Welfare check

@entrailbucket said:
Please don't show up at their office in person. Players have done that before...

Good lord. Seriously?

This is probably a joke thread but they’re in CA and google is a thing which reveals a location on their website. They are, after all, a business.

No one should go there obviously, but maybe if someone sent them donuts or something, they’d appreciate it.

The comms are way too quiet, but they did fix Zola quickly so someone’s doing some work on broken things…..

Our generally (justified) negative attitude right now probably isn’t helping matters.

@Timemachinego said:

@bluewolf said:

The comms are way too quiet, but they did fix Zola quickly so someone’s doing some work on broken things…..

Our generally (justified) negative attitude right now probably isn’t helping matters.

The problem then is that almost none of us are positive enough people to talk about anything game related without going negative. Even the things some of us are enjoying, like the billions of seeds/seals in pvp, is ruining the hardcore pvp folks fun.

Yeah...this forum (and every MPQ discussion chat or forum I've ever seen) has been relentlessly negative about everything since basically day 1. You can read posts from 2014 about how the game is dead.

@entrailbucket said:

@Timemachinego said:

@bluewolf said:

The comms are way too quiet, but they did fix Zola quickly so someone’s doing some work on broken things…..

Our generally (justified) negative attitude right now probably isn’t helping matters.

The problem then is that almost none of us are positive enough people to talk about anything game related without going negative. Even the things some of us are enjoying, like the billions of seeds/seals in pvp, is ruining the hardcore pvp folks fun.

Yeah...this forum (and every MPQ discussion chat or forum I've ever seen) has been relentlessly negative about everything since basically day 1. You can read posts from 2014 about how the game is dead.

I do understand the negative downward spiral that communities go through, but I used to be positive about the things worth being positive about and negative about what warranted it. There's just very little to be positive about anymore. I liked Elsa's art, Frankie is fun (granted, she was too good to be true pre-release, but that DID sour her reception). IDK what else there is to be having a party for.

Look, human nature seems to be "complaining is the default state of commenting" but the devs have completely destroyed their credibility and reputation over the past few months. And people aren't having it.

Pre-Unity, the biggest complaint was that we thought they didn't understand the game - they'd release sad attempts at countering metas, or some other thing, we'd complain that they don't know what its like to play at a high level....etc.

For a year they told us that they couldn't really work on the game because they needed Unity to make it easier to do. Fine, we all went along with it, waiting for the transition so things could be cooler and not stale.

And now a huge % of people just think they're incompetent. Because things keep breaking and barely anything is fixed and it's been 2 months - 8 weeks - since Ice assured us they were on top of it, and they have big plans. etc. New things break constantly, seemingly simple things are not fixed. You can't trust the rewards screens to show you what rewards you actually earned? Really? The daily rewards screen is broken? really?

So are we more negative? Absolutely. They have shown us no reasons to trust in their abilities or capacity to adapt or pivot. They took 3 weeks for an update that didn't do half of what they said it would.

I don't know what we are supposed to say or do especially when their communication is just as bad as ever.

@entrailbucket said:
See, I don't think "we" are more negative, though. The amount of negativity here (and in the tiny number of other spaces I'm in) hasn't really increased. It's just sort of always been like this.

So maybe it's just more accurate now?

And like honestly the negativity isn't really that complicated, and it's not the players' fault.

At the start, nobody knew what MPQ was yet, so stuff just happened all the time. Events were random -- some days you'd log in and there'd be no PvE or PvP to play. The schedule wasn't published and they just sort of did whatever whenever. There was no release cadence. Nerfs and buffs happened all the time for no particularly obvious reason. Entire mechanics changed overnight. PvE events were dramatically different, with overlapping subs, varying difficulty levels, and number of fights.

Eventually, over the years, the previous developers figured out what MPQ was, and moved to the sort of regimented schedule of events and releases that we have now. And that was great for some players, but others got bored of doing the same events, at the same times, with the same characters, over and over forever. The devs basically embraced this, and it was probably because being hands-off in this manner cost them a lot less. The game could run on autopilot forever. As time went by, players who wanted something new to do realized they weren't going to get it, got bored and left.

So after years and years of this, we have a veteran playerbase composed solely of folks who really like playing the same game in the same way every single day, and who hate change of any kind. What are those folks going to do when something changes? The previous guys kept change to a minimum, but when they did something they always got killed for it.

Then the new guys come in and make a lot of change really quickly, including rebuilding the entire dang game from scratch. This was never going to go well for them.