Operation Pay Harder: A Debrief

Unknown

Well, do not let alliance points move with the player.

Alliance points are earnt for an alliance. Player points are earnt for a player.

A player moving to another alliance mid-event starts from scratch in the alliance pool.

Raekwen

Phantron wrote:

Raekwen wrote:

Phantron wrote:

Attacking another time shard would be the same as being able to queue up players who are shielded since that's exactly the same thing once a previous shard is done and it'll just lead to runaway inflation of scoring, and if the guys from the previous shard can lose points that'd mean you better put a 24 hour shield before the event ends if you're in the earliest shard.

That doesnt make a bit of sense. The system works the way it's always worked, you queue people who are non-shielded, regardless of shard. If they are shielded, you can't see them, and they fall out of the system once their shard ends.

The reason why being able to queue up shielded players led to runaway inflation is because shielded players can't ever fight back.

A player in a shard that has already ended also cannot fight back. What would happen is people would just pass around names of guys in an earlier shard and just keep on skip until they get them. Once enough people do this you won't get attacked anyway because people will be looking for the guys in the earlier shards because hitting someone who can't fight back is still the safest thing to do until you pass up the highest point guy from the shards that already ended.

Why would their scores be affected? That would be stupid. The shard ends, players scores are locked. People who have them queued can still hit them, but since their score is locked it doesn't affect them. People who don't have them queued can't see them anymore, regardless of shield.

I don't see why this has to be so difficult.

Unknown

I think the "eliminate the skip tax for people that give you less than 20 points" is reasonable.

A bigger issue is how shielding hides you from view. Even in the less populated brackets, there are a large number of people with higher scores. However, most of them are shielded at any given time. With larger brackets, the effect of that wasn't as noticable. However, it was a huge issue when I was playing the 8AM finish at midnight - most of the (European) players had shielded and gone to bed, leaving very few appropriately leveled targets.

Perhaps a better approach is to enforce a certain number of targets at any level (kind of like seed teams) or to allow shielded people to be targeted.

Ducky

TheBraintrust wrote:

...or to allow shielded people to be targeted.

No...just no!

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

Raekwen wrote:

Phantron wrote:

Attacking another time shard would be the same as being able to queue up players who are shielded since that's exactly the same thing once a previous shard is done and it'll just lead to runaway inflation of scoring, and if the guys from the previous shard can lose points that'd mean you better put a 24 hour shield before the event ends if you're in the earliest shard.

That doesnt make a bit of sense. The system works the way it's always worked, you queue people who are non-shielded, regardless of shard. If they are shielded, you can't see them, and they fall out of the system once their shard ends.

The reason why being able to queue up shielded players led to runaway inflation is because shielded players can't ever fight back.

A player in a shard that has already ended also cannot fight back. What would happen is people would just pass around names of guys in an earlier shard and just keep on skip until they get them. Once enough people do this you won't get attacked anyway because people will be looking for the guys in the earlier shards because hitting someone who can't fight back is still the safest thing to do until you pass up the highest point guy from the shards that already ended.

He said that you'd only be able to target players in active shards, so they would be able to retaliate

Raekwen

TheBraintrust wrote:

Perhaps a better approach is to enforce a certain number of targets at any level (kind of like seed teams) or to allow shielded people to be targeted.

God no. This happened before, and it led to absolutely stupid scoring. It can't happen again. Global targeting would solve this issue though, as much as it ever has anyways.

Unknown

Raekwen wrote:

Why would their scores be affected? That would be stupid. The shard ends, players scores are locked. People who have them queued can still hit them, but since their score is locked it doesn't affect them. People who don't have them queued can't see them anymore, regardless of shield.

I don't see why this has to be so difficult.

It's more a seed team match than a "normal" match then. One match leads to win/loss of points (loss is 0 if the player is shielded).

It's just a question of rules to be set (one way or another).

Ducky

gamar wrote:

Phantron wrote:

Raekwen wrote:

Phantron wrote:

Attacking another time shard would be the same as being able to queue up players who are shielded since that's exactly the same thing once a previous shard is done and it'll just lead to runaway inflation of scoring, and if the guys from the previous shard can lose points that'd mean you better put a 24 hour shield before the event ends if you're in the earliest shard.

That doesnt make a bit of sense. The system works the way it's always worked, you queue people who are non-shielded, regardless of shard. If they are shielded, you can't see them, and they fall out of the system once their shard ends.

The reason why being able to queue up shielded players led to runaway inflation is because shielded players can't ever fight back.

A player in a shard that has already ended also cannot fight back. What would happen is people would just pass around names of guys in an earlier shard and just keep on skip until they get them. Once enough people do this you won't get attacked anyway because people will be looking for the guys in the earlier shards because hitting someone who can't fight back is still the safest thing to do until you pass up the highest point guy from the shards that already ended.

He said that you'd only be able to target players in active shards, so they would be able to retaliate

Quoted from the Smash Hit Beta thread regarding cross time-slice attacking and finishing slices being untargetable after they're completed.

DuckyV wrote:

Spoit wrote:

DuckyV wrote:

And if they are able to be hit after their event ends, their shield will run out and people will have free reign on their points.

Which would be elegantly solved by "shielding" everyone after their slice ends

That still gives people advantages to people who choose the middle end times, as they will have more opponents to queue for longer times than the bookend end times. The only way to keep it fair across the board is to prevent cross time-slice matching.

Raekwen

I would think if anyone had the advantage, it would be the end shards to be able queue people up for longer. Either way, you're talking about an advantage that's very minimal.

As it is, there is no way you could say that the current system of non-global matchmaking is fair.

Unknown

Hi Everyone,

This issue isn't about the 1 percent, it effects everyone. You may just not have noticed it yet because most have been joining the standard time slot out of habit. If you pick the wrong slot

1)Progression rewards become a lot more expensive or impossible to reach for many
2)Alliance rankings are hurt. I have been in alliances struggling for 100 before, it usually consists of a few players that can score high and help carry the team to victory. If any of these players pick the wrong slot kiss top 100 goodbye. you can argue all day about not needing a high score. I don't score high for my personal rewards I do it for the alliance. The alliance is the only thing keeping me in the game.

As for the statement session placement doesn't matter..... Well then seasons don't matter...... But they exist and they are a part of the game. If they don't matter they should be removed, until then this feature goes directly against a fundamental game design.

You can't develop a feature in a void and once again it just demonstrates what's wrong with the game, It's schizophrenic.

They introduce seasons then they make game changing changes during a season totally invalidating rankings.
They nurf characters to encourage a varied roster then they release sentry
They give us alliances with ranked rewards then they split alliances up with different time shards.


How splitting alliances up is a good thing is beyond me but hey I guess I'm an out of touch 1 percenter


Lastly I just want to give a shout out to X-men. They are often villainized but they have always played nicely with me. You guys are insane but I love you, this wasn't about beating you but to make a statement against a feature that may kill the game for me.

Unknown

Raekwen wrote:

I would think if anyone had the advantage, it would be the end shards to be able queue people up for longer. Either way, you're talking about an advantage that's very minimal.

As it is, there is no way you could say that the current system of non-global matchmaking is fair.

Based on the way you describe it the effect would be minimal and in that case I'm not sure why D3 should waste resources implementing this system when they can be working on other things. I'm assuming this system we currently have is the simplest they can do and it does seem fairly foolproof.

I don't think they care at all on whether a player is able to pile how many more hundreds of points after 1300, and if anything they should have an incentive to make it hard for you to get to 1300 under any circumstance.

Ducky

Raekwen wrote:

I would think if anyone had the advantage, it would be the end shards to be able queue people up for longer. Either way, you're talking about an advantage that's very minimal.

As it is, there is no way you could say that the current system of non-global matchmaking is fair.

Is it fair? Yes. Are all the scores going to be similar? No. Does that mean you are going to score as high as other slices? Not if you aren't in a slice with win-traders, but that is more a flaw of the scoring system than it is of the end time system. With no cross-slice matchmaking everyone is on the same playing field initially. What happens after that is completely dependent on people's will to score high.

Raekwen

Phantron wrote:

Based on the way you describe it the effect would be minimal and in that case I'm not sure why D3 should waste resources implementing this system when they can be working on other things. I'm assuming this system we currently have is the simplest they can do and it does seem fairly foolproof.

I don't think they care at all on whether a player is able to pile how many more hundreds of points after 1300, and if anything they should have an incentive to make it hard for you to get to 1300 under any circumstance.

Maybe they should, but that's a whole different discussion. But in no way should there be THIS much discrepancy between the shards. I'm not whining about high scores, I couldn't care less if the top scorers were at 1400, or whatever. Just make it even across the shards. Like Zen said, they splits alliances up, and it doesn't make any sense. Calling out targets? Well, if you chose a different shard you can forget that. Queuing up alliance mates? You live in Malaysia, so sorry to you.

Spoit

DuckyV wrote:

All this being said, what time slot are people picking for Heavy Metal? I don't want to miss out on my season points!

We'll see how it is with the US morning times, but in general it's folly to choose something other than the "normal" slot 4 endings

Raekwen

DuckyV wrote:

Is it fair? Yes. Are all the scores going to be similar? No. Does that mean you are going to score as high as other slices? Not if you aren't in a slice with win-traders, but that is more a flaw of the scoring system than it is of the end time system. With no cross-slice matchmaking everyone is on the same playing field initially. What happens after that is completely dependent on people's will to score high.

How is making someone work much much harder to achieve progression rewards just because they live in a different country fair?

You're ignoring the inevitable, which we are seeing. The majority of players live in the US, which is going to continue to lead to one shard scoring much higher than the others. It's not starting on an even playing field, because you already know the results.

I have yet to see one good, solid argument against global matchmaking. This doesnt require resources to happen, it already happened and they labeled it a mistake. This is the way the game had been played for a year, and no one had any problems with it before.

user311

I dont see how its D3 that split the alliances up? Every alliance has US and EU players mixed in. The idea of "choose your own" was to benefit everyone's schedule. It is the people in the alliances that make the choice to all join the same time shard. You all could self regulate and join the time appropriate to your timezone and this problem would not exist to the extent that it does. But you dont, you deliberately game the system so that the rest of us are shut out. That is not D3 ... its you.

Unknown

I'd need to see some demographics from D3 before I buy the whole 'certain timezone guys have it much harder hitting 1300 (max progression) reward'. If there are shards where they have to spend about 2500 HP to hit 1300 then I can see that being a problem, but I have a hard time believing that. Now if you want to say people in EST can score 2000 while people on European time can only get 1600, I'm sure that's quite possible but since you only need about 20 guys willing spend a ton of money to prop up an arbitary high score, that just means there aren't enough crazy guys in Europe to do it and maybe that says more about how rest of the world isn't as crazy as people on US time rather than a fundamental flaw of the system. If MPQ become the national sport of South Korea and you start seeing the Asian timeshard with scores of 5000 that just means Koreans are more competitive than the rest of the world and I see no reason to change the game just because one timezone is dominating the game.

JamieMadrox

user311 wrote:

I dont see how its D3 that split the alliances up? Every alliance has US and EU players mixed in. The idea of "choose your own" was to benefit everyone's schedule. It is the people in the alliances that make the choice to all join the same time shard. You all could self regulate and join the time appropriate to your timezone and this problem would not exist to the extent that it does. But you dont, you deliberately game the system so that the rest of us are shut out. That is not D3 ... its you.

Not true. I know of a few alliances that are region specific and therefore would not be split up by time sharding.

I really like the idea of allowing cross shard queuing when both shards are active. That is, shard 2-5 can hit people in shard 1 until that shard closes. It would mean having some overlap in time of all of the shards, but that also wouldn't be terrible. It could even allow them to have more time shards with more end time options. Say 12 shards ending every 2 hours for 24 hours. Each Shard is still 2.5 days. Or whatever works for them.

Raekwen

user311 wrote:

I dont see how its D3 that split the alliances up? Every alliance has US and EU players mixed in. The idea of "choose your own" was to benefit everyone's schedule. It is the people in the alliances that make the choice to all join the same time shard. You all could self regulate and join the time appropriate to your timezone and this problem would not exist to the extent that it does. But you dont, you deliberately game the system so that the rest of us are shut out. That is not D3 ... its you.

Alright, let's take your example, and everyone chose their own timezone (which I'm pretty sure is more or less what happened in Hulk.) So, the US timezone shard blows up, since that's where the majority of top scorers live. The EU timezones are still sitting at half the score of the US timezone. So, not only does it make it much harder for the EU top scorers to do well, it makes the other EU players who were previously feeding off of the top scorers have to work much harder and spend much more to hit progression rewards.

I'll give you a real life example. mrdogfather is our alliance is EU. In Hulk, he joined his own shard. Subsequently, he scored among the lowest in our alliance, due to the shard targeting (he's usually among the top.) In the GSBW event, he felt forced (not by us) to join shard 4 so that he could keep up with season scores and because he wanted to contribute to the alliance. So, he went back to getting up at odd hours. Now, you can say that he should be happy with lower scores in the exchange of playing at his time, but why should he have to sacrifice? He should be able to play at his time, and contribute the same as the rest of us.

Raekwen

Jamie Madrox wrote:

I really like the idea of allowing cross shard queuing when both shards are active. That is, shard 2-5 can hit people in shard 1 until that shard closes. It would mean having some overlap in time of all of the shards, but that also wouldn't be terrible. It could even allow them to have more time shards with more end time options. Say 12 shards ending every 2 hours for 24 hours. Each Shard is still 2.5 days. Or whatever works for them.

Exactly Jamie. During the point when all of the shards are open, PVP would be exactly as it always has been. No change. Just simply the event time are staggered. That's it.