The reason there should be reimbursement

Bacon Pants

Now par for the course would be for there to be an in game message on Tuesday or Wednesday addressing this outage today.

The Compensation...20 ISO.

That would be a D3 move for sure.

Unknown

Now if Riot gave people in League RP for everytime there's a massive server issue like they used to AGES ago.
welp, they don't anymore, they learned that it hurt their profit giving such free income when they don't see a end to the issues coming, cause people will keep demanding more compensation on every tiny issue that arises (like they still do)

Unknown

nobody1111 wrote:

Now if Riot gave people in League RP for everytime there's a massive server issue like they used to AGES ago.
welp, they don't anymore, they learned that it hurt their profit giving such free income when they don't see a end to the issues coming, cause people will keep demanding more compensation on every tiny issue that arises (like they still do)

I'm not sayin they need to give us a hand out every single time there's an issue, but come on, throw us a bone every once in a while, especially when things are as bad as they have been last month or so.

Unknown

Psykopathic wrote:

nobody1111 wrote:

Now if Riot gave people in League RP for everytime there's a massive server issue like they used to AGES ago.
welp, they don't anymore, they learned that it hurt their profit giving such free income when they don't see a end to the issues coming, cause people will keep demanding more compensation on every tiny issue that arises (like they still do)

I'm not sayin they need to give us a hand out every single time there's an issue, but come on, throw us a bone every once in a while, especially when things are as bad as they have been last month or so.

You're not saying that, but the line standing right behind will say that whenever a new issue raises, and especially if they do as you say "throw us a bone" they'll be surrounded by users demanding for more bones faster then you can sneeze

HailMary

nobody1111 wrote:

You're not saying that, but the line standing right behind will say that whenever a new raises, and especially if they do as you say "throw us a bone" they'll be surrounded by users demanding for more bones faster then you can sneeze

And this is why I completely understand D3 refusing to announce or admit that any game changes were spurred by forum feedback. Can you imagine the absolute s---storm of torrential complaining that'd ensue? It'd make the current storm of General Discussion rage-spam look like a drizzle of whimsical displeasure.

Unknown

HailMary wrote:

nobody1111 wrote:

You're not saying that, but the line standing right behind will say that whenever a new raises, and especially if they do as you say "throw us a bone" they'll be surrounded by users demanding for more bones faster then you can sneeze

And this is why I completely understand D3 refusing to announce or admit that any game changes were spurred by forum feedback. Can you imagine the absolute s---storm of torrential complaining that'd ensue? It'd make the current storm of General Discussion rage-spam look like a drizzle of whimsical displeasure.

I think that could be managed with a statement along the lines of "These five characters, A/B/C/D/E, have been the focus of a lot of discussion in terms of balance. Upon reviewing those characters, we've decided that A needs a nerf [specifics]; B and C need buffs [specifics]; and we feel that D and E are about where we want them to be right now." Forum feedback needs to be taken with a grain of salt; some of the ideas are bad, and some complaints should be rejected as poorly reasoned. However, some suggestions are good, and if the devs demonstrate that they can tell the difference, that would be confidence-building, in my opinion.

I also think that the justification you're describing is pretty much "We won't respond directly to feedback, because that will just get us more feedback." Um...isn't another word for bilateral feedback..."communication"? That thing we've said they suck at and need to do a lot more of?

HailMary

Vairelome wrote:

I think that could be managed with a statement along the lines of "These five characters, A/B/C/D/E, have been the focus of a lot of discussion in terms of balance. Upon reviewing those characters, we've decided that A needs a nerf [specifics]; B and C need buffs [specifics]; and we feel that D and E are about where we want them to be right now." Forum feedback needs to be taken with a grain of salt; some of the ideas are bad, and some complaints should be rejected as poorly reasoned. However, some suggestions are good, and if the devs demonstrate that they can tell the difference, that would be confidence-building, in my opinion.

A lighter version of that essentially happened with Spiderman's nerf, and the forum still raged because some people didn't like the specifics of that nerf. I think they've demonstrated that they can tell the difference between topics that've been legitimately discussed on the forums: Spiderman has been nerfed, PVE scaling and rubberbanding is being tweaked, etc. vs. idle whining.

There are, of course, legitimately discussed topics that the devs choose not to kowtow to the forum about. While I strongly disagree with some of their decisions, it's silly to sling condemnations far and wide. They probably listen to us more than they should, considering how relatively tiny the forum population is compared to their active playerbase, and considering how we almost certainly do not represent their core paying customer base.

For example, I don't like the downgraded cover packs, because I'm psychologically anchored to the old "guaranteed featured character" model, but I remember a dev mentioning (probably in a business article of some sort) that the gambler-friendly cover packs boosted sales. Similarly, I think the new bracket sharding that caused death brackets sucks for me, personally, and even moreso for my alliance mates fielding L85s or a single unmaxed 3* in those same death brackets, but the general intent is sound: you don't want to scare low-tier players s---less when they see a 1000+ Top 10. The execution certainly needs some work, if we're going by the forum's anecdotal consensus. But, simply saying "sharding sucks" accomplishes literally nothing besides a momentary self-back-pat. Explaining how sharding is hurting players (as some have done) is something that just might have nonzero positive impact. Lastly, I think D3 would do well to provide simple, comment-locked forum announcements for server outages, since it's zero-cost and seemingly extremely low-effort. On that topic, I truly have no idea why they don't do so, and the fact that they don't annoys me. However, I'm not going to pretend that screeching about how they're all greedy player-haters is any more meaningful or productive than peeing on someone's carpet because you don't agree with their opinions.

Vairelome wrote:

I also think that the justification you're describing is pretty much "We won't respond directly to feedback, because that will just get us more feedback." Um...isn't another word for bilateral feedback..."communication"? That thing we've said they suck at and need to do a lot more of?

There's a difference between constructive feedback and meaningless ranting. Even if we ignore the absolutely bats--- crazy threads threatening endless rage-spam if the devs don't specifically respond to that one person's personal disagreements (seriously, dafuq?), there are multiple threads that pretend to ask for dev responses, yet start and end with nothing more civil than "Hey, Scrooge McDev, go f--- yourselves."

If people keep saying "Hey buttface, here's my problem, can you help me? Hey buttface! Hey buttface! Earth to buttfaaaace!" while flipping someone the bird, the very best response they should expect is no response. This forum -- especially General Discussion -- isn't some CS call center where screaming your head off at the phone rep will get you transferred to an obsequious floor manager or the customer retention department for pacification-via-bribery. Several new daily threads trying to turn the forum into such a hellhole is (hopefully) not going to change that.

Unknown

HailMary wrote:

A lighter version of that essentially happened with Spiderman's nerf, and the forum still raged because some people didn't like the specifics of that nerf.

This is a *very* poor example of the point you are trying to make. Spidey's blue needed nerfing--no question--and rebalancing him was going to be tricky because of the interdependent nature of his abilities, particularly the fact that his yellow and purple scaled off the web tiles created by his blue. I don't have very strong opinions on the overall design change, mostly because my Spidey is 0/1/4, which was a useless spec before and after the changes. I'm inclined to think that the current version of Spidey is a little over-nerfed, but the nerf-on-release was *ludicrous*--his purple was nerfed into oblivion, and yes, that version deserved all the hate that it got. According to IceIX, the purple numbers were not the intended balance point, but were caused by their spreadsheet erroneously using 2* scaling instead of 3* scaling, and the mistake blew right through their internal checks, QC, everything, and went live broken.

It wasn't immediately obvious that the purple numbers were so drastically low due to a simple spreadsheet error because the devs' history with rebalancing characters is uneven. 2* Thor was well done, in my opinion; 2* Wolvie was slightly over-nerfed in his yellow; Rags went from best 3* to either worst or second worst. It turns out that nerfed Spidey wasn't "working as intended," and his purple got patched back to something reasonable. I believe he's still a third-tier 3*, but he's no longer down at the very bottom. Still, the nerf-stick beatdown looks closer to the Rags situation than 2* Wolvie.

HailMary wrote:

There are, of course, legitimately discussed topics that the devs choose not to kowtow to the forum about. While I strongly disagree with some of their decisions, it's silly to sling condemnations far and wide. They probably listen to us more than they should, considering how relatively tiny the forum population is compared to their active playerbase, and considering how we almost certainly do not represent their core paying customer base.

I don't believe I have been "sling[ing] condemnations far and wide." The devs have done a number of things well and a few things poorly, but the single thing I care about the most is their horrendous communications/PR/CS. It is shamefully inadequate, and needs to be called out as such. There's been little evidence that the dev staff beyond IceIX pays much attention to the forums at all, and the idea that the forum population is of trivial importance within the larger playerbase is a stupid one, and needs to stop being repeated. The people who post on the forums are the *most engaged* part of the playerbase, and tend to be opinion leaders, which is an important concept in PR concerning how ideas spread. We have a significant impact on MPQ's reputation, far beyond any other subset of the playerbase of comparable size. I don't know exactly how many whales MPQ has, but there are several who frequent the forums, and many more who are in alliances with forum lurkers/posters. The "please ignore us; we're unimportant" idea is wrong on all levels.

HailMary wrote:

There's a difference between constructive feedback and meaningless ranting. Even if we ignore the absolutely bats--- crazy threads threatening endless rage-spam if the devs don't specifically respond to that one person's personal disagreements (seriously, dafuq?), there are multiple threads that pretend to ask for dev responses, yet start and end with nothing more civil than "Hey, Scrooge McDev, go f--- yourselves."

If people keep saying "Hey buttface, here's my problem, can you help me? Hey buttface! Hey buttface! Earth to buttfaaaace!" while flipping someone the bird, the very best response they should expect is no response. This forum -- especially General Discussion -- isn't some CS call center where screaming your head off at the phone rep will get you transferred to an obsequious floor manager or the customer retention department for pacification-via-bribery. Several new daily threads trying to turn the forum into such a hellhole is (hopefully) not going to change that.

...And speaking of slinging condemnations far and wide...pot, meet kettle? Go and read the responses IceIX gets when he posts on the forums. While there may be some pushback depending on what he's announcing, we've generally been pretty polite and encouraging to him personally. The forums are not, in fact, wholly populated with Beavis and Butthead clones.

HailMary

Vairelome wrote:

I'm inclined to think that the current version of Spidey is a little over-nerfed, but the nerf-on-release was *ludicrous*--his purple was nerfed into oblivion, and yes, that version deserved all the hate that it got. According to IceIX, the purple numbers were not the intended balance point, but were caused by their spreadsheet erroneously using 2* scaling instead of 3* scaling, and the mistake blew right through their internal checks, QC, everything, and went live broken.

And did the forum rage end after the nerf correction? No.

Vairelome wrote:

I don't believe I have been "sling[ing] condemnations far and wide."

Apologies for the confusion. AFAIK, you haven't. I was speaking more generally (see: any and all of the rant threads in General Discussion).

Vairelome wrote:

the idea that the forum population is of trivial importance within the larger playerbase is a stupid one, and needs to stop being repeated. The people who post on the forums are the *most engaged* part of the playerbase, and tend to be opinion leaders, which is an important concept in PR concerning how ideas spread. We have a significant impact on MPQ's reputation, far beyond any other subset of the playerbase of comparable size.

Do we? I frankly don't know that we do have a significant impact in absolute terms. Sure, our impact is disproportionately large compared to our population, but noting our tiny population, that still doesn't mean it's significant in the Big Picture. I mean, I guess it feels nice to simply dismiss an idea as stupid and follow it up with vague assertions, but do you actually have the numbers to support that dismissal?

Vairelome wrote:

I don't know exactly how many whales MPQ has, but there are several who frequent the forums, and many more who are in alliances with forum lurkers/posters. The "please ignore us; we're unimportant" idea is wrong on all levels.

I didn't say that the devs should ignore everything everyone ever says on the forums (and anyway, they don't). However, expecting the devs to actively and directly cater to the specific criticisms made by the vocal-minority-within-a-tiny-vocal-minority is an absurd standard. Lest you oversimplify that point as well: yes, I'd like to see them communicate better, per my earlier point about server outage announcements. But, making formal statements that directly and explicitly note forum criticism as a primary impetus behind certain changes? No. Heck, in various discussions, Ice has already made comments to the effect of "yes, we noted forum complaints, and looked into it, and it simply looks good from our end" multiple times -- he's sometimes gotten an "Alright, fair enough", and sometimes he's gotten ragey flak for it from whomever the supposedly aggrieved party was.

As a point to ponder, I haven't noticed a single anti-dev rage thread started by a known forum whale. Have you? reckless made some very understandably angry comments about the server outage ruining her shielding and causing her to get hit for a hojillion points, but AFAIK, that's as close as any forum whale has gotten to raging. I certainly haven't seen a known whale grandstand by starting an insult-filled rant thread in General Discussion.

Vairelome wrote:

...And speaking of slinging condemnations far and wide...pot, meet kettle? Go and read the responses IceIX gets when he posts on the forums. While there may be some pushback depending on what he's announcing, we've generally been pretty polite and encouraging to him personally.

That's a nice euphemism: "pushback." If critics (again, in general) actually want the devs to respond to criticisms, the distinction between "people don't generally insult Ice on an explicitly personal level" and "people only call the faceless 'devs' or 'D3' greedy, incompetent, etc." is perfectly nonexistent. That distinction only matters if someone's concerned about forum bans for bad behavior. It's like saying "Nothing personal, but everyone you work with is an idiot. By the way, can y'all idiots help me out? ...How 'bout now? ... How 'bout now?"

Vairelome wrote:

The forums are not, in fact, wholly populated with Beavis and Butthead clones.

This statement would be approach rebuttal territory if I stated anything of the sort.

Perhaps we're crossing our wires a bit. I'm not criticizing active forumites on the whole. Most of us aren't making Jerry Springer audition tapes on the forums. As I noted before, there have been many constructive forum discussions and pleas to the devs about things we don't like. Some of those issues were subsequently worked on by the devs, with varying degrees of success. However, putting everything under the "feedback" umbrella whitewashes a lot of outright b----ing. Lastly, I do believe that the devs shouldn't make official announcements (in contrast to mid-thread Ice comments) that directly credit forum complaints for game changes.

Unknown

Vairelome wrote:

The people who post on the forums are the *most engaged* part of the playerbase, and tend to be opinion leaders, which is an important concept in PR concerning how ideas spread. We have a significant impact on MPQ's reputation, far beyond any other subset of the playerbase of comparable size.

There is absolutely zero evidence for this.

MaxCavalera

Ok im ready for my free stuff now... just wanted to grind some of these pve nodes who knows what is counting. probably nothing.

atomzed

To those who said that D3 should not hand out free stuff because it is considered "bone throwing", and the players will want more bones...

You guys have a point that D3 should not be giving "compensation" ALL the time. I think for situations like the delayed rewards and accidental rewards of falcon covers do not need "compensation".

However this server outage affects many people and ruin chances of people progress in pvp and pve. The least they can do is to do some thing, anything to demonstrate their genuine apology.

Also, the "compensation" gives them a reason to ensure their server remains good. Which is a good lesson learnt for them.

I really see no reasons why iso compensation is a problem.

Unknown

I, too, think some form of reimbursement for people who paid for characters' power. Personally, I feel scammed when I paid for full upgrade of my Spider-Man 2-tiles stun ability and to have it nerfed recently. In addition to adapting and restrategizing the game, spent money on buying 2 sets of 10 packs draw on Daken, and I have not been able to draw one single Daken. C'mon developers, are u trying to make ppl quit the game or what?

kensterr

I've played other F2P MMOs before and usually they give out freebies whenever their server goes down or when they screwed up some event. If players bought items that will help in leveling their online characters usually the devs will give a small reimbursement. Something small is better than nothing at all, as it says "we screwed up and here's something as a thank you for your support."

Update:
You can show CS this image about everyone facing server issues

My main MPQ account on my tablet, with the second Steam account in the background. As you can see I have trouble connecting on my Android device while no such problem on Steam.

bloafx69

Is everyone aware that D3 is probably making millions off this game? That's why they are not apologizing or giving a few recruit tokens out... they are upset because we aren't giving them BILLIONS!

So, maybe we are all going about this the wrong way. Instead of quitting and not giving them money, we should each contribute $2,500 to D3. I bet then we'd get some Ritz-Carlton style service.

I wanna see some coat tails!!!

Marvelous

bloafx69 wrote:

Is everyone aware that D3 is probably making millions off this game? That's why they are not apologizing or giving a few recruit tokens out... they are upset because we aren't giving them BILLIONS!

So, maybe we are all going about this the wrong way. Instead of quitting and not giving them money, we should each contribute $2,500 to D3. I bet then we'd get some Ritz-Carlton style service.

I wanna see some coat tails!!!

I know your being sarcastic.. but I cant' even crack a smile to this. The thought of giving them money with a game in this state makes me nauseas.. even if it's only joking. the sad truth.. (they actually do make millions.) and the reality with these kinds of games is that the more money people spend in it, the cheaper they get. Prices will start rising, more and more things will get cheaper in quantity and pricier to buy. As a business it makes sense to try and make the most profit you can. A perfect example were map packs in the Call of Duty franchise. I remember when they first started with Map Pack DLC in the earlier COD games, believe it or not (for those old enough to remember back me up) they use to contain 10 maps and the price was 10 dollars. than, a few years later they changed it to 3 or 4 maps for 15 dollars. So many people complained and were upset, all over several forums asking why they would do that. There were several articles that came out that the dev's said people will respond with there wallets if they continue to buy the map packs than it must not be bothering to many people (total ****) and we will continue to package/price them that way but if we take a severe hit in sales we will rethink our pricing and content packaged DLC. unfortunately even though just about everybody was raging about it, there were enough trolls to purchase there DLC that now it has become a standard in the FPS franchise when it comes to packaging and pricing map pack DLC. Absolutely pitiful. So please don't even joke like this.

bloafx69

Marvelous wrote:

bloafx69 wrote:

Is everyone aware that D3 is probably making millions off this game? That's why they are not apologizing or giving a few recruit tokens out... they are upset because we aren't giving them BILLIONS!

So, maybe we are all going about this the wrong way. Instead of quitting and not giving them money, we should each contribute $2,500 to D3. I bet then we'd get some Ritz-Carlton style service.

I wanna see some coat tails!!!

I know your being sarcastic.. but I cant' even crack a smile to this. The thought of giving them money with a game in this state makes me nauseas.. even if it's only joking. the sad truth.. (they actually do make millions.)

The only reason I can joke is because I spent only $15 on the game (would have spent more but I started to see the schiestiness early on). I'm still even kind of mad (if I pay for something, I expect it to work). I know there are plenty more players out there who have spent so much more than me, and I feel bad for them... They're the ones who are totally out of luck here. If there was only a way to unite all of them...

Unknown

Injustice actually gave something to the player base after they had recent problems. It'd be nice if D3 can step up too.


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