A Mess or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Quit the Game

I quit late last week when they destroyed the Season One SHIELD Training and couldn't be bothered to announce anything about it in game at all, and only put the most wishy-washy mess of an explanation here a day or more afterwards. Not going to start my own thread - frankly I'm not any sort of big name here and I can live without calling that amount of attention to myself.

That said... Note to D3: I'm your worst nightmare. You'd better hope there aren't a lot of players drawing the same conclusions I am.

I am not a huge veteran - I came in on the steam sale and was really casual for probably a month or more. I did spend money - probably $60 or so in the 3-4 months I played the game. I don't mind spending a buck or two on a shield to end a PVP if it's for a cover I want. I'm that guy who's in sight of getting Ares and OBW to 85, and pondering what I want to do next. I even would buy a few tokens, when it appeared they had decent odds.

What's next for a player like me is obviously gearing up for the the 3* conversion. From what I have in inventory and information here and elsewhere, the next step was going to be buying covers to round out my Punisher and then working on getting him leveled. A month ago, I was a guy who was going to spend $50 to build that Punisher - and as equivalent opportunities came up in the future probably repeatedly spend similar amounts - and I was happy about it.

...and then... stuff happened. I'd been aware of Alliances, but hadn't really put together the fact that I'd have to go hardcore to get the opportunities at covers I was getting a month before. (You guys have successfully implemented old-school WoW raid guilds. Congratulations. Not.) Token rewards got worse. Token deals got worse. Token packs got worse. PvE event design, already something that grated on me (I'm competing, that makes it PvP.) strongly deemphasized mid-tier rewards (no more 3* in the middle of the table), and doing the math it was pretty obvious that the top-tier rewards were unreachable. Rubberbanding stopped working to the extent it had. My personal scaling isn't bad yet, but community scaling is breaking my play style since I don't have the broken 3* characters.

You know that Punisher I have all three colors of? It happened because of prog rewards.

Note to D3: Your players can do math. Very likely, a fair number of them can do math better than you can.

...and then... weird stuff happened. I got clobbered in the change because of my clear strategy on Heroic Oscorp. I thought I'd understood the PvP system and suddenly everything worked differently. It's not hitting me super hard, but some checking on what's going on let me know that it's only going to get worse. The SHIELD Training got changed with no notification.

Note to D3: You can't build a system this hyper-competitive (even the PvE is PvP) and then go changing undocumented, fundamental rules on any scale on events in-progress without an epic-scale justification. You have to time it, and you have to explain it very clearly, and you have to make that explanation very easy to find. Nothing less is satisfactory in this industry.

So. Here I am, 2* guy looking forward. All of the paths I have for growing my collection are getting more iffy - and because progression in this game insists that you obtain at least one of each cover for a character before you can direct-pay to make the character worth something serious, that's already closing off my future progression. And the parade of new characters that are pumped into the game which effectively are then required to get any covers in the next PvE and dilute the pool everywhere else... In fact it appears that the more I grow, the harder it will become to continue for the same (or as currently trending, less) rewards. I probably can't do math better than the core PQ devs, but I can do the math for me. And as things stand, I'm only going to be less-satisfied if I continue.

Note to D3: I was never going to be a whale, but judging by my spending on other micro-transaction games and the projections I've made, you've successfully through your actions and inactions convinced me NOT to spend $300 or so on you in the next twelve months.

So I quit. Resigned from my alliance. Pushed uninstall on Steam. Thought about it and decided to leave a few pithy thoughts on the forums. Installed a certain microtransaction-based CCG I'd been hearing nice things about. And you know what? It's not continuously trying to applied-psychology me into spending absurd dollars for negative returns. And that has me in a good mood. Though I guess I'm still ranting here.

Note to D3: You are my new go-to example of how not to do a microtransaction game. A shame, since the underlying gameplay is a blast.