What's Wrong With MPQ (And It's Community)...

Unknown

Buret0 wrote:

It's funny, in my 34 years of life, I've only ever played two games that ever had developers actually interact with the community. Most of the time, I would just play the game, completely oblivious of what the developers were planning and the developers completely oblivious of what I thought about their game.

I don't know when this changed, but obviously it is a good thing with respect to developing a community and understanding what the community wants in order to keep people playing and happy.

On the other hand, it creates these expectations that the developers should serve the community, especially the forum active community. In both of the games that I played that had developer involvement in online forums, this eventually divided the community with respect to proposed and implemented changes. The developer tried to please too many different people and thus broke from their own vision for the game.

The changes drove away vets and made the game far too difficult for newcomers to get into. Many of the vets stopped playing the game but continued to login to the forums to spout their discontent for the way the game had changed and about why they had quit (or were going to quit, or would never spend another dollar on them).

In my day (being the days where games were developed in isolation), I wouldn't write letters to the developers when I grew tired of their game. I wouldn't go to the place where I bought the game to complain about how much money I spent on the game and to discourage other people from playing it.

I would just pick up a new game and forget about the old one. If one of my friends asked me about the game, I would tell them about it, but I certainly wouldn't offer my opinion about it, unsolicited to strangers.

Then again, in the past, when you were in the middle of your Super Mario 3 run, Nintendo wouldn't update the game and decide to nerf Tanooki Suits (which is really the 4* version of the Leaf power-up). Then again, I never called my friends to complain that I pulled a frog suit token from my mushroom hut reward either.

Community involvement is both empowering and potentially treacherous waters to tread. I was happy playing this game, completely oblivious to the other people playing it and what changes were coming down the pipe. I believe that the majority of the casual players will never find this website or even ever bother looking for it. They will play the game, or they won't. I'm guessing that many of them were far more frustrated by the Ultron event server errors than the hardcore players, because they had no idea what was going on or whether anything was ever going to be done about it.

However, once the developers let the genie out of the bottle, they created expectations with respect to community involvement, communication, and becoming part of the vision for the future of this game. Now the developers are stuck with these expectations and risk alienating the hardcore MPQ gamers if they fail to live up to them.

It is a tough boat to be in... but it is a mess that they made for themselves.

Good luck to the team. You will need it.

Here's why I think people stick around and complain.

Have you ever seen Jumper? Jumper was meant to be one of the most original, most interesting movies ever. In a time where no comic book movies were coming out regularly, suddenly there was this movie about a guy who could teleport. Even more interesting, he seemed to be one of many teleporters, and there was this ancient cult that chased after them through their "jump scars". If that doesn't sound awesome to you, I don't know how anything comic related would.

But then they made the protagonist a huge selfish ahole, all the secondary characters uninteresting, and gave the villain part to Samuel Jackson spouting dialog that alternated between complete cliches and incoherent nonsense. They crammed in a love interest played by a very disinterested Mila Kunis and they made the plot go nowhere.

I always complain about Jumper. Not because it was a bad movie, there are tons of bad movies, and I love many. I hate Jumper because it was meant to be spectacular. It could have given birth to the age of comic book movies way before Marvel started their money train, but instead everyone involved stopped caring, and it ended up being a mess.

MPQ could be awesome. It could be truly the best Marvel game on mobile. Get a team that plans way ahead and hire experienced designers, consult veterans heavily, get beta servers to test new content, release new pve content every couple months and have some of it be really hard and hugely rewarding, and some of it be easy. Have more than one mode of pvp. Continue to work on the UI and listen to the costumer base whenever they make updates intently, talking to them and weighting their options. Cater to newcomers heavily, but have something rewards continued loyalty. And I'm not talking about 3 Dino covers after a YEAR of playing this. They don't even have to start on any of this tomorrow or soon, they just have to tell us that they're working on one or more of these and everyone would be much happier.

But instead we get to watch this thing that many of us loved and many of us still love being slowly driven into the ground because of greed and/or incompetence, or just because people don't care that much. This is what pisses people off. Wasted potential. Not bad games.

Unknown

ArkPrime wrote:

But instead we get to watch this thing that many of us loved and many of us still love being slowly driven into the ground because of greed and/or incompetence, or just because people don't care that much. This is what pisses people off. Wasted potential. Not bad games.

There are a lot of games that are far worse than MPQ and it's not even worth my time to complain about them because they just suck and I don't play them to begin with. This game always seems to be one great idea short of great success. Maybe it's not going to be a Candy Crush Saga since the learning curve is surprisingly hard but I think if the game just has one more great idea then nobody would ever have to worry about the game going under due to a lack of revenue, or having The Hunt ran again because they don't have the resources to add new content (where's the continuation of the Dark Reign PvE stuff anyway???)

Recently I've seen some days for MPQ's daily estimate went close to $40K on thinkgaming.com. Yes I know dev always say don't trust the external sites but I've never seen MPQ go up to that range unless there happened to be a sales and I know there aren't any HP sales recently, so I guess they must be doing something right (weekly buffs? streamlined PvE? Ultron?) but they really need to build upon this momentum because you can see there's a period of lull where MPQ's sort of just hanging there, which isn't really that surprising since nothing really interesting came up for a pretty long period of time prior to the Ultron event.

Pylgrim

ArkPrime wrote:

GothicKratos wrote:

*Forums ask to have insight on characters before they are released so that they can analyze them in hopes that they get fixed pre-release and not post-release.

...did this happen? Far as I know people just started poking around the code and finding stuff that was going to be released next, and posting it. Some forumites got excited about it do IceIX started posting "releasing next" characters.

The problem with doing something like that you take responsibility for it. If you're going to show your cards before the characters are released, then obviously you should be careful that you're showing the final version. If you wait until there are a bunch of pages of comments then change the character, it looks a lot like you read the comments and said "Oh that's right, let me squash that interaction", even if nothing of the sort is going on (which in turn smacks of amateurism and lack of testing)

In my mind the smarter way to do it is to continue to let people poke around in the code, and when they post the characters before they're finished, you get to go "oh we didn't post anything, some dude did. How can you be disappointed at us when you're the ones doing it to yourselves?"

The other smart thing would be to explain the genius strategy behind releasing highly experimental features Friday afternoon right before everyone in the company goes home for the weekend/holidays. I'm sure that has some kind of explanation behind it, I'd just like to know what it is.

Every time IceX advised that the characters were in pre-release form and should be taken with a grain of salt. In fact Prof X's nerf shows that even though when they had a "good for show" version of the character to reveal, they were still heavily testing him which revealed the necessity for a tone-down. The ensuing outrage by some of the community was unacceptable because no one lost any investment from that "nerf".

simonsez

Pylgrim wrote:

The ensuing outrage by some of the community was unacceptable because no one lost any investment from that "nerf".

I'd hate to think that as human beings, the only times we're allowed to profess outrage is when something harms us financially...

Unknown

simonsez wrote:

Pylgrim wrote:

The ensuing outrage by some of the community was unacceptable because no one lost any investment from that "nerf".

I'd hate to think that as human beings, the only times we're allowed to profess outrage is when something harms us financially...

If you think everyone is like that maybe it says more about your life and the people you know than it does about human beings. Most of the changes that effected the all lot of the players were financially motivated by the company that make MPQ, so it makes sense to feel aggrieved from a similar position.

I could give you a list of the things I feel outrage at, but they don't relate to the game and this forum, so I'll save them for another time and place.

Pylgrim

simonsez wrote:

Pylgrim wrote:

The ensuing outrage by some of the community was unacceptable because no one lost any investment from that "nerf".

I'd hate to think that as human beings, the only times we're allowed to profess outrage is when something harms us financially...

... or physically, or emotionally, or any harm at all. Because some developers found out that an unreleased comic character in a mobile 3-match game was too powerful and needed to be toned down to ensure balance and avoid nerfing after the release? Anyone would have to be a special kind of human being to feel harmed or get offended by that. Can't imagine they have a very long life after all the terrible upsets whenever a movie cuts out scenes that were shown in a previous trailer!

Unknown

Gothic,

Though I do appreciate the time you put to develop your point of view, it remains your point of view.
You are quite right overall in the "best world there is".

However :

For months, we've had bad communication from the devs, bad or no compensation... You know the story. Doesn't help building trust within the community. Add to this a forum is a media where people are more bound to complain... You see the results.

When the forum was on fire, the devs were not trying to appease the riot, they either kept silent or were giving canned answers that did not mean much.

David Moore was supposed to be the solution to our problems. Though David's dedication was perfect, he was a spokesperson and had no power of initiative whatsoever. He hardly could express his own opinion, he had to stick to D3's policies and strategies (which is absolutely correct of course). So he was not the solution overall (broken promise).

The community lost confidence in the dev team, and it always takes time to regain confidence.

September and October were probably the best months of MPQ in 2014 (X-Force buff, Anniversary...).

Then, on and off, we've had a mix of awesome, good, bad and terrible changes. Most of which were going against what the community was expecting. Leaving aside some recurring concerns (like scaling in PvE...).

Lately, they've made major changes to the game (seed teams, MMR) which make progression very difficult. Health Packs are the new collateral problem, the pace of released went up, leading to burn out (though they said earlier they understood we were burnt out in the past).

I hope they are going to do something, because many players are going casual. Not that this is a problem, but a casual player is mostly F2P...

At last, and this is probably the most important matter : addiction.

When you build a game around addiction, and make it addictive to the extreme, don't expect your customers to act "reasonably". They react according to the level of frustration they are going through.

I've chosen to be casual myself, until something is done to balance all the late changes that turned this game into "work".

So, now that the addiction is stopped, frustration has stopped, and now, I just do not care. I am playing, enjoy the company of my Alliance mates.

D3 has (temporarily ?) lost me as a paying customer. I'm not the only one.

I have hopes in Kabir. I see him as someone responsible, thoughtful, courageous and careful about his customers. The other devs are "polite politicians"...

esoxnepa

Buret0 wrote:

It's funny, in my 34 years of life, I've only ever played two games that ever had developers actually interact with the community.

Yet, you are younger and must have played far fewer games than many of us.

In the early days, we were all the developers. MUDs had individual flavor depending on the university hosting it. Games had to be modified and recompiled to run on your specific hardware. The BBSs were loaded with unique games. Weekends and late nights at universities, all types of Car Wars and Flight Simulators launched. Ping mattered.

When a game was good, we told the developers in an email, which was right there in the code, or made mention at how nice it was at the next symposium. They became our demigods.

We had game stores. If a game was terrible, everyone let the store owner know, who let the regional managers know, who let the publisher know, who let the developers go. If the game was good, you can be sure we let everyone know, so that it would sell, so there would be a sequel, so that we could play more of it.

Access and feedback were common, until the pseudo monopolies of the publishing houses in the 2000s. Even the best developers and the best games could be gutted by the upper levels for a perceived slight.

The world has turned again, and we again have access to provide feedback, and for our dollars to be directed to the best games. Only now, feedback is faster and accessible to those without the knowledge of the effort the craft takes. Pressure on the development staff comes both from those that love the game and would see it grow and from those who control the IP and demand ever increasing profits.

Crunch Time is now all the time. So provide constructive feedback, along with praise, and try to be patient as game evolution takes time.

Malcrof

esoxnepa wrote:

Buret0 wrote:

The BBSs were loaded with unique games. Weekends and late nights at universities, all types of Car Wars and Flight Simulators launched. Ping mattered.

Oh to play Trade-wars and The Pit again!

Unknown

arktos1971 wrote:

Gothic,

Though I do appreciate the time you put to develop your point of view, it remains your point of view.
You are quite right overall in the "best world there is".

However :

For months, we've had bad communication from the devs, bad or no compensation... You know the story. Doesn't help building trust within the community. Add to this a forum is a media where people are more bound to complain... You see the results.

When the forum was on fire, the devs were not trying to appease the riot, they either kept silent or were giving canned answers that did not mean much.

David Moore was supposed to be the solution to our problems. Though David's dedication was perfect, he was a spokesperson and had no power of initiative whatsoever. He hardly could express his own opinion, he had to stick to D3's policies and strategies (which is absolutely correct of course). So he was not the solution overall (broken promise).

The community lost confidence in the dev team, and it always takes time to regain confidence.

September and October were probably the best months of MPQ in 2014 (X-Force buff, Anniversary...).

Then, on and off, we've had a mix of awesome, good, bad and terrible changes. Most of which were going against what the community was expecting. Leaving aside some recurring concerns (like scaling in PvE...).

Lately, they've made major changes to the game (seed teams, MMR) which make progression very difficult. Health Packs are the new collateral problem, the pace of released went up, leading to burn out (though they said earlier they understood we were burnt out in the past).

I hope they are going to do something, because many players are going casual. Not that this is a problem, but a casual player is mostly F2P...

At last, and this is probably the most important matter : addiction.

When you build a game around addiction, and make it addictive to the extreme, don't expect your customers to act "reasonably". They react according to the level of frustration they are going through.

I've chosen to be casual myself, until something is done to balance all the late changes that turned this game into "work".

So, now that the addiction is stopped, frustration has stopped, and now, I just do not care. I am playing, enjoy the company of my Alliance mates.

D3 has (temporarily ?) lost me as a paying customer. I'm not the only one.

I have hopes in Kabir. I see him as someone responsible, thoughtful, courageous and careful about his customers. The other devs are "polite politicians"...

yeah non-ultron compensation was a joke

Buret0

esoxnepa wrote:

Buret0 wrote:

It's funny, in my 34 years of life, I've only ever played two games that ever had developers actually interact with the community.

Yet, you are younger and must have played far fewer games than many of us.

In the early days, we were all the developers. MUDs had individual flavor depending on the university hosting it. Games had to be modified and recompiled to run on your specific hardware. The BBSs were loaded with unique games. Weekends and late nights at universities, all types of Car Wars and Flight Simulators launched. Ping mattered.

Oh no, I totally remember the days of dialing in to a local BBS to play Legend of the Red Dragon, Falcon's Eye (was that what it was called? I remember it as Falcon something... it was essentially the precursor to the Game of War style games where you build up armies and then send them out to attack other BBSs), and some game where you explored space and traded goods.

But I wasn't involved at any point in giving feedback to the BBS about the game, though where the game was customizable or where mods existed, we might discuss those options on the message board.

Unknown

GothicKratos wrote:

This is going to be one of those "the good, the bad, and the ugly" things. I want to address three things; the community, the developers, and what we both need to do to improve our relationship.

I'm going to start with us, as a community, because this is going to be a long post and this is what we can directly impact.

The Community (aka the ugly)

First and foremost, when something happens we don't like, we need to be more constructive. There's a lot of players here that are extremely smart and regularly put together very thought out, insightful pieces on these forums. We need to get back to that. Think of it in real world terms; when you're at work and you have some snot nosed brat in your face with a complaint, you're less likely to really give that guy the benefit of the doubt, right? But when the person is sincere and at least level-headed about it, you're more likely to go above and beyond for that person, right? There's plenty of things I think need to be examined in MPQ right now, as a game, but I just don't see the need to be aggressive about it.

Secondly, we need to stop biting the have that feeds us. If you want someone to hand you something, they should not have to worry about retribution for doing so. Here's a few examples;

*Forums ask to have insight on characters before they are released so that they can analyze them in hopes that they get fixed pre-release and not post-release. IceIX starts posting spoiler-free versions of upcoming characters for the community to both theorycraft whom it is and theorycraft good pairing. Win-Win, right? Until the first time someone was adjusted pre-release - Professor X comes around and there's a mini-apocalypse because he was "nerfed before he even got released!!129171!". Same thing happened to another character (can't think of who it was off-hand tbh). Do you see the ridiculous amount of irony here?

*Forums complain about the incredible amount of ISO-8 required to make a character playable. Developers chop off quite a large bit of that amount (50k was it?) at the top-end and reduce the curve at the bottom end so it's easier to reach the middle of the curve but harder to get to the top of the curve, so characters are useable earlier in your investment. Forums throw this back in the developer's faces by implying that it's a "cash grab" and an attempt to indirectly increase our node scaling. Maybe that's a little bit of a stretch, maybe? Since no matter what they did here, it would have that same indirect effect - the other option would have been to tell us to shove off and keep it as is. Can we admit this was probably overzealous?

*Forums complains that it's always the same old content released time in and time out. DQvMPQ comes out. Huge influx of players. Servers go down. Acceptable out rage, followed by acceptable compensation. Enemy of the State comes out, there's an issue with one event, that gets fixed within a day (maybe two? pretty sure it was one though). Outrage! Do I know how that particular stage made it past QT? No idea, but I'd be willing to be they tested the node type obsessively and not individual nodes - I have no idea what broke exactly - but it's clear the node type works and it was just a single clerical error. Compensation was given, people didn't partially like it from what I remember, but that did indeed pass pretty quietly. Next up was Ultron. I'll be the first to admit it was a catastrophe. The first run of that event was catastrophic. I was all but locked out entirely until the last day. On top of that, anyone in my boat was also locked out of every other event going on at the time. This is a disasterpiece if I ever saw one. I was frustrated because I came out of my hiatus to hopefully be interested in MPQ again...to this. Man was I aggravated. I piss and moaned on Line. I pissed and moaned to my girlfriend (whom used to play too). I pissed and moaned to myself. I didn't piss and moan to the developers. I'm not going to piss and moan right out of the gate, because they deserve a chance to fix it before I complain - it's completely new tech for them - so it's only fair, in my opinion. It came back up for a little bit, but it went back down again. I was still annoyed, but I still wasn't going to complain because clearly they were working on it. It took them a long while to actually get it under ropes, but they did. And you know what? That event was a TON of fun while I could play it. I look forward to it running again. I would play it again right now, honestly. I also look forward to the next piece of new content, even if it's in six months, because DPvMPQ was fun, EotS was fun (and by extension Survival Nodes), and Ultron was a blast (especially the unique-to-MPQ style meta it created). [**If you stick with me, I'll talk about compensation a little bit later, when I talk about the developer's end of the deal. Spoiler: I don't think it was handled right.**]

My point here is this; they're listening and they're trying to do the things we want them to, but we're sending some seriously mixed signals when we yell at them about one thing and then when they do the other thing we still yell at them. We're basically an abusive partner, honestly.

Thirdly, and lastly, we need to be more civil to each other (myself included). I know, personally, it's easy to get annoyed or frustrated, and it's even enough to type up some snarky response to someone and 'put them in their place', but this has got to stop. We need to start doing more things to harvest a community and unity. Demuirge is providing us with a game. We're the community, so we need to step up and be the community. I've brainstormed a few ways to bring some fun and some events to the community, that if things work out how I want to, I can hopefully bring to the community soon. As well, I think we need to give more nods to the developer team from taking time out do to some of these things for us, even if they're aren't anything hugely "special" - like that meme thread they did, or the Hero Point contests, or attending cons - because that's honestly special in itself. Yeah, maybe they aren't "as good as Marvel Heroes", but I'll be damned if I can't say they're better than the 80%. Give them credit where credit is due. It's fine to say 'hey, look at what these guys are doing, it might make things better here too', but saying 'you guys drool, these guys rule' is a pretty piss poor way to go about things.

The Developers (aka the bad)

Here it is folks. The sequel of the "MPQ White Knight Tells MPQ You're Doing It Wrong" - "MPQ White Knight Tells MPQ You're Close, But No Cigar". This is the part all you hyena are going to enjoy.

First and foremost, is the compensation thing. I've been keeping pretty close tabs on this since my last post about this. You guys have been doing pretty great. I only heard about a handful of token comps and they felt okay to me. Fast forward to Ultron Event. I'm not going to sit here and say those Token 10-packs were bad compensation, specifically related to the server outages, but overall, I feel like you gave a genuine effort, but you missed the mark. Here's why;

*The 10-pack was a good starter. I feel like that addresses the literal issue of the extended outages, however it was a lot more complicated issue than that. There should have been tiers to the compensation.

a.) Compensation for server outage. Ultron 10-Pack. (Which they did.)
b.) Compensation for first PVP event (assuming they had started the event). Top Prog Cover.
c.) Compensation for the first PvE event (assuming they started it). Top Prog Cover.
d.) Compensation for the Ultron Event. Scarlett Witch Cover. (Which they did.)
e.) Compensation for second PvP event. Bottom 3* Placement Cover.
f.) Compensation for second PvE event. Bottom 3* Placement Cover.
g.) Compensation for Shield Simulator (assuming they had started it). Heroic 10-Pack. Alternatively, they could wait until the end of the season to comp for this and bump your reward tier to the next tier.

I think that covers everything. I'll say, yes, some of these items are "steep" (like the 2nd PvP/PvE rewards or Shield Sim), but it comes with the territory. There's a pretty small scope of times that tokens are an okay compensation, and never when it's on a global scale - why? Because it's not fair. One guy gets an awesome Hulkbuster cover, but another guy gets a freakin' Bagman! That's no good. It's also not so great for specific occurrences because it's hard to say your sorry about missing that Hulkbuster with a Yelena cover. That just stinks. I think it's okay in this case, because it's kind of a 'step one' kind of thing - basically an icing on the cake. I think it's okay for Shield Sim, mostly because what else do you give? Like, really, giving the next award up right now is butt, because you're probably just going to get it anyways and a dupe of something might not be great, unless you're already at the top of Shield Sim.

Secondly, you guys need to be more transparent. I know we're rough to communicate with sometimes, but really, it's a key to releasing some of the stress around here. I'm not just talking about business stuff, but like, real things. Talk about the games you're playing (like, I know IceIX is playing FFRK right now in his spare time), vent with us about stupid things that crop up in MPQ (like bad pulls or downtime or a bad clear), talk to us about stuff that's in the gates, or things that you wanted to do and couldn't (like you did with Deadpool's event), and probably most importantly; get back to doing QnA videos and do some Reddit-style AMAs. Humanize yourselves.

Lastly, you need a new policy and process for handling character balancing refunds. The stuff we got going on is not working out. We already have to work with Customer Service to get these things rolling, so doing something different where CS is involved shouldn't be an issue because of that. Here's what I would suggest;

*For New Characters (characters that have not been out for longer than three months): We should, without a doubt, be able to contact Customer Service and have covers swapped equivalently across colors, however we would like. I understand that right now, that does require someone to sell the entire character, and have Customer Service send them those covers, and that's not optimal, but that is fine, as long as ISO-8 is refunded as well, and it should be handled within the hour. If a player does not wish to have their covers reorganized, they should be given a full refund of any Hero Points put into the character, as well as a reduced refund (not necessarily Hero Points - perhaps equivalent covers in another character) for any non-purchased covers as compensation.

*For old characters (characters that have been out for longer than six months): I feel like the current model is relatively fair. I think that the amount of ISO/HP refunded could due to be increased about 10%, maybe more, maybe less.

*For everything in between: Case by case basis. Poll the community. Talk to the mods, we have a hidden sub-forum for a reason. Whatever you have to do to get a feel for what we feel is fair.

Coming Together (aka the good)

The good. The good thing is both parties has been in a prime much better than what it is, so I feel like we can work together to achieve a much better community as a whole than what we have, or what we have had.

Forumites: When the developers do something for us, say thank you in some shape or form - even if you don't agree, say thank you for their time and effort. Try and keep your tinfoil hats to a minimum. D3Publisher's CEO might be a money grubbing POS and Marvel/Disney might be power hungry leeches, but that doesn't mean our developers are. When you disagree with something, feel free to express yourself, but please try and be constructive with your statements, and when you make said statements, do try your best to place it into an existing topic, if one exists - it's very disheartening to vertran and newbie alike to log into a forum and see five negative threads on the front page. We want to garner a positive, welcoming environment.

Developers: Work with us. Give us some time to work out of our bad habits. Keep up the good work - if you guys weren't doing something right there wouldn't be so many of us sticking around! Most importantly is just interact with us. We don't want robots or business stiffs. We want to see some human beings. Convince the tinfoilist that you're just some average Joes making an awesome game.

Ok, so didn't actually get a chance to read this until now:

Yeah, it's not fair to freak out about characters getting nerfed, D3 puts the disclaimer on everything they do 'May change when it hits the game'. We kept Iron Fist from becoming the new x-force enabler(he's still pretty ridiculous, but at least D3 'fixed' him).

Iso changes can't possibly be considered a 'cash grab', when they're REDUCING overall iso expenditure. I wish they would said 3* would've been cheaper on the first hand, but c'est la vie.

It's fair to complain about servers/events breaking. There's been a trend in the gaming industry of releasing games when they aren't ready - that is not the consumer's fault they're hungry and want a hotdog, but the restaurant's fault for telling everyone they can get a hotdog at the same time

I still have not received compensation for Earth's Mightiest Heroes and Combined arms, and that's all I will say about that.

Transparency is great, and we need more communication.

Changing characters should be done that way, I agree. It's not our fault D3 releases overpowered/underpowered characters haphazardly. There should be a 4-5 month 'if D3 changes this' period and a 1 year(YES 1 YEAR FOUR STAR CHARACTERS ARE HARD TO COVER) period for 4* characters for full refunds/cover switching. Yes, D3 will take a loss, but again, it is D3's fault they're releasing new characters that aren't up to snuff.

PS get rid of scaling

Unknown

raisinbman wrote:

Iso changes can't possibly be considered a 'cash grab', when they're REDUCING overall iso expenditure. I wish they would said 3* would've been cheaper on the first hand, but c'est la vie.

If you view it in isolation you're right, but viewed in context with every other change it appears to be a wider core game shift, which a deeper roster is essential (cover packs and cover purchases) and health is a premium (consumables to climb up the table). Because a deeper poster is required more ISO is needed and probably balances out the loss. You don't say if you do pvp, but these changes are pretty apparent.


Edit: You were compensated with the 4 Ultron tokens, same as the rest of us that lost out when the servers died.

Unknown

MarCr wrote:

raisinbman wrote:

Iso changes can't possibly be considered a 'cash grab', when they're REDUCING overall iso expenditure. I wish they would said 3* would've been cheaper on the first hand, but c'est la vie.

If you view it in isolation you're right, but viewed in context with every other change it appears to be a wider core game shift, which a deeper roster is essential (cover packs and cover purchases) and health is a premium (consumables to climb up the table). Because a deeper poster is required more ISO is needed and probably balances out the loss. You don't say if you do pvp, but these changes are pretty apparent.


Edit: You were compensated with the 4 Ultron tokens, same as the rest of us that lost out when the servers died.

Well, to be fair, that's how I've treated the game since I learned about essential characters and how D3 haphazardly nerfs anything and everything. I don't consider any character sacred and have a wide variety of characters I improve upon.

Then why are they 'investigating' more compensation options? Don't give me that bull that Customer Service gave me. I've tried going through official channels(customer support) to get compensation, only to find D3 is trying to give compensation. I hope that includes the particular compensation I deserve.

daveomite

First of all, kudos on a fantastic, well written post. I meant to add my thoughts to this thread earlier, just forgot to.

GothicKratos wrote:

The Community (aka the ugly)

First and foremost, when something happens we don't like, we need to be more constructive. There's a lot of players here that are extremely smart and regularly put together very thought out, insightful pieces on these forums. We need to get back to that. Think of it in real world terms; when you're at work and you have some snot nosed brat in your face with a complaint, you're less likely to really give that guy the benefit of the doubt, right? But when the person is sincere and at least level-headed about it, you're more likely to go above and beyond for that person, right? There's plenty of things I think need to be examined in MPQ right now, as a game, but I just don't see the need to be aggressive about it.

Completely agree on this point 100%. Unfortunately, I feel like one of the biggest issues is that many of the better forum posters have went to pasture due to their unhappiness with the state of the game, and/or their growing mistrust with the developers, even if part of that is only their perceptions. A certain level of transparency, greater than what has existed here, needs to be brought out and focused on, if only to clear the air a little and get some really good, thought out discussion started and billowing again here.

GothicKratos wrote:

Secondly, we need to stop biting the have that feeds us. If you want someone to hand you something, they should not have to worry about retribution for doing so. Here's a few examples;

*Forums ask to have insight on characters before they are released so that they can analyze them in hopes that they get fixed pre-release and not post-release. IceIX starts posting spoiler-free versions of upcoming characters for the community to both theorycraft whom it is and theorycraft good pairing. Win-Win, right? Until the first time someone was adjusted pre-release - Professor X comes around and there's a mini-apocalypse because he was "nerfed before he even got released!!129171!". Same thing happened to another character (can't think of who it was off-hand tbh). Do you see the ridiculous amount of irony here?

I agree on this too. The issue is, at least in my mind, a great deal of that negativity has been brought on by the devs themselves. Using one of your examples - Professor X's "pre-nerf" situation. Personally, I actually PREFER a character to get "pre-nerfed" than after release. Why? Because that shows that the devs are at least attempting to play test said character beforehand.

However, there's a huge difference between developing a game and actually communicating to the actual customer base. Some things may be best left behind the veil, others, better to discuss openly. From my experience, it's becoming harder and harder for some businesses to differentiate between "good" and "bad" talking points, leading them to wind up in situations where they're are torn apart by their own customer/player base and/or supporters over something they may have never actually done. It can become an absolute mess.

The fact is - Professor X wasn't even released yet. It makes no major difference if he was "adjusted" before release or not. The issue became:

His stats had already been released to the public on the forum ahead of time.

Once the event started, people were able to load up the rewards screens, see the cover and the various stat bases.

Because of those two things - the devs had to backtrack on themselves publicly to state that those character stats were being changed, which to the player base meant "nerf". The term "nerf", in and of itself, is already considered negative in the players eyes, and brings out negative reactions, even if not 100% warranted. The best practice they should have used was to NOT announce any stats whatsoever and/or - doing more thorough play testing BEFORE releasing them, so then at that point, the "adjustments" would have already been made.

Had that have happened - that entire issue would have been resolved before it even happened.

GothicKratos wrote:

*Forums complain about the incredible amount of ISO-8 required to make a character playable. Developers chop off quite a large bit of that amount (50k was it?) at the top-end and reduce the curve at the bottom end so it's easier to reach the middle of the curve but harder to get to the top of the curve, so characters are useable earlier in your investment. Forums throw this back in the developer's faces by implying that it's a "cash grab" and an attempt to indirectly increase our node scaling. Maybe that's a little bit of a stretch, maybe? Since no matter what they did here, it would have that same indirect effect - the other option would have been to tell us to shove off and keep it as is. Can we admit this was probably overzealous?

*Forums complains that it's always the same old content released time in and time out. DQvMPQ comes out. Huge influx of players. Servers go down. Acceptable out rage, followed by acceptable compensation. Enemy of the State comes out, there's an issue with one event, that gets fixed within a day (maybe two? pretty sure it was one though). Outrage! Do I know how that particular stage made it past QT? No idea, but I'd be willing to be they tested the node type obsessively and not individual nodes - I have no idea what broke exactly - but it's clear the node type works and it was just a single clerical error. Compensation was given, people didn't partially like it from what I remember, but that did indeed pass pretty quietly. Next up was Ultron. I'll be the first to admit it was a catastrophe. The first run of that event was catastrophic. I was all but locked out entirely until the last day. On top of that, anyone in my boat was also locked out of every other event going on at the time. This is a disasterpiece if I ever saw one. I was frustrated because I came out of my hiatus to hopefully be interested in MPQ again...to this. Man was I aggravated. I piss and moaned on Line. I pissed and moaned to my girlfriend (whom used to play too). I pissed and moaned to myself. I didn't piss and moan to the developers. I'm not going to piss and moan right out of the gate, because they deserve a chance to fix it before I complain - it's completely new tech for them - so it's only fair, in my opinion. It came back up for a little bit, but it went back down again. I was still annoyed, but I still wasn't going to complain because clearly they were working on it. It took them a long while to actually get it under ropes, but they did. And you know what? That event was a TON of fun while I could play it. I look forward to it running again. I would play it again right now, honestly. I also look forward to the next piece of new content, even if it's in six months, because DPvMPQ was fun, EotS was fun (and by extension Survival Nodes), and Ultron was a blast (especially the unique-to-MPQ style meta it created). [**If you stick with me, I'll talk about compensation a little bit later, when I talk about the developer's end of the deal. Spoiler: I don't think it was handled right.**]

My point here is this; they're listening and they're trying to do the things we want them to, but we're sending some seriously mixed signals when we yell at them about one thing and then when they do the other thing we still yell at them. We're basically an abusive partner, honestly.

ISO - I understand your example, though I'm not sure I agree with all of the points about it. No, I don't think the ISO change is a "cash grab" by itself. I could go on much deeper in thought about everything, but I see it as there is a much larger base to look at, not just any one issue alone. The change to ISO is one small change in the midst of many more - combined, they completely changed the overall state of the game, like it or not.

Content - I too was quite upset over the various server issues happening during those events. So, I completely understand and agree. I do think things got overly heated publicly here on the forum by some people, but I remained quiet on here during that I believe. On the flip side, I totally understand and respect others needs to vent and voice their own frustrations.

As far as them "trying to do the things we want them to do" - to me, that's a bit too open ended and generally based. No, nothing they have done is anything I wanted them to do, nor anything I specifically asked for. From my standpoint as a longer term player, my frustrations are based on how much more expensive and time consuming it is overall to even try to find enjoyment in the game, and to continue progressing from the point that I'm at. Because of many of those combined changes, I've seen friends and/or alliance mates quit the game and give up - and find myself not caring as much about the game as I once did. But I have, for the most part, reserved how I feel about it all on the forum until my recent thread on here, as I wanted what I felt needed to be said to be as cohesive as possible.

GothicKratos wrote:

Thirdly, and lastly, we need to be more civil to each other (myself included). I know, personally, it's easy to get annoyed or frustrated, and it's even enough to type up some snarky response to someone and 'put them in their place', but this has got to stop. We need to start doing more things to harvest a community and unity. Demuirge is providing us with a game. We're the community, so we need to step up and be the community. I've brainstormed a few ways to bring some fun and some events to the community, that if things work out how I want to, I can hopefully bring to the community soon. As well, I think we need to give more nods to the developer team from taking time out do to some of these things for us, even if they're aren't anything hugely "special" - like that meme thread they did, or the Hero Point contests, or attending cons - because that's honestly special in itself. Yeah, maybe they aren't "as good as Marvel Heroes", but I'll be damned if I can't say they're better than the 80%. Give them credit where credit is due. It's fine to say 'hey, look at what these guys are doing, it might make things better here too', but saying 'you guys drool, these guys rule' is a pretty piss poor way to go about things.

I'll agree on this point. Yes, things need to be made more civil overall. All of the back and forth snarky snaps between certain people and those being negative just to be negative type situations, I simply can't see why we, as the community, can just agree to disagree, rather than constantly try to one up one another with how smart so and so is.

GothicKratos wrote:

The Developers (aka the bad)

First and foremost, is the compensation thing. I've been keeping pretty close tabs on this since my last post about this. You guys have been doing pretty great. I only heard about a handful of token comps and they felt okay to me. Fast forward to Ultron Event. I'm not going to sit here and say those Token 10-packs were bad compensation, specifically related to the server outages, but overall, I feel like you gave a genuine effort, but you missed the mark. Here's why;

*The 10-pack was a good starter. I feel like that addresses the literal issue of the extended outages, however it was a lot more complicated issue than that. There should have been tiers to the compensation.

a.) Compensation for server outage. Ultron 10-Pack. (Which they did.)
b.) Compensation for first PVP event (assuming they had started the event). Top Prog Cover.
c.) Compensation for the first PvE event (assuming they started it). Top Prog Cover.
d.) Compensation for the Ultron Event. Scarlett Witch Cover. (Which they did.)
e.) Compensation for second PvP event. Bottom 3* Placement Cover.
f.) Compensation for second PvE event. Bottom 3* Placement Cover.
g.) Compensation for Shield Simulator (assuming they had started it). Heroic 10-Pack. Alternatively, they could wait until the end of the season to comp for this and bump your reward tier to the next tier.

Wholeheartedly agreed. The issue was MUCH larger than just the server outage. That affected numerous events and players across the entire player base.

GothicKratos wrote:

Secondly, you guys need to be more transparent. I know we're rough to communicate with sometimes, but really, it's a key to releasing some of the stress around here. I'm not just talking about business stuff, but like, real things. Talk about the games you're playing (like, I know IceIX is playing FFRK right now in his spare time), vent with us about stupid things that crop up in MPQ (like bad pulls or downtime or a bad clear), talk to us about stuff that's in the gates, or things that you wanted to do and couldn't (like you did with Deadpool's event), and probably most importantly; get back to doing QnA videos and do some Reddit-style AMAs. Humanize yourselves.

Lastly, you need a new policy and process for handling character balancing refunds. The stuff we got going on is not working out. We already have to work with Customer Service to get these things rolling, so doing something different where CS is involved shouldn't be an issue because of that. Here's what I would suggest;

Transparency - I actually already mentioned the same basic thing above. Maybe I have a different way of looking at things or thinking of solutions, but there are a ton of things that the devs could be doing right now - not costing them anything - to better engage the audience.

One of the biggest issues is that engagement, as more and more are distancing themselves from the game due to negative feelings about it. Some of that could be deflected with some solid "out of game" mechanics for positive PR. However, I mean more than what games they might be playing (as that doesn't really impact me at all) - or another video interview (as I probably won't like or agree with everything I hear, just be even more frustrated overall). I say "me", but I mean any player, just not my own perceptions matter here.

The engagement of the audience needs to extend beyond the idea of it just being "a game they play on their phone" or "on steam". That type of connection to the audience needs to be fostered, and won't just happen because the devs wish it to be. What kept someone like you or I "engaged" originally may have just been the game, or an event, etc. However, after long term play - you've pretty much been there, done that in regards to events, leaderboards, scoring, seasons, and on and on. The only differences between this PvP or the next PvP? The featured character... maybe what other characters are "boosted"... what the best team will be, etc, etc.

Think about it. Not just Gothic - everyone. Think about how long you may have played this game. Think about how many PvP's you've played. Think about how many PvE's you've played. In that, how many times have you played Thick as Thieves, for instance? Or a Beast or Psylocke PvP? After how many times does it become too many times? Unknown and depends on each person.

For me - the very first PvE I played was ISO-8 Brotherhood, maybe the first run of it, not sure.

I played some PvP a few times, but once seasons started, I have played every PvP in every season since Season 1. Every one. I have played every day since I started playing, no days off. Everyday, I have logged into the game and played something, either PvE or PvP.

That same type of example is true for a great number of other players on here too. Now we're almost done with Season XIV, which I believe should be Season 14. Even if we say only 10 PvP's happen each season (which in earlier seasons, I'm pretty sure it was more like 12-13) - that averages around 140 PvP's, not to mention any off season PvP's, any "Anniversary" events, and any PvE events.

How many times has something like ISO-8 Brotherhood, Thick as Thieves, Hulk, Heroic, etc - how many times has each been deployed individually? I'm not asking because I want an answer, I'm asking as I want people to think and realize just how much they've probably done. It's a lot, more than probably any "phone game" I've ever played. This is even beyond the level of involvement something like Skyrim or Fallout was for me, and I was totally engrossed in both of those game models. Yes, I am aware of things like the WOW model, I know there are some extensive based game models out there. MPQ falls closer to that type of model given it's setup than say Angry Birds or Candy Crush, etc.

The lowest season score I've ever had in any season, I believe, was around 11k. The highest, around 21k. I've played a lot, won a lot, lost a lot, even took a few events soft. I have "skipped" a few PvE's in that time - but rarely for any new character releases. Not even once have I ever been 1st in seasons since inception though.

Blah blah. My point is - what I've described is my "involvement" as a player - not my engagement as one. I can be involved and tied to the game due to refresh timers, cooldown timers, etc, etc - but that doesn't mean I'm actually engaged in the game beyond that, as I'm not really. The fact that I'm sitting here typing all of this out shows that I'm finding more interest in doing this than actually playing the game at this moment.

GothicKratos wrote:

Coming Together (aka the good)

The good. The good thing is both parties has been in a prime much better than what it is, so I feel like we can work together to achieve a much better community as a whole than what we have, or what we have had.

Forumites: When the developers do something for us, say thank you in some shape or form - even if you don't agree, say thank you for their time and effort. Try and keep your tinfoil hats to a minimum. D3Publisher's CEO might be a money grubbing POS and Marvel/Disney might be power hungry leeches, but that doesn't mean our developers are. When you disagree with something, feel free to express yourself, but please try and be constructive with your statements, and when you make said statements, do try your best to place it into an existing topic, if one exists - it's very disheartening to vertran and newbie alike to log into a forum and see five negative threads on the front page. We want to garner a positive, welcoming environment.

Developers: Work with us. Give us some time to work out of our bad habits. Keep up the good work - if you guys weren't doing something right there wouldn't be so many of us sticking around! Most importantly is just interact with us. We don't want robots or business stiffs. We want to see some human beings. Convince the tinfoilist that you're just some average Joes making an awesome game.

Negativity breeds negativity. True. But, that's also a two way street, or is supposed to be. We, as customers, cannot expect 100% of the time that the developers will do everything we each want individually. That would be impossible. However, there could be things done, some small, some large, that would positively affect the player base as a whole.

As far as there being 5 negative posts on the forum main page - very true, that is an issue. But looking at things in a case by case basis - let's say that 2 of those 5 threads are valid, honest concerns and frustrations, 1 a duplicate of one of the honest ones, and 2 are the "usual suspects" playing the negative card just to play it. Weeding out the "good negative" from the "bad negative" may actually need to be done from time to time.

However, more than anything, a great deal of that issue can be resolved from the source. I mean, the developers themselves could do various things right now (some not even involving changing the game at all) to eliminate the need for negativity. The developers allowing these issues to loom in the game, on the forum, but more importantly, in the players mind is a tremendous factor in what type of outcry the player base makes. The audience, in many ways, needs to be managed, just like writing lines of code and deploying changes have to be. In my mind, that is one critical thing that has been taken lightly for far too long here, but with many other game companies too.

There are a lot of other games out there, MPQ is not the only egg in the basket. But it is a game that caused many of us to get involved in playing, and caused many of us to remain loyal to it. That should mean something to both the developers and to us, the players.

The developers have the power to do whatever they want to do. But having the power isn't what's important, using that power in the appropriate fashion is.

Unknown

Pylgrim wrote:

ArkPrime wrote:

GothicKratos wrote:

*Forums ask to have insight on characters before they are released so that they can analyze them in hopes that they get fixed pre-release and not post-release.

...did this happen? Far as I know people just started poking around the code and finding stuff that was going to be released next, and posting it. Some forumites got excited about it do IceIX started posting "releasing next" characters.

The problem with doing something like that you take responsibility for it. If you're going to show your cards before the characters are released, then obviously you should be careful that you're showing the final version. If you wait until there are a bunch of pages of comments then change the character, it looks a lot like you read the comments and said "Oh that's right, let me squash that interaction", even if nothing of the sort is going on (which in turn smacks of amateurism and lack of testing)

In my mind the smarter way to do it is to continue to let people poke around in the code, and when they post the characters before they're finished, you get to go "oh we didn't post anything, some dude did. How can you be disappointed at us when you're the ones doing it to yourselves?"

The other smart thing would be to explain the genius strategy behind releasing highly experimental features Friday afternoon right before everyone in the company goes home for the weekend/holidays. I'm sure that has some kind of explanation behind it, I'd just like to know what it is.

Every time IceX advised that the characters were in pre-release form and should be taken with a grain of salt. In fact Prof X's nerf shows that even though when they had a "good for show" version of the character to reveal, they were still heavily testing him which revealed the necessity for a tone-down. The ensuing outrage by some of the community was unacceptable because no one lost any investment from that "nerf".

I understand that. I'm saying it's a bad move to have anyone with a colorful name do the posting.

Unknown

Well, if they were not releasing so many so quickly, they would have more time to test the new characters' abilities and do less mistakes ?

GothicKratos

Pylgrim wrote:

ArkPrime wrote:

GothicKratos wrote:

*Forums ask to have insight on characters before they are released so that they can analyze them in hopes that they get fixed pre-release and not post-release.

Every time IceX advised that the characters were in pre-release form and should be taken with a grain of salt. In fact Prof X's nerf shows that even though when they had a "good for show" version of the character to reveal, they were still heavily testing him which revealed the necessity for a tone-down. The ensuing outrage by some of the community was unacceptable because no one lost any investment from that "nerf".

I understand that. I'm saying it's a bad move to have anyone with a colorful name do the posting.

I don't get the reasoning, unless it's just a "to avoid this inevitable situation" (which seems to be the case based on your original posting), and if that's the case you have far less faith in our ability to be more kinsmen-like than I do.

/////

I'm trying to let each reply garner it's own conversation before I respond to them directly, so to respond to your OP;

ArkPrime wrote:

...did this happen? Far as I know people just started poking around the code and finding stuff that was going to be released next, and posting it. Some forumites got excited about it do IceIX started posting "releasing next" characters.

Yes, we absolutely asked to be given more information about the things being released and having more say in those things before they are released (i.e. player "consults", etc etc, even within this very thread we're asking them to share more information), and like the above example of Xavier (and I think it was Quicksilver too, that also got a "pre-nerf" - I cannot recall but I seem to remember another character being changed prior to release) people just complained that their input was actually taken seriously. That's just baffling to me. Each thread has literally said "this is not finalized" and there's a flashmob whenever something changes. I don't wonder why they don't tell us things beforehand. The community is going to burn them at the stake for it either way. If it were me, to be quite frank, I wouldn't release anything, like at all. You'd get Patch Note and that would be the end of it. Comments disabled, et al.

Now, I'll give ya that the timing was sorta fishy, but realistically, turul had been doing his thing for months before they started doing those previews. I don't think they're directly related. I love that thread (though it's been severally sidetracked recently ) and when it was first started I asked what we could do to work together to let that thread still be a thing. I think it's a great, healthy mechanic within the community, but it's not a supplement, let a lone a replacement for official information - after all, turul has access to a lot of old information - the stuff that gets shipped to us in updates is not necessarily finalized either, and I'd bet money they change a lot more than any of us dataminers see.

Is there a reason, besides shifting the blame to the playerbase on disappointment involving character changes that you feel this is the correct way to be? Can you agree that maybe this is slightly at odd with the overarching ideals that the developers need to be more open and engaging with the community?

ArkPrime wrote:

The other smart thing would be to explain the genius strategy behind releasing highly experimental features Friday afternoon right before everyone in the company goes home for the weekend/holidays. I'm sure that has some kind of explanation behind it, I'd just like to know what it is.

Yeah, this is a pretty meh business move.