Business vs Play -- what is more important to D3? New revenue or game quality? (long, boring)

HoundofShadow

Big corporations all over the world post job ads all year round because of various reasons.
The typical reasons are 1) that particular employee decided to change job/replacement 2) poor performance 3) expansion 

Microsoft, HP, Google etc have job openings all year round. So, I don't understand the purpose of mentioning that the Devs have job opening for Digital Marketing Manager, besides supporting your belief or spreading misinformation that MPQ is dying. 

MysterB

NeonBlue said:

MysterB said:

NeonBlue said:

MysterB said:

aside from the 2% of those who are dropping fat stacks and beating the rest of the 98% into submission, I think this is the beginning of the end for the game. I find myself not having as much fun as I was 2 years ago. This game sorely needs an overhaul. They can’t even be bothered to fix the in-game character ability sounds. They ask us what we think about their game and barely, if ever, listen. It’s pretty clear with this past Infinity War event 300 vault that put supports behind a Pay wall (what a joke) they only care about money. I could go on........

There is an important metric that's hard to ignore when anticipating the "end for the game," which is that according to the App Store, despite not consistently making it into "most popular," MPQ has always made it into top grossing. This means that despite people not having as much fun, there has always been consistently enough people who feel like the game's worth whaling for. When this metric declines, then you can be sure changes will come.  

Absolutely. You reinforced the first part of my rant. There is a reason why there is a job posted under the career tab for a new digital market manager. The whales will get bored eventually, it’s fast approaching. 

You may be right. However, there are threads like this that pop up every week along the lines of "Oh, this game isn't fun anymore, so it's dying." What people don't realize is that losing some players isn't going to directly cause the downfall of this game. The lifeblood of this game, like many F2P games is microtransactions, not necessarily player enjoyment. Even if you don't like the game as much as you used to, as long as someone else is willing to foot the bill, it doesn't actually matter. While it is valid that a declining playerbase may encourage whales to leave, whales are far more invested than to leave before the ship fully sinks. You say this time is fast approaching, but its been "fast approaching" for years now, if forum posts are to be believed. Until this actually happens, I'll treat it with some skepticism.



i see what you’re saying and respect your opinion. You’re right though, people will always make judgments about anything, it’s what we do. To which it’s their opinion. My statement wasn’t predicated on the years of frustration from players. You also reinforced what I first said again though. The top 2% being the whales run this game. A lot of us know that if (example) a business loses 0.12% of their daily profit it won’t mean jack. Just because I’m not getting into the specifics as to why I said the game is dying doesn’t mean I’m unaware or uneducated on how this or any game that solely lives off of micro transactions work. I’ll speak for myself, this game just isn’t as fun as it used to be. Riddled with bugs and rinse/repeat events. The blatant pay to win as of late,the even worse RNG on pulls/favorites, fighting tooth and nail against these Fed players are just getting stale. This game is just slowly becoming more and more unattractive. Again, I stress it’s just my opinion. 

MysterB

HoundofShadow said:

Big corporations all over the world post job ads all year round because of various reasons.
The typical reasons are 1) that particular employee decided to change job/replacement 2) poor performance 3) expansion 

Microsoft, HP, Google etc have job openings all year round. So, I don't understand the purpose of mentioning that the Devs have job opening for Digital Marketing Manager, besides supporting your belief or spreading misinformation that MPQ is dying. 

I respect your opinion. I don’t get into specifics because my information is most likely against TOS

Jexman

My closet is filling up with gas masks. That is character inflation. But it might be an inherent characteristic of the game. It might be that the CHASE is the protein in the game, and the matching/strategizing is the starchy staple.

Someone---either Marvel or Demiurge---decided that the "content" of this game would be new characters and little else. Probably too many lawyers decided that new story modes would have to be approved by Marvel IP experts (to optimise MCU marketing, to avoid competing with other IPs getting concentrated marketing, to avoid MCU plot clashes, etc), and so this game, very old and merely a match 3 among a million others, has been left to mold and then rot. Demiurge can make decent money doing nothing, why do something? When the game dies, the people working on it can move to other jobs (as we're seeing now). It's business, no one involve has to care about "the players" beyond being customers. I've been playing since just after day 1, this has all been clear for a long time.

Yepyep

Jexman said:

My closet is filling up with gas masks. That is character inflation. But it might be an inherent characteristic of the game. It might be that the CHASE is the protein in the game, and the matching/strategizing is the starchy staple.

Someone---either Marvel or Demiurge---decided that the "content" of this game would be new characters and little else. Probably too many lawyers decided that new story modes would have to be approved by Marvel IP experts (to optimise MCU marketing, to avoid competing with other IPs getting concentrated marketing, to avoid MCU plot clashes, etc), and so this game, very old and merely a match 3 among a million others, has been left to mold and then rot. Demiurge can make decent money doing nothing, why do something? When the game dies, the people working on it can move to other jobs (as we're seeing now). It's business, no one involve has to care about "the players" beyond being customers. I've been playing since just after day 1, this has all been clear for a long time.

It's interesting to me: I didn't start this thread as an "it's a dying game" thing. But it does seem like most serious conversations on the board take a turn into that territory pretty quickly.

I actually deleted the game this morning. My reasons are my own but I will say that the dissatisfactions I expressed in my OP made me a lot less doubtful about that choice. Your comments above distill my sentiments quite well.

Jrlrma

We’ll know when the bean counters are worried about the health of the game when they release a “gambit-killer” for whales to chase. Until that happens, theyre content w the status quo

NeonBlue

Jrlrma said:

We’ll know when the bean counters are worried about the health of the game when they release a “gambit-killer” for whales to chase. Until that happens, theyre content w the status quo

Leads me to believe that somehow, some way, having dominant, meta-defining staple characters makes more money, and balance is actually hurting their bottom line, or at the very least, has no impact on monetization. If balance has no foreseeable value, then it would make sense not to have the already small  dev team devote time to it. They release new characters just to have shiny content for collectors to collect and renew interest every few weeks as to placate the general player base, but have no intention of actually balancing anything ever again

HoundofShadow

I believe that Will already shared factors they use to decide when a character should be rebalanced. I mean, even after they have communicated how and when they decide to balance characters, and you still choose to believe otherwise, I don't think that whatever they share in the future matters anymore. Because you will choose to believe things that you want to hear.

If you are talking about 5* Gambit, I remember seeing that they have plan to re-balance Gambit. As for R4G, I think Will also explained whether R4G will be re-balanced. If I remembere correctly, based on the data that they have collected, it's unlikely to be the case. 

NeonBlue

HoundofShadow said:

I believe that Will already shared factors they use to decide when a character should be rebalanced. I mean, even after they have communicated how and when they decide to balance characters, and you still choose to believe otherwise, I don't think that whatever they share in the future matters anymore. Because you will choose to believe things that you want to hear.

If you are talking about 5* Gambit, I remember seeing that they have plan to re-balance Gambit. As for R4G, I think Will also explained whether R4G will be re-balanced. If I remembere correctly, based on the data that they have collected, it's unlikely to be the case. 

I couldn't find posts relating to that. Not saying I don't believe you, but if you have a link to that post, I'd appreciate it.

HoundofShadow

Regarding re-balancing characters:
https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/comment/792836/#Comment_792836

Regarding 5* Gambit being in the pipeline:
https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/comment/781313/#Comment_781313

Regarding something related to R4G:
https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/comment/781656/#Comment_781656

Updated: Thanks @TPF Alexis for the help.

TPF Alexis

HoundofShadow said:

I don't know how to link to the exact post, so you have to find it yourself.

If you click on the date in the header of each reply, you can get the URL specifically to that reply.

broll

Full: Disclosure, I only skimmed the OP and didn't read the comments.  I'm primarily responding to the title.

Obviously as a business revenue is most important.  Quality is only as important as it effects revenue (this is probably more true of D3 as the publisher, than it is of Demi the developer, but ultimately the outcome is the same).  If they focused everything on quality and the revenue suffered then the game would cease to exist.  If you aren't happy with the quality speak with your money, it's the only way things are likely to change.

TheOncomingStorm

TL; DR - The two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.  It’s probably a difficult balance, but I’d say can’t have one without the other.  Need money to keep the game going, but need the game to be fun or there won’t be players to provide the money.  If I had to guess, I’d say they the scales always tip in one direction or another.  Personally, I would not want to have to try to make everyone happy at the same time.