State of D3

Unknown

Does anyone else find it peculiar that D3 said over half of its players started recently? But to coincide this news, they've also announced that they will be keeping the new powerful 4* coming in fast, which they have to know 1* players can't get. After reading a forum post along the lines of the death of mpq, I believe that D3 is hurting and can't keep the money come in, and putting new 4 stars out is the only possible way to try and lure veterans into paying.

Anyone have any input? I just find it to be strange that they'd release more characters with a large percent as new players.

Spoit

Sure they can get them, they're segregated in their own little cheesecake brackets

Unknown

that doesn't mean it's useful. The noobs that join alliance usually have one or two covers of the higher characters, if thst because of roster space. They can't transition, and it gets harder with every update.

Spoit

squirrel85 wrote:

that doesn't mean it's useful. The noobs that join alliance usually have one or two covers of the higher characters, if thst because of roster space. They can't transition, and it gets harder with every update.

Well sure, but twice now I've killed myself grinding lvl 300+ enemies for the bonus 4* cover in pves, and twice now I just couldn't keep up with the 2* players who couldn't even use the covers. What can you do?

Unknown

Well for sure, putting more 4* out means the whales continue to spend money. Until the whales stop doing it (because they are the only ones driving this) then that will continue.

I don't think D3 are hurting yet. I think that the issue comes when the new players realise the transition to a decent roster is very time consuming, and they leave. Whales leave over time, they either find other things to spend their money on, run out of money etc. If all these new players that come in give up within a month or two, then who replaces them? That's when D3 has an issue. Because right now they are just pissing off the middle-tier of players so there is no-one coming up through the ranks.

To use a very poor sporting analogy, it's like an NHL team relying on it's vets without drafting right for the future. You end up like the Oilers. And that isn't any good. For anyone.

brisashi

It seems like they aren't in the long term business model for this this game.

I think they are trying to get as much revenue as they can before players move on to other titles.

SnowcaTT

hermanbloom wrote:

Well for sure, putting more 4* out means the whales continue to spend money. Until the whales stop doing it (because they are the only ones driving this) then that will continue.

Almost every week you can check in here and see some "whale" retiring. If half+ of their customers joined recently, how many new whales can they get? These players can't possibly buy covers - they haven't been able to earn the first one to buy more! And they would have to become whales from nearly day one (not decide to pay later on) - otherwise they wouldn't have the roster space for these characters anyway.

A move to 4* sounds terrible - unless they essentially eliminate 1*, and move 3* drop rate to current 2* drop rate.

Unknown

Well they just buy token packs until they get a cover, then they buy HP to get more covers for a guy.

I thought that was exactly what whales did to start off, they spend money to leap right up the progression ladder?

Anyway, my point was the over-reliance on whales by the devs when they decide their strategy. Which we agree on. I think.

Unknown

The transition process is broken. I have posted repeatedly suggestions to assist them with the process.

With the current amount of characters, ISO and covers are TOO rare in the current token and reward structure systems to facilitate transitioning within a reasonable time frame.

Even if they max covered 1 3* per month (which they won't) they would fall behind 12 new characters in that time, not to mention they would not gain ground on all the existing characters as of now.

The system was great when the game first started. However, the number of characters has grown exponentially and the ISO, HP, and cover system have never been adapated for the environment with this many characters (most of which have 3 abilities).

lukewin

Don't have much time, but it seems like the snowball is rolling, and the problems are just mounting up. Choose your own end time was a great idea, but it is negated by 12 hr / 36 hr subs in PVE and dry slices and death slices in PVP. The intentions to make the game good are there, but the execution is lacking. And communication is lacking, which makes the posts that come from the devs seem great, because they come in not as often. The game is geared towards noobs it seems. On my Steam account, which I don't play that often, only really have it now because it does me no harm to keep it has the following roster.

Yellow Fury
Black, Red Hulk
Blue Dock Ock
Black Psylocke
5/3/5 IM35 lvl 32
5/5/3 Storm lvl 26
5/5 Juggernaut lvl 26

That is a pretty unbalanced roster. I am finally up to 375 HP, but it costs 400 HP to buy the first 3-pack of roster slots. I joined a Prod Sun PVE last night just to mess around. I finished Top 200 by beating the node in the main with the loaners and 1 node in Thunderbolt Mountain. If I would've finished 2 nodes, I would've finished Top 150 and got a DD blue. I wiped twice trying, and couldn't get used to playing with a mouse / the matches taking so long.

My token pull rate on my main acct is abysmal. I managed to pull dupes of the 9 3* covers I can't use, while there are over 90 3* covers I can use.

esoxnepa

They did say 56% started recently, and in the same thread, since several asked it, Will said it is because of growth of the game. So it is positive news. He mentioned retention numbers of active players were high for a mobile game as well.

So while there will always be burnout and churn in these games, the growth for MPQ means we should have another couple years to vent our frustrations.

Unknown

Sure, why would d3 lie about the state of their product? No company does that. All I'm saying is that if you look at56% since, what, September, move it back a month or two and those guys might barely be in two star land...I think the number of vets has severely dropped off. My alliance, for example, is posting similar scores to last season, and we cracked top 100 barely. This season we are ranked top 25, with not a lot else changing. It's just interesting to me, and I'm curious to see how all the vets react towards he new 4 star model of games.

And someone mentioned doing away with ones and giving 3* like they do 2, that was almost my exact thought on a "fix" but it would mean overhaul to the tutorial, and I don't see it happening.

Unknown

I don't know what their problem is but their micro transactions are one of the most expensive I've ever seen. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if it is the most expensive F2P game ever.

GrumpySmurf1002

squirrel85 wrote:

I think the number of vets has severely dropped off. My alliance, for example, is posting similar scores to last season, and we cracked top 100 barely. This season we are ranked top 25, with not a lot else changing. It's just interesting to me, and I'm curious to see how all the vets react towards he new 4 star model of games.

We're in the generally same position. Yes we reorganized but nobody is putting up X-men scores, and we're sitting top 50 fairly easily. It's a little too early to crunch the numbers (plus lack of Sim score availability makes it hard to really compare pro-rated seasons), but I don't think it's the veterans, the top 10 looks as normal as ever.

They also said the average player was on for 5 months. So if 56% are 2 months or fewer, that means the other 44% average around 9 months. I don't know what kind of numbers they had in that event, but if it's say 100k (iirc Deadpool debut was around 120k), then that's 44000 players averaging 9 months of play time. A few whales leaving wouldn't really dent that.

I don't know what's really contributing to the (potentially) lower season scores (my guess is the low scoring time slices implementation), but I don't think player atrophy is the primary source.

Phaserhawk

Just wait until we see a legacy format. That's usually what happens, because the newer players can't keep up with older players, what they will do is create seperate formats, the best prizes will be in the limited format whereas the legacy or every character type format might be good for ISO but no HP or covers, that is what I predict will happen, PvP is going to get split into 2 formats and I see PvE going Simulator like where you have to join the hard mode or normal mode not both

simonsez

Phaserhawk wrote:

Just wait until we see a legacy format. That's usually what happens, because the newer players can't keep up with older players, what they will do is create seperate formats, the best prizes will be in the limited format whereas the legacy or every character type format might be good for ISO but no HP or covers, that is what I predict will happen, PvP is going to get split into 2 formats and I see PvE going Simulator like where you have to join the hard mode or normal mode not both

This is along the lines of what I was thinking. Despite the dev's expressed confusion as to how to provide ISO to those who need to level 4s without trivializing progress for those still leveling 2s and 3s, the obvious solution is to have separate high-level ISO events that require 4s.

snlf25

stephen43084 wrote:

The transition process is broken. I have posted repeatedly suggestions to assist them with the process.

With the current amount of characters, ISO and covers are TOO rare in the current token and reward structure systems to facilitate transitioning within a reasonable time frame.

Even if they max covered 1 3* per month (which they won't) they would fall behind 12 new characters in that time, not to mention they would not gain ground on all the existing characters as of now.

The system was great when the game first started. However, the number of characters has grown exponentially and the ISO, HP, and cover system have never been adapated for the environment with this many characters (most of which have 3 abilities).

In a year they would be way farther behind than 12 covers with a new character being released every week. They severely need to dial that back. It should be 1 new character a month and only one or two should be 4*, which would make new characters special again and players would honestly feel like they have a chance to keep up. As it is now the game really feels like work more than fun sometimes. Plus I used to have a heck of a lot easier time getting covers and I figured out what the difference was. I actually won a Heroic Cover Token the other day. I used to win tons of those and I honestly couldn't remember the last time I'd got one outside of the season 10 pack prizes for reaching 4,000 points.

AxeVirtuoso

Not surprised that there are so many new players or, to say things from another point of view, less 'seasoned' (don't know the accurate word as english is not my mother tongue).

Anyway, I think this reflects that the game mechanics and progression works well when starting out. It's once the 2-3 star transition starts when problems begin. Few gamers will keep to a game where it takes months to just max out one character due to artificial rarity of covers. For example I just sold LThorch who was sitting at 2 covers. And I got those when I was maybe a month into the game. Now I'm at 6 month. Can you imagine any other game where you wouldn't be able to progress a character in five month? I can't... Of course you could do the whale thing and buy more covers but at these prices...not really.

So I think there are 3 types of players now: newbs, veterans who were lucky to start when more covers were given out to build their roster, and intermediates like me who have spent too much money on this game to simply quit, but who are getting more and more frustrated, sadly.

energythief

Interesting points in this thread. One flaw in the arguments I see over and over is that people think that whales are leaving in numbers that will hurt the game. However if that many new players are joining, there will be plenty of whales among them. Original players != the only whales.

orbitalint

Yes and no. I'd bet they are losing vets at a faster pace and new whales aren't replacing them at the same rate. That implies downward revenue trends to me. Now it just seems too much trouble to become a vet through the whale method.

Except for the occasional pve, it is really hard for newer players to grab the first three color covers of any of the staple characters needed to even become a whale right now because of how fast they are releasing characters. The characters they are releasing right now really won't allow them a great deal of success in pve or PvP. 4hor is the only one I can think of that has impacted the meta in any way recently.

Even if you wanted to max an xf to be high end competitive in pvp, you'll likely only get the first ones 6 months in from daily rewards. 6 months is a long time to keep a potential whale engaged when they'd prefer to buy their way to a roster.

From a game perspective, I'm OK with them not allowing full blown buying characters but if someone wants to drop 100 a week on this game, what would they spend it on to become successful? Cover packs (lol)? Iso (blahaha)? Packs don't even guarantee they'd get all three color of a high powered character in a certain amount of time. So what's the point in trying to spend your way to a competitive roster?

Vets (me included) benefited from having a small set of characters to start and 13 cover most of them within a few months because the rotation was so small for events. Whales did it faster and have been in maintenance mode ever since. That's not the case anymore and I'd bet potential whales lose interest long before they get to a point where they consistently spend on the game.

unpouramor

Hey guys,

This business needs revenue and they cater to those willing and with the means to spend (aka financially support D3's existence). If you aren't with them catering enough to you because you can't/don't want to pay, go find another free game that does.