the end, I was 40th when I got up at 5am for the final hour. During that last hour I managed to grind my way from 40th to 30th while there were alliance mates in t10 who got there because they were able to hit all refreshes during the final 9 hours.
Just pull your App from the international stores, Demiurge, it'd be more honest to us outside of the one true timezone(TM) of Murica.

3) Prize structure
Reward tier cutoffs of 2 - 10 - 20 - 150 are just stupid. There needs to be a cover as a progression reward, or at least a better cutoff for meaningful rewards.
Make it T20 for 3 covers, t50 for 2 covers, t100 for one cover.

4) Cover colours
Get back to the alliance reward being the highest single player cover.
Now I have a 0/2/0 Colossus. Of course that's _massively_ better than 0/1/0. Next time I just won't bother playing for a personal cover.

5) Old Heroics with no subs
We saw how much this sucked in the last PVE that gave out a new char. Why oh why do you insist of running these old Heroics, Demiurge?
Scrap them. Kill them with fire. They belong to a bygone era. Give us PVEs with a new structure, like Deadpool, Sentry, or the new Heroics with subs.
Anything but these horrible horrible events that you keep running over and over again.

6) Rubberband
Get rid of RB in the final 12 hours. Period. Just do it.

7) 2:25 hrs refresh cycles with timers
Look how well that turned out! People are grinding a lot less now, just like you wanted!
Seriously, please, get back to 12 hour refresh cycles. Don't literally poke people's noses in it and say "GRIND NOW".

8) Stuff ending at the same time
We had PVE, Shield Simulator and the final PVP of Season V all end within an hour of each other. End this. Make PVE end on Sunday 6am CET instead of Monday. This way there would have been a meaningful timeframe to play both PVE and finish the season in a sensible way.

9) Competitive PVE in general
That says it all, really. Player Versus ENEMIES. See? Enemies. Not other players.
Get rid of these idiotic competitive aspects of the single player campaign.
Get rid of leaderboards for PVE, get rid of giving covers out based on placement.
Make covers progression based. Please. There's enough competition in PVP. Nobody enjoys the competitive aspect of PVE. Trust me. We don't. We won this event, and we hated it. Every minute of it.

Unknown

scaling was put in to combat old spidey and the more health you left with the higer your scaling went. now with no healing you'd think scaling would decrease. WRONG!!!! that's one of the flaws with this game, they don't remove temporary fixes when they put a permanent one in place and it screws the game completely.

Unknown

Hi, I'm D3-o-bot, your helpful response automaton. Here are your answers:

1) Scaling - Our healthpackerizer chart shows a significant number of wipes on "Who is this clown" from people that resulted in greater numbers of health pack purchases. Working as intended.

2) End times - Our charts show that less than 1% of the European population has a smartphone (source: 2002 Euro Data syndicate) and that Steam players are most likely to be at home, where they can access their PC, between 1am and 5am in the morning. We do not understand why Europeans are upset if they do not have phones and/or have end times that allow them to be at their home PC's.

3) Prize structure - During this event we decided that the top progression reward should not just be restricted to people that play the game for more than 45 minutes over the weekend. Giving the top reward out to anyone that completed one sweep of the board in the final day benefits everyone. Playing more is it's own reward.

4) Cover colours - Having 2 x Red and no other colours simply gives you more opportunity to practice this power without the distraction of other powers. This makes the game simpler and more accessible to new players who might get confused by having more colours immediately availble. We are new player friendly.

5) Old Heroics with no subs - Once again, the healthpackerizer clearly shows that Heroics give people more opportunity to use their healthpacks. D3 donate 5 hero points from every healthpack purchase to our charity "Smartphones for Europe", so everyone wins.

6) Rubberband - Super Mario Kart is one of the most successful games in history. This key mechanic in later versions of Super Mario Kart is a key part of our strategy to make MPQ the king of mobile based puzzle kart racers.

7) 2:25 hrs refresh cycles with timers - As above, playing MPQ is F.U.N (which is also the designation of our cleaning droid) and it's own reward. Your weekend is Funner with the addition of MPQ every 2.5 hours. Statistically speaking, it's over 4 times Funner than than a 12 hour refresh cycle. Don't forget you get 20 iso per clear after the first day, so you can level your characters.

8) Stuff ending at the same time - Our technical staff work 2 hours per day. We would love more diversity but, well, our servers sometimes blow up and D.O.R.R.I.S our refreshment bot is incapable of pressing the reset button on the servers outside these hours.

9) Competitive PVE in general - Your argument here seems to have no monetary incentive for D3. YOU WILL BE EXTERMINATED. E-X-T-E-R-M-I-N-A-T-E!!!!! (or pay 500 for a non-extermination kit).

Thank you.

Unknown

Moving to the feedback forum. These are all pretty standard complaints and you can find a hundred or more threads on each of these topics already.

While I agree with several of the points, MPQ is going the competitive route, and so a lot of these complaints are conscious design decisions.

Unknown

I'm going to half disagree with the end times bit but only half.....

In this PvE I did set my alarm for the end (I guess i'm a vampire) as a UK player but.... my score at 12pm (5 hours before the end) wasn't that far below what 10th place got. In fact, had I ground the nodes down rather than a single pass i'd have definitely got 10th, probably a few places higher if i'd gone to bed and ignored the event from then.

The change to RB in this event by, I think, having the extent of rubber banding fall off further below the global leader did at least mean you could get around the end time with excessive effort.... not a great situation but a slight improvement.

Otherwise agree with everything else 100%

Unknown

Riggy wrote:

Moving to the feedback forum. These are all pretty standard complaints and you can find a hundred or more threads on each of these topics already.

While I agree with several of the points, MPQ is going the competitive route, and so a lot of these complaints are conscious design decisions.

Riggy, moving this thread to the suggestions and feedback forum is basically like taking it outside and shooting it in the head. It's a great summary of our feedback and has already attracked 14 upvotes in 30 mins which has got to be some kind of record?

The suggestions and feedback forum is a graveyard.

Unknown

Gotta add also sucked for ppl who work weekends

Unknown

... or for anyone who finally has a chance at a social life during the weekend.
Don't get me wrong, I do want to play this game... but not tons of nodes of the same boring characters every 2,5 hours with their levels quickly climbing into Absurdity Heaven.

Unknown

DrUnpleasant wrote:

Riggy wrote:

Moving to the feedback forum. These are all pretty standard complaints and you can find a hundred or more threads on each of these topics already.

While I agree with several of the points, MPQ is going the competitive route, and so a lot of these complaints are conscious design decisions.

Riggy, moving this thread to the suggestions and feedback forum is basically like taking it outside and shooting it in the head. It's a great summary of our feedback and has already attracked 14 upvotes in 30 mins which has got to be some kind of record?

The suggestions and feedback forum is a graveyard.

Suggestions in the general forum have about as much effect on the game as suggestions in the suggestion forum (except you get a lot less free forum rep).

jojeda654

Riggy wrote:

(except you get a lot less free forum rep).

Aww, why you gotta nerf tha rep sys brah?

Unknown

jojeda654 wrote:

Riggy wrote:

(except you get a lot less free forum rep).

Aww, why you gotta nerf tha rep sys brah?

Hey, if anyone is going to milk the rep system around here, it's gonna be me.

But seriously, to Dr. UP's point, I do try to keep the good suggestions centrally located in 1 forum b/c then we can actually try to drive people into similar topics and have constructive conversation that builds upon what others have already suggested. Bad suggestions or rants masquerading as suggestions/feedback generally get ignored while good well-thought out posts tend to percolate to the top. If I ever get back to full-time moderating again (i.e. if/when more mods are added or when the spam doesn't take up 90% of my time), then I can start locking dup threads and point people towards the existing relevant threads. This forum used to have a lot of constructive feedback and the devs have listened to them in the past. And that does still happen on occasion - just look at our shiny new forum smilies (not exactly game-changing, but still pleasant).

Unknown

Bowgentle wrote:

I'm reposting this from the Juggernaut event thread to give this more visibility and maybe get Demiurge to take notice.

To me, this event was everything that's wrong with PVE in MPQ right now.

1) Scaling
This needs to go. Obviously some people weren't getting scaled out because the enemy levels kept rising right until the bitter end.

2) End times.
Live in Europe? You better be satisfied with a single cover, because there's no way in hell you'll get t20.
Unless you're a vampire or a student/jobless person who can bend their lives around the final 4 hours of PVE.
Next time I'll just accept that D3 doesn't want me to be competitive and stick with t150 from the start.
I tried for t10 this time. I really tried. I was 4th 6 hours from the end, I was 40th when I got up at 5am for the final hour. During that last hour I managed to grind my way from 40th to 30th while there were alliance mates in t10 who got there because they were able to hit all refreshes during the final 9 hours.
Just pull your App from the international stores, Demiurge, it'd be more honest to us outside of the one true timezone(TM) of Murica.

3) Prize structure
Reward tier cutoffs of 2 - 10 - 20 - 150 are just stupid. There needs to be a cover as a progression reward, or at least a better cutoff for meaningful rewards.
Make it T20 for 3 covers, t50 for 2 covers, t100 for one cover.

4) Cover colours
Get back to the alliance reward being the highest single player cover.
Now I have a 0/2/0 Colossus. Of course that's _massively_ better than 0/1/0. Next time I just won't bother playing for a personal cover.

5) Old Heroics with no subs
We saw how much this sucked in the last PVE that gave out a new char. Why oh why do you insist of running these old Heroics, Demiurge?
Scrap them. Kill them with fire. They belong to a bygone era. Give us PVEs with a new structure, like Deadpool, Sentry, or the new Heroics with subs.
Anything but these horrible horrible events that you keep running over and over again.

6) Rubberband
Get rid of RB in the final 12 hours. Period. Just do it.

7) 2:25 hrs refresh cycles with timers
Look how well that turned out! People are grinding a lot less now, just like you wanted!
Seriously, please, get back to 12 hour refresh cycles. Don't literally poke people's noses in it and say "GRIND NOW".

8) Stuff ending at the same time
We had PVE, Shield Simulator and the final PVP of Season V all end within an hour of each other. End this. Make PVE end on Sunday 6am CET instead of Monday. This way there would have been a meaningful timeframe to play both PVE and finish the season in a sensible way.

9) Competitive PVE in general
That says it all, really. Player Versus ENEMIES. See? Enemies. Not other players.
Get rid of these idiotic competitive aspects of the single player campaign.
Get rid of leaderboards for PVE, get rid of giving covers out based on placement.
Make covers progression based. Please. There's enough competition in PVP. Nobody enjoys the competitive aspect of PVE. Trust me. We don't. We won this event, and we hated it. Every minute of it.

I cannot understand this either. MPQ says they want new players. Well, there's a huge untapped customer base waiting for them. It's call anywhere outside the U.S. friendly time zones. Why would any one else refer this game to any of their friends or acquaintances? To share in the aggravation and disappointment?

This is the most glaring problem MPQ has right now. It's time for something to be done to at least mitigate the issue, even if a perfect solution is far off down the road. I thought from ICEIX's post in the PVE thread that the issue was going to be addressed during this event. However, from what I can tell, rubberband was never significantly turned down, and everyone suffered from horrendous scaling due to his urging that MPQ wanted players to play more often and rubberband was going to be altered at some point.

I'm sure proposed solutions litter this fourm, and people far more tech savvy them me have far better ideas on the subject. Why cannot the rewards structures simply be switched until a MPQ is able to come up with a better system for different time zones? This way the covers would be progressive rewards, and the other rewards would be the placement rewards.

I can accept that MPQ does not have the resources to create a perfect solution to PVE end times for other time zones. What I cannot understand is why it is that players are the ones that must be penalized until MPQ is able to adequately address the issue.

Moreover, a progressive rewared structure would be much more player friendly in playing on our time and permitting us to have lives especially on the last day of these events. It would certainly go further in diminishing player burn out.

The last thing I'll say is this. Developers should play the game and join an alliance. To me, it is obvious that this is not currently the case due to there seems to be a disconnect between developers' expecations of player experience and what the players actually experience. We'd also see how you felt about this issue when you have people in your alliance that work just as hard (or in most cases harder) as you, but they get penalized simply because of where they live. Then, maybe MPQ could find a temporary solution to remedy the situation until they have time to derive a perfect solution further down the road.

P.S. Of course, I have not checked my grammar or spelling.

DrNitroman

DrUnpleasant wrote:

9) Competitive PVE in general - Your argument here seems to have no monetary incentive for D3. YOU WILL BE EXTERMINATED. E-X-T-E-R-M-I-N-A-T-E!!!!! (or pay 500 for a non-extermination kit).

Dr ... Unpleasant you said? Dr... who?
Dr Who!
Of course, here is the last chance for MPQ European players.
An alien who travel in space and time but strangely half of the time in only one timezone: London - UTC+0 !
No doubt he's the only one able to deal with unfriendly end time and weird game mechanics!

DrNitroman

By the way as Bowgentle reposted his comments (gone green by 32 votes in event thread at this time!), I repost my related answer, just as a reminder...
...and hoping David 'Hi-Fi' is taking notes!

Bowgentle wrote:

9) Competitive PVE in general
That says it all, really. Player Versus ENEMIES. See? Enemies. Not other players.
Get rid of these idiotic competitive aspects of the single player campaign.
Get rid of leaderboards for PVE, get rid of giving covers out based on placement.
Make covers progression based. Please. There's enough competition in PVP. Nobody enjoys the competitive aspect of PVE. Trust me. We don't. We won this event, and we hated it. Every minute of it.

There a lot of common sense and good suggestions to pick up in Bowgentle's post!
I don't want to repeat what he has already well stated
I just want to underline that point 9 - making pve not competitive between players- is probably the most important.
I mean we all know that fixing issues about rubberbanding / scaling / end time in a way that satisfy newbie & veterans or differente timezone players will not be easy and therefore probably not in a close future.
Accounting this, a PvE really without competition among player (no ranking) but with fair challenge and reward would please a lot of us (and not only European players who don't want to wake up early! )

homeinvasion

I completely agree, I have 2 max 166 only and couldn't even get through one clear, let alone the many required with scaling, then the stupid finish time. 2PM on a Monday in Australia. D3 it's time to get serious and do something about this.

Unknown

Riggy wrote:

jojeda654 wrote:

Riggy wrote:

(except you get a lot less free forum rep).

Aww, why you gotta nerf tha rep sys brah?

Hey, if anyone is going to milk the rep system around here, it's gonna be me.

But seriously, to Dr. UP's point, I do try to keep the good suggestions centrally located in 1 forum b/c then we can actually try to drive people into similar topics and have constructive conversation that builds upon what others have already suggested. Bad suggestions or rants masquerading as suggestions/feedback generally get ignored while good well-thought out posts tend to percolate to the top. If I ever get back to full-time moderating again (i.e. if/when more mods are added or when the spam doesn't take up 90% of my time), then I can start locking dup threads and point people towards the existing relevant threads. This forum used to have a lot of constructive feedback and the devs have listened to them in the past. And that does still happen on occasion - just look at our shiny new forum smilies (not exactly game-changing, but still pleasant).

Please add to compendium of topics that have gone green.

Dragon_Nexus

homeinvasion wrote:

I completely agree, I have 2 max 166 only and couldn't even get through one clear, let alone the many required with scaling, then the stupid finish time. 2PM on a Monday in Australia. D3 it's time to get serious and do something about this.

I was cruising the nodes with a (before buffing) level 120 Thor, a level 94 Wolverine and level 94 Hawkeye, sometimes swapping out for my level 125 Hulk (who only tanked the black nodes).
I'd manage the Required nodes okay (though a level 80 Juggernaut destroyed my Thor one time. One insane cascade got him 11 reds in one move. He did something that made a red L show up in the top right hand corner made of 11 , total ****).

Most times I'd manage those three and be really beaten up by the end. Early on I was taking out the end nodes with Daken but by sunday they were level 180 and I just couldn't.

Hell, that one earlier medium node with Yelena and the two minions kicked my ****. The board was full of purple, black and a smattering of reds, blues and greens. I'd struggle to make green matches and yellow matches, nearly make it and Yelena would steal them from me. Took me ten minutes to beat that node and two characters were down at the end.

The entire event was just a depressing slog. It's rare that I don't enjoy a PvE event. Sometimes I grumble about wiping, but usually it's bad luck or a poor roster. But with such a poor selection of characters to work with I was left with little choice. Especially since OBW doesn't properly heal any more.

over_clocked

I was almost scaled out of the event before I even started, and I had a pretty great roster for the event!
Maybe I shouldn't have hoped to take advantage of rubberbanding, but I did resign myself to an average finish once I saw the levels of scaling, and I am not bitter about missing 2 other covers and the 4* cover - I got what I worked for.
But I couldnt even enjoy the event as I usually do on the first run-through since my best heroes kept dying.
Community scaling is that thing that kills most of the joy of the PvE events for me. Oh, you don't want to grind? No problem, other people have grinded for you...
I do understand that it exists to offset rubberbanding, but why not make both weaker? You say you made RB weaker - the scaling should also get down a notch if the two are supposed to counter each other.
I'm for one am okay with missing good rewards if I skip the major part of an event for whatever reasons, but having lvl 200 Daken out of the gate because all these 1*-2* players have grinded the kitty out of the nodes before I even started? Not cool. I would like my personal scaling to determine the toughness of my game more, thank you very much.
Global scaling/rubberbanding maps need to go. As far as I know, we have only a handful of events like this: Juggernaut Heroic, Venom Heroic and Unstable Iso-8. Do whatever it is in your power to remove the need for global scaling in these events if you are going to re-run them, for the love of pasta.

P.S. Baby Daken just got even more threatening in PvE. Not only does he heal of a weak, uncontested colour now (blue and purple being the two weakest colours), but he also gets a mini-nuke off his *free* strike tiles that he spams off the strongest and the most contested colour. Not sure what can be done here. Weaken community scaling, maybe?

CrookedKnight

It emphasizes that you want a 3/5/5 Black Widow whenever you fight Daken. Stealing blue early and often is vital against him.

Unknown

Good to see this thread 'Greened' even in this forum. Lets hope the Devs have taken some notice.

CNash

Nobody enjoys the competitive aspect of PVE. Trust me. We don't. We won this event, and we hated it. Every minute of it.

This needs to be shouted from the rooftops. It's such a succinct summation of the general opinion regarding competitive PVE that I don't need to add anything to it. In fact I'm going to put it in my sig.