PvE on a Schedule - What’s the fix?

animaniactoo

Smart80 said:

The rockett said:

As requested. Webbed Wonder Bracket info:
All SL9
Slice 1: 4 brackets 
Slice 2:  3 brackets 
Slcie 3:  3 brackets 
Slice 4:  3 brackets 
Slice 5: 4 maybe 5 brackets 

This is less SL9 brackets, by 1 bracket, from the anti tapping test event. 

Thanks.
1 more or less doesnt mean too much, especially as we dont know anything about how full the unflipped brackets have been

what does pop out to me, is that this looks more evenly distributed.

I think the even distribution can be accredited more to the fact that WW was weekend rather than weekday for most of the run; whereas the previous was more weekday.

ZeroKarma

Smart80 said:

The rockett said:

As requested. Webbed Wonder Bracket info:
All SL9
Slice 1: 4 brackets 
Slice 2:  3 brackets 
Slcie 3:  3 brackets 
Slice 4:  3 brackets 
Slice 5: 4 maybe 5 brackets 

This is less SL9 brackets, by 1 bracket, from the anti tapping test event. 

Thanks.
1 more or less doesnt mean too much, especially as we dont know anything about how full the unflipped brackets have been

what does pop out to me, is that this looks more evenly distributed.

I'm coming around to the floating start more and more, however it might work. While one more or less won't hurt....it also won't really change much in terms of making the schedule flexible for people in general. Adding a slice at 2pm EST might solve the issue for 10-20% of the people that have an issue. We still have a problem but fewer pissed people, that's it. 

@OJSP If we can get past the technical hurdles for the floating start time, elimination of regen and just base everything on an internal timer then it looks like it serves everyone except people interested in alternative win conditions. That was one of my stipulations at the beginning of this. Just no idea how easy or hard it is. 

Yeah. Putting the progression rewards n the nodes wouldn't work. Just throwing a random idea out there. 

Smart80

I know its all still concept, but how would you think the floating start without regeneration would work for 48h subs?

Also, just so I have right thing in mind, would we be hitting same node 6 times in clear and no grind?

My vote still is for keeping it as it is, without tapping option, but getting rid of 48h subs could lure me to give it some more thought... ;-)

ZeroKarma

Smart80 said:

I know its all still concept, but how would you think the floating start without regeneration would work for 48h subs?

Also, just so I have right thing in mind, would we be hitting same node 6 times in clear and no grind?

My vote still is for keeping it as it is, without tapping option, but getting rid of 48h subs could lure me to give it some more thought... ;-)

I suppose theoretically, you wouldn't have 48 hour subs? In this case, you do the subs or call it "content" when you have time, no matter 1 day or 4 days. 

 That would make for a really boring 4 day event though. 

Addaran

ZeroKarma said:

Put the progression rewards in the nodes, and nodes unlock as you progress so you can’t skip to those rewards.

I'd find it pretty annoying for everyone missing essentials. It's already pretty hard to get full (or almost full) progression if you're missing some of them. If you play SCL 6 or less, you don't get the 4* for progression, so you can't even you keep a slot for roaster-and-trash characters. Also, even on 7+, i only don't get the 4* until the 2nd day at least.

Bowgentle

Addaran said:

ZeroKarma said:

Put the progression rewards in the nodes, and nodes unlock as you progress so you can’t skip to those rewards.

I'd find it pretty annoying for everyone missing essentials. It's already pretty hard to get full (or almost full) progression if you're missing some of them. If you play SCL 6 or less, you don't get the 4* for progression, so you can't even you keep a slot for roaster-and-trash characters. Also, even on 7+, i only don't get the 4* until the 2nd day at least.

That's the idea of the essential nodes.

If you don't have them, you're supposed to spend money in the vault to get them.

I'm surprised the math checks out to still be able to make full progression with missing essentials - from a financial standpoint it probably would make more sense to make full prog unattainable, so that the pressure to spend rises.

Addaran

Bowgentle said:

Addaran said:

ZeroKarma said:

Put the progression rewards in the nodes, and nodes unlock as you progress so you can’t skip to those rewards.

I'd find it pretty annoying for everyone missing essentials. It's already pretty hard to get full (or almost full) progression if you're missing some of them. If you play SCL 6 or less, you don't get the 4* for progression, so you can't even you keep a slot for roaster-and-trash characters. Also, even on 7+, i only don't get the 4* until the 2nd day at least.

That's the idea of the essential nodes.

If you don't have them, you're supposed to spend money in the vault to get them.

I'm surprised the math checks out to still be able to make full progression with missing essentials - from a financial standpoint it probably would make more sense to make full prog unattainable, so that the pressure to spend rises.

I'm usually able to get to the final HP reward, even when missing 4*. That does requiere for me to do more 6 clears and often more in the last sub. As long as they let you do more clear then the minimum requiered for full progression, you can't lock out people of full progression for missing essentials, unless those essentials give an insanely bigger number of points then the normal nodes.

Doesn't really makes sense to punish lower lvl players (lower SCL) for not having 4*. Even if they do spend money, it will be for roaster slots and the 2* and 3*. If they don't, they'll just mess their roaster, making PVP hell and PVE weird (a lvl 70 2* with full cover is better then a one-cover lvl 70  4*).

Reecoh

fight4thedream said:

*the emphasis of speed above all else severely devalues a majority of characters and skill sets and goes against the dev team's stated goal of roster diversity. 

I'm a little late to this thread, and there's a lot to consider, but the one point Fight made above made me wonder if the dev's would ever consider some kind of bonus for using characters that you haven't used in a while or during each event. There may be some balance of speed vs. diversity that could be reached so if you aren't in a position to play for the top placement rewards due to schedule or whatnot you could instead opt to play slowly with a lot of different teams and rack up some different kinds of rewards, be they additional resources or a multiplier of some kind on what you do place with.

Daiches

Reecoh said:

fight4thedream said:

*the emphasis of speed above all else severely devalues a majority of characters and skill sets and goes against the dev team's stated goal of roster diversity. 

I'm a little late to this thread, and there's a lot to consider, but the one point Fight made above made me wonder if the dev's would ever consider some kind of bonus for using characters that you haven't used in a while or during each event. There may be some balance of speed vs. diversity that could be reached so if you aren't in a position to play for the top placement rewards due to schedule or whatnot you could instead opt to play slowly with a lot of different teams and rack up some different kinds of rewards, be they additional resources or a multiplier of some kind on what you do place with.

They had that. It was called Heroics. It was pretty sweet in rewarding you having a wide roster. 
People with small rosters hated it, so they cancelled it. And with it went the only  PVE variant besides alliance events.

Daredevil217

Daiches said:

Reecoh said:

fight4thedream said:

*the emphasis of speed above all else severely devalues a majority of characters and skill sets and goes against the dev team's stated goal of roster diversity. 

I'm a little late to this thread, and there's a lot to consider, but the one point Fight made above made me wonder if the dev's would ever consider some kind of bonus for using characters that you haven't used in a while or during each event. There may be some balance of speed vs. diversity that could be reached so if you aren't in a position to play for the top placement rewards due to schedule or whatnot you could instead opt to play slowly with a lot of different teams and rack up some different kinds of rewards, be they additional resources or a multiplier of some kind on what you do place with.

They had that. It was called Heroics. It was pretty sweet in rewarding you having a wide roster. 
People with small rosters hated it, so they cancelled it. And with it went the only  PVE variant besides alliance events.

Not at all what he's talking about.  Heroics forced you to play from a limited pool of characters.  Reecoh is talking about having every character available to you, but you getting bonus rewards for using characters you don't usually use.  In heroics you didn't get bonus rewards, you just got to play. 

By the way I'm on team #bringbackheroics.

Daiches

Daredevil217 said:

Daiches said:

Reecoh said:

fight4thedream said:

*the emphasis of speed above all else severely devalues a majority of characters and skill sets and goes against the dev team's stated goal of roster diversity. 

I'm a little late to this thread, and there's a lot to consider, but the one point Fight made above made me wonder if the dev's would ever consider some kind of bonus for using characters that you haven't used in a while or during each event. There may be some balance of speed vs. diversity that could be reached so if you aren't in a position to play for the top placement rewards due to schedule or whatnot you could instead opt to play slowly with a lot of different teams and rack up some different kinds of rewards, be they additional resources or a multiplier of some kind on what you do place with.

They had that. It was called Heroics. It was pretty sweet in rewarding you having a wide roster. 
People with small rosters hated it, so they cancelled it. And with it went the only  PVE variant besides alliance events.

Not at all what he's talking about.  Heroics forced you to play from a limited pool of characters.  Reecoh is talking about having every character available to you, but you getting bonus rewards for using characters you don't usually use.  In heroics you didn't get bonus rewards, you just got to play. 

By the way I'm on team #bringbackheroics.

A limited pool of characters, yes. But you needed a large roster to have the biggest selection available from that limited roster of B and C team players that now get value.
The bonus rewards you get are that you are in much better shape for placent than others with smaller rosters/different character focus.

mohio

Some of you might remember there was a time when progression rewards were all over the place and there were some events you could get up to 3 3* covers just in progression (this is how I got Punisher as my first maxed 3*). Devs were really bad at setting progression totals each event though, and occasionally you couldn't even reach the top few levels. Other times it was laughably easy and you were playing an extra 3 days for really no reason at all. They finally decided to just put full progression at a pretty reasonable amount but cut the available rewards down to just 1 3* cover. 

Anyway, I bring up this small history lesson because I was thinking "what if they just brought back those old progression rewards where you could get 3 top tier covers through progression?" Certainly this isn't a fix to the scheduling issue, but would people care nearly as much if they were getting 3 4* covers through progression? They can keep a couple covers and some LTs/event tokens as placement rewards otherwise, but if the bulk of the "best" rewards are in progression how much would people be complaining?

As for my own personal experience I can understand why people would suggest having different end times. I'm in the USA, Eastern Time, and I work, so you can pretty much throw out s2 and s3 cause that leaves no time for end grind. I'm more of a night person so s1 is ruled out cause that's way too early. With a family (wife and 2 kids) that always seems to be busy, s4 can often butt up against quality time with the wife. That leaves just s5, which ends at 2AM...So yeah, I either pick any slice and play suboptimally and otherwise go about my day normally, or I choose s5 and either set an alarm to wake up and grind/initial clear or I stay up until 2:30-3 and get about 4 hours of sleep.

Sadly, I often choose s5 and very little sleep (or I fall asleep waiting to grind and miss it completely). 

Clearly for myself an ending time more like 12AM or 1AM would be better than the 11PM and 2AM options there currently are, but the fact is that having this type of scheduling is always going to be beneficial to some and problematic for others. Outside of having a separate bracket for every single hour of the day, there is just no "fair" way to split up the entire world so that everyone gets equally good choices. 

Dogface

There are three 3* in progression awards in most PVE if you play SCL8 or 9, two in SCL7. So i don't get your "there was a time".

mohio

Dogface said:

There are three 3* in progression awards in most PVE if you play SCL8 or 9, two in SCL7. So i don't get your "there was a time".

This was 4 years ago when 4* were merely trophies and actively worse than most all of the 3*. 3 covers was a big deal. Hence why I equated it more to getting 3 4* covers now..

cschwinge

Anything that they can do to make is so that players don't *have* to play at a specific time for placement would be appreciated by most of the player base. Even with time slices, gameplay that needs people to play at specific times during the day, for 1 hour (or 2-3 hours for lower tier rosters) is a non-starter for many people with lives

There have been several suggestions on changing competitive PvE, I'd rather see one of those

The_A_Train

Keep the time slices as they are for now. There's a good mix of people in each slice and changes would mess with the rewards structure.

Use a timer based system instead of regenerating points to determine placement. There's already some kind timer running to keep track of an individual's point regen. Use this timer to keep track of time spent in each match. Track to the thousandth of a second (.001) to avoid ties.

Define a prescribed number of clears to reach max prog. Right now I believe 5 clears on all but the 5e and wave nodes will net max prog, so probably keep it the same.

Placement will be determined on the number of nodes cleared in the fastest time. This means we'll need a max limit of clears. The current is 7 for standard nodes, suggest keeping it the same.

If necessary, assign a point value (e.g.1-5) for each node type for placement purposes. The highest number of "points" with the lowest time would take first place. This would just be to avoid situations where someone flies through without doing all of the harder nodes and places higher than someone that completes all of the harder nodes but fewer of the easy nodes.

Opening up the PvE side of the game to reward skill and roster strength without the "set time" restrictions will promote competition and likely lead to regular spending from players that dont currently feel like they can compete due to rl commits or time constraints. I think this is pretty self explanatory. If a new player feels like he can't compete because the current slices don't fit his schedule then that player is less likely to spend money on the game. If the time restrictions were removed then the new player might feel compelled to spend to get that new character in order to speed up clear times.

Keep all subs either 24 or 48 hours and don't open up an entire event at once. D3 and Demiurge want us coming back regularly and the ability to finish a 7 day event in one sitting prevents that from happening. Subs would still start and end like they do now, the only change is your performance is measured by how quickly you can clear each individual match.

HoundofShadow

After 10 pages of discussion, there are still no conclusive evidents that "most" of the players are unhappy with the time slices available or dislike a scheduled PvE. There are still no solution that can satisfy different sides. Any attempt to say x solution will solve this PvE perceived problem and make most or many players happy are purely hypothetical and/or self-serving.

Also, different players have different definitions of the words "most" and "many-". To me, most of the players = 70%-90% of players who play the game and does not necessary need to post in this or any other forums. Many = 50-60%. 

I think a more empirical approach or evidence-based approach is to let MPQ run a simple close-ended survey in-game to see how the players feel about the current time slices available, whether they think the current setup is fair, whether they like PvE remain the way it is, or do away with placement/time-slices,  run an in-match timer etc. 

The answer would be just like how the Dev. gave a conclusive and data-centric answer on the possibility of 6*. 

Smart80

When and where was that 6* survey?

animaniactoo

HoundofShadow said:

After 10 pages of discussion, there are still no conclusive evidents that "most" of the players are unhappy with the time slices available or dislike a scheduled PvE. There are still no solution that can satisfy different sides. Any attempt to say x solution will solve this PvE perceived problem and make most or many players happy are purely hypothetical and/or self-serving.

Also, different players have different definitions of the words "most" and "many-". To me, most of the players = 70%-90% of players who play the game and does not necessary need to post in this or any other forums. Many = 50-60%. 

I think a more empirical approach or evidence-based approach is to let MPQ run a simple close-ended survey in-game to see how the players feel about the current time slices available, whether they think the current setup is fair, whether they like PvE remain the way it is, or do away with placement/time-slices,  run an in-match timer etc. 

The answer would be just like how the Dev. gave a conclusive and data-centric answer on the possibility of 6*. 

I do not and have never claimed that it is most. Many, I'll give you - I count many as "more than slim pickin's". What I do still stand by is that at a minimum it is a significant portion of the playerbase that is affected by the current time slot distribution of 5/5/6/3/5. And by significant portion, I mean more than 15%. I can't see who is being arguably *helped* by that distribution. Especially when you note that the main damage is to the entire US East Coast with the giant gap covering 5pm to 11 pm EST - pretty much the hours you could most reasonably expect people to have free time to play.

It is unlikely that there will be a solution that satisfies everyone, true - but in terms of "fairness", I think that right there is a pretty strong argument for a change in the current distribution (to 5/5/5/4/5 at least), whether another time slot is added or not.

Spudgutter

HoundofShadow said:

After 10 pages of discussion, there are still no conclusive evidents that "most" of the players are unhappy with the time slices available or dislike a scheduled PvE. There are still no solution that can satisfy different sides. Any attempt to say x solution will solve this PvE perceived problem and make most or many players happy are purely hypothetical and/or self-serving.

Also, different players have different definitions of the words "most" and "many-". To me, most of the players = 70%-90% of players who play the game and does not necessary need to post in this or any other forums. Many = 50-60%. 

I think a more empirical approach or evidence-based approach is to let MPQ run a simple close-ended survey in-game to see how the players feel about the current time slices available, whether they think the current setup is fair, whether they like PvE remain the way it is, or do away with placement/time-slices,  run an in-match timer etc. 

The answer would be just like how the Dev. gave a conclusive and data-centric answer on the possibility of 6*. 

Confirmation bias and hyperbole.  Just like with vaulting or wins based, in a large thread as you skim along and try to keep up with the entire discussion, you will see those that agree with you and allow them to carry more weight, and shrug off or ignore those that are counter to what you may already believe is the 'correct' outcome.  So you see people using words like "most" and "many" and other variations because it is what they believe.

As for your first point, what were you even hoping for?  This is a thread created by a forum goer, in response to another thread.  What *evidence* were you really hoping to come away with?  The majority of what gets posted are just thought experiments, and any arguement for or against something can be brushed aside by saying there isn't enough evidence.