I just wanna see some results
I don’t remember exactly what I put for everything but essentially I would never recommend the game to anyone especially when they couldn’t even be bothered to give out compensation for the game being down the other day. For the last option I picked too many 4s in packs, I don’t like playing at specific times and my progress doesn’t match my overall time investment.
Edit: Logged back in and they finally gave out compensation for the server outage.
I always want to play for placement, and having to do it at very specific times makes you schedule your life around MPQ, which is impossible sometimes.
In the polls I always suggest that the solution could be a having a timer that starts every time you start a battle, and pauses as soon as you finish it. So you still have the 24h subs, and still have to do battles as quick as possible, but you can play at any time in these 24hs. Whoever finishes all nodes (6 times?) quicker gain most points. Speed will still determine who finishes first, and you can get rid of time slices.
How does progression work under that system? Anyone who gets X% of the #1’s total speed? Anyone who gets Y total clears, regardless of speed? I’m not opposed, entirely, to it, but it’s a complete overhaul of the existing system and would need to be mapped pretty carefully.
Based on the charts @Brigby posted here (https://forums.505go.com/discussion/64725/update-to-progression-rewards-in-story-events-5-18-17) progression could be tied to #of clears without too much difficulty, in theory. Placement for people doing less than 6 clears could get…interesting, but I guess it’s already a crapshoot now.
That said, not being a competitive player, I don’t have a dog in the fight…
That would be one way to do it though one issue for me would be what if your internet stalls or if there’s a problem with the server or the game crashes or reboots. Would the extra amount of time spent on the match count towards your overall time even if it was out of your hands?
All of those things can already impact your play and placement if they happen when trying to do you clears during the pre-determined times.
Battles in MPQ run entirely locally without the need for internet access. You just need to access to report the win/loss and claim the reward(s). So the X number of seconds the battle took will be stored and sent to the server when you regain connection just like your battle result is sent now when you reconnect.
A crash on the other hand is going to cost you a set amount of time (say 2-5 minutes) to prevent players fom deliberately closing the app if they get a bad board/battle.
In the same vein, unfinished battles (ie you only complete 4 of 6 clears on a node) will have a time penalty assigned too (say 5-10 minutes per battle) so players don’t benefit from not doing clears.
To balance out bad boards/crashes the game could allow you to do up to 7 clears per node and take your 6 best times. That way you get 1 throwaway battle in case there is a crash/bad board.
KGB
Honestly, just raise the number of shards from 5 to 12, every 2h a new shard gets available, you can’t tell me that people don’t have the time at least once a day to start in one of the 12 shards (and even if it’s 8pm and you play instead of watching jersey shore, you shouldn’t watch that anyway!)
I could be wrong about the changes they have done in the past and the playercount, but my assumption is that there was a lot of growth in the playerbase earlier on in the game.
IMO there is a lot more potential benefit in changing up scoring systems, timers, rewards when you have a growing playerbase. You can lose some people (maybe) and replace them but hopefully have happier players. Maybe you add more people than you lose if you make the game more convenient to play. Etc.
As it is, the game’s top bracket count (SCL 7-9) has been the same (on average) for the last 4 months (at least), based on reported flips. About 45K players per PVE. Sometimes there are more flips so there are a few thousand more casual players hanging around, I think. So the current game environment is maybe not as likely to be shaken up when the count isn’t growing overall.
Anyway, any big changes in play timing, while being a benefit to many players, runs the risks pointed out by @OJSP of just being a way to give out more a lot more top end rewards, while possibly putting more pressure on current top players by creating more opportunity for other people to be competitive. That could make some people decide to walk when their current effort level no longer benefited them to the same degree. Which could ultimately be a wash in terms of top player engagement but a lot of current top people also spend a lot of money on the game, and keeping them happy is obviously a top priority.
I do wonder if the listed options on the survey are all somewhat-likely to be addressed or if they just want to capture people’s areas of frustration…it would be nice if the things that are listed were all possibilities they might address, which I am not sure is the case.
Would it double the rewards? There are already dozen of brackets spread in the 5 time slices, each giving placement rewards for groups of 1000 players. With more time slices, each slice would have less brackets, and the rewards given would be almost the same, or am I wrong here?
I think he’s referring to the top placement rewards, rather than the non-top placement rewards.
My main thoughts behind the 12 shards were, that it would a) help people find better times to play, b) more people would participate since there would be better chances to actually get rewards and c) it would help close the gap between high tier players and low tier players.
Atm, the strongest players get the best rewards, getting even stronger, endless circle of pain
But the game can’t live from like 150 super players in long terms, the devs have to change the game so new players actually have a chance to get into it. Main problems for this are dilution, which hopefully gets eased by the new feature and the super players who bash you outta live