Omega Red's Villainous Community Challenge

JoeHandle

@bluewolf said:

@DAZ0273 said:

@bluewolf said:
I mean it’s whatever. But there’s missing the goal and then there’s being over 20% short.

I still find the numbers around the boss suspicious. It makes no sense.

Also putting up a challenge where one of the 3-4 characters players avoid fighting whenever possible gives bonus points feels a bit like they were setting us up to fail.

And the timing….the end falling during off season so there isn’t even a Simulator to hunt OR in.

We were supposed to lose.

I mean I would love to lay that level of Machiavellian scheming at their door but the Devs can't even co-ordinate having a rebalanced character be boosted so there is an incentive to try them out! And what fun is there to making us fail a LOT? It would be much more fun making us just fail enough to miss out!

I was making a reference to the first Galactus boss when they told us he was so hard because we were supposed to lose.

I don’t know what they intended but they’re in control of the goals and have reams if data about play etc to use as a guide.

It’s not like after 10 3/4 years they can’t predict what the players will do over a 2 week period and design an achievable challenge around that.

Do we think they sat down for 5 minutes and made up some number and called it good?

Oh no ... I don't think they spent that much time on it

They should have the data needed to know how "productive" the playerbase is on various days ... in season, out of season, during various events ... and they should use such data to inform the design of events. If they don't bother to use such data or worse don't bother to collect it or worst of all aren't able to collect it ... that's mismanagement. A "challenge" should require some marginal increase over the typical level of activity. And it should be achievable; if it's impossible, it isn't a challenge, it's a farce.

But, we've now seen at least a couple "challenges" where the bar was set comically low. So long as that was the case I assumed it was just generosity. Trying to goose engagement and goodwill by all but literally giving stuff away. A "challenge" with a friendly wink and a nod.

But now, a challenge that was never in reach. That's a farce.

Between these observations and the mod's comment above, sounds like mismanagement confirmed. Just spitballin' numbers and going with it. Sometimes laughably high, someitmes laughably low, but never doing the modeling homework to properly design a "challenge".

Not alleging mendacity, just garden variety half-arsedness. (Hanlon's razor)

Scofie

@JoeHandle said:

Between these observations and the mod's comment above, sounds like mismanagement confirmed.

For the avoidance of doubt, I was expressing my own opinion since I have no insight at all into how these decisions are made, nor access to any of the data they're based on.

Predicting the future by assessing the past is not an exact science. There are 2 options you mention 1) mendacity and 2) half-assedness. My assumption was that it was neither - it was 3) the data said it was possible at a stretch and players went the other way. I have noticed variances in my regular PvE slice over the last 3 weeks - fewer players in general - and members of my alliance have had more than usual odd days off. I've played less PvP because the boost week wasn't great for me and I've been busy and the weather is nice. It's entirely anecdotal of course but I've been playing for a long time and I wouldn't have predicted the dips in play.

Even then, there are 4 whole levels of free stuff that was achieved, which again, my assumption is, were designed to be hit with relative ease, so it's not like nobody got anything for all the extra effort we put in... 😉

DAZ0273

@bluewolf said:

@DAZ0273 said:

@bluewolf said:
I mean it’s whatever. But there’s missing the goal and then there’s being over 20% short.

I still find the numbers around the boss suspicious. It makes no sense.

Also putting up a challenge where one of the 3-4 characters players avoid fighting whenever possible gives bonus points feels a bit like they were setting us up to fail.

And the timing….the end falling during off season so there isn’t even a Simulator to hunt OR in.

We were supposed to lose.

I mean I would love to lay that level of Machiavellian scheming at their door but the Devs can't even co-ordinate having a rebalanced character be boosted so there is an incentive to try them out! And what fun is there to making us fail a LOT? It would be much more fun making us just fail enough to miss out!

Do we think they sat down for 5 minutes and made up some number and called it good?

They are having an entire season of PVP with Supports with non live beta testing so maybe yes?

DAZ0273

Also we need to nail this down and I don't even think a pinned thread would be too much:

The player Base Mods on this forum ( so not S0kun, Ice etc) are NOT employees of The Devs. They have no more insider knowledge than me and well, I don't even know what the next 4 releases are apart from ~~Agatha Harkness, Rom, Captain Ultra and Discus.~~

Wait did I type that?

Oops, nothing to see here.

dianetics

If you just played the game...you know like inside the game opened it up and played.
I bet you would never know this even happened.
I ignore these community events every time now, because they never really make sense.
You can't track it in the game and if you aren't queued in you would never even know it happened.

We've missed infinity stones before because these events are completely outside the scope.
I think the devs look purely at the numbers but don't understand what is going on underneath.

The day I saw this thread I had no hope for it.

bluewolf

Now I see my problem. I had hope!

I started back up last October and we did amazingly well in that challenge (beating stretch goals!). Then we had the challenge this past Feb (?) and that went great.

I assumed “hey, maybe the devs set targets low because they’re trying to keep people invested in a game with increasing dilution and longer and longer goalposts.”

I thought “challenges are fun!”.

Lesson learned.

Godzillafan67

@Scofie said:
At the risk of being unpopular, there was a number decided that it was thought the community could make with a bit of effort. We didn't. Is that because the whole playerbase didn't try, or because the number was too high in the first place? We'll never know. But during other community events we've exceeded a number of times and got more levels of free stuff added. Maybe that's because the playerbase did well, or maybe the numbers were set too low.

I find the view that "not enough free stuff is being received for something we've not achieved" slightly odd. It's a "challenge" not a "giveaway."

I wish we could know! For me personally, I truly view the community challenges as giveaways because I have no control over how anyone else plays. I continue to play a lot, and it would be cool to see how my contributions compare to others (ooohhh... incentivizing figures to add to the in-game reportings on these things), but otherwise I just click Claim when any prizes are handed out. On the other hand, the new Quests are what I consider "challenges" and not "giveaways".

DAZ0273

@bluewolf said:
Now I see my problem. I had hope!

I started back up last October and we did amazingly well in that challenge (beating stretch goals!). Then we had the challenge this past Feb (?) and that went great.

I assumed “hey, maybe the devs set targets low because they’re trying to keep people invested in a game with increasing dilution and longer and longer goalposts.”

I thought “challenges are fun!”.

Lesson learned.

I am pretty confident we will get another shot at this Infinity Stone down the line. Keep the faith MPQ Bro.

Scofie

@Godzillafan67 said:

@Scofie said:
At the risk of being unpopular, there was a number decided that it was thought the community could make with a bit of effort. We didn't. Is that because the whole playerbase didn't try, or because the number was too high in the first place? We'll never know. But during other community events we've exceeded a number of times and got more levels of free stuff added. Maybe that's because the playerbase did well, or maybe the numbers were set too low.

I find the view that "not enough free stuff is being received for something we've not achieved" slightly odd. It's a "challenge" not a "giveaway."

I wish we could know! For me personally, I truly view the community challenges as giveaways because I have no control over how anyone else plays. I continue to play a lot, and it would be cool to see how my contributions compare to others (ooohhh... incentivizing figures to add to the in-game reportings on these things), but otherwise I just click Claim when any prizes are handed out. On the other hand, the new Quests are what I consider "challenges" and not "giveaways".

That would be good - a player leader board for no other purpose than your name up in lights. Like when you win DDQ and end in 1st place. At this point, I think that would be a fun incentive for the longer term players and bigger alliances.

Zarqa

Despite what the devs said on Discord, I am not convinced that the Boss event wasn’t borked and counted towards the goal as intended.

We’ve had plenty of evidence that what the Devs think is happening in game is, in fact, not happening in game. cough… anti-venom cough…

So, my guess remains option 4) we were supposed to get more points during the Alliance event. But, as Scofie said, we’ll never know for sure.

Zarqa

Okay, I stand corrected. We were supposed to get more points from boss, but not because the system was borked.

Pantera236

@Zarqa said:
Okay, I stand corrected. We were supposed to get more points from boss, but not because the system was borked.

Like... that kinda sucks. If we'd been given the parameters that it was actual HP depleted me and some others could've traded hits with our 550 OR and like Knull or whatever and knocked it out in a day lol.

WilliamK1983

And the entire time I thought it was strictly downing a villain and not tied to health pool. Oh well, get em next time.

Tony_Foot

@bluewolf said:
Now I see my problem. I had hope!

I started back up last October and we did amazingly well in that challenge (beating stretch goals!). Then we had the challenge this past Feb (?) and that went great.

I assumed “hey, maybe the devs set targets low because they’re trying to keep people invested in a game with increasing dilution and longer and longer goalposts.”

I thought “challenges are fun!”.

Lesson learned.

How are challenges that you easily get to stretch goals with no change in game behaviour fun? The best moments in this game for me were when boss events were actual challenges with your whole alliance. Working teams up together and hoping you could get enough points.

Now people expect to just turn up, one turn or less matches and to win every 'challenge' or complain about the set up. So many people won't bother changing how they play for these. I know I didn't even look at the requirements because I just assumed we would hit stretch goals because every thing is so easy in this game.

I don't care because I know another one of these will be run until they give it away because that's what the people demand. The gameplay is nothing more than a habit at this point and because they made it so you could steam roller pve in 10 minutes while watching tv and playing with your feet, any re-correction from that will be the death of the game.

Domitronas

@Tony_Foot said:
So many people won't bother changing how they play for these.

Maybe it's because it's not worth changing how we play? You think people want to go through 10 different hoops in the boss event just to get that same 1 measly 5* cover as the final reward? Everyone just wants to be done with it as soon as possible, because it's just another scheduled monthly grind that we go through, same old every month. It's up to the devs, not the players, to create incentives for us to go out of our way and do things differently. It's working pretty well so far with the seasonal vaults, so why can't they do it for the boss event?

Coming back to the topic of the community challenge, it definitely does not help that the description was pretty vague on this one, is it intrinsically understandable that "Defeat Super Villains anywhere in MPQ to damage Omega Red and his forces" in fact means "Make progress based on the amount of damage you do to Super Villain characters"? What even are "Super Villains"? Are goons considered villains? If progress is based on the damage you deal, does it matter if you "defeat" them? What if you cheese them for 99% of HP and then leave the fight, rinse and repeat, does that move the progress bar? I have no idea about any of these. Also as pointed by EyeSnipe in the screenshot from Discord, Omega did not have > 60k HP in the boss event, so that's what, 300k worth of HP each hit at the last stage, and he's solo, while you're getting multiple characters with 300k each during regular PvE. Also, if this is based on HP damage dealt, it means that lower rosters contributed even less and it was all up to the SCL10 players to carry the weight. Last time I checked that's a small part, although a very vocal one, of the overall playerbase. Oh and let's not forget the broken scaling on the side nodes with lvl 1 characters deep into the event. Definitely did not help either.

St_Bernadus

For this particular challenge, even for those engaged on the forum, it was incredibly unclear what it was that we got points for!

LavaManLee

@St_Bernadus said:
For this particular challenge, even for those engaged on the forum, it was incredibly unclear what it was that we got points for!

This! There wasn't much information on how points were actually going to be scored and, additionally, the percentage chart didn't mean anything if you don't know how the scoring works.

DAZ0273

This isn't the first time they have done this. On the "fire powers" thing (last year?) they just sat back and happily let confused players assume that you had to fire active powers and that passives didn't count. Those confused players sowed further confusion by spreading this message in multiple media places. Nope, wrong! Then when they did course correct they just casually announced on Discord that passives did count! So we missed days where we could have all just cheesed Polaris and got it done!

Now I can understand wanting your player base to figure things out but when they are heading the wrong way on fire towards the dynamite factory, maybe mention that isn't gonna work?

Seph1roth5

I left up **** villain teams in shield at least.

BGanhs

@Domitronas said:

@Tony_Foot said:
So many people won't bother changing how they play for these.

Maybe it's because it's not worth changing how we play? You think people want to go through 10 different hoops in the boss event just to get that same 1 measly 5* cover as the final reward? Everyone just wants to be done with it as soon as possible, because it's just another scheduled monthly grind that we go through, same old every month. It's up to the devs, not the players, to create incentives for us to go out of our way and do things differently. It's working pretty well so far with the seasonal vaults, so why can't they do it for the boss event?

Coming back to the topic of the community challenge, it definitely does not help that the description was pretty vague on this one, is it intrinsically understandable that "Defeat Super Villains anywhere in MPQ to damage Omega Red and his forces" in fact means "Make progress based on the amount of damage you do to Super Villain characters"? What even are "Super Villains"? Are goons considered villains? If progress is based on the damage you deal, does it matter if you "defeat" them? What if you cheese them for 99% of HP and then leave the fight, rinse and repeat, does that move the progress bar? I have no idea about any of these. Also as pointed by EyeSnipe in the screenshot from Discord, Omega did not have > 60k HP in the boss event, so that's what, 300k worth of HP each hit at the last stage, and he's solo, while you're getting multiple characters with 300k each during regular PvE. Also, if this is based on HP damage dealt, it means that lower rosters contributed even less and it was all up to the SCL10 players to carry the weight. Last time I checked that's a small part, although a very vocal one, of the overall playerbase. Oh and let's not forget the broken scaling on the side nodes with lvl 1 characters deep into the event. Definitely did not help either.

This right here!