Billy Buskell streaming MEAMP.

Had they kept things as they were prior to Patch 1.09 (plus a few fixes), we could perhaps be saying the same things about MEA. A game which manifest completion doesn't take more than a couple of hundred hours and the ultimate goal is fun with friends (like ME3)? Well, it could have been. Maybe it still is, for some players. The issue is that the manifest completion has been pushed to such a distant point in the horizon that it ends up being seen as the ultimate goal right now.

That's exactly what he should say, with more tact.

You can say a lot about Warfarme, but when Sheldon (whom basically has Billy's job) takes the stage you know you will get realtalk about money, and why you're expected to farm until your fingers break based on DE's incentivization model, and seeing as how Warfarme is basically bitchslapping AndDramaDuh on every level on every platform, it shows pretty keenly which approach retains people and which one doesn't.

The addition of mods to the MF item store could have helped alleviate that...

... if they hadn't also added a crapton of crappy mods with negatives.

Maybe he could compare head shots by hosts and not-hosts and see who gets more. I know I get a weak point medal every time I host and almost never when I don't.

I didn't mean regular as "normal", but someone that plays very often.

When I started ME3 MP, I came from pausing the game to order my character around in ME1 and ME2. I never ever used the "action" option. I'm was bad with a keyboard, bad with a mouse, my reflexes weren't great either. I never played a shooter before, ME1 and ME2 on pause mode was how I aligned my shots! Let's just say it was a hell of a learning curve.

Still, I played about 3 hours a day and more on weekends. I did max my manifest around 450 hours. Then, as soon as new content was released, I could max it with the credits in the bank. And most of that was before Platinum, before players could carry you in Platinum even if you couldn't shoot to save your life.

It was perfectly possible to max within 400 hours when Platinum started, people simply stopped trying to go to higher difficulties.

Given my history and how low skills I had (and still have), at then end I could easily score second on Gold with a level 1 and do the same in Platinum with a level 8. I never was able to solo Platinum, took everything I could to do Gold, but give me a couple teammates as decoy and I could easily hit 200k on Gold. It's all about understanding the mechanics and taking advantage of them. If most people stuck to Silver, sorry but it's their own damn fault for not taking the next step. They were solely responsible for making their grind last an eternity.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind people sticking to Bronze or Silver. If they have fun, it's all that matters! Fun is subjective to each and everyone of us, I'm not gonna argue on that! I'm just saying you can't take the worst approach and think it's the valid way to calculate how fast you can do things.

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I still believe maxing your manifest shouldn't take more than 200 hours. Release more maps, introduce weekend challenges, give incentives like special banners.

The challenges were a great way to give you a little nudge to try other things than what you always do. They extended a great way the amount of time people played because they tried many combinations, characters that weren't as attractive at first but grew on you after a while, etc. I'm not saying it was the end all be all, I'm just saying they allowed you to give a little nudge. Especially when you just needed 20K to complete a challenge again and thus played "just one more game".

Sadly, the "just one more game" is a lot less present in MEA because there's no reason to do so (challenges are not repetitive, banners are ugly, combinations are not that high and I'll never max my manifest with that UR pool and the variants). It's not normal to take 150 hours to unlock the Salarian Operator, everyone has that kind of experience...

ME3 is still played because it's fun as fuck.

It's not the universe, it's not Mona Lisa, hell it's not even balanced frankly, it's just fun a shit to play, at the end of the day that matters the most.

Exactly. It amazes me how incompetent they were when designing MEA challenge system (and the whole game in general). If they had simply copied what was done in ME3, it would be far, far better. 

On my side I started Gold around 200 hours in. Looking back at things, I was "late" since I realized I could have gone there some 80 hours ago already. If I had skills at all and didn't have such a learning curve being my first Shooter experience (not being able to pause the game to align a shot), I could probably have done it even faster than the 120 hours mark.

As I said, fun is subjective and everyone has its own definition. What I find fun isn't necessarily what others find fun and vice versa. Playing Silver isn't a crime and a good portion of my friend list stuck there. I decided I wanted to push thru Gold, I made that decision for myself because I found the challenge fun, that's all.

I never did it for the grind, I did it because it was fun as hell. While the loot was secondary, it was still a motivation to play "one more game since it was actually possible to max your manifest within "reasonable" time. You don't get up in the morning saying "I'm gonna grind that shit today!"... But when you know you're about to max something, the incentive can be very real for a non-obsessive completionists.

And this is gonna sound a bit strange, but I feel the game became a lot more fun once I completed my manifest. Suddenly, failure didn't have any consequences anymore so I could try all kinds of combinations. I could finally take the focus off the loot to push things to their limit. The challenges took the relay for the focus, but again just as a little nudge. I did get my Best of the Best banner, but afterward I stick around again for hundreds of hours just for fun.

Loot and Challenges were secondary goals, everything was about having fun. The best things about ME3 (for me) was how powerful you can be with a bit of practice, something MEA is cruelly missing...

Also, don't jump to conclusion about me. You missed half my post in your reply and I can't write everything about this complex subject. It's never just 1 thing, it's a myriad of them working in concert. Internet is very bad at conveying emotions and nuances.

BioWare employees are not immune from reasonable criticism.
But we're not going to entertain personal insults, particularly to those who are also forum members....

They can take infiltrators for all I care but have them use Sandstorm/Phalanx/Halberd and let them facetank hack on platinum since their defense is weapon variants are there to make the game easier.

The off-host headshot bug is not a thing when the host is low ping.

I do not know if there are other issues needed to experience it, but that one I am pretty sure of.