Poll: Galactus event

GrumpySmurf1002

lukewin wrote:

You could also make this event, and possible other new events suck less, by informing us of the event parameters, so we can possibly plan earlier. If we are able to plan, please don't use our strategies we post to tweak the event and make it that much more difficult. It'll just turn people off from using the game's official forums.

This is my universal gripe and worth highlighting. "Guess the Rules" is not fun. It will never be fun. Don't do this 9 months from now when we get the next new PvE.

LordXberk

I think the results of this poll (93% negative, 7% positive at 362 votes) would apply to the entire Anniversary event (aka Sadiversary or Failversary).

GuntherBlobel

Galactus needs a major overhaul. That said, I enjoyed it:

In Round 5-6 Galactus, I found myself staring at the board, considering every move as if it were my last (it often was). I had to use my iPad, because the battery on my phone couldn't handle how long I was staring at the screen before making a move. When I did find the key move that led to beating Galactus, I had more fun than I have ever had with this game. Ever.

My Alliance failed to complete Round 6 with ~5% Galactus health left and I can still say I had fun.

That said, Round 5-6 Galactus should never have made it live. I had plenty of challenging, entertaining moments in Round 4 before the mechanics went right off the rails. I'd gladly give up the most exciting moment in Round 6 for an overall experience that feels somewhat fair and more consistently fun.

Unknown

GuntherBlobel wrote:

Galactus needs a major overhaul. That said, I enjoyed it:

In Round 5-6 Galactus, I found myself staring at the board, considering every move as if it were my last (it often was). I had to use my iPad, because the battery on my phone couldn't handle how long I was staring at the screen before making a move. When I did find the key move that led to beating Galactus, I had more fun than I have ever had with this game. Ever.

My Alliance failed to complete Round 6 with ~5% Galactus health left and I can still say I had fun.

That said, Round 5-6 Galactus should never have made it live. I had plenty of challenging, entertaining moments in Round 4 before the mechanics went right off the rails. I'd gladly give up the most exciting moment in Round 6 for an overall experience that feels somewhat fair and more consistently fun.

That's perhaps the single most frustrating part of all of this for me.

If you polled the player base on Stages 1-4? I'm guessing overwhelmingly positive responses.

Galactus himself was hard by Stage 4-5, but not impossible. Even if you lost, you felt like you had dented him a fair bit, done some damage for your alliance. Health packs were used because you felt a sense of shared purpose, like your crew of 20 was going to succeed, if only you tried a bit harder, a bit longer.

The side nodes, while not end-of-the-world difficult, weren't supposed to be difficult. You got virtually no reward for completing them, aside from another shot at the boss. The difficulty, reward, and purpose inherent to those fights was self-evident, and perfectly reasonable and logical.

Then came Stage 5… when everything began to change, with the event essentially beginning to devolve into another yet another reason for many to contemplate deleting MPQ.

I cannot help wondering what the feedback would be right now if the event had continued to increase in difficulty past Stage 4, but at a more reasonable pace.

DBC

Unknown

JVReal wrote:

Flare808 wrote:

I really do understand the devs wanting us to struggle and not win 100% of the time. Unfortunately, overscaled "relatively simple" and "minor hazard" minion fights weren't cakewalks. My nodes were ended up maxing out around 340+, which will bang up any team and chew healthpacks.

Galactus forced us to use either Hulk or Capt. Marvel to tank hits to generate AP. These two were the only ones we could use and still win with a decent percentage. Winfinite and other teams were simply too slow in dealing with the overwhelming amount of tiles Galactus pukes out. Having a developed roster was useless when you're pigeonholed into a singular strategy. I feel for those with weak rosters because Galactus would be a futile exercise in misery.

While my alliance did complete Galactus and I reached the Legendary Token, I am disappointed with the event and Anniversary in general. This should be a time when morale is at an all time high and people are excited to play. Unfortunately, as the poll reflects, very few are happy with the outcome.

EDIT: Removed comment again, so that the devs won't get any ideas. Last time I said something in jest, it happened for real.

The lesson learned from pre-Galactus comments that led to last minute changes is not "do not share anything on the forums lest them be used against us", but "do not share possible winning strategies right prior to an event lest them be used to tweak the game play last minute and introduce unintended consequences"

developers have all the data they need right now to tweak the red-hulk event. Anything we say here is only a small subset of what they know thanks to real-time data from the event itself. And to make matters worse, we are also already assuming that they will change boosted characters thereby invalidating the few strategies we are discussing on the forums.

sinnerjfl

OneLastGambit wrote:

I agree with some previous posters this poll was loaded to begin with. You shouldn't conduct a poll with only polarised answers to select it skews your data and also discourages people from voting.

Just a tip for next time use a five point scale on your poll and also don't make your statements leading, it will give more accurate data.

How can it be loaded... You enjoyed it or you didnt, yes or no...
I wasnt trying to judge the subtleties the enjoyment or not of everyone. Just in general if they were happy facing Galactus.
Simple question requires a simple answer.

ZekeBarrett

I can understand it's supposed to be difficult but not to the point where it all comes down to luck. There's no strategy involved. Our alliance was one of those playing in round 8 and it just came down to the board you were dealt with. Due to the event not being any fun, I didn't spend my money of the Stark Salary so that's $100 d3 lost. How long I continue to support this game is up in the air at this point but I'm not satisfied.

MarvelMan

Rounds 3-6 were fun (I missed Rds 1 & 2 due to server issues....****?). Rd 7 was crazy challenging and decidedly boring due to the only viable option I had. I gave up in Rd 8 because I didnt have the roster to do either of the moderately successful strategies I was aware of.

I LIKE challenging puzzles: the IW/QS DPDQ4* was possibly my favorite battle in MPQ ever. Yes, part of that was because I have an underleveled IW and it required excellent puzzling to win. It took me about 5 tries, but I did it....and knew it was more about my abilities to extend the game than luck....which brings me back to the Big Purple Baddie. It sucked since it was so luck based and so short. There were quite a few matches, even in Rd 7, where I looked at the board and quit because I knew there was nothing I could do. That is the epitome of no fun.


Ive already told my (amazing) alliance that if the rules are not dramatically changed and EXPLAINED....Im not participating in the next run.

W4LAndre

I might as well take a whack at this dead horse. We gave up after we realized that we weren't likely to finish round 7. I do not believe that anyone on any of our teams enjoyed it. I reached a point on Saturday morning where I'd rather have spent the day paintballing (which I hate), while being forced to watch an endless loop of Draft Kings commercials, while wearing contact lenses that were in backwards, than continue to waste my time on this. Luckily, I did not have to spend any time getting shot at, hearing about fantasy football millionaires, or have the sting of daggers in my eyes to get away from the painful Anniversary event. I went out to a friend's house, posted up in the back yard in the clearing in the woods on the property, fired up the smoker, and spent 11 hours drinking beer and smoking cigars while I slow cooked a hog to perfection. 100 pounds of ham, ribs, tenderloin, shoulder, and jowl (you haven't lived until you've tried jowl) made me forget all about the misery of wiping on turn 3 after dealing a thousand damage or less. I've said it before about other major blunders in this game, I simply hope that they make it right. Everyone here has a different definition of what that means, and it is impossible to satisfy everyone so I won't even try to suggest how the community can be made whole. Several minutes ticked by on my doomsday clock for MPQ because of this. I've proudly been completely self sufficient and F2P for the better part of this year, so if they lose me as a player, they won't be losing anything other than a fan and someone who spends more time than someone probably should on their product.

JVReal

Rumbles

My alliance finished this event reasonably quickly, at a high cost of health packs, and boosts. D3 might view our completion of the event as a success. Let me state this clearly:

NOT ONE member of the alliance or our extended family of alliances was happy with the event. Not one member has said "what fun can't want for round2!"

The event was as bad as all the threads would indicate. Nobody had fun, nobody is looking forward to more of this "fun"

Unknown

It was still fun at round 3. It was round 4 when things start to go downhill for me. After blowing most of my health packs for 6,7 tries and still couldn't even hurt him, I told my alliance members to just screw it and don't waste any health packs after we all reach round 4 since we're only a casual alliance and only 2 person can beat round 4, and none can go past round 5. So it's really frustrating from a player's point of view. It is also quite scary to all the new comers of the game. The experience does encourage players to quit playing if you know what I'm saying. The learning curve of this game in the beginning is consider high for most people, so getting beat like this would piss off a lot of newbies and make them quit altogether since the bad experience would then be imprinted in their mind. I don't know what you think, but at least I would feel this way if I'm a new player to this game and got pummeled like this time after time. Hope we can see something different next time.

Unknown

I was only able to play briefly for the first couple of days, so was disconnected from most of the chatter and strategies around galactus. Playing on my own I found Galactus infuriating and it was the worst feeling since I started this game.

I felt like G's ability to win in just a few turns was horribly unfair and, on reflection, I think the fundamental issue is that I just didn't trust d3 enough to believe that there was a reasonable way to beat him.

By Sat pm I was finally online again properly and chatted with my alliance members. There were actually workable solutions to the puzzle, even to r8, and I didn't hate galactus so much any more.

Hopefully the devs can see that there's a fine balance there.

If you present a difficult puzzle that can be solved then that's fine. But you also have a lot of goodwill to rebuild as of late since there is a growing feeling of resentment among your loyal player base that you're just trying to find new and faster ways to milk us of cash for hpacks/slots and tokens.

Imho, the key to long term success would be a happy and engaged fanbase. Push too hard and you'll get a short term revenue boost as people chase but then people will burn out. And leave.

Getting back to the immediate issue of the galactus event as a whole, there were good and bad aspects.

The good:
* immediately paying out the rewards to all alliance members is really nice (insread of having to do an extra 'prime' node)
* galactus is defeatable after all, and once that became apparent it was kind of fun working within those fairly unique confines
* being able to replay the sub nodes if you lost was nice.

The bad:
* pitiful rewards from both galactus and goon nodes... these were much more generous when facing ultron and felt good. The galactus ones are just an unending disappointment.
* anniversary tokens with a boosted 2* pull rate. Why, just why? That's a kick in the teeth for all loyal players
* if you're going to make galactus hard then give us the option to make a tactical retreat during a boss battle. If we retreat we take retreat damage and score no points but the node should not be locked. Sometimes the board is just a mess and unplayable and I think we'd all feel better if there was a way to accept that, take the hit and try again rather than be forced through the gpon dance just because the rng was mean.
* some insane scaling on the goon nodes towards the end, but would have been better if we could more easily see who we'd actually be fighting. E.g. is the wave ninjas, mafia or multiple villains?

The players that were around for the previous anniversary hyped it up as a great time to be a player and build up iso and your roster. Effectively a period where d3 was generous and gave back to the community. This anniversary feels nothing like that at all - and came within a hair's breadth of turning me off mpq for good.

PorkBelly

The two poll choices should really be

A - Bad event

B- The worst event.