Unnecessary timeouts in various fights

BlueTanuki13

Hello. This has happened to me multiple times in the past :
- I start a fight in AQ and make good progress
- I get interrupted by a phone call or I receive a message / email I need to reply urgently
- either I pause the game or is automatically paused by the incoming call
- I finish the call or replying to the message in another app
- I return to the game and face a timeout loss
- this happens even though the fight is "paused" and costs me 50% of my character's health for no reason

This feels like a bug to me. I understand that if my device decides to kill the game there is nothing that can be done. But can you please tell me if the fact that even when the game survives I face a timeout loss is the expected behaviour? The fight was paused I technically did not use my 3 minutes, why can't I just simply continue the fight? It's just a minor annoyance and happens only rarely, but I feel the game should not punish me for something that is beyond my control. I am anyway likely to get hit because of the interruption, that feels like punishment enough.

This also applies to pausing the fight to read the active abilities. Why is the time I spend reading the countless abilities placed on various characters deducted from the actual fight time? Sometimes that pause screen is the best place to find information and there are encounters specific to timed fights. Why are we being punished for trying to read the abilities?

Mirage_Turtle

The timer intentionally keeps running while the game is paused. This is not a bug. While it's not the only reason, this feature will prevent cheeky teammates from starting a fight and pausing, thus locking the whole battlegroup indefinitely.

BlueTanuki13

I don't know... I am aware that is a concern, however I just feel that there are much better ways of solving this potential issue. Officers could have the ability to "unlock" the node if this happens, I don't see the reason for such an aggressive timer. And in general I think this particular concern is a false one - this is a coop mode, we work together for our own good and putting in functionality specifically against people who would choose to sabotage the progress feels silly. If someone does that, that person will be kicked out of the alliance fast enough - I don't see this as a recurring issue. Plus if you want to sabotage progress, you can do this easily by not fighting at all, or fighting and losing.

And even if the timer is the best solution for such potential issues, why don't we at the very least have timers that scale with map difficulty? Can you really expect map 1 fights to take just as long as map 7 fights? Continuing to add new and more difficult maps and increasing the difficulty of encounters while still expecting us to finish fights in the same 3 minutes is ridiculous.

Maybe not a bug per se, but at the very least this is an opportunity for improvement in my opinion. Personally I feel these timers cause more problems than they solve, and the problem they "solve" can be just as easily be solved in a different manner.

Mirage_Turtle

Like I said, it's not the only reason there's a timer, just one of them.

While you're generally correct about map 1 fights not taking as long as map 7 fights, keep in mind that Kabam's likely intention was that your attackers would also scale in power as the maps increase in difficulty.

To some extent, the fight timers do scale with difficulty. On map 7, there are 7 "mini bosses" on the map that have fight timers set to 15 minutes. In the overwhelming majority of cases, these can be cleared in less than 5 minutes. How they landed on 15 minutes is beyond me, but rest assured, the actual mini bosses and the final boss still have 3 minute timers.

They have given at least some indication that they monitor how long these fights take given that they made the timer 8 minutes long in Incursions, which is progress.

I run a combo of map 6 and map 7. Knowing these fights, I don't think the 3 minute timer is ever a problem in AQ, but it is a problem in AW. The 3 minute timer makes many champions outright unusable in competitive AW play as they simply can't produce enough damage in 3 minutes.

But as we said, this isn't a bug. It's intentional. If you'd like to see increased timers in AQ/AW, I'd encourage you to voice your opinion in the General Game Feedback thread in the General Discussions area.

Demonzfyre

BlueTanuki13 said:

Hello. This has happened to me multiple times in the past :
- I start a fight in AQ and make good progress
- I get interrupted by a phone call or I receive a message / email I need to reply urgently
- either I pause the game or is automatically paused by the incoming call
- I finish the call or replying to the message in another app
- I return to the game and face a timeout loss
- this happens even though the fight is "paused" and costs me 50% of my character's health for no reason

This feels like a bug to me. I understand that if my device decides to kill the game there is nothing that can be done. But can you please tell me if the fact that even when the game survives I face a timeout loss is the expected behaviour? The fight was paused I technically did not use my 3 minutes, why can't I just simply continue the fight? It's just a minor annoyance and happens only rarely, but I feel the game should not punish me for something that is beyond my control. I am anyway likely to get hit because of the interruption, that feels like punishment enough.

This also applies to pausing the fight to read the active abilities. Why is the time I spend reading the countless abilities placed on various characters deducted from the actual fight time? Sometimes that pause screen is the best place to find information and there are encounters specific to timed fights. Why are we being punished for trying to read the abilities?

Maybe call them back after the fight is over?