Mercing/Dropping of players in PVE

anamosity

Our Alliance hung in top 10 for 4 days. We had an even distribution of slice 1-5 so we weren't front loaded. In the final 12 hours we went from 12th to 51st. People in early time zones went to bed at 12 and woke up with daredevil. In the aftermath a team that has been together for months is even loosing grumpy/guilt ridden commanders.
Yes I guess we could have merc'ed better to clich the top 50 but as the posts here have been saying that's not the solution to this problem. It's not like an extra prof X cover is going to ruin the game, I won't be able to use him in any meaningful way other than as an essential until they come up with the next tier of DDQ in a year.

NighteyesGrisu

anamosity wrote:

Our Alliance hung in top 10 for 4 days. We had an even distribution of slice 1-5 so we weren't front loaded. In the final 12 hours we went from 12th to 51st. People in early time zones went to bed at 12 and woke up with daredevil. In the aftermath a team that has been together for months is even loosing grumpy/guilt ridden commanders.
Yes I guess we could have merc'ed better to clich the top 50 but as the posts here have been saying that's not the solution to this problem. It's not like an extra prof X cover is going to ruin the game, I won't be able to use him in any meaningful way other than as an essential until they come up with the next tier of DDQ in a year.

That's pretty much what happened to AoB in the elektra event. We were in the low top 20, and it looked like it's a lock in...then mercing started...so the past 2 events we too merced with another alliance to secure that ****, on the long run, such things will tear alliances apart, I'm afraid.

Colognoisseur

This is the unfortunate result of taking away the HP charge for Alliances.
This was what I wanted to warn against when I participated in OpPayHarder.
The fact that a team can go from 12 to 51 because they got out recruited is flat out wrong. It is not what Alliances were supposed to be.
Then again I am sure the Devs thought it would be "fun" to be able to hop around and move from Alliance to Alliance except when it destroys the team because people feel left out and it takes a team who played hard but early and lost out.

Is everybody having "fun" yet?

slidecage

NighteyesGrisu wrote:

In my open the alliance/alliance reward mechanic is broken.

Especially in 4* PVE like the current Hunt, it encourages late game mercing/alliance hopping so that a given alliance will hop over the top 50 bar. As a result alliance standings throughout most of the event are pretty much useless since it's all gonna change in late game. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about mercs. I'm not blaming them for this, since this is just how the game works at the moment, they'd be stupid not to do this.

Another effect of this is that sometimes even mid-range-scorers (say top 50 but not top 10) in the end find themselves without the alliance cover, since the top grinders hop out when it gets tight (which again is understandable, since nobody likes to lose the 3rd/4th 4* cover when they've grinded so hard).
Then there's those in the lower third of the alliance who might not post great points but worked nevertheless and sometimes risk being left without any alliance reward since they get kicked out very late in the event. (myself I'm somewhat between mid-range and low range with an expected final 80k or so points.)

So I'd like to find some solutions that might somewhat lessen these problems (unless I'm the only one that feels that way).

I guess one way would be to keep the scores of one member fixed to one alliance after a certain deadline. that way, adding a high scorer in the last minutes/hours woud do nothing for the alliance score. Another thing might be some kind of cooldown on alliance moves, etc. Do you guys have any ideas to fix this?

i asked this months ago and was flame saying, O it only effects a very small number of people here, love how when it now effect them they want it changed.

Simple way to fix this. whatever group your in after 48 hours your score is only locked to that team. meaning if you leave the team your score will no longer count. (in group totals)

thbrown81

I mentioned this in redundant thread, but will here as well.

Extending rewards to T100 alliances seems to be the best choice, and I firmly believe would also encourage more spending, which is all that really matters to D3 in the end.

The alliance hopping isn't all bad. Not everyone can grind PVE, and mercing allows PVP alliances to keep good players who hop out at the end of PVEs. Adding cool downs would just create a bunch of different complications. You would have to worry about mercing at just the right time to be able to get back to your PVP alliance without getting your PVP points locked. If you lock alliances then you're going to make the game even more stratified than it already is, because top players will just consolidate into PVP/PVE combo alliances.

Mercing w/ T100 alliance 4*s gives you:

1) Flexibility for PVP focused alliances.
2) Twice as many people buying new roster slots.
3) Twice as many people potentially buying more covers for their new 4*.
4) Five more people buying the ridiculously overprice ISO to level up their new 4*.
5) WHALES!

The T50 option gives you:
1) Grumpy alliance leaders and raging customers who finished between #51 and #60.
2) WHALES!

lukewin

It may sound like some of my responses, regarding merc'ing, sound like I am ok with the current system. It is actually the opposite. I agree with everyone that merc'ing isn't ideal, and defeats the purpose of an alliance. The system does suck, and 4* Top 50 alliance rewards sucks more.

I have just accepted the current system, as is, and try to work around it as much as I can. Learn the system, so you can work the system. Ideally, you could change the system, but until that happens, you gotta adopt and adapt. I actually spent most of my day, helping out other alliances doing moves, because I finished slice 1, and wanted to make sure my Top 50 alliance was locked in place, but then had no problem playing matchmaker.

I won 4 covers at 9 am, an alliance cover at 3 am, and didn't try him out til 4 or 5 am. He is a great support character, but way too early to tell for me right now. Of course, outside of lucky token pulls, he might be 2/2/1 for a long time. He will hopefully give me a small advantage in DA Heroic, against those that don't have him, so that I can get my 3rd Xforce black with a Top 2 finish.

JVReal

They could lock Alliances 24 hours before the end of the last slice, and D3P schedules PVP's to not end during that lockout period.

A lockout once a week for 24 hours isn't a bad thing to ask for, nor is it a hard thing to do. Other games do it all the time when they have alliance battles, and they lock out during the entire event.

simonsez

slidecage wrote:

i asked this months ago and was flame saying, O it only effects a very small number of people here, love how when it now effect them they want it changed.

Hmmm... my spidey sense tells me you're talking about me. So let me set the record straight here:

a) the thread you referred to was specifically complaining about roster swapping to get the top spot.

b) you were NOT flamed. In fact, you ended your post with "let the flaming begin" and I told you no one's going to bother to flame you because no one will care about an issue that affects 60 people out of 20,000.

c) I didn't all of a sudden find Jesus. I posted this 6 weeks ago, complaining about PvE mercing: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=23107&p=290671

d) Unless you count lack of sleep, this issue still hasn't affected me. My alliance has gotten the 4* alliance award every time. But I've been consistently clear that things have spiraled out of control. Expanding the alliance award would be the easiest way to put the brakes on it, rather than adding all sorts of new alliance movement restrictions.

e) And I still don't care about people mercing to finish #1. Groot made a couple of very late moves last night to go from #3 to #1. Good for them. Less mercs to go around for the alliances who were trying to knock us out of T50.

hex706f726368

simonsez wrote:

And speaking philosophically, how exactly is the alliance reward an "alliance" reward, when you can just put together a collection of 20 people who had a good score, and then disband them an hour later? That's not an "alliance" reward... it's just an extra individual reward for people for people who don't mind coordinating and communicating. I really don't think that's the point of having separate alliance awards.

Agree so much with this. We decided against gutting a quarter of our alliance for an extra cover this time around. We were 12th going into the last 12 hours. Unfortunately, that left us feeling good about our chances to hold onto top 50. We underestimated the player community. We dropped to 52 in the last hour of slice 5 because of the rampant swapping. Feel bad for our high scorers who stuck it out with us and didn't get the extra cover.

DrStrange-616

This killed my alliance and may well have sucked the last bit of desire to play this game from my body.

mjh

they need to look at bracketing alliances and stop this t50 alliance tomfoolery. It's complete horsehockey. D3 needs to take a hard look at themselves after this last PVE fiasco.

Blergh

I think the easiest solution would to be use sub scores, wouldn't it?

I mean you get an alliance rank for some subs.... if they just extended that to all subs, and then locked that score into the alliance rank. It would eliminate cool down, flagging, everyone would have a fair idea of the time frame they need to find the right team to join/recruit. And merc's joining late would only carry with them the sub they are currently grinding - reducing the huge changes in rank and position, but that could still serve as a boost.

Suppose it doesn't stop someone getting kicked last sub and missing out on the cover.....

And there would be other cons - but think subs would be a good way to lock scores, as scores kind recorded and seen in the system for reward purposes and give a clear cut-off point to the player.

slidecage

thbrown81 wrote:

I mentioned this in redundant thread, but will here as well.

Extending rewards to T100 alliances seems to be the best choice, and I firmly believe would also encourage more spending, which is all that really matters to D3 in the end.

The alliance hopping isn't all bad. Not everyone can grind PVE, and mercing allows PVP alliances to keep good players who hop out at the end of PVEs. Adding cool downs would just create a bunch of different complications. You would have to worry about mercing at just the right time to be able to get back to your PVP alliance without getting your PVP points locked. If you lock alliances then you're going to make the game even more stratified than it already is, because top players will just consolidate into PVP/PVE combo alliances.

Mercing w/ T100 alliance 4*s gives you:

1) Flexibility for PVP focused alliances.
2) Twice as many people buying new roster slots.
3) Twice as many people potentially buying more covers for their new 4*.
4) Five more people buying the ridiculously overprice ISO to level up their new 4*.
5) WHALES!

The T50 option gives you:
1) Grumpy alliance leaders and raging customers who finished between #51 and #60.
2) WHALES!

Pushing it to top 100 does not do a thing cause mercs will just move in and push the teams that are 110 to 98. Then what do we do, Push it to top 200, why not top 1000. Only way to stop it is to put locks in place simple as that.

thbrown81

I reject the premise that there are sufficient heavy hitters in sub T100 alliances to create chaos at the end of event. But in the 50-100 range? Tons.

simonsez

slidecage wrote:

Pushing it to top 100 does not do a thing cause mercs will just move in and push the teams that are 110 to 98. Then what do we do, Push it to top 200, why not top 1000.

The farther down you go in the alliance ranks, the less competitive and cutthroat things are. So no, the mercing around a T100 cutoff would be nowhere near as insane as it is at a T50 cutoff.

SymmeTrey

hex706f726368 wrote:

simonsez wrote:

And speaking philosophically, how exactly is the alliance reward an "alliance" reward, when you can just put together a collection of 20 people who had a good score, and then disband them an hour later? That's not an "alliance" reward... it's just an extra individual reward for people for people who don't mind coordinating and communicating. I really don't think that's the point of having separate alliance awards.

Agree so much with this. We decided against gutting a quarter of our alliance for an extra cover this time around. We were 12th going into the last 12 hours. Unfortunately, that left us feeling good about our chances to hold onto top 50. We underestimated the player community. We dropped to 52 in the last hour of slice 5 because of the rampant swapping. Feel bad for our high scorers who stuck it out with us and didn't get the extra cover.

This happened to one of the GR00T alliances in the Star-Lord event. Grootlings fell from #15 to #51 in the last 3 hours of the event. Literally 2% of the total event time was left on the clock, we were top 50 by tens of thousands of points.

Grootlings had no roster changes, we went to bed feeling good about being in 15th place with 3 hours to go in a 6 day event. We underestimated the amount of mercing and juggling that occurs in these T50 alliance events.

The current system essentially forces alliances that want to be T50 to be disloyal to their players. It hurts the community and introduces a lot of negative feelings about the game for both players and commanders.

To me, somehow "locking in" sub scores or points scored while in an alliance would fix a lot of this. I don't mind living and dying with the same 20 guys and really wish that made any kind of sense. Unfortunately, all the alliances get caught up in a "who-can-out-merc-who" game in the waning hours. Don't want to play? Fine, no cover for you or your players.

anamosity

SymmeTrey wrote:

To me, somehow "locking in" sub scores or points scored while in an alliance would fix a lot of this. I don't mind living and dying with the same 20 guys and really wish that made any kind of sense. Unfortunately, all the alliances get caught up in a "who-can-out-merc-who" game in the waning hours. Don't want to play? Fine, no cover for you or your players.

I agree with this, when the PVP meta gets out of hand they nerf the **** out of the characters in play. This is the busted pve meta, last minute merc swapping. The people that feel they need to play in pvp-centric alliances then merc out the pves, just find like minded pvp&pve alliances to join if they find a way to make this whole mess more reasonable.

This has disillusioned a lot of my alliance, commanders left, people are giving up trying to be competitive. And in terms the devs can understand: A member was talking a week ago about how she could't wait for an hp sale to go in with real money and upgrade her team. Now she's more or less quit.

Scoregasms

I still think a step in the right direction to this is to just count the top 18 out of 20 in an Alliance for scoring purposes. This doesn't stop the wholesale/mass alliance swapping, but does deter it somewhat since swapping out someone with 30k points with someone with 75k means a 45k swing. But if 18th is at 55k (which counts toward total), this is only a 20k swing.

Having 2 spots not count towards an Alliance total just makes sense since we all have a couple folks not able to fully play a pve event each week. Some of us have PVP focused folks and take it easy in PvE and vice versa. Yes, would like for this to also apply to PVP events as well.

It's not a perfect solution, but I'm not sure any notion of "locking" points to an Alliance will also fix anything. We just had folks quit mid event due to the nerf announcements and had to scramble to recruit new folks, not mercing at the end, but having "locked" points would've been problematic.

cletus1985

I would think with as many times as they've run these events the simplistic solution would be to take their data, figure out what the average score to place 50th, 10th, 1st, ....etc....etc. was and just make the alliance reward a set figure for your alliance to reach. Everyone knows going in what they have to achieve based on alliance standards and there is no hopping over an alliance that has grinded repetitively for days to steal their award.

There would still be mercs and alliance jumping, but it doesn't penalize alliances that have put in the effort and gotten to the rewards.

Individuals still have to compete for their personal ranking, therefore keeping their current system basically untouched.

thbrown81

cletus1985 wrote:

I would think with as many times as they've run these events the simplistic solution would be to take their data, figure out what the average score to place 50th, 10th, 1st, ....etc....etc. was and just make the alliance reward a set figure for your alliance to reach. Everyone knows going in what they have to achieve based on alliance standards and there is no hopping over an alliance that has grinded repetitively for days to steal their award.

There would still be mercs and alliance jumping, but it doesn't penalize alliances that have put in the effort and gotten to the rewards.

Individuals still have to compete for their personal ranking, therefore keeping their current system basically untouched.

This is so much better than any other idea. You win sir.