To D3 Dev Team..Suggestions to improve user experience

chill21genlee

Dev Team,
Thanks for an overall great product! There are a few improvements I would like to suggest, aggregated from the thoughts and sentiments of much of your user base, that are designed to address some legacy issues and competitive balance problems. While I realize resources are limited, I think the majority of the user base wouldn't mind if you took just one cycle off of the onslaught of 4 star chars to place some focus on the fundamentals. These fundamentals would meaningfully impact the entire user base, and therefore have a positive effect on the health (adoption/abandon) of the application overall. With no further ado:
1) Put and end to Merc'ing (single players bouncing around alliances mid event to increase alliance placement) once and for all by applying a rule to PVP and PVE events. This rule would essentially only allow a player's accumulated points to count towards the Alliance that he or she began the event in. I know this can be done, since it how the "Big Boss" events work. This will help the rest of us compete against the top 5 or 10 cabals of alliances that regularly exploit merc'ing to augment their placements.
2) Apply SCL enhancements to NODE rewards, not just progression rewards. Your experienced, tenured players with mature roster have absolutely no use for standard tokens, so at a minimum swap that one out for Heroic or Elite as a node rewards for SCL 6 and above.
3) Add at least a couple more sandboxes for players making the 4 to 5 star transition. I have one single champed 5 star, and it has put me in what feels like the most brutal PVE and PVP sandbox, I think there's room for improvement near the top of the difficulty scaling / sandboxing. If not this, at least add the ability to down level for diminished ISO for other folks in this situation.
4) The starting board should not be gamed to accommodate for the lack of enemy AI and/or used to simulate difficulty of the match. Two examples: When fighting Teen Jean there is a 5 match available on the starting board at an inordinately higher rate than when NOT fighting a team with her on it (I estimate somewhere btw 3 and 4 times more likely). Example two, the starting board should have a relatively equidistant amount of ALL colors and respective available matches; however whatever color the players strongest character "tanks" on is almost always less present and less apt to be matchable (ie when I run my 5Cap there are almost always very few Yellows present and almost never Yellows available for match). This happens with entirely too much frequency to be chalked up to "randomness". Conversely if you have a team that has 1 or 2 colors uncovered, those colors will appear more abundantly on the starting board at a rate too high to be coincidence.
*While I admit that there may be some self serving observation bias here, I have actually been tracking this actively the last 3 months or so, and the numbers I provide are indicative of that and also bear out the assertion that "fixing" the starting board is a functional mechanic of the game. I know it can't be completely random as matches can't result, but in my opinion the trends I mentioned are way too pronounced and sustained to be anecdotal.*
It is my belief that this is an unacknowledged, unspoken game mechanic and another of the ways that the devs have accounted for the fact that the AI behavior is lackluster, and it needs to die a horrible death.
5) Add some new PVE stories and events; and make it a priority to keep them coming more often. The same rotation is getting very boring, often makes no contextual sense for the chars required, and makes us all feel the "grind" much more than if there were new chapters/stories being added more consistently.
6) Improve PVP opponent base. In any given event when you start to get about 6-700+ points, you just get the same 3-4 opponents no matter how much skipping you do.
7) Fix the "LATEST" node of the Legendary Token pack draw to include the older 5 star chars as well. When receiving LTs as a reward, a player is forced to use them on the "Latest" packs, meaning they can't possibly pull anything but the most recent 5 stars, albeit at a higher draw rate. Either put the old ones in there or let us choose whether to spend LTs won as awards on Latest OR Classic pulls

Thanks very much for your time, and to all my fellow boards members, please reply back with any of your additions, or just to agree/disagree with the ideas and suggestions set forth. The more replies the post gets, hopefully the more likely it is that it will be read and perhaps given some serious consideration by the Devs!

Megdar

Put and end to Merc'ing (single players bouncing around alliances mid event to increase alliance placement) once and for all by applying a rule to PVP and PVE events. This rule would essentially only allow a player's accumulated points to count towards the Alliance that he or she began the event in. I know this can be done, since it how the "Big Boss" events work. This will help the rest of us compete against the top 5 or 10 cabals of alliances that regularly exploit merc'ing to augment their placements.

People will just merc at the start of the event, you are really dellusionned if you think this would prevent the same 10 alliances to hold the top 10 spots... They hold them because they are coordinate way more then "regular" alliance...

chill21genlee

Understand but i dont want mercing gone because of the top 10 they will always find a way to be there..i want it gone because its a cheesy exploit that adversely impacts the alliances who dont do it.
Also just feel like its a better system to have the rewards based on the alliance makeup you went into any given event with..thats your team and only the folks who started on the teams contributions should count in the end.
So no, not delusional (one L)..just think its a loophole that can and should be addressed

Megdar

Your word:

This will help the rest of us compete against the top 5 or 10 cabals of alliances that regularly exploit merc'ing to augment their placements

Also, they would have to punish 19 other person in an alliance because a douch bag decide to stop playing after 1 sub of Story. You would really love to have your season reward totally scraped because 2 person stopped playing after two event in the month...

The reason why they let people move is probably because of that... It can already be a pain to see your chance to finish a Boss diminished because of two persons that did not deliver... if they make it so for everything this will end up really not fun.

6) Improve PVP opponent base. In any given event when you start to get about 6-700+ points, you just get the same 3-4 opponents no matter how much skipping you do.

Nothing to do with their system... well not directly... everyone are shielded over 700 points, and you can't see shielded person, so you see no one... I'm a big advocat of letting you see shielded person, this would help that and also help you not get it by over 9000 person when you unshield because you are the only available target.

Sure there would be point inflation, but you adjust progression.