Please comment on the decision to backload pve cp progression rewards.

mpqr7

Yeah, I don't like it either. I think it would've been better if they kept the first 25 cp at 4 clears and then added the bonus cp later on. Oh well. I guess I'll need to grind more than I used to, if I have the available time.

jredd

a better carrot would be a sense of self determination (colourless covers), more game modes, and several other things that have been discussed repeatedly on here, rather than important resources placed further out of reach for those who don't want to spend more time on this game than they already do.

why is this so hard for the devs to see?

Aidonis

This post should be moved into a different forum, before too many people see it.

Zappa

It's like offering the players a carrot, and then burying it 6 feet under and saying "Look at how generous we are!"

ZeiramMR

I don't like the backloaded CP as it is currently implemented.

However, if they put the 8 CP after the old progression prizes, it begs the question from new players: "Why do I have to grind nodes at the increased difficulty for a smaller prize?". You may disagree, but that is a legitimate reason of having the prizes increase the further along into the progression rewards. Of course, they could have done this escalation AND split the CP into smaller pieces to make it less back-loaded.

Instead of doing 8 CP and 25 CP, a good compromise in my mind would be to have 18 available (an 8 and a 10) in the prizes about halfway between the old pair of 5 CPs and a little under the 4 clear mark, with the last 15 CP available at the 5th clear. Which honestly, isn't even a full clear needed if you space your playing out across the day.

DrDevilDinosaur

broll said:

Ducky said:

It's a carrot to keep players playing and engaged in the game.

It's a carrot stick to keep players playing and engaged in the game demoralized and questing the devs decisions.

I fixed it for you.  Obviously this isn't their intention, but this is going to be the result for anyone who felt 4 was too much.  There will obviously be large amounts on either side who are either OK not getting top or go to 6 regardless, but those can't be the target audience for bumping engagement because they've already chosen to be it or not.  Sure there will be some doing 4 who have to have the rewards and do more, but I don't think most of them will be happy about it.

It's just more of the "pay or quit" game design that has been coming since last year's anniversary.

Legendary Tokens are the only way to obtain 5*'s. Pushing the CP to the back of the progression rewards gates that behind full clears essentially. (Yes I know it's actually 5/6 optimal clears and only 6/6 clears if you don't wait for points to refresh, like that's somehow vastly different) For players entering the 4* tier and trying to compete in the higher clearance levels, if they don't have the required 4* character then they'll likely not manage to get the final progression reward. It will take longer for them to progress their rosters now. Their other option is to head to the store and make some big purchases (bonus CP, and HP to spend on the event tokens in the hope of drawing the featured character).

CNash

I enjoyed the feeling of making progress by getting the smaller 5 CP rewards earlier in the progression. Even if I didn't want to commit myself fully to a certain PVE, I could always join in on a sub-event or two and grab a few 3* covers and a small amount of CP. Now I have to play every sub to get any CP at all, and if I don't do five clears of every node, I get fewer CP than I would have done before (8 instead of 10).

Can we please just have the smaller, earlier CP rewards back?

sinnerjfl

Don't forget also that the 8 CP reward is quite far in the progression rewards now.

The two 5 CP prizes were super early in the progression before (WHICH EVERYONE LIKED)


And I have to agree, 5 clears is basically almost full clears and after 1 event, I'm already burning out and will
probably not bother reaching max prog next event.

The relatively insane time and effort needed to accumulate CP from PVE now + the no guarantee of any good returns (hello multitude of Riri, Mordo & Gwenpool covers that I dont want!) = why should I bother with this?

It was already grindy at 4 clears, now its worse but you get a bit more CP...        If you ask most players, I think
overall we want to grind less, not more.

Mekuh

I don't like this update. Before the update, I would net 10 CP total (5 each) if I can't reach the max progression. Now I can only get 8 CP and even that prize is further down the list compared to the recent one! Who thought that was a good idea? There was nothing wrong with the previous way of earning CP. Don't get me wrong. I like the idea of adding more prizes, but the only difference here is more ISO. AS IF WE DIDN'T HAVE OTHER SOURCES OF EARNING ISOS!

And as some people here already mentioned, it's getting tiresome doing these repetitive nodes more than 4 times. Fighting the Dark Avengers over and over and over and over and over. It's reasons like this why I lose interest in reaching max progression sometimes. And now that the devs thought it was a good idea to push the big prizes further down the list, I had to asked myself "What's the point?" I might as well uninstall the game because of this and the other bad decisions the devs have implemented this year. And boy howdy, they've made some bad decisions this year.

GrumpySmurf1002

sinnerjfl said:

It was already grindy at 4 clears, now its worse but you get a bit more CP...        If you ask most players, I think
overall we want to grind less, not more.

It's more grind for sure, but lets look at the Hunt:

4 clears + main nodes = 48855, which means you need to pick up 6145 from 'extra' clears.  3555 comes from clearing the 48 hour sub a 2nd time, which I would think most people were doing anyway.  

That leaves 2590 to get elsewhere.  That's green checking the 1st/3rd sub easy + 2* essential nodes (trivial with Thano3 or Thano5) and hitting the main repeatable node twice more over the course of the 4 days.

Yes, still more effort, but for this event it's 10 extra trivial nodes + the 5th clear of the 48 hour sub.  Not a horrendous amount of extra effort for the rewards increase.

(standard caveat, they shouldn't have backloaded the CP, yadda yadda)

Crnch73

I just feel like there is a very large disconnect between the developers and the players. Sure, what is best for the game's longevity might anger us. Sure, what would make us happy would probably also make the game "die" soon. But here's the thing: we keep getting more of the former and none of the latter. Ducky called this a carrot, while I contest that this is the developers moving the carrot further away. As one post said earlier, if they keep making it hard to even get CP and pull legendaries, then maybe we wouldn't realize how bad vaulting is? Is it all that sinister?

I want to believe in this game. I want to keep playing. It has just become SO incredibly hard to do it. I feel like the devs are taking their ball and going home, and we are just sitting here waiting for them to come back.

MissChinch

Crnch73 said:

I just feel like there is a very large disconnect between the developers and the players. Sure, what is best for the game's longevity might anger us. Sure, what would make us happy would probably also make the game "die" soon. But here's the thing: we keep getting more of the former and none of the latter. Ducky called this a carrot, while I contest that this is the developers moving the carrot further away. As one post said earlier, if they keep making it hard to even get CP and pull legendaries, then maybe we wouldn't realize how bad vaulting is? Is it all that sinister?

I want to believe in this game. I want to keep playing. It has just become SO incredibly hard to do it. I feel like the devs are taking their ball and going home, and we are just sitting here waiting for them to come back.

I don't think the developers are unaware of this, I think they use different metrics to judge the game than you do, its as simple as that.

I'd imagine they, (and I'd strongly suggest they are obligated to) develop the game in a manner that makes the most money for the owners and/or investors while minimizing their risk.  This is likely NOT going to mean the game is developed in a way the extremely small and extremely non-representative sample of forumites would want it. 

I think the best we can hope for is more transparent feedback that doesn't try to avoid that issue entirely, because when they do it comes off as either ignorant, dismissive or condescending.

sinnerjfl

GrumpySmurf1002 said:

It's more grind for sure, but lets look at the Hunt:

4 clears + main nodes = 48855, which means you need to pick up 6145 from 'extra' clears.  3555 comes from clearing the 48 hour sub a 2nd time, which I would think most people were doing anyway.  

That leaves 2590 to get elsewhere.  That's green checking the 1st/3rd sub easy + 2* essential nodes (trivial with Thano3 or Thano5) and hitting the main repeatable node twice more over the course of the 4 days.

Yes, still more effort, but for this event it's 10 extra trivial nodes + the 5th clear of the 48 hour sub.  Not a horrendous amount of extra effort for the rewards increase.

(standard caveat, they shouldn't have backloaded the CP, yadda yadda)

I get that, its not a herculean effort that's required or anything. After 4 clears, I just feel tapped out...  (not helping this is The Hunt)

Im curious how doing 4 clears + repeating whatever easier nodes for max prog would look like withouth a 48h sub...
We wont know either with DPvsMPQ.
  

GrumpySmurf1002

sinnerjfl said:

I get that, its not a herculean effort that's required or anything. After 4 clears, I just feel tapped out...  (not helping this is The Hunt)

Im curious how doing 4 clears + repeating whatever easier nodes for max prog would look like withouth a 48h sub...
We wont know either with DPvsMPQ.
  

I definitely hear you, I hate PvE and am sure to miss progression more than the past.  

I think 4/7 day subs will be ok if you can at least do the easy stuff and clear the last few subs fully (where points are backloaded).  3 days might be trickier.

In general though it should hold a similar formula - if you green check the easy nodes and event long repeatable nodes, it'll mitigate always doing 5 clears of the hard nodes.

GurlBYE

I'd still love to know why this was implemented without testing. 

I really hope they don't get the bright idea to move the CP back to the end of pvp as well. 

MissChinch

GurlBYE said:

I'd still love to know why this was implemented without testing. 

I really hope they don't get the bright idea to move the CP back to the end of pvp as well. 

I don't think testing was the issue here, I'm guessing everything is working as they intended... 

Red letter day by the way, put a gold star on prod rollout if there were indeed no bugs...

GurlBYE

MissChinch said:

GurlBYE said:

I'd still love to know why this was implemented without testing. 

I really hope they don't get the bright idea to move the CP back to the end of pvp as well. 

I don't think testing was the issue here, I'm guessing everything is working as they intended... 

Red letter day by the way, put a gold star on prod rollout if there were indeed no bugs...

By testing I'm referring to all the times they've tested major changes to the structure of pve before deciding.

5 clears especially the 5th being after point reduction is fairly arbitrary.

Compared to for example, the change from "play the node every 8 hours (jesus christ how did this game survive lol)" to "clear X times for all awards" had at least several different alternatives tried out. 

optimus2861

MissChinch said:

I'd imagine they, (and I'd strongly suggest they are obligated to) develop the game in a manner that makes the most money for the owners and/or investors while minimizing their risk. 

Along with the comment about "pay or quit" above, this PVE progression change would make me suspect that MPQ is not projected to last a whole lot longer. I.e. 6 months, maybe a year. So the focus will shift, has shifted, is shifting, to keep milking the whales as long as possible and disincentive other players from continuing (i.e. reducing costs by dropping low/no-spenders). Putting a big carrot at the end of the progression table keeps the big fish going; dropping the little carrots from the start pushes the minnows away.

MissChinch

GurlBYE said:

MissChinch said:

GurlBYE said:

I'd still love to know why this was implemented without testing. 

I really hope they don't get the bright idea to move the CP back to the end of pvp as well. 

I don't think testing was the issue here, I'm guessing everything is working as they intended... 

Red letter day by the way, put a gold star on prod rollout if there were indeed no bugs...

By testing I'm referring to all the times they've tested major changes to the structure of pve before deciding.

5 clears especially the 5th being after point reduction is fairly arbitrary.

Compared to for example, the change from "play the node every 8 hours (jesus christ how did this game survive lol)" to "clear X times for all awards" had at least several different alternatives tried out. 

That was a change in the mechanics of how PvE points work, this is just a reward threshold, they seemingly tweak those frequently...

I'm with anyone who thinks this was a change targeted at screwing those that can only make 4 clears and not 5... they'll lose some people, but they'll get other to play for 25% longer in PvE...  removing the CP at 4 clears is one of the best examples of needlessly sticking it to players that I recall.

GurlBYE

optimus2861 said:

MissChinch said:

I'd imagine they, (and I'd strongly suggest they are obligated to) develop the game in a manner that makes the most money for the owners and/or investors while minimizing their risk. 

Along with the comment about "pay or quit" above, this PVE progression change would make me suspect that MPQ is not projected to last a whole lot longer. I.e. 6 months, maybe a year. So the focus will shift, has shifted, is shifting, to keep milking the whales as long as possible and disincentive other players from continuing (i.e. reducing costs by dropping low/no-spenders). Putting a big carrot at the end of the progression table keeps the big fish going; dropping the little carrots from the start pushes the minnows away.

I wouldn't go that far.
They've pulled through some.. Interesting decisions. And you might be vastly underestimating how much the people who actually pay are spending.
Compared to what they spend the 35 CP may as well be a light snack.