Fellowship adventures start/finish

[nsaplay78]

I dont see why the FAs were changed from Monday to Sunday how they have always been. Inno posted that the change was made due to many requests to make it easier for more people to be online at the end of the adventure for final pushes. The changes seem to do exactly the opposite. The FA used to end at 5pm-8pm sunday evening depending on ur time zone. Now they are set to end at 10am-1om on Thursday. So instead of being on a weekend when everyone is home, now it ends in the middle of the week in late morning/early afternoon when everyone would be at work. This makes absolutely no sense to me. Im on the west coast so it will end at 10am for me. Most of my fellowship are either at work or are not early enough risers to get online and work on an FA in the early morning. My guess is the amount of participation at the end of the FA will be considerably lower at the end than it used to be. Frankly, I think this is rediculous and so does everyone else I have spoken with about this. It needs to change back or change to something similar to what it was

 

[Darielle]

Inno is based in Germany, so they may have gotten a lot of European requests to change the ending time. Those 10am-1pm times are only for the US. Before, it always ended late at night for Europe, long after many people go to bed. Now it will end at a decent time in the evening, so it doesn't interfere with going to work the next day, as it used to for them.

 

[samidodamage]

Speculation only: I think they want the last few hours to be during regular working hours in Germany. There was that part about swift technical response at the end of that sentence about 'player requests'. There's loads of complaints on the forums after the end of every FA about losing connections, not being able to get back in before it ends, losing out on rank/prizes after having spent diamonds, etc. I can only imagine the amount of support tickets placed because of these issues (since most players never visit the forums). So, having it end during their regular working hours means more folks around to handle the issues and do whatever they do to keep the servers responding/connecting, whatever. I'm guessing there are more diamonds spent during those last hours by the teams chasing rank/prizes. Now, will it be less diamond spending because it's not on the weekend and more folks are at work and unable to be in game? Maybe. It'll be interesting to see if lost revenue causes them to go back to weekend endings and just live with the complaints/support tickets.
Personally, I think they should just fix the underlying glitchy, laggy, annoying [?coding? ?structure?, whatever you call it] that has existed since the first FA launch. I have zero knowledge of how those things work or what it would take to fix it. All I know is it has been an issue since the beginning of FA's. They've created new maps, tinkered with the badge requirements in the pits, changed the quest system, and done whatever other tweaks I'm forgetting but have failed to address the root problem since day one.

 

[Pheryll]

Speculation only: I think they want the last few hours to be during regular working hours in Germany. There was that part about swift technical response at the end of that sentence about 'player requests'. There's loads of complaints on the forums after the end of every FA about losing connections, not being able to get back in before it ends, losing out on rank/prizes after having spent diamonds, etc.

If lag is the main issue, it might be better to ditch the pit and add in extra maps. People do not have to check map waypoints nearly as much as they do the pit and the ability to know the numbers in advance is a tremendous help in reducing lag as less people are needed to monitor and check the waypoints, as well as less time spent recording and updating the numbers present.

 

[T6583]

I don't understand why all servers in all countries have to start and end events at the exact same time. Why can't European servers start a few hours before US servers start? Alot of players including myself have difficulting with trying to convert different time zones in different countries to their time zone. Or at least make the announcements match the time zone that the server is in. I've easily confused CEST with CST. Heck I was never even taught military time (that's the name I know for it. Sure there is a more proper term) growing up. I learned it due to my husband being in the service.

 

[nsaplay78]

I didnt realize that they all started at the same time, world wide. So then I have to agree with WHY are they all the same time. At the very least, they could have 2 or 3 timeframes for various parts of the world. Put the American continents back to where they were. Set Europe at one timeframe. Set Asia at another. Problem solved. Making it world wide but at one time frame is just lazy and no matter what time you set it for, it will be screwy for someone. With this many servers, just set them up according to whats best for everyone there. This isnt complicated

 

[neeronie]

I found the change to be very disruptive. If there was to be a change of the starting day, I would have appreciated an extra days notice. It was a real scramble to get set up. I can understand the reason but the unexpected start day without notice, was not considerate to the rest of the world's players.

 

[nsaplay78]

I found the change to be very disruptive. If there was to be a change of the starting day, I would have appreciated an extra days notice. It was a real scramble to get set up. I can understand the reason but the unexpected start day without notice, was not considerate to the rest of the world's players.

I think they figure that beta is enough notice. The fact that they started it on Friday on the beta servers tells everyone that they will do the same in the regular worlds. I have a beta city specifically to see these new things so I can relay them to the rest of my fellowships. We at least got a few days notice in teh worlds. On beta, they gave us 1 day. We couldnt even prebuild statues cuz that window had already passed.

 

[Risen Malchiah]

The time of day doesn't bother me, but combining that with it ending on a workday is brutal. For the final push up the rankings in the pit, having people online together is key. Some of my fellowship members even took off from work to do this! I'd prefer if FA always ended on a weekend.

 

[NightshadeCS]

The time of day doesn't both me, but combining that with it ending on a workday is brutal. For the final push up the rankings in the pit, having people online together is key. Some of my fellowship members even took off from work to do this! I'd prefer if FA always ended on a weekend.

This may be somewhat subjective. I know this doesn't bode well for employee productivity, but I am actually more likely to be active during the week than on the weekend. I do bookkeeping from home, so am on the computer all day long and can have Elvenar up concurrently and collect badges. On the weekend, I stay away from my computer more, or am out of the house doing activities.

I would bet there are a lot of people who play Elvenar while at work. It would be interesting to see some statistics on that, if that were possible.

My only point is that it is probably very difficult to come up with a start and end time that works well for everyone, especially taking into account other things like the tournament, etc. It is actually nice that they vary it a bit from time to time, and I hope they are collecting usage data to see how that impacts the game.

 

[nsaplay78]

The previous time frame was great. It worked well with tournaments cuz u could get a bunch of the instant for the magic hat in teh 1st round. Now we have to actually build those. It also ended later in the FA where we got some of the other instants for wands and potion when some people could use them. My fellowships are in the pit by then, but being able to get all the stuff for the hats early allows us to focus on the other 2 when buildings in the academy. The whole reason tehy changed teh timeframe on us is cuz lots of people were complaining to them to do so, presumably in europe cuz it ended in the middle of the night over there. The bottomline is that if they want a world wide game with people playing together from everywhere, they need different start/end times for different regions.

 

[ajqtrz]

If the thing ended too in Germany and they ended it at 6 or 7pm on Sunday here wouldn't it have made more sense to end it at 11am (CST) on Sunday instead of Thursday. 11am CST Sunday is, I think 9pm Sunday in Germany and most of Europe would be in the evening hours, but not the way late evening hours past 11pm. As for the technical glitches, while I admit they are or could be a problem, do we really think tech support is going to respond within a couple hours let alone fix the vast majority of the complaints, especially when often it's not the severs but the Internet connection or some other non-Inno problem? I've never found Inno's response time anything but reasonable. Part of any game is the visit by Murphy. He's annoying but at least he appears fair. So if, in a football match, the wind suddenly lets go a big gust and because of that the ball doesn't reach the goal (see how I've worded that for either American football or football to the rest of the world?, lol), you don't demand a "do over." Glitches happen and are part of any game and thus should be here too. Maddening, but understandable.

And, on a side note, Inno should recognize that to support the game they should have staff available 24/7. And I'll bet they do. But since it generally costs more to staff on the weekend, ending an FA on the weekend is, no doubt, more expensive. My guess is they just don't wish to pay for the extra staff needed on the weekend. Which means by moving the ending to a weekday they save some money. In other words the weekday is more convenient for their bottom line even if it is less convenient for players. The answer then, is that they should, in my opinion, fix the problems (in the natural course of things this should be ongoing and, over time, reduce the level of weekend staffing) and move the ending back to the weekend. Both make the game more convenient for their players and even if it isn't, or won't be convenient for their bottom line in the short run, it will, in the long run as players are more likely to contribute to that bottom line if they aren't already taking time off from work and are frustrated that they must do so to participate.

AJ