Upcoming PVE End Times Testing (*Updated)

DrNitroman

Vertigozooropa wrote:

you can't even look at the event until after it starts. So when I decided Sunday 1pm would be an interesting end time, I had to wait until the next day to even find out what the prize would be.

You're right, a good feedback to David before the test has even started!
Yes, for both PvE and PvP it should be possible to see the rewards until the first time slice has begun even when you have picked another time slice

Unknown

GrumpySmurf1002 wrote:

I assumed each sub would be selectable. In fact, I was hoping that was the case. With PvP, I've found the 7pm on Sunday to be more enjoyable a finish time than the typical 1am, but I wouldn't want to carry that all week. If you can pick each sub, it would make the game much more flexible and probably make PvE a bit less of a hassle.

This. In PvP, I am currently finishing at 3pm Wed, 6pm Friday, and midnight Sunday because that works best with my schedule most weeks. Every day is different, so being able to select subevent endtimes is key to this working without the forum bringing out the pitchforks (I'm sure somebody will find a reason though)

Unknown

I read the event as Unstable Isotope the first time so I thought it was one of those 'I got good news and bad news' deal.

Doesn't Iso 8 Brotherhood completely flip the timezone around the halfway mark? Has this been redesigned to account for PvE end time is selectable? From what I recall the first half is on one time zone and the second half is 12 hours later than the first timezone to make things fair. If it's still the same way then it'd not really matter what timezone you pick because you'd still be screwed half of the time.

Unknown

papa07 wrote:

GrumpySmurf1002 wrote:

I assumed each sub would be selectable. In fact, I was hoping that was the case. With PvP, I've found the 7pm on Sunday to be more enjoyable a finish time than the typical 1am, but I wouldn't want to carry that all week. If you can pick each sub, it would make the game much more flexible and probably make PvE a bit less of a hassle.

This. In PvP, I am currently finishing at 3pm Wed, 6pm Friday, and midnight Sunday because that works best with my schedule most weeks. Every day is different, so being able to select subevent endtimes is key to this working without the forum bringing out the pitchforks (I'm sure somebody will find a reason though)

Realistically thats tricky though. What if you pick the last end time for the first sub, and the first end time for the second sub? If that's a 1 day sub then the two will overlap.

Yeah, I know that only picking one time for the whole event (the final end time) isn't perfect but it's soooo much better than what we've got now.

Bowgentle

Phantron wrote:

I read the event as Unstable Isotope the first time so I thought it was one of those 'I got good news and bad news' deal.

Doesn't Iso 8 Brotherhood completely flip the timezone around the halfway mark? Has this been redesigned to account for PvE end time is selectable? From what I recall the first half is on one time zone and the second half is 12 hours later than the first timezone to make things fair. If it's still the same way then it'd not really matter what timezone you pick because you'd still be screwed half of the time.

Considering the second half was US-friendly and had the higher points than the first half, having the second set of subs in a good time zone would help.

Of course the best solution would be to be able to pick end times for each sub.

GrumpySmurf1002

DrUnpleasant wrote:

Realistically thats tricky though. What if you pick the last end time for the first sub, and the first end time for the second sub? If that's a 1 day sub then the two will overlap.
Yeah, I know that only picking one time for the whole event (the final end time) isn't perfect but it's soooo much better than what we've got now.

Overlapping subs only really affects your ability to grind them. It won't affect the standings at all, you'd still be competing for the same length of time in the event.

FaustianDeal

Already said by others, but end times should be on 24-hour intervals, or we need to be able to pick end times on a per-sub basis.

David [Hi-Fi] Moore

DrUnpleasant wrote:

Hi David,

A few questions from the resident PvE end time zealot:

1. How many slices will there be?
2. If more than 3, are there concerns over main bracket filling speed (i.e. people joining after some have already completed 2-3 clears)
3. Will all subs conform to the end time scheduling? E.g. if I pick 9pm, will they all end at 9pm?
4. I assume rubberbanding will be off the 'global' leader in that sub time slice, or will it continue to be off the overall event leader?
5. What am I going to post about if all this goes well?

Cheers,

Hi DrU,

I'll see if I can get some further info/answers today. I'll update or one of the devs will jump in if they can. Thanks.

Phillipes

Event end times were a reason I nearly quit playing this game. I hope my dreams come true.

reckless442

How will rubber-banding possibly work so it is consistent for users in different shards? The recent PVP differences between shards had made a mess of alliance results because one shard has people scoring 2000+ while other shards are barely capable of hitting 1300. That means alliances with the most members in the high scoring shards can get significantly more points than those whose members wind up in lowere scoring shards. Given the grindfest that PVE has become and scaling, many PVE players depend on alliance results for any new cover. If PVE scores are similarly affected by the time shards, that could become a major problem.

Unknown

You can't have a situation where the main bracket isn't time sliced but the sub is, because otherwise the guys in the latest time slice will never lose all else being equal if the rubberband is still based on the overall leader. If both main and sub are time sliced... I'm not even sure if this make sense because you would be say in the EST timezone main bracket but your subs are in European time?

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

You can't have a situation where the main bracket isn't time sliced but the sub is, because otherwise the guys in the latest time slice will never lose all else being equal if the rubberband is still based on the overall leader. If both main and sub are time sliced... I'm not even sure if this make sense because you would be say in the EST timezone main bracket but your subs are in European time?

I believe they would have to rubberband each subevent slice. Since you only need 1 crazy grinder to rubberband off of, it is safe to say that all slices should be much closer to the same scores than we are seeing in PvP

evanbernstein

I'm glad that this is coming in, but I keep coming back to feeling that selecting end times is the right solution to the wrong problem.

The real problem is that you need to play this game in the last hour of an event. Why is that? Is that fun? I don't think so.

It should be more possible for this game to be more casual than it has become. Why do I have to be so competitive just to enjoy playing (if I'm not competitive I can't get any of my old characters elevated or get new characters) but I just want to be casual. Or is it this way because this is what drives the most money.

I keep considering paying money into this game, but everytime I do, I see what things cost and I'm appalled. I like paying for things. I would gladly pay for this game if the prices weren't so out of whack. New slots cost too much. Chances at new characters via packs cost too much. Playing at specific end times costs too much time. Playing PVE at all takes too much time because you have to grind.

PVE is the only way to reliably get new characters if you don't have 3* characters (I have quite a few level 94 2* characters but no 3*s above 80 and I cannot get into the top 100 for PVP). But the only way to do that is to devote days of your life to the game.

I think there is a bigger design problem with this game. I'd love to pay money for it, but I'd like what I pay for to be somewhat permanent and allow me to play this game casually.

reckless442

@evanbernstein, you've nailed the issue, but it also points out the massive problem that time sharding is going to create. The only reason we need sharding in the first place is because the game requires people to play in the last hour or so of each sub/event to get decent rewards. So the people who are facing the problem already are the competitive players.

So time-sharding serves to help non-US competitive players by giving them more convenient end times. Yet at the same time, it will screw up a different competition, alliances, which is the means for a large number of players to get their only cover. As Phantron pointed out, there is no feasible way to keep all-event rubber-banding because that would give the final shard a huge advantage in scoring. But if you don't have a single event rubber-banding and you keep rubber-banding at all, you will get terrible disparities in scores. Alliance A's members may play as hard as Alliance B's, but if Alliance B has more members is in a bracket with some super-high grinders, Alliance B will get a better overall score. Removing rubber-banding entirely is an option, but that exacerbates the problem with PVE being a grindfest.

GrumpySmurf1002

reckless442 wrote:

Yet at the same time, it will screw up a different competition, alliances, which is the means for a large number of players to get their only cover.

It's what now?

You can basically ignore anyone in a top 50 alliances, if they're in that type of alliance, they're almost always earning their own too. So the top 50-150 alliances = 2000 players, most of whom will also place well enough to get their own.

Individual brackets = 1+ cover for 150 out of every 1000 players. IIRC, the inaugural Deadpool event had around 120k players, give or take. That's 150 covers x ~120 brackets = 18000 players.

Take out the 3000 players in the top 150 alliances, that's 15k whose only chance to get their only cover is to place well individually. That's considerably more important than the handful of alliances that get shuffled by the score effects of different slicing changes.

Unknown

With alliance defaulting to 20 members I find it hard to believe you can have a significant number of freeloaders in either PvP or PvE. I'd be very surprised if someone is consistently below top 100 in PvP or top 150 in PvE but still manage to stay in a top 100 alliance by merit. Now if you got an internet celebrity who does practically nothing in MPQ but is too cool to not include so you don't mind taking the hit that's fine, but there can't be that many internet celebrities out there.

I think you can somewhat safely assume that there must be at least one crazy in every time slice and if not, over time people might migrate to that time slice anyway since competition would be much lower there, and then just have each time slice based on their time slice's sub/main leader whenever appropriate. But they got to make sure they don't do that rotating sub times that are already in PvE events where you got these 1D 12H subs that pretty much ensures at least some sub will end up in a time that's bad for you. If I pick the PST time slice, all subs should end in PST time too. Yes sometimes that'd turn out to be inconvenient too, but it's still better than picking the PST time slice and found out halfway through there's a 1D 12H sub that flips the ending time to something totally not favorable to you.

Unknown

Good question about the subs. Right now they're usually staggered. A 5pm overall end time would be better for me than the usual 9pm, but not if that means half the subs then end at 5am.

reckless442

GrumpySmurf1002 wrote:

reckless442 wrote:

Yet at the same time, it will screw up a different competition, alliances, which is the means for a large number of players to get their only cover.

It's what now?

You can basically ignore anyone in a top 50 alliances, if they're in that type of alliance, they're almost always earning their own too. So the top 50-150 alliances = 2000 players, most of whom will also place well enough to get their own.

Individual brackets = 1+ cover for 150 out of every 1000 players. IIRC, the inaugural Deadpool event had around 120k players, give or take. That's 150 covers x ~120 brackets = 18000 players.

Take out the 3000 players in the top 150 alliances, that's 15k whose only chance to get their only cover is to place well individually. That's considerably more important than the handful of alliances that get shuffled by the score effects of different slicing changes.

Alliances exist because they cause players to stick around longer than if they play individually. The Devs want people in alliances. But if they also want to impose game changes that serve individual players at the expense of the alliance (and season) system, they need to eliminate alliances. They can't have it both ways. There should not be a significant feature of the game that is then rendered meaningless by these constant changes.

David [Hi-Fi] Moore

*Update (12/03/14): The plan for this test is to have 5 selectable end times similar to how the Versus end time selection works. To keep variables down on the test, we're leaving the Sub-Event timers the same, which means that they're going to be 12 hour subs. This will help us to nail down any bugs that may appear. Specifically, we can rule out anything related to the changing of sub times.

A reminder - when selecting your end time, choosing a final end time in the afternoon may mean that previous subs end early in the morning.

Unknown

"David wrote:

Moore"]*Update (12/03/14): The plan for this test is to have 5 selectable end times similar to how the Versus end time selection works. To keep variables down on the test, we're leaving the Sub-Event timers the same, which means that they're going to be 12 hour subs. This will help us to nail down any bugs that may appear. Specifically, we can rule out anything related to the changing of sub times.

A reminder - when selecting your end time, choosing a final end time in the afternoon may mean that previous subs end early in the morning.

So I guess that I will be entering after the changeover and playing with the same end time for the entirety of the event.

What is the intent for subevents after testing is over? Will there be separate subevent endtimes?