The All-New PVE Refresh Times

JVReal

Trisul wrote:

Honestly JVReal, your real beef with the game is lack of content. It's not really the 8h timers. C'mon, the fact that you have to sacrifice sleep to optimize (w/3h timers) is sucky by principle.

8h timers shouldn't affect anyone's PvE rankings that drastically because the basic principles of high scoring remain the same, and it's not difficult for a 2* roster to attain T50, which is a good goal for progression. I get that you want to play the game more (ah, those were the days), but the game simply lacks compelling content right now. We're hoping that changes in the future, but grinding PvE isn't particularly "good content" more than just a time suck.

That is a good point Trisul, I wish I could uprate you more than once. The current state of the game content-wise is the biggest contributing factor to my not liking 8 hour refreshes.

As a side note, I don't sacrifice sleep with 3 hour refreshes, I double or triple clear the nodes that I am able to do before bed that will give me a refresh time <= the amount of sleep I require.

The 8 hour refresh didn't effect my ranking, I still ranked 36 in my slice while missing out a lot of play because of a weekend emergency of water in my basement. 8 hour refreshes saved my placement this weekend.

If there was more content that I could play and progress in as a transitioning, free player, I would be more than happy to play those in between my refreshes and it would keep the game lively for me. This is where non-competitive, progressional storylines will be helpful.

I wish they had more content before they removed the 3 hour refreshes.

Unknown

So if the PVE had been started one day later...instead of only giving players a 12 hour break....

Unknown

YAY the cows came home!

Unknown

Demiurge_Miles wrote:

Hey Everyone,

Since the Hunt wrapped up yesterday we've had some time to crunch the data on how the event went with the 8hr refresh times. We'd received a huge amount of positive qualitative feedback, both from people on these forums, and from our friends and family that play the game. We wanted to make sure the numbers backed it up though.

The main thing we were worried about is that a larger than average number of players would be able to play "perfectly" and get the maximum number of points possible. This would mean that we'd have a lot of people essentially tied for the top scores. Fortunately this didn't happen! Chris, one of our engineers, actually made this nice graph of the top 500 scores:



As you can see there's no plateau at the top!

What does this mean? It means that we're going to be running all PVE events with 8hr refreshes from now on! Unfortunately, it's too late to update Thick as Thieves (that would make things really weird as it's mid-run) but you can be sure that the next PVE event will run with 8hr refresh times.

8hrs is too long. The main reasons for no plateau at the top because Lthor is fully covered in most veteran players roster. They just no need to charge

If you introduce 8hrs refresh in current event i sure there are different story.

I can forsee that the PVE will all depends on final hrs charge. depends on Hp spend on health pack and wake up at 3 am to play

Unknown

Always funny when you can hear an accent in writing.

SnowcaTT

This is good news, thank you!

IReallyHatePVP

benben77 wrote:

Demiurge_Miles wrote:

(snip)



As you can see there's no plateau at the top!

What does this mean? It means that we're going to be running all PVE events with 8hr refreshes from now on! Unfortunately, it's too late to update Thick as Thieves (that would make things really weird as it's mid-run) but you can be sure that the next PVE event will run with 8hr refresh times.

8hrs is too long. The main reasons for no plateau at the top because Lthor is fully covered in most veteran players roster. They just no need to charge

If you introduce 8hrs refresh in current event i sure there are different story.

I can forsee that the PVE will all depends on final hrs charge. depends on Hp spend on health pack and wake up at 3 am to play

I am going to disagree. I think the curve might be differently....whats the term?....angled? if the rewards were, for lack of a more accurate word, fresher, but I still think that reality always has a say, and top-level plateauing(is now a verb, the wordsmithing guild approved it: ref. #51027201) will not occur.

But they will fire it off after TaT, so we'll all have to wait, hope, and see....

chaos01

Lost in this news is the fact that someone scored around 150000 in that last event. That is crazy. I thought my 90000 was decent.

kidicarus

A more useful metric would be hours spent playing a pve event.

As a developer you should be more concerned with player retention. You will lose the players who are spending an unhealthy amount of time on the game to burnout. With a 3 hour refresh, that's 8 refreshes per day and that's 4 hours a day if every refresh takes 30 minutes to clear. Especially when there are two subs running simultaneously and also grinding nodes down to dust at the end which takes anything from 3 hours to 2 hours at the end of each sub.

You guys should be focused on creating 'fun' content to encourage play rather than having players play out of compulsion to keep up.

So yeah 8 hours - or longer.

simonsez

Demiurge_Miles wrote:

What does this mean? It means that we're going to be running all PVE events with 8hr refreshes from now on!

It also means you're not accounting for the fact that The Hunt was the worst possible test to see if any plateauing happened, because too many people didn't need the high end awards, and having 25 nodes running simultaneously isn't the typical format.

Unknown

I still don't understand why it isn't 6h refresh rate if you're going to stick with events lasting 36 hours. At 8h refresh and event cycling, you need to plan for 6 different times (t0, t8, t16, t4, t12, t20) to gain optimal amount of points (and because there is so little points, being on top of that is worth so much more). With 6h refreshes, you will always have 4 times, all 12 or 36h nodes will 'click' into it.

Unless we're getting rid of 36h subs in favor of 48h. We do right? Please? Pretty please with cherry on top?

ShanePHallam

Thank you to the devs for the change and a quick implementation when seeing the results. The reactions were mostly positive as it was, and this will help the game not get stale

With plenty of PVEs having multiple subs (like The Hunt was,) the 8 hours should also appease those who want it a little bit shorter ultimately. Good move!

user311

[color=#FF0000]Demiurge_Miles[/color] wrote:

The main thing we were worried about is that a larger than average number of players would be able to play "perfectly" and get the maximum number of points possible.

Not sure I really grasp what play perfectly means? Would that be play at exactly 8hrs and not grind there after ... or grind every node down to one? I think the graph shows that a very few amount of players grinded to excess but the overall top 500 did seem to plateau between 80 and 100K. If perfectly means just playing at the 8hr mark, then the player who did that would have score significantly lower. I give myself as an example, I only played at the 8 hr marks and then grinded a couple rounds at the end of each sub... ending up at 75K.

I really like the 8hr times for "The Hunt" since there were so many nodes in the subs. It would be excessive for TaT because the smaller number of nodes.

Unknown

In the same boat as JVReal. Now that shield cooldowns have been added, PVP is off limits for 8 hours at a time. Do a run through PVE, the game says "Cool, now come back in 8 hours."

I really hope that there will be a daily PVE, otherwise there's just not enough to do in MPQ.

Lately I've just been tanking Shield sim and climbing back up for iso.

simonsez

user311 wrote:

Not sure I really grasp what play perfectly means?

I means play every node once as soon as they return to max, and then grind them all down to 1 during the final clear.

Unknown

benben77 wrote:

I can forsee that the PVE will all depends on final hrs charge. depends on Hp spend on health pack and wake up at 3 am to play

I agree its going to come down the the final 2 hours and how many stacks you can grind. But why would you pick a time slice which means you have to get up at 3am to do this final grind?

fmftint

Demiurge_Will wrote:

rbdragon wrote:

Demiurge_Miles wrote:

What does this mean? It means that we're going to be running all PVE events with 8hr refreshes from now on! Unfortunately, it's too late to update Thick as Thieves (that would make things really weird as it's mid-run) but you can be sure that the next PVE event will run with 8hr refresh times.

Would it not be possible to implement this in TaT as well, starting from the second sub on? This way at least everyone experiences the same timers and no one benefits more than another. An announcement in-game would probably be enough to make people happy and not be frustrated with a mid-tourney change - something D3 has done in the past anyway.....

That particular change couldn't be safely done live, and it would have complicated impacts on scoring. We ordinarily need to have Story events locked down close to a week ahead of time in order to test them, and while we do sometimes have to make changes live, they're risky. This would be a lot riskier than any other change we've made to events while they're running.

How did Scotland Yard going live TWO DAYS EARLY make it through internal testing?

fight4thedream

So anyone else hoping that since they decided to make Scotland Yard magically disappear they might wave their magic wand and make those refresh timers a little longer~say another 3 or 5 hours longer? *i kid i kid* (ok i'm only half joking lol)

Unknown

People who complain about having nothing to play now. Seriously??

Firstly you CAN still play, might just not be optimal.

Also you still end up playing 2-3 HOURS a day with 8 hour refreshes

Stax the Foyer

JVReal wrote:

Trisul wrote:

Honestly JVReal, your real beef with the game is lack of content. It's not really the 8h timers. C'mon, the fact that you have to sacrifice sleep to optimize (w/3h timers) is sucky by principle.

8h timers shouldn't affect anyone's PvE rankings that drastically because the basic principles of high scoring remain the same, and it's not difficult for a 2* roster to attain T50, which is a good goal for progression. I get that you want to play the game more (ah, those were the days), but the game simply lacks compelling content right now. We're hoping that changes in the future, but grinding PvE isn't particularly "good content" more than just a time suck.

That is a good point Trisul, I wish I could uprate you more than once. The current state of the game content-wise is the biggest contributing factor to my not liking 8 hour refreshes.

As a side note, I don't sacrifice sleep with 3 hour refreshes, I double or triple clear the nodes that I am able to do before bed that will give me a refresh time <= the amount of sleep I require.

The 8 hour refresh didn't effect my ranking, I still ranked 36 in my slice while missing out a lot of play because of a weekend emergency of water in my basement. 8 hour refreshes saved my placement this weekend.

If there was more content that I could play and progress in as a transitioning, free player, I would be more than happy to play those in between my refreshes and it would keep the game lively for me. This is where non-competitive, progressional storylines will be helpful.

I wish they had more content before they removed the 3 hour refreshes.

Let me preface this by saying that I'm sympathetic to your position, and am hopeful that the daily pves will provide some meaningful content for players in your position.

In the interim, though, please don't mistake a lack of milestone/ranking rewards for a lack of progression. If you're playing pvp matches but then getting knocked back down to a 400-ish point level, you're still progressing, because the ISO rewards allow you to level your characters. Even if you're at a point in your transition where you're cover-starved, rather than ISO-starved, that balance will change dramatically later on.

Take full advantage of the double ISO pvps running right now. If you get to a point where your only options are teams that look too difficult, either give it a shot with your best team and hope you get lucky, or throw some of your less developed characters at them, lose, and you'll eventually have more forgiving opponents available that you can beat. Rinse and repeat. If you have no viable characters to use the ISO on, stockpile it. You'll lose any points you get, but you'll make a bunch of ISO in the process, and it's something to do during refreshes. Telling people in your position to claw a little bit up the ladder and then get knocked back down, over and over again, isn't the most fun advice, but you will be making progress.

Also, with the current implementation, nodes hold their value pretty well even after you've cleared them (which causes an entirely different set of issues at the end of the subs). Especially when the subs are relatively short, you can clear them on something like the old 3 hr schedule and still do all right for yourself in terms of the overall rankings and the progression rewards. You probably won't be near the very top, but if you want to play on the old schedule, it's an option.

tl;dr - It's not perfect right now, but until the daily pve comes out, there is stuff you can do.