Registered here just to make this post. I think the complaints here need as much weight as they can get. Hopefully the devs will see the writing on the wall. Allow me to preface this with why D3 should care: I represent your average paying customer. I put about $20 into this game. Not a lot, but easily more than I pay for most of the PC titles that I play. If I kept playing, I likely would have paid more in the future.
This game was really fun at first, but it hits a wall. It’s not hard to understand why. Two huge problems:
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The cycle of events tied to new character releases makes you feel obligated to compete hard every day. If you don’t you fall out of the loop. You don’t get that new character, and you’re stunted in the next event. As noted by everyone else already, alliances have only amplified this. Not only do you feel pressured to compete in every event or you’ll be at a disadvantage in the next one, but you have your alliance depending on you for the same reason. It wouldn’t be quite so bad, but you also have to play at certain times of the day, in super-concentrated hardcore bursts. You can’t just pop in and play a round now and then.
For the story events, the way points are funneled in over time and enemies scale to crazy levels even when you’re not playing means you have to play through the thing as soon as you see that it’s started, and check back periodically.
For the PVP events, you have to build up all your points at once in a super-hardcore 2-4 hour sprint and then shield. But you have to do it on the last day of the event, not only because you’ll have to pay for multiple very expensive shields to keep your score otherwise, but also because there aren’t enough players around with decent scores to win points from at a decent pace. And you have to do it before the last 2-4 hours of the event, or you will lose points faster than you can possibly make them. I’ve lost over 100 points in less than 5 minutes on multiple occasions. There desperately needs to be a cap on the speed of point loss in pvp events.
This kind of pressure is not fun.
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This is the absolute worst problem right here. I could probably forgive and put up with the above if not for this:
In order to win large numbers of rounds in concentrated bursts as seems to be required, you absolutely must abuse healing. There are only two characters in the game that offer the healing powers required. So you’re stuck using one of those two characters constantly. Another of your characters is usually forced into use by the event, and this character isn’t even leveled up enough to matter at all unless you’re paying ridiculous amounts of money for covers or you’re a veteran in an event centered on an old 3* character. So by virtue of that character being useless, you absolutely have to use a third character that complements one of the healers, which severely limits your choices.
So you may have a roster of over 30 characters, but you’re going to end up using the same handful in almost every fight, against the same handful of opponent rosters over and over and over and over and over again dozens or hundreds of times until the monotony has your brains bleeding out your ears.
It’s unbelievably stupid. The design of this game is incredibly short-sighted. I’m bothering to make this post, because I think those reasons are very easily identifiable, and should be fix-able. I love Puzzle Quest games and I loved this game for a while, but I’m done now unless there are drastic changes to address these complaints that it seems like a majority of experienced players have.