The Hunt: July 12-16

Unknown

Adventfire wrote:

Could someone put this this in newbie speak? I know what the nodes are but what does it mean to clear them down to 1 or 0?

All the nodes go down to 1 point (or 0) after clearing them 5 times. 'Down to 1' means you clear everything 5 times and then come back 12 hours later. Realistically it's awfully hard to ever lose if you actually cleared everything down to 1 every opportunity unless you're somehow unable to make the final refresh. You might be able to do 'down to 1' in the earlier phases of an event when scaling is low, but scaling tends to prevent this strategy from being even possible as the event progresses.

Unknown

Lyrian wrote:

Florida has something along the lines of 15-16 nodes in it, some of which are quite brutal once scaled and some that must be opened through progression via completing certain nodes in the sub.

I forgot just how many nodes where on the Florida map. With subs finishing at 5am most days in this event due to staggering I am going to give this event a miss. One pass before I go to bed is probably not even going to cut it for top 200 in those subs. I will just get some ISO and write this one off and hope it lowers my levels for the next one.

Unknown

The worst PVE and the worst PVP possible. Way to end Season 3 on a high note.

The Hunt blows.

Unknown

jozier wrote:

The worst PVE and the worst PVP possible. Way to end Season 3 on a high note.

The Hunt blows.

It can't be any worse than the last time they ran it and scaling went berserk. 300+ Ares, Daken, and Bullseye nodes everywhere. Then again it's early. Maybe it can be worse. Challenge accepted, MPQ? Impress us with your crapitude (yeah, that's not a word, so what?).

Can't argue with Krakadumb being the worst. It is, in pretty much every way. Really boring. Just talking about it...is...making me...kind of....zzzzzzz.

HairyDave

Thugpatrol wrote:

jozier wrote:

The worst PVE and the worst PVP possible. Way to end Season 3 on a high note.

The Hunt blows.

It can't be any worse than the last time they ran it and scaling went berserk. 300+ Ares, Daken, and Bullseye nodes everywhere. Then again it's early. Maybe it can be worse. Challenge accepted, MPQ? Impress us with your crapitude (yeah, that's not a word, so what?).

Can't argue with Krakadumb being the worst. It is, in pretty much every way. Really boring. Just talking about it...is...making me...kind of....zzzzzzz.

True.

At least Loki can make things a bit interesting with Illusions.

Unknown

I'm glad that I'm busy for most of Season 4 because this game is stale as hell and boring. The story hasn't progressed in 2 months, and 2 months before that. The structure is all the same. The game is a slog.

Florida is the worst designed PVE map in existence.

HairyDave

jozier wrote:

Florida is the worst designed PVE map in existence.

Scaling is mental too - "Ares" is over L110 already for me.

Unknown

Haven't joined this yet. Couldn't care less either.

I'l prob make 1 pass through the first sub just because, but if things even start feeling a touch annoying, i'll just stop. The best thing about kittied events is that they really liberate me from giving a flying kitty about my performance.

Best of luck to everyone to finish up S3 strongly...and more importantly...sane.

marc

Unknown

If the scaling resets like the recent events then they've to start kind of high. Having level 110 enemies isn't saying much when your 3* are now level 166 to start, though the prevalence of Daken + Ares makes these match relatively difficult. Based on past history there's an increasing base level from Alaska -> Florida -> Savage Land but the mission base points also increase in that order too. This event has way too many nodes in general and should've taken a page out of Iso 8 Brotherhood.

Unknown

The last run of Hunt was enough for me to avoid the next dozen instances unless they change something substantially.

The amount of repeats was overt the top one third into the event and it even issued a 4th set of subs ovet the estimated 3 repeats. This one at least has just 2 sets but it is still way too much.

Unknown

"Confirmation Bias" my tinykitty....

This event is already causing my blood pressure to rise.

The AI intelligence has definitely been increased. I've played way too many rounds already since the start of the event for this to be mere coincidence.

There are still the normal limitations on the AI, such as 1 power/turn and not creating L-matches, but many of the restrictions on the AI appear to have been relaxed or removed.

-- The AI has learned how to check to see if it has gained enough AP to cast an ability on the same character after casting another ability by that character on the same turn. (Did Thor gain enough Green AP from casting Thunder Strike to immediate cast Call the Storm on the same turn?)

-- The AI has learned how to recognize special tiles, especially defense tiles, and will actively work to remove them if it is convenient or beneficial for the AI to do so (Ex: Can I remove a special tile while matching a primary color for my team?)

-- The AI has learned how to chain match 4 and 5s together to remove special tiles in hard to reach places, such as corners. Very annoying.

-- The AI has improved with its ability to starve the board for the player, or force the player to set up matches that are beneficial to the AI on subsequent turns.

TL;DR: The AI appears to be have tweaked to not necessarily play smarter (although this is a noticeable effect of these changes), but rather to cause as much collateral damage to the player as possible.


Further Speculation: Are these changes to AI behavior universal? What if, similar to MMR buckets in PvP, there are similar PvE buckets that contain increasing levels of AI intelligence (in other words, veterans rosters now face much more difficult AI opponents than newbie accounts do)? More data is surely needed on this subject.

Unknown

pasa_ wrote:

The last run of Hunt was enough for me to avoid the next dozen instances unless they change something substantially.

The amount of repeats was overt the top one third into the event and it even issued a 4th set of subs ovet the estimated 3 repeats. This one at least has just 2 sets but it is still way too much.

Nope.

As far as I can tell, nothing appears to have changed at all from the previous run, unless something changed in the Savage Land sub.

The node difficulty should get to be fairly astronomical soon (as usual for this event), as nodes are already in the Yellow difficulty range and increasing relatively quickly.

Unknown

Ok, you **know** the leaderboard is bad for your sub when the Top 10 all have either 6168, 6167, or 6166 points.

over_clocked

Is this bad, then?


I assumed grinding leaders were a good thing? Since tokens are spectacularly bad, I don't aim for good sub placements, just want to see how well we can do as an alliance without being interested in rewards.

Unknown

Lyrian wrote:

"Confirmation Bias" my tinykitty....

This event is already causing my blood pressure to rise.

The AI intelligence has definitely been increased. I've played way too many rounds already since the start of the event for this to be mere coincidence.

There are still the normal limitations on the AI, such as 1 power/turn and not creating L-matches, but many of the restrictions on the AI appear to have been relaxed or removed.

-- The AI has learned how to check to see if it has gained enough AP to cast an ability on the same character after casting another ability by that character on the same turn. (Did Thor gain enough Green AP from casting Thunder Strike to immediate cast Call the Storm on the same turn?)

-- The AI has learned how to recognize special tiles, especially defense tiles, and will actively work to remove them if it is convenient or beneficial for the AI to do so (Ex: Can I remove a special tile while matching a primary color for my team?)

-- The AI has learned how to chain match 4 and 5s together to remove special tiles in hard to reach places, such as corners. Very annoying.

-- The AI has improved with its ability to starve the board for the player, or force the player to set up matches that are beneficial to the AI on subsequent turns.

TL;DR: The AI appears to be have tweaked to not necessarily play smarter (although this is a noticeable effect of these changes), but rather to cause as much collateral damage to the player as possible.


Further Speculation: Are these changes to AI behavior universal? What if, similar to MMR buckets in PvP, there are similar PvE buckets that contain increasing levels of AI intelligence (in other words, veterans rosters now face much more difficult AI opponents than newbie accounts do)? More data is surely needed on this subject.

I agree with the 1st 2 observations.
I'm not so sure about the last 2

Unknown

Pulled a red Matchstick. He's 2* but still! at this point in the game it still feels nice to pull a cover that I "need."

dr tinykittylove

Psykopathic wrote:

Lyrian wrote:

"Confirmation Bias" my tinykitty....

This event is already causing my blood pressure to rise.

The AI intelligence has definitely been increased. I've played way too many rounds already since the start of the event for this to be mere coincidence.

There are still the normal limitations on the AI, such as 1 power/turn and not creating L-matches, but many of the restrictions on the AI appear to have been relaxed or removed.

-- The AI has learned how to check to see if it has gained enough AP to cast an ability on the same character after casting another ability by that character on the same turn. (Did Thor gain enough Green AP from casting Thunder Strike to immediate cast Call the Storm on the same turn?)

-- The AI has learned how to recognize special tiles, especially defense tiles, and will actively work to remove them if it is convenient or beneficial for the AI to do so (Ex: Can I remove a special tile while matching a primary color for my team?)

-- The AI has learned how to chain match 4 and 5s together to remove special tiles in hard to reach places, such as corners. Very annoying.

-- The AI has improved with its ability to starve the board for the player, or force the player to set up matches that are beneficial to the AI on subsequent turns.

TL;DR: The AI appears to be have tweaked to not necessarily play smarter (although this is a noticeable effect of these changes), but rather to cause as much collateral damage to the player as possible.


Further Speculation: Are these changes to AI behavior universal? What if, similar to MMR buckets in PvP, there are similar PvE buckets that contain increasing levels of AI intelligence (in other words, veterans rosters now face much more difficult AI opponents than newbie accounts do)? More data is surely needed on this subject.

I agree with the 1st 2 observations.
I'm not so sure about the last 2

For me, the AI saves up ap over a few cascades ( how is it getting so many?) then unloads them in series all in one go. Tinykitty doom for the poor schmuck targeted with Moonstone, Ares(?) and Venom all getting their bit in.

They're not noticeably acting to remove special tiles.

It's cascading so much in the AI's favour that I gave up using suboptimal teams even on the essential nodes, because I get wiped so much otherwise. I seem to remember reading about what causes "volatile boards", but not the details. What am I doing wrong that's giving me all this bad board karma?

Abralicious

This event is the opposite of the last one-- Last time I wanted the Sentry cover, didn't care about the ranking awards. This time, I want the Lazy Caps and don't give a sh!t about the progression rewards.

Unknown

Psykopathic wrote:

I agree with the 1st 2 observations.
I'm not so sure about the last 2

The last two are much harder to substantially prove. However, it is fairly clear that the vastly improved AI is still hamstrung by the traditional limitations in place.

For example, I just exited a match where Moonstone correctly used her Gravity Warp to pull a well-hidden high-value strike tile from a corner to a position where it would be easily matched away by her (on Red, of course). However, the tile swap caused a match-4 opportunity to exist, in which the AI was forced to take that instead of destroying the strike tile. This granted me the opportunity to save the tile.

I am reasonably sure that the AI creates plans of attack at this point, but usually cannot execute them correctly because of the limitations in place. But, when it can, watch out. Earlier today, I had a match where I was using Punisher and had 6 strike tiles out from 2 Judgments. By dice roll, 3 strike tiles were on Purple and 3 on Yellow. Normally, wouldn't care at all. The AI went and matched as normal, and maneuvered the 3 yellows into formation where they could be matched away. I had downed the opponent Ares, so I knew that the AI wasn't going to match yellow as it was not a priority color for the remaining opponents. What I did not expect, however, was the AI to begin to position the three 3 Purple strike tiles in a way to knock out all of the Purple tiles as well as the Yellow ones in a single cascade. I didn't make the connection until the AI would have eliminated all 6 strike tiles on its next move. Fortunately, because of "roster diversity" reasons, I was running Steve Rogers at the time and had his Red and Blue powers ready to go. Spent them both eliminating one strike tile of each color to break up the cascade. **REALLY** should have taken a screenshot of that one.

The player "starving" part is even harder to substantiate, which is more of a gut feeling at the moment. I think the AI concludes that a board is starved if it is forced into an off-color match 3 and changes its behavior appropriately. It is actively attempting to try to set up situations that will result in a cascade for itself or for the player to set up one for the AI to escape a starved board. Then again, this is pretty much nearly impossible to prove in any real substantial manner consistently.

GTannen73

Lyrian wrote:

"Confirmation Bias" my tinykitty....

This event is already causing my blood pressure to rise.

The AI intelligence has definitely been increased. I've played way too many rounds already since the start of the event for this to be mere coincidence.

There are still the normal limitations on the AI, such as 1 power/turn and not creating L-matches, but many of the restrictions on the AI appear to have been relaxed or removed.

-- The AI has learned how to check to see if it has gained enough AP to cast an ability on the same character after casting another ability by that character on the same turn. (Did Thor gain enough Green AP from casting Thunder Strike to immediate cast Call the Storm on the same turn?)

-- The AI has learned how to recognize special tiles, especially defense tiles, and will actively work to remove them if it is convenient or beneficial for the AI to do so (Ex: Can I remove a special tile while matching a primary color for my team?)

-- The AI has learned how to chain match 4 and 5s together to remove special tiles in hard to reach places, such as corners. Very annoying.

-- The AI has improved with its ability to starve the board for the player, or force the player to set up matches that are beneficial to the AI on subsequent turns.

TL;DR: The AI appears to be have tweaked to not necessarily play smarter (although this is a noticeable effect of these changes), but rather to cause as much collateral damage to the player as possible.


Further Speculation: Are these changes to AI behavior universal? What if, similar to MMR buckets in PvP, there are similar PvE buckets that contain increasing levels of AI intelligence (in other words, veterans rosters now face much more difficult AI opponents than newbie accounts do)? More data is surely needed on this subject.

I was thinking the AI was tweaked too, and now I have some evidence of my own. Just finished a battle against MNMags, who had collected enough purple for a Polarity Shift. I wasn't too concerned, because he changes tiles randomly, right? Wrong, this time--with two blues in the corner (and not many others on the board), he made himself a nice little T that I might have done myself. The resulting critical tile was unmatchable, but even so, that's the first I've ever seen him do that.