An Open Letter To D3, DemiUrge and Marvel

supergarv

I want to gauge interest on whether to start a coordinated open letter to the three groups in the thread.

My personal opinion is that the community management here is abysmal. Important changes for high-level players are either not communicated, or asked for feedback and never given responses on. My key points in the past months:

* Changing CL10 scores/pts without addressing the impact on alliance play and without adressing the grind (especially of Challenge Node)
* Introducing new goons, asking for feedback, and not adressing it (i.e. gameplay speed)
* Changing UI aspects of the game nobody asked for while not addressing those, that are asked for (roster screen vs. battle screen, favorite teams)
* General gameplay speed bugs (Mindless Ones after the first match after game start vs. the rest is a long standing pet peeve of mine, as it is obviously a bug)

Of course there's more, but I don't wanna dive into that if the broader playerbase here and in top-alliances doesn't support this.

My suggestion would be to write up the most pressing issues we have with the game and community management and sign on as many players as possible.

If supported, to give weight to the letter, we should also coordinate top-players bailing on one PVE and PVP event as well as stopping spending for a week. That's the only metric we are able to give that has an impact. I know it hurts us, but a coordinated boycott is IMO the only way for player's pain to be addressed. I've been with the game for 5+ years and the only time the voices were heard were when it impacted spending and Store Ratings on the Shardocalypse.

I'm just fed up with how the game is run, because it has so much potential and the community around it is something that gives me joy. I want my game life to be better than this, and I hope others see it similar. Think on how much time high level players spend on the game, and how you see that continued with how the game is heading at the moment.

HoundofShadow

I think you need to go back to the drawing board and rework how you want to position your proposal because there are a couple points that will weaken your credibility.

Firstly, the moment anyone put this sentence or similar sentence in their proposal, they will lose a lot of credibility: 

"Doing X that nobody asked for"

For example, "Changing UI aspects of the game nobody asked for while not addressing those, that are asked for (roster screen vs. battle screen, favorite teams)". Over at Reddit MPQ, there are quite a number of players happy with the change and some of them did request such changes. This evidence will damage your credibility.

Secondly, "I've been with the game for 5+ years and the only time the voices were heard were when it impacted spending and Store Ratings on the Shardocalypse."

Once again, this will damage your credibility because they've implemented quite a number of changes that other players asked for and players were happy with them. Even though those changes didn't impact you positively, but ignoring the impact of those changes on other players will make your position less credible.

Thirdly, I think based on past and recent interviews, Marvel is pretty happy and satisfied with what the developers have achieved. Also, Marvel is unlikely to interfere in such "relationship" because it's something that's irrelevant to them. I would leave out Marvel in the proposal.

Fourthly, the changes seem to be centering around what benefits the high level competitive players the most, while seemingly ignoring the newer and mid-level players.  So, it makes your proposal somewhat self-centered.

On a side not, I hope high level players make known the date that they will boycott PvE and PvP because I'm sure a number of players will grab hold of this opportunity to get better placement rewards, even if it's for just one event. 

DAZ0273

Marvel Comics will probably not get involved. As long as the characters are presented “on spec” and not in a way that might be detrimental to the brand, they will consider how the game is marketed and how in game mechanics/problems/game play is handled is down to the Licensees preogative.

bluewolf

No, an open letter will not do anything, save your breath.

I personally am a bit annoyed by the lack of communication, but one big impact of that is to push me further toward disengagement.  I care less/get less emotionally invested the more they continue this policy/practice non-communication.

They barely tell us about new characters before they enter the game, so I suppose we should be completely unsurprised by the fact that other, less marketable changes are also poorly communicated.

It's worth keeping the perspective that the only reason, really, that this game is operating after 7 years is because it's profitable and is also the main source of revenue for D3Go.  It's a business pure and simple.  If they had a better alternative or it stopped making money, they would close it down fairly unceremoniously.  So investing yourself heavily into it will just lead to disappointment at some point.  

I am relatively happy with most of the recent changes so I wouldn't do anything different, and I also don't think it would make any difference in terms of the devs' behavior if we somehow got some % of players to not spend money or play the game for a week.  I also doubt many other players would be motivated enough by the things you list to take any significant steps.

DAZ0273

In terms of Community Management it is apparent that there is none. This may well be down to the fact that revenues continue to be at acceptable levels regardless, so that is one less salary to pay with the exact same result. Are there disgruntled players/customers - it seems so but are there enough of them to make a difference? Apparently not unless the review bombing on the ap sites starts again. No company is going to employ somebody for the sake of it and it seems they have determined that replacing Brigby will not have any uptick in revenue generated so is actually a waste of resources rather than a generation of them.

bluewolf

No, an open letter will not do anything, save your breath.

I wish I could find the post, but I seem to remember that when Brigby moved from the MPQ community, he said Ice was our new (returning) community manager.  Remember that Brigby shifted to MtGPQ and (I think) GI Joe before leaving D3Go.

So technically Ice replaced Brigby and did it in a less involved manner for a while.  Then recently (especially since early 2020) he shifted more away to seemingly, maybe, take on other roles. 

I'm partly just being pedantic, but pointing out that they DID assign Ice the role.

DAZ0273

Not that long ago I straight up asked Lakestone about who we could ask about stuff and he said both him and IceIX - my suspicion therefore is that there is no actual person assigned to the role any more and it is rotated amongst whoever has any time to post stuff.

ThaRoadWarrior

Seems like even Brigby had the title "producer/" back in the day, and i'm fairly confident IceIX does too. My guess is they have actual game development responsibilities, which are going to be higher priority in any given workday than showing up here and talking to us, no matter how nice we are to them (or not). On a game team, a producer fills in any gaps not being performed by someone with a hard skill and associated tasking (ie a programmer, designer, artist). It ranges from project management to ordering cheese fries on late nights to support or community management depending on what you're working on and the size of your organization. It used to be a catch-all term for anyone who wasn't an artist or engineer, but it's starting to settle more into management now in industry.

bluewolf

No, an open letter will not do anything, save your breath.

I don't want them here every day.  I don't expect it.  I don't mind if they aren't teasing upcoming things like roster sorting etc.

There are, to me, 3 things they could/should do at minimum to maintain a community relationship:

1.  The Sneak Peek - this is hardly a rare thing in gaming.  Other Marvel games do it.
2.  Tell us about changes/new characters and features and answer questions, at least initial ones.  How does this new character work?  What are the rules with this event? etc.
3.  Address bugs.  Are things working as intended?  Will things be fixed?

I suppose one might say item 3 is handled via the update notes which come from Demiurge, I presume, and are copy/pasted to the forum by some D3 person.  But they used to communicate about bugs in that section of the forum and don't even do that anymore.

Obviously, maintaining a community relationship is not important to them.

Mayo

 
Yes, comestic changes are a waste of time
Yes, so many unfulfilled promises such as incomplete support system, useless polls, alliance events taken down for no real reason, etc
Yes, the same people who will leave the game as protest but that will not really make the difference and most continue playing free. 
Yes, all the few constant supporters of this game always saying that 'wait, this time feels good changes are coming' but somehow I read them several times every year posting the same but it is not really true
Yes, for months all resources have been progresively cut more and more many times without even an informative post
Yes, communication is mínimal and mostly useless

I grew tired of being positive, gave  feedback and gave fair time and chance to this game so I could support it over other RL leisures but nothing I expected happened so now i play with almost 0 expenditure. Got enough good roster to play carelessly and still be entertained until the game is shuts down while recovering the time I spent enslaved by the grinding times. I feel fine with this change. 

Don't waste your time, been enough years in this game to confirm that the owners do what they want with what they own.

Cheers! 

PiMacleod

I'm pretty sure that we (the forum-goers) are a TINY percentage of the whole.  I'm not just saying that as a Devil's advocate kinda thing... I'm saying that as a measure of how much money they (probably) generate in order to keep a mobile game of this age still alive.  If it wasn't making enough funds, they'd have shut it down already.

It's age and popularity tell me that there's enough other players out there that dwarf us here.  If those other groups are spending money on this game, without too many signs of 'pitchforks and torches', then I think they'll just carry on as is.  Kind of like a "if it ain't broke don't fix it".

I know this isn't the pattern of thought anyone wants to hear -- I'd like to think that they listen to us too.  But, there's a few signs that they do.

  New characters.  A lot of characters that come down the pipeline end up being characters we see that get mentioned from time to time.  I mean... they actually released Dazzler after her being a joke here on the forums for so long.  ...I still think we should've kept it going and started throwing out Morph references. 

  New goons.  After a long drought of new things to pummel blindly, they've given us TWO new sets of goons... both of which are 100x more entertaining to fight than Ultron sentries and Mindless Ones.  Of course, we need to see them implemented in PvEs, but baby steps and all that.

  Altering the SCL10 points.  I know this is contested still, but they DID do it.  Maybe it's not to the measure that people want, but it's a start.  I honestly don't think they're gonna alter it more without altering ALL SCLs points/nodes required.  After all, if they lowered the amount of clears, or raised the point values (for SCL 10), then lower SCLs might have the valid argument of "why am I spending MORE time to get LESS than the SCL above me"?  You could argue that back and forth... but that's not an argument anyone wants to endure.

  The new filter features.  This isn't making "favorite teams", or picking our fighting team any easier... but it's a giant step forward in organization and finding who/what you're looking for amongst 200~300 slots of characters.  It has saved me a bit of time here and there already.  I'm sure I'm not alone in this.


Maybe they don't listen to everything that we want.  But maybe they listen to some of it, and also feedback from the app stores, FB comments, YouTube comments, discord, and more.  Compile those results and see what bubbles to the top.  I'm just speculating at that, honestly... but this is why I think we're just a tiny fraction of a whole.  We've seen some results, and then there's other things that we see as "easy fixes" that they don't do.  There's GOTTA be a reason.  To me, that reason is because we're such a small percentage, and everything that we want and desire doesn't equal everything that EVERYONE desires.

Perhaps if we spread our ideas and passion across the many social media outlets, there'd be more response.  That's just a hypothesis at best, though.  

Good luck with the poll and letter!  I wish it the best.  I hope it does better than the public petitions that were signed by 10s of thousands of people to bring Mother 3 to the states.. that was something I thought was a shoe-in after so many people lovingly supported it.  I don't put a lot of stock into letters/petitions/etc anymore after I saw that many potential buyers of a product get told 'no'.  

Loosie

I see no point in including Marvel and such open letter. Otherwise Hound and bluewolf both have good points and i agree with them.

Overall I seemed to care less about the sneak peeks. I find while it's nice to know who's coming up, where my roster is at it' really doesn't matter (all 4s save Anti-Venom and Misty Knight are champed now). The one place it is kind of nice to know is the featured 5* as we don't know which Featured 5* get replaced with new 5* shards. And that's purley based on whether I should keep pulling LTs or not if one of the latest 5s is only a cover or less away from champable.

Michael1957

I don't care: Hell it's a game, not politics; stop the rambling already and let us play the game as it is.

Maybe we need to do a Ready Player One revolution 

JRYUART

With all due respect , give them a break.  I enjoy the game as much as anyone else and look forward to hearing about any sort of news regarding the game but not to belabor the obvious, the world is being rocked atm by the pandemic.  

D3 and Demiurge are very small studios who are trying to adapt to so many new normals, just like all the other businesses out there. Just because they make digitally distributed products doesn’t mean that they can easily transition to working remotely without having to adjust accordingly.  These folks have lives and families outside of work that they now have to factor into their daily lives - children at home, partners that may be furloughed as well, etc. 

For example, I work in the collectible industry as an artist and I am designing stuff that won’t be released until 2022 due to all of the delays in manufacturing and logistics resulting from the pandemic.  Approvals with licensors are being delayed .  Factories have a backlog of orders to fulfill, and at a slower pace.  Shipping (air/sea/land) is obviously in a precipitous state atm.  I want to have stuff out ASAP atm. There are people ready to buy.  It’s just not going to be on their timeframe unfortunately due to so many things going awry and changing. 

In the big list of things to-do, certain things may unfortunately have to be placed lower on the priority list just because they simply don’t have the resources to handle everything all at once. To my understanding, even pre-pandemic, info about the game features were sometimes received from Demiurge only hours before Brigby posted them.  You have to remember that you have two companies, with different workflows, trying to coordinate the presentation of a unified message, during a tumultuous time.  It’s not an easy place to be atm.  

i’m not trying to be an apologist for their lack of communication, but as long as the game is relatively running smoothly, and there is movement on new toons and features, I think it’s not too much to ask to be a bit more patient and understanding. 

Step back for a second and think about the reason why we all want more more more.  It’s because they crafted a product that we actually like enough that we can’t wait to get more more more.  I’ve met Brigby, Ice and Lakestone in person before and they are all good people with good intentions for the game.  I’m sure both teams are full of the same.  Just give them some time because between the constant negativity from disgruntled players and the issues that the world is facing, something we actually do to help the situation is step back a little , stop breathing down their backs, offer constructive feedback and give them room and time to work.  

supergarv

Yes, we need an open letter. It cannot be like this.

Thanks for the feedback, it helped to know I‘m mostly alone and overreaching/reacting. This can help me too chewing on it and moving on.