Reintroduction of Strange Sights 5* essential node midway through event

@Bullroarer said:
**First, I'm going to acknowledge that for those who play casually, some of what I'm about to say might sound silly.

And, in a way, it is. MPQ is a game, not real life. Those who know me will know that "Real life comes first" is something I'm fond of saying.

Having said that, MPQ is a game that many of us effectively pay to play, and the game's existence is dependent on it being a game that delivers a positive player experience to those that are willing to pay to play it.

The MPQ player experience has, on the whole, deteriorated in the last 12 months, and this issue is an example of that. Allow me to explain...**

I think by now almost everybody who reads this forum will be aware that the current PVE event, Strange Sights, started with the 5* essential node missing.

This was, of course, initially confusing, but word of it quickly spread here and elsewhere and it didn't require much player adaptation to not play a node that wasn't there.

True, it made getting full progression rewards marginally harder for some players but many of them would be able to adapt, and there was an obvious and a fair way of dealing with the issue: by issuing some player compensation.

It wasn't an ideal situation but it was the same situation for everybody: the playing field was a little smaller but it was still a level playing field for everyone.

For some strange reason (no pun intended) someone in the dev team decided that the best way to resolve things was to reintroduce the 5E node, and to reintroduce it in the current active sub-event.

Words cannot adequately express how foolish that was.

It might have been well intended but this move has taken what was a fair event and turned it into an unfair one, because those who noticed that the 5* essential node was back and acted on it now have a massive advantage over those who haven't noticed it at all.

And the sooner someone noticed and acted on it, the more of an advantage they had.

Someone who was on course to finish top in the event might now not even finish in the top 50 or even the top 100, purely because this node was introduced at a random point.

And it's not just individuals that this effects, it also effects alliances. An alliance made of players who play the later slices now has a significant disadvantage over an alliance made of players who play the earlier slices.

There are multiple ways that this missing node could have been "fixed". Here are just some that I can think of:

1. Leaving things as they are; giving some player compensation later.

2. Reintroducing the node for the final sub-event only, which hasn't started yet, and leaving its points value as normal.

3. Reintroducing the node for the final sub-event only, which hasn't started yet, and (for this one time only) increasing its points value.

4. Reintroducing the node at a random point during the current sub-event.

(Those are four possible approaches that I thought of in just 30 seconds; you can probably think of others.)

Of those four approaches, three are fair to everybody and keep the event a level playing field.

One isn't fair, and distorts the entire event.

Why the devs chose that one unfair approach is a mystery to me.

I hope that such an issue never occurs again but if it does I hope that the devs think about the consequences of their "fix" — and perhaps even discuss it with us — before they "fix" it.

**Apologies if this all sounds like a rant but I care about the long-term health of this game, and I see players, some of whom I consider friends, drifting away from this game and this community because of mistakes like this one, and that concerns me.

If you care about this game then it should concern you as well.**

PS, this missing node shouldn't even have happened. It was missing from Strange Sights was last run for players on Steam who were already playing with the new Unity engine and for Unity beta testers on other platforms. It was reported as an issue then; it should've been addressed before Strange Sights was run again.

Thanks for the heads up on this 👍🏼

Have to agree. It is a moronic decision to add back the node part way through the event.
@Zarqa is spot on, they don't understand how their own game works.

@ArchusMonk said:

@Bullroarer said:
**First, I'm going to acknowledge that for those who play casually, some of what I'm about to say might sound silly.

And, in a way, it is. MPQ is a game, not real life. Those who know me will know that "Real life comes first" is something I'm fond of saying.

Having said that, MPQ is a game that many of us effectively pay to play, and the game's existence is dependent on it being a game that delivers a positive player experience to those that are willing to pay to play it.

The MPQ player experience has, on the whole, deteriorated in the last 12 months, and this issue is an example of that. Allow me to explain...**

I think by now almost everybody who reads this forum will be aware that the current PVE event, Strange Sights, started with the 5* essential node missing.

This was, of course, initially confusing, but word of it quickly spread here and elsewhere and it didn't require much player adaptation to not play a node that wasn't there.

True, it made getting full progression rewards marginally harder for some players but many of them would be able to adapt, and there was an obvious and a fair way of dealing with the issue: by issuing some player compensation.

It wasn't an ideal situation but it was the same situation for everybody: the playing field was a little smaller but it was still a level playing field for everyone.

For some strange reason (no pun intended) someone in the dev team decided that the best way to resolve things was to reintroduce the 5E node, and to reintroduce it in the current active sub-event.

Words cannot adequately express how foolish that was.

It might have been well intended but this move has taken what was a fair event and turned it into an unfair one, because those who noticed that the 5* essential node was back and acted on it now have a massive advantage over those who haven't noticed it at all.

And the sooner someone noticed and acted on it, the more of an advantage they had.

Someone who was on course to finish top in the event might now not even finish in the top 50 or even the top 100, purely because this node was introduced at a random point.

And it's not just individuals that this effects, it also effects alliances. An alliance made of players who play the later slices now has a significant disadvantage over an alliance made of players who play the earlier slices.

There are multiple ways that this missing node could have been "fixed". Here are just some that I can think of:

1. Leaving things as they are; giving some player compensation later.

2. Reintroducing the node for the final sub-event only, which hasn't started yet, and leaving its points value as normal.

3. Reintroducing the node for the final sub-event only, which hasn't started yet, and (for this one time only) increasing its points value.

4. Reintroducing the node at a random point during the current sub-event.

(Those are four possible approaches that I thought of in just 30 seconds; you can probably think of others.)

Of those four approaches, three are fair to everybody and keep the event a level playing field.

One isn't fair, and distorts the entire event.

Why the devs chose that one unfair approach is a mystery to me.

I hope that such an issue never occurs again but if it does I hope that the devs think about the consequences of their "fix" — and perhaps even discuss it with us — before they "fix" it.

**Apologies if this all sounds like a rant but I care about the long-term health of this game, and I see players, some of whom I consider friends, drifting away from this game and this community because of mistakes like this one, and that concerns me.

If you care about this game then it should concern you as well.**

PS, this missing node shouldn't even have happened. It was missing from Strange Sights was last run for players on Steam who were already playing with the new Unity engine and for Unity beta testers on other platforms. It was reported as an issue then; it should've been addressed before Strange Sights was run again.

Thanks for posting this, so that I didn’t have to. I’ve been t5 the last several events, and now I sit 40th through no fault of my own other than not realizing that I should have been more aware of this possibility based on the poor choices the devs have made in the last several months. I know EB likes to say this game is player against player NOT player vs devs, but when something like this happens, I definitely feel I’m playing against the devs. I guess this is just another nudge towards the door.

When they screw around with the competition that's something different. I said in the post about this that they shouldn't fix it midstream because it'd be unfair (I definitely didn't expect them to because they never fix anything that fast).

You're still not playing against the developers, but they're changing the rules to advantage one group of players over another.

I'll be bugging CS for my t5 finish compensation, these devs just can't get out of their own way.

@DAZ0273 said:
Has there been official confirmation that the Devs manually did this or could it just be that only a couple of time slices were bugged?

Sort of seems a bizarre solution otherwise.

Yes, this was an active decision:

This post was followed by multiple people on Discord suggesting/telling/begging them to NOT update mid event. No response though…

Thank you @Bullroarer for this post.

I'm sure the cheaters are everywhere crowd will find a way to blame the folks who cleared that node once it was added instead of blaming the folks who haphazardly dropped the ball on the bug that they've known about for months.

@LavaManLee said:

@Zarqa said:

@DAZ0273 said:
Has there been official confirmation that the Devs manually did this or could it just be that only a couple of time slices were bugged?

Sort of seems a bizarre solution otherwise.

Yes, this was an active decision:

This post was followed by multiple people on Discord suggesting/telling/begging them to NOT update mid event. No response though…

I have said it for years. This proves they don't understand how to play their own game competitively. Why on earth would you think patching it mid-game is acceptable? Just leave it alone so everyone is on the same playing field.

I'm having a hard time understanding how the folks running this game are managing to Keystone Kops their way through every single part of the Unity process.

They seem to compound every single mistake with an even bigger mistake. Release untested mess of a opening rollout on Steam? Let's double down by "accidently" forcing Amazon users to have that mess too. Realize that things are horribly broken? Definitely a good idea to force everyone on to the horribly broken build. Instead of communicating about how we are going to fix things lets put out an angry post talking about exploits but not do anything about the underlying bugs for a few days so that now not only is the exploit happening but people are pissed off.

Even with the awful transition they could have have salvaged most of it with good communication and some openhanded compensation to folks. But instead they go radio silent for weeks at a time. It's like this company is being run by dropouts from a community college at every level of the operation.

I'm one of those minority players that feel the same as you. I played for placement in PVE, chasing flips and always ending T5. It's silly I know because the the extra rewards are minuscule, but I enjoy it.

After Unity, the game has been too laggy to play competitively so I took a break. Seeing what's been going down patch after patch I think it's going to be an extended hiatus.