Changes to Event Schedule and Events *Updated (10/18/17)

NiftyC

@Brigby HUGE thank-you for listening and changing direction on HoR legacy / standard!

FWIW I personally like the idea of legacy events generally, just not in coalition PvP. PvE seems like a great fit for it to me. 

gogol666

The double event starting on Monday has been a too much. It would be much better to have multiple events on the weekend than on weekdays

Kinesia

Thank you Brigby for listening and getting other people to listen and talking to us.



And I agree with gogol666 a little. We need stuff to do all the itme, but different time pressures on events would help a lot. 1 event with pressure to do things as soon as possible is fine, but not two at once, extra events should be things you can do at your own pace. Like having Fateful Showdown up is _fine_, I can fit that in whenever I like. I just havent been able to touch it at all yet because of the 2 other personal events on... I played for 5 hours straight last night, trying to catch up after work before time ran out... Theoretically I could have left them, but...

It's hard to balance "wanting to do everything" with "having stuff for everyone to do even though some people do nothing but play and some people work fulltime and have families".
I don't know the answer, but I like things like Fateful Showdown with limited rewards that I can fit in anywhere, you could do things like that that lasted for a whole week because it doesn't hurt anyone.

UweTellkampf

@Brigby thank you for listening. And here come another wild ideas regarding your announcement of wanting more events with no card restrictions:

Brigby said:

Yes. We have decided not to remove the card set restrictions for Hour of Revelation. We do still plan on incorporating more events with no card restrictions, but based on the player feedback, we'd like to take more time to determine which event would be a more appropriate avenue for that change.

1. Rotate older Legacy PvE-Events in. Bring back Avacyn Madness and Trial of Zeal, once a month each. So many people are fed up with RotPG, you could see that in the last event taking forever to finish. This way you could give us stuff to tinker around and get some (kind of) fresh wind and at the same time get your goal of more legacy.

2. Create new events. It has been so long that we got anything new, its just the same over and over again, same dull objectives, same strategies, etc. I mean, you are in game development, right? Well then, develop a bit. Create two new events, make them both legacy for all I care (1 - 1 would be better though), instead of lazily just returning the ones already in play to be legacy. There was a time I liked Firf, but this time has long passed, and I dont know anyone who still likes it. Or this sad energy thingy in individual PvE, dont even know its name. Just give us fresh blood.

3. Revive story mode. Open a new chapter. A legacy one. A hard, really hard one. One that would force us to write angry posts, how frustrating the new story mode is. Until we find the way to beat it. We always find a way. And this game is at its greatest when it gives us content that lets us become creative, work together, solve problems. And its at its weakest - and that is the time where we are now - when it becomes repetitive and stale.

tfg76

@Brigby to your request for thoughts around events with no card restrictions, I will reiterate some of the points I´ve made earlier in this and other threads.

1. I´d love to hear your thoughts on the overall strategy and ideas behind standard and legacy event and event structures in general. I believe we would all have a more interesting discussion if we had a feeling for the background of the decision making process that led us where we are now.

2. In general, I´d like to see events become more "family friendly". To me, that means more , but shorter events and a reduced pressure to complete nodes in short time frames. For instance, the recent change of 4 hour charges in the PVE event goes against this. I think it´s also important to get rid of the extremely short (6 hour) window for the last charge in PVP events, which many struggle with (West Coast players because they would like to sleep, Europeans because they should really be at work). 

3. As a rule, the more competitive PVP events should be standard. As time passes, it will be increasingly hard to become one of the top players in Legacy, simply because there is no way to get the important cards (Olivia, Pig and others). With standard, my opinion is that the dev team has done a great job in recent sets of moving the power level downwards in rarity, with more complex and specialized cards being mythic, rather than simply brute power. This allows most players to compete at a level playing field, all the while building their collection without huge investments. Specifically, my suggestion would be to have one non-coalition event in Standard per week (currently ToA), one coalition event in Standard per week (currently HoR) and one special weekend event (see below). The rest can be legacy (currently all events older than ToA).

4. I would love to see the coalition weekend event alternate between PvP and PvE. The PvE can always be legacy in my opinion, especially with the current "grindy" format, which doesn´t really require highly power legacy decks to compete. The PvP should be standard. The special monthly event (with new planeswalkers) should be one of these, and continue with the greater prizes, making it special and something to look forward to. In the off weekend, where a new planeswalker is not available, run a "Planeswalker Arena" in standard, with one of the planeswalkers in the store (for crystals) at that time. 

5. After the introduction of standard, legacy cards have seen a depreciation in perceived value, since they´re not really usable for the big tournaments. Since those cards are also not available for any kind of purchase, perhaps it would be possible to have really good prizes in the legacy tournaments (i.e. mythics for the top players). Those prizes would work as a means to keep even legacy tournaments vibrant and accessible to new players.

6. Similarly, there should be events that award Origin boosters and rares. These cards are still fairly important in Standard, but are fairly inaccessible to new players compared to old. For instance, HOU cards and boosters have only been available with the new prize (and price) structures, which means they´re fairly distributed between old and new players. However, Origin cards used to be much more accessible, both with "Fat Packs" and as prizes. An alternative would be to rotate out Origins as a standard set.

7. Trials of the Planes: I like this event, but it lacks the pressure and excitement of the leaderboard events. If it had a leaderboard with nice prizes, we could try to fight through the progressively harder nodes to achieve perfect scores. Such leaderboards might also make it attractive for non-platinum players, for which the event is currently overly expensive. It also has a reasonable length (max 12 battles) and flexibility (all charges available right away), which makes it family friendly right off the bat. Ideally, there would also be a standard version of this available.

8. PVEs: Every week, we have an "old" PVE with really nice prizes and a reasonable time investment (max 8 battles). I don´t understand why the weekend event should require us to play as much as a hundred matches, repeating the same kind of battles over and over, in order to compete. I say align the weekend PvE around the same logic as the single-player PvE: if a player can master (close to) all the battles and secondary objectives, the should be able to reach progression (without proving the same thing over and over). If a coalition can muster 20 people that can achieve the same, they should be able to be at a high level. What this would foster are coalitions that try to help each other master the battles and secondary objectives, rather than trying to push everyone to spend several hours per day during their weekend to play the game. I realize, of course, that with the current events, it would be fairly easy for a coalition to achieve these goals, but that can be remedied by making the top bosses harder, and perhaps especially, the secondary objectives. My thinking is that those secondary objectives could be used to separate the top coalitions. For instance, let´s say the maximum points is 270 like today, but 5 of those points were really hard (e.g. defeat Nicol Bolas without taking any damage). If progression came at 250 points, casual players could ignore those hard goals, but the top coalitions would need to really put their heads together to achieve them if they planned to reach the top scores. I think this is the kind of behavior you want to encourage with the game: hard thinking about tough puzzles, not endless grinding of simple puzzles. The former also drives a desire to purchase more cards (perhaps some specific ones are useful/needed to achieve certain goals).

blacklotus

tfg76 said:

@Brigby to your request for thoughts around events with no card restrictions, I will reiterate some of the points I´ve made earlier in this and other threads.

1. I´d love to hear your thoughts on the overall strategy and ideas behind standard and legacy event and event structures in general. I believe we would all have a more interesting discussion if we had a feeling for the background of the decision making process that led us where we are now.

2. In general, I´d like to see events become more "family friendly". To me, that means more , but shorter events and a reduced pressure to complete nodes in short time frames. For instance, the recent change of 4 hour charges in the PVE event goes against this. I think it´s also important to get rid of the extremely short (6 hour) window for the last charge in PVP events, which many struggle with (West Coast players because they would like to sleep, Europeans because they should really be at work). 

3. As a rule, the more competitive PVP events should be standard. As time passes, it will be increasingly hard to become one of the top players in Legacy, simply because there is no way to get the important cards (Olivia, Pig and others). With standard, my opinion is that the dev team has done a great job in recent sets of moving the power level downwards in rarity, with more complex and specialized cards being mythic, rather than simply brute power. This allows most players to compete at a level playing field, all the while building their collection without huge investments. Specifically, my suggestion would be to have one non-coalition event in Standard per week (currently ToA), one coalition event in Standard per week (currently HoR) and one special weekend event (see below). The rest can be legacy (currently all events older than ToA).

4. I would love to see the coalition weekend event alternate between PvP and PvE. The PvE can always be legacy in my opinion, especially with the current "grindy" format, which doesn´t really require highly power legacy decks to compete. The PvP should be standard. The special monthly event (with new planeswalkers) should be one of these, and continue with the greater prizes, making it special and something to look forward to. In the off weekend, where a new planeswalker is not available, run a "Planeswalker Arena" in standard, with one of the planeswalkers in the store (for crystals) at that time. 

5. After the introduction of standard, legacy cards have seen a depreciation in perceived value, since they´re not really usable for the big tournaments. Since those cards are also not available for any kind of purchase, perhaps it would be possible to have really good prizes in the legacy tournaments (i.e. mythics for the top players). Those prizes would work as a means to keep even legacy tournaments vibrant and accessible to new players.

6. Similarly, there should be events that award Origin boosters and rares. These cards are still fairly important in Standard, but are fairly inaccessible to new players compared to old. For instance, HOU cards and boosters have only been available with the new prize (and price) structures, which means they´re fairly distributed between old and new players. However, Origin cards used to be much more accessible, both with "Fat Packs" and as prizes. An alternative would be to rotate out Origins as a standard set.

7. Trials of the Planes: I like this event, but it lacks the pressure and excitement of the leaderboard events. If it had a leaderboard with nice prizes, we could try to fight through the progressively harder nodes to achieve perfect scores. Such leaderboards might also make it attractive for non-platinum players, for which the event is currently overly expensive. It also has a reasonable length (max 12 battles) and flexibility (all charges available right away), which makes it family friendly right off the bat. Ideally, there would also be a standard version of this available.

8. PVEs: Every week, we have an "old" PVE with really nice prizes and a reasonable time investment (max 8 battles). I don´t understand why the weekend event should require us to play as much as a hundred matches, repeating the same kind of battles over and over, in order to compete. I say align the weekend PvE around the same logic as the single-player PvE: if a player can master (close to) all the battles and secondary objectives, the should be able to reach progression (without proving the same thing over and over). If a coalition can muster 20 people that can achieve the same, they should be able to be at a high level. What this would foster are coalitions that try to help each other master the battles and secondary objectives, rather than trying to push everyone to spend several hours per day during their weekend to play the game. I realize, of course, that with the current events, it would be fairly easy for a coalition to achieve these goals, but that can be remedied by making the top bosses harder, and perhaps especially, the secondary objectives. My thinking is that those secondary objectives could be used to separate the top coalitions. For instance, let´s say the maximum points is 270 like today, but 5 of those points were really hard (e.g. defeat Nicol Bolas without taking any damage). If progression came at 250 points, casual players could ignore those hard goals, but the top coalitions would need to really put their heads together to achieve them if they planned to reach the top scores. I think this is the kind of behavior you want to encourage with the game: hard thinking about tough puzzles, not endless grinding of simple puzzles. The former also drives a desire to purchase more cards (perhaps some specific ones are useful/needed to achieve certain goals).

Rotating Origins out of Standard format is a bad idea since that is the first rewards a new player receives in the first starting tutorial, unless Octagon wants to keep changing the starting tutorial rewards new players get based on the latest set in circulation.

I rather Octagon and D3go spent their limited resources on adding new content and fixing existing bugged contents rather than changing the new player's tutorial every time a new set drops in.

I agree with your other points, in having short non-overlapping competitive events spread throughout the week. Definitely more family friendly.

GrizzoMtGPQ

@Brigby is HoR going to run today?

MDsupa

@Brigby can we please NOT have two events in one day?  Every Monday Evening I'm trying to catch up two events and spending 4-6 hours clearing all the nodes.  not something I like to spend my whole evening after work doing only.   Spread it out.  past few weeks nothing to do on Wednesday and yet Monday I'm overwhelmed.

Thank you.

Kinesia

I'm Australian. I've talked about time pressure before but want to make it very clear.

Balancing the timezones and time pressures matters a LOT.


Friday night, my time, there is NOTHING on and hasn't been for weeks, this is when I have completely clear time to play. But thi is _my_ timezone.
Fixing timezones is hard, you pretty much have to stop having short events so people can fit them in and they'll covere _all_ time periods, but not have people lose nodes and not have people being awake at the right time to have the "last node".

Monday morning Australian time is EXTREMELY bad, I am just going off to work and get 40 minutes to play on public transport but there are now _3_ events going at once. That's crazy. Some of them haave EXACTLY the same time design, they shouldn't be on the same day _ever_ let alone part of a weekly structure.

There should never be 2 events on the same day that are structured the same way, but we need at least 1 event available at all times in all timezones and we need more LONGTERM LOWSTRESS events that we can do at our own pace.