Support Circuit - Hiatus (4/5/19)

jamesh

Presumably it will be back right after Fight for Wakanda, Places of Power, and Sinister 600.

Bowgentle

jackstar0 said:

This is the kind of communication we're after.

Is it, though?

Friday night, after the devs have left for the weekend, so they don't have to deal with pesky follow-up questions until Monday?
At the absolutely latest moment possible, before Support Circuit was supposed to start on Monday and people would find out in-game that it wasn't starting?

I'd say once again it's the barest of minimums of communication.

1882

D3 developers. There is an easy fix for the supports conundrum! I was one of the players that enjoyed support curcuit. However I do think you made it to time heavy by way of a story mode.
Why don't you you do it like deadpool. Taco tokens become support vault tokens. And LL token becomes advanced support token. 
I recon you would more positive feed back! 
Just an idea.. 
(ps I don't mean replace deadpool) 

Ed_Dragonrider

I'm not really surprised, interest and partcipation has been dropping steadily, they need to do something asap.

I usually play slice 3, but enter an hour after it starts. I dont think my bracket has been full since the beginning, but it went from ~960 players to ~580 this last time. It was steadily dropping between the two, and i can only imagine other brackets and SCLs showing similar tendencies.

I doubt that is a figure the devs like seeing.

For myself, i do hope they continue to rotate the support store, while they figure something out and make changes. Im sitting on 18 tokens from the previous 2 cycles as i've been waiting for the right supports to finally be in the store.
Although, I dont know how wise it would be to pull them now that we know changes are on the way. If they adjust ratios for pulling higher ones or change the master token back to 4*/5* only, i might risk loosing a lot. Decisions, decisions...

DAZ0273

I'm glad this is being looked at. I sincerely hope that whatever metrics can be looked at in terms of when this is run factor in to any relaunch, for me personally I only found the time once or twice to complete this and PvE (not to mention DDQ and PvP) so anything that either reduces time commitment or allows longer to complete can only be a win in my eyes. I would definitely suggest avoid cramming it into such a tight timeframe.

Thanks for letting us all know @Brigby

Nick441234

Glad its been removed. We didn't need another event where we had to clear 7 times for decent rewards. 

The rockett

Bowgentle said:

jackstar0 said:

This is the kind of communication we're after.

Is it, though?

Friday night, after the devs have left for the weekend, so they don't have to deal with pesky follow-up questions until Monday?
At the absolutely latest moment possible, before Support Circuit was supposed to start on Monday and people would find out in-game that it wasn't starting?

I'd say once again it's the barest of minimums of communication.

I agree with you 100% Bow.  Yes they let us know about it, but as you said they are out the door for the weekend.   They could have still ran this event this week and say hey we are looking at it, but they decided to just kill it.  Not following the logic on it. So for now there is no extra way to earn supports. 

AlexR

Thank you for communicating this!

Considering in the past they often just... stopped doing a regular thing without a word, and even after we found out in-game never confirmed whether it got dropped permanently or temporarily (never to be seen again without a single word), this is worlds above some of the usual communication. So, thank you for letting us know, appreciated.

bluewolf

After thinking more about this....the communication, as I said, is appreciated.

But Support Circuit was not the same as FFW or S600 or PoP.  It is/was a 4 week event where a vault was open that whole time, where the Support tokens got updated every 5 weeks to allow you to pull from a pool of 16/43 (ignoring Infinity Stones) supports, and the event ran weekly for 4 weeks giving us a pretty significant injection of CP, riso, and riso, along with some HP.  Even the vault pulls were resources that improved your roster a little (2*s are far less exciting that Supports to pull, in general, but still helpful).  I pulled numerous Support tokens and a few direct Supports from them.

And when FFW and S600 and PoP disappeared (apparently) there wasn't suddenly a 4 day gap in PVE every 1 1/2 - 2 months.  They just continued with the existing events.

So....NOT communicating this would have been a giant, very large failure of communication.  

I hope the tokens do get updated somehow - even all the Supports might be helpful even though they'd be diluted.  Otherwise we are going to be stuck pulling from the same pool of 16 Supports for a while.

My guess is that this was announced late because they weren't sure they wanted to put a halt to it and it was not an easy decision.  I also suspect that any change will be a while as the devs are hard at work on Endgame tie-ins.  So it might be 2 months or more before something shows up.

Colognoisseur

I'm also with those who appreciate the communication on this.

You guys can't have it both ways. We want more communication then blast them for what they do. Especially the day they do it on!? Come on!

I am against zero communication.

This was appropriately done far enough in advance to allow players to react appropriately.

As for anything more the hiatus tells me they heard the feedback and need to change things. I don't expect anything more on this subject until when, or if, Support Circuit returns.

Freelancer

I don't mind a hiatus as long as the focus is now on 'EARNING a support' and not 'earning a CHANCE at SMALL ODDS to WIN a support'.

Dragon_Nexus

Daredevil217 said:

I also want to give HUGE props for the communication. This is what we are talking about in several threads when we say even if you don’t have all the answers now, letting us know, “we hear you, we agree (or even disagree) this is a problem, we are working on it (or not) and will give you info later” is a really big step in the right direction. More of this please! The game is always evolving and a work in progress. We get it. Even if we don’t like the direction you are taking us, we appreciate getting to look at the roadmap. So a sincere thanks @Brigby, I look forward to seeing what is next!

Exactly this. 100%

I remember back to when Championing came out and suddenly 3* characters hit less hard. We asked on the forums for weeks and weeks for information as to why this was. Was it a bug? Was it intentional? Were they planning to revert it back to how it was,  now that our entire team has been nerfed?

Things got more and more heated as time went on and the radio silence persisted. Eventually someone came in and said something like "It's intentional. We're not planning on changing it" and that was it.

If the message had been given out way sooner, things wouldn't have been so heated. It's a self perpetuating problem. Devs don't want to talk to the community because the community's angry.

The community's angry because the devs won't talk to them.

We need a lot more communication like the thread above. It's much better to be given information which we can work with than be told nothing and have to draw our own conclusions (and our own conclusions are almost always going to be negative, even if it's not the case).

Tony_Foot

It was garbage and they have removed it and told us with 3 days notice, they said they are looking at better options.

Sounds good to me. Any wonder they don't want to interact when they then get accused of leaving it to a Friday when they do offer us something.

More like this would be very welcome.

jp1

Nick441234 said:

Glad its been removed. We didn't need another event where we had to clear 7 times for decent rewards. 

This is a baffling concept to me to be honest. Respectfully, if you didn’t like it, it was optional. What benefit was there in removing the content that others might enjoy? It could have simply been replaced when/if it was revamped or reworked.

Perhaps you are part of an alliance that requires full participation in every event. I guess from that perspective it would make sense.

Quebbster

jp1 said:

Nick441234 said:

Glad its been removed. We didn't need another event where we had to clear 7 times for decent rewards. 

This is a baffling concept to me to be honest. Respectfully, if you didn’t like it, it was optional. What benefit was there in removing the content that others might enjoy? It could have simply been replaced when/if it was revamped or reworked.

Perhaps you are part of an alliance that requires full participation in every event. I guess from that perspective it would make sense.

Support
 Circuit had no alliance rewards.

Nick441234

jp1 said:

Nick441234 said:

Glad its been removed. We didn't need another event where we had to clear 7 times for decent rewards. 

This is a baffling concept to me to be honest. Respectfully, if you didn’t like it, it was optional. What benefit was there in removing the content that others might enjoy? It could have simply been replaced when/if it was revamped or reworked.

Perhaps you are part of an alliance that requires full participation in every event. I guess from that perspective it would make sense.

If you wanted a chance to earn decent supports you had to play the event like a PVE. That is a lot of work when you have the 7 clears for PVE to do on top of it and also PVP to play. 

Yes, I am part of a very competitive alliance. The Support Circuit should be like Deadpool Daily Quest. That sort of length. 

Dragon_Nexus

jp1 said:

Nick441234 said:

Glad its been removed. We didn't need another event where we had to clear 7 times for decent rewards. 

This is a baffling concept to me to be honest. Respectfully, if you didn’t like it, it was optional. What benefit was there in removing the content that others might enjoy? It could have simply been replaced when/if it was revamped or reworked.

Perhaps you are part of an alliance that requires full participation in every event. I guess from that perspective it would make sense.

I think it's easy to fall into the thought process that content in a game is a physical thing. So when it's being changed it needs taking away for repairs.

The devs did this with character rebalances way back when, too. The character was taken out of tokens until they were "fixed" and then put back in.

Like it's a car being taken to the garage.

I suppose the only reason I can think of for wanting to turn it off for a bit is if they believe they cn bring out a changed version within a couple of weeks, so they don't want to subject us to 4 weeks of the not-very-good version when they've already made a much-better version in 10 days.

JHawkInc

Dragon_Nexus said:

I suppose the only reason I can think of for wanting to turn it off for a bit is if they believe they cn bring out a changed version within a couple of weeks, so they don't want to subject us to 4 weeks of the not-very-good version when they've already made a much-better version in 10 days.

I figured Endgame factored into it.

Either they plan to announce a new version as part of Endgame celebrations or (more likely) they decided to get it out of the way for the duration of Endgame celebrations.

And then there's the length of the cycle itself. Support Circuits ran 4 weeks on, 1 week off. Dropping entirely means you can bring a new version back in, say, 7 weeks. Or 12. Or any number that isn't a multiple of 5. Whenever it's ready (next week, next month, etc), they won't have to wait for a current cycle to end before the new system can be put into place.

I can get why people would rather have kept it going, for the extra resources it provided, as well as to get through Supports that weren't featured in the first two runs, but I personally don't have a problem with it being gone while we wait on a replacement, either.

ZootSax

Bowgentle said:

jackstar0 said:

This is the kind of communication we're after.

Is it, though?

Friday night, after the devs have left for the weekend, so they don't have to deal with pesky follow-up questions until Monday?
At the absolutely latest moment possible, before Support Circuit was supposed to start on Monday and people would find out in-game that it wasn't starting?

I'd say once again it's the barest of minimums of communication.

I’m not sure I understand the complaInt that they announced this on Friday.  Considering they are taking it offline for an indeterminate amount of time, what’s the difference between telling us Tuesday when the last one ended or on Friday?  Has any information about the forum’s opinion on the event been disclosed in this thread that wasn’t brought up previously in a half-dozen or more other threads.  It seems unlikely that they could have rolled out an improved event by Monday regardless of when they told us this past week, unless they already had the next iteration coded already which based on their announcement it’s reasonable to assume they don’t.

I’ve certainly been critical of their communication for the past several years, but this I can’t really find much fault with.

jredd

it's not a lost cause. it can be tweaked and made into a welcome addition to the game. thanks for the communication brig.