Does the stack contribute to grind burnout. Shorten it?

nwman

I would be surprised to see removing just 1 from the stack changing much except making the game take a bit less time, I doubt it gives much advantage to a fuller roster, I have 66 in my roster and even with heroics running I have no issue needing all my characters as is.

This pve I have used IF, SW, and cyc or torch almost the entire event for example. I haven't had to grind to one here but watch out for jeans release.

The game is getting broken, look at all these threads and you can see the discontent from the player base.

I still think w lower stacks it will stay the same as it generally is now, faster initial clear and being there at the event start outweighs grinding each node to 1 because it is almost impossible to time optimally.

If you start too early on a final clear you can be worse off than waiting an extra 30-60 minutes if you happen to win too fast for example.

Zen808

Drummerboycroy wrote:

Quoted from above: "...reducing the number of stacks will affect less than 5% of the population"

If I'm reading you correctly (and perhaps I'm not), are you saying that 95% of the people playing MPQ can "make top 50 without getting anywhere near grinding the stacks to 0?"

Side note: I tend to agree with the "getting rid of the refresh altogether and letting people space out their grinds," part, but I'm not sure how D3 would implement the change...

DBC

Naw, I'm saying that only 5% of the population does more than maybe 3 clears at the end (at least, in my slice, I can usually get Top 50 by doing about 3 clears at the end). So reducing the stack to, say, 4 hits won't reduce the amount that most people play. Conversely, because each hit results in less points (100%, 75%, 50%, etc for 4-stack; 100%, 83%, 67%, etc for 6-stack), people might play harder, because there won't be as much separation. I might do my 3 clears and realize that I can make Top 10 by doing just 1 more; things will start to cluster at the top. Don't know for sure, because you can't guess what people will do, but it's a possibility.

Unknown

What we need is a non competitive PVE as already suggested numerous times like the Prologue stories. Everyone has completed them and got every reward off them without feeling burnt-out. Talking of which can they be minimised or moved to another tab when completed as unless you are ISO 20 insane, used for healing with a R&G yellow they are done/completed/finished. Competition is fine but punishing casual players who god forbid might actually want to play through stories at their own leisure. Timed PVE with slices, stacks, rankings are grinder fodder with little regard to you having an actual life this is meant to be a match 3 game not an endurance 24 hour slog to get a new shiny.

Phillipes

Id like to have max 4 stacks. That would be good.
But if we have max 3 stacks, that would be perfect.

Im also sick of playing PVE for 3 hours in a row when sub ends.

simonsez

808SpicyToro wrote:

Naw, I'm saying that only 5% of the population does more than maybe 3 clears at the end (at least, in my slice, I can usually get Top 50 by doing about 3 clears at the end). So reducing the stack to, say, 4 hits won't reduce the amount that most people play.

Exactly. They're under the illusion that this will let them play less and rank higher, when in reality it'll just compress scores and just make people feel like they came closer to the top page of the leaderboard.

Orion

I don't think any of this would be as much of a problem if they just had more 2 and even 3 day subs. But grinding a 7 day event every single day for a week just burns me out. I wouldn't care if I had to do 6 clears every 2 or 3 days.

Unknown

Definitely shorten the stack. Three should be the absolute maximum. That's 24 hours of refresh, similar to the length of most subs.

Spoit

The correct answer is to bring back rubberbanding, now that we have time slices. And peg it to the global leader, not bracket leader

simonsez

Spoit wrote:

The correct answer is to bring back rubberbanding

Then we'd need to bring back community scaling, to mitigate the benefit players get from sitting on their thumbs.

Scoregasms

I don't mind the improvements they made, 6 stacks seems right to help spread the field out a bit as simonesz points out. Only thing I'd like to see is 48 hour subs instead of 24, doing a grind every day is pretty rough. I still do it like a lemming, just wish it was every other day and now the stacks would make sense. Probably wouldn't fit the current pve's though, which is too bad, I'd have very few issues with PVE if 48 hours subs were the norm. They just need to have more event tokens in the sub to make up for lost sub rewards and I'd be a happy camper.

mohio

It's funny to me that after all these changes people are making suggestions for "new" fixes and they are just things they did way back once upon a time. 5 stacks? Yup, not even all that long ago. Refreshes on server time all at once? Yup, used to reset every 12 hours regardless of whether or when you played (or I think 8 hours for short events occasionally).

I will second spoit though, been saying for a while that a stronger rubber band needs to return now that the reason for killing it ("off" time zone peeps needing to sleep during end of events) has been eliminated by time slices. It was probably too strong at one point, but something more than the super weak **** we have now should be much better.

simonsez

mohio wrote:

I will second spoit though, been saying for a while that a stronger rubber band needs to return now that the reason for killing it ("off" time zone peeps needing to sleep during end of events) has been eliminated by time slices.

The reason for killing it was 8hr refreshes. We had RB because people who wanted to sleep through the night were missing 3 clears vs. those who liked covers more than sleep, and the devs wanted to keep the scores artificially close. Are we seriously at the point now where 8hr refreshes are too taxing for people?

mohio

@simonsez - but rubber band was killed way before 8 hr refreshes were a thing. They wanted people playing all the time, so they got rid of the universal refresh every 8 or 12 hours, implemented the 2.5 (little less) hr refresh per stack and then eventually killed rubber band so you'd have to actually play each 2.5 hr and not catch up at the end of each sub.

Unknown

Eh. The stacks are fine as they are now. It separates the wheat from the chaff in terms of how badly a player wants to place in PvE.

Bowgentle

simonsez wrote:

mohio wrote:

I will second spoit though, been saying for a while that a stronger rubber band needs to return now that the reason for killing it ("off" time zone peeps needing to sleep during end of events) has been eliminated by time slices.

The reason for killing it was 8hr refreshes. We had RB because people who wanted to sleep through the night were missing 3 clears vs. those who liked covers more than sleep, and the devs wanted to keep the scores artificially close. Are we seriously at the point now where 8hr refreshes are too taxing for people?

You keep posting stuff like that, and I really wonder: Do you really _want_ to have to treat PVE like a second job to do well?

You keep saying it's "work" and it should be "work" to place well in PVE, etc.

It's nice that you are willing and able to schedule your life around refreshes and 3 hr grinds at the end of each sub, but for a lot of people their real jobs are work enough.

So if I have no inclination of grinding for 7 days straight, with (if 24 hr subs) about 4 hours per day (which easily amounts to a part-time job), I should just accept that I'll never get more than one cover in a PVE release?

I can't believe that this is the business model that a F2P company intends to have - because if it's too hard to get all colours for a new character for people with jobs (=people with money) then there is no way for those people to max those new covers, so they don't spend.
I hope nobody thinks that anyone in their right state of mind would buy 42 packs to get the missing colours (yes, I know, there are some. Not many though I hope).

So yes, bringing RB back is definitely an option - because then I'd at least have a fighting chance for T100 when I'm thrown into a bracket with 800 people because in some slices there are veteran brackets that never fill for a week.

Shadow

GrumpySmurf1002 wrote:

simonsez wrote:

I hope everyone who's voting "shorten the stacks" has a **** roster, because that's the option that will help those people's speed clears dominate PvE.

If a **** roster has a 10 second advantage per battle, then more battles helps them.

Wrong. Speed becomes the emphasis when there's a shorter stack. Reason is that it allows you to start the final grind nearer to the end of the sub. The nearer towards the end of the sub that you're able to start the final grind, the more points that you are going to be able to get.

On the other hand, having more battles means that unless the player wants to burn health packs on the fastest team, that fastest team will not be solely used during the final grind. Thus having more battles actually doesn't help them.

GrumpySmurf1002

Shadow wrote:

Wrong. Speed becomes the emphasis when there's a shorter stack. Reason is that it allows you to start the final grind nearer to the end of the sub. The nearer towards the end of the sub that you're able to start the final grind, the more points that you are going to be able to get.

If it takes an underleveled roster 2 minutes and a vet roster 2:10, they're gaining 10 seconds per stack.

If there's one stack, the vet loses 10 seconds of points, if there are 6 he loses a minute worth. If there are 30, he loses, 5 minutes, etc.... So yes, more nodes means more of a gap between when the low roster can start versus the high, and more advantage the low roster has.

Shadow wrote:

On the other hand, having more battles means that unless the player wants to burn health packs on the fastest team, that fastest team will not be solely used during the final grind. Thus having more battles actually doesn't help them.

I think this actually hurts the higher roster too, at least in a Heroic. There are teams that can be used in other PvEs that can offset this disadvantage.

simonsez

Bowgentle wrote:

You keep posting stuff like that, and I really wonder: Do you really _want_ to have to treat PVE like a second job to do well?

If you have a method for awarding covers that doesn't give them all to everyone, and yet somehow doesn't require effort, I'm all ears. Seriously.

I wouldn't characterize my viewpoint in the way you did. What I would say is, I don't mind a system where people's rewards are commensurate with the effort they put in.

simonsez

Bowgentle wrote:

So yes, bringing RB back is definitely an option - because then I'd at least have a fighting chance for T100 when I'm thrown into a bracket with 800 people because in some slices there are veteran brackets that never fill for a week.

If brackets aren't filling, then play the whole event like the people you're trying to catch up to. RB shouldn't be a reward for bracket shoppers who gamble and don't land a fresh bracket.

simonsez

GrumpySmurf1002 wrote:

If there's one stack, the vet loses 10 seconds of points, if there are 6 he loses a minute worth. If there are 30, he loses, 5 minutes, etc.... So yes, more nodes means more of a gap between when the low roster can start versus the high, and more advantage the low roster has.

What you're not considering is, if it takes a **** roster 3-4 hours to grind everything down to 1, not everyone is going to be able to do that. So if you have a maxed roster and enough time, you can make up the speed disadvantage by grinding deeper than a lot of people. But if it only takes 90 minutes for a **** roster to clear the whole board, there's gonna be a TON of people who do that, and someone with a developed roster will have no chance to compete with that many people. You can't outclear them, and you can't go as fast.