Galactus - Lessons Learnt

Argon Flame

Hi

I am going to preface this by saying I'm an engineer. When we do work for our clients/customers not everything runs smoothly. One thing we do when the dust settles is have a Lessons Learnt. This enables us to do things better in the future... I'm sure there is a quote about history and being doomed to repeat it somewhere.

Do you have anything similar to analyse how your events go? If no, would you consider it? If not, why not?

We often share a summary of our lessons learnt with our enduring clients to show evolution. Would you consider sharing your results with us? If not why not?

As a side note that is directly relevant, I enjoyed the gameplay of Galactus... right up to the point where unless I started with a 'lucky' board and boosted for max starting AP I lost on turn 3/4.

I look forward to hearing your reply but in reality assume that even if someone at your end does read it, it will be ignored, or if discussed nothing will feedback to us: your clients/customers.

Unknown

I'm going to guess they do, but they keep most of that internal and all.

I'm guessing the biggest most obvious thing they learned was "We need to make sure THIS doesn't happen for a big event or else crash", which they've claimed has been something new every time they've crashed.

Otherwise, your guess is as good as mine. "Good participation but frustrated players" and how to deal with that. Getting desirable end results for this run, but knowing it ain't likely to be repeated, especially for a less interesting reward. (For a 3rd Galactus run)

What comes from that is theirs to know and probably won't be shared with us anytime soon.

simonsez

Have the even conceded yet that there were any problems? All I've seen as far as official communication is that the event is working as intended.

Unknown

simonsez wrote:

Have the even conceded yet that there were any problems? All I've seen as far as official communication is that the event is working as intended.

Well, there was the server crash and outage.

That was a problem they admitted.

Vhailorx

Maybe they learned that the sub-nodes were too low level? That problem's been fixed!

Overall, I am concerned that the devs will see this event and the reaction to it as the player based overreacting to an unexpected challenge.

I think there is *some* truth to that view. People did come up with ingenious tactics to defeat galactus more reliably as the event progressed. But I still think this event was a failure of (1) design and (2) communication.

(1) design: the level of challenge in galactus was novel, but not in a particularly good way. max boost and hope for luck or die by round 4 is not a very enjoyable experience, especially over and over again. Also, the pool of viable characters to use successfully against galactus was pretty small, even when people did figure out ideal strategies. This makes the event less inclusive and even more repetitive than normal. Also, the rewards were conspicuously uncompelling.

(2) communication: the player base clearly did not understand the key design changes between this event and ultron. This created unnecessary frustration. The eventual dev communications to the playerbase about this misunderstanding were relatively unsatisfactory, and a little self-contradictory.

Mawtful

People complained about the anniversary & Galactus events, but continued to play.

Lesson learnt: people are going to keep playing anyway, so no change needed.