This is going to be one of those “the good, the bad, and the ugly” things. I want to address three things; the community, the developers, and what we both need to do to improve our relationship.
I’m going to start with us, as a community, because this is going to be a long post and this is what we can directly impact.
The Community (aka the ugly)
First and foremost, when something happens we don’t like, we need to be more constructive. There’s a lot of players here that are extremely smart and regularly put together very thought out, insightful pieces on these forums. We need to get back to that. Think of it in real world terms; when you’re at work and you have some snot nosed brat in your face with a complaint, you’re less likely to really give that guy the benefit of the doubt, right? But when the person is sincere and at least level-headed about it, you’re more likely to go above and beyond for that person, right? There’s plenty of things I think need to be examined in MPQ right now, as a game, but I just don’t see the need to be aggressive about it.
Secondly, we need to stop biting the have that feeds us. If you want someone to hand you something, they should not have to worry about retribution for doing so. Here’s a few examples;
*Forums ask to have insight on characters before they are released so that they can analyze them in hopes that they get fixed pre-release and not post-release. IceIX starts posting spoiler-free versions of upcoming characters for the community to both theorycraft whom it is and theorycraft good pairing. Win-Win, right? Until the first time someone was adjusted pre-release - Professor X comes around and there’s a mini-apocalypse because he was “nerfed before he even got released!!129171!”. Same thing happened to another character (can’t think of who it was off-hand tbh). Do you see the ridiculous amount of irony here?
*Forums complain about the incredible amount of ISO-8 required to make a character playable. Developers chop off quite a large bit of that amount (50k was it?) at the top-end and reduce the curve at the bottom end so it’s easier to reach the middle of the curve but harder to get to the top of the curve, so characters are useable earlier in your investment. Forums throw this back in the developer’s faces by implying that it’s a “cash grab” and an attempt to indirectly increase our node scaling. Maybe that’s a little bit of a stretch, maybe? Since no matter what they did here, it would have that same indirect effect - the other option would have been to tell us to shove off and keep it as is. Can we admit this was probably overzealous?
*Forums complains that it’s always the same old content released time in and time out. DQvMPQ comes out. Huge influx of players. Servers go down. Acceptable out rage, followed by acceptable compensation. Enemy of the State comes out, there’s an issue with one event, that gets fixed within a day (maybe two? pretty sure it was one though). Outrage! Do I know how that particular stage made it past QT? No idea, but I’d be willing to be they tested the node type obsessively and not individual nodes - I have no idea what broke exactly - but it’s clear the node type works and it was just a single clerical error. Compensation was given, people didn’t partially like it from what I remember, but that did indeed pass pretty quietly. Next up was Ultron. I’ll be the first to admit it was a catastrophe. The first run of that event was catastrophic. I was all but locked out entirely until the last day. On top of that, anyone in my boat was also locked out of every other event going on at the time. This is a disasterpiece if I ever saw one. I was frustrated because I came out of my hiatus to hopefully be interested in MPQ again…to this. Man was I aggravated. I piss and moaned on Line. I pissed and moaned to my girlfriend (whom used to play too). I pissed and moaned to myself. I didn’t piss and moan to the developers. I’m not going to piss and moan right out of the gate, because they deserve a chance to fix it before I complain - it’s completely new tech for them - so it’s only fair, in my opinion. It came back up for a little bit, but it went back down again. I was still annoyed, but I still wasn’t going to complain because clearly they were working on it. It took them a long while to actually get it under ropes, but they did. And you know what? That event was a TON of fun while I could play it. I look forward to it running again. I would play it again right now, honestly. I also look forward to the next piece of new content, even if it’s in six months, because DPvMPQ was fun, EotS was fun (and by extension Survival Nodes), and Ultron was a blast (especially the unique-to-MPQ style meta it created). [If you stick with me, I’ll talk about compensation a little bit later, when I talk about the developer’s end of the deal. Spoiler: I don’t think it was handled right.]
My point here is this; they’re listening and they’re trying to do the things we want them to, but we’re sending some seriously mixed signals when we yell at them about one thing and then when they do the other thing we still yell at them. We’re basically an abusive partner, honestly.
Thirdly, and lastly, we need to be more civil to each other (myself included). I know, personally, it’s easy to get annoyed or frustrated, and it’s even enough to type up some snarky response to someone and ‘put them in their place’, but this has got to stop. We need to start doing more things to harvest a community and unity. Demuirge is providing us with a game. We’re the community, so we need to step up and be the community. I’ve brainstormed a few ways to bring some fun and some events to the community, that if things work out how I want to, I can hopefully bring to the community soon. As well, I think we need to give more nods to the developer team from taking time out do to some of these things for us, even if they’re aren’t anything hugely “special” - like that meme thread they did, or the Hero Point contests, or attending cons - because that’s honestly special in itself. Yeah, maybe they aren’t “as good as Marvel Heroes”, but I’ll be damned if I can’t say they’re better than the 80%. Give them credit where credit is due. It’s fine to say ‘hey, look at what these guys are doing, it might make things better here too’, but saying ‘you guys drool, these guys rule’ is a pretty piss poor way to go about things.
The Developers (aka the bad)
Here it is folks. The sequel of the “MPQ White Knight Tells MPQ You’re Doing It Wrong” - “MPQ White Knight Tells MPQ You’re Close, But No Cigar”. This is the part all you hyena are going to enjoy. 
First and foremost, is the compensation thing. I’ve been keeping pretty close tabs on this since my last post about this. You guys have been doing pretty great. I only heard about a handful of token comps and they felt okay to me. Fast forward to Ultron Event. I’m not going to sit here and say those Token 10-packs were bad compensation, specifically related to the server outages, but overall, I feel like you gave a genuine effort, but you missed the mark. Here’s why;
*The 10-pack was a good starter. I feel like that addresses the literal issue of the extended outages, however it was a lot more complicated issue than that. There should have been tiers to the compensation.
a.) Compensation for server outage. Ultron 10-Pack. (Which they did.)
b.) Compensation for first PVP event (assuming they had started the event). Top Prog Cover.
c.) Compensation for the first PvE event (assuming they started it). Top Prog Cover.
d.) Compensation for the Ultron Event. Scarlett Witch Cover. (Which they did.)
e.) Compensation for second PvP event. Bottom 3* Placement Cover.
f.) Compensation for second PvE event. Bottom 3* Placement Cover.
g.) Compensation for Shield Simulator (assuming they had started it). Heroic 10-Pack. Alternatively, they could wait until the end of the season to comp for this and bump your reward tier to the next tier.
I think that covers everything. I’ll say, yes, some of these items are “steep” (like the 2nd PvP/PvE rewards or Shield Sim), but it comes with the territory. There’s a pretty small scope of times that tokens are an okay compensation, and never when it’s on a global scale - why? Because it’s not fair. One guy gets an awesome Hulkbuster cover, but another guy gets a freakin’ Bagman! That’s no good. It’s also not so great for specific occurrences because it’s hard to say your sorry about missing that Hulkbuster with a Yelena cover. That just stinks. I think it’s okay in this case, because it’s kind of a ‘step one’ kind of thing - basically an icing on the cake. I think it’s okay for Shield Sim, mostly because what else do you give?
Like, really, giving the next award up right now is butt, because you’re probably just going to get it anyways and a dupe of something might not be great, unless you’re already at the top of Shield Sim.
Secondly, you guys need to be more transparent. I know we’re rough to communicate with sometimes, but really, it’s a key to releasing some of the stress around here. I’m not just talking about business stuff, but like, real things. Talk about the games you’re playing (like, I know IceIX is playing FFRK right now in his spare time), vent with us about stupid things that crop up in MPQ (like bad pulls or downtime or a bad clear), talk to us about stuff that’s in the gates, or things that you wanted to do and couldn’t (like you did with Deadpool’s event), and probably most importantly; get back to doing QnA videos and do some Reddit-style AMAs. Humanize yourselves.
Lastly, you need a new policy and process for handling character balancing refunds. The stuff we got going on is not working out. We already have to work with Customer Service to get these things rolling, so doing something different where CS is involved shouldn’t be an issue because of that. Here’s what I would suggest;
*For New Characters (characters that have not been out for longer than three months): We should, without a doubt, be able to contact Customer Service and have covers swapped equivalently across colors, however we would like. I understand that right now, that does require someone to sell the entire character, and have Customer Service send them those covers, and that’s not optimal, but that is fine, as long as ISO-8 is refunded as well, and it should be handled within the hour. If a player does not wish to have their covers reorganized, they should be given a full refund of any Hero Points put into the character, as well as a reduced refund (not necessarily Hero Points - perhaps equivalent covers in another character) for any non-purchased covers as compensation.
*For old characters (characters that have been out for longer than six months): I feel like the current model is relatively fair. I think that the amount of ISO/HP refunded could due to be increased about 10%, maybe more, maybe less.
*For everything in between: Case by case basis. Poll the community. Talk to the mods, we have a hidden sub-forum for a reason. Whatever you have to do to get a feel for what we feel is fair.
Coming Together (aka the good)
The good. The good thing is both parties has been in a prime much better than what it is, so I feel like we can work together to achieve a much better community as a whole than what we have, or what we have had.
Forumites: When the developers do something for us, say thank you in some shape or form - even if you don’t agree, say thank you for their time and effort. Try and keep your tinfoil hats to a minimum. D3Publisher’s CEO might be a money grubbing POS and Marvel/Disney might be power hungry leeches, but that doesn’t mean our developers are. When you disagree with something, feel free to express yourself, but please try and be constructive with your statements, and when you make said statements, do try your best to place it into an existing topic, if one exists - it’s very disheartening to vertran and newbie alike to log into a forum and see five negative threads on the front page. We want to garner a positive, welcoming environment.
Developers: Work with us. Give us some time to work out of our bad habits. Keep up the good work - if you guys weren’t doing something right there wouldn’t be so many of us sticking around! Most importantly is just interact with us. We don’t want robots or business stiffs. We want to see some human beings. Convince the tinfoilist that you’re just some average Joes making an awesome game.
