Thoughts of Frustration from The HP Suck Guy

mohio

TLCstormz wrote:

I already told you to PM David. And also, NO ONE has been compensated for those events, yet.

Also, I was literally lmao when I saw this thread stickied, yesterday. That's hilarious, ballsy, and very well deserved.

While I think inadequate, I believe D3 considers these all compensated for with the iso, HP, and ultron tokens for "server issues". With them addressing DDQ separately though maybe they will reconsider these other events as well.

daveomite

Pylgrim wrote:

Adding a grain of salt to the whole concoction I feel the need to point out that Dave made a long laundry list of grievances in his post. I agree with some, disagree with some, and I expect it would be the same for most people reading it, a different subset for each according to their experiences. As such, I do not believe that the 112 and rising reputation means that every single of the items in the list is a pressing matter that the whole community backs. Dave would you mind making a poll with the items in your list to find out what people care for the most?

That said, I greatly appreciate the tone and language of the original post which ensured that the tone of the whole thread remained respectful and polite, even when talking about frustrating things. Complaints about missing rewards and compensation and long forgotten tickets are definitely a valid concern and a warrant of confusion and frustration.

I have no issue with a poll or anything like that. Don't see why not.

raisinbman wrote:

So many good points....and D3 should know that turnover is bad - having loyal customers is much more beneficials.

Very true, at least my opinion is and has been, loyalty is key in any customer base. Not to mention, one of the strongest, most beneficial things is business built off of "word of mouth". That is so much stronger and sustained that any marketing campaign can ever really achieve in most cases, as it's based more in honesty, and on actual customer perceptions and opinions.

GothicKratos wrote:

Which Mod stickied this?! I'm not going to unglue it yet because I feel like some exposure is healthy (especially how well put together and thought out the initial post was), but it definitely made me chuckle.

I hope you don't mind, Dave, but sometime in the future I'm going to use some information gathered in my own post, this post, and some other to try and address some of the issues that are the community's issues with the game, facing outward, in hopes to get some attention on those things.

First of all - thank you Gothic, I appreciate that! Glad my post seemed coherent at least, lol.

And absolutely - feel free. Speaking of which, I thumbed you up - just neglected to comment as I got involved in putting this one together. I need to catch up on that thread too.

Unknown

As a long time player, two seasons quit guy I can say a massive thanks to the dev team for making it so hard to come back. Essential new chars here there and everywhere, increased heath pools making time commitment greater, multiple pve brackets in the same slice making it hard to join late... I really might have slipped off the wagon otherwise.

Yeah, there's been good stuff as well but D3 will always deliver a step back for every step forward.

Unknown

The sad thing is...if the bottom line profit is delivering for D3, they are less likely to address these legitimate concerns.

JamieMadrox

GothicKratos wrote:

Which Mod stickied this?!

I did. It was very well written, made valid points, wasn't confrontational, and resonated with the community more than any other post in recent memory. People should be able to see this and it's something that the dev team should be reading.

I also want to encourage anyone that has a complaint about the game to send a message to CS. The information will get to the dev team and they will read it.

Azoic

You finished round 7 of Ultron, then went back to original alliances to try to help them finish? How so? Once you start Ultron, you are locked into that "bracket"/leaderboard, and anything you did would still apply to that original group.

PVE scaling...never understood lvl 395 mobs. I haven't gotten to the point where I can even level up my guys all to 166 yet, but I am already worried when faced with the decision to take a 4* higher. At 166, they do less match dmg than a 3*, and tasty in pvp. Yet you take them higher and all your pve scaling goes wonkers? For having 1-2 characters higher? I think they just need to have 4* only count as high as 166 or something, and that would help solve a lot of issues.

JamieMadrox

Azoic wrote:

You finished round 7 of Ultron, then went back to original alliances to try to help them finish? How so? Once you start Ultron, you are locked into that "bracket"/leaderboard, and anything you did would still apply to that original group.

If you start Ultron with one alliance, then everyone leaves and the alliance is disbanded, you can join a new alliance, start Ultron with them, and then your new progress will be added to their leaderboard.

Azoic wrote:

PVE scaling...never understood lvl 395 mobs. I haven't gotten to the point where I can even level up my guys all to 166 yet, but I am already worried when faced with the decision to take a 4* higher. At 166, they do less match dmg than a 3*, and tasty in pvp. Yet you take them higher and all your pve scaling goes wonkers? For having 1-2 characters higher? I think they just need to have 4* only count as high as 166 or something, and that would help solve a lot of issues.

PVE scaling is more about your performance than roster. If you do really well in PVE (clearing nodes with little to no health lost) then your scaling will go up. That said, you generally need really high level characters to accomplish this, but one of the reasons why Winfinite had to be fixed was that it would have resulted in insane scaling for anyone using it regardless of roster size and strength.

Azoic

However, I believe that there was a post stating that the initial levels in a sub was the average of your 3 highest level characters. So if you have 2 270s, then you are pretty much stuck with using 4*

tanis3303

Azoic wrote:

However, I believe that there was a post stating that the initial levels in a sub was the average of your 3 highest level characters. So if you have 2 270s, then you are pretty much stuck with using 4*

Yes and no. The 4* characters, even at lvl 270, are still at an extreme disadvantage to these lvl 350+ enemies. Xforce and Thor used to be able to stand up to them, but no longer. Before the nerf hammer came down, if you could survive long enough to gather 10 red, 9 blue, 8 green and a handful of black, you could (usually) swing the match in your favor, bringing at least one of them down and stunning another long enough to get a chain going. Now? You can unload all that mana at say, lvl 350 Ares, who has around 22,000 health, and the entire enemy team just chuckles at you. If you unload xforce, power surge and smite on him, he takes ~9,000 and is stunned for 3 turns. But venom still has his 18,000 health, and daken only needs 5 blue to hit you for 4,000+. Your charge tiles are probably nowhere near each other, so you have little chance of quickly building back that mana. Basically, you scratched Ares (is that bleeding? No? Oh...Ouch tho!) and your mana pool is empty and your still staring at 23,000+ health and 2 other characters ready to strike. A few turns later, Ares unstuns and fires all his powers, downing your almost full health xforce, and you're boned. These levels of difficulty seem to be designed for characters to fight against when they were powerful. When those characters were made mediocre, the dev team seems to have forgotten that they tuned the AI to cope with the powerful versions. Now folks who earned or bought their 4* covers and did well in pve for a time are stuck fighting near-impossible odds with no tools left to combat them, save perhaps for newer 4* characters with powerful abilities (hulkbuster says hi). But that's a catch 22...buying into these characters is a suckers bet, since the nerf hammer can and will fall when they become ubiquitous.

My best suggestion for this is to retain these crazily overscaled nodes, but make them one-and-done, and give them a decent reward for clearing them. Give out several thousand event points, and maybe an event token or a small HP prize. But don't let players overall pve event placement be dependent on clearing these frustrating affairs multiple times, leave that up to whether or not they have all the essential characters. Boom, two problems solved at once: 1:) players are less frustrated with pve because it's not nigh-impossible to complete/keep up AND there's a decent reward for managing to clear a lvl 395 Ares/Hood/Muscle node, and 2:) you are promoting roster diversity and probably even roster slot sales by encouraging people to develop a wide character base in order to be able to play all the nodes.

TL:DR - Post nerfs, even fully developed 4* rosters can't compete reliably with lvl 395 Dark Avengers. Makes these nodes more rewarding and non-repeatable to retain player sanity.

Unknown

tanis3303 wrote:

Azoic wrote:

However, I believe that there was a post stating that the initial levels in a sub was the average of your 3 highest level characters. So if you have 2 270s, then you are pretty much stuck with using 4*

Yes and no. The 4* characters, even at lvl 270, are still at an extreme disadvantage to these lvl 350+ enemies. Xforce and Thor used to be able to stand up to them, but no longer. Before the nerf hammer came down, if you could survive long enough to gather 10 red, 9 blue, 8 green and a handful of black, you could (usually) swing the match in your favor, bringing at least one of them down and stunning another long enough to get a chain going. Now? You can unload all that mana at say, lvl 350 Ares, who has around 22,000 health, and the entire enemy team just chuckles at you. If you unload xforce, power surge and smite on him, he takes ~9,000 and is stunned for 3 turns. But venom still has his 18,000 health, and daken only needs 5 blue to hit you for 4,000+. Your charge tiles are probably nowhere near each other, so you have little chance of quickly building back that mana. Basically, you scratched Ares (is that bleeding? No? Oh...Ouch tho!) and your mana pool is empty and your still staring at 23,000+ health and 2 other characters ready to strike. A few turns later, Ares unstuns and fires all his powers, downing your almost full health xforce, and you're boned. These levels of difficulty seem to be designed for characters to fight against when they were powerful. When those characters were made mediocre, the dev team seems to have forgotten that they tuned the AI to cope with the powerful versions. Now folks who earned or bought their 4* covers and did well in pve for a time are stuck fighting near-impossible odds with no tools left to combat them, save perhaps for newer 4* characters with powerful abilities (hulkbuster says hi). But that's a catch 22...buying into these characters is a suckers bet, since the nerf hammer can and will fall when they become ubiquitous.

My best suggestion for this is to retain these crazily overscaled nodes, but make them one-and-done, and give them a decent reward for clearing them. Give out several thousand event points, and maybe an event token or a small HP prize. But don't let players overall pve event placement be dependent on clearing these frustrating affairs multiple times, leave that up to whether or not they have all the essential characters. Boom, two problems solved at once: 1:) players are less frustrated with pve because it's not nigh-impossible to complete/keep up AND there's a decent reward for managing to clear a lvl 395 Ares/Hood/Muscle node, and 2:) you are promoting roster diversity and probably even roster slot sales by encouraging people to develop a wide character base in order to be able to play all the nodes.

TL:DR - Post nerfs, even fully developed 4* rosters can't compete reliably with lvl 395 Dark Avengers. Makes these nodes more rewarding and non-repeatable to retain player sanity.

scaling needs a rework(or to be tossed entirely), but honestly, I think they should just scale events like Deadpool's daily. 1* players can beat this, if you have the essential, you can beat this, 2* can beat this, 2* transition can beat this

Pylgrim

I think that the problem with scaling is that by necessity, it has too many moving parts, and accounts for too many variables in attempts to make things fair for everybody, but its own complexity also makes it prone to get messed up. I sometimes get perfectly fine difficulty (around 280 level enemies which are a doable challenge for my batch of 166 guys), sometimes it's rather too easy, and sometimes, infuriating hard.

I believe that messing with scaling trying to minutely adjust things to make sure everybody always get the prefect challenge is a losing, pointless battle; I think that it currently is around the point where it's as good as it will ever be. A perhaps more effective and less risky change would be to place caps to the max level enemies can raise to based exclusively in the player's roster level. Something like enemies cannot go over 120 levels above the average level of your top 5 guys.

simonsez

Pylgrim wrote:

A perhaps more effective and less risky change would be to place caps to the max level enemies can raise to based exclusively in the player's roster level. Something like enemies cannot go over 120 levels above the average level of your top 5 guys.

This doesn't seem right, because post-nerf 4*s aren't really 100 levels better than 3*s. You'd be way better off tackling lv280 juggs/ares with something like bp/if/lcap, than trying to tackle lv390s with xor.

How 'bout something simpler: let the devs play one of these overbuffed nodes with a 4* roster, and then honestly ask themselves the question, "Is this the kind of difficulty we should be serving up to someone trying to clear this node 4-5 times during a final grind?" If they're going to say "yes", then my first question for June would be to request a more detailed explanation of how they expect PvE to be played. If they're going to come out and say "We believe the top ranks should be reserved for people who either **** their rosters or are willing to spend health packs after each battle", then fine, then we'd at least know where they're coming from.

Wonko33

daveomite wrote:

1-

Shield Cooldowns that really weren't needed in the first place

2-

Snipers who can hit you from practically 0 when you're above 1k

3-

Even boosts got nerfed "because people thought it was cheating"... against who? The AI?

4-

The AI has incredible odds stacked in it's favor - constantly.

5-

Complete removal of tanking, or any means to reduce what enemies you have to face at the start of events

6-

The fact that now, you MUST start something at the very beginning, even if it's not convenient time, because that is the ONLY way you can hope to find maybe 3 seed teams. Otherwise, maxed teams from 0.

7-

Constant nerfing of characters that you pushed down our throats as necessary to have and to level.

OP please don't take this wrong I agree with pretty much everything I left out of the quote, good thread. I just wanted to express my opinion on a few of your points. I numbered them to make it easy

1- They did not want shield hopping, it is a legit point even if I don't agree. The cooldowns should be the same length as the shields though, seems like a HP grab to force you to use more expensive shields.
2- I have no problem with that, just strategy on when you want to start the event, it's risky to start early to reach big rewards.
3- The thing no one wants to face is that boosts broke and are still breaking the game. They prevent character balance, you can't mitigate a good power balanced by high costs. They are the reason why Sentry, Xforce and 4thor got nerfed.
4- I totally disagree with that; the AI is dumb clueless of good combos and easily baited, it doesn't have any boosts, it always starts second. The only advantage AI has is that it is not concerned with conserving health. For example, during the "good old days" I have never lost a match with my lvl210-Xforce-4htor with boosts vs 270 of the same... never. Odds are incredibly favoring the player in PvP. In PvE the only challenges are 300+ level and goons that feed a certain color to a character.
5- That is just people being upset that they can't cheat the game mechanics. "Oh I am killing every event but I don't want to face people of my strength".
6- Seed teams are a necessity of the system to have matches early not a god given right to free wins
7- That is truly a money grab, destroy characters people have to force them to have to get the new shinny one, the one that is obviously OPed. But it is also a side effect of bot planning for boosts in their character creation process.

I like the thread, started great conversation

Pylgrim

simonsez wrote:

Pylgrim wrote:

A perhaps more effective and less risky change would be to place caps to the max level enemies can raise to based exclusively in the player's roster level. Something like enemies cannot go over 120 levels above the average level of your top 5 guys.

This doesn't seem right, because post-nerf 4*s aren't really 100 levels better than 3*s. You'd be way better off tackling lv280 juggs/ares with something like bp/if/lcap, than trying to tackle lv390s with xor.

How 'bout something simpler: let the devs play one of these overbuffed nodes with a 4* roster, and then honestly ask themselves the question, "Is this the kind of difficulty we should be serving up to someone trying to clear this node 4-5 times during a final grind?" If they're going to say "yes", then my first question for June would be to request a more detailed explanation of how they expect PvE to be played. If they're going to come out and say "We believe the top ranks should be reserved for people who either **** their rosters or are willing to spend health packs after each battle", then fine, then we'd at least know where they're coming from.

Note that 120 was just a number that randomly jumped to mind. it has to be tested and yes, perhaps concessions need to be made about rarities, though I have to say that I don't think that I'd mind a 390 node with 270 4hor/Prof. X/IMHB.

TLCstormz

......and now it's unstickied. :+/

daveomite

Just an update.

I finally got a reply to my ticket earlier. Ironically, shortly after this thread was removed as a pinned thread.

This was about a ticket I created on, I believe, the 23rd of April. Their last reply to it was on April 28th - and I only got that reply after I contacted David here on the forum over PM. Now, I only get a reply after I created this thread on the forum, and created a totally separate ticket where I referenced the original ticket number of the still open ticket. See a pattern?

In today's reply, they ask me "did you not receive the reply from April 28th?".

They know that I did as I mentioned that in the new ticket I created over the weekend. Yet, they asked me anyway. Of course, I couldn't reply to the April 28th reply they sent to me because, if I did, "bottom of the queue" would happen.

They ask the question today, but then threaten if I reply to answer, that the ticket will be ... wait for it.... "bumped to the bottom of the queue".

Why send a ticket asking me a question that I cannot answer? Not only that, ask me a question they already know the answer to? It all seems like a run around and waste of time.

Yes, I'm frustrated over it. No, I don't hate the game or hold any developer or anyone else directly accountable or responsible for it. This is not a flame post, but a post to remain as transparent as possible considering this thread wound up getting so much more activity and upvotes than I even thought possible for something like this.

So basically... I create a ticket and I have to sit waiting for however long it takes to get a reply, even if it's just another generic, canned message. I cannot reply to any ticket or else it gets bumped to the bottom and may never get a reply. Even if there is important information that needs to be relayed about the ticket, we, as the customer, cannot reply.

Again, I'd like to thank everyone who thumbed up and kept the conversation going here. I do appreciate each and every one of you for taking part. I never expected that kind of response to any thread I'd ever put together.

Unknown

daveomite wrote:

Just an update.

I finally got a reply to my ticket earlier. Ironically, shortly after this thread was removed as a pinned thread.
~snip~

So basically... I create a ticket and I have to sit waiting for however long it takes to get a reply, even if it's just another generic, canned message. I cannot reply to any ticket or else it gets bumped to the bottom and may never get a reply. Even if there is important information that needs to be relayed about the ticket, we, as the customer, cannot reply.

This is absolutely ridiculous! They are supposed to be "Customer Support". But with them, it is an oxymoron. This is NOT how you treat your playerbase. How can D3/Demuirge not see that CS response is a MASSIVE problem? And it is a fixable problem. I am a Manager in a Customer Service Orientated business, and have been for the last half of my life. If your (D3/Demuirge) CS Team can't handle the job, FIRE THEM and hire people who can handle the job and would love to do it! Plain. Simple. To the point. If your CS Team is bad, no matter how good your PR Team or Dev Team is, your company will eventually sink. Bad Customer Service is the #1 reason customers stop dealing with a company. I know. I see disgruntled customers from my competitors on a daily basis.

Unknown

I'm down the customer service rabbit hole atm. Its a 100% legit problem, but you start to wonder if anything is worth this hassle.

Edit: Maybe that's the point, mug people off long enough and hopefully they'll go away.

simonsez

Pylgrim wrote:

I have to say that I don't think that I'd mind a 390 node with 270 4hor/Prof. X/IMHB.

Well, a lv395 juggs has around 30k health and does over 9k damage per headbutt. Sure you can try to deny red all you want, and maybe you will, but then he'll just get green and cascade his way into red; or Ares will use the green and yellow and one-shot someone with an Onslaught/Sunder combo.

I'm not saying you can't beat lv395s, but the team you proposed would get slaughtered, unless you luck into a boatload of blue and keep everyone permastunned, which is not something you're going to see much of, post-nerf. You can only win these kinds of nodes with a fast lockdown team, not with a couple of slow tanks. Which is pretty much my point... basing scaling on the roster presence of 4hor, HB, Elektra, Starlord, IW, whoever, is silly because you wouldn't want to use a team of characters like this on a node like this.

DrStrange-616

Why was this unpinned?