New Event - Places of Power *Updated (10/11/18)

Agent262

The rewards for this event are generous, but the lack of communication has pretty much ruined at least the first day of this.  Both the disinformation we got on these forums (that you should spread everybody out) and the lack of a way to communicate with your alliance out of game.  By the time i logged in last night, i found 3-5 members of my alliance on each node, so we got hosed.  Hopefully people pay attention to alliance chat enough so this doesn't happen today but I wont know until it's too late.

The idea behind this alliance event was a good one:  everyone in the alliance participates to the best of their ability and everyone in the alliance gets rewarded.  The way it was implemented was the exact OPPOSITE of that, meaning alliance members who went to the "wrong" node because they don't scour the forums like I do, actively HURT the rest of the alliance.

I was going to offer a suggestion here about a single pool of points but i don't code so that might be too difficult.  But good lord ANYONE here could have told them this was going to be an issue.  Happy Anniversary i guess?

ThaRoadWarrior

I was pretty caught off guard by the point totals resetting every day. If I'd known yesterday we could have focused-fire much more effectively than we did. I was expecting those of us who had "big" rosters would be able to accumulate points in the deadly node across the days to help bootstrap younger rosters, but it seems like it doesn't work like that. I can't put my finger on why, but I kind of feel penalized for having the "good" roster in my alliance and doing deadly yesterday, and today dropping down to "hard"

MennoKnight

By the way, thanks for swapping POP tokens for Anniversary tokens.  Much appreciated!

St_Bernadus

ThaRoadWarrior said:

I was pretty caught off guard by the point totals resetting every day. If I'd known yesterday we could have focused-fire much more effectively than we did. I was expecting those of us who had "big" rosters would be able to accumulate points in the deadly node across the days to help bootstrap younger rosters, but it seems like it doesn't work like that. I can't put my finger on why, but I kind of feel penalized for having the "good" roster in my alliance and doing deadly yesterday, and today dropping down to "hard"

Why did you drop down to Hard then? You don't have to play the same site every day.

Smart80

ZootSax said:

One odd quirk of this event I just realized is that if you're the only player in your alliance who plays a given location, you're MUCH better off with the progression rewards from "Normal" than in "Hard" or "Deadly".  Considering the large difference in difficultly between these levels, that just seems odd...

I could see some logic to this as players who go deadly are more likely to be a bit more organised and therefor not be alone in a given location.. The other way around, it gives very casual players in a very casual team, still some chance to get some prizes..

just a theory

ThaRoadWarrior

St_Bernadus said:

ThaRoadWarrior said:

I was pretty caught off guard by the point totals resetting every day. If I'd known yesterday we could have focused-fire much more effectively than we did. I was expecting those of us who had "big" rosters would be able to accumulate points in the deadly node across the days to help bootstrap younger rosters, but it seems like it doesn't work like that. I can't put my finger on why, but I kind of feel penalized for having the "good" roster in my alliance and doing deadly yesterday, and today dropping down to "hard"

Why did you drop down to Hard then? You don't have to play the same site every day.

The 2 of us playing Deadly with no chance of fully closing it out decided to drop down to "hard" so that the other 3-4 people in our casual alliance actually trying (but unable to move up to deadly) would have a chance of actually closing out progression on something.

Moon Roach

I'm not sure why, but there's a lot less engagement for this event in my alliance.  9 joined Savage Land in sub 1, 4 of us scored any points.
:edit: I asked what was going on, answer came there none.

ThaRoadWarrior

I'm guessing it's because the preview-able rewards are underwhelming, and end in a 4* rather than a token of some kind. But my alliance is the same. I have like 4 people who did a single node to get entered, and then there's maybe 4-5 of us actually trying anything.

Jadams78

So, if I've figured this out correctly, an alliance would need at min., 4 members in a normal mission lvl, 6 members in a hard mission lvl, and 10 members in a deadly mission lvl to reap ALL rewards in that specific location lvl, right? 
I apologize if the wording is confusing. I'm a little tired and am not 100%, brain wise. Lol

Welforj1

Seems to me that those that stand to gain the most are those who have mega alliances! Our Alliance has 5 players who can handle the Deadly level, the rest are normal to a few coping with the hard level. Consequently only the 5 players are really earning any awards for the Alliance. I don't think this was thought through enough. As in earlier posts it's hard to determine who's doing what and trying to communicate the missions to the Alliance is painful, due to continually cross referencing between screens. On a positive note it's good to see something new.

St_Bernadus

Jadams78 said:

So, if I've figured this out correctly, an alliance would need at min., 4 members in a normal mission lvl, 6 members in a hard mission lvl, and 10 members in a deadly mission lvl to reap ALL rewards in that specific location lvl, right? 
I apologize if the wording is confusing. I'm a little tired and am not 100%, brain wise. Lol

Yes.

Richyyy

ThaRoadWarrior said:

I'm guessing it's because the preview-able rewards are underwhelming, and end in a 4* rather than a token of some kind. But my alliance is the same. I have like 4 people who did a single node to get entered, and then there's maybe 4-5 of us actually trying anything.

Also the whole reason I find alliance events fun (or at least 'found', before 5*s that could just overpower anything), was because they were different. The bosses typically involve some kind of challenge that changes things up from the usual PvE or PvP grind. This one, once you get past the decision of which level to enter, is an utterly basic, fairly dull PvE minus the time pressure.

The concept of variable difficulties and alliances winning rewards for their whole group is nice, but I can totally understand why people might've swiftly lost interest in the event itself.

DyingLegend

My alliance is split on this event. 

Im not a fan, but I do like something new. My only main complaint is that in other alliance events, people who play more and have stronger rosters can help out the other weaker members in getting those higher progression rewards. I wish I could loan out some of my characters to weaker rosters to help them compete at a higher level. Or help them complete there node's. Overall I find this event boring. Takes me under 30 mins to clear all the nodes the required amount of times then it's waiting til the next day to play more. I want to keep playing! Atleast with other events the node's refresh more often. 

Shintok17

I'm one of the Commanders of the Alliance I'm a part of. During this event I have realized that Coordinating 19 other people is stressful. Some people either don't read the chat or don't care. I can't even find out who the members are that are not going according to plan, because I can only see those who joined the same side and difficulty as me. Also some members did not max out their mission points even though they had 24 hrs to do it. Here is my experience for Day 1 and Day 2 in progress.

Day 1: New event. No real plan. Info was given too late by Devs so it was hard to coordinate with people in different time zones and countries.
Member Distribution Results: 2 Left Normal, 2 Right Normal, 2 Left Hard, 2 Right Hard, 5 Left Deadly, 7 Right Deadly.
Not ideal but we got many rewards. Learned from it and made a plan for next day.

DAY 2: Communicated the strategy with the Alliance for today many hours before it begun. It was suppose to be 10 on Deadly on the same side, 6 on Hard on the same side, and 4 on Normal on the same side. This will give us Maxed rewards for all 3 difficulties. 
Member Distribution Results So Far: 10 Left Deadly, 3 Right Deadly (Why?), 1 Left Hard (Why?), 1 Right Hard, 0 Left Normal, and 1 Right Normal. 4 members haven't joined yet, which is fine as long as they join before the 24 hr reset and choose the right difficulties and side. 

So far it seems to be harder than I thought to try to coordinate an alliance to get max rewards. I hope tomorrow is better.

fmftint

Shintok17 said:

DAY 2: Communicated the strategy with the Alliance for today many hours before it begun. It was suppose to be 10 on Deadly on the same side, 6 on Hard on the same side, and 4 on Normal on the same side. This will give us Maxed rewards for all 3 difficulties. 
Member Distribution Results So Far: 10 Left Deadly, 2 Right Deadly (Why?), 1 Left Hard (Why?), 1 Right Hard, 0 Left Normal, and 1 Right Normal. 5 members haven't joined yet, which is fine as long as they join before the 24 hr reset and choose the right difficulties and side. 

So far it seems to be harder than I thought to try to coordinate an alliance to get max rewards. I hope tomorrow is better.

You needed to assign specific players to specific nodes,  just saying 4 here,  6 there,  10 there leaves a ton of room for error

A B C D left normal
E F G H I J left hard
K L M N O P Q R S T left deadly 

Smart80

Welforj1 said:

Seems to me that those that stand to gain the most are those who have mega alliances! Our Alliance has 5 players who can handle the Deadly level, the rest are normal to a few coping with the hard level. Consequently only the 5 players are really earning any awards for the Alliance. I don't think this was thought through enough. As in earlier posts it's hard to determine who's doing what and trying to communicate the missions to the Alliance is painful, due to continually cross referencing between screens. On a positive note it's good to see something new.

At first, I think its isnt very weird that mega alliances as you call them, could win the most, cause they simply can play at the highest level, right?

Furthermore, the difficulty level isnt that high on deadly. Even the advertised 370 levels arent reached before the nodes are worth 0 points..

But yeah, they really need to work on possible communication and interface improvements.

Venom9

So my biggest complaint is that even though I laid out a plan for our alliance to follow but a bunch of people are not following the plan and doing there own thing. In this situation I would call those people out and mabey hand out a few kicks, but I can’t see who is in each place, only the one I joined, why is this? It’s really hard to make changes when you don’t know who the problem is. This whole event smacks of being rushed, I know they wanted to get it out during the anniversary month but I wish they would have just given us a boss event and took the time to get this one right. 

smkspy

gentgeen said:

DyingLegend said:

I'm confused, I did the Deadly node and got less points than someone who did the same amount of nodes in the hard?

Why? Deadly was tougher, took longer but less points? Doesn't make sense to me

You are correct... "Why" is a really good question.  Why does "Normal" get you more points then Hard or Deadly? And why are there different values between a difficulty level?

(D) Savage Land = 16,080 total  (15680 Sub-Chapter, and 400 for Parent Chapter Game)
(D) Wakanda = 15,720  (15,320 + 400)

(H) Kamar-Taj = 15,620 (15,320 + 300)
(H) Sokovia = 15,560 (15,260 + 300)

(N) Greenwich = 15,880 (15,680 + 200)
(N) Kun-Lun = 15,880 (15,680 + 200)

It's so lesser alliances or those with weaker members can also achieve personal progression.

Not wrong with that imo.

The different point totals between same level nodes is odd though.

Lystrata

Pros: 

The pace. I love any event where I'm not needing to carve out a specific hour or so of my day to play optimally.

The rewards. Even accounting for not being able to get them all, there is a great spread of rewards and I don't walk away from this feeling my time:reward ratio is unbalanced.

Cons:

The completely unforgiving nature of the points/placement. In other events, if someone enters and real life causes a problem, everyone else can push a little harder to help out. Here, if everyone goes to their assigned spots, no one can push a little more. A specific reward that the alliance revolved their group around getting will be missed.

On that point... 'if everyone goes to their assigned spots'. Even using LINE to coordinate, we've had people jump into the wrong node/sub. And again, it totally tinykittys everything up, if no one is around to spot that / shuffle people around so the groups balance out again.

Communication (A). The level of communication needed for this - a global game, with global time zones - has been a nightmare. I'm sure in future runs, knowing how it operates ahead of time, would ease this a little, but still. Absolute. Nightmare.

Communication (B). The mpq chat is horrendous. We all know this. I am floored at how much of a pain it was to arrange this event with LINE and one or two mpq chat stragglers - I cannot imagine how horrific its been for casual alliances. 

Overall take.

The pace is nice, the rewards are good, and the levels were surprisingly manageable for a first implementation of a new alliance event (I was genuinely surprised at how achievable it was).

The need to have everyone doing their part 100% perfectly in order to achieve the different rewards an alliance goes for though, detracts significantly from this event. It's a huge hassle for commanders, mercs are likely to get short-changed, and players are generally going to miss out on things if not everyone can achieve 100%. I really don't like any event where my efforts are mitigated by someone else being called away, without any way to try and help make up their difference.

HoundofShadow

I think the commander should have the ability to assign members to a specific node or difficulty level. However, if your member decided to rebel against your decision and not play the node at all, you will be screwed anyway.

I say this Alliance event is a true test of how well your alliance members communicate with one another, and how much authority and leadership you have  exude as a leader.

On a side note, somehow I believe we'll get a boss node in the final day. This event lasts for 4 days and all nodes would have rotated to all difficulty level by the 3rd day.