Ultron Destroyed my Alliance, a Lifetime Original by D3

Dauthi

I'll start with the hook, my alliance lost 4 members due to burnout. I see a similar phenomenon on the forums, so this isn't a local event. Why? The Ultron event stacked on the normal event schedule for important characters was too much for our casual/competitive players. Luckily our secondary alliance is there to help us out.

My alliance hits somewhere between top 60-100 consistently, so it is fairly casual. It consists of two types of players which I value equally. There is the hardcore players who carry us, and the casual/competitive who earn the minimum we ask for and occasionally perform extraordinarily. Both are equally valued because consistency is what matters when holding top 100, but the most importantly it leaves a feeling that you can perform low if you need to take a breather.

This feeling was destroyed by too many important events. The Ultron event pressured, for over a week, our casual/competitive members to push beyond their means. This wasn't like PVE where the gap was fairly large and the top members could carry. Instead we could see casual/competitive members progress so they felt obligated to push; if we didn't make that progression it would be their fault. When you add this pressure, along with the end of a season, several important PVPs (she hulks green, HB and SW), and a PVE offering more HBs, we were stretched thin yet still managed to take all the prizes.

The aftermath wasn't worth it however, as my introduction indicates. You can't run events side by side that are important. If you had offered older characters instead it would have relieved the stress of top 100 alliances, while allowing alliances that had no chance in Ultron nearly guaranteed prizes in those events. Instead it burned everyone out. Letting down your teammates is a big incentive, even more so sometimes than your own satisfaction.

To sum up, the event would have been perfect had it been ran as the only important event to veteran players. Please tread lightly in the future.

Unknown

This is one of the main reasons why even though i'm back, i won't get heavily into this game anytime soon...

Playing the game as an extremely casual player now can be great if you already have a decent roster, since you literally can play however you see fit without having to worry about pulling other team members down, or chasing new characters... But the minute you get into a top 100 alliance the dynamic of the game changes and for better or worst, you are kinda expected to put up points for the greater good...

Having been in your alliance in the past was great, and the way you set it up really gave people a chance to chill when needed, but sometimes MPQ just doesn't want the top 100 teams to take a break and thats sadly when we burn out...

Either way though, i have seen a lot of improvements in this game compared to just before i stopped playing, so hopefully they will keep improving on it, although not sure what it would take for me to actually want to get back into a top 100 alliance and face the inevitable grind...

Unknown

Yeah the Groots/Broots family lost some good people due to Ultron. I have been playing for as long as I have (16 months now I think) by basically going PVP with a small amount of PVE on the side. I think a very, very small percentage of the human population could operate on the developers timeframes for any real length of time. It's just not a healthy way to live really.

The guys that we lost basically are all or nothing personalities. Guess I'm just lucky as I am fine with top 50 in events and going "all that effort in PVE for one or two covers, hell no".

Whilst players continue to come in and try and compete in every event running, the path of the game will remain the same. Have said countless times before, the only way it changes is if people down tools on specific events. But people don't. They aim for everything, they burn out, they leave, they get replaced.

Wintersmith

Nobody forced you to play all events. You (as an alliance or individual player) made the decision to try and get everything at once. You got greedy and some players burnt out because of that. So what that EoS has also HB as reward at the time as the Ultron event? Maybe D3 wanted to also give a chance to get those HB covers to the players not in hardcore alliance.
I'm just a casual player in a casual alliance, so peer pressure wasn't an issue in the Ultron grind for me. I have made a conscious decision about my roster and I'll only push for some particular covers and save my energy for the long haul.
Still the Ultron events were tiring and too time consuming for my taste.

Phillipes

Agreed with OP.
Mine group also lost several people who went casual / retired completely due to burnout. I also dont like so many simultanious event running at the same time. But for unknown reason, D3 is doing that more and more often.

MarvelDestiny

Hi. I'm MD, and I'm a MPQ addict.

I have watched my alliance roster rotate regularly for months. The pressure to put up points is significant and our Commanders diligently rotate out those that are not holding their end of the bargain. That always bothered me but I understood. However, when I joined the alliance it was billed as a casual group whose only requirement was daily play for the daily bonus. Over a few weeks the alliance morphed into a competitive group with both PVP & PVE minimums. It wasn't what I bargained for but I consistently put my share on the table.

Then Ultron hit. Bam! The servers went nuts. I had a lot of connection issues throughout both runs of AvU. I did respectable for all the problems I had and we managed to kick his shiny butt through all 8 nodes. But my connection and server issues continued during the second run and at the start of it I was kicked by a commander to make room for a merc.

Don't get me wrong. I understand why I was kicked and I don't take it personally (for the most part), but it was still a **** thing to do. Luckily, I was able to slip into a sister alliance and all is good.

My point is why. Why do we do all of this in the pursuit of covers? Because that's what it boils down to. A single cover out of 13 needed to spec out a character. Characters, I might add that become more and more trivial everyday due to nerfing and the on-going character explosion. This driving need of alliances to acquire the covers in every event is skirting madness. We just can't do it all anymore.

Anyway, I digress. Ultron was fun for about five minutes. Then it became a decent into the 7th circle of hell. It was a boring grind...take down boss, clear a node filled with annoying, cheating goons and repeat...oh good, a Prime node is open. Fight a Prime with his annoying cheating goons. Repeat ad nauseum. The worse part was, it felt like an obligation. I had to take down Ultron as many times as possible to do my part for the alliance and maybe even a few more times to cover for alliance mates.
Then I get to open my tokens to enjoy the new 2*'s...yippie!

I'm so glad Ultron is over. Don't get me wrong; Devs, thank you for working on this and bringing us the fresh content we've been asking for. I enjoyed it initially but please tweak it before you run it again.

Seriously, I'd rather do my taxes than face Ultron again anytime soon.

Ugh, this was a wee bit long. (I guess I need a new hobby.) Thanks for reading.

Colognoisseur

This has been an interesting question for all alliances to consider.
Even if you are semi-casual it is probably true an Alliance wants to place t100 most of the time.
In the first few seasons those semi-casual alliances could pretty confidently be carried by a few hardcore members at the top.
I think especially with the last two or three seasons that is less of a certainty.
The changes in PvP have led to decreased scoring and so less margin for the more casual members slack to be picked up
That means more competition especially at the desired cover breakpoint of t100.
I am wondering if it is possible to have a t100 semi-casual alliance anymore because of these changes.
If you don't have a solid core of 10-15 really working a PvP or PvE I don't think t100 is a given anymore.
If it takes >10 to t100 there will eventually be resentment for those semi-casual players from the hardcore and the semi-casual for the hardcore pushing them when they don't feel like playing.

For myself I started with a semi-casual Alliance in Retribution and we lasted for 10 seasons. I have now fully transitioned to a semi-hardcore team in DeadpoolsTacos which I think I need to continue playing the game I want to play.

I am sorry Dauthi that the pace of things has cost you members but I suspect it just accelerated an inevitability.

Unknown

Someone in the suggestion forum found the original quote about how alliance is meant to be 'something extra and not essentia' or something along these lines. What's scary is that I think devs still think this is true. This is something I see in a hardcore genre where the devs just think it's okay to be a loser because they play the game and they sure don't win everything, never mind that it's easy to be a loser when you know you designed the game and could get anything you want in the game if you really wanted to. If MPQ is supposed to be this super hardcore alliance thing then where are some global channels so we can actually recruit people via the game itself? Where can we run the 3am surprise drug, err, MPQ test to see a member lives up to how hardcore he claims? You can't even scroll your alliance's leaderboard on Ultron and people are supposed to be super hardcore while not knowing roughly what 1/4 of the alliance's score is at any given point (someone in #10 can see #1-#15)?

MPQ needs to make up its mind on how hardcore it is supposed to be, especially with alliances. As far as I can tell alliances are indeed implemented like an afterthought and devs are saying 'it's not our problem people take this too seriously' but it is their problem. Either you give people the tools necessary to deal with alliance level stuff (recruiting interface and a scrollable interface would be a good start, probably would need to see your member's play pattern/timezone too) or make it something extra like it originally is. And no the only initial method to obtain some new 4* is not 'something extra'. Even the extra cover 4* on top of a normal 4* release isn't 'something extra' unless devs are blind to all the craziness that happens at the alliance level on every new 4* release PvE event.

puppychow

Just to add something to Phantron's comment re: developer mindset. It was amusing to see, when I first started playing, pve nodes refreshing at 2.5 hours. Remember those days? And players would look at the top of the leaderboard, and wonder if players have lives outside of MPQ. When nodes were lengthened to refresh at 8 hours, D3 noted part of the reason as basically to encourage a more healthy lifestyle for players (including sleep). Yet, when you see major events being placed side by side, it makes the veteran players wonder if D3 decided revenue increase (via sale of health/cover packs) is more important than ensuring a healthy player base.

Unknown

puppychow wrote:

Just to add something to Phantron's comment re: developer mindset. It was amusing to see, when I first started playing, pve nodes refreshing at 2.5 hours. Remember those days? And players would look at the top of the leaderboard, and wonder if players have lives outside of MPQ. When nodes were lengthened to refresh at 8 hours, D3 noted part of the reason as basically to encourage a more healthy lifestyle for players (including sleep). Yet, when you see major events being placed side by side, it makes the veteran players wonder if D3 decided revenue increase (via sale of health/cover packs) is more important than ensuring a healthy player base.

Health pack is never going to be a significant revenue generator unless they get rid of boosts, shields, and a whole mess of guaranteed rewards (say, only T1-10 gets a 3* cover everyone else gets tokens) because all those methods are way cheaper to get rewards than buying health packs. If you work out the math on the health pack you need it is generally much cheaper to just buy the covers directly as long as you have 1/1/1 let alone spending money on the HP-efficient methods. And I don't think they ever intended this way. They're just looking at those 5 concurrent events and say, 'you don't have to win everything, I sure don't win everything'. D3 said they formed their own alliance to playtest Ultron, but there's no way they cleared Ultron on round 8 on part 2. If they did that, that would explain why the rest of the event sucked because obviously nobody was doing anything during the week they attempted to beat round 8 on part 2. I doubt they even beat round 8 on part 1 because while that's not that hard, the time commitment is significant and again would easily push deadlines way back if they took the week to make sure they hit round 8. Now, it's okay that the devs cannot beat the content they made since their job isn't to consume that content, but as the content provider you can't just say 'all you have to do is walk away from it like me' either. D3's stance has always been 'we have no idea that our game encourages people to kill themselves/each other to place well', even though you don't have to look very far to see an example of this happening, and it's getting kind of absurd now. Sure, I know they never intended for people to kill each other/themselves, but they should know that this is what the game is doing in some of the most competitive events. And it is in their interest that people don't kill themselves over these events so that they'll stick around and spend more money on the game.

Dauthi

Wintersmith wrote:

Nobody forced you to play all events. You (as an alliance or individual player) made the decision to try and get everything at once. You got greedy and some players burnt out because of that. So what that EoS has also HB as reward at the time as the Ultron event? Maybe D3 wanted to also give a chance to get those HB covers to the players not in hardcore alliance.
I'm just a casual player in a casual alliance, so peer pressure wasn't an issue in the Ultron grind for me. I have made a conscious decision about my roster and I'll only push for some particular covers and save my energy for the long haul.
Still the Ultron events were tiring and too time consuming for my taste.

The problem is, if you are a competitive alliance you can't pass new 3*s and new 4*s. It's not about being greedy, it's about not falling behind. Honestly though, I had told my alliance to only focus on 1 of the 3 events, and put some time into a second (Ultron then HB PVE) if they had time. In the end they all put plenty of points in the 3rd event too (SW pvp) without me even asking. Camaraderie is a powerful thing.

Phantron wrote:

Someone in the suggestion forum found the original quote about how alliance is meant to be 'something extra and not essentia' or something along these lines. What's scary is that I think devs still think this is true. This is something I see in a hardcore genre where the devs just think it's okay to be a loser because they play the game and they sure don't win everything, never mind that it's easy to be a loser when you know you designed the game and could get anything you want in the game if you really wanted to.

Yeah, new covers definitely aren't "extra," they are an overwhelming edge against other alliances and if a top 100 alliance cannot obtain them, their alliance doesn't have the firepower to continue to get alliance rewards and decent personal rewards. If you can't keep this edge you lose all your hardcore players, in which case your alliance drifts towards top 250.

The ultron event ran side by side by an event giving SW, and another giving HB. That was absolutely insane and unheard of.

slidecage

i loved the event and dont see any problem with running it along the side of the PVE and PVP under one change.. DROP THE AI of the game and the health of ultron. Turn it into a deadpool daily where everyone playing like 20-30 mins a day would make it to the final stage with no problems.

In the 2nd event after stage 5 ultron was so freaking powerful and the health was so high people were just feeding Level 1 people to him to get the Ess nodes to open to try to get rewards that way

Unknown

slidecage wrote:

In the 2nd event after stage 5 ultron was so freaking powerful and the health was so high people were just feeding Level 1 people to him to get the Ess nodes to open to try to get rewards that way

Why not just retreat?

Unknown

shade_tree wrote:

slidecage wrote:

In the 2nd event after stage 5 ultron was so freaking powerful and the health was so high people were just feeding Level 1 people to him to get the Ess nodes to open to try to get rewards that way

Why not just retreat?

Retreat with full health doesn't work. You can retreat after taking damage, or you can just watch a level 1 team die horribly.

forch

Dauthi wrote:

Wintersmith wrote:

Yeah, new covers definitely aren't "extra," they are an overwhelming edge against other alliances and if a top 100 alliance cannot obtain them, their alliance doesn't have the firepower to continue to get alliance rewards and decent personal rewards. If you can't keep this edge you lose all your hardcore players, in which case your alliance drifts towards top 250.

This is the issue. Missing an event reward cripples you for the next event, which cripples you for the next event. Either you stay on the train or you get way off. Unfortunately, it also cripples your alliance mates. Of all of the elements of MPQ that are truly destructive, the alliance structure is the worst (when it should be the best). Instead of a group of like minded folks that enjoy banter and trading ideas, it is a tool for social pressure to get players to spend more time and money on the game. Making Alliances a nice perk (e.g., a few ISO and HP) would completely change the dynamics of the game for the better. As it doesn't take a genius to figure this out, we can only assume that this is done intentionally.

Der_Lex

forch wrote:

Instead of a group of like minded folks that enjoy banter and trading ideas, it is a tool for social pressure to get players to spend more time and money on the game.

Although I don't disagree with the negative side-effects of alliances, I do think that a good alliance manages to turn the latter into the former, though. 50%, if not more, of my enjoyment of this game comes from being in an alliance with awesome people who are a lot of fun to hang out with in chat, and who don't bite your head off if you miss/ don't score high in the occasional event due to real life priorities. Our alliance still manages to score high enough to consistently hit top 100 and often even top 50 in both PvP and PvE, but with zero internal pressure: we all play as much as we want to.

That being said, it's still making the best of a bad situation, and the way characters are released does force you to put effort into getting characters you're not interested in, simply because they might be required to score high enough in an event for a character that you do want.

Unknown

forch wrote:

Of all of the elements of MPQ that are truly destructive, the alliance structure is the worst (when it should be the best). Instead of a group of like minded folks that enjoy banter and trading ideas, it is a tool for social pressure to get players to spend more time and money on the game. Making Alliances a nice perk (e.g., a few ISO and HP) would completely change the dynamics of the game for the better. As it doesn't take a genius to figure this out, we can only assume that this is done intentionally.

I'm truly sorry to hear that you're apparently in a terrible alliance. There are plenty of alliances with realistic expectations of their members, commanders that are supportive without slave drivers, and absolutely no drivers for spending money. You can find many such alliances listed in the forum ads.

Unknown

My alliance lost a few players between round 1 & 2. There are around 1/3 of the team that play pretty hardcore, 1/3 that just get by, and 1/3 that are new due to constant cuts from commanders. Some of the hardcores got sick of carrying the team, and some of the newbs got kicked for not playing enough. When I saw we weren't going to even complete the first round I knew we had no hope for the second - but, strangely, the commanders in my alliance nagged us all into playing it hard as we could. We cleared round 6 but none of us had touched anything else (PvE or PvP) to do it. Now the commanders are complaining that no one has been playing the PvP events in the season, and a few more people left/been kicked. All that trouble for 1 cover for a 4* character - which is about as useful as a car with 1 wheel.

forch

shade_tree wrote:

I'm truly sorry to hear that you're apparently in a terrible alliance. There are plenty of alliances with realistic expectations of their members, commanders that are supportive without slave drivers, and absolutely no drivers for spending money. You can find many such alliances listed in the forum ads.

Your statement is untrue and shows your ignorance. My last two alliances were both wonderful groups of people. I was in Dauthi's Shake n Bake, but left when I decided that I didn't want to put in the time for PvE (they are competitive in both PvP and PvE, so I would have been dead weight on half of their activities). I would have retired at that point but I found Nirvana, a great competitive PvP alliance with no focus on PvE. With the recent changes to the game, I don't want to put in the time for competitive PvP, so again chose to leave (once they had a replacement). Perhaps you are comfortable mooching off others, but most of us are not.

Unknown

Dauthi wrote:

Wintersmith wrote:

Nobody forced you to play all events. You (as an alliance or individual player) made the decision to try and get everything at once. You got greedy and some players burnt out because of that. So what that EoS has also HB as reward at the time as the Ultron event? Maybe D3 wanted to also give a chance to get those HB covers to the players not in hardcore alliance.
I'm just a casual player in a casual alliance, so peer pressure wasn't an issue in the Ultron grind for me. I have made a conscious decision about my roster and I'll only push for some particular covers and save my energy for the long haul.
Still the Ultron events were tiring and too time consuming for my taste.

The problem is, if you are a competitive alliance you can't pass new 3*s and new 4*s. It's not about being greedy, it's about not falling behind. Honestly though, I had told my alliance to only focus on 1 of the 3 events, and put some time into a second (Ultron then HB PVE) if they had time. In the end they all put plenty of points in the 3rd event too (SW pvp) without me even asking. Camaraderie is a powerful thing.

Phantron wrote:

Someone in the suggestion forum found the original quote about how alliance is meant to be 'something extra and not essentia' or something along these lines. What's scary is that I think devs still think this is true. This is something I see in a hardcore genre where the devs just think it's okay to be a loser because they play the game and they sure don't win everything, never mind that it's easy to be a loser when you know you designed the game and could get anything you want in the game if you really wanted to.

Yeah, new covers definitely aren't "extra," they are an overwhelming edge against other alliances and if a top 100 alliance cannot obtain them, their alliance doesn't have the firepower to continue to get alliance rewards and decent personal rewards. If you can't keep this edge you lose all your hardcore players, in which case your alliance drifts towards top 250.

The ultron event ran side by side by an event giving SW, and another giving HB. That was absolutely insane and unheard of.

Couldn't agree more about the cover chase for top 100 Alliances...

basically if you want to stay competitive in this game, the only way is to earn new covers... the minute you miss one new character, you'll be at a disadvantage for at least one event, its just the way this game always has been, and one of the few things that i see hasn't changed since the inception of the game basically...

The only way i see life for alliances easier is if they expand at the very minimum the alliance rewards structure so that more people over all can be rewarded with better covers, and those in more causal alliances don't need to rely as heavily on their hardcore members to help them score points...

Not to mention, i'm sure expanding the reward structure is probably easier than coding some new type of game mode etc... plus no real issues with needing to balance the game per se, so to me at least, it seems like a win / win for all sides?

-EDIT-

The reason i'm not asking for the single player rewards to be expanded is because however much effort a single player wants to put into this game is their business, but i think when we're working as a team for a greater cause then our own, i think the players involved should be rewarded fairly for their efforts to help other players by going above and beyond what they need to score (for top tier rewards)...

Eddiemon

Dauthi wrote:

My alliance hits somewhere between top 60-100 consistently, so it is fairly casual. It consists of two types of players which I value equally. There is the hardcore players who carry us, and the casual/competitive who earn the minimum we ask for and occasionally perform extraordinarily.

Everyone defines 'casual' by what they do. But top 60-100 with minimums isn't casual by any reasonable definition. Having to play every 36 hours isn't casual. It may not be as strenuous as is required for top 10, but it's more strenuous than 95%+ of the playerbase.