(Week of 19-Jan) Dev Updates Thread

@Zarqa said:

@TheMigz said:

@Zarqa said:

@TheMigz said:
We will make a formal post about time-zone related changes for certain things in the lead up to the next Season. We didn't intend for the Season to go out at a different time to normal on this last one, but going forward, we will need to officially move it from 4am our time coz we generally like most of our devs to be fully awake when a key thing is happening.

(The DDQ issue wasn't an intended time change either, but I don't believe we have any plans currently to change that timing.)

Thanks again for the transparency. When you adjust timings, can you please make sure that standard quest and offer push out times do not overlap with the start time of any PvE or PvP slice?

This has been a consistent feedback throughout the years and now is the opportunity to adjust it the right way.

Sorry to make you folks repeat yourselves and/or state the obvious, but can you tell me specifically why you want the quest and offer times not to over lap with the PVP/PVE slice start times? I just want to make sure we have heard directly from you folks on this and understand.

(MPQ has a pretty intricate relationship to time.)

Currently, offers launch at 9am Pacific Time. This is at the exact same start time of Slice 2 of PvE. When offers launch, there are in game pop ups for each new offer, and those pop ups can only be stopped by visiting the Offer Tab in game or seeing each offer pop up individually. So this is a big distraction from playing PvE in that slice. Since a big part of the game is competitive placement, this interruption can take you out of the placement race for that PvE, since seconds can sometimes matter. And even if you don’t play for placement, seeing those offer pop ups appear every. single. time. you play your PvE node is just annoying.

For PvP, there are ‘seed nodes’ that are available to attack if you join at the exact start time of the slice. This can usually get you 6-10 easy wins. If offers and their pop ups would overlap with this, it would mess with those seed teams at the start.

New quests do not cause any in game pop up, so that is less important. But who knows, maybe you all want to add quest announcements in the future? Better to be safe than sorry and don’t have any automated launch tasks overlap with any PvE or PvP start times.

Please let me know if the above doesn’t make sense. Happy to go into more detail.

Ahhhhhhhh, the pop-ups.............
Thank you, that makes a lot of sense. In future we'll push them to 30 minutes past the hour. (I think we have a few locked in at the moment, but after that, they'll have the new time.)

That'll be the bandaid until we get around to fixing the more fundamental problems with things like how the pop-ups and menus work. At 12 years, MPQ is a pretty old gal as far as games go, and the way things are put together now vs how things were done (or could be done) back then is obviously pretty different, so it's a big job on our list.