Falcon Distribution

Unknown

Falcon marks the first time that a character debuting in this new post-alliance era has a third cover available only to the top 100 alliances (as opposed to top 250). Alliances were kind of cool in the early days (read: last month) because they allowed me to help my more casual friends/wife earn some cool new 3* covers in events in which they might not have otherwise placed highly. Now that benefit is gone, as I'll need a larger alliance (mine is only 13) or far less casual players to reach that competition mark.

This is very frustrating, because it looks incredibly transparently greedy. Alliance roster purchases are incredibly expensive, and approximately 15 of them are already necessary to earn any return in your regular PvP events (you know, outside of the 50 HP that serious players were already earning from the 500 point progression mark). Now that same level of buy-in is going to be necessary to get the debut 3rd color cover for new characters as well.

Alliance rewards are not an addition to the game if A) all of the prizes are just redistributed from other places and the players who earn them have paid thousands and thousands of collective Heropoints for the privilege of competition. This is the feedback forum, so here's my feedback: this is gouging, and it's making the game a lot less fun. Please stop extorting funds from your playerbase.

_RiO_

Seconded.

Since the first day that rewards were shifted to alliances I've been reiterating my complaints both the shift and the way that alliance rewards are dominated consistently by the top few veteran players.

Unknown

Moon 17 wrote:

This is very frustrating, because it looks incredibly transparently greedy.

It only looks incredibly greedy, It's not. It's purely, maniacally greedy. The alliance system has been a blatant cashgrab from the start, forcing people to either buy HP or get squeezed out of rewards. And it will get worse. I can pretty much guarantee it.

Unknown

I was optimistic--no, enthusiastic, even--about it for a few days. I've since become decidedly less so.

Unknown

Let's look at the math for a moment.

In the Hulk event, we saw just over 100,000 players. Let's assume that's the normal number of players in any given event. So in a given event, the top 10 players in a 1000 person bracket would get the 3rd cover (and sometimes top 10 in a 2000 person bracket, but let's stick with 1K for now for easy math). Which translates to 1000 copies of that 3rd cover being given out.

Let's assume that it takes a full 20-man alliance to get top 100 (not unreasonable - my 20 man alliance has had to have full participation in the 400+ range for some PVP tourneys). Which means you're looking at a guaranteed 2000 copies of the 3rd cover being handed out.

So even if the next 150 alliances were all 5 man, that's 1750 more covers total (1000 from T100 + 750 from T101-250) that were being handed out under the "top 250 alliance" prize structure. If they're working to regulate the flow of covers, it makes perfect sense that they would want to cut back. Given the number of other discussions across this board on ISO flow, HP flow, and cover flow, we know that they monitor this stuff very closely and all they're trying to do is bring it back to normal levels.

I get that you don't like the reward shifting to alliances, but also realize that even with just the top 100 alliances getting it, that's still a massive increase over what was available in say Thick as Thieves (top 10 in a 2K man bracket) or ISO-8 Brotherhood (top 10 in a 1K man bracket).

Dormammu

Riggy wrote:

Let's look at the math for a moment.

In the Hulk event, we saw just over 100,000 players. Let's assume that's the normal number of players in any given event. So in a given event, the top 10 players in a 1000 person bracket would get the 3rd cover (and sometimes top 10 in a 2000 person bracket, but let's stick with 1K for now for easy math). Which translates to 1000 copies of that 3rd cover being given out.

Let's assume that it takes a full 20-man alliance to get top 100 (not unreasonable - my 20 man alliance has had to have full participation in the 400+ range for some PVP tourneys). Which means you're looking at a guaranteed 2000 copies of the 3rd cover being handed out.

So even if the next 150 alliances were all 5 man, that's 1750 more covers total (1000 from T100 + 750 from T101-250) that were being handed out under the "top 250 alliance" prize structure. If they're working to regulate the flow of covers, it makes perfect sense that they would want to cut back. Given the number of other discussions across this board on ISO flow, HP flow, and cover flow, we know that they monitor this stuff very closely and all they're trying to do is bring it back to normal levels.

I get that you don't like the reward shifting to alliances, but also realize that even with just the top 100 alliances getting it, that's still a massive increase over what was available in say Thick as Thieves (top 10 in a 2K man bracket) or ISO-8 Brotherhood (top 10 in a 1K man bracket).

There may be more 3rd covers going out, but I think what irks people is that they are going to the same 100-150 alliances every time. Yeah, there's more of them, but they're only available to the elite. The rest of the schmoes who can't afford better than a 5-10 man alliance have zero chance at that 3rd cover. ZERO. This is especially frustrating to them when the same color is only available as an alliance reward, meaning they have absolutely no means of getting it until it becomes available as a token prize months down the road.

People aren't begging for more covers to be available, they just want a shot at getting it. A chance. An opportunity.

Unknown

I think they need to lower the cost to expand alliance so that we've a relatively even field and then we can see if the numbers work out. Right now there's nothing fair for competition between alliances of unequal sizes so it's impossible to draw any meaningful conclusion with the expansion costs being as expensive as they are still.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

I think they need to lower the cost to expand alliance so that we've a relatively even field and then we can see if the numbers work out. Right now there's nothing fair for competition between alliances of unequal sizes so it's impossible to draw any meaningful conclusion with the expansion costs being as expensive as they are still.

I still believe that third cover should be available as personal reward. Increasing competition won't really help much, I'm somewhat convinced that it's still going to be mostly the same alliances placing at the top. If you aren't in one of those, you'll be missing that coveted cover, no matter how much effort you spend. I'd vote for making alliance rewards HP/ISO/Tokens only, that's incentive enough to place well without putting non-alliance players (or players not in top placing alliances) at too big a disadvantage. If D3P is feeling generous they may throw in an additional cover for alliances, provided it doesn't get taken away from regular players.

Unknown

Riggy wrote:

Let's look at the math for a moment.

Have done, and will freely admit that the sheer volume of covers given out post-alliances has increased. I usually preface all of my complaints about alliance prizing by admitting that the raw numbers are more generous.

But let's not forget the overwhelming cost of alliance formation. People paid a lot of premium currency to be competitive in alliances; it isn't as though D3 just started giving these extra covers away. The fact that we paid a lot of premium currency to be competitive in a field that basically just allows those of us who are competitive to take prizes we were already getting is lame. The fact that they're increasing the amount of premium currency needed to buy back prizes many of us were already winning is ultra lame.

And it's that way across the board. The nearly ubiquitous 50 HP prize must seem pretty generous to most participants, but let's not forget that it was taken directly off of the PvP progression track. So, yeah, there are more HP in circulation, but the maximum number of them that you can personally earn hasn't changed. As a generous individual, I'm glad prizes are penetrating deeper into the playerbase. As a competitive gamer, I'm understandably grumpy that my prize ceiling is exactly where it was before, but my ability to earn those prizes had been directly monetized.

So, yeah, I get it. More covers are going out now than were going out before. That's fantastic. But how many more, and at what (exorbitant cost), and for how long?

Unknown

I acknowledged in my post that I understand the real gripe to be the shift of rewards to alliances, and that the complaints mainly come from solo players who don't want to be forced to rely on other people to be rewarded for their efforts. However, the fact is that solo players don't stick around as long as those who are involved in an in-game community. It's one of the key design aspects of a free to play game. I've said elsewhere that people's gripes aren't so much that alliances are necessary to get some of the rewards, but rather that the implementation felt ham-handed after individual rewards were already established.

So like it or not, the need to be part of a community is a nearly essential aspect of any f2p game where the payoff is measured in months, not days. Read any design article on free 2 play games and they all say "build an in-game community". You can complain that the implementation was a ham-fisted after-thought on the part of D3, but the design is consistent with most other games out there.

Also, it's way too early to tell whether the covers for alliances will rotate or not. We've only had 1 repeat so far, have we not? And we know that D3 all too often just republishes earlier events with the same rewards (a couple months back everyone griped that it was the same 2* rewards in every tourney). They've been better about it lately so I have no doubt that covers will rotate through the prize structure.

Unknown

I think you're still slightly to the side of the problem. It's not that rewards are partially alliance-based; I don't care for that, but it's a personal complaint that I can swallow. It's that the alliance system, despite its premium cost, added very little to the game--and now what little added value it came with is being ratcheted back. We appear to have been paying D3 for the privilege of nothing being different.

Unknown

Moon 17 wrote:

I think you're still slightly to the side of the problem. It's not that rewards are partially alliance-based; I don't care for that, but it's a personal complaint that I can swallow. It's that the alliance system, despite its premium cost, added very little to the game--and now what little added value it came with is being ratcheted back. We appear to have been paying D3 for the privilege of nothing being different.

I guess you're right, I'm not quite following the complaint. You're right in that alliances by themselves added very little of substance. The setup of alliances is infrastructure only. Rewards got shifted around, and they made alliances a pre-requisite for a lot of rewards that were previously accessible to individual players. However, I'm still optimistic that there are good things to come for alliances, like the tournament seasons. Now, if the tournament seasons also just shift rewards around, then I'll agree that D3 is being too stingy.

So if I'm beginning to get on the same page as you, I think the underlying problem is that D3 is still in the "add infrastructure" stage of game design and they need to be moving to the "add features" stage. New tourney types and new characters are great, but they're still the same ISO/HP sinks that they were before. There's really only one avenue for expenditures, and that's in the size and level of your roster. Which means that D3 can't increase the ISO flow without affecting the rate of growth for a given demographic's roster (size and overall level).

What they really need to do is to add additional ISO & HP sinks. If there was another venue to sink currency into (lairs / HQs, alternate costumes, vehicles, crafting system, etc. are all common themes) then they could safely increase the flow of ISO and HP b/c the net economic effect will be zero (with the expectation that some people will invest only minimally into the alternate currency sinks and power up their roster - that's just a given and can be managed).

Unknown

There needs to be a balance. I am fine with strong alliances earning great rewards.

The feeling that those rewards are simply unavailable unless you are already part of a strong alliance is frustrating, and even a strong alliance that you took the time effort and HP to grow is no guarantee of covers.
As a solo players it was pick and choose where you wanted to put effort and you could earn the rewards you were excited about, and if you didn't get them you had only yourself and your competition to blame.
As an alliance player everyone will need some covers so there is no slacking off, no choosing your own destiny. If your group earns rewards you feel great and congratulate your team.
If you don't then who do you blame.

The list is longer and more complicated now.
You can blame yourself (but I was the top scorer for my alliance, I can't be the one holding us back)
You can blame the rest of your alliance ( but they are trying as hard as they can, and some people had to be away for a day and I like these people I don't want to start brewing up alliance conflict or kicking people out because of scores but how else are we supposed to perform better, should we just resign ourselves to never getting alliance covers any more?)
Or you can blame the new system that makes you feel like you are getting shut out.

I agree community is important. This system makes you feel vaguely bullied into signing up whether you wanted to or not, makes you feel guilty if you under perform and your alliance misses rewards, and makes you a little disappointed in your alliance if you performed well and your alliance misses rewards. Works great if your team is always a winner, so for ~2000 people, but for the rest? This is not how to encourage community.

_RiO_

Cryptobrancus wrote:

I agree community is important. This system makes you feel vaguely bullied into signing up whether you wanted to or not, makes you feel guilty if you under perform and your alliance misses rewards, and makes you a little disappointed in your alliance if you performed well and your alliance misses rewards. Works great if your team is always a winner, so for ~2000 people, but for the rest? This is not how to encourage community.

QFT. The way alliances were designed and delivered was flawed from the ground up and exactly for the reasons you so eloquently articulate.

The current alliance power dynamic breads a toxic environment where you are pressed into overworking yourself for your peers, while there is a general sense of oppression from the higher ranking alliances looming overhead. This was still the case when certain notorious high level players used to be pushed into your single player bracket, but the introduction of alliances has forced that secondary emotional understream "out of the shadows and into the light" in a very dangerous way.

And what did we really gain as players from it? Nothing. All the rewards that were created on the alliance ladder were originally available on the single player ladders. Allegedly according to the developer and publisher, putting them on the alliance ladder means rewards are spread to 'more players'. If you take their presented math at straight face value, then yes; it does work out that way. However, it does not take into account distribution. While more stuff gets handed out, it now almost exclusively gets stuck at the top, with high-level players. Whereas it used to be the case that those rewards would occasionally be won by lower-level players that had the luck of not being bracketed together with high-level players. The alliance ladder is global and not bracketed, which means that happy fortune does not exist there.

The only parties that gained anything from the alliance feature are veteran players with pre-established and well-rounded rosters and hardcore players that devote disproportionate amounts of time to the game. These two groups are able to compete at the top and feasibly have a consistent enough chance at the good ladder rewards to lock them almost exclusively into their own little walled garden. Their reward opportunities have probably seen a net increase, whereas everyone else's have seen a net decrease, purely because of the unbracketed nature of the alliance ladder and the lost potential of the rewards reallocated there from the single-player ladders.What a happy coincidence it is then for the developer and publisher, that it are exactly these groups of veteran and hardcore players that are also the most vocal, outspoken and well-represented on these forums, ready to trivialize complaints and ridicule opposing views all while looking at things from their lopsided view of the game dynamic. Incase the tone of that last sentence wasn't clear enough yet; yes, I'm implying the current alliance system was specifically engineered to keep that particular group appeased. By its very nature that group will also end up holding the bulk of the paying 'whales', and there's no sense in 'upsetting the natives'.

[...]

Actually, I lied when I stated those two groups of players were the only parties that gained something from the alliance feature. The parties that had the biggest gain period were ofcourse the developer and publisher. They've set up an entire infrastructure's worth of additional monetization options by placing climbing HP costs on alliance member slots. Infact, the entire scoring system for the alliance ladder plays into the member slots mechanic: it's a system of simple aggregation of collective member points. This means that next to roster strength, the single biggest contributing factor to placement on the ladder is alliance size, i.e., the sale of additional member slots is a big thing and the single quickest way for weaker players to climb. The fact that only commanders can buy additional member slots puts them in charge of making a risky decision; promoting other players, complete strangers I might add, into a similar position of power within an alliance, or ponying up the HP themselves. Take then the huge total cost of those slots and offset it against the general scarcity of HP, all other things in the game that tax HP and the immediate emergency of scaling up your alliance size to not be pushed out of the competition. That's an awful lot of pressure being put on players and I expect quite a few of the more addicted ones to buckle and head the way of micro-transactions.

Pwuz_

Honestly I see being in a smaller alliance as an added bonus for my Iso & HP. I wasn't counting my alliance to push me to that 3rd cover. What pisses me off about it is when the same covers are being handed out for the alliance rewards each time. If they rotate which ones are rewarded, everyone can earn all colors for a new hero, it just takes more than one event.

Example: Human Torch was given out with Red as the Alliance reward in it's debut, but the next event featuring him moved red over to the lower of the two individual rewards.

Lazy Cap on the other hand gave out Blue as the Alliance reward in nearly every event he was rewarded in. I'm still waiting to get my 1st Blue cover for him.

Unknown

Now that event tokens can persist after an event is over I think we should just go back to the old cover structure with the alliance getting like 1-5 event tokens depending where they place instead of the guaranteed cover. If you get 3 event tokens that only has one possible 3* (like say, Shield of Justice) that's like getting 40% of a particular 3*. That seems to me like an adequate prize for being in an alliance. It obvously adds up over time but due to the RNG nature it's not like you can ever count on getting the right color or even the cover at all.