Everything wrong with the events in one picture

Magic: The Gathering - Puzzle Quest MtGPQ General Discussion
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As you can see, I’m an avid player, once invested in a game I play like crazy. Now for my little story, I woke up in the middle of the night at 5:00 AM, the nodes refresh at 4:00 AM here, as an EST player, and despite my better judgment, I decided to go play my last nodes because I had a perfect score until then. I managed, against all odds, to score perfect for the first time in the new Nodes of Power event. (or affectionately called Confluences of Commanding Knowledge) Unfortunately, I finished 8th, with a rare, some crystals and a pack. For a perfect score. Looking at the top 6, you can notice about 4-5 alleged and known cheaters, finishing all their nodes in about 7 minutes after the last refresh. Yup, it took them only 7 minutes to play 5 games in arguably the hardest event. (it took me 30 nerve cracking minutes for reference)

What does this all means?

Last refresh time: Firstly, dear devs, what is your target audience exactly? the american continent should be your primary market, right? Why do you put us through the impossible decision of deciding between our sleep or having any chances of success in the events? Do you understand that as much as we love your game, our health is more important, right? You can put other events during the week with different last node refreshing time for European or Asian players. Otherwise it’s absolutely useless for anyone not in a privileged timezone to get their due rewards.

Cheaters in events: Secondly, you did a good job (with our help) at purging the Quick Battle events, unfortunately they are still present in the events, where it matters the most, since exclusive rewards are awarded there. So, even if the last node refresh happened at a reasonable time for me, I still wouldn’t have gotten my Mythic, because the cheaters would have taking all the top 5 spots.

Crazy secondary objectives: Thirdly, the worst offender is the red node, win in 5 turns or less. It changes the WHOLE game, and is purely luck-based. In a normal game, you can have a slow start, your opponent may be using really diverse strategies to win: tons of removals, bumrush you with hasty creatures, lots of ramps, super controlling, etc. ALL that matters in the end is that you win, while managing to get your objectives. Here, if you’re paired against an opponent packing any removals, you lose. If you weren’t, THEN, your deckbuilding will be taken into account as you’ve invested everything into a 5 turn or less win.

Matchmaking: Fourthly, As you all know, we’re only facing a really really small pool of opponents, and some of them has built their decks in a way to rob you of your objectives, knowing just that. Not only is it boring, it’s unfair too, they don’t have to face themselves, nor us. So, if you are unlucky, and are paired against one of those decks, the odds are stacked against you. If not? Then you can play a normal game.

Meaningless perfect score: Lastly, players asked for events to test they deckbuilding skills, their playing skills, where speed would not be a factor (compared to the Quick Battle event), thus the limited amount of games. The last refresh is the most important node, and all that it matters. Why not say that it’s a QB race where players only play 5 games? If you played perfectly, you should be rewarded with the best reward, it’s only logical.

Do you see a pattern between all these issues? The players want to be in control. If they succeed, it’s thanks to their abilities, if they lose it’s because of their mistakes, not because of luck or something totally outside of their control. We play this game to test our skills, not pull the lever on a slot machine.

Your luck-based and insane secondary objectives did nothing against ties, you’ll still have many people at the top. We do evolve, adapt, and learn as players. You’re only alienating your player base instead. And I mentioned it before, WHY did you merge all the platinum brackets into one? You’ve created the problem yourself, and refuse to apply the easiest band-aid fix. Create more Platinum brackets, proportionally with the amount of Platinum players. (I mentioned Platinum, because it’s the top end, every players will eventually end up here, so once we’re there we’re stuck there) We finished at, I think, 9 players with perfect scores, despite the cheaters, with more brackets, the legitimate players could at least have a chance at the maximum rewards. Also why top 5? Why not top 10 like in QB? There’s more and more Platinum players but less rewards. There’s more and more events, but less chance at winning them.

I don’t care if you’re showing in front of me all the cool cars that I won’t have. I just want one that I can have.

Make it fun again for us please, GIVE US BACK THE POWER.

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They should stop rewarding mythics and/or packs and give crystals. There is nothing wrong in using that crystal to buy packs.
That was everyone get the same rank, same reward and cheating is made pointless. No more ties and no more unreasonable objectives that add to frustration instead of being fun
As it is, cheaters are getting the best out of the game for free. Cards exclusive events are bad. Your money in this does not get you anything good except low quality cards in vault. For best stuff, cheat or be in top 10.
It wont be long before top 20 gets hard due to cheaters in QB.
For events I only play to get my gold.

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Crazy secondary objectives: Thirdly, the worst offender is the red node, win in 5 turns or less. It changes the WHOLE game, and is purely luck-based. In a normal game, you can have a slow start, your opponent may be using really diverse strategies to win: tons of removals, bumrush you with hasty creatures, lots of ramps, super controlling, etc. ALL that matters in the end is that you win, while managing to get your objectives. Here, if you’re paired against an opponent packing any removals, you lose. If you weren’t, THEN, your deckbuilding will be taken into account as you’ve invested everything into a 5 turn or less win.
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Actually I think the take 10 or less damage is worse. Two out three times I lost that to turn one hasty creatures one Olivia and the other an Abbot with a pig. Theoretically there are things to stop that if you get lucky on your own turn one but it’s very much up to chance. Even worse is direct damage if you face red, nearly impossible to stop.

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Hi DuskPaladin,

I agree on most of what you wrote except:

“Last refresh time: Firstly, dear devs, what is your target audience exactly? the american continent should be your primary market, right? Why do you put us through the impossible decision of deciding between our sleep or having any chances of success in the events? Do you understand that as much as we love your game, our health is more important, right? You can put other events during the week with different last node refreshing time for European or Asian players. Otherwise it’s absolutely useless for anyone not in a privileged timezone to get their due rewards.”

How do you know that America is their main market or why do you think it should be?

And why should only other events have rotating finishing times and not all? In your post it sounds like you want NOD fitting your personal time schedule.

Maybe I understand you wrong, but I’m confused about the statement of that part from your post.

Regards!

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I’m loving the 8pm finish times (wooh Australia!), but I do think that rotating the end times would be fairer for everyone. However, I’d disagree with changing the times depending on what event it is. E.g. if someone is best at NoP but terrible at TiTS then compared to another player they could get doubly impeded if NoP is at a bad time but TiTS ends at a good time for them.

Instead I’d support events on one week finishing at, say, 8pm GMT, then the next week finishing at 4am and so on. That way everyone gets an equal crack at all the events.

Re: the Americas being the primary market, I don’t think any of us have enough data to say for certain what their main market should be (or is). For example, Blizzard is US based but I think South Korea accounted for nearly 50% of all StarCraft sales worldwide.

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Yo MADAFAKA!

Are you friends with BOTOFAKA that I’m seeing a lot in QBs these days? Crystal-only rewards would be terrible news for us, as we found, the odds of getting mythics from packs are incredibly low, we need those guaranteed mythics/rares.

Hi Nexus13!

That’s true, you’re basically doomed if you’re facing a red deck. Chandra with direct dmg spells and her first ability doesn’t exactly give you any chances at achieving the 10 dmg or less objective. You are also using a blue deck, built to control, so most likely that you won’t be able to kill her in time. And yea, how many people had lost the objective in one unfortunate turn from a wild Olivia, who conveniently deals 11 hasty dmg, please raise your hand? raises mine But once again, how do we feel after such matches? We only feel robbed, not like “wow, such a great match, too bad I couldn’t prevail, but my opponent’s deck sure was cool!”

Hey Angelforge!

You’re right, I may be hasty and don’t have the stats to prove it, I’m sorry. My reasoning though, is that it’s an North-American company drawing a lot of his fanbase from paper MTG who also has a huge NA pool of players with tons of tournaments and prizes. (yea, it’s a bit unfair for the rest of the world) At its peak, in the advent of the Coalitions, PQMTG had about 50 000 players, compared to about 20 000 players, now, the events at that time had the last nodes refresh at about 8:00 AM EST. Players were used to that, and played at that time. It’s in no way a direct correlation, and alot of other factors could explain the decline. (cheating, bugs, matchmaking, etc.) But, we knew that alot of players still played and stuck to the game with these conditions, while it might have pushed away alot of the asian/european/australian players for instance.

It doesn’t seem wise to, all of sudden, change the last refresh, by 4 hours, from a time that most players showed that they could play. I know a lot of other NA players who are affected by this and are really unhappy about it. I know that I am, and am seeing the futility in all this. It won’t magically bloom an interest for, let’s say, new European players, but rather make them lose the players they had.

@Angelforge, @Magog,

Sorry about the confusion, I didn’t mean to say to just change the other events while leaving NoP the same. Another way to fix time last refresh issue would be, of course, different ending times. Looking at the devs not even bothering to swap the colors for Terror in the Shadows events, I thought that it would be easier to make one event end at a certain time, and another event end at another one. TitS and EC, particularly, are basically the same event, with the same rewards, just different objectives, so why not make them end at different times?

But you’re correct, what I would like too, is a rotation of all the events’ last refreshes. As of now, American players are favored for Quick Battle events, while European players seem to be really favored for all the other events (TitS, EC, NoP, IF). As such, while I liked QB before, I’d really appreciate it not being my only option at great rewards like Mythics and crystals. (for the record, the night before, I woke up at 4:07 AM for EC, managed another perfect score, but I ended up 33th, for being only 7 minutes late…) I’m sure that European and Asian players would really like to have a real shot at QB, too, while other players would appreciate a shot at winning the other events.

The deciding factor should be: do have loads of time to kill/invest (Quick Battles) or do I just want to play as good as possible (the other events)? Give us options, please.

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While I get that 5 incredibly skilled and committed competitors would lose out of a guaranteed mythic, you have to understand, if all ranks with a shared score all got a prize, it would improve the event experience for the majority of people participating. A lot of people can get a great, if not perfect score through their first set of nodes but just quit playing because they hit progression and refuse to participate in the idiotic “first come first serve” tie breaking system. Especially now that cheaters just make a new account after being banned and continue to grief the community.

Ideally I would love to see D3 write an awesome code that makes the game cheat-proof. That way the super competitive guys and gals can still enjoy the events in the same way they always have. But… knowing D3… we can assume they are absolutely incapable of making this happen any time soon. When a game’s ecosystem becomes thrown out of balance, the developers have to adapt. If they don’t, MtGPQ will start to look a lot like ATPQ… extinct.

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Well said DuskPaladin! Much more eloquent than my rambling rage posts of recent weeks. Bravo!

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Remember that magical 8am refresh time you were talking about? Yeah… that’s when those of us in California were dealing with the same issue of it being at 5am. Arguably not much better than the 4am refresh time you’re complaining about now. The times absolutely should rotate maybe on a week by week basis since the events seem to be the same during the week every week so that no matter where you live you have some weeks where you’ve got great refresh times, and some weeks where they’re awful. However, then you have the issue of not really knowing for sure when your next refresh is unless you’re babysitting the game. Honestly, it seems the best solution is to eliminate the ranking entirely and move those rewards into the progression score. Sure it’ll mean maybe a dozen people won’t get a free mythic card, but it’ll be better for the players of the game in general, and will mean that those who do cheat won’t be able to rob those not cheating of potential rewards.

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Or, and I realize this is a reach but could tackle two birds with one stone, include more brackets per event per tier with staggered start/end times.

That would give more people the opportunity to place in the top spots and with 2 or even 3 groupings, a chance to pick a more suitable time slot for their location.

Or even three birds, could go back to 24 hours as the burden on the servers would be spread out.

It works for MPQ…

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I find it hard to believe that 30k players left the game because they all were all plat players going for the top 5 and the times changed and forced them to wake up early.

Only a small set of people care about ranking rather than enjoying the game itself.

I think it’s the ranking system itself that turns people off this game for when you have a conpetitive ranking system that generously rewards at the top and gives nothing to the bottom it’s perceived as a hardcore game and not really one suited to a largely casual audience.

Giving out more mythics would only make this game worse considering how purposely unbalanced some mythics are.

I think the handing out of extra crystals or packs work if they give these event packs an even higher chance of a mythic or maybe a normal chance of getting a mythic with the proviso that it’s a non dupe mythic making these packs extra special.

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30k players have left or are not joining the events because the rewards are not like they used to be, and are slowly dwindling. The oath of the gatewatch events were the best when they came out, not because it was any different to the PVE events now but the rewards at the time were unreal, every second match gave you a rare card or pack of cards and in between was crystals for completing secondaries, I would have approx 400 crystals more after each event plus cards, my collection grew quickly during this time and I think that’s what people liked about it more than the challenges and if people are seeing diminishing returns they stop playing, and cheaters filling the top places and get the fewer rewards we have now will leave just the cheaters cheating each other out of the rewards

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I see two simple solutions.

  1. Have three brackets.
    a. American
    b. European.
    c. Asian/Australian

Make the start end times appropriate for each. Also allow a choice of time zones to choose for those that may work nights.

  1. Progression brackets rather than individual ranking. Rewards would be based on score only taking out time problem.
    As example if perfect were 100 points.
    a. 0-10: 1000 runes
    b. 11-20: 1000 runes + basic booster
    c. 21-30: 25 crystals + basic booster
    d. 31-40: 50 crystals + booster
    e. 41-50: 75 crystals + booster
    f. 51-60: 100 crystals + rare
    g. 61-70: 125 crystals + rare
    h. 71-80: 150 crystals + rare
    i. 81-90: 175 crystals + mythic
    j. 91-99: 200 crystals + mythic
    k. 100: 250 crystals + mythic

This is obviously an example and optimistic but it would solve the tie breaker and with the current event being next to impossible to get perfect maybe not unreasonable.