BriMan2222 said: entrailbucket said: There's a massive difference between getting "upset" and the actions some players took during that time.If the extent of the reaction was players getting upset about this and posting about it on the forum, we're not in the situation we're in today. What actions are those? I only saw people complaining on here and fb and discord. I don't remember anyone taking it too far, like attacking the devs personally, but it's possible I may have missed that if it happened.
entrailbucket said: There's a massive difference between getting "upset" and the actions some players took during that time.If the extent of the reaction was players getting upset about this and posting about it on the forum, we're not in the situation we're in today.
entrailbucket said: BriMan2222 said: entrailbucket said: There's a massive difference between getting "upset" and the actions some players took during that time.If the extent of the reaction was players getting upset about this and posting about it on the forum, we're not in the situation we're in today. What actions are those? I only saw people complaining on here and fb and discord. I don't remember anyone taking it too far, like attacking the devs personally, but it's possible I may have missed that if it happened. That. And other things. A small group of players took things too far -- it went way beyond upset, civilized people arguing on a forum. If it was limited to what you're aware of, we're not in the situation we're in today.As an aside: do you think it was worth it? Was the successful fight to get full rewards back then worth the fact that after that fight, we will never get retro rewards again, and we'll never have a true feeder system for 5*? Would you do it again if you knew this would be the result?
DAZ0273 said: entrailbucket said: BriMan2222 said: entrailbucket said: There's a massive difference between getting "upset" and the actions some players took during that time.If the extent of the reaction was players getting upset about this and posting about it on the forum, we're not in the situation we're in today. What actions are those? I only saw people complaining on here and fb and discord. I don't remember anyone taking it too far, like attacking the devs personally, but it's possible I may have missed that if it happened. That. And other things. A small group of players took things too far -- it went way beyond upset, civilized people arguing on a forum. If it was limited to what you're aware of, we're not in the situation we're in today.As an aside: do you think it was worth it? Was the successful fight to get full rewards back then worth the fact that after that fight, we will never get retro rewards again, and we'll never have a true feeder system for 5*? Would you do it again if you knew this would be the result? What did they do? This sounds super intruiging.
entrailbucket said: DAZ0273 said: entrailbucket said: BriMan2222 said: entrailbucket said: There's a massive difference between getting "upset" and the actions some players took during that time.If the extent of the reaction was players getting upset about this and posting about it on the forum, we're not in the situation we're in today. What actions are those? I only saw people complaining on here and fb and discord. I don't remember anyone taking it too far, like attacking the devs personally, but it's possible I may have missed that if it happened. That. And other things. A small group of players took things too far -- it went way beyond upset, civilized people arguing on a forum. If it was limited to what you're aware of, we're not in the situation we're in today.As an aside: do you think it was worth it? Was the successful fight to get full rewards back then worth the fact that after that fight, we will never get retro rewards again, and we'll never have a true feeder system for 5*? Would you do it again if you knew this would be the result? What did they do? This sounds super intruiging. It was the catered-breakfast threat! As it turns out, the dev team finds the concept of breakfast particularly offensive.
entrailbucket said: So, was it worth it? If you were involved in the fight at that time, would you do it again, knowing the results?
entrailbucket said: I think it's just a classic pyrrhic victory. The players fought and got full retroactive rewards at the time, and ensured that we'd never get anything approaching that ever again.
entrailbucket said: How interesting! So even though that fight happened "for the future of the game" and "to benefit all players," (not my words) the post-tantrum feeder system coincidentally seems to benefit certain players more than others.How many players here find it easy to accumulate 100+ covers for a new 4* a few weeks after their release? Do we have a lot of lvl370 Ikarises and Blobs on the forum?
BriMan2222 said: entrailbucket said: How interesting! So even though that fight happened "for the future of the game" and "to benefit all players," (not my words) the post-tantrum feeder system coincidentally seems to benefit certain players more than others.How many players here find it easy to accumulate 100+ covers for a new 4* a few weeks after their release? Do we have a lot of lvl370 Ikarises and Blobs on the forum? By "shortly after their release" I didn't mean quite that shortly. More like a couple months after release with them as my sole favorite 4 star. The newer 4 stars I've never favorited at all are all in the low 300's except blob and Hydra stomper both around 280 and ikarus at 10 covers.
entrailbucket said: BriMan2222 said: entrailbucket said: How interesting! So even though that fight happened "for the future of the game" and "to benefit all players," (not my words) the post-tantrum feeder system coincidentally seems to benefit certain players more than others.How many players here find it easy to accumulate 100+ covers for a new 4* a few weeks after their release? Do we have a lot of lvl370 Ikarises and Blobs on the forum? By "shortly after their release" I didn't mean quite that shortly. More like a couple months after release with them as my sole favorite 4 star. The newer 4 stars I've never favorited at all are all in the low 300's except blob and Hydra stomper both around 280 and ikarus at 10 covers. My Throg is lvl308 and Beast is lvl311. I would've gotten more shards from almost any older 4*, even at a 30% retro rate, especially if it happened in a batch.Should players who don't have hoarded resources to immediately max out new feeder 4* throw a huge tantrum and threaten the developers, to get the system adjusted "for the good of the community?". I suppose one might ask *which* community that tantrum benefited, exactly?
ThaRoadWarrior said: Most of my newer 4*s are in the 280s, scorpion is inexplicably up at 306 but not on purpose. My Blob is sitting covered with 1400 shards and Icarus is undercovered. But I don’t sit in tokens to have a stash of them available.
So, I was going to re-visit this a bit more seriously because I think it is worth exploring a bit more.
The accusation that a minority of players have undue influence over a game such as Marvel Puzzle Quest is a pretty big one. To pre-face this – MPQ is hardly alone with entitled fan/player bases in the world of entertainment. There are many who feel entitled to get what they want by throwing tantrums and feel they have a right to the property/IP/film/game due to being a fan, paying or otherwise. There are Star Wars fans who weren’t even born when the original Trilogy was in cinema who loudly trash anything that varies from what they expect because they have somehow managed to absorb Star Wars culturally despite never experiencing it as a cultural event at the time.
So, who are these players (obviously forum rules mean no names!)? Do they really wield this level of power? Do the Devs listen to them above the sound of the majority? I can think of several instances which are worth exploring again on this topic.
1.) Wins based PVP – The controversy here was the removal of CP from progression and the demand to remove Wins Based PvP. The main threat that I recall besides boycotting the game was that certain high level players would mobilise and spread across all possible brackets and SCL to take all top spots. Lower tier players would be the collateral damage which were basically accepted as tough luck. There was also talk of “seal clubbing” of lower tier players also which in itself seemed a pretty sad thing to incite but I don’t think MMR particularly allowed this. What did the Devs do? They restored CP in reasonably short order however they did also respond to the wider threat by gating PvP so that high Shield Rank players could no longer play down significantly. The Devs also implemented Wins based/points hybrid PvP. Who won? The players probably declared victory but the Devs didn’t completely lose as they managed to still implement their desired change (if not the desired reward structure) and they penalised these players so they could never threaten to disrupt wider PvP again.
2.) Cupcakes – Players seemed to be at war over this issue with the Devs caught in the middle. The Devs came down against cupcakes as “gaming” the system in an unintended manner. The players responded by shrinking the level of collusion but collusion still exists and has not been addressed any further. We’ll call this one a draw.
3.) Tapping – This seemed to be a very minor issue affecting a very small amount of top end players but those players managed to get the Devs to remove this style of gameplay through fairly aggressive lobbying. To my mind this is one of the times that a small minority of players clearly exerted a level of influence on the game far in excess of the problem at hand to the wider customer base. Possibly the Devs listened to the (somewhat baloney) argument that tapping was a health related issue rather than a placement related issue. I think most of us could smell that one from a mile away.
4.) Cheating – apparently cheating happens quite a bit. If you are like me, you have little to zero clue about this. So, who does? It all seems to be at the very high end that players know who is cheating, how they are cheating and what the Devs are or are not doing about it. You might argue in this case that even if it is a small minority affected, they have the right to ask the Devs to address this and doing so is not overly entitled. However, there are degrees of reasonableness – the Devs should not have to report every single instance of cheating that they deal with nor are they beholden to do anything at all, especially if their resources don’t allow it. I have seen the same player names on this forum address this issue again and again but it doesn’t seem that they tend to be able to order things as they wish always.
So that brings us to Shardmas – the suggestion is that a small amount of players exerted undue influence on the Devs to get what they wanted but I am not sure that really lines up with what happened exactly. There was a LOT of bad reaction to the lesser rewards given out and not just by the usual suspects here. We have been told on this thread that things went beyond just complaints – the accusations have not been fleshed out so we don’t know what sort of behaviour was involved. The Devs have changed how they assign feeders – we don’t know unless somebody has proof otherwise that it was always their intention to shift feeders to new releases and so it might have had nothing to do with the backlash. But if it did then as a community should we ask ourselves whether next time a player arrives on the forum *JUST* to trumpet a cause against the Devs/demanding changes whether we should push back against that in case it harms the game for all of us? Is this influence really there? Or is entrailbucket just paranoid? 😉