I’m all for making games tough but they went way too far with this. A game should always be something you play in your spare time, it shouldn’t be required that you have to play 24 hours a day 7 days a week to have any chance of getting all the rewards. Our alliance played a hell of a lot more than I normally would and we still only just reached round 7. I think a 25th hour in the day would have had to be added for any chance of completing all 8 rounds!
It seems like they levelled the health perfectly, a small percentage of well organised alliances got 3 covers and the rest got what they deserved (we got 2 btw). I think this is how the game should be run and the best teams and players get what they deserve and anyone whining that its was too hard for them, good and stop feeling entitled.
Run 1, we cleared all 8 early.
Run 2, one of our alliances cleared 7, the other cleared 6 and was 2million away from clearing 7.
Nobody is feeling entitled. You see a goal given for your group of 20, you expect it to be achievable. When only 2 alliances achieved it, it’s out there. That’s not entitlement, that’s reasonable expectation.
I think this is going to be an unpopular opinion but the Second Round of Ultron is something the game as a whole has been missing. An extremely hard high level event that only the best coordinated teams can hope to complete. It also acts as a measuring stick for those trying to get better. Only made Round 6 this time? How will it feel if you make Round 7 next time? We have been asking for end game kind of content and the 4* run of this was as close as we have ever been to that.
Two teams finishing is not what should have happened, more teams would have finished if they had not spread out their best players to try and get a more even distribution of progression awards. Lesson Learned and if this is re-run for a 4* I expect 20 or 30 teams to clear Round 8 because they will be prepared.
I hope all 4* releases are done this way.
why not publish Ultron’s health table before instead catching most alliances off guard? Even worse we took it easy because the first one prevented most of our members from attaining maximum progression and we wanted to give them a chance to earn early.
It was a marathon disguised as a 5K race – Oh well you should have expected a marathon even if we hinted at the opposite.
I think that there are a couple of different arguments being conflated here.
(1) how difficult should end game content be? This is an endless debate with no right answer. Some , like colog, feel that extreme difficulty is good, in that it sets a high bar. Others feel differently. Personally, I think that more difficult != more gindy. I don’t feel that casual games should gate the best rewards behind massive grindwalls. So while i recogmize that difficulty is essential to keep players invested, This is the wrong sort of difficulty.
(2) if events will have very hard to reach goals, that fact should be communicated to the players. With ultron 2, the devs made no express statements about the higher health, and made some comments that arguably suggested the health would be similar to that seen in ultron 1. I think that is the more serious failing of this second event. While there is legitimate ground for debate about how difficult things should be, if would hope that we can also accept that generally speaking that when the devs communicate, their statements should be accurate and comprehensive.
The problem is that being able to beat round 8 isn’t a matter of skill or difficulty, but a matter of having enough time to devote to the game, which seems like an iffy yardstick.
I hope everyone here realizes that 11 votes for clearing round 8 doesn’t mean 11 alliances cleared it. All it means is that 11 people voted for that option - for all we know, could be the same alliance members!
This event was too difficult. I am all for making people work to achieve a goal, but this was demoralizing. By the start/middle of round 7, we already knew we’d never make round 8. This is with a very decent alliance, that communicates well on LINE and whose members cleared Ultron 1 with 2 days to go! While this event should have arguably been tougher, I think that going from having 2 days extra, to not even being able to touch round 8 is a wee bit too much scaling.
Why not scale it like the supposed 3* to 4* ratio? ~1.5x stronger? Level 8 at 9mil would still be challenging, but not so impossible.
This is one of those very rare MASSIVE screw ups (yes, D3 makes other mistakes, but let’s face it, we eventually get used to most - they also made a fun game) that in my humble opinion, deserves compensation for all. I don’t mind if everyone, including a 1* roster newb in a 1 person alliance gets the reward - all should be rewarded the black hulkbuster in this case, just to say “sorry, our bad”
this 100%.
each round of ultron’s health should be in the event rules section. that way commanders and players can plan accordingly.
eta: should also include how much each clear of ultron will net for each round, otherwise the health figures mean nothing 
problem is MPQ only seems to have 2 options for difficult, super grindy or super lucky
Fmftint:
How do you feel about the gauntlet? I think it is the best pve recent because it rewards players who have deep rosters and/it are good at using creative team lineups to beat difficult opponents. Its not grindy, and is still challenging. I would like to see better rewards from it, but otherwise it is a model I would like to see used more often. (but enough with the stupid you character x to earn this cover for character s rewards)
It was a trial run, they said it as much, and they would rather launch and work out the bugs then delay, delay, delay. Yes it sucked, Run 1 was plagued with lock outs and Run 2 was scaled too high, trust me, they want you to get at least 1 cover of everything. However I think they covered their rears just incase it was too hard as the cover we couldn’t get is the alliance reward as well as the top 50. I think it should be hard, but lack of communication from Devs about point totals and such was a big issue. I know for our alliance we didn’t push too hard because we feared a repeat of run 1, but when it became obvious it was not going to be like that, we didn’t have enough time to push anymore, not to mention the massive increase from round 6 to 7. I think we could have gotten there had we known this would have been the issue, so I think the event was doable, just no one knew.
We cleared 6 with about an hour left. We had 3 people, myself included, out of state during the event, so that really hurt.
Wow, so many more actually cleared the event than I was anticipating. Congrats!
We got to round 7, saw that it was mathematically impossible to clear given time left and member participation and went full casual.
Our Alliance was about half way through Round 6. Unfortunately, a number of players were either disheartened or fatigued (like myself) to run the event aggressively like we mostly were during the first time around (they should have put a pause on other PVE events in my opinion). Also we had two people drop from the alliance during the event, one of which I know was for personal reasons, so that made matters worse.
Want an extremely challenging event let all have an actual chance of competing
Progressions are supposed to be reachable.
They dont publish any info, that’s the player’s job kappa
This person gets it. Just because I’ve played 1,0000 straight hours of Ultron does that really make me qualified for 3 Hulkbuster covers?
I wish D3 would do this. With the new type of Ultron event, Alliance information/organization is even more important
to add to this:
on top of it many alliance have tons of fun doing this- we had an alliance mate sharing spreadsheets and planning etc
I’m trying to figure out where people are coming up with the idea that the very first cooperative Alliance event was supposed to be “MPQ End Game”…
Alliance events in most other games are groups winning together stronger members helping the weaker members. Or Alliance vs Alliance matched by alliance strength, etc.
In this particular 2nd run, if you had a weaker member on your team who missed a refresh, you’re whole alliance just lost out on a chance at beating level 8. That’s not really how I see an ideal cooperative alliance event as playing out. I can see that as an End Game play, where you have a perfect game to win it.
Had this been billed as Run 1, every alliance gets to try out this new mode! Then Run 2 be listed as an EXTREME version… at least we would know what we were getting at. Heck, Run 2 could have had 2 modes, Normal and Hard (like simulator) where Normal rewards 2 IMHB covers and Hard rewards 4. At least then you could ask your alliance mates which one they want to go for, play well for 2 or push near perfect for 4. I know which we would have picked.
Just submitted my ticket citing getting to round 8 as impossible and asking for compensation
I agree so, so much. To that effect, they designed the Boss Fight to return only a subset of points if your team wiped. So, why was it designed to be a grind-fest in addition? There was a mechanism in place to measure skill/ingenuity/Roster utility. If it was the Boss Fight too easy, then it could have made more difficult/interesting as the Rounds progressed. I think this event could have been much better if the Boss Fight was a bigger risk/reward with 12-24 hr. refreshes.