What is wrong with these people? This is so amateur.

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

LESS than 2 hours left in the biggest event they have EVER done…and the game will not load for me. Again. For the umpteenth time in a few days. I am guessing that the servers are down, again?

The last time that I felt the need to speak up and call the business practices and skill levels of this company into question was when everyone Taco Tokens disappeared. I straight up said that all of the recent blunders seemed very, VERY fresh out of college and KickStarter for an indie app and not the type of service that you’d invest countless hours and even money into.

My frustrations were met with things like “you don’t know how hard it is to program video games” “just calculate all of the pull rates yourself and stop whining,” “gamers are so entitled, nowadays,” and even a moderator said “I’m sorry, but I really have no idea what you have to complain about” and of course, numerous down votes.

So again, I ask you all…what excuses / reasonings can be used that NONE of this is their fault, at this point?

2

I don’t think the debate has been about whether it’s their fault or not. Clearly, if there is an issue with the game, it is someone’s fault, whether by oversight, over/underevaluation, lack of foresight, lack of communication, whatever. What I’m more concerned with, and what I believe most people should be, is what is being done.

Here’s the reason I don’t freak out: I can see things from other people’s perspectives. Not in an omniscience way, although that’d be cool, too. I work as a customer service rep in a retail store. I have many duties, but let’s focus on one: handling inbound calls. When we get calls, we have to determine which department gets the call. Frequently, after transferring the call, it bounces back to us. Now, I cannot begin to tell you how frustrating this is, inasmuch as the constant back and forth of calls detracts from the real work we have to get done. It’s easy to imagine the person in that department is jacking off, or playing with his phone, or turning the ringer off as he lays his feet on his desk and eats his way through a Subway sandwich. But the fact of the matter is usually that he is also overworked, on the phone already, talking with a customer in the aisles, or handling some other issue.

So when people say you don’t know how hard it is to code a game properly, they ain’t wrong. Most of us don’t know that stuff, or the specific problems that can arise from it. I’m reminded of a Dilbert comic in which Dilbert’s boss comes to him with a list of tasks that have a timetable. He prefaces this by saying that, logically, anything he doesn’t understand must be easy to do, and immediate commands him to create something vastly complicated in 6 minutes.

Just give it time. They will fix the issues. And if you feel you need some sort of recompense, you aren’t alone. Send them a message asking for some sort of payback. Just try not to insult them, because it makes it sound like you could do a better job, and unless you know coding, you probably couldn’t.

3

What Werebison said. Also, D3 has always been very good about compensating when they goof.

4

The game is free to play. By definition it should be amateur?

5

F2P means amateur?

Somebody let Gameloft know.

6

I get the frustration about not being able to play especially when I was working on collection the quick silver covers but at the same time I have to agree that they do compensate people for there mess ups and I can’t complain to much about that.

7

In some ways, it’s actually the opposite of amateur.

  1. They created a game and an event.
  2. They anticipated increased traffic for that event.
  3. The game and event are more popular than their highest estimates.
  4. The amount of traffic is more than the servers could handle.
  5. Lots of people who are trying to get into said popular game/event are locked out.

So if anything, none of us can fix this. If most of us were in their position, the game wouldn’t be popular, so we wouldn’t have to worry about too much traffic crashing the servers.

I think it’s asking a bit much to say, “You should have been able to predict exactly how much traffic this would have drummed up.” They said they anticipated more activity, but clearly the actual exceeded even their largest expectations.

I think it was caused by a number of factors:
A. More players being active (some new, some casuals playing more, some retired coming back)
B. Every trying to load the game/play at exactly the same time (part of the problem that time slices originally fixed)
C. People pinging the server more often than usual (switching between the two subs, checking the leaderboards)

#A is a good thing. #B is why they made time slices, but you can’t do that in an alliance co-op event. I see no way around this right now. #C is a result of it being popular again. I remember in some of the early seasons there were crashes because everyone kept refreshing the leaderboards over and over at the end of events. Same result.

8

What issue have they ever fixed? I haven’t been around as long as most of you, so I am interested in hearing this, especially since you’ve gotten so many upvotes.

9

As frustrating as all these issues are, in some ways I feel sort of bad for the various D3 employees. What should have been a week of excitement over a great promotion for the biggest Marvel movie of the year, showing great synergy between the various product lines instead ended up being a fiasco of server crashes, missed events, annoyed customers, etc etc. And because of all the frustration, even little things that would normally be overlooked become huge points of contention.

This should have been a week of celebration for them, and it sure did not turn out that way. I think about the disappointment that they have to be feeling internally, it would be like showing up to your birthday party expecting a fun time with your friends and expecting a bunch of presents but instead you show up, someone pants you and everyone spends the next few hours talking about how ugly you are. Ouch.

That is not to excuse the culpability that they have for allowing these issues to occur or the lackluster public response they have had to the situation. Not to mention the damage to their relationship with Marvel, as I really don’t think Marvel is going to be quite to eager to involve MPQ in whatever next promotion they run. I really hope they do a “lessons learned” internal meeting about this and review what they could have done better to avoid this issues as well as to respond to them in a more productive manner when they did occur. That might involve a more robust service architecture, more proactive monitoring of key systems, redundancy in operations to allow for fail-over in the event of an adverse incident, better communication on the forums as well as twitter to keep the community informed as to what is going on, and so on.

I think there is a lot to be learned from this last week of events, and if D3 handles is correctly they can grow stronger as a company because of it. Sometimes the school of hard knocks is the best school you can attend. As annoyed as I am tonight over the fact that I am locked out, missing event closures, and have unanswered support tickets, I still have a lot of empathy for a development team that is likely having one of the worse weeks of their year right now. I think any of us that have worked in any capacity in IT knows that stomach turning sick feeling you get when something breaks and you are responsible for it, and really I would not wish that on anyone. Especially in this visible of a situation.

10

When a Season suddenly ended with a few hours left to go, they compensated people with rewards that they might have been able to achieve if they had been playing during that time. That’s very similar to this situation.

In that instance, I received a 4* Thor cover that I had very little chance of getting otherwise. I didn’t send in a Ticket; it just came to me because I was kinda, sorta, close to that goal.

Don’t expect a 4* cover, but some decent form of compensation will happen. It’s also possible that they will extend the Event like they once did for the Gauntlet. They are actually pretty good when something of this magnitude occurs.

11

I have sympathy for the devs as I’m a human with empathy, but I also find it quite funny. I like to think its karma at work for their greedy antics in the last month.

12

All I can say is that I’ve never played a game with many issues as Marvel Puzzle Quest, and I have been playing games since dial-up was a thing icon_e_biggrin.gif

13

You must have avoided a lot of titles. And/or forgotten some of their issues…

14

They knew for a long time this event was coming, hell they have been planning it for a long time, they had to expect that it would be very popular as well. This was predictable and they weren’t ready for whatever happened.

Just because you can’t code doesn’t mean you don’t have a valid complaint when saying that this event has gone to s**t.

15

I’m in the telecom industry, specifically Datalink, distribution, and a lot of route-switch.

S-HI~T happens. Outages happen. This could have NOTHING to do with their servers at all. But without a circuit TO the Internet, guess what you don’t get to play?

Settle down, boys. Their track record has proven that when outages like this happen, we get freebies for it. How much do you want to bet we get Ultron specific tokens. Or even better, we might get free Wanda Maximoff covers.

Let the frustration ease from you. Find your spirit cave. Bond with your power animal. Breeeeeeeeeeeeeeathe.

16

I should introduce you a little known game developer called Blizzard… icon_razz.gif

17

For people who were on the verge of specific Wanda covers tokens would be a bit insulting. My alliance literally just finished beating round 8, but the prime node never opened. Even worse, I’m sure there are some people who were just about to get their first sw cover tonight. I feel bad for them…

18

I have personally sent in tickets for lots of stuff.

For PvE survival nodes not counting my scores.

For the countdown timer in PvPs not reflecting the correct time, making me end up in a fight, while the actual PvP ended.

For PvEs properly awarding me Progression Rewards, and then taking them back on the very next screen.

For the Stockpiled Taco Token fiasco and it’s continued non-announcement / update / corrections.

And others.

…and the stock answer that I usually receive is “since this crisis has effected so many users, there will be no compensation given out.” And most of the times, I wasn’t even LOOKING to be compensated. I was usually just asking WTF happened. lol

And thats not even counting the things that MOST people complain about on here (the over nerfing of characters or the newly announced “back to back to back from now on PvEs and PvPs that will have all the same essential / featured characters” and all of the upcoming changes to Time Shards, or the ridiculous odds in the 10 / 40 packs or PvE scaling or the pricing of Iso and token packs, etc).

So…yeah, it’s great that they helped out those who were close to reaching something in that one season. Any others?

And again, my original question was how are these recent and repeated issues NOT to be looked at as amateur / why would people not be allowed to wonder what in the world is going on with them? As someone else just said, I have never played a game with so many issues, and even though some of you HAVE, that does not take away the fact that some of us HAVE NOT.

:+p

19

Eh, I’ve lost real money back in my online poker days when the internet went out in the middle of hands/tournaments. No one compensates you. And yes, the amount lost was worth more than these new 3* covers.

20

Yeesh, you have found a lot more errors than I have. I can understand a bit better where you’re coming from. (And personally, I agree, the Taco Token thing is a bit BS, I’ve read a lot about that).

It wouldn’t be a bad idea for them to have a real PR guy on staff, a community liaison of sorts. I’m always for transparency, I like to KNOW things are being done. I just don’t like to demonize, the internet breeds too much of that. I find that most companies really don’t TRY to piss off their consumers. icon_razz.gif

Assuming is always bad, but inevitable. I try not to assume we’ll receive compensation or communication, but I also try not to assume they’re just sitting on their hands. I TRY. XD