On Retroactive Rewards

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Comments

  • DAZ0273
    DAZ0273 Posts: 9,576 Chairperson of the Boards
    I think they did say rewards will be handled differently.
    They actually did

    They did. Not in the initial post though. It was out of office hours post when a lot of America was asleep and buried as an edit in an existing post instead of a new thread. But they did.
  • TriggerTime
    TriggerTime Posts: 72 Match Maker
    DAZ0273 said:
    I think they did say rewards will be handled differently.
    They actually did

    They did. Not in the initial post though. It was out of office hours post when a lot of America was asleep and buried as an edit in an existing post instead of a new thread. But they did.

    I have no issue about the update being in the same thread, but they should have had that info in the thread from the beginning. If they weren't ready to release the full info, they shouldn't have said anything about it at all.

    Ice even replied to someone about max level champs, saying they still need to be rostered. He didn't say they're going to be handling the retroactive rewards differently this time. As far as I can tell, there were no subsequent replies clarifying this, up until the last minute update. 

    As a personal example, I recently sold all my max 3* champs to fund shards for my 13th Thor cover, which I had been waiting weeks to show up in my store. After the tease announcement,  first I was gutted that I had sold my champs, then Thor actually showed up in the store but I didn't buy any shards because I didn't think I would need to (figured I'd get them from Valkyrie) and ended up blowing my HP on useless Carnage 40 packs. Now that the update's come and gone I have no extra shards/covers, I've wasted my HP and am back to square one. 

    In my opinion, D3 has every right to manage the game and its rewards however they see fit, but I hope they will learn from this experience and give us the complete picture at the outset rather than vague bits of information. 
  • turbomoose
    turbomoose Posts: 764 Critical Contributor
    When I read the original release by Icelx I got the impression that we’d be getting rewards backdated that were not there previously 

    mighty tokens for example, shown as ticked in the level slots but we certainly didn’t get them 

    what probably should have happened is a slow rollout of each star level starting with 2*s 

    it took me a long time to find all the extra characters I received because they all went in together so I had to check each character individually 

    anyway, hope you guys can come up with a suitable solution 

    thanks for listening to our feedback 
  • DAZ0273
    DAZ0273 Posts: 9,576 Chairperson of the Boards
    DAZ0273 said:
    I think they did say rewards will be handled differently.
    They actually did

    They did. Not in the initial post though. It was out of office hours post when a lot of America was asleep and buried as an edit in an existing post instead of a new thread. But they did.

    I have no issue about the update being in the same thread, but they should have had that info in the thread from the beginning. If they weren't ready to release the full info, they shouldn't have said anything about it at all.

    Ice even replied to someone about max level champs, saying they still need to be rostered. He didn't say they're going to be handling the retroactive rewards differently this time. As far as I can tell, there were no subsequent replies clarifying this, up until the last minute update. 

    As a personal example, I recently sold all my max 3* champs to fund shards for my 13th Thor cover, which I had been waiting weeks to show up in my store. After the tease announcement,  first I was gutted that I had sold my champs, then Thor actually showed up in the store but I didn't buy any shards because I didn't think I would need to (figured I'd get them from Valkyrie) and ended up blowing my HP on useless Carnage 40 packs. Now that the update's come and gone I have no extra shards/covers, I've wasted my HP and am back to square one. 

    In my opinion, D3 has every right to manage the game and its rewards however they see fit, but I hope they will learn from this experience and give us the complete picture at the outset rather than vague bits of information. 

    Yes. The information on handling the 4* rewards differently was in the second/amended post which really should have been a headliner thread of its own. I'm not sure exactly what time it was posted but it was early morning in the UK something like 7am so middle of the night for East Coast USA - I was online when I saw Ice's name pop up as having posted. As soon as somebody else posted it was not at all obvious that an important update was made and there was a relative lack of reaction/response from the board - again presumably because of the time.

    The Communication was strange but then we have no idea what instructions IceXI was under and I am sure that in retrospect if they could roll back how this was communicated they would because from a cynical point of view it looks like the timing and vagueness were all designed to bury the bad news.

    I'm going to be optimistic and decide that this was just poorly communicated as to what the real intentions/rewards to be given were and it all just went pear-shaped. The Devs are humans too (allegedly!) and mistakes happen.

    The question as to how "fair" anything is I'll leave to others to debate.
  • TriggerTime
    TriggerTime Posts: 72 Match Maker
    DAZ0273 said:
    ...
    The Communication was strange but then we have no idea what instructions IceXI was under and I am sure that in retrospect if they could roll back how this was communicated they would because from a cynical point of view it looks like the timing and vagueness were all designed to bury the bad news.

    I'm going to be optimistic and decide that this was just poorly communicated as to what the real intentions/rewards to be given were and it all just went pear-shaped. The Devs are humans too (allegedly!) and mistakes happen.

    ...

    Just to be clear; I am in no way implying any of this is Ice's fault or there was any malicious intent on anyone's part. 

    I'm simply saying there's a lesson to be learned from this. 
  • DAZ0273
    DAZ0273 Posts: 9,576 Chairperson of the Boards
    DAZ0273 said:
    ...
    The Communication was strange but then we have no idea what instructions IceXI was under and I am sure that in retrospect if they could roll back how this was communicated they would because from a cynical point of view it looks like the timing and vagueness were all designed to bury the bad news.

    I'm going to be optimistic and decide that this was just poorly communicated as to what the real intentions/rewards to be given were and it all just went pear-shaped. The Devs are humans too (allegedly!) and mistakes happen.

    ...

    Just to be clear; I am in no way implying any of this is Ice's fault or there was any malicious intent on anyone's part. 

    I'm simply saying there's a lesson to be learned from this. 

    Agreed.

    Forums right now be


    But hopefully in a few days it will be


    And then it will be


  • Chitown
    Chitown Posts: 9 Just Dropped In
    I'm in agreement with the majority that the champion reward change to shards was handled poorly.

    I'm adjusting my game rating to 1*.  To reflect my disappointment in the change.
  • ThaRoadWarrior
    ThaRoadWarrior Posts: 9,125 Chairperson of the Boards
    *cross posted from @Daredevil217's why everyone is sad thread, because this seems like the official place to put it*

    I guess I should define my Player Persona so whoever reads this can assign the correct level of weight to it:
    Day: 1406
    Shield Rank: 151
    Monetary Status: 100% F2P for the life of my play
    Alliance Commander in a casual, largely young roster alliance with people who do spend here and there in it
    Overall player category: 5* Transitioner

    Roster state: 
    Everyone above 1* on roster save Beta Ray Bill
    5* Champs: 5 (none meta)
    4* Champs: all but 16
    3*s: I've turned over most of the tier once, no dupes on roster, some of those early flips are getting close to a second round
    2*s: farming since forever, on my second champ bagman
    1*s: just Sp1der-Man at lvl 40/50 for ddq

    I do PVE to progression in SCL 9
    PVP I play to 900 when I can

    Spending habits: spend as I go, cp/lt into latest exclusively

    I've actually come around on shards. I've spent all of 2019 trying to bonus hero my America Chavez from 285->350 so I can finish Jessica Jones, and I finally did that the day this reward overhaul went live. The thing about shards though is that I can now accurately and reliably predict my 4* earn rate: 1/week. My 5* earn rate appears to be 1 every 2 months. So now I can look at my roster, then look at a calendar, and tell you what fraction of my lifespan it's going to take to get one of these characters over. I have little to no agency to speed that up meaningfully short of burning HP in the shard store, but at least I can correctly weigh the time cost of chasing any given character this way. The reason I'm chasing 4* characters at this point is specifically to feed over my classic 5*s that can be fed to completion, in order of how long it will take to get them there. I have to chase 5*s now, because i"m stuck with 5* MMR. The timescale it takes to put together a usable 5* roster after you get that first one is SO long, that you just get desperate for more warm bodies on the bench to alleviate the pain of getting stomped out in vs mode.

    This brings us to the Shardpocalypse:
    I wasn't expecting to earn any shards from my America Chavez towards Jessica Jones, but I did expect to receive the consistent level of retroactive reward that we've been seeing since 5*s were added to champion rewards back in 2017 for any newly assigned feeders. Because why would i not? At that time, I had no 4* characters even close to 280, but this time I had loads over 280 and 5-6 above 300.

    At the 5* tier, I was only "stung" by losing out on the Level 300 Gambit cover, since my Rogue just happens to be at level 306. This wasn't going to make my Gambit usable, he's been sitting at 1/3/2 since he left latest, and now he's 2/3/2 + 100 shards. 3/3/2 wouldn't have turned the knob into making him usable or anything, but losing out on that cover at 300 means it would take me 14 weeks of focused shargeting to get to the next one (if i wanted to do that).  

    Rogue has been in the game since 9/27/2017, and I've never set her as my bonus hero. RNGeezus has just been kind enough to decide she needed to really be on my roster. So it has taken me 2 human years to organically get this character to accidentally be 7 levels higher than she should have been to take advantage of this situation.

    All the other new feeders landed on my 280-299 crew, so I lucked out and got 1 cover + 250 shards like you'd want for quite a few 5*s, which is a great feeling, so thanks for that.

    Where I was most let down was actually in the complete disregard for the additional rewards at the 2 and 3* tier. I can see both sides of the equation here - if you were to flood a bunch of 2-3-4* transitioners with covers for half the next tier up, maybe you'd have a similar but bigger outrage about "Ugh, where will i get the HP???" from them, which could have caused them to leave in droves, or maybe it would have driven some to spend...I couldn't really say. But for me, what i had in my head we were going to see were all the additional Mighty Tokens, and possibly the secondary feeder additions. I was hyped for those tokens because I wanted shard progress on IM40->Hulkbuster->Rescue, who I had at 5/2/6 (6/2/6 now). I was actually excited for the potential Sabretooth cover as well - I have him at 4/3/5 lvl 250, and that last cover would have had him champable which would have been a huge quality of life improvement for me. With the wide gulf between "good," "decent," and "terrible" characters in the 5* tier, not having a functional Kitty or Gladiathor means I really need tools to combat the opponents I'm matched up against with champ Kitty/370 Rockets in pvp, and Sabretooth is arguably the best at it right now even as a baby champ. Sure, I could shard him, and my Patch Wolverine is about to flip, so I'll get back around to that cover before too long, but the point is that we weren't told it wasn't happening and i thought it had a high probability of happening. It would have been better to just say "you will get this, this, and this, but not this" right up front rather than giving out a vague update that made it out to be better than it was.

    And that was just the short term disappointment. The loss of the midrange CP and HP out of the 3* champion rewards during the switch to shards and double feeders seems exactly targeted at players like myself to keep us from treading water F2P. Maybe it is, and maybe that's fine in the end, but it isn't a great feeling on this end of the equation. I play the game in a way that is presented within the game as possible, I don't game the system, I don't cheat, and I resist recruitment drives from people in higher performing alliances partly out of a sense of obligation to the newer players in my alliance who could use the bootstrapping. At any rate, that's the story of why I was disappointed in this "free stuff."
  • CAttitude
    CAttitude Posts: 3 Just Dropped In
    edited December 2019

    The issue is not about shards or communication or fairness. 

    My only question is, “Is MPQ worth it to me?”  At this point, the primary fun of the game is making 5 star characters playable - which is basically when they are championed - and messing around with them.  Even weak 5s, not worth explicit investment, can be made interesting with the right teams.  When too much time passes without this reward, the game’s constant grinds get miserable.  When loot boxes or the wrong color covers or other social engineering schemes obfuscate this goal for too long, and waste my time, I disengage financially initially and then completely.  

    Feeders have been a necessary rebalancing of the game to make me care about getting covers for 4s and 3s with the mainstreaming of 5s.  I, like others, had been annoyed by your slow walking of the rollout of 5 feeders, but still rewarded by each 4 milestone reached for its promise of future 5s.  Clearly, to retroactively turn these past 4 accomplishments into giant mistakes is just one of the significant problems I have with your current approach.

    At the end of the day, I can’t tell if MPQ is more like a fun computer game to look forward to, invest in, and share with friends, or a dirty little habit more akin to smoking to privately get out nervous energy until something better comes along.