Black Vortex & Women Of Marvel Wrap-Up Info

simonsez

Splarne wrote:

As with any data analysis, did you consider looking at the distribution?

Of course they didn't. I'm pretty sure that total ISO won "overall" looks fine because groups like Crewsaders were scoring 3k+ points. I didn't score any higher in WOM than I did in any other event. Actually, it might've been my lowest score of the 4. But I guess I'm not supposed to complain about the ISO I didn't get, since other players picked up the slack for me.

tfcrazy1980

at this point, i dont even care anymore after all the problems. not that i was a big spender anyway, but the wallet is definetly shut. i was one of those people who didnt exploit the bug because i figured people were miserable already, so why make it worse.....but i do see both sides of exploit and not to exploit, because look at the response you get back for not exploiting the bug. if you dont and play honest....you get nothing, so why not go ahead and take advantage of the situation. im sure those who got above 1000 have no complaints.

aesthetocyst

simonsez wrote:

Splarne wrote:

As with any data analysis, did you consider looking at the distribution?

Of course they didn't. I'm pretty sure that total ISO won "overall" looks fine because groups like Crewsaders were scoring 3k+ points. I didn't score any higher in WOM than I did in any other event. Actually, it might've been my lowest score of the 4. But I guess I'm not supposed to complain about the ISO I didn't get, since other players picked up the slack for me.

Gosh, are you saying that one of these events is not like the other? But, but, but, they all add up the same, ha.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ 1_ _ _ _ 2 _ _ _ _3 _ _ _ _4_ _ _ _5 _ _ _ _6
Player 1 ... 1300 ... 1300 ... 1300 ... 1900 ... 1300 ... 1300
Player 2 ... 2500 ... 2500 ... 2500 ... 1000 ... 2500 ... 2500
Player 3 ... 1000 ... 1000 ... 1000 ... 1100 ... 1000 ... 1000
Player 4 ... 1100 ... 1100 ... 1100 ... 2400 ... 1100 ... 1100
Player 5 ... 1900 ... 1900 ... 1900 ... 1000 ... 1900 ... 1900
Player 6 ... 1600 ... 1600 ... 1600 ... 1000 ... 1600 ... 1600
Player 7 ... 1500 ... 1500 ... 1500 ... 1900 ... 1500 ... 1500
Player 8 ... 1200 ... 1200 ... 1200 ... 1800 ... 1200 ... 1200

Your mistake costs people, you pay up. If it means doing work to arrive at an accounting of the inequities, you do the work.

Stax the Foyer

This Anniversary week was bracketed by a pair of completely tone-deaf posts explaining bad decisions. So, congratulations on the symmetry, I guess.

A big part of the reason that we like double ISO events is because they feel special, and because we feel like we're getting an additional reward that's proportional to our effort. If we put in more effort, which lots of us planned to do, it pays dividends. These inexplicable bugs meant that we didn't get those opportunities.

Deciding whether or not to give rewards or compensation based on average performance misses a big part of why we like these events. It diminishes our role in this event. It might be that I'd only have earned an extra 5K ISO if I played the double lightning rounds, but it feels a lot better to have found that out for myself, rather than having it decided by the developers.

Plus, it doesn't help that this is all happening in the immediate aftermath of some very questionable design decisions for Galactus I. When it's your errors that cause these problems, the fact that the average effect was neutral doesn't mean that a large portion of your players weren't adversely affected. Your responsibility for all of these problems has gotta figure into the calculus.

You could have stuck the landing after a wobbly Anniversary week. Instead, you got stingy with digital goods for no real reason, and you justified it by looking at the average effect of your mistakes. Not a great look.

theo199

Bugged decision.

emaker27

"David wrote:

Moore"]When we looked at the numbers overall - post Event, a couple of things became clear. One is that points earned for these Events were *much* higher than other Events without this bug, nearly player-base wide. What this means is that for the majority of players, people were able to hit higher point targets, and thus higher progression rewards than they otherwise would have been able to do. Additionally, all players involved also played more matches than were played during other Anniversary events (even when the no-Iso battles are filtered out).

Essentially, most players ended up gaining more Iso overall through these Events than they gained through similar plays in Class of 2015 and the Devil Dinosaur Event - while also gaining more progression rewards. As a result of this, we are not planning on awarding any additional compensation for these issues.

Were concurrently running PvE events factored into PvP engagement? The health packs are shared so if PvE engagement dipped during the bugged PvPs, then that could also be used to explain the the much higher involvement. In most cases, there are always statistics that can be used to support either side of the argument. For example, 90% of the posts in this thread are negative. When extrapolated across the rest of the player base, that is a lot of negativity. And a moment to foster goodwill is passed by.

(If I can speak for the community) We're just looking for the 'feel' test from the company, not a cold calculated decision. Does having a bug that negatively impacts a player feel like zero compensation sounds right?

During the first run of Galactus, the actual numbers of alliances that at least made it to round 8 were relatively good. Those are numbers though and didn't take into account the real world strategies that people employed to hit those numbers. With these bugged PvP events, the numbers look good but that doesn't take into account what really happened to achieve those numbers. As people have previously mentioned, engagement was higher since there were bug abusers, you had to play more to make up the bigger point losses, and you had to play more to keep up with the bug abusers. So it makes sense that engagement returned to normal for bug free events.

Azoic

And you just put the nail in the coffin. I will use the rest of my hp this season and I am out.

- no double ISO LRs. Promise a measly 5k, which was never awarded. Folks hitting 10 seed teams would earn 1400-5000 per Round. Even just hitting 10 rounds over 3 days would yield 14-50k. But 5 is good? Do your math.
- **** token odds only adjusted halfway through. ice admits Iceman was supposed to be added, but oh, another oops. No reissues there, and decide to wait even longer to add him
- Galactus obviously not play tested, and most of the community does not make it far. Others have to resort to force closes.
- progression awards are nothing compared to iso gained in two double iso events. I would take double iso awhole event over a legendary token anyday anyways, just so I can actually level up the characters I have. And if scores were inflated across the board, placement didn't change!! And no rewards after 1300 anyways.

This whole event smells funny to me. It was so bad it really seems like an underhanded, intentional way to screw the users and not pass out the goodies. Regardless, you lost at least one dedicated players.

CrookedKnight

I realize it's only one item in the list but if you never got your 5K you should send a ticket in, my whole alliance received it on Thursday.

tfcrazy1980

ojsp, let me clarify, what i meant to say was, those who got over 1000 pts exploiting the bug probably have no complaints, no offense to the people who didnt exploit the bug. came out wrong.

Lidolas

Personally I scored higher in those events because I still cared. By the time RAAAAWR came around, I was about done with Anniversary week. I had gotten my 10 pack and didn't feel the need to pursue any other progressions.

W4LAndre

Lidolas wrote:

Personally I scored higher in those events because I still cared. By the time RAAAAWR came around, I was about done with Anniversary week. I had gotten my 10 pack and didn't feel the need to pursue any other progressions.

Wow, I commend you for having a stronger will than I did. I don't think I would have been able to sleep at night without getting that 2* wolverine at 3000 for season progression.

Boommike

W4L Andre wrote:

Lidolas wrote:

Personally I scored higher in those events because I still cared. By the time RAAAAWR came around, I was about done with Anniversary week. I had gotten my 10 pack and didn't feel the need to pursue any other progressions.

Wow, I commend you for having a stronger will than I did. I don't think I would have been able to sleep at night without getting that 2* wolverine at 3000 for season progression.

Sorry if this has been already asked (and answered) elsewhere, but has there been any word on this decision? I like that the ten pack was quite attainable; that fits in with the anniversary goodies, but having a 2* AFTER that? I knew I wouldnt get to the legendary, so I had no motivation to continue.

Linkster79

Really am pissing myself laughing

After this nugget of wisdom in customer relations

IceIX wrote:

Hey all,

Wanted to share a few things about how Galactus works and what we're expecting versus what we're seeing.

To start, it seems like a lot of people are on a basic disconnect here, looking at the boss battle similar to how Ultron ran in terms of how things work. Meaning that Ultron should be going down pretty regularly. He's powerful, but his real power lies in the fact that killing his body doesn't stop him. You need to crush every one of his drones and main bodies to win. So winning rounds is a pretty regular occurrence. Game-wise, what this means is that players won fairly easily against Ultron and took their lumps against the drones. The stopping timer there was health packs based on when the drones finally wore you down. What this also meant is that the higher end Alliances would chew through the entire Event in about 12 hours and let it kinda sit for 3 days.

Galactus is different. The "minion" fights against the villains are relatively simple. They're there as minor hazards but relatively easily winnable. Galactus on the other hand is a massive threat. He's not going to be stopped by gnats. Iron Fist punching him in the toe isn't very painful. So he gets bored and swats them away. In game terms, this means that players are going to be beaten. Winning a round against Galactus is an achievement. You're supposed to lose. Every time you do, you're still chipping away at his life. It's an exercise in damage in aggregate. Over the 3.5 days, hitting him over and over to finally bring down the big bad is somewhat slow, but certainly effective.

Overall, most of the higher end Alliances are in Round 6 or knocking on the door to Round 7. Which is actually slightly faster than we were expecting people to get just based on the math. So everyone's doing pretty darned well in terms of progression. There are some teams rockin' the Winfinite, other teams that are pushing through with some interesting strategies (who woulda thought OBW would be a rock star against Galactus?). Not many Alliances are getting anywhere near full clears. Which is actually intended. You're supposed to lose your Health Packs on Galactus, rather than against the minions like on Ultron. It's also why we changed up the play method for this round too so that it's not just a flip flop between Ultron and minions till you win. There's a set number of times you can hit Galactus before you need to take a break to let minions refresh. That break means that you have plenty of times for Galactus drained Packs to refresh while you can go in and get some Black Vortex in. Or play Simulator (up soon). Or get your Devil Dino on when that starts up. It's a different design than the rush of Ultron where that was pretty much all players did while it was open.

Long story short, you all are doing really well against Galactus. Yes, the gameplay is different. I'm sure most of you aren't used to going into a battle with the idea that you may well lose. But given that you're still pulling out wins with pretty strong regularity, I don't see any reason this wouldn't continue into Rounds 7 and 8, and on to Cyclops awesomeness.

At the outset, going into the boss battle, you're looking at winning like normal. After all, it works elsewhere in the game, and it worked against Ultron. So suddenly getting rocked by Galactus is a shock. Keep at it. If things are really going to go poorly, we'll look at doing refresh timer changes and the like that we can do server-side as a quicker band aid style fix for run 1. After that, we'll figure out what we want to do for difficulty on run 2 (and any other runs that we do in the future, of course).

I kind of gave up on the whole anniversary thing, well really I gave up on everything except for Deadpool Daily Quests. For a celebration of reaching a major milestone in the free to play market you really did start as you meant to carry on, and that is not a compliment. Still the folks at Electronic Arts will be happy as you are making them look really good.

Unknown

Boommike wrote:

I had no motivation to continue.

That's okay, neither did the decision makers.

Unknown

I think the disconnect here was assuming the anniversary was meant to celebrate the players. Did they ever actually say it was? All their decisions make more sense if you assume the anniversary was meant to celebrate the employees on another year of good profits. Abusing us with an event that is designed to repeatedly kill us within 30 seconds of starting. Condescending remarks from the devs on the forums. A new "bug" in an event that has been run fine multiple times, a bug that allows players to get hit multiple times more often than normal. LRs and PvPs awarding less ISO than they should have (the most expensive resource for sale in their store.)
Sorry to sound like I'm wearing a tin foil hat. Just some thoughts that have been rattling around my head.

Kheiron

I rarely post here, but I've been playing for awhile (today was day 489 for my daily reward) and was around for the first anniversary. I'm not going to pile on about the issues that came up, since they're well covered. And it's only a game at the end of the day, so I try not to ever get too worked up about what happens in any of them. I do agree that the response to this issue seems short-sighted, since whatever perceived losses that giving players a few thousand iso would bring seem trivial compared to the long-term goodwill it would have garnered. I think the bigger issue is that, long-term, while the amount or character releases have gone up substantially (and been focused almost exclusively on 4*s, who need more iso), the rate that you can gain iso hasn't kept up at anywhere near the pace needed to level them at anything beyond a crawl.

I think a better way to make up for the loss of iso, and for all the issues during the anniversary as a whole, would be to simply make the double iso rate permanent. It would still take a decent amount of time to gather the amount to level any one character, but it would definitely make the grind feel less painful. Outside of just general leveling of characters, I'm sure a lot of players are like me who have several 4*s with a handful of covers. Just enough to try the 4* DPD fight. So I wind up spending iso on them to do that, then having a character I can't use at all once it's over. So gaining iso to actually level characters is more difficult, since I'm always saving it for whatever 4* is needed in the next DPD cycle instead of focusing on characters I might be able to use, since legendary tokens are probably the biggest commodity in the game now. Even just having double iso one week a month would be better than what we have now, and I think it would go a long way towards smoothing over the ill-will that has built up over the course of this anniversary event.

boldfacedfemme

This is my summary if this whole event:

Game: Baby, you know I love you. Here's an event to show you

Players: This event is tiny kitty. Why do you hurt me so much? I thought you loved me?

Game: I'm sorry baby, I won't ever do it again. Here is some more love to show.

Players: Aww you do love me! This is great!
*few days later*
Why do you keep hurting me with this tiny kitty?!

Game: But I do love you. You just can't appreciate how much I love you. Since you can't, I won't even try anymore.

Players: *ragequit*

John Wayne74

John Wayne74 wrote:

After everything that happened last week and the response that has been provided to the customers here, I have one last thing to say.

If Marvel Puzzle Quest came with a money back guarantee, D3 would have most assuredly went bankrupt on 10/19/2015. Without a doubt. It may be a f2p game but the amount of money that has been spent by the p2p playerbase that would have said "screw it give me my money back" if they had the option would have put you guys belly up! Something to think about there.

Not that what I am doing will leave a mark of any real significance, but I decided that I too have had enough of D3 and have decided to move on. I will still do dpd in case I return just to have some ISO but even if I do return. Not one penny will ever be earned from this used to be dedicated p2p player ever again. Sorry boys you screwed the pooch one too many times for me to continue to support such an incompetently ran system.

STOPTHIS

Always one step forward, two steps back with this game.

The Anniversary is a great idea, that you completely botched. But then you made some changes and turned it around towards the end. Now here's a another case of you messing up and using suspect reasoning for why it's all okay. I'm glad other people getting super high scores negates any problem lower level people got.

I tend to hit a little over 400 and bail in PvP, this wasn't any different. I got that 450 token and stopped, but along the way I got little to no iso. But good for those other people.

It's times like this that make me wonder why I don't just get myself sandboxed.

Dragon_Nexus

I had a feeling this might have been the case.
Honestly...I'm guilty of abusing this bug a bit. When I got to about 850 points in one PvP I found a fairly easy opponent worth, originally, 40 points which slowly decreased. I just rode that wave up to 1000. I always stop around the 1000 mark though, regardless.

Having an easier time reaching 1000 points and getting a 4* cover more than makes up for losing out on the ISO.