An American in EU Ending Time Hell

Colognoisseur

I was in Italy this weekend and it got to see first hand what the EU players go through every time.
Needless to say i wanted all three covers. I knew I had to be awake for the last two hours to have any chance at t10. Therefore I woke up at 4AM and played for two hours finishing third. Oh wait there was a PvP and s5 ending an hour later? Nope no rest for the weary.
I know if I had to do this every PvP and PvE I would have quit he game long long ago.
They really need to implement the simplest solution of end times rotating every six hours. That way the pain will be shared. My EU and other time zones I have felt your pain and agree with your complaints.
It would be nice if D3 did something simple but that definitely is not their style. I shudder at their version of True Time Zone. Now it is time to kill time on the flight testing out the new toy I woke up so early to get.

Unknown

Sad thing is that I envy people who live in Italy. Bloody GMT+1 is a luxury. Oh, and their climate is quite nice too

Maybe if all the D3/Demi team had the same 'opportunity' you had, something might get done. Rotation is the simplest solution, but I'm not a fan of punishing everyone just to share the pain - implementing a choice of 2 or 3 start/finish times is the BEST solution and one that doesn't force anyone to play at stupid times of the day/night while balancing server load.

Unknown

Now you know why I was so grouchy in the morning (the worst part was getting up at 5 AM only to end up with merely two thanks to getting wiped by constant AI cascades half of the time, and after that dissatisfaction some sim to be fitted in before 7 AM )
The bad part about PvE is that you practically have to get up in the night, or else everybody and his goldfish will have overtaken you by 50 ranks at the very least

Still, at least I can play at that time. I probably couldn't at noon. 6 PM or midnight would be ok.

Unknown

Rico Dredd wrote:

Still, at least I can play at that time. I probably couldn't at noon. 6 PM or midnight would be ok.

That's another advantage of having a selection of end times, there's plenty of American and Asia based players who might prefer an 'EU friendly' end time because it also fits in with their plans better. The current system is just 'play at this time or might as well not bother at all' which, lets face it, is probably just designed to ensure that final rankings are as volatile as possible to increase sales of health packs etc.

Unknown

I'd be fine with the rotating end times. Your solution, Doc, would be the extra comfy one of course.

Unknown

DrUnpleasant wrote:

is probably just designed to ensure that final rankings are as volatile as possible to increase sales of health packs etc.

Ding, this thread just leveled up with its mention of for .

Unknown

I'm an east coast US player so the ending times have always been rubbish for me. What I can't understand is the comment, "A workable solution hasn't been presented but we are aware of the problem"

Seriously? How difficult is it to see a solution? Do the math and figure out what time it would be in California when it is 9 pm -10 pm in EU and then occasionally schedule a popular event to end then. Maybe we need to state this in terms the devs understand:

West coast USA players are overpowered and need nerfed / East coast USA and EU players that have lives need buffed. Maybe in PvP events those in unfortunate time zones will do 25% more damage.

Before anyone chimes in and explains why that won't work...I'm joking. But you owe me 25 HP if you started formulating a reply before you got to these last 2 sentences.

Unknown

They'll only get to the "nerfing" part. Eventually. Then, three months later, they will "buff" Antarctica players.

CrookedKnight

Penguins are totally OP.

Unknown

Easier solution is rotating brackets. Join when you can knowing then end exactly 5 days from when you start - give or take a few hours. Close a bracket every 2 hours All Bracket end within 12 hours of each other. Make rubber banding if it must stay only respective to your own bracket. And throw out all alliance cover rewards - make it a novel token hp and iso so no real loss for an alliance if people can't kill an event.

Another solution - make pve rewards progression based completely. Problem solved. Goodnight!

Unknown

LoreNYC wrote:

Easier solution is rotating brackets.
Another solution - make pve rewards progression based completely. Problem solved. Goodnight!

But there is no nerfing in those solutions. Something must be nerfed for these devs to even consider it as viable.

Unknown

Depends on their customer distribution. If the vast majority of D3's customer is in North America, and it probably is than it makes absolutely no business sense to rotate between NA or EU friendly ending times. It'll just alienate their main customer base to appease a smaller one

Unknown

mrnohnaimers wrote:

no business sense to rotate between NA or EU friendly ending times. It'll just alienate their main customer base to appease a smaller one

1 am on Monday morning is not a friendly time for Eastern USA players. You owe me 25 HP

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.

Unknown

Just for the record, the status quo ending times are not USA friendly. They are west coast USA friendly. Ending an event at 1 AM on a weekday morning is substantial different from ending it at 10 PM on Sunday night. This issue isn't a problem for people outside of the USA. It is a problem for anyone east of Denver, which is a lot of US players, IN ADDITION to all of Europe.

So this idea that it only affects a small portion of players needs to be removed from anyone's arguments moving forward. Anyone that does so owes me 25 HP.

Unknown

Everly wrote:

Just for the record, the status quo ending times are not USA friendly. They are west coast USA friendly. Ending an event at 1 AM on a weekday morning is substantial different from ending it at 10 PM on Sunday night. This issue isn't a problem for people outside of the USA. It is a problem for anyone east of Denver, which is a lot of US players, IN ADDITION to all of Europe.

So this idea that it only affects a small portion of players needs to be removed from anyone's arguments moving forward. Anyone that does so owes me 25 HP.

Friendlier. Better?

Unknown

stephen43084 wrote:

Friendlier. Better?

Not really. Maybe it is just me but 1AM and 4AM are equally **** times compared to a 10 PM slot.

There are plenty of American players this affects adversely. You and I are on the same side with this issue. I'm just adding to your argument that it hits an even larger section of players than people seem to appreciate.

Unknown

Everly wrote:

stephen43084 wrote:

Friendlier. Better?

Not really. Maybe it is just me but 1AM and 4AM are equally **** times compared to a 10 PM slot.

There are plenty of American players this affects adversely.

I"m not saying it's peachy here in the US (central here). I"m saying if you have any players in your alliance outside the United States, it's pretty obvious that they are substantially adversely affected by end times more than us. If I don't want to stay up till the end time, I can at least do optimals until the last 2.5 hours or use a 3 hour shield in PVP and try to minimize the disadvantage of not staying up to the end time, which is more advantageous than missing three optimals in PVE and having to use a 8 hour shield.

CrookedKnight

A quick googling tells me that 36% of the US population lives on the East Coast. Not even in the eastern time zone, just the areas within shouting distance of the Atlantic Ocean. Expand it to the entire time zone and it's more than 50% of the country. So this isn't even for Americans' benefit as a block. It's basically for Californians.

Killinstinct

Everly wrote:

stephen43084 wrote:

Friendlier. Better?

Not really. Maybe it is just me but 1AM and 4AM are equally **** times compared to a 10 PM slot.

Lol at calling it equally ****. But maybe when you don't get a new character when you went to bed standing in the top 10 you will get it.

Marty17

I'm actually starting to develop a different (normal) daily pattern, where I stay up till 5am "watching" repeats of repeats on TV playing MPQ. Hit the hay after that & sleep till 1pm-2pm, have a late lunch, shower & head off to work on the later afternoon. Come home past midnight & rinse & repeat.

<12pm no longer exist in my daily basis. I call it extreme daylight saving time.