Stating something’s “boring” doesn’t identify anything specific to address.
What would be “exciting”, specifically?
If you can’t identify any specific issues, that’s not unusual. Your opinion isn’t any less legitimate even if you can’t put words to what you’re thinking. Your opinion is legitimate, you expressed your opinion, and your feedback is useful.
Yet the developers really can’t determine a course of specific action based on nonspecific criticisms. Just saying.
Based on? Let’s say you say something’s great. People want to go along with that. Nobody wants to be negative. Or maybe you liked one aspect of the event and someone else liked another. Unlike with criticisms, people often like praise. But as with criticisms, praise that is nonspecific doesn’t provide so much a course of direction. Who had that consensus, specifically? Why? For the reasons you stated? Was there a discussion, did everyone agree? Or was it just a couple comments from a couple people? What about their experience specifically was positive, what would they change, what would they not change and why? How can the event be made even better based on that specific positive feedback? That sort of thing.
At any rate - as much as I liked certain aspects of the event - no event timers, progression based only - I do have some criticisms (apart from the identified communications issue).
==Broll wrote much I agree with. A few additional comments:
- A lot of players in this thread are criticizing in-game chat. Probably there’s another thread specifically about in-game chat and its lack of features somewhere else - or perhaps there should be. But considering I’ve just commented about nonspecific criticisms, I won’t leve it at a nonspecific criticism “chat needs improvement”.
So - remembering that other players will have other issues that what I identify here -
A) Chat log doesn’t keep much history. A commander makes an important announcement, it gets pushed down by other alliance members asking questions or making requests for specific team-ups, or such things.
B) Chat log isn’t differentiated. If someone thinks their cat looks cute today, if someone makes a team-up request, if there’s an important announcement, it all goes in the pile.
I suggest as a fix to this having different tabs in alliance chat - one for posts that may only be created or edited by alliance commanders (for announcements or instructions that don’t need to be checked all the time), one for general chat (my cat looks so cute today / I would like XYZ specific teamups), one for specific events (what slice players are starting, etc.).
Also keeping more chat history, and allowing alliance commanders to delete past posts as chat just needs to be cleaned up and some moderation ability would be welcome, I think.
2) Reward structure and Deadly nodes, I really don’t like the implementation. Even supposing communications all went well, as it works, 10 players need to go one Deadly node, 10 another, for maximum alliance rewards. This pretty well means players need well-developed 4* rosters or 5* rosters to perform well. But think on what that means; that means any player that doesn’t have those sorts of rosters or that can otherwise finish Deadly nodes is a detriment to their alliance.
I think the development team may have assumed that’s already the case what with Essential nodes at SCL 8+ providing more points so allowing higher scores, or with timers that mean players with better and more developed rosters being able to consistently have lower clear times so higher points. But this event is on another whole level.
Specifically - suppose a player is in the 2*-3* transition, which happens in well less than a month of regular play. By playing at PvE SCL 7, they earn the essential 3* and essential 4* characters as progression rewards that they can rotate into empty character slots (the 3* very quickly and the 4* about halfway through the event). Given a few good 3*s, knowledge of what’s efficient and what’s not, a player that has researched what to do or figures it out can quickly find placement in a top 100 PvE alliance. This can be confirmed by looking at in-game data and seeing it is literally true that such players can earn full progression, and also by looking at alliance recruitment boards where posters are advertising spots in top 100 PvE alliance requiring only max progression (and some not even that).
That is, even new players can get to a point at which they’re earning somewhat decent rewards fairly quickly.
But with this new alliance event and its requirement that 10 alliance members max one deadly node and 10 alliance members max another deadly node, there’s this big pressure on alliances to kick such players out, as such players are simply totally incapable of handling deadly nodes. It makes me sick to think of playing MPQ, and it makes me think I cannot recommend MPQ to new players.
Before now, it was “Yes, MPQ is a long grind, but if you play smart, you can become a valued member of a good alliance in under a month, and you can transition to a fairly powerful roster in a year to a year and a half”. Now it’s “The developers are going in a direction that’s ever more about new players with undeveloped rosters being deadweight, you’re a second-class citizen and you’re going to feel that way until you put up at least a couple thousand dollars or a year and a half real time”.
I mean all right, the PC interface sucks now, I don’t love it, but it’s a cost-savings measure and I can deal with it. There’s ever increasing numbers of heroes which makes managing rosters for matches more of a pain in the butt (I recommend user-defined preselected teams that a player can press a single button for, including two-player teams for Essential character nodes) but I’m sure quality of life measures may not be the first thing on the development team’s mind. Well all right, I suppose, maybe if they look at things down the line or maybe I can live with it, not super happy, but that’s as it goes.
But this whole “new players equals pleb trash” just sucks the enjoyment out of it. It’s like, all right, I respect and accept the whole F2P structure, there’s this big grindy thing, players retain gains from grinding or they can buy in. But I’ll only participate in F2P if new players that care to do research game mechanics and really look and think about what they’re doing have some real chance for advancement and can be valued members of even a veteran team. Then it’s not about how many hours you put in, or how much money you threw at the screen - it’s really about being smart. And yes all right, you could say the top echelons of play may only be for players that put in a big time and/or money investment, but that’s fine, the lower echelons are still making progress and having fun in their own right.
But now here’s this alliance event, and I’m like yeah that just isn’t working any more, and whoever designed the event in the first place must have figured that was exactly what was going to happen. Maybe they figured “hey, MPQ’s already a grind/pay-in sort of game, what does it really matter if an alliance misses out on top rewards if some of its players just can’t cut it? what does it matter if an alliance needs to boot a couple of its members and take on temporary players to get best rewards, what does it really matter?” Well in the larger scheme of things it doesn’t matter, does it? Because in the end a few legendary tokens or not per player for an event, that isn’t going to change the fact that players are spending hundreds of hours or dollars to grow their roster.
But it does make a difference - a HUGE difference, because it’s exactly those small gains that smart min-maxers that don’t have developed rosters need to look out for. You make events that cut players out of small gains, the smart min-maxers look at the event and realize “hey, this new event isn’t really for me, maybe this game isn’t for me.”
btw - in case devs read this, a note of appreciation for 24-hour based timers (as opposed to the previous shorter timers), championing, progression-based PvE, I liked those changes. Probably others I forget offhand. Also note that I think the idea of having an alliance event that requires coordination is a good thing - it’s just that the chat’s not up to handle it, and the current implementation for prize structure really pushes this “plebs is trash” thing - but both could well be changed. So thanks for your hard work! but please remember the little folk because without them the world would be cold and empty.