Planned Updates To Shields - New Start Date

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  • simonsez wrote:
    Dauthi wrote:
    PVP is pretty important, and in order to do well you have to play an unfun and extremely stressful metagame called "shield hopping" that was in no way intended.
    And you think trying to get to 1300 without shield-hopping is going to be fun and extremely stress-free? For crissakes...
    Which s why Francky thought Phantron and Dauthi were related. Or married.

    I personally find it very relaxing to finish a fight as fast as I can only to find out I've been pumped by three different teams to net myself -70 points instead of the +20 or so I thought I'd gotten to push me over the hump for a progression reward. That's how I truly find my Zen moment.
  • I think that Operation PayHarder made D3 decide that they needed to limit the ability of the players to score so high. The progression reward remains at 1300, yet I and other players, consistently score over 2000. My average score last season was 1861@PvP.
    Rather than encourage the players to score higher, D3 is doing what they can to throttle "over-scoring".
  • I still don't understand what the point of this change is. Check the comments on Balance of Power. Taking away the possibility of an advantage makes winning arbitrary.

    Actually, it puts victory in the hands of the players with the most OP characters, thus negating the idea of strategy. David might kill computer Goliath, but human Goliath will never fear the Davids.

    In the Bible, David picked five smooth stones with which to kill Goliath. Coincidentally, the same number of heals we get.

    Imagine if David had to kill a hundred Goliaths. He only had five stones. If he could kill three then shield while he picked up more stones, he'd have a chance.

    My point is, there's an army of nine-foot-tall badasses out there, and they will squash me flat if I challenge them without a chance to escape.

    I really don't get what the intention is. I don't see the value in this. It's going to make it so that the only way not to lose is to have a team so strong nobody will challenge you. A team where the computer's incompetent play style is stronger than any player's best strategies.

    The winner of the next PVP will have fielded 4Thor, X-Force, and the featured character at level 166. Second through fifth place will be determined by the number of other characters playing that roster. Shields won't matter because they only ever do anything when you take a few potshots then buy another.

    Maybe if...no.

    Maybe...no.

    How about...wait.

    Okay, so what if they made points progressive? Like, instead of losing points when someone beats you, you only lose points when you lose? Your ability to win would be limited by your survival plus your heals. Okay, so you can buy heals to keep going, but you can do that now. Progression rewards would have to be much higher, but this blue shell nonsense has to stop, and this is the only way. It's not fair that doing well means becoming a target. That just discourages doing well.

    Let's encourage excellence.
  • NorthernPolarity
    NorthernPolarity Posts: 3,531 Chairperson of the Boards
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    I still don't understand what the point of this change is. Check the comments on Balance of Power. Taking away the possibility of an advantage makes winning arbitrary.

    Actually, it puts victory in the hands of the players with the most OP characters, thus negating the idea of strategy. David might kill computer Goliath, but human Goliath will never fear the Davids.

    In the Bible, David picked five smooth stones with which to kill Goliath. Coincidentally, the same number of heals we get.

    Imagine if David had to kill a hundred Goliaths. He only had five stones. If he could kill three then shield while he picked up more stones, he'd have a chance.

    My point is, there's an army of nine-foot-tall badasses out there, and they will squash me flat if I challenge them without a chance to escape.

    I really don't get what the intention is. I don't see the value in this. It's going to make it so that the only way not to lose is to have a team so strong nobody will challenge you. A team where the computer's incompetent play style is stronger than any player's best strategies.

    The winner of the next PVP will have fielded 4Thor, X-Force, and the featured character at level 166. Second through fifth place will be determined by the number of other characters playing that roster. Shields won't matter because they only ever do anything when you take a few potshots then buy another.

    Maybe if...no.

    Maybe...no.

    How about...wait.

    Okay, so what if they made points progressive? Like, instead of losing points when someone beats you, you only lose points when you lose? Your ability to win would be limited by your survival plus your heals. Okay, so you can buy heals to keep going, but you can do that now. Progression rewards would have to be much higher, but this blue shell nonsense has to stop, and this is the only way. It's not fair that doing well means becoming a target. That just discourages doing well.

    Let's encourage excellence.

    People dont lose once they have xf ladythor vs other equivalent teams. All this would do is turn pvp into a grindfest the likes of which weve never seen.
  • simonsez wrote:
    So how do you explain that they adjusted the progressions in PVE that anyone that plays a reasonable amount can hit the top progression no problem?
    The top progressions in PvE are 3*, not 4* like in PvP.

    So? If they did not want players to reach them in PvP they could just make them higher (or remove them altogether).
    simonsez wrote:
    I have seroius doubts that making the progressions unreachable (or even making more money off shields) is one of them.
    Then once again, they've solidified their status as masters of unintended consequences of which anyone seriously playing the game can foresee.

    Sigh. Any change they make to shields is going to increase or decrease the amount of revenue from shields. This is an incidental feature of the change not a necessary one. We know this (and they are not trying to prevent progressions from being reached) again because if this was their goal they would raise the progressives and encourage more hopping not less. If they wanted to sell the more expensive shields, they could have just raised prices.

    I'm not saying the change is good or needed. I'm strongly against the change (see p. 3 of the thread). I'm simply saying from a logical and reasonable perspective, whatever the reason for the change, the reason is not money from shields.

    Moreover, if we want MPQ to listen to us (I mean really listen to us), we should focus on the real arguments of the why the change is bad for the game. Every time someone puts things like "also money" or so players cannot reach progressives (aka the developers hate us), it marginalizes our position as reasonable and rational customers/gamers that understand how the game mechanics work and our opinions are valid.[/quote]

    The premise of your entire argument is that the developers truly care what we think. This is the fault in your logic. I do not disagree with most of what else you said.
  • FaustianDeal
    FaustianDeal Posts: 760 Critical Contributor
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    I don't know if this was already thrown out as an idea; maybe it belongs in suggestions...

    If we are tightening up the way shields work in a way that potentially forces players to remain exposed for longer periods of time is there an offsetting way to, perhaps, not allow my name to be queued into the nodes of 5 different people within the same 2 minute window? This might be hard to manage because nodes are loaded out of sync from when fights are selected, but it seems like it shouldn't be possible for my team to have to participate in that many fights in a tight time window. (I'm not saying once a fight starts with my team on defense they can't be queued again.. just restrict the frequency to slow the flow of blood.)

    If we can't get a restriction on the number of people that can hit us within a given window of time... how about this:
    A way to prevent THE SAME PERSON from being able to hit me 3+ times in the time it takes for me to complete a single fight?
  • What I'd like to see is something that I think has sort of been said by others in this thread, some sort of cap on the number of times you can get drilled in a certain time period even if its only 30 min or something. That way, if your playing and you get beaten on defense you know that for the next 30 your safe to try and grind out as many victories as you can, rack up some points and pop a shield and walk away for while waiting for the cool down to expire. This way you can choose to set your sights on gradually working your way up to the progression rewards over the full two days of the pvp event instead of just mad scramble shield popping for the final two - three hours of the event and praying a bunch of people don't target you and nail you while you are in the middle of a fight. May be a little less stressful too if that's what people are after.
  • reckless442
    reckless442 Posts: 532 Critical Contributor
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    I think that Operation PayHarder made D3 decide that they needed to limit the ability of the players to score so high. The progression reward remains at 1300, yet I and other players, consistently score over 2000. My average score last season was 1861@PvP.
    Rather than encourage the players to score higher, D3 is doing what they can to throttle "over-scoring".
    Ice said this has been in the works since before OPH.
  • mohio
    mohio Posts: 1,690 Chairperson of the Boards
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    Ghost79 wrote:
    What I'd like to see is something that I think has sort of been said by others in this thread, some sort of cap on the number of times you can get drilled in a certain time period even if its only 30 min or something. That way, if your playing and you get beaten on defense you know that for the next 30 your safe to try and grind out as many victories as you can, rack up some points and pop a shield and walk away for while waiting for the cool down to expire. This way you can choose to set your sights on gradually working your way up to the progression rewards over the full two days of the pvp event instead of just mad scramble shield popping for the final two - three hours of the event and praying a bunch of people don't target you and nail you while you are in the middle of a fight. May be a little less stressful too if that's what people are after.
    I do like the idea behind this as there needs to be some mechanism to prevent people from dropping so many points in a short time. The issue though is basically exactly what you brought up as an example. You essentially are handing out free shields to people for whatever x-amount of time that the limit is set to. It certainly can't be too long cause then you'd just get drilled in 5-10 minutes and then be shielded for the next 50 minutes. 30 minutes might be reasonable. It's all about what the limit is I suppose. If you assume people can average a match in 5 minutes then maybe you cap losses to 150 points every 30 minutes (conveniently 25x6, which is how many matches you can do in 30 minutes on average). Then you can at least make some progress if you can queue enough >25 point matches and finish them in the same average time.

    The benefit of this method is that it allows the people who would otherwise shield for 30 minutes to continue to play and progress without having to shield. So now people should really only be shielding when they are away from the game, which (I'm assuming) is what they were intended for in the first place.
  • mohio wrote:
    Ghost79 wrote:
    What I'd like to see is something that I think has sort of been said by others in this thread, some sort of cap on the number of times you can get drilled in a certain time period even if its only 30 min or something. That way, if your playing and you get beaten on defense you know that for the next 30 your safe to try and grind out as many victories as you can, rack up some points and pop a shield and walk away for while waiting for the cool down to expire. This way you can choose to set your sights on gradually working your way up to the progression rewards over the full two days of the pvp event instead of just mad scramble shield popping for the final two - three hours of the event and praying a bunch of people don't target you and nail you while you are in the middle of a fight. May be a little less stressful too if that's what people are after.
    I do like the idea behind this as there needs to be some mechanism to prevent people from dropping so many points in a short time. The issue though is basically exactly what you brought up as an example. You essentially are handing out free shields to people for whatever x-amount of time that the limit is set to. It certainly can't be too long cause then you'd just get drilled in 5-10 minutes and then be shielded for the next 50 minutes. 30 minutes might be reasonable. It's all about what the limit is I suppose. If you assume people can average a match in 5 minutes then maybe you cap losses to 150 points every 30 minutes (conveniently 25x6, which is how many matches you can do in 30 minutes on average). Then you can at least make some progress if you can queue enough >25 point matches and finish them in the same average time.

    The benefit of this method is that it allows the people who would otherwise shield for 30 minutes to continue to play and progress without having to shield. So now people should really only be shielding when they are away from the game, which (I'm assuming) is what they were intended for in the first place.


    Totally agree with your idea.
  • Abuse of the shielding system has been going on long before OPH. The name was chosen as a homage to a long standing technique.....

    Team ups bothered me more then this change to be honest. I saw it as a lack of strategy in a game that already plays loosely with the term.

    Time slices I saw as a way to break up alliances.

    If they scale progression rewards down based on newer scores after change is in effect I don't see it as a big deal.

    I would like to see separate time out values for shields. Forcing players to use a 8 hour shield after a 3 hour shield doesn't make any sense from any perspective imho.


    I think it would be easier if the Dev's defined what the intended purpose of shields are then worked backwards from that they could come up with a better solution.

    I may not agree with the devs decisions but if there was some clarity on their game design it would be a lot easier to get behind.

    I have written a few posts about the schizophrenic game design. choose to make a competitive game or a casual game don't try to shoehorn both into the same package. Its the dichotomy of the game design that creates the most frustration.
  • Dauthi
    Dauthi Posts: 995 Critical Contributor
    edited December 2014
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    Dauthi wrote:

    I wouldn't say it harms zero players, those not in the specified alliances won't have a chance in hell to score 1st or 2nd etc. I will say it doesn't harm me, as I am not a player interesting in scoring 2k to get a reward.

    Oh, so you REALLY don't care about any of this yourself, you just wanna hate on those who do care? You have no dog in this fight and it doesn't effect you but you are trying to be "Captain Save-a-hoe" when there's no hoes and no saving that needs to be done in the first place?

    I'm only stating this here for your benefit. We all figured out you were a malcontent from your original post.

    Your logic doesn't make sense. I can't voice my opinion because this may not affect me? Wow, if that is how everyone thought imagine how badly the civil rights movement would have failed.
    Dauthi wrote:
    Like tanking, it wasn't intended and should be fixed, however it is viable to use until then.

    See? You say it's ok if YOU CAN DO IT, but if somebody else can do it and you can't because you can't seem to make enough friends... Well then that is an injustice and needs to end because it's an exploit and it's unethical to use an exploit so shame on us!!!!!!!

    You realize you just showed everyone how hypocritical you truly are with that post, right.
    First you say exploits are bad because everyone can't use them, then you turn right around and say that you use them yourself.

    Wow. Do yourself a favor and stop talking now, before the true level of your understanding, or lack thereof, becomes more apparent.

    I can't make friends? And people think I am the troll when not once have I slandered someone, yet get personal attacks left and right. Please quote anywhere I said any of that. I said they are eploits, they are wrong, and should be corrected. I never said people shouldn't use them, as I clearly stated later because of all the straw-man arguments others were attempting to place.
    lukewin wrote:
    I have to believe at this point that you are a troll. Since you are taking the time to address every post. That or you have plenty of free time and feel like responding/countering every post that you have conversed in. I don't mean to defame you by my belief, but that is my opinion. I would say that you are more like arktos than phantron, except you are shilling for the devs/pubs, as opposed to against them.

    Thank you for omitting what I have bolded in my original quote, which makes it seem like I am just calling you a troll to call you a troll. Since you have a life outside the forums, as you put it, and didn't get the Phantron reference ( I did not either ), maybe you don't know what I meant by troll. I have copied/pasted from Wikipedia and highlighted why I think you fall in this category.

    In Internet slang, a troll (/ˈtroʊl/, /ˈtrɒl/) is a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people,[1] by posting inflammatory,[2] extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response[3] or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.[4]

    Why not just say the second part and assume the better then. Why even add the name calling part? An example would be coming up to a mentally disabled person and saying "Hey, you are really stupid. Either that or mentally disabled".

    I didn't omit that part, I responded to the part that was rude.
    simonsez wrote:
    Dauthi wrote:
    PVP is pretty important, and in order to do well you have to play an unfun and extremely stressful metagame called "shield hopping" that was in no way intended.
    And you think trying to get to 1300 without shield-hopping is going to be fun and extremely stress-free? For crissakes...

    I thought that global gains through attacks stacked statically. If I was right, it wouldn't be stressful because the top end of scores would be constantly pushed up. To be honest, I don't see why they don't lighten up these restrictions to solve the problem.


    Lastly, I came here for information and to debate and ended up surprised at how many people lashed out at me for not knowing something. I can understand a troll or two, but I was actually down-voted for asking a question by multiple people, why?

    If you ever wonder why there are forum users who stay silent/guests, read this thread. If you want new forum users, an attitude of superiority isn't going to help.

    Thanks to all of you who offered the information in a non-condescending tone. Thanks to those who attempted to up-vote the unprovoked down-votes from the same group of individuals who down-voted much of what I posted.
    ark123 wrote:
    People engaging in flame wars in a message board about a match-3 cellphone game...smh

    I know, right? Anything is possible I guess. icon_lol.gif

    I haven't been to many forums, but this is probably the least regulated forum (company run) I have ever been to, that could contribute to it. I guess they expect the up/down vote system to run everything.
  • People engaging in flame wars in a message board about a match-3 cellphone game...smh
  • SnowcaTT
    SnowcaTT Posts: 3,486 Chairperson of the Boards
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    While I don't think this is "bad" news, many seem to take it that way. I'll give it to you guys for this: for once, this wasn't a late Friday afternoon news-dump. I know that's the way many organizations like to express bad news, and it has been the case around here for awhile. I guess it means customer service doesn't have to take calls right away.

    I would guess this news had to be placed early since the season was starting - but maybe that's just me being pessimistic. Here's hoping more bad news (any changes, I guess) are done mid-week. Leave fridays for the "good" news, like the Elektra announcement.
  • Lystrata
    Lystrata Posts: 322 Mover and Shaker
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    Dauthi wrote:
    Lastly, I came here for information and to debate and ended up surprised at how many people lashed out at me for not knowing something. I can understand a troll or two, but I was actually down-voted for asking a question by multiple people, why?

    If you ever wonder why there are forum users who stay silent/guests, read this thread. If you want new forum users, an attitude of superiority isn't going to help.

    This tends to be a problem with almost any forum. I'd actually say that this forum is better than most, but some of the responses to you / others in this thread have been downright rude / unnecessary. If people can't even ask questions on a forum without being down voted... it's tinykitty ridiculous.

    I am more than happy to admit I didn't have a clue about half the inner-workings of points beyond X moment in the game (on day 100-something here), and this thread has certainly been educational. The more I read, the less I'm convinced this solution to shield hopping is the 'optimal' one, and the more I think D3 should occasionally run ideas past players first. (Also think they should really learn their lesson about introducing game-changing mechanics mid-season, buuuut... whatever.)

    The more convinced I also am that some people need the chill the **** out and realise that sometimes, other players are commenting with less knowledge than you are. Instead of responding to that with flame and down votes, why not just... explain things / why their ideas might be misguided? Surely fostering growth amongst players is more beneficial.

    *awaits down votes* icon_e_wink.gif
  • Spoit
    Spoit Posts: 3,441 Chairperson of the Boards
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    Some people seriously have a major persecution complex here
  • GothicKratos
    GothicKratos Posts: 1,821 Chairperson of the Boards
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    I'm half tempted just to lock this whole debacle, but realistically, the downward spiral just amuses me, because I am not a decent human being. icon_lol.gif

    That being said;

    Anymore rude or inflammatory remarks are going to garner warnings and will downwardly spiral from there. Discussion is awesome, but be civil about it, or we'll have to take your toys away, Timmy.
  • This needs to happen now. After the **** I am going thru in BOP right now. I am perposely being targeted by Junebugkiller in the line app. He has people waiting for me to take 1st so they can Hop in and lose to him. **** really? I don't mind a little friendly competition but when you sign on to your girlfriends account just to snipe me you have massive issues. I am very disgusted with this. Shields are nice and they work but Junebugkiller and his like are the reasons we can't have nice things.
  • TheDobot
    TheDobot Posts: 61 Match Maker
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    Maybe this has been touched on, but I want to write it anyway. I've been thinking about this change and I'm afraid for the average player now. The hard hitters are going to have to play more and that means they are going to feast on the lower and mid range teams in the bracket. Before no one ever had to worry about those players because they were shielded, but now they might be playing at the end crushing the average player who is just trying to just get in the top 100. Does anyone else feel this way? Just a note too...I'm not complaining just throwing this out there.
  • Chrono_Tata
    Chrono_Tata Posts: 719 Critical Contributor
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    Suggestion: since shield-hopping is going to be heavily nerfed, how about this as a balance? Give out the progression reward as soon as the match ends before calculating the points lost from defensive losses while you were playing the match.

    The most soul-crushing thing in this game is when you push hard for that 3- or 4-star cover progression reward, win the match, gets to the point tally screen that tells you that you have won your hard-earned reward, and in the very next screen it lets you know that, psych!, actually you just lost 50 points from defensive losses and you never got your cover after all. Good luck winning 2 more games without getting attacked so you could try again.