Those that wanted the end of cakes...

GurlBYE

The posts here get it.

As someone not in 5 tier.

(3 with some fledgling 12/13 4's that aren't top tier)
The reward structure doesn't reflect where the meta is.

In my year + with the game, no matter my roster the 4 star and the 3 stars have consistently been beyond reach.

Before i needed maxed 3's or soft capped 4's.
Then i needed champed 3's or maxed/ 4's.
Now i need Champed 4's to reach 4's.

I missed the cupcake train so that leg up to 4 town is gone and the gap has gotten wider.

Fightmastermpq

Piro_plock wrote:

dsds wrote:

Also line (which is a chat outside of the game) was heavily used to coordinate cupcakes.

Well, the main reason why people use LINE, Facebook groups or Discord isn't to exclude people... It's because the in-game chat sucks.

Because it's a match-3 game, not a chat app. Even if the in-game chat were great, people would still migrate to external tools specifically made to do it better. And IMO it's unreasonable to assume that competitive players won't use LINE or Discord or some type of 3rd party platform to communicate outside the game. It's incredibly common in all of gaming these days.

dsds wrote:

Here's the thing I don't get... why champion that idea of cupcakes to benefit a few people more instead of champion an idea of fixing pvp so everyone can benefit? Was it not a bandaid solution? Why support a broken system and come up with some wacky way to fix it by the players (cupcakes)? Here's the chance to make the game better for everyone not just the 5% of the player base that benefitted from the cupcakes?

Because cupcakes were a result of other PvP mechanics (as I outlined in my earlier post.) Instead of addressing the cause of the cupcake "problem" they implemented a new mechanic that prevents the crazy low cupcakes, but didn't really address any of the previous issues, and added some new ones.

GurlBYE

Fightmastermpq wrote:

Piro_plock wrote:

dsds wrote:

Also line (which is a chat outside of the game) was heavily used to coordinate cupcakes.

Well, the main reason why people use LINE, Facebook groups or Discord isn't to exclude people... It's because the in-game chat sucks.

Because it's a match-3 game, not a chat app. Even if the in-game chat were great, people would still migrate to external tools specifically made to do it better. And IMO it's unreasonable to assume that competitive players won't use LINE or Discord or some type of 3rd party platform to communicate outside the game. It's incredibly common in all of gaming these days.

No one cares if people chat outside the game.

people are mainly more upset on principle that it requires outer communication for competition period.

Even if the chatting were in game it'd be weird in any game to implement a competitive mode where you have to rely and solely communicate with others to see any solitary success.

mohio

GurlBYE wrote:

Fightmastermpq wrote:

Piro_plock wrote:

dsds wrote:

Also line (which is a chat outside of the game) was heavily used to coordinate cupcakes.

Well, the main reason why people use LINE, Facebook groups or Discord isn't to exclude people... It's because the in-game chat sucks.

Because it's a match-3 game, not a chat app. Even if the in-game chat were great, people would still migrate to external tools specifically made to do it better. And IMO it's unreasonable to assume that competitive players won't use LINE or Discord or some type of 3rd party platform to communicate outside the game. It's incredibly common in all of gaming these days.

No one cares if people chat outside the game.

people are mainly more upset on principle that it requires outer communication for competition period.

Even if the chatting were in game it'd be weird in any game to implement a competitive mode where you have to rely and solely communicate with others to see any solitary success.

The thing is you really don't/didn't need Line to achieve success. I have several alliance mates that hit 1200+ with no battle chats, and they were hitting 1300+ before. Also every single "what is a cupcake" thread on this forum has multiple instances of posters saying they don't use battle chats but still find cupcakes because they follow predictable patterns (just familiarize yourself with names of top finishers and if you see them hopping look for cake - also look around certain times, 3h, 8h, 11h, etc.). People complaining didn't understand the system and how to use it to benefit themselves, or were too lazy to do it and wanted the game to cater to them. That's their prerogative, but claiming that a 3rd party chat app is the only way to achieve solitary success is just plain false.

dsds

mohio wrote:

The thing is you really don't/didn't need Line to achieve success. I have several alliance mates that hit 1200+ with no battle chats, and they were hitting 1300+ before. Also every single "what is a cupcake" thread on this forum has multiple instances of posters saying they don't use battle chats but still find cupcakes because they follow predictable patterns (just familiarize yourself with names of top finishers and if you see them hopping look for cake - also look around certain times, 3h, 8h, 11h, etc.). People complaining didn't understand the system and how to use it to benefit themselves, or were too lazy to do it and wanted the game to cater to them. That's their prerogative, but claiming that a 3rd party chat app is the only way to achieve solitary success is just plain false.

Here's the thing. Yes there are multiple instances of people hitting cupcakes without coordination. But that does not mean that everyone is doing it. I can say that there are several examples of billionaires out there. But that does not mean it's the norm or that it is achievable to the average person. The majority of the time, people find cupcakes through coordination. If you want to save time and not spend all day on mpq, you would use line because then you get a notification when cupcakes are available or someone would tell you at what time they plan to climb. It's so much easier than checking every hour or so for cupcakes. It would also save on shields if you knew ahead of time when people were going to put out cupcakes. For instance if you knew cupcakes would be available in 3 hours, you would use only a 3 hours shield to hop. If you didn't you may want to use an 8 hour shield in case there are no cupcakes within 3 hours and your shield runs out.

Fightmastermpq wrote:

Piro_plock wrote:

dsds wrote:

Also line (which is a chat outside of the game) was heavily used to coordinate cupcakes.

Well, the main reason why people use LINE, Facebook groups or Discord isn't to exclude people... It's because the in-game chat sucks.

Because it's a match-3 game, not a chat app. Even if the in-game chat were great, people would still migrate to external tools specifically made to do it better. And IMO it's unreasonable to assume that competitive players won't use LINE or Discord or some type of 3rd party platform to communicate outside the game. It's incredibly common in all of gaming these days.

dsds wrote:

Here's the thing I don't get... why champion that idea of cupcakes to benefit a few people more instead of champion an idea of fixing pvp so everyone can benefit? Was it not a bandaid solution? Why support a broken system and come up with some wacky way to fix it by the players (cupcakes)? Here's the chance to make the game better for everyone not just the 5% of the player base that benefitted from the cupcakes?

Because cupcakes were a result of other PvP mechanics (as I outlined in my earlier post.) Instead of addressing the cause of the cupcake "problem" they implemented a new mechanic that prevents the crazy low cupcakes, but didn't really address any of the previous issues, and added some new ones.

Yes we get that the root problem wasn't addressed, I never disagreed with that. Now that we are starting this topic again, we should keep the topic to the root problem not the bandaid fix (cupcakes). Don't ask to bring back cupcakes, because it supported a broken system, get the system fixed and we won't need cupcakes anymore.

Fightmastermpq

GurlBYE wrote:

Fightmastermpq wrote:

Piro_plock wrote:

dsds wrote:

Also line (which is a chat outside of the game) was heavily used to coordinate cupcakes.

Well, the main reason why people use LINE, Facebook groups or Discord isn't to exclude people... It's because the in-game chat sucks.

Because it's a match-3 game, not a chat app. Even if the in-game chat were great, people would still migrate to external tools specifically made to do it better. And IMO it's unreasonable to assume that competitive players won't use LINE or Discord or some type of 3rd party platform to communicate outside the game. It's incredibly common in all of gaming these days.

No one cares if people chat outside the game.

people are mainly more upset on principle that it requires outer communication for competition period.

Even if the chatting were in game it'd be weird in any game to implement a competitive mode where you have to rely and solely communicate with others to see any solitary success.

As mohio pointed out you don't need outside communication to be successful. And you seem painfully ignorant of the entire world of eSports - filled with games that have competitive modes where you must rely on communication with others to remain competitive at the highest levels. This is my point. If you have a game where players compete against each other, and there is any sort of team dynamic at all (i.e. alliances) then the MOST competitive players WILL communicate outside the game. Quite frankly I'm surprised the MPQ playerbase is still using the mostly text based communication on LINE and hasn't migrated to something like Teamspeak or Discord for even faster communication in real time.

Stax the Foyer

Fightmastermpq wrote:

Quite frankly I'm surprised the MPQ playerbase is still using the mostly text based communication on LINE and hasn't migrated to something like Teamspeak or Discord for even faster communication in real time.

The timing isn't that critical in MPQ, you have a window of about a minute to take any action that matters

Plus, and this is way more important, voice communication isn't as work and/or bathroom friendly as text-based communication.

AtlasAxe

What I would say about in game chat is that it is so abysmally bad that even with the 20 people in your alliance, for mundane items it is nearly unusable. The simple act of requesting team-ups for example: because of often hours-long lag, a simple "MBW stings please" may not appear until well after the TU request was made, or until an app restart. People then get annoyed because they were given the wrong things.

I can't count the number of times I've come into chat and clearly there are replies to discussions that don't fully appear. Then I have to force quit/restart to get context and be able to answer as a cmd. Add then the message length, and the lack of copy/paste, and inability to use the type-forward and autocorrect functions of the OS, etc. as major, basic, glaring gaps.

Every mobile OS has these APIs built-in. It doesn't have to be fancy, just basically capable.

AtlasAxe

aesthetocyst wrote:

Not too mention potentially communicating with dozens ... hundreds ... of people in multiple conversations simultaneously.

Even a "battle chat" goes on over the course of an event, not only an hour or two. And it's important to have a record of the information shared. It's hard to imagine using voice comms for anything other than trash talking. Seems like it would be an endless cacophany of people repeating themselves and asking he same questions over and over again

Agreed with everything here. This is not RTS, RPG, or FPS. Events are very disconnected and take hours to play out - when was the last shield, for example. Voice wouldn't be very valuable.

mpqr7

All my recent alliances only use group chat for TU request specifications.

If I have further notes about TUs (for example, please no wolverines ), I chat it to my team on Line.

user311

Welcome Death wrote:

A brief history of competetive play in mpq.

Hey, just wanna say thanks for this. I've been reading this thread and asking myself, the heck are cupcakes/baking? Got it now. Thanks.

I had stopped playing right about the time that Iceman came out in 2015. I was absolutely one of these people who benefited from this mechanic and hitting the top guys in between their shields and was hitting 1300 consistently. Line or not, it wasn't hard to just skip until i found a juicy target.

I just started playing again and my roster after this long is just pitiful. I can skip just about all day and every team is outside of my league. I've tried choosing a lower rank and varied slots but generally its the same so I stick with 5 or 6 (Do people actually hit max progression in rank 1-4 without champs?). It's gonna be some time before I can hit 900+ again and I think that's fair, considering. I am happy with the 575 reward as it is, but really what i need more than CP is HP for roster slots. There are so many 4*s now and not enough HP available to roster them. Just as an example using myself, I have gained through champing and CP, ~20 legendary tokens. I have at least 18 unique covers in my vine that I have to figure out how to roster. So when I see folks talking about scoring and stopping at the 575 mark, I think that if others are in my situation and really need more HP, then we would push higher if that 725 was more feasible, but it isn't. So unfortunately it's 575 then back to PVE (for now).

Vhailorx

dsds wrote:

Yes we get that the root problem wasn't addressed, I never disagreed with that. Now that we are starting this topic again, we should keep the topic to the root problem not the bandaid fix (cupcakes). Don't ask to bring back cupcakes, because it supported a broken system, get the system fixed and we won't need cupcakes anymore.

A hypothetical Better PVP System > PVP with baking > PVP now. Baking may not be the ideal PVP system, but it is pretty clearly superior to what we have now. The current system just widens the gap between 5* players and everyone else. At least baking was democratic in that anyone who could climb to 900+ could benefit from the system if they knew how. .grilling is an oligarchy

I would happily welcome a return of baking. And then I would continue advocating for an even better PVP system.

Speaking of improvements to PVP: For ****'s sake can we not get rid of shield cooldowns already?! Does ANYONE actually benefit from them? All they do is punish PVP losses even more, and force high scorers to live their lives on strict 8-hour schedules. They are a scourge on PVP. If demi really wants to force us to shield fewer times, and force us to use more expensive shields, then just cap the total number of each type of shield. The cooldowns and fixed event-length already does this effectively. But switching to a shield count instead of a cooldown would actually let players play on their own schedules.

Vhailorx

I'm compromising aesth! Demi clearly doesn't love scores 3x or 4x the max prog reward.

And just uncapping shields would clearly inflate scoring. So my proposal does the same work as the shield cooldowns, but really allows players to play whenever they want.

But I suspect it's a non-starter at demi/d3 because giving players even 2x 3-hour shields would result in a noticeable drop in 8-hour shield sales for those players that only hop 0-2 times per event. You could probably make it up from the whales by allowing them to purchase more 8- and 24-hour shields (say give everyone 2x 3-hour, 4x 8 hour, and 8x 24 hour shields), but that would be more complicated and harder to disguise from the players (not that the original shield cooldown implementation was particularly well disguised. Demi/d3: we did all notice when you forced us to buy more 8-hour shields and sold it to us as a change made to reduce crazy scores and let players have a better.)

Alas, as much as I have raged on these forums about cooldowns for almost 2 years now, it's pretty clear that the playerbase has largely acquiesced to this abomination, so I doubt we will see any improvements now. . .

El Satanno

Atlas Axe wrote:

aesthetocyst wrote:

Not too mention potentially communicating with dozens ... hundreds ... of people in multiple conversations simultaneously.

Even a "battle chat" goes on over the course of an event, not only an hour or two. And it's important to have a record of the information shared. It's hard to imagine using voice comms for anything other than trash talking. Seems like it would be an endless cacophany of people repeating themselves and asking he same questions over and over again

Agreed with everything here. This is not RTS, RPG, or FPS. Events are very disconnected and take hours to play out - when was the last shield, for example. Voice wouldn't be very valuable.

Then you'd also have dozens of guys like me who will just burp or fart into the mic for hours on end.

Hendross

In case anyone thought my first photo evidence of the great divide was abnormal...

Hendross wrote:

More evidence...with 3hr to go in the same event.

The next event.

You may have guessed, everyone above me had 1 or more maxed 5-star.

Vhailorx

Hendross wrote:

In case anyone thought my first photo evidence of the great divide was abnormal...

Hendross wrote:

More evidence...with 3hr to go in the same event.

The next event.

You may have guessed, everyone above me had 1 or more maxed 5-star.

Look at you being all responsible and blurring names!

And remember that there were off season events. Season events will have much higher scores at the top.

cletus1985

I'll just repost my opinion from 4 months ago, pretty sure it explains everything accurately to this date. Number 1 is totally based on opinion, everything else predicted is exactly what people are complaining about now.

Re: Thank god cupcakes are gone

by cletus1985 » Sat Sep 24, 2016 11:55 pm

I'll throw my perspective into the ring here. Agree or disagree this is my personal opinion.

1) Cupcakes added a side game that honestly made PvP more fun. It's just another grind now and it's making me question if this game is really fun enough for me to continue playing (lord knows PvE grindfests aren't any fun).

2) The biggest issue with removing cupcakes isn't how many points are injected into each slice, but the fact that it's the only core mechanic they removed (the point loss differential they implemented is laughable at best). The fact that I can play from the beginning and get to 1.3k+ points and a 5* team can come in the last 3 hrs and hit me from 300 points to steal 75 points is ridiculous. Make a cutoff where the point differential that awards 75 points is the lowest you can queue someone from.

3) To all the people who are demoralizing cupcakes that aren't at the top of the hill: have fun never finding a target you can beat worth more than 30 points again past 800ish points. While you may have very rarely ever found an actual cupcake, I can almost guarantee you found the 3* rosters using them. From this new system they probably won't exist anymore, so be prepared to take down champed boosted 4* and 5* rosters. Hope all you wanted was placement, because progression is about to disappear, and placement was actually taken care of with SCL's.

4) Have a nice day. I'm not upset at anyone, just less interested in MPQ and feeling like the naïve will be wishing they were more careful what they wished for soon.

Vhailorx

cletus1985 wrote:

I
4) Have a nice day. I'm not upset at anyone, just less interested in MPQ and feeling like the naïve will be wishing they were more careful what they wished for soon.

Except that sadly, as demonstrated by this thread, there are still plenty of people out there who prefer the current meta. I'm sure some small number of players are really better off in the current system, but it seems to me that a very significant majority of players were better served by the old world of baking.

Bishop

aesthetocyst wrote:

Stax the Foyer wrote:

Fightmastermpq wrote:

Quite frankly I'm surprised the MPQ playerbase is still using the mostly text based communication on LINE and hasn't migrated to something like Teamspeak or Discord for even faster communication in real time.

The timing isn't that critical in MPQ, you have a window of about a minute to take any action that matters

Plus, and this is way more important, voice communication isn't as work and/or bathroom friendly as text-based communication.

Not too mention potentially communicating with dozens ... hundreds ... of people in multiple conversations simultaneously.

Even a "battle chat" goes on over the course of an event, not only an hour or two. And it's important to have a record of the information shared. It's hard to imagine using voice comms for anything other than trash talking. Seems like it would be an endless cacophany of people repeating themselves and asking he same questions over and over again

It's hard to imagine doing this at all.

Mr_Sinister

Hendross wrote:

In case anyone thought my first photo evidence of the great divide was abnormal...

Hendross wrote:

More evidence...with 3hr to go in the same event.

The next event.

You may have guessed, everyone above me had 1 or more maxed 5-star.

They don't even have to try either. You grind out points for 1.5 days, are near 1k and t5, then the 5* decide to play and stroll to 1200 in a couple hours, # to end with an easy t5 while you furiously skip looking for anything above 15 points. When you find it, it's usually another 5* roster climbing you can't beat.