 | NS Leaderboard Players Ambushed!(1) | Category: GeneralApril-16-2016 12:57 AM PDT (9 years ago)  |
| Would you have competed to the level that you did in NS Leaderboards in Era 5, if you knew that: - NS LBs would close after Seasonal LBs with the effect that Seasonal players could join in after their LBs closed? - NS LBs would close only after patch 2.4.1 hit? Did this take you by surprise, and would you have preferred to know about it right from the beginning, especially if that was the devs' design intention for this Season & Era? (By the way, I don't consider myself a competitor on LBs, though I do typically end up on the Barb one in the modest upper quartile) Also 2 questions for the devs: - Was this the original design intention, and if so why wasn't it communicated to the player base earlier? - If it wasn't the original design intention but it changed - when did it change, and what was the basis for the change, and why wasn't it communicated to the player base until, like, too late? | ||
 | NS Leaderboard Players Ambushed!(214) | April-26-2016 12:01 PM PDT (9 years ago) |
| Eras were never really designed to be a “mirror†of Seasons, though as they coincided frequently in the past, it’s easy to see how that became the expectation. We’re philosophically discussing the place of Eras going forward, namely what they mean to us as well as players and how we’ll handle rolling them in the future. How (or even whether or not) Eras are affected by patches is a consideration and is why we changed the way we rolled Era 5. Changes in 2.4.1 will affect the performance of multiplayer groups, potentially bringing overall group records down, and we wanted to avoid a situation in which Era 6 could have had multiplayer records effectively locked at the start of the Era. This is definitely something we could have communicated earlier and more clearly, and we’re certainly going to strive to do so in the future. Needless to say, the community’s feedback has most certainly been heard on this issue, and we’re evaluating our process to try to find the best of both worlds going forward. | ||
| NS Leaderboard Players Ambushed!(294) | April-27-2016 3:49 PM PDT (9 years ago) |
just lock leaderboards when the new patch goes into effect. Just move the era transition to today if you're so hung up on patch day having to be a Tuesday, or just patch on Thursday with the era transition. Unlike Seasons, when an Era ends, the next one immediately begins. Simply put, there is no such thing as Era downtime. “Pausing†the Era leaderboards wasn’t an option. In addition, as a byproduct of the tech that allows us to launch patches without maintenance, there was a window in which some players could still be on Patch 2.4.0 for up to 24 hours, potentially creating the same issue of unfairness but in perhaps a less obvious way. In order to put everyone on the same playing field, ending the Era after the patch was the best option to ensure all players had access to the same circumstances. Over a year later they still haven't been able to define what an era is. Eras haven’t been very well defined, and that’s a fault that lies with us. They’ve become something different from our original intent primarily because we’ve had a lot of game and build changing patches back-to-back. Eras function differently than Seasons at both a fundamental and technical level. This is why we never explicitly planned to have them coincide and, when they were originally conceived, we believed we would reset Eras very rarely, possibly as little as once per year. The original intent with Eras was to only reset them when significant balance changes occur. Perhaps a better choice would have been not to reset the current Era until a later time. However, we felt the changes to multiplayer groups was enough to warrant it in this situation. This was definitely a matter of taking the less of two not-ideal options, and we hope the definition of Eras is more clear now. | ||
