Places of Power feedback

Voldemort93

This is my thoughts, review and suggestions regarding the newly introduced anniversary event

My overall impression is that it was set in the right direction. Had wonderful rewards. But it still needs a bit of polishing. It is great to see the developers continuing to innovate newer types of levels. Before I go further let me tell you about my alliance to get a clearer picture.

My alliance is a PVE alliance. We have players in 5 star land, 4 star land and 3 star land. We don't strive for the number one position in every event.  But everyone plays daily and we get sufficiently enough rewards from the events. We finish T100-T250 in PVE events with an occasional less than T100 finish. We played this event with 10/4 players at Deadly difficulty and 6/0 in Hard difficulty. I played in the Hard difficulty since my roster is in 3 star land.

So to the event now

1. Level design: The divide and conquer strategy was great. And the fact that I could play it anytime in the 24 hours was a nice change compared to the PVE events where optimal scoring is needed for best rewards. All of the nodes had a varied mixture of goons and characters. This mix made it sufficiently challenging to keep me engaged. And this being the first time, and nobody knowing what each node had in store was kind of exciting. I'm sure we will see more of this event. When it does, I would like a different combination of goons and characters than we see it this time.

2. The two-door system: This in my opinion is what needs most of the polishing. It served to divide us and gain double the rewards. For an alliance like mine, It wasn't possible to get all the rewards in both the Deadly difficulty locations. So we had to pick one. And it didn't matter which location we picked because the both offered same rewards. I think the two locations of a same difficulty should have rewards of same value but not identical rewards. For example: Fan favourite token in one and  Latest Legends in the other. This would mean not everyone in the alliance would agree to a single door, hence they must come to a mutual understanding of what to go for. This would have made it more exciting among the alliances to come to a choice. And an alliance that doesn't communicate may not prosper. Isn't that the way the event was announced? That to play the raid event efficiently, good communication is needed.

3. Rewards:  Lots and lots of rewards the game gave away in this event.  But the realization that no alliance can achieve all the rewards of the event for a single day seemed a bit anti-climatic. Maybe the devs felt it was too many rewards for a single day. But next time the event comes around consider this: Increase the points awarded per node day by day like how it's done in regular PVE. That way, each day lesser number of people are neccesarry to clear a location making more people available for the other places to hit more locations and reap more rewards. And by the last day, the top alliances should be able to play normal, hard and deadly difficulty and come away with all the rewards. If all of the rewards are too much for a single day, reduce them appropriately.  This would mean each day alliances have to send players in at different nodes making it a lot interesting. Once again this would need effective communication and proper co-ordination to reap the best possible rewards for any alliance.

Those are the three things I wanted to say. Keep innovating. I have a couple of general things to add.

P.S: Rehash all the old PVE events. Replace the old ones for new. Let the structure, enemies be the same. Change the combination of goons in the nodes and title and the storylines. Hearts of Darkness, Prodigal Sun, etc has been around forever. It's time to let the old die and bring in new ones. There's too many events with the Dark Avengers. And the boss events are an abosolute blast.

abmoraz

I was just about to come and post the same thing (feedback on the event), so I'll just put a few addendums:

1. Level Design: Totally agree with everything you said here

2. The Two-door System: Agree with most of what you said.  It would've been a bit better if they let us know that the points reset each day.  Our Alliance was under the impression that you built towards the progression rewards over the entire event, so we split everyone into all 6 doors on day 1.  When day 2 hit and we had nothing again, it was a pretty big letdown

3. Rewards: Here, I disagree with you.  I like how things didn't escalate each day, however, it would've been nice if the points didn't reset each day.  The only thing that needed to reset was your ability to enter a door.  I think it would've been nicer if the points didn't reset at all until max-progression was reached.  Then the reset back to 0 and you could start over. 

4. Required Nodes: It would've been nice if they told us which doors had which required characters (as all 4 required toons weren't in each door).

4. Event Timing: It would've been nice if this was at the beginning of the anniversary instead of the middle.  Heck, It would've been nice at the end.  It would've been even nicer if EVEN ONE TINYKITTY ALLIANCE EVENT DIDN'T RUN THURSDAY TO SUNDAY.  JUST ONE!  Sorry, lost my temper there for a second.  The last 60+ alliance events have been run on Thursday - Sunday.  Just once it would be nice to have an event that wasn't in that time slot.  In the PVE schedule, they could just as easily fit this in the "Sunday - Thursday" event slot.

Now, this one was better than most as it had a 24hr window, rather than 3x 8hr windows, but 15 of my alliance members are bar&restaurant workers who work double shifts on fri & sat (the other 5 of us consist of former workers, regulars to that bar, or a rando we picked up to fill out to 20).  So we had everyone play on Thursday, next to no-one play on Friday and Saturday (because working 16hr days doesn't leave much time for MPQ), and then just about everyone played again on Sunday.

DigitHAL9000

I think most people wasted first day because it wasn't clear that game reset would have reset all points earned and all efforts had to be focused on that day and not in all 4 days.

So there was no way of getting all prizes as someone was thinking about in the event topic.

So next time please explicit important points:
1. You can play only one node a day
2. When game reset you loose all alliance points
3. Maximum points you can earn for each node in each level.

Then there should be a possibility, at least for commanders, to check in each node who's playing and points earned.

Voldemort93

I would like to add some thoughts to @abmoraz and @DigitHAL9000

Actually, I think there was an FAQ answered which said that the points would get reset each day. We knew in our alliance that the reset was going to happen. So we weren't surprised to see that. Too bad you guys missed that. 

@abmoraz Every PVE event has points accumalating each day. The point about the new event is to give something new and fresh. So I liked the design this way. Once again I feel bad that your alliance is having a hard time with weekend alliance events. Must suck.

@DigitHAL9000   My alliance found out the maximum points that can be earned per node by sending in only the commander into a node to scope it out. Also that data was shared in the forums too. And by going into the alliance rank tab it was possible to see how many points each member has accumulated.

DigitHAL9000

Voldemort93 said:
...

Actually, I think there was an FAQ answered which said that the points would get reset each day. We knew in our alliance that the reset was going to happen. So we weren't surprised to see that. Too bad you guys missed that. 
...
@DigitHAL9000   My alliance found out the maximum points that can be earned per node by sending in only the commander into a node to scope it out. Also that data was shared in the forums too. And by going into the alliance rank tab it was possible to see how many points each member has accumulated.

I read a FAQ , and knew the game was going to reset each day, but I didn't find specification about the fact that the reset was also involving alliance points.

Sending a commander in each node is a way to avoid the issue.
And we did it.
But even if we were in contact via Messenger it isn't as fast as tapping and checking, and also we're not always connected at the same time, so tapping and having the possibility to see who's in and what's he doing is very useful.

We had some players who played wrong nodes despite chat advice and wasting a player to send in and check who's there isn't even to mention.

Thank you

chf5868

Well, a couple days into new event & a good majority of these questions have been answered, although I think the explanations for rollout info were extremely helpful & spot on, so thanx to the MPQ staff. I have more requests/comments than questions. 

We REALLY need some issues to be addressed for alliance commander controls in coordination & available information. Frankly, I'm surprised that data availability for commanders wasn't built into the event. Access to stats & members locations for commanders is not available in any form, we can't even look at the parent event board & get any info at all beyond what board we choose as a player & all member contribution totals for the event. We need access to stats such as:

1) Clickable list of member point totals & locations during each leg of the event.
2) Clickable access to parent board, showing commander not only number of players & total score for the board in question, but an actual clickable list of members on that board & their corresponding score on that board alone. Also would be helpful to include member Shield rating for 1) & 2).
3) Addition to parent board point totals for each board to include the total needed, to make funneling members to needed areas easier. (Ex. 65,720/142000 for deadly)
4) Expand not only character limit per post in group chat, but access to p2p private chat between members, or at least between commanders & members. This was somewhat  needed previously, but the intro of this event has made it much more important.
5) Access to info involving members beyond 20 person limit. If someone joins & leave during event sign up boxing out a longtime member from joining event, it seems to say in rollout notes that those members can play outside the first 20 to sign up, I'm assuming for access to prizes. As such, commanders need access to event info on those players as well, to gauge their event participation as well.

Not sure if this is the correct place to post this or if other info requirements need to be added, please post any additional ideas in comments. Thanx for listening!

JSP869

What would be great for Places of Power would be if Commanders could assign players to specific nodes.

Very early on the first day most of us had figured out how Places of Power worked. Unfortunately we had a couple of players still unclear on the concept, and in spite of several of us telling our very last player via the limited in-game chat which node he needed to join...he still joined the wrong node, and so we only got 1 Deadly node reward that first day.

On the second day, even though our Commanders had indicated who was to hit which Deadly node, we still had a couple of players join the wrong node. Fortunately I and one other hold-out changed sides (so to speak, we just joined the "other" side) late in the day so we still had 10 players hitting each node.

This was a nerve-wracking event though as I watched the nodes slowly fill up throughout the day knowing that if someone wasn't paying attention they could join the 'wrong' node and then we'd have 11 players in one node and 9 in the other. Or even if two people looked at the two nodes each with 9 players in them at the same time and they both just decided at the same time "I'll join the left node".

To hopefully counter this happening whenever I was about to join a node I always announced in Chat which node I was going to join, then I waited a few minutes, closed the App, reloaded it, checked my target node still only had 9 players, and only then did I join.