DNA I agree with 95 percent of what you say but I haven’t gotten more then 6 hours of sleep in a given night in over 15 years...it’s physically not possible for me to sleep that long.
Everyone says that as you get older you need less sleep, but as I've gotten older I've discovered that I tend to want more sleep. I used to sleep five or six hours a night, but now if I don't get eight I get cranky. Of course I've been on emergency call support for the last twenty two years so I've been woken up in the middle of the night several hundred times: that might be a factor.
As Scar said in Lion King, "Life isn't fair!!" There isn't going to be a solution that meets everyone's needs or expectations.
If you read my post, I would appreciate your perspective on how rethinking the eight hour cycle window for future content would hurt or disadvantage anyone, relative to the current eight hour cycle system they've used on the sales and Modok. Is there a specific advantage to the eight hour cycle that changing it in the future would explicitly hurt the people it currently offers an advantage to?
they could try a 12 hour, but that would give less of a rotation, which is probably why they ran with an 8 hour.
There's a couple of possibilities, and these came up with Modok also. You could do twelve hours, but as you said that reduces the number of cycles. For an event like Modok they could rebalance the rewards to match the fewer cycles.
You could also overlap. You could have each event start every eight hours but last say twelve hours. So you'd still have three cycles per day but you would also have twelve hours to take advantage of each "period."
You could also decide to explicitly not align with the twenty four hour day and do something like every ten hours. The events would drift during the day but they wouldn't consistently line up with the same window every day, which would break the repeated sync. Everyone would be affected similarly over time, and also everyone would have more than eight hours to jump into a cycle.
I've also seen tailgating cooldowns implemented in some games. For example, take Modoks. You could design it so that every time a player did it they would have to wait some minimum cool down time (tail gate) before they could do it again, say two hours, and could only run it a maximum of three times a day. Every player would have the opportunity to get three plays in per day, and they couldn't just run them back to back, but they could in effect design their own schedule.
Perhaps the phrase "oddly unfair" was poorly selected, because a lot of people seem to be keying off the unfair part, but I'm more interested in the oddly part. Eight hours seems to be the worst of all possible alternatives to me, and I know Kabam didn't pick it because of that, but it is an odd coincidence. Almost any other schedule treats all players in all time zones and living on all schedules more evenly. Even *seven hours* as weird as that sounds actually treats players more evenly after enough cycles has past. So does nine, and three, and all the options I list above. They all seem to treat the entire playerbase taken as a whole, across a long enough time period, more evenly.
I also don't understand all the hate. Why are people being such ****? Haha
Having larger windows on events would be a good change. It doesn't hurt anyone. However, it gives people more choice. Why not? There's no need for some of the player's reactions in this thread. Ironically, those insinuating the OP is whining are actually make whining comments themselves over someone's comments about a game. Lol. Now of course I see the irony in my own comment but still....what's the harm in someone vocalising their opinion in what they feel would be a positive change at no detriment to others?
I'll now shut up. Bring on the hate and the trolls.....
So now u want kabam to make the special quests now 12 hours? Which will make u still only being able to do 2 a day? How does this help anyone? Or maybe 24 hours which will hurt everyone. What is it that the OP wants done?
@DNA3000 point eloquently made as always, far too eloquent for most of the readers of this forum, as expected.
For me the time is not too bad, the reset is at 2am in the UK, but I did find Modok’s challenge to be a somewhat punishing schedule and would welcome a 12 hour reset, with events having perhaps more to do, and the same rewards distributed across 2 resets instead of 3.
Younger players or those without any family responsibilities/commitments won’t “get it”, and I don’t expect them to. Empathy is also a skill which is mastered in later life.
Why not cap an event at 3 runs per day, sync it to the calendar timer and do them whenever you want?
No one misses out, No one gets "more" than they should.
The reason Kabam do things like this is so as many people as possible login to the game as many times as possible every day. And to keep us doing that. Thats why we have different calendars, MODOK type events etc as well
What you suggest would remove this for Kabam so why would they change it
That's fundamentally why energy timers exist in all games that have them: to compel you to return to the game often, to try to increase your engagement with the game.
However, the eight hour cycle time seems even run counter to that objective. If you ask someone to log in every two hours to use energy, you assume that the vast majority won't wake up every two hours in the middle of the night to do that. You assume that you will lose that engagement for most players. Eight hour cycles is three events per twenty four hour day and it would be in Kabam's best interests if they got the maximum amount of engagement for those three events, but eight hour cycles cost them some engagement. Implementing a system where more people are able to execute those three events acorss their normal day would increase engagement with the game at no cost to Kabam in any other area of their game design, and hand out no more rewards than the design is intended to hand out to most other players.
Letting people run an event or participate in some function three times in a row without a break would reduce engagement because players could do it all in one session. But that's why I suggested tailgates. If there was a cooldown after participation where you couldn't do them in a row but had to wait some period of time, you could still get players to log into your game in three separate distinct sessions (assuming they aren't playing sixteen hours a day or something).
I also don't understand all the hate. Why are people being such ****? Haha
Having larger windows on events would be a good change. It doesn't hurt anyone. However, it gives people more choice. Why not? There's no need for some of the player's reactions in this thread. Ironically, those insinuating the OP is whining are actually make whining comments themselves over someone's comments about a game. Lol. Now of course I see the irony in my own comment but still....what's the harm in someone vocalising their opinion in what they feel would be a positive change at no detriment to others?
I'll now shut up. Bring on the hate and the trolls.....
So now u want kabam to make the special quests now 12 hours? Which will make u still only being able to do 2 a day? How does this help anyone? Or maybe 24 hours which will hurt everyone. What is it that the OP wants done?
Although that's one possibility, I mentioned specifically that doing so would require rebalancing the event, if it was that kind of event, to compensate for the total rewards possible. That hitch is why I also suggested other alternatives that do not have that problem, like participation caps plus cooldowns.
That would be tricky to make work with things like sales happening now, but I'm less concerned about sales specifically and more concerned with the eight hour cycle choice being applied to other more important things. I'm not asking for the current sales structure itself to be changed, that ship has sailed. I'm asking the devs to consider the eight hour problem before applying it to future events. There's lots of time between now and whenever to consider alternatives.
I find it difficult to believe there's a lot of people who specifically *want* eight hour cycles. It appears from the comments in this thread that most players don't want Kabam shuffling things around just to benefit one or a small minority of people, probably because doing that most likely just shifts the problem to someone else. That's reasonable. And they don't want things to be changed in such a way that reduces the number of opportunities to participate in special events or activities. That's also reasonable. They don't want Kabam's hands tied to only develop for the least common denominator (pet peeve: this should technically be called the greatest common factor, because math) and that's also reasonable. There are many things in this game that some people can participate in and others cannot due to various circumstances. However antagonistically these ideas were expressed, they are all valid concerns.
But I think there are options for Kabam to consider that a) do not reduce the flexibility in designing the events, b) do not shift any burden to other players, c) more evenly treat all players in all time zones and all life circumstances (not perfectly, just better), d) do not reduce rewards or benefit to players in any way, and e) would not be difficult to implement. If it is possible to add some upside to some players while penalizing or disadvantaging no one else, and it doesn't hurt Kabam's own game objectives - in fact it helps them - then I think it is worth considering.
Lol!! Who is actually buying this ****?! 6,000+ units for T4CC shards... thats 21,000 shards for $200!!! Kabam, you have lost your mind!
Somewhat off topic but the first 720 costs 20 units and the 30th costs 600 units. No way is 720 shards worth 600 units, but it might be worth 20 units. Its 2% of a crystal. 20 units for 720 is like 1000 units for a whole crystal. That's not unreasonable. It quickly becomes unreasonable as you escalate up. 720 for 600 units is crazy: that's the equivalent of 30k units for a T4CC. But the offer isn't banana-hat crazy if someone was just trying to buy the last few fragments to complete a crystal for an upgrade, if it wasn't too many of them.
things you can do in 8 hours in MCOC:
1) get a 150 arena match win streak going, scoring 2.4 million - 4.5 million points
2) burn 70 tiles of energy, regenerate 96, burn another 70 after 6 hours
3) burn 10 tiles in AW or AQ
4) troll the message boards
5) run a modok lab
ALL IN THE SAME 8 HOUR SPAN (blows mind)
Sure you're not maximizing every conceivable reward you could be getting if you somehow miss an 8 hour window, but think of all the other things you're missing out on anyway by not being active in that window. Perspective is a good thing...
You seem to have missed the point of the original post. But fortunately, someone at Kabam appears to have been thinking about the problem correctly, whether due to my post or just because the same problem coincidentally occurred to them as well. From that perspective, the discussion in the thread wasn't wasted effort.
things you can do in 8 hours in MCOC:
1) get a 150 arena match win streak going, scoring 2.4 million - 4.5 million points
2) burn 70 tiles of energy, regenerate 96, burn another 70 after 6 hours
3) burn 10 tiles in AW or AQ
4) troll the message boards
5) run a modok lab
ALL IN THE SAME 8 HOUR SPAN (blows mind)
Sure you're not maximizing every conceivable reward you could be getting if you somehow miss an 8 hour window, but think of all the other things you're missing out on anyway by not being active in that window. Perspective is a good thing...
You seem to have missed the point of the original post. But fortunately, someone at Kabam appears to have been thinking about the problem correctly, whether due to my post or just because the same problem coincidentally occurred to them as well. From that perspective, the discussion in the thread wasn't wasted effort.
The 8 hours worked great for my schedule PST. Was super easy to bang out all 3. One first thing in the morning. One like 10 hours later, and one before bed.
They should just give us two chances per difficulty daily.
It would just be like the trial of the king except with two chances daily. This would help a lot of people and they wouldnt lose sleep
things you can do in 8 hours in MCOC:
1) get a 150 arena match win streak going, scoring 2.4 million - 4.5 million points
2) burn 70 tiles of energy, regenerate 96, burn another 70 after 6 hours
3) burn 10 tiles in AW or AQ
4) troll the message boards
5) run a modok lab
ALL IN THE SAME 8 HOUR SPAN (blows mind)
Sure you're not maximizing every conceivable reward you could be getting if you somehow miss an 8 hour window, but think of all the other things you're missing out on anyway by not being active in that window. Perspective is a good thing...
You seem to have missed the point of the original post. But fortunately, someone at Kabam appears to have been thinking about the problem correctly, whether due to my post or just because the same problem coincidentally occurred to them as well. From that perspective, the discussion in the thread wasn't wasted effort.
The 8 hours worked great for my schedule PST. Was super easy to bang out all 3. One first thing in the morning. One like 10 hours later, and one before bed.
Statistically speaking, that was probably true for about 7/8ths of the playerbase.
They should just give us two chances per difficulty daily.
It would just be like the trial of the king except with two chances daily. This would help a lot of people and they wouldnt lose sleep
They should just give us two chances per difficulty daily.
It would just be like the trial of the king except with two chances daily. This would help a lot of people and they wouldnt lose sleep
I still don't get the problem. Were you saying that you go to bed exactly when the time ticks over, and you fall asleep instantly and sleep for exactly eight hours? And there's no chance of changing your timetable? And that's why eight hour timers are oddly unfair? Is that what you were saying? Because if that was me, I would just go to bed a little later. Problem solved.
I still don't get the problem. Were you saying that you go to bed exactly when the time ticks over, and you fall asleep instantly and sleep for exactly eight hours? And there's no chance of changing your timetable? And that's why eight hour timers are oddly unfair? Is that what you were saying? Because if that was me, I would just go to bed a little later. Problem solved.
Yes you are correct on everything except for your solution. There's no need to change sleep schedule.
The OP clearly stated that for most the schedule isn't a problem. The OP is claiming that there is a small subset " that will consistently get disadvantaged by events like this". Evidently, there's this desire to make sure that 99% of us get to enjoy the event and not let anyone fall behind.
And then it falls of the rails when he mentioned the word "sleep", repeatedly, as if that would be the only thing that would impact a player's schedule, not to mention that none of us play at exactly 8 hour shifts.
The example that was given were the 12 AM, 8 AM, and 4 PM shifts. During those exact times, I would be either sleeping, driving to work, or driving home. It is currently not recommended to play MCOC while driving. Thus, it looks like I would miss 2 of the 3 shifts, assuming I decide to sleep at 12:30 AM. Otherwise, I miss all. So my situation is actually worse than he described where he stated that 10% or so would miss one of the 3 shifts.
So, my solution would be the following:
For the 4 PM shift, I would play at 5 PM. Problem solved. No need to change my driving schedule.
For the 12 AM shift, I would play at 6 AM. Problem solved. No need to miss any sleep.
For the 8 AM shift, I would play at 12 PM (noon). Problem solved. No need to change my driving schedule.
I miss none, don't miss any sleep, and I get to receive all 3 sets of rewards. This solution would work even if I sleep 10 hours a day because there's a 13 hour gap between 5 PM and 6 AM.
The key to making this work is change the times I play the game.
Comments
Everyone says that as you get older you need less sleep, but as I've gotten older I've discovered that I tend to want more sleep. I used to sleep five or six hours a night, but now if I don't get eight I get cranky. Of course I've been on emergency call support for the last twenty two years so I've been woken up in the middle of the night several hundred times: that might be a factor.
If you read my post, I would appreciate your perspective on how rethinking the eight hour cycle window for future content would hurt or disadvantage anyone, relative to the current eight hour cycle system they've used on the sales and Modok. Is there a specific advantage to the eight hour cycle that changing it in the future would explicitly hurt the people it currently offers an advantage to?
There's a couple of possibilities, and these came up with Modok also. You could do twelve hours, but as you said that reduces the number of cycles. For an event like Modok they could rebalance the rewards to match the fewer cycles.
You could also overlap. You could have each event start every eight hours but last say twelve hours. So you'd still have three cycles per day but you would also have twelve hours to take advantage of each "period."
You could also decide to explicitly not align with the twenty four hour day and do something like every ten hours. The events would drift during the day but they wouldn't consistently line up with the same window every day, which would break the repeated sync. Everyone would be affected similarly over time, and also everyone would have more than eight hours to jump into a cycle.
I've also seen tailgating cooldowns implemented in some games. For example, take Modoks. You could design it so that every time a player did it they would have to wait some minimum cool down time (tail gate) before they could do it again, say two hours, and could only run it a maximum of three times a day. Every player would have the opportunity to get three plays in per day, and they couldn't just run them back to back, but they could in effect design their own schedule.
Perhaps the phrase "oddly unfair" was poorly selected, because a lot of people seem to be keying off the unfair part, but I'm more interested in the oddly part. Eight hours seems to be the worst of all possible alternatives to me, and I know Kabam didn't pick it because of that, but it is an odd coincidence. Almost any other schedule treats all players in all time zones and living on all schedules more evenly. Even *seven hours* as weird as that sounds actually treats players more evenly after enough cycles has past. So does nine, and three, and all the options I list above. They all seem to treat the entire playerbase taken as a whole, across a long enough time period, more evenly.
So now u want kabam to make the special quests now 12 hours? Which will make u still only being able to do 2 a day? How does this help anyone? Or maybe 24 hours which will hurt everyone. What is it that the OP wants done?
For me the time is not too bad, the reset is at 2am in the UK, but I did find Modok’s challenge to be a somewhat punishing schedule and would welcome a 12 hour reset, with events having perhaps more to do, and the same rewards distributed across 2 resets instead of 3.
Younger players or those without any family responsibilities/commitments won’t “get it”, and I don’t expect them to. Empathy is also a skill which is mastered in later life.
No one misses out, No one gets "more" than they should.
That's fundamentally why energy timers exist in all games that have them: to compel you to return to the game often, to try to increase your engagement with the game.
However, the eight hour cycle time seems even run counter to that objective. If you ask someone to log in every two hours to use energy, you assume that the vast majority won't wake up every two hours in the middle of the night to do that. You assume that you will lose that engagement for most players. Eight hour cycles is three events per twenty four hour day and it would be in Kabam's best interests if they got the maximum amount of engagement for those three events, but eight hour cycles cost them some engagement. Implementing a system where more people are able to execute those three events acorss their normal day would increase engagement with the game at no cost to Kabam in any other area of their game design, and hand out no more rewards than the design is intended to hand out to most other players.
Letting people run an event or participate in some function three times in a row without a break would reduce engagement because players could do it all in one session. But that's why I suggested tailgates. If there was a cooldown after participation where you couldn't do them in a row but had to wait some period of time, you could still get players to log into your game in three separate distinct sessions (assuming they aren't playing sixteen hours a day or something).
Although that's one possibility, I mentioned specifically that doing so would require rebalancing the event, if it was that kind of event, to compensate for the total rewards possible. That hitch is why I also suggested other alternatives that do not have that problem, like participation caps plus cooldowns.
That would be tricky to make work with things like sales happening now, but I'm less concerned about sales specifically and more concerned with the eight hour cycle choice being applied to other more important things. I'm not asking for the current sales structure itself to be changed, that ship has sailed. I'm asking the devs to consider the eight hour problem before applying it to future events. There's lots of time between now and whenever to consider alternatives.
I find it difficult to believe there's a lot of people who specifically *want* eight hour cycles. It appears from the comments in this thread that most players don't want Kabam shuffling things around just to benefit one or a small minority of people, probably because doing that most likely just shifts the problem to someone else. That's reasonable. And they don't want things to be changed in such a way that reduces the number of opportunities to participate in special events or activities. That's also reasonable. They don't want Kabam's hands tied to only develop for the least common denominator (pet peeve: this should technically be called the greatest common factor, because math) and that's also reasonable. There are many things in this game that some people can participate in and others cannot due to various circumstances. However antagonistically these ideas were expressed, they are all valid concerns.
But I think there are options for Kabam to consider that a) do not reduce the flexibility in designing the events, b) do not shift any burden to other players, c) more evenly treat all players in all time zones and all life circumstances (not perfectly, just better), d) do not reduce rewards or benefit to players in any way, and e) would not be difficult to implement. If it is possible to add some upside to some players while penalizing or disadvantaging no one else, and it doesn't hurt Kabam's own game objectives - in fact it helps them - then I think it is worth considering.
No one I'm aware of is fighting over the eight hour sales reset with anyone else.
Somewhat off topic but the first 720 costs 20 units and the 30th costs 600 units. No way is 720 shards worth 600 units, but it might be worth 20 units. Its 2% of a crystal. 20 units for 720 is like 1000 units for a whole crystal. That's not unreasonable. It quickly becomes unreasonable as you escalate up. 720 for 600 units is crazy: that's the equivalent of 30k units for a T4CC. But the offer isn't banana-hat crazy if someone was just trying to buy the last few fragments to complete a crystal for an upgrade, if it wasn't too many of them.
You seem to have missed the point of the original post. But fortunately, someone at Kabam appears to have been thinking about the problem correctly, whether due to my post or just because the same problem coincidentally occurred to them as well. From that perspective, the discussion in the thread wasn't wasted effort.
The 8 hours worked great for my schedule PST. Was super easy to bang out all 3. One first thing in the morning. One like 10 hours later, and one before bed.
It would just be like the trial of the king except with two chances daily. This would help a lot of people and they wouldnt lose sleep
Statistically speaking, that was probably true for about 7/8ths of the playerbase.
Err...
Are you frustrated?
You don't have to get every reward, every champ, every milestone.
It's a game. Play it and have fun.
Yes you are correct on everything except for your solution. There's no need to change sleep schedule.
The OP clearly stated that for most the schedule isn't a problem. The OP is claiming that there is a small subset " that will consistently get disadvantaged by events like this". Evidently, there's this desire to make sure that 99% of us get to enjoy the event and not let anyone fall behind.
And then it falls of the rails when he mentioned the word "sleep", repeatedly, as if that would be the only thing that would impact a player's schedule, not to mention that none of us play at exactly 8 hour shifts.
The example that was given were the 12 AM, 8 AM, and 4 PM shifts. During those exact times, I would be either sleeping, driving to work, or driving home. It is currently not recommended to play MCOC while driving. Thus, it looks like I would miss 2 of the 3 shifts, assuming I decide to sleep at 12:30 AM. Otherwise, I miss all. So my situation is actually worse than he described where he stated that 10% or so would miss one of the 3 shifts.
So, my solution would be the following:
For the 4 PM shift, I would play at 5 PM. Problem solved. No need to change my driving schedule.
For the 12 AM shift, I would play at 6 AM. Problem solved. No need to miss any sleep.
For the 8 AM shift, I would play at 12 PM (noon). Problem solved. No need to change my driving schedule.
I miss none, don't miss any sleep, and I get to receive all 3 sets of rewards. This solution would work even if I sleep 10 hours a day because there's a 13 hour gap between 5 PM and 6 AM.
The key to making this work is change the times I play the game.