Alliance Quest starting time

I wanted to say that the starting time for Alliance Quests at 3 p.m. EST in the USA is a really bad choice. And there is no flexibility, either, as alliances are given exactly 5 days to finish 5 quests... so if you want to finish all 5 you really HAVE to start immediately at this time. There's no wiggle room. And while this may work out great for people living in the USA it's a horrible time for people in some other parts of the world.

I currently run an international alliance on MCOC. We have members from the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, India, Egypt, the UK, Canada and the USA. The start time is brutal, mostly for our players in East Asia. 3 pm EST is equivalent to 3 a.m. in the Philippines, and 2 a.m. in Thailand. Why doesn't Kabam care about these players? How many thousands or hundreds of thousands of players do you have in places like China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Australia? You basically are saying you don't care about them by sticking to this time frame.

Some solutions I've outlined below for your consideration:

Solution 1:
Make the AQ Series last 6 days instead of 5. Give each alliance 5 tokens per series to start AQ with. Upon using one token a quest would start with a full 24 hours to complete it.
Pros: Maximum flexibility. This would be the most advantageous option for alliances as they could pick a time that best suited them.
Cons: It would take an extra 2 days to get results and rewards from each AQ series. It would require some extra coding and design hours to create the "token" system for starting quests.

Solution 2:
Add an extra 5-6 hours to the AQ series, increasing the total time from start to finish from 120 hours to 126 hours.
Pros: This would give alliances a little bit of extra flexibility, while at the same time requiring almost no extra coding hours from your programmers to implement.
Cons: This extra flexibility would not really benefit East Asia much as the time would still be unfavorable. Also there is potential for abuse if an alliance starts a 6th AQ on an easy map and then just leapfrogs to the end so they could get an extra map 1 or map 2 crystal.

Solution 3:
Change the start time from 3 pm EST to 12 pm EST.
Pros: Minimum coding time. Everything would work exactly the same as it does now. But the time would be better. Currently each AQ series starts at 12 pm in California. That's 3 pm in New York, 8 pm in London... that's all good. But then it's 12:30 a.m. in Mumbai, 2 a.m. in Bangkok, and 5 a.m. in Sydney
Change this to 9 am in California and it works out better for everyone. It's still late in Manila but 12 midnight is much more manageable than 3 a.m.
Cons: Still not very good for people in New Zealand or Hawaii. And still suffers from the same inflexibility of the current system, forcing alliances to start at EXACTLY this time or else they miss out on rewards.

I would prefer the first solution myself but any of these 3 solutions would be much better than what we currently have. Your many users in Asia will thank you.

Comments

Ivanka

And if it's not clear why start time matters because everyone has 24 hours to play through... it matters a lot. The initial movement in AQ is important because otherwise you are wasting energy. So it should start at a time when everyone is awake. And... often there is a final push toward completing the quest in the last hour or two... so it's very helpful to have the end time also be when everyone is awake. This goes for Alliance Wars, also, maybe even moreso.

Dexman1349

As someone in the south Pacific, it starts at 7am for me which is great for the initial kick-off, but means I essentially have 16 hours to get it done with no "overnight refresh" unless I wake up early. If I don't finish before going to bed, it won't be done because it ends before I have a chance to play (wake up, shower, breakfast, get kids ready, etc).

I would advocate a hybrid of options 1 and 2. Add another 6 hours to the timer but set the limit to 5 quests.

TeriGaandMeKaddu

Agree with op on the issue. It's a game played worldwide, and you get revenue from all corners of the world. Then why is there this time advantage to few specific regions? Just because working time of few hundred doesn't sync, hundred thousands of gamers should suffer? You should increase your work shifts and put a fair system that would be to keep a dynamic range of start time periodically so it's a level playing field for all.

Ivanka

Dexman1349 wrote: »

As someone in the south Pacific, it starts at 7am for me which is great for the initial kick-off, but means I essentially have 16 hours to get it done with no "overnight refresh" unless I wake up early. If I don't finish before going to bed, it won't be done because it ends before I have a chance to play (wake up, shower, breakfast, get kids ready, etc).

I would advocate a hybrid of options 1 and 2. Add another 6 hours to the timer but set the limit to 5 quests.

I also think a combination of approaches could work. Actually you could combine all of them 1 2 an 3... Move the start time to 3-5 hours earlier... extend the total amount of time you have to finish by 6-8 hours... and limit the total number of quests you can start per series to 5. I think that would solve everything. It would just take a bit of programming work.

Ivanka

Do Kabam execs or content designers ever read these forums or are we just talking to ourselves, other players, and the moderators?

Just curious.. do any Kabam employees aside from moderators ever respond to these posts?

Ivanka

Just wanted to bump this. It's one of the more important suggestions I've made. And re-ask the same question: do any Kabam employees ever read these boards? I've only received responses before when I was asking about rules clarifications, or when I made a post that the moderators didn't like.

If they don't read them, is there a better way to make formal suggestions to Kabam?

phillgreen

I like option one.

Or just allow leaders to start the first quest at a convenient time within a 6hr window, every quest for the week will then start at the same time.

The 6hr window should minimise delays at the end of the week.

Milkthewhales

None of these would be required if they just did 30min timers, oh but wait there bad right lol

Ivanka

Dropfaith wrote: »

9 am actually would hurt the west coast pst. They are at work generally your asking to slow down the Americans to speed up.the Asians.

Right now it starts on my lunch I move go work get off move again shifting the time hurts more players then it helps

If you're going to whine about having to wake up before 9 in the morning imagine how the Asians feel who are being asked to stay up until 3 or 4 a.m. Or the Australians who have to stay up even later (or wake up earlier).

9 a.m. seems fine to me. 9 a.m. in California and midnight in the Philippines feels like a good compromise to me.

Also... hurts more players than it helps? Are you kidding? Do you know how many people there are in China?

Ivanka

Milkthewhales wrote: »

None of these would be required if they just did 30min timers, oh but wait there bad right lol

30 min energy refresh would be fine, too, but if they did that and didn't change the start time, while it would make it easier to finish, it still wouldn't fix the fact that some time zones are seriously disadvantaged.

Ivanka

I feel like bumping this because we've recently been having discussions in officer chat that pertain to it.

My main alliance is pretty international. We have members from North America, Europe, the Middle East, India and East Asia.

We'd LOVE to be able to start AQ about 3 hours earlier as this would work out much better for everyone... but that's impossible so we start it at 3 a.m. Philippines time every day because this is required.

We've put most of our Asian members into BG3... and BG3 has by FAR the biggest problem finishing AQ. While BG1 and 2 are able to get everyone to join immediately, finish section 1 and part of section 2, go to bed, get all their energy back, and then quickly knock out section 3 the next morning.... BG3 is stuck waiting for 4-7 hours for its members to wake up and get going.

It's such a HUGE disadvantage for Asian players that the officers are actually talking about deliberately forcing out all the Asian players of the alliance and replacing them with North American players which Kabam has obviously biased the game in favor of.

This is HORRIBLE. We shouldn't be faced with having to make this decision. DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS! The game as is is severely prejudiced against Asian players/alliances. It can't be that hard to fix but it's extremely important. If you don't give a **** about the players just imagine all those millions and millions of players in China as big bags of money. They want to come in and spill their guts in your pocket... but you're saying to them "sorry, we're closed, please come back during normal American business hours." Why do you hate money so much?