I have more and more problems justifying the timeslots in PVE. None of them are ideal for where I live. And what works today, might not work tomorrow or the day after due to RL events (family, work, sickness, …).
Here are some ideas to fix PVE worldwide. Please add more if you come up with something!
Improve PVE to be more enjoyable worldwide, not just D3 timeslots
Increase the number of timeslots to 12 have a lot more choice
Make PVE a 24 hour thing per sub. No more grinding. Placement is based on speed from your individual start to finish. Hit each node x times till it reaches 0 and stays 0 till end of sub.
Let players change the shard per sub instead of event. This won’t solve all problems, but could help already
Remove placement all together and just give better rewards for predefined points
I chose 12 time slots not because I think it’s the best way forward but I think it’s a realistic change that might actually stand a chance at being implemented. If I could ask for anything it would be to just have pve be a timed 24 hr thing where fastest player through N clears gets 1st place.
I would rather play without worrying about either timing or speed. That means either progression only or a system of bonus points. This would entail giving bonus points for things like using characters of a particular affiliation, amount of health your team loses, making match fives and above, etc.
On the speed suggestion, it’d be good if it just counted your time in the 7 clears, so that people could fit in a few games here and there when they had a spare five mins.
The match-3 gameplay is ideal for that style of play and it is slightly odd that optimal play is so different from that, particularly since there would be more chances for them to sell us stuff if we were logging in more often during the day.