Why are certain ability covers alliance-only?

Zifna

HailMary wrote:

It's still effort-based. It's just that the focus of the effort has changed from 100% individual scoring to maximizing individual score + consistency of team scores + resource investment in alliance ability.

I don't see how that takes away from what I was saying at all - I said it's not your own individual interest or effort that affects your own outcomes, and a lot of the covers are going to people without particular interest in them. It seems like you're agreeing with me.

HailMary

Zifna wrote:

I don't see how that takes away from what I was saying at all - I said it's not your own individual interest or effort that affects your own outcomes, and a lot of the covers are going to people without particular interest in them. It seems like you're agreeing with me.

It's not all-or-nothing, though. It's certainly far from your hypothetical scenario involving 100% random cover rewards.

The effort is just no longer absolutely focused on individual score performance. It takes effort to maintain a high-ranking alliance, and if your alliance is managed in any marginally competent way (which it needs to be to consistently hit top 100), each alliance member will still consistently put in solid individual effort for rewards. Heck, there's been a couple of PvPs in which a couple of Djangoliers who had no use for/interest in those specific cover rewards put in points just to ensure that the 80%-90% of us who did need the alliance cover reward got it.

Zifna

HailMary wrote:

It's not all-or-nothing, though. It's certainly far from your hypothetical scenario involving 100% random cover rewards.

Of course, that scenario was an obvious exaggeration intended to counter the people saying "Well, there are more covers, so this is obviously better, more=better, right?" It illustrated the simplistic and insufficient nature of this argument - simply the fact that they're giving out more covers does not justify this as being a nice move or a good move for the game, but that seems to be the only argument in favor of the new system.

Katai

It really wouldn't be an issue if the colors just moved around between events. Especially when they have the same event back-to-back.

HailMary

Zifna wrote:

Of course, that scenario was an obvious exaggeration intended to counter the people saying "Well, there are more covers, so this is obviously better, more=better, right?"

Yes, strawmen make for great debate points.

Zifna wrote:

It illustrated the simplistic and insufficient nature of this argument - simply the fact that they're giving out more covers does not justify this as being a nice move or a good move for the game,

That argument only came about because people were claiming that the alliance system reduced cover reward quantity, which is demonstrably false, because math.

Zifna wrote:

but that seems to be the only argument in favor of the new system.

Or, ya know, there's the stuff I said that you chose not to quote.

Another argument is that you're spreading the risk of failing to get a reward among all players in an alliance. Whether or not you personally believe that's "nice" or "good" depends entirely upon your own preferences. If you value going lone wolf more than you value getting a cover, that's your preference. If you value the casual flexibility of not building an alliance more than you value getting alliance rewards, that's your preference. If you put in effort, upfront, towards forming a competitive alliance, the longer-term returns on that investment of time, effort, and maybe money are quite good.

As I said before, I would also like to see more color rotation for alliance cover rewards. But, your primary point of contention seems to have shifted away from that.

Unknown

rabscutle wrote:

For me it actually feels like it spreads out the rewards. In the past you only got that one coveted cover if you were in the top 5 or whatever. Giving alliance rewards (to the top 100 alliances no less) spreads out that third cover to a much larger group of people.

This is not necessarily true. The alliance rankings are unbracketed, individuals are bracketed. More people may or may not be getting covers, it depends on how many brackets are formed. Even if it ends up that more covers are being given out, it's not a generous giveaway like seeing a big top 100 may first appear. The way rewards are constantly bring funbalanced, I'd be surprised if alliance rewards weren't intended as an underhanded way to reduce total rewards.

Unknown

There's enough big-Alliance advantage in iso, HP and gaining covers generally without also reserving specific covers (high demand covers at that, like Hulk's black) for Alliance prizes. It's ridiculous and the kind of thing that will drive me and players like me to quit... hard enough to get certain covers without the requirement to go join an active 20 player alliance too.

Zifna

HailMary wrote:

Or, ya know, there's the stuff I said that you chose not to quote.

The other things you said I didn't think I needed to respond to because it seemed very supportive of what I was saying. You described how people in your alliance - who didn't want the covers at all - worked to acquire those covers for the rest of your alliance.

While it's clear how such an action was a good thing for you personally, it's more or less exactly the negative that I cited - covers being misallocated to people who don't care much about them. Not only that, your example clearly illustrates another negative - enticement to burnout.

I used to lead a server-first World of Warcraft guild. Burnout is a very real thing, and it often led to people quitting not just the guild, but the game. The current alliance system puts potentially harsh penalties in place for any member sitting out or performing weakly any event - even events they personally don't care about. If you go on vacation, your alliance is incentivized to kick you. Temporarily? Maybe. Or maybe you find a new alliance when you get back. Or maybe your weeklong vacation leads to you quitting the game since you can't easily pick up where you left off. Our guild was successful largely because I focused on recruitment and retention, and did all I could to allow people to balance an extremely demanding game with their real lives. While MPQ is a horse of a somewhat different color, there are strong parallels, particularly in the top levels of competitive play.

Please understand - I'm not saying this "against" you or "against" D3. I'm trying to help them, myself, AND you. While there are clear short-term benefits to the current situation for D3 and the top echelons of players, I am very seriously concerned at how the way the alliance system works, because I think it will frustrate players who are "locked out" of covers without playing the social game, stress people who are in successful or near-successful alliances because of the strong pressure to play even when they don't want to, and ultimately lose players and money for D3.

HailMary

Zifna wrote:

Please understand - I'm not saying this "against" you or "against" D3. I'm trying to help them, myself, AND you. While there are clear short-term benefits to the current situation for D3 and the top echelons of players, I am very seriously concerned at how the way the alliance system works, because I think it will frustrate players who are "locked out" of covers without playing the social game, stress people who are in successful or near-successful alliances because of the strong pressure to play even when they don't want to, and ultimately lose players and money for D3.

Don't worry. I didn't take it as personal aggression. You raise some good points, though I felt you were cherry-picking a bit.

I hear ya on the burnout issue, but to me, that's more about how you manage the alliance, and less about alliances existing or providing additional progression value. Simply being in an alliance doesn't necessarily impose requirements on players. That depends on the nature/personality of the alliance, its aims, its recruitment process, etc. You're going to have hardcore "everyone had better get 700+ in PvP" or "everyone needs to have 4 L100+ chars and go Rambo BAMF" alliances, but you're also going to have alliances like mine that want fun people do well and expect regular activity, and it's cool if you want to take a break from an event or two, or go on vacation, etc., as long as you give us a heads-up. No one's required to get placements, but the people we recruit tend to be self-starters, and generally do vie for individual placement the way they did before the alliance system was implemented. There are even more casual alliances that try to go for alliance rewards. At the "bottom," there are the fluid, ad-hoc congregations of randoms that band together in the short term for rewards, etc., etc.

I can't say much about the long term, since I've never been part of an alliance/guild/clan in any game. Just as I was convinced by an experienced MMO player that intra-alliance cover trading would be a terrible (as opposed to "totally awesome") idea, you may very well convince me that the alliance system itself is fundamentally flawed.

Specifically regarding misallocation of covers, though, I'd actually be curious about relative cover-reward wastage before and after alliances. Alliances will certainly encourage some max-covered players to place in reward tiers to help their alliance, but at the same time, max-covered elites have regularly placed very highly in PvP ever since I started looking at such things. It'd be interesting to see whether the total number of utilized covers rose or fell with alliance implementation.

Unknown

TLDR version of what I wanna say.
I've played many different competitive games and it always amazes me how wildly different the term "casual" is from person to person.

I'm an extremely competitive person by nature so my idea of casual could be the next persons idea of busting their **** off to place well.
Alliances overall are no different really.

Also yeah the covers could use MORE rotation(as we have seen them have at least some so far), but I don't expect them to do it for every event/subevent in a block. But I do have faith that If I look forward by months rather then weeks that everyone will have their fair shot at obtaining the covers they want.

Unknown

Ever since i looked at 3 events with no-blue-cap-for-you-9ppl-aliance-looser at the same time i just cant force myself to play again.
And i adore mach3 games and love this one.
Its just so... soooo frustrating.
And to ppl who say aliance rewards means more ppl will get the cover... the main problem for me - it will always be the same ppl. With bracets one player have a chance to get to top 5 with some luck-strategy-effort. I dont know who much of an effort 10ppl aliance have to generate to get into top 100. I just dont.

Unknown

Something about the "Alliances means more covers" argument - There are ten fewer 3* covers per bracket given out to solo players (two rather than three for 1-5, and one rather than two for 11-15), and a maximum of 2000 more for alliances (top 100 alliances, max of 20 per alliance). That means, even if every alliance to get one is twenty people, if there are more than 200 brackets - 100,000 players - in PVP, there are actually fewer 3* covers given out (and that's before you get into the cut to 2* covers, which are definitely being given out less). I don't know what PVP vs. PVE participation levels are, but the last PVE we have a firm count for had well over 100,000 players. Even if the same number of people who want covers are getting them, we're probably at least near the point where fewer covers are being given out in absolute terms. I think the assumption that "more covers are being given out in total" may not be true, and in any case, it's not true by a lot.

EDIT: Now that I think about it, they added the 46-50, so it's five fewer per bracket, not ten. So my numbers are probably off.

Unknown

Also note the amount of alliance covers that gets discarded.

Zifna

Shimary wrote:

And to ppl who say aliance rewards means more ppl will get the cover... the main problem for me - it will always be the same ppl.

That's a very good point I hadn't considered. I am sure which alliance is first will change but I bet there are really like 150 alliances (at maximum) who really have a shot at the top 100 alliance slots. That's very different than the individual rankings where probably half the people playing could be in the top few tiers of awards if they put the effort in.

Unknown

While there are clear short-term benefits to the current situation for D3 and the top echelons of players, I am very seriously concerned at how the way the alliance system works, because I think it will frustrate players who are "locked out" of covers without playing the social game, stress people who are in successful or near-successful alliances because of the strong pressure to play even when they don't want to, and ultimately lose players and money for D3.

This is my concern as well - there's danger of a wide gap forming between players who already have great rosters and strong alliances and players who are trying to get to that level. I'm in a pretty great 16 person alliance with friends, but there are 16 of us and not 20 so while we've all pushed hard to compete in events we've only been in the top 100 once. This means that in almost every tournament there are rare, increasingly necessary covers that we're missing out on. My personal roster has grown and made great strides in the last few months, but how long can that keep going if I start to hit a point where many of the players I'm competing against for top 10/top 25 places in PVP and PVE events are getting 1 or 2 more high-level covers in every event than I can get?

famousfoxking

tazary wrote:

This means that in almost every tournament there are rare, increasingly necessary covers that we're missing out on.

As long as they rotate the rewards (for example, as long as there is an upcoming event where Hulk Black is an individual reward and Hulk Red is alliance only) no one will miss out on covers, they'll just procure them more slowly than high-tier alliances. In a single event, it can seem pretty ****, but as long as covers become available, it's still doable.

I would start to get concerned if we ONLY saw Hulk Black and Steve Blue as alliance rewards (for example), over the course of many events. That would suck. But as long as they continue to rotate, I'm happy being on a slightly slower pace than the SHIELD guys.

_RiO_

Zifna wrote:

I am very seriously concerned at how the way the alliance system works, because I think it will frustrate players who are "locked out" of covers without playing the social game, stress people who are in successful or near-successful alliances because of the strong pressure to play even when they don't want to, and ultimately lose players and money for D3.

It's preached often at game development seminars during talks on the topic of monetization and player retention for free to play games: 'being part of a team' does something to people at a deep psychological level, subconsciously incentivizing themselves to keep on playing and lowering the pressure on the developer or publisher itself to continue to provide engaging content. This 'for the good of the team'-effect has been scientifically studied at length and it affects everyone to some varying degree. (Well-- unless you are a complete sociopath, ofcourse.) It's a very dirty way to increase player retention and monetary investment and you have every right to be concerned about it.

Demiurge_Will

You can expect that, over the course of many events, each of the abilities for a character will appear in alliance rewards and in individual rewards - we're not setting any abilities aside to be alliance-only. When we repeat the same event with the same rewards (like when an event runs 2x back-to-back), we won't necessarily rotate the abilities between repeats. (We've greatly reduced the frequency of back-to-back repeats over the past months and we'd rather do new events than repeats, but sometimes it's best for the game to put the effort required by varying the rewards into new events instead.)

Unknown

Demiurge_Will wrote:

You can expect that, over the course of many events, each of the abilities for a character will appear in alliance rewards and in individual rewards - we're not setting any abilities aside to be alliance-only. When we repeat the same event with the same rewards (like when an event runs 2x back-to-back), we won't necessarily rotate the abilities between repeats. (We've greatly reduced the frequency of back-to-back repeats over the past months and we'd rather do new events than repeats, but sometimes it's best for the game to put the effort required by varying the rewards into new events instead.)

Just curious, you mentioned that varying the rewards takes effort in comparison to new events. Is changing the cover from a hulk black to a hulk red or green that difficult? This is from someone who does no programming and has no idea about the actual dev team's size. I am just curious.

Unknown

My 4/5/0 Captain Steve would like a word...