Operation Pay Harder: A Debrief

Bowgentle

user311 wrote:

for those who offer the suggestion that we can choose which path to go on easy ranking or more points how do we know which shard to join is there a sign or other input provided global player base that tells us which shard has the top alliances. we can guess that it is the fourth but the top alliances could conspire again to switch to another.

Pick the shard that has the most US-unfriendly end time and you can be pretty sure that it's easier to rank in there.
That's the assumption I'm operating under until I run into death brackets in the 10 PM CET shard.

lokiagentofhotness

Raekwen wrote:

It's amazing how shortsighted transitioning players are these days. Was I ever this bad? I would hope not. For people to think that's it's "fair" for them to receive equal rewards for a fraction of the time/money/etc. the rest of us put in is baffling. There is a hierarchy for a reason. I mean, I've given examples, but do you think this way in the rest of your life? Is it cool with you if a new guy gets hired at your work, puts in a quarter of the hours you do, then gets a raise to make the same amount as you? I just don't get it..

You know how I got my roster the jump start it needed to start scoring high enough to compete? I bought Thor covers (before Sentry was out). I rarely buy covers, but I knew it was an investment that was worth it to get where I needed to be. And not surprisingly, it worked. You want to get over the hump? Well, I would've previously said buy Sentry, but now I guess buy X-Force once you have three covers (which are handed out from daily rewards.) Most of us probably bought some covers to make it past that stage. You can sit and complain how hard it is for you, which some of you seem content to do, or you can bite the bullet, actually spend some money and invest in the game you enjoy playing. Boom! Problem solved.

Except that as I have mentioned over and over again it's not equal rewards. Transitioning players don't get progression rewards beyond 800 mostly because they then face a wall of 166 players that they can't compete against - you don't see me whining about not getting that Fury cover like the vets are. My roster isn't strong enough and I understand that.

It's simple enough math - 50 points per game is basically what? 50 x 20 games to get a thousand points? 25 points per game (which is what you get if you're a transitioning player mostly) is 25 x 40 games for the same 1000 points. That's twice as much time for an equal number of points. As the time shards has shown, that is not a great place to be in if you want to get up to 1300 progression points. But clearly the transitioning players aren't working hard enough, not compared to the hard working vets. Clearly. Let's just never give them any covers ever in the interest of fairness so that the vets can get the progression rewards AND top 5 always.

I'm not against vets getting all the progression rewards - hey, good for them. I am not against them getting top 10, or top 5, or whatever the hell level they want. But then don't turn around and say transitioning players don't "deserve" their rewards - we work hard too, but at a different level because shockingly enough we haven't been playing long enough to get a massive roster. Why should I spite a new player who just joined and tops their bracket with 300 points - eventually he's going to have all his covers maxed out and end up fighting in the top tier too - it's a natural progression of the game. Unless you want the game to remain static with the top tier always remaining the top tier and everyone else at the bottom. The game is going to get more competitive as time passes simply because more people are entering the top tier, again, natural progression of the game. FYI I've actually spent a fair amount of money on this game as a transitioning player and am slowly building up my roster.

But why don't the vets just buy all the covers instead of playing hard to get their rewards, that's what I don't understand. Why doesn't everyone just buy all the covers all the time instead of playing this game?

Bowgentle

lokiagentofhotness wrote:

It's simple enough math - 50 points per game is basically what? 50 x 20 games to get a thousand points? 25 points per game (which is what you get if you're a transitioning player mostly) is 25 x 40 games for the same 1000 points. That's twice as much time for an equal number of points.

Erm... you don't get 50 point matches on a regular basis until you're past 950.
From 0 to 300 it's whatever points you can get, usually 25-30.
300 to 600 it's 20 to 35 maybe.
600 to 850 it's 20 to maybe maybe 40.
850+ is where bigger scorers show up, but you'd be _very_ lucky to get 50 all the time from there unless an anomaly like Operation Pay Harder is in effect.

So, no, we're not getting 50 pointers all the way from 0 to 1300 lol.

lokiagentofhotness

Bowgentle wrote:

lokiagentofhotness wrote:

It's simple enough math - 50 points per game is basically what? 50 x 20 games to get a thousand points? 25 points per game (which is what you get if you're a transitioning player mostly) is 25 x 40 games for the same 1000 points. That's twice as much time for an equal number of points.

Erm... you don't get 50 point matches on a regular basis until you're past 950.
From 0 to 300 it's whatever points you can get, usually 25-30.
300 to 600 it's 20 to 35 maybe.
600 to 850 it's 20 to maybe maybe 40.
850+ is where bigger scorers show up, but you'd be _very_ lucky to get 50 all the time from there unless an anomaly like Operation Pay Harder is in effect.

So, no, we're not getting 50 pointers all the way from 0 to 1300 lol.

Good to know! So everyone's in the same boat more or less until they hit 600 I think? I get 166 level 50 pointers at around 600 and so then I mostly just try not to get attacked too often and try to keep pushing forward until 800+ which is where I am not able to compete anymore/get attacked too much to continue.

Eh, that does suck then. But I can't think of an actual solution beyond going back to the way it was before - which was just as terrible for everyone I think.

Unknown

To solve alliance swapping, why not have a 24-hr flag that temporarily ignores scores? 2 parts:
A. if an alliance boots a player, they are flagged for 24 hours. Any player that joins within that 24 hours will have their score not count.
B. If a player leaves an alliance, they are flagged for 24 hours. Their score won't count towards any alliance that accepts them for 24 hours.

After reading the thread it seems there are 2 actual problems:
1. MMR inflation due to shield hopping and win trading. (hard to solve)
2. Alliance swapping. (many proposals, including my own).
Time sharding doesn't seem to change any of these fundamental problems. Veterans will eventually flock to the busy shards, so they can boost all they want, business as usual. Smart transitioning players can flock to non-busy times so they can get the 3* placement rewards. Everyone else can pick a time that works for their schedule. It's win-win!

Pylgrim

Wow so many "high profile" players in this thread basically patting each-other's back whenever they make a post that always distils more or less to:

"If MPQ is not pay-2-win, it should. We've spent so much in this game so we deserve to win. Always. Everything. All the time. The rest of you, miserable paupers, deserve only to lick the sole of our expensive shoes as we rightfully crush you into the dirt."

Just so you know, games that are (allegedly) NOT P2W, are supposed to either not allow money influence progress (i.e. being limited to cosmetic/convenience items and improvements) or to simply allow accelerated progress into the middle levels of the game, literally buying time with money. Non-P2W games are not supposed to guarantee victory and top positions forever to the spenders. So please, if you are going to limit your answers to valid arguments to "I can't understand why you expect me, a paying player, not to win more", just don't bother.

Unknown

Pylgrim wrote:

Wow so many "high profile" players in this thread basically patting each-other's back whenever they make a post that always distils more or less to:

"If MPQ is not pay-2-win, it should. We've spent so much in this game so we deserve to win. Always. Everything. All the time. The rest of you, miserable paupers, deserve only to lick the sole of our expensive shoes as we rightfully crush you into the dirt."

Just so you know, games that are (allegedly) NOT P2W, are supposed to either not allow money influence progress (i.e. being limited to cosmetic/convenience items and improvements) or to simply allow accelerated progress into the middle levels of the game, literally buying time with money. Non-P2W games are not supposed to guarantee victory and top positions forever to the spenders. So please, if you are going to limit your answers to valid arguments to "I can't understand why you expect me, a paying player, not to win more", just don't bother.

The problem with your argument is it's top players who are upset, i.e. people who are "winning". The issue is defining winning as 2000+ points for people who care about their Season score (so "Winning Losers" I guess) or 500 pts for people who don't.

Money only comes into the argument because people wondered why the concerns of top players mattered at all since we are the minority. If you don't care about fairness, the reason is financial since top players generally correspond to top payers.

Moreover, by your own definition, MPQ is not even allegedly but straight out P2W because money buys you something more than cosmetic or accelerated progress: it buys you a finite resource that is needed to reach high levels (HP). You can't simply grind out more HP whenever you want, and to consistently score above a certain level, you have to spend more than you bring in. Therefore, by your logic since MPQ qualifies as P2W, top players should have an extra right to win even more.

(Also, the kind of "NOT P2W" games you're describing normally has a subscription fee, an initial cost, or ads (I think?) to offset its costs. MPQ has none of those, but it's not a traditional P2W game in that it doesn't say you have to pay to unlock this or that.)

Unknown

Pylgrim wrote:

Wow so many "high profile" players in this thread basically patting each-other's back whenever they make a post that always distils more or less to:

"If MPQ is not pay-2-win, it should. We've spent so much in this game so we deserve to win. Always. Everything. All the time. The rest of you, miserable paupers, deserve only to lick the sole of our expensive shoes as we rightfully crush you into the dirt."

Just so you know, games that are (allegedly) NOT P2W, are supposed to either not allow money influence progress (i.e. being limited to cosmetic/convenience items and improvements) or to simply allow accelerated progress into the middle levels of the game, literally buying time with money. Non-P2W games are not supposed to guarantee victory and top positions forever to the spenders. So please, if you are going to limit your answers to valid arguments to "I can't understand why you expect me, a paying player, not to win more", just don't bother.

When I was transitioning, I could place in almost every PVE by repeating mStorm in the desert nodes. OBW and 2* Thor could reliably take down any 3* team on offense (I got my 2* a-team to 85 about a month too late to take advantage of Thorverine). You could prologue heal. It took a lot fewer losses to tank and "tanked" battles didn't stop after 600 pts. I frankly find the idea that newbies today have it "easier" than I did ludicrous.

Unknown

I will admit to being in eastern time and so far have not picked the "normal" slice for any of these events. Game has been that much more fun. Yes the top players will all congregate in one slice and the brackets there are likely going to be worse than ever. And to those veterans who believe they need to be in those deathslices to get progressions and season points. I am sorry but that is something you are placing on yourself. Veterans don't be so outraged by this that the rest of the community sees you as that guy complaining that the chef left the gold flakes off your dessert and that under the new meta you find it hard to completely dominate Ranking, progressions, alliance, and season leaderboards.

Opening up the game to be more enjoyable to the majority will bring in more players who will then form a broader base of paying players across all slices.

I have one question. Yes the Top percent of players contributes a large amount to the revenue of the game, is that more or less than may have been contributed by people who picked up the game built a fledgling roster and learned that paying for boosts and shields etc. wont get them over the giant wall of veteran players who dominate the leaderboards in every event. I am going to call these players baby whales. If this system makes the game accessible to even more people and provides a warm breeding ground for a new group of baby whales to grow up into full fledged whales without having to fight the existing whales for every morsel, is that not a great move for the financial future of the the game?

And besides "zomg, season score" is there anything keeping the occasional whale from sharking an easy slice to take first place where before they may have had to settle for a billion points for 11th place?

Most importantly. Is it not better to have the choice.

Pylgrim

gamar wrote:

Pylgrim wrote:

Wow so many "high profile" players in this thread basically patting each-other's back whenever they make a post that always distils more or less to:

"If MPQ is not pay-2-win, it should. We've spent so much in this game so we deserve to win. Always. Everything. All the time. The rest of you, miserable paupers, deserve only to lick the sole of our expensive shoes as we rightfully crush you into the dirt."

Just so you know, games that are (allegedly) NOT P2W, are supposed to either not allow money influence progress (i.e. being limited to cosmetic/convenience items and improvements) or to simply allow accelerated progress into the middle levels of the game, literally buying time with money. Non-P2W games are not supposed to guarantee victory and top positions forever to the spenders. So please, if you are going to limit your answers to valid arguments to "I can't understand why you expect me, a paying player, not to win more", just don't bother.

When I was transitioning, I could place in almost every PVE by repeating mStorm in the desert nodes. OBW and 2* Thor could reliably take down any 3* team on offense (I got my 2* a-team to 85 about a month too late to take advantage of Thorverine). You could prologue heal. It took a lot fewer losses to tank and "tanked" battles didn't stop after 600 pts. I frankly find the idea that newbies today have it "easier" than I did ludicrous.

Thank you, I always forget to bring this up. Another thing that bothers me about the entitlement of some is that many raised to the top in the circumstances that you describe. Afterwards, the "rich gets richer" scheme planted by the matchmaking in MPQ just served to keep them on top.

Unknown

I still don't entirely see the point of the "top players" complaint. You have to compete against each other, instead of being able to feast on the weaker teams? Top ranking prizes are now more competitive in your ideal time slice? You're still able to obtain the top progression prizes with relative ease? Transition players are obtaining decent prizes and are far too happy for your liking?

You do realize that while the top percentage of players (who are upset with the current situation), while they do probably pay more per person than the rest of us, collectively doesn't pay as much as the majority (which is now potentially more likely to pay in small increments due to an increase in perceived competitiveness). The way I see it, 20ppl X $50 < 500ppl X $5

And the argument "It was tough for me, so it should obviously be tough for them" is so ridiculous I don't even know how to respond to that. They're FIXING things. It sucks that it was difficult for you during the onset, but that doesn't mean they're not allow to fix any problems there might have been with the game. Have you stopped to think that maybe the devs didn't intend for early adopters to have such a hard time and now they're trying to right a wrong?

reckless442

Perhaps some of the transitioning players here should consider how stacked against top players the game has been progressively getting. How many of you are facing level 395 Hood/Mags in the final node of Thick as Thieves? When I was a transitioning player, I routinely hit top-5 in PVE. Now, I'm lucky to get top-50 because scaling is so heavily stacked against high-level rosters. That means the way I can get the remaining covers unavailable in PVE is through PVP. Yet the changes the Devs have implemented are now making it harder to get those covers. Right now, I'm seeing max-level teams in PVP at 350 and am in a super-death bracket in shard 4. This event, thankfully, doesn't have rewards I need, but what happens when Rocket and Groot is the reward in the next event?

I don't disagree that there are issues that transitioning players face today that we didn't face. But basically making it so transitioning players get an easy route to top-10 rewards while vets have to slog through ever harder brackets for increasingly lesser rewards is not the solution.

Unknown

Fievel wrote:

I still don't entirely see the point of the "top players" complaint. You have to compete against each other, instead of being able to feast on the weaker teams? Top ranking prizes are now more competitive in your ideal time slice? You're still able to obtain the top progression prizes with relative ease? Transition players are obtaining decent prizes and are far too happy for your liking

We don't feast on weaker teams. We feast on each other. And now that we are split up the people that pick the wrong time get screwed. We climb past the transitioning teams till we get to 700ish, though from my experience it can sometimes happen at 550. Then we hunt each other.

If you think that we feast on the transition teams then maybe the issue should be spotting the top players some point level, and letting us go from there. Heaethstone works this way. Top rank in one season means you don't start from the bottom the next season.

As it is now if a top guy gets in a bad time, they will have to pick on the transitioning player to score anywhere close to how they want.

Oh and btw. Did you notice that Xmen did not pick the "standard" time this time.

xKOBALTx

Fievel wrote:

I still don't entirely see the point of the "top players" complaint. You have to compete against each other, instead of being able to feast on the weaker teams? Top ranking prizes are now more competitive in your ideal time slice? You're still able to obtain the top progression prizes with relative ease? Transition players are obtaining decent prizes and are far too happy for your liking?

No, no, no, no, no, no. I don't think any of us have a problem with competing against each other. Once you hit a certain score you see nothing but maxed 3*/4* for miles. For several hundred points and they are nowhere near worth 50 points for all matches. We do it every single PvP. What I don't want is to have to choose between the time slice that features high points/progression with death brackets and Top 50 placement for an 1100+ score versus choosing a less competitive time slice with low points/progression/season scoring, "feasting" on weaker teams and getting Top 5 from 7 or 800 points, but hurting my alliance.

Not all decently maxed roster/top players are in top alliances that don't have to worry about falling out of the Top 100. Many of us are in alliances that do depend on the scores of their top players to obtain the alliance covers to help our own transitioning players. I'm a pretty selfish player, but I don't feel great about sacrificing a few hundred points per PvP that I help to provide our alliance to go after my own placement in time slices that don't even suit my schedule.

scottee

The alliance swap problem is easily fixed by making alliance scores tabulate for an individual:
% of event player was in alliance times player's final score

Do that for all players who are or were in the alliance at any point during the event.

Unknown

Well I guess it's good at least OPPayHarder has kicked off some discussion.
Sadly I don't think it will matter much.

I don't want to screw new players out of rewards and I get the devs need to balance the needs of new players.

The issue is the whole game is designed around competition. You can't ignore the game design. It is a competitive game, where rewards are handed out based on effort , time and/or money. They designed the game this way.

The top 1 percent as we are called either payed a lot of money or spent a lot of time building their rosters. As a developer you can't ignore that, they built you up.

Is it hard for new players? Absolutely, the game is a nightmare. It's hard to completely cover a 3 star char. There use to be a time before season where players would allow other players to take top spots to get rewards they needed. The devs decided to foster competition by implementing seasons. Maybe you have noticed I don't gun for top placement off season, its not because I'm lazy and I want to take a break its because i don't feel like screwing anyone else out of covers and the alliance doesn't need me.

Its not the 1 percent that is making life difficult for everyone, its the game design. There are players that just want to be number 1 of course but I promise you there are many that just want to collect covers and rewards so we can level them.

All the new players who are happy about the changes today are going to complain about them months from now when they face the same issues as the vets.

I don't think new players should have easy access to top rewards, a two star roster shouldn't win 4 star covers. Limited rosters shouldn't be able to breeze into pve and win the new 3 star covers. It doesn't even help them... They wont be winning the pvp to win any more covers and they need to focus on getting a complete 3 star roster. Not to mention the iso constraints.

They should make the transition easier from 2 to 3 star.
Fixing the token rewards is one way to help transitioning players. Having more progression rewards in PVE for good transition 3 star chars could help (such as Lthor, punisher)

End seasons so Vets aren't forced to score high in pvp's where they don't need the covers.

Lastly you guys are all fooling yourself if you think there will be a guaranteed hard end time vs easy end times. Its going to be a gamble as alliances rotate trying to chase each other.

Unknown

So I guess the reason I'm having trouble understanding the issue is that you did this "experiment" that shows one thing and saying that you want something different.

What you DID, was get together a group of whales to show that if you all get together in one time slice, you can absolutely destroy the rankings, racking up ridiculous and unnecessarily high scores.

What you (the more coherent and reasonable you) want is for points to be spread more evenly among time slices so that situations like, say, a huge group of whales colluding to all join the same time slice doesn't deprive the rest of the slices of potential points for the sharks who feed off the whales, making it so season/alliance awards aren't dependent on choosing the "right" slice.

What you (the more vocal and less eloquent you) want is to scrap everything, return to the Dark (Reign) Ages, tiny kitty the new or transitioning players because it was hard for us so it should be harder for you.

If there's a better allegory for modern American politics on a non-political forum, I haven't seen it.

I would love to play on a Utopian MPQ where veterans and whales get their challenge as well as their points, and new/transitioning players get their opportunities to actually transition to stronger teams instead of being constantly beaten back. Until that happens, as a currently transitioning player, I'm sorry (not sorry), but I'm going to put my vote behind making my experience better every time and if somebody gets inconvenienced along the way, oh well. Nothing personal, I'm just selfish.

Unknown

Fievel wrote:

What you (the more vocal and less eloquent you) want is to scrap everything, return to the Dark (Reign) Ages, tiny kitty the new or transitioning players because it was hard for us so it should be harder for you.

I fail to see how anyone got screwed by the experiment. I guess there was one alliance that fell out of top 100. To alliance 101 i apologize. Post your alliance rank on here and maybe I can retreat to some of your members to make it up to you.

2k scores have been happening quite frequently the past couple of months. Some where trying to hit the 2500 record before sentry is nurfed so the scores would have been inflated no matter what.

Spoit

But seriously, is no one else having death brackets with 10+ top alliance people in them? Where top 10 is somewhere around 2k+?

That are seriously taking more than 12 hours to fill. in the "popular" 4th time slice.

_RiO_

Flare808 wrote:

Your premise was to have EU friendly times, correct? I pointed out that as a corporation, D3's goal is to make money (providing a good game is secondary to that for most companies). I did say that they should listen to all feedback, from anywhere in the world. But that doesn't mean that they will bend to appease a minority, which the EU is.

Statistics published by Demiurge in a thread labeled "'Marvel Puzzle Quest' User Statistics (Platforms & Locales)" indicated that the largest EU countries combined could already be representing a playerbase within 75% of size to the US one. That's without the smaller countries added in and all while EU players are being treated as second rate citizens, which would logically lower both word-of-mouth adoption and player retention. If anything, the EU represents a market with future growth and more potential profit whereas the US market is reaching a point of stagnation and start of decay; saturated with many end-game veterans that would quit the game when the influx of new characters to collect would cease to be.

The EU market would actually represent as much, if not greater, business value at this point in time than the US market, I would think.