Power Gem Season Updates (3/5/18)

Spudgutter

optimus2861 said:

shardwick said:

To be fair even if there were plans to shut down the game soon I doubt D3 or anyone from Demi would announce it on here in advance of an official announcement by Disney. Not that Brigby or others would want to keep us in the dark but that the people that work for a developer tend to be some of the last to know themselves.

Players can usually see the writing on the wall. Decreased frequency of updates and/or fewer content in the updates (less development time / resources); increased monetization practices in the game (trying to squeeze final purchases out of players); possibly increased advertisements for other games by the developer (steering you to more active / profitable games); significantly altered game mechanics / heavy character modifications to try & push major rebuild decisions to stay at the top of the curve (a big stick; this would be one of the last things you'd see).

I don't think any of these things are true in MPQ, at least not presently. Go look at Future Fight ( ) and the writing on the wall has been flashing neon for months now.

Yeah, i dont think this game is dying, either.  I have been seeing ads for MPQ like crazy the last few months on the reddit is fun app, in between rounds of words with friends, and even a personalized ad(as in the host, Jessica Chobot, reads the ad in the middle of the video) in a couple of nerdist news youtube videos.

Why spend all that ad money if you are shutting down the game?

carrion_pigeons

OML was immensely OP for a long time, and he created a haves-vs-have-nots situation even worse than Gambit does.  The game caught up to him, and *then* he was nerfed, after almost everyone had at least a few of his covers, and literally everybody who was going to spend to get him champed had done so.

If you think they're going to do anything different with Gambit, yer nuts.  We have already seen this play out; we know what their business model is.  Gambit players will have a steadily increasing representation and a steadily decreasing advantage for the next year, and then he'll be nerfed.  And everyone will hate the devs for it, but they will have already spent their money, and the players won't really care *that* much, because Gambit will be old hat by then anyway.

shardwick

sirwookieechris said:

shardwick said:

sirwookieechris said:

Spudgutter said:

Brigby said:

LifeofAgony said:

Hot topic issue like tapping that’s now been on the table for a year?  This is classic no information acknowledgment we come to expect.  “Yes we know you’re not happy.  Yes, we’re aware, no we have nothing report.  Move along”

-snip-

"Tapping" also sits alongside Gambit (Classic) in the category of "Things the development team would like to work on addressing, were it not for this other thing currently being worked on." It is definitely something the team is looking into:

Update: The team is working on scheduling trial runs for some changes to Story Events that intend to address the issue of "Tapping." Once we have more information on these trial runs, we'll be sure to communicate this to players.
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Probably too late to make the change, but could we get the number of clears for Max progression back down to 4 (or even less)? It always seemed weird to me that on one hand you would tell us that we needed to play the game more, but then turn around and say you didn't want people to play so much.  

Not to be rude, but why? Is pve progression as is too time consuming for you? As is some of us are doing 7-8 clears daily to play for placement. They numbers were increased because they added more rewards to progression. It didn’t effect us playing for placement so I’m ignorant on how much it affects those only playing for max progression.

You are talking about the difference between 4 and 6 clears, right? How much time would this save you? Those last three clears are the hardest under current pve set-up. The initial three nodes were also made extremely easy compared to what they used to be. So how much extra time has really been adding compared to before?

What is a workable solution for you? Go back to old rewards? So that everyone loses out on rewards but progression players still get that feeling of completion? Keep current rewards but move everything up sooner? Besides the fact I don’t devs doing so, it upsets placement players. Being that guy at #11 who just misses the 4* reward put in an extra two days of work for nothing.

Once again, not trying to be rude. I think it’s a valid opinion but I don’t see how it can be improved. If anything progression needs more rewards, imo. I finish progression usually after a few matches after starting the last day.

I think they screwed up in the implementation of adding better rewards. Instead of moving to five clears needed for max progression they should have kept it at 4 clears for the old cp prize and added more rewards for those of us that like doing more. More cp, covers, hp, iso, event tokens.

I can see that as a fix, but it creates a problem: do you add a second good “cap” at the end of the expanded progression like an extra cover or extra cp? Because then people will still be upset that they are being “forced” to play more. If you make the extra rewards lackluster like 100 iso it de-incentivizes you from chasing the stick.

I think people in general ultimately play just hard enough for the rewards that they want. So if someone usually only does four clears of a node and doesn't bother with more than that because a standard token isn't exactly very exciting, unless they're a 1* player, then do you think they would be more motivated if those node rewards were 250 iso and an elite token on cl5 and up? Maybe even 500-1000 iso for the sixth clear of a node on cl8 or 9? If you give people a good reason to play more, then they will play more and I don't think that most would complain about it.

For your comment about the cap it was always weird to me that max progression was set at four clears. Granted I know that not everyone has the time, health packs, and/or sanity to do six clears of every regular node but it just seems like a big missed opportunity to not have better rewards past the cp at four clears. CP at four clears then additional rewards past that. It just seems like a no-brainer to me.

tiomono

It's 4 clears in scl 8 if you have the 5* essential. That gets the cp on the last day easy enough.

ZeroKarma

babinro said:

Brigby said:
Update: The team is working on scheduling trial runs for some changes to Story Events that intend to address the issue of "Tapping." Once we have more information on these trial runs, we'll be sure to communicate this to players.

@Brigby If it's not already well known I'd like to make it clear that optimal PvE play requires 7 clears for each node.   4 Clears at the start of the sub and another 3 clears when it ends.

(Edit:  Wave nodes require only 2 clears initially, then 3 at the end)

I bring this up because you can guarantee that a LOT of players will be upset if we learn that the new optimal way to play PvE will now require 8 or more clears with the proposed changes

Optimal clears hasn’t meant 7 clears in quite a long time. The current “meta” sometimes requires hours of tapping per sub for placement. For people tapping I’d guess 8 clears would be like a giant weight lifted off their shoulders. 

However, I’d agree that a solution that requires more than 7 clears would be burdensome. The fewer the better! Straight race to 4 clears at the beginning and a game of chicken for the two clears in the back end would be nice.

Borstock

ZeroKarma said:

babinro said:

Brigby said:
Update: The team is working on scheduling trial runs for some changes to Story Events that intend to address the issue of "Tapping." Once we have more information on these trial runs, we'll be sure to communicate this to players.

@Brigby If it's not already well known I'd like to make it clear that optimal PvE play requires 7 clears for each node.   4 Clears at the start of the sub and another 3 clears when it ends.

(Edit:  Wave nodes require only 2 clears initially, then 3 at the end)

I bring this up because you can guarantee that a LOT of players will be upset if we learn that the new optimal way to play PvE will now require 8 or more clears with the proposed changes

Optimal clears hasn’t meant 7 clears in quite a long time. The current “meta” sometimes requires hours of tapping per sub for placement. For people tapping I’d guess 8 clears would be like a giant weight lifted off their shoulders. 

However, I’d agree that a solution that requires more than 7 clears would be burdensome. The fewer the better! Straight race to 4 clears at the beginning and a game of chicken for the two clears in the back end would be nice.

I prefer 7.

Daredevil217

Brigby said:

*Please keep all comments civil and constructive. Thank you!

It's certainly apparent to us that Gambit (Classic)'s strength is one that's a hot-topic issue for players, and I can understand why seeing these sparse season updates can be frustrating. While I don't have any details to provide just yet, what I can say though is that it's reasonable to assume that development time usually devoted to working on season updates (character buffs, system reboot, etc etc.) has been allocated towards a different aspect of the game. Thank you all for being so patient.

Hey @Brigby,

I'm just curious if this scoring change to PVE is what you were referring to when you mention resources being allocated to a different aspect of the game?  While I'm grateful you all are looking into tapping, I'm hoping there is a bigger change to the game similar to champion levels coming around the corner.  I don't want to get my hopes up though if this is what you were referring to.

Brigby

Daredevil217 said:

Brigby said:

*Please keep all comments civil and constructive. Thank you!

It's certainly apparent to us that Gambit (Classic)'s strength is one that's a hot-topic issue for players, and I can understand why seeing these sparse season updates can be frustrating. While I don't have any details to provide just yet, what I can say though is that it's reasonable to assume that development time usually devoted to working on season updates (character buffs, system reboot, etc etc.) has been allocated towards a different aspect of the game. Thank you all for being so patient.

Hey Brigby,

I'm just curious if this scoring change to PVE is what you were referring to when you mention resources being allocated to a different aspect of the game?  While I'm grateful you all are looking into tapping, I'm hoping there is a bigger change to the game similar to champion levels coming around the corner.  I don't want to get my hopes up though if this is what you were referring to.

No, the trial run for Story Event missions dropping to a minimum of 0 points was not what I was referring to.