MPQ Community Q&A #3 – December - Answer Time!

loroku

Re: moderation

I don't know how people have interpreted the ToS on this forum so much, but in other forums I've been to, arguing publicly with a mod or publicly questioning a mod decision is a temp ban at minimum. I don't care how long someone has been around; this doesn't mean the rules don't apply to them. Personally I would suggest anyone who wants to argue with a mod please do so in PM and keep the drama out of the general chat.

Edit: Having finally read the entire (rapidly shrinking thanks to deleting posts) thread, the same can be said to anyone - mods included - about keeping drama out of general chat, please.

Spoit

loroku wrote:

Re: moderation

I don't know how people have interpreted the ToS on this forum so much, but in other forums I've been to, arguing publicly with a mod or publicly questioning a mod decision is a temp ban at minimum. I don't care how long someone has been around; this doesn't mean the rules don't apply to them. Personally I would suggest anyone who wants to argue with a mod please do so in PM and keep the drama out of the general chat.

Edit: Having finally read the entire (rapidly shrinking thanks to deleting posts) thread, the same can be said to anyone - mods included - about keeping drama out of general chat, please.

Nonce was a mod. He was the mod. For months, when D3 checked in like maaaaybe once a month, he was doing the thankless job of cleaning up the spam day in and day out. And then one person complained to someone at D3 about him criticizing some of the company's decisions, certainly nothing like personally attacking another poster, and he was demoded, leaving no one to deal with all the **** for months until HiFi was hired.

Hell, it wasn't even him personally attacking the company, it was just him doing his usual collation of other threads information.

Also: money

loroku

I am not for or against anyone. I am pro ToS. That is all from me.

franckynight

There is a reason why you dropped from the iOS top 50 gross down to 150.. Its because of the unrewarding structure of the pve and pvp.. Forcing ppl to play marathon events of 7 days and refresh every 3 hrs is insane.. The forwarding changes in pvp where you ll prevent ppl from playing whenever they want will make ppl ragequit even more.. And like It is not enough.. You decide to release more 4* whereas many newbs are still transitionning and vets cant keep up with the quickness of latest release.. Your business model is flawed and you will quickly realize it..

Unknown

Unknown

CNash

In general, some good answers, but question #1's answer is rather frustrating as it doesn't address the actual issue - rather it talks generally about HP/ISO progression rates. The devs seem to be pretending that some of the most common-sense and oft-repeated potential answers posted on this forum (roster slot price cap, reduce cost of slots, etc.) just don't exist or aren't relevant to the discussion, which feels terribly disingenuous and damages their reputation as a dev team.

Also, for the next Q&A, could the answers be posted in a more straightforward manner, and not so obviously whitewashed to the point that they sound like sanitized press releases?

_RiO_

gamar wrote:

as I read it "adding roster sorting would be a very small improvement for a lot of work and so it's not a high priority [compared to new characters, new pve modes, etcetc]" is on its face a really uncontroversial statement and I don't see why people are getting upset over it

If I'd hand in an hour estimate for a work item detailing the implementation of sortability into a pre-existing display list, and that hour estimate exceeds 4 hours, then questions will be asked by my team lead or project manager. Making a list of data objects sortable over different properties of those data objects is trivial to the point that most modern programming languages have that functionality built-in as part of their standard libraries. Furthermore, the order in which those data objects are arranged should have absolutely zero effect on the code that handles their display.

You cannot even use the argument that there is no design for the UI yet. All it takes is a basic 'sort by' dropdown list and that is already available as a widget in the options window of the Steam version of the game, being used to select your resolution. Maybe you'd still need a touch-compatible version of that widget, but that's it.

Ofcourse, the above holds only when the game code is architected and programmed by actual developers that knew and know what they're doing, and is not a sodding "hack-and-test" mess tossed together in some Flash-deriven RAD-tool by would-be-developer staff. Given the track record of screw-ups this game has had, I'm wagering we're closer to the latter than we are to the former.

Unknown

Sorry if I'm banging an old drum here (haven't read through all the forums yet), but roster slots are a huge problem for casual players as well as the serious collectrers... the answer that it's important for players to choose which characters they keep in there rosters doesn't hold water when - there are at least 20 (?) 3* characters, and their covers are incredibly hard/expensive for expensive for the non top-5 grinder to come by. I've only been playing since just before the Spiderman nerf... with a bit of early luck, I managed to get about 8 or 9 covers in the Hulk and Spidey, but I've got a ton of 3* with 4, 3 and mostly 2 or 1 cover. I spend a bit of money every month, just to get the extra roster slots, because I never know which cover I will be (un)lucky enough to get next. Meanwhile, most of my 2*'s are maxxed out, and I keep getting extra, unusable covers for them.

I know most of the forum players have already passed the 2/3* transition phase, and found that pretty painfull, but I think it's even harder now, with so many 3* characters, and also many established 3* opponents making it pretty difficult for casual gamers, and even daily grinders to get the covers out of placement awards. I have noticed that hero points are given a little bit more freely now than when I started playing, but not nearly enough to cover the spread of characters that have been released since that time, especially when you need to hold onto almost any half decent 3* character in the hopes of a hit on that cover! If the Dev's can't give us more HP's, then they have to give us more covers, so that we actually do have a choice... As I said, I don't mind paying, but I can't really spend more than say $10 a month on a casual game...

In other words, I find the Dev's answer unsatisfying, and I think if that's the attitude they're going to go with, they might lose my support, and that of other players in a similar situation. For those of you at the top of your game, who got there through grinding more than paying, it may well be the same when you hit a real 3/4* transition!

Just my 2C.

Mikaveus

Since transitioning sucks, why not do away with it altogether? Teams that feature a 3* character don't battle 2* teams. Teams with a 4* character don't battle 3* teams.

That does away with A LOT of inequity when it comes to players with TONS of time on their hands or TONS of money to buy all the covers/iso they please. Nothing personal against said people, but they don't need to stroke their egos by beating up on teams below their weight limit.

Can I get an amen? Someone give me a bleeping amen!

fmftint

Mikaveus wrote:

Since transitioning sucks, why not do away with it altogether? Teams that feature a 3* character don't battle 2* teams. Teams with a 4* character don't battle 3* teams.

That does away with A LOT of inequity when it comes to players with TONS of time on their hands or TONS of money to buy all the covers/iso they please. Nothing personal against said people, but they don't need to stroke their egos by beating up on teams below their weight limit.

Can I get an amen? Someone give me a bleeping amen!

I would sub bracket by level not * rating

Mikaveus

fmftint wrote:

Mikaveus wrote:

Since transitioning sucks, why not do away with it altogether? Teams that feature a 3* character don't battle 2* teams. Teams with a 4* character don't battle 3* teams.

That does away with A LOT of inequity when it comes to players with TONS of time on their hands or TONS of money to buy all the covers/iso they please. Nothing personal against said people, but they don't need to stroke their egos by beating up on teams below their weight limit.

Can I get an amen? Someone give me a bleeping amen!

I would sub bracket by level not * rating

I hear you, but you gotta start somewhere and I think * rating is the easiest way right off the bat. From there, you can refine parameters by level.

ZeiramMR

_RiO_ wrote:

gamar wrote:

as I read it "adding roster sorting would be a very small improvement for a lot of work and so it's not a high priority [compared to new characters, new pve modes, etcetc]" is on its face a really uncontroversial statement and I don't see why people are getting upset over it

If I'd hand in an hour estimate for a work item detailing the implementation of sortability into a pre-existing display list, and that hour estimate exceeds 4 hours, then questions will be asked by my team lead or project manager. Making a list of data objects sortable over different properties of those data objects is trivial to the point that most modern programming languages have that functionality built-in as part of their standard libraries. Furthermore, the order in which those data objects are arranged should have absolutely zero effect on the code that handles their display.

You cannot even use the argument that there is no design for the UI yet. All it takes is a basic 'sort by' dropdown list and that is already available as a widget in the options window of the Steam version of the game, being used to select your resolution. Maybe you'd still need a touch-compatible version of that widget, but that's it.

Ofcourse, the above holds only when the game code is architected and programmed by actual developers that knew and know what they're doing, and is not a sodding "hack-and-test" mess tossed together in some Flash-deriven RAD-tool by would-be-developer staff. Given the track record of screw-ups this game has had, I'm wagering we're closer to the latter than we are to the former.

You are correct that the sorting code itself should be fairly trivial if implemented well (and their current code behind-the-scenes probably has a decent level of kruft just by being in production for a year, before assessing the ability or lack of ability of the developers). But the UI changes require both design considerations and coding, which I think are being sold short.

1) In planning how to make the change: it's a game on iOS/Android/Steam, with multiple layouts (possibly just combinations of generalized "phone" vs. "computer" dimensions with handling from mouse vs. touch-screen), but that's still a lot of combos to test for a UI change.

2) There are three screens to view your roster in the game: the Roster page, Train page, and Character Select screen for a battle. My thought for user experience is that if there is a sorting option, it should be visible on all of the pages where sorting occurs, or none of them (say the Settings/Options screen that the dev mentions in the Q&A). On my phone's client, the Roster page is already pretty cluttered, and the other two screens have space but not currently near the character thumbnails. Seems like adding to an already busy UI layout for a power-user feature, and there's the added problem of phones with smaller screens. Putting it on the Settings/Options screen has the problem of being missed by a lot of users, as they noted. Neither implementation seems like an ideal solution to me.

All-in-all, that's a fair amount of testing involved and I would personally prefer the developers prioritize other items.

Now after defending their answer for that specific question... that was a lot of ducking questions and posting non-answers on the other questions.

Mikaveus

ZeiramMR wrote:

_RiO_ wrote:

gamar wrote:

as I read it "adding roster sorting would be a very small improvement for a lot of work and so it's not a high priority [compared to new characters, new pve modes, etcetc]" is on its face a really uncontroversial statement and I don't see why people are getting upset over it

If I'd hand in an hour estimate for a work item detailing the implementation of sortability into a pre-existing display list, and that hour estimate exceeds 4 hours, then questions will be asked by my team lead or project manager. Making a list of data objects sortable over different properties of those data objects is trivial to the point that most modern programming languages have that functionality built-in as part of their standard libraries. Furthermore, the order in which those data objects are arranged should have absolutely zero effect on the code that handles their display.

You cannot even use the argument that there is no design for the UI yet. All it takes is a basic 'sort by' dropdown list and that is already available as a widget in the options window of the Steam version of the game, being used to select your resolution. Maybe you'd still need a touch-compatible version of that widget, but that's it.

Ofcourse, the above holds only when the game code is architected and programmed by actual developers that knew and know what they're doing, and is not a sodding "hack-and-test" mess tossed together in some Flash-deriven RAD-tool by would-be-developer staff. Given the track record of screw-ups this game has had, I'm wagering we're closer to the latter than we are to the former.

You are correct that the sorting code itself should be fairly trivial if implemented well (and their current code behind-the-scenes probably has a decent level of kruft just by being in production for a year, before assessing the ability or lack of ability of the developers). But the UI changes require both design considerations and coding, which I think are being sold short.

1) In planning how to make the change: it's a game on iOS/Android/Steam, with multiple layouts (possibly just combinations of generalized "phone" vs. "computer" dimensions with handling from mouse vs. touch-screen), but that's still a lot of combos to test for a UI change.

2) There are three screens to view your roster in the game: the Roster page, Train page, and Character Select screen for a battle. My thought for user experience is that if there is a sorting option, it should be visible on all of the pages where sorting occurs, or none of them (say the Settings/Options screen that the dev mentions in the Q&A). On my phone's client, the Roster page is already pretty cluttered, and the other two screens have space but not currently near the character thumbnails. Seems like adding to an already busy UI layout for a power-user feature, and there's the added problem of phones with smaller screens. Putting it on the Settings/Options screen has the problem of being missed by a lot of users, as they noted. Neither implementation seems like an ideal solution to me.

All-in-all, that's a fair amount of testing involved and I would personally prefer the developers prioritize other items.

Now after defending their answer for that specific question... that was a lot of ducking questions and posting non-answers on the other questions.

To quote Vincenzo Coccotti from True Romance: "You don't wanna show me nothin', but you're tellin me everything!"

And to address your two points in depth:

1) It's just software.

2) It's just software.

Unknown

Mikaveus wrote:

Since transitioning sucks, why not do away with it altogether? Teams that feature a 3* character don't battle 2* teams. Teams with a 4* character don't battle 3* teams.

That does away with A LOT of inequity when it comes to players with TONS of time on their hands or TONS of money to buy all the covers/iso they please. Nothing personal against said people, but they don't need to stroke their egos by beating up on teams below their weight limit.

Can I get an amen? Someone give me a bleeping amen!

Then you'd hear complains of how the 2* teams rewards suck. They want the same rewards the 3* teams get and how they feel the deserve the same reward pool even if they've only put in about 5% of the time of the maxed 3* teams.

The only reason the transition sucks is because roster slots are limited.

The ONLY reason

I have an alt account I rarely touch and by that I mean a few hours a month at most. And that account has a few 3* with 5 or more covers. With any effort what so ever you could max more but the main issue as that one is completely free to play is I have to sell off 3* covers for lack of hp.

A suggestion I'd have for devs to consider is either start out by giving away a roster slot for each unique character or give the first 20 slots for free or lastly to impose a much much cheaper 250 or so hp per slot. Hp is easy to earn as a 3* team but damn near impossible as a 1* / 2* team to keep up with slots

All vets advise new players to use ALL YOUR HP ON ROSTER SLOTS

Why? Because that aspect needs to be fixed badly

Unknown

Roster slot is not as big an issue unless you're a collector/hoarder and in that case you don't have a choice. There's no conceiveable scenario where Dr. Octopus is likely to become a MPQ powerhouse and you know they will usually hand out at least one cover before the PvE event that has him as a required character. That said I wouldn't mind if they put in a system where all characters in the current season rotation are available without any slot consideration. That is, since Dr. Octopus is in this season there should be a spot reserved for him to ensure you can use him while he's in the rotation (I'm pretty sure the featured PvE characters are only characters in the heroic token pack, not counting any newly introduced characters that haven't made it there yet), and once he gets vaulted you'll have that slot go to the limbo until he returns to the rotation again, or you can of course buy a roster slot and then you can pick up wherever you left him off when he got vaulted.

This might be more complicated than it needs to be but I don't think D3 wants everyone to have everyone so just having cheaper or even free slots isn't going to work, and I don't think you really need those except for the guys who are definitely going to be featured in PvE. For PvP this shouldn't matter because you get a loaner, but I think the featured character in PvP follows the same system anyway? You'll be free to build up the characters as long as he's relevent, and if you want that character when he's vaulted you got to pay for the roster slot.

Vhailorx

LoreNYC wrote:

Then you'd hear complains of how the 2* teams rewards suck. They want the same rewards the 3* teams get and how they feel the deserve the same reward pool even if they've only put in about 5% of the time of the maxed 3* teams.

The only reason the transition sucks is because roster slots are limited.

The ONLY reason

I have an alt account I rarely touch and by that I mean a few hours a month at most. And that account has a few 3* with 5 or more covers. With any effort what so ever you could max more but the main issue as that one is completely free to play is I have to sell off 3* covers for lack of hp.

A suggestion I'd have for devs to consider is either start out by giving away a roster slot for each unique character or give the first 20 slots for free or lastly to impose a much much cheaper 250 or so hp per slot. Hp is easy to earn as a 3* team but damn near impossible as a 1* / 2* team to keep up with slots

All vets advise new players to use ALL YOUR HP ON ROSTER SLOTS

Why? Because that aspect needs to be fixed badly

I disagree with you LoreNYC. Transition sucks because it is impossible to get a sufficient number of covers for any particular 3* character in a timely fashion. Given the number of 3*s in the game, the rate of introduction of new characters, and the low token rates in general, it takes forever for the same character to rotate back as a featured character. And vaulting exacerbates the problem.

Consider falcon, he was the featured 3* character in a pve event last month. Assume a transitioner grinds hard and gets four covers (yay alliance!). That same transitioner also played hard in the precedeing Top Gun PVE event and won another falcon cover (only 1 because it is not possible for a 2* roster to get more than top 100 in a normal pvp event). That's it for guaranteed falcon rewards for the near future. How long will it be before falcon is featured in pve again? There are 20 active 3* at any given time, about 1 pve a week, and a new 2* introduced in pve every other week (sometimes more often). So it's 10 or 20 weeks before falcon is likely to be a pve reward again. And that is if he NOT vaulted for a few months. Now that transition player has to get lucky from tokens, buy covers, or wait several months before having another chance to build falcon.

THAT is the main problem with transition. it takes months, with no guarantee of success on any particular 3*, or any 3* at all. And several major changes instituted in the past months have extended this process substantially.

limited roster slots exacerbate this problem by forcing f2p players to sell 3*s that don't fit, thus prolonging the transition even further. But the lack of any ability to build any one character in a reasonable period of time is the key problem.

As for changing the price of roster slots, all of your suggestions would be a huge improvement for the players, but they will never happen. Roster slots is a big source of $ for this game. changes that will drastically reduce the money players spend on roster slots will not happen anytime soon.

Mikaveus

LoreNYC wrote:

Then you'd hear complains of how the 2* teams rewards suck. They want the same rewards the 3* teams get and how they feel the deserve the same reward pool even if they've only put in about 5% of the time of the maxed 3* teams.

The only reason the transition sucks is because roster slots are limited.

The ONLY reason

I'm a 3* player, but many members of my alliance are 2* players trying to build their 3* characters. I can tell you they do no put in 5% of the time. I can promise you that.

I don't feel roster slots is the only reason, but it is a problem and I agree it needs fixing. I'll take any of your suggestions: lower cost, free slot when earning a new character through an event, etc.

lokiagentofhotness

I don't know how one works hard to beat 166 players with a 2* roster. Me playing the same round over and over against a 270 max team is still gonna get me negative points if i keep losing, no matter how many matches I play. Now, this isn't the fault of the veterans, if you work hard you should be rewarded. But the frustration here is working hard and repeatedly NOT getting rewarded. I think if there's a possibility that there will be advancement at some point to 3* status more people will be willing to put in the hard grind, but as it is more people just end up quitting, which really isn't good for anyone.

I feel there should be a way for transitioners to get 3* covers without it impacting the vets, but I don't know what it is. More gauntlet style PVEs with exclusively 2* rosters with cover rewards? Something?

Unknown

Fourty Fifthing the sentiment that no-one enjoys getting rid of characters they spent time building. I'd probably have liked to keep my 1* and 2* characters I levelled at the start of the game but most of them have been sold off for the roster space nowadays because outside of BoP / Combined Arms they have no worth, yet roster slots definitely do.

For gods sake, just cap the cost of slots at 500 or less. People still won't enjoy paying for them, but it won't feel like you're being penalised for being a long-term player.