An American in EU Ending Time Hell

Unknown

Colognoisseur wrote:

I'm back in the Promised Land of Convenient End Times

Luke 23:42 - "He turned to him and said, 'Remember me when you get into your Kingdom'"

Unknown

I want the time problem to be fixed. I have to say this before what I am going to type.

So maybe one of the issues with the time slot selection would give opportunities to people to organize in which brackets they want to end up. Going even further, all of the top alliances may decide to enter a specific time zone or bracket and split the top positions between them. And after some time of this timezone selection is applied, people can make observations of what usually is the highest score for a specific time zone and if they see that a timezone is usually weak they can just jump into it to get easier rewards.

Now I know there are going to be brackets inside the time zones, but still you are allowing the user to make a selection on the huge pool of people. If there are 5 different times at minimum, then people might find a way to organize the time zones and take advantage of them.

So, I am not saying this should not be applied. I am just trying to brainstorm some of the issues that might be stopping them from implementing these changes. However, I hope they do find a solution fast because I was 2nd in this PVE yesterday and I could not maintain the position because of my stupid time zone. And the end time for me is 6AM for the first sub... I'll be lucky if I get that t150 tonight since work is also part of my life.

hurcules

^^^ Which is why I think rotating end times is an easier solution to implement. Not the best solution, but a solution nevertheless. That way everyone shares equal joy and pain.

And yes, some additional thoughts would need to go into planning of reward so no one particular end time getting the shaft for new character release, but that sounds more manageable than trying to mitigate the risk of potential bracket cherry-picking.

Unknown

Currently, you get a greyed-out image for the upcoming event with a countdown timer on it.

What I'm picturing is if there were three/four of these, with staggered start times. You'd be able to pick any of these you wished, at which point the others would disappear, leaving you with just the one you selected. Slot times would have no upper limit of participants, players joining a time slot would be sharded in the same way they are now. I suspect that even the least popular time slot would be large enough that there wouldn't be any benefit from trying to game the system.

You'd still be free to jump into an event very late, if that's your style, either by picking the event slot you want and waiting for the timer to run down, or simply opting not to choose until you want to start. Players would also be able to pick the timers that suited them best, rather than being slotted automatically; and D3/Demiurge wouldn't have to try to come up with some criteria to automagically slot people.

Unknown

Well the perfect solution is to divide the game into US, EU and ASIA servers that each has it's own timezone. In general, games that have events where end time is important they do not mix these 3 continents together. The very first reason is that if you have EU and US players in the same server, they will never come together and play at the same time. It's always going to be whoever has the timezone favor (Or less sleep in EU) wins. Now this will require a lot of technical stuff to be applied and some really good piece of hardware. Not to mention that they would at least need to double their stuff to cater for each region separately. We all know that cannot happen in a short time and i do not think they have such a thing in mind for such a game. But, it is the only absolute solution to this ridiculous timers.

Now, since we cannot avoid this crazy time endings, can we work around it? Of course we can. That is the reason PVE and PVP exist!

Differentiate PVP from PVE. Currently you have 2 modes of gameplay where they are a copy of each other to the only difference that in PVE you do not lose points and you get some goons time after time instead for heroes (Which end up worse than PVP with scaling). PVP is for people to compete for that first place and it should never change. It works the way it is and maybe some rotating times would be good so everyone can feel the same pain (Like a previous poster said) and this way everyone is equal up to a point.

PVE on the other hand is the chance for people (Including me) with stupid end times to get some rewards without losing sleep. Remove those Rank Rewards, kill them with fire. I should not compete with anyone in PVE but myself. Progression Rewards is what you are looking for. Think about it economically as well. If you have only progression rewards and remove rubberbanding (You can still keep the scaling), people will be playing more to get the higher rewards. This will bring revenue from the health packs. Because you can make the very top rewrads actually difficult to get. Meaning that in order to get them you can't just play 2-3 hours per day. You need to grind and grind for them (Especially if RB does not exist). So people that are casual will get some rewards for it and people that want to grind one whole day will get what they play for. However, people that grind 2 days in a row and they cannot play the last 10 hours because of their sleep "interfering" should not be punished to go from t10 to t500. This is very discouraging and I know that every single one can agree here.

I do not think the model I am providing ruins your revenues. To the contrary it might boost them a bit. Also PVE should have rotating times even though last hour pushes will not have any effect. Now here you have a pattern or a model that will satisfy everyone at certain points. If this PVP is no good for me, I can focus more on PVE this time. Next time maybe PVP will be a good end time so I will do less PVE, or maybe both if I can. But if you give me one or two options to choose from, I would feel like I am not cornered.

Now I know this is not the perfect solution, but it is still better than what we currently have. Timezone is killing people, it is THE issue at the moment for the game. I do not want any other anniversary gift than a solution to the time problem. Please listen to these ideas. They are not only mine, a lot of members have expressed them. We want to play your game and feel good about it. Help us and we will help you.

Unknown

Okin107 wrote:

Well the perfect solution is to divide the game into US, EU and ASIA servers that each has it's own timezone.

Not everyone is going to want to play at the times that "fit" their time zone. Hence my suggestion that people be allowed to choose the time slot that suits them best.

Wolarsen

by GhostWolfe » Wed Sep 17, 2014 6:09 am

<<Okin107 wrote:
<<Well the perfect solution is to divide the game into US, EU and ASIA servers that each has it's own timezone.
"Not everyone is going to want to play at the times that "fit" their time zone. Hence my suggestion that people be allowed to choose the time slot that suits them best."

True. There's always job/train/family/whatever circunstances that doesnt allow people to play at certain times. D3 should look for a system that allows freedom to most, if not all, players.

Unknown

The way the EU players get screwed over is why I barely play the game any more. As an EU player I feel D3 basically doesn't give a toss about me and it's not a particularly nice feeling to get from a developer. If they ever change things it might tempt me back into the game but as things stand I don't see that happening any time soon. The lack of even a simple acknowledgement from D3 is the worst thing about it, they just don't care.

hurcules

DaveyPitch wrote:

The way the EU players get screwed over is why I barely play the game any more. As an EU player I feel D3 basically doesn't give a toss about me and it's not a particularly nice feeling to get from a developer. If they ever change things it might tempt me back into the game but as things stand I don't see that happening any time soon. The lack of even a simple acknowledgement from D3 is the worst thing about it, they just don't care.

David did post that D3/Demiurge acknowledges this issue and is under discussion. Nothing more than that, however.

_RiO_

hurcules wrote:

DaveyPitch wrote:

The way the EU players get screwed over is why I barely play the game any more. As an EU player I feel D3 basically doesn't give a toss about me and it's not a particularly nice feeling to get from a developer. If they ever change things it might tempt me back into the game but as things stand I don't see that happening any time soon. The lack of even a simple acknowledgement from D3 is the worst thing about it, they just don't care.

David did post that D3/Demiurge acknowledges this issue and is under discussion. Nothing more than that, however.

Demiurge acknowledged the issue over a year ago. They've spent over a year of time not being able or not waning to fix it.
The repeated acknowledgment is a nice, but somewhat empty gesture unless something is actually being done for once.