Helping our EU' friends with the end times

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

I mean the end times of the events, not that the end of the world is upon us. I don’t recall death brackets being one of the four horsemen.

So, I was thinking about the issue EU players have trying to play this game. The end times are quite unfair to them. In PVP at least there is an option - get enough points that they should get a reward and then shield up, but in PvE, you must play during the last two hours or you’re out of contention. This actually benefits me right now, since in live in EST, the One True Time Zone ™.

So I started thinking about how I’d design the system. I’d want a few things - 1) Some rubberbanding in needed, or leaders will be uncatchable and people out of contention won’t even try 2) some stack depletion is needed, or we just grind like mad 3) But I want to try to be fair(er) to Euro players.

And I realized the core problem is this: Rubberbanding is constantly checked - live, up to the minute - against the current global leader. I think it would help to actually not make this a ‘live’ check, but to fix the rubberbanding multiplier and only update it periodically. In addition, at the time when this RB multiplier is set, everyone’s stacks refresh, to full, instantly.

I’m going to assume 12 hour refreshes, but this number could be easily tweaked. So the idea would be:

  1. Event comes out, say at noon Friday EST. There is no global leader at this point. the RBM (rubber banding multiplier) is set to 1.0. Everyone’s RBM will be 1.0 for the duration of the 12 hour period. When you do the nodes during this 12 hour period does not matter at all.
  2. 12 hour later, at midnight (late Friday/early Sat AM), two things happen - first everyone’s stacks immediately refresh to full. Second, the global points leaders score is checked, noted - and set aside. Rubberbanding will still be in effect for the next 12 hour reset period, but to set your personal RCM, you’ll always be checked against the ‘set aside’ global points leaders value, as it was at the beginning of this refresh. Not against the live value if someone passed them, which will only be used for the next refresh period.
  3. Keep doing #2 until the sub ends.

How does this help Euro players? To be in contention now, you just need to be able to play during the last 12 hours of the event, without an unfair advantage given for playing as close as possible to the end of the event.

Won’t everyone then just need to grind the nodes to 1 every 12 hours? i expect this to be much the same as today - personal scaling should handle this for the most part, and the approach of playing lightly and then do a full clear during the last few hours (now last 12 hours) will be similar to now. It may be a bit harder for NA players, since they can’t just automatically beat EU players by virtue of being in NA.

I also don’t expect this is too much work to code - another plus for D3.

Thoughts? At first I really liked the current refresh approach that was just rolled out, but I can quickly see it becoming "hit each/essential nodes once every 2.5 hours for maximum points’, as others are pointing out. I’m sure the rigid refresh schedule may be an issue for some, but I think fixing the RBM during a given refresh will address a lot of the issues that can come out of it.

I’d like some feedback, please.

2

The solution to PVE end times should be even easier than PVP matchups. Have a choice of brackets that end at different times. We all get bracketed anyways so why not be able to pick a bracket that ends at a sane time and compete against only people who agree on that timing. Have players choose a node (with staggered start times as well) that is clearly labeled with an end time and lock them into a corresponding bracket. I understand that rubberbanding is based off global leaders so that may need to be changed to Timezone leaders so everyone has equivalent rubberbanding effects and simmilar chances at progression rewards.

This may even open up the meta for people in the One True Time Zone ™ to intentionally choose a 5 am finish hoping for an easier bracket.

PVP would have many problems with a system like this and would nearly require dividing the global playerbase into chunks that determine end times, brackets and matchmaking/mmr.

Moral of the story, giving the players some choice and control over their own gaming experience would be awesome

3

this may work - but this is serious work, and likely has some network implications. IceIX noted the sharding started as a method to load-balance their servers in the backend. I’m not sure how, or if, this would affect that. You note the global leader issue, you could perhaps split that into regional leaders. What happens in one regional leader is well ahead of the others? That region would all get higher points due to RB’ing and now it’s affecting the quantity of prog rewards given.

In short, I’m fine with your idea in principal, but it appears it would require significant work and thought on the part of D3 - enough so that I see it as a barrier to implementation.

4

This cannot work.
The reason this system (hypothesis) is not already in place is because you would see people obtaining rewards “first”. If Euro end times are at 6 p.m. GMT and NA end times at 6 p.m. EST than the Euro base has a “6 hour head start on the rewards”. Of course the whole system could be staggered to “release all rewards for all players” simultaneously, meaning Euro players would have to wait for the NA tourneys to end before receiving benefits.

The above (mine) states as follows:

  • If the Euro players do not receive their rewards until after all tourneys close, than, they cannot proceed to commencing the next tournament, which usually starts immediately after the one ends. Hence they lose time. So, to offest this, the start times of the next tournament needs to be offset to allow said rewards be used by said winners. By offsetting the next start time, you are constantly in a cycle where for periods of 12/24 hours, no new tournaments are beginning and everyone is waiting after the NA tournaments to end in order to reap benefits.

  • So again, you are placing the Euro players at the mercy of waiting for the NA players.

  • D3 would never implement this, because there always needs to be something going on. This is a lot more overhead than you would expect to handle this.

  • Other online games handle this by separating game populations by server. Think MMO rpgs that have different servers for different player bases and regions. This again cannot work as the playerbase (in size) is what makes the game interesting. Opening up a bracket is like a box of chocolate (thanks Forrest).

  • Cross server / time zones would become even more difficult. There is no one size fits all solution for this. Already offsetting the end times to be as favorable to one as to another is a step in the right direction, and one that could go even further, easily.

  • Our player base is set on 2 things. 1.) Mobile (See tablets, phones,etc.) and 2.) Steam players. The common denominator for both these platforms is geogrpahic area. Where, we all have IP addresses and internet providers/wireles providers. Granted, my internet is behind a proxy and does not disclose my proper geographic area, but that is my issue and would only affect an infinitely small percentage of the player base.

  • Since "sharding is already nudging people in the right direction, and I know that D3 has our information: platform, IP address, etc. This can be coded in such a way to nudge East Coast players into brackets together, and Euro players into brackets together. Would this be perfect, no? Would it help, to a certain degree. It would suck in that you would probably see “more” of the same players more often, but they can cut down the brackets to 500 / 1000 pools. Balancing this out would benefit everyone except the “3 cases of red bull (Jolt in my day) and a whole lot of time, to grind everything all the time”. The supergrinders - be them Euro, Asia, America (not to leave out our central, south friends) will always be on top, but everyone would have a fairer shot at not being bracketed out at the end…

5

Thanks for the comments on the other 2nd idea - I still like the ‘fixed refresh times’ idea, but I’m sure there are holes i’m overlooking. Do you see any?

The potential downside to sharding people by region is that in general it could work, but with technology you can often fool it. I have a VPN service setup - currently it is set to New York, so I can watch US media. But I know I can VPN my traffic through other locations, such as London etc.

Being the only person in EST with a shard full of GMT people would be amazing. For me.

6

I like this idea. In fact I like it so much I suggested it a month ago icon_e_smile.gif
https://forums.505go.com/discussion/6783