Ongoing PVE Break Till 1/5 and Compensation

Scofie

@entrailbucket said:
I'm not following this at all, sorry. It either sounds like you're saying that predictability="integrity," or you're attributing some sort of morals or sense of fairness to a superhero phone game which has neither.

My preferred token rotation scheme would be random characters entering and/or leaving tokens at random times on random days (seriously, this is what I want). Does that scheme have integrity?

It's more than morals or fairness, it's the design principles upon which the game hangs. So yes, if the design was random characters at random times, that would have integrity and if it was changed to be Wasp, Kingpin and 5trange permanently, it would undermine that design principle.

@Captain_Trips88 described it far more eloquently than I.

I'd expect roughly 1/3 of people that hoard for the 3 Latest to rotate would care, but again, have no data to support whether that's 1% or 80% of the playing population.

As I mentioned earlier, it makes no difference to me, really, just seemed cleaner, but a good discussion nonetheless on the integrity of game mechanics. 👍

Scofie

@HoundofShadow said:
I remember reading both Riri and Monkey will rotate in together on the 12th.

Here's the quote:

"Current plan with next season is to rotate out She-Hulk and Emma with Riri and Hit-Monkey coming in, then have a CP store for a little bit for people who still wanted to grab Emma a little longer."

https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/comment/996778#Comment_996778

Yes, they rotate in together, but out separately.

JimboJambo

I don't get why we couldn't have just one of the LL rotated out at the start of the season and then the next rotation in, say, 4 weeks time. Why is the rotation so rigidly tied to the start of a season?

HoundofShadow

I prefer the old rotation where it's predictable and more consistent. For example, under the old rotation, Riri would have rotated in on December 10th or 11th and Hit Monkey would be in on Jan 8th or 9th. The reason why it's predictable is because 3 to 4 days before the release of new 5* marks the rotation of latest 5*.

Scofie

@JimboJambo said:
I don't get why we couldn't have just one of the LL rotated out at the start of the season and then the next rotation in, say, 4 weeks time. Why is the rotation so rigidly tied to the start of a season?

I think it is probably helps with the development roadmap to have defined periods to work on new things without business as usual getting in the way and requiring time/updates.

Scofie

@HoundofShadow said:
I prefer the old rotation where it's predictable and more consistent. For example, under the old rotation, Riri would have rotated in on December 10th or 11th and Hit Monkey would be in on Jan 8th or 9th. The reason why it's predictable is because 3 to 4 days before the release of new 5* marks the rotation of latest 5*.

I'm fine with whatever and whenever things rotate, as long as people are informed in advance and can make sensible decisions with limited resources.

ThaRoadWarrior

The question is when those two rotate out, will it be together or is one of them going to leave first, giving the other a longer than normal stint in latest?

Timemachinego

@ThaRoadWarrior said:
The question is when those two rotate out, will it be together or is one of them going to leave first, giving the other a longer than normal stint in latest?

They'll rotate out one at a time, it was said a few places by official folks... it's still a little messed up like you say but far better than having multiple 5s waiting in a queue just to break into latest.

JHawkInc

When I talk about "integrity", I'm talking about structural integrity and consistency. It's a free to play game, where the nature of our existence is managing static systems (character rotation, event rotation, reward/difficulty structure, etc) with the RNG of tokens/covers, where the devs want a system that keeps us engaged for as long as possible, so they can attempt to entice us with ways to spend money on the game. If things are too inconsistent, they start to feel unfair of frustrating, and people quit playing.

The game can survive little deviations from time to time, like the extra PVE events simultaneous with a boss, or the short gap without a PVE event recently, or any of the times a PVP season has been short (like many Anniversary events) or had a longer off-season to shift the start of the next season, at least so long as these are little deviations and not a pattern of inconsistency (that sounds weird, doesn't it?). Little course-corrections can help. I mean, that's what this thread is all about, a course-correction (added rewards) for a minor deviation (missing a PVE event).

Two 5's rotating in at the same time is a course-correction for the slightly off schedule we've had recently. We'll be going from She-Hulk/Emma/Arcade to Arcade/Riri/Hit-Monkey, moving two notches along a pattern, and skipping over the Emma/Arcade/Riri store we would normally expect in the middle. So they're adding another Emma CP Store to compensate for that skip. So.... it's pretty reasonable to just have the Emma/Arcade/Riri store, since that's the one being skipped that's causing them to add a new store in the first place. This whole thing is happening to maintain the integrity of the 5-star release/store pattern, so why randomly choose this moment to only go 90% of the way, and have an Emma store but NOT do the Emma/Arcade/Riri store people would expect?

Yes, alternatives may be mechanically stronger, and yes, the game won't die if they do something different, but the entire point here is to correct for a problem, so why not actually do that, instead of stopping inches short?

@ThaRoadWarrior said:
The question is when those two rotate out, will it be together or is one of them going to leave first, giving the other a longer than normal stint in latest?

@IceIX said:

@killahKlown said:
Assuming then that Riri and Hit Monkey won't be rotated OUT on the same day?

Nope, normal rotation past that.

So Arcade should rotate out by himself (but I'm too lazy to sketch out when that would be, to see how long he'll have spent in LTs by then).

trenchdigger

A don't think one of them will have a longer than normal stint, in fact exactly the opposite; one will have shorter than normal. If we return to the "normal" 4 weekly rotation then Riri will only be in LL for 8 weeks, Hit Monkey the "normal" 12 weeks.

fractalvisions

@trenchdigger said:
A don't think one of them will have a longer than normal stint, in fact exactly the opposite; one will have shorter than normal. If we return to the "normal" 4 weekly rotation then Riri will only be in LL for 8 weeks, Hit Monkey the "normal" 12 weeks.

Yes, that's my understanding too. Which is why it makes sense to do an Emma/Arcade/Riri store since it's Riri that's getting the shortest time in LL. I think Emma's at least been in for about 10 weeks.

entrailbucket

@JHawkInc said:
When I talk about "integrity", I'm talking about structural integrity and consistency. It's a free to play game, where the nature of our existence is managing static systems (character rotation, event rotation, reward/difficulty structure, etc) with the RNG of tokens/covers, where the devs want a system that keeps us engaged for as long as possible, so they can attempt to entice us with ways to spend money on the game. If things are too inconsistent, they start to feel unfair of frustrating, and people quit playing.

Strongest possible disagree. When things are inconsistent they're exciting, unpredictable, and much more interesting. Tying this to revenue is nonsensical -- the players who demand predictability are also the ones who are the most unlikely to spend any money ever, they have their routines worked out exactly to prevent that. Introducing inconsistency could convert some of them to spenders.

Players at lower levels, who actually support the game monetarily, don't have a full understanding of all the crazy schedules and systems -- they're barraged by all sorts of randomness. Because they don't understand these systems, it looks like unpredictability. This often entices them (successfully, in a lot of cases) to spend small amounts of money.

trenchdigger

Yes, assuming we return to 4 week seasons, ie seasons start on 12th Jan, 9 Feb, 9 March, etc. both Emma and Arcade will only spend 10 weeks in LL and Riri 8 weeks.

Xception81

This is what I wrote in Reddit a couple days ago. Should have just posted it here too:

Once they started the 4/5/4/5 release schedule, the standard time in Latest was ~84 days (12 weeks). Then they had the weird timing issues in Sept/Oct, and therefore Kamala/DocThor/Chasm/iSHulk got much longer at ~98 days (14 weeks). Emma/Arcade will get ~70 days (10 weeks) but Ironheart will only get 56 days (8 weeks). And then HitMonkey and everyone after will get back to the new standard ~84 days (12 weeks). Obviously this is assuming we will be back to the standard 1 month between seasons and don’t have short or long seasons. That’s what the devs have said this long off-season was meant to do, so I think it’s a safe assumption.

Bad

The real problem is about lacking a previous reaction.
Arcade was an extra 5* for the anniversary. Well, in that case the rotation should had happened a bit faster than usual and then we would be ok now, instead of waiting more then ever like it's the case.
If in the future they release extra 5* it should rotate 1 week before and never waiting more.

fractalvisions

@Bad said:
The real problem is about lacking a previous reaction.
Arcade was an extra 5* for the anniversary. Well, in that case the rotation should had happened a bit faster than usual and then we would be ok now, instead of waiting more then ever like it's the case.
If in the future they release extra 5* it should rotate 1 week before and never waiting more.

Arcade wasn't an extra 5*. 5*s are still being released once every 4 weeks. That hasn't changed and there haven't been any extra ones. (There was an extra 4* released - She Hulk.) The problem is that they decided they wanted the turnover of LL to occur at the start of each season, which obviously led to issues around anniversary due to a short season (for which they skipped the LL turnover) prior to anniversary season.

I still don't understand why they wanted to make this change or whether we can expect this issue to happen again next anniversary.

trenchdigger

That's correct. No extra 5*. 2 extra off-season weeks at anniversary, and 2 extra off-season weeks at xmas has resulted in the 5* release schedule being 4 weeks behind, and hence the solution to release 2 5s together.

DAZ0273

Emma now at 12 covers with a 4/4/4 and Arcade is in decent shape too so I guess I can be easy come/easy go on what goes in the special store.

ThaRoadWarrior

@fractalvisions said:

I still don't understand why they wanted to make this change or whether we can expect this issue to happen again next anniversary.

I tend to agree that this seems, at a glance, to have caused more problems than it solved, but perhaps this clean sheet of paper year we just started will prove otherwise. Is anniversary the only short season? I feel like there have been others but I can't recall which holiday they'd have been around. April Fools or Halloween? Maybe that's a mis-remembering on my part.

Bowgentle

We had shorter seasons before, but they never made things go off the rails that badly.
That "bonus" 4 caused a lot of ripple effects through PVE rewards, which probably collided with their set schedules in a very bad way.