Why scoring is so high in PVP.

Ryz-aus

Phantron wrote:

Ryz-aus wrote:

Spoit wrote:

The only hard counter I could think of would be, like, gold bullseye with a 3rd power that is actually useful. And even then, sacrifice and supernova would probably out damage it

Something like storm's old raging tempest would work as well, but "fixing" one broken mechanic with a new one is a bad idea.

Making shield breaks have a minimum duration of like 30 minutes would be better - it would kill shield hopping because you would be open to attack, but still allow shielding for weaker teams to recover health packs and let people play on their own schedule (vs. the old pre shield last minute madness). No shield hopping means sentry's negatives actually matter a bit. I can't imagine them making this kind of change though - I think shield hopping has to be a decent part of their revenue.

You mean 30 minutes before you can shield again?

Shields weren't a big part of their revenue when the chart for their revenue was shown. Even adding boosts, both come way to be way smaller than roster-related categories (roster expansion, cover upgrade, token packs). Although shield usage seems more common than before, it's not like people didn't use shields a lot back in the old days. Even if you tripled revenue from shields/boosts, they'd still come nowhere close to the major roster-related categories.

That's exactly what I mean. Let the player pay for it immediately so they don't have to play longer than they want to or keep an eye on the clock, but the soonest it could take effect is 30 minutes (or some other arbitrary time - long enough that getting all your fights done in 5 minutes doesn't matter) from when the last shield was broken. Maybe leave immediate reshields available if the first one naturally ends - this is probably a bad idea, but the super slo-mo shield hop sounds funny to me.

I am one of the many that benefits from shield-hopping, but it doesn't change that it's a broken mechanic and that whoever does it best wins. Getting rid of the mechanic means having a defensive team might actually matter a little vs. the current game where all that matters is how many points you are worth.

Unknown

Ryz-aus wrote:

That's exactly what I mean. Let the player pay for it immediately so they don't have to play longer than they want to or keep an eye on the clock, but the soonest it could take effect is 30 minutes (or some other arbitrary time - long enough that getting all your fights done in 5 minutes doesn't matter) from when the last shield was broken. Maybe leave immediate reshields available if the first one naturally ends - this is probably a bad idea, but the super slo-mo shield hop sounds funny to me.

I am one of the many that benefits from shield-hopping, but it doesn't change that it's a broken mechanic and that whoever does it best wins.

I don't think D3 has much of an incentive to fix shield hopping because they've nothing else to replace it with at the moment. I don't think shield accounts for much of revenue, but if you got rid of it, it's still just less revenue. If someone can come up with an idea that'd get rid of shields/boosts while boosting revenue from say roster slot expansion that'd certainly be used, but I have no idea how that'd even work. Looking at the revenue breakdown I'm sure D3 would rather you pay for a more diverse roster than shield hopping to 1XXX points, but I don't think they even know how to do this yet.

Unknown

I'd love to see an updated version of that revenue chart, which was pre-True Healing and pre-Seasons. My guess: Cover and token purchases decreased, health pack and shield purchases increased.

To me, in the past four months, devs have focused on generating higher revenue from the previously minor streams, in order to fight off the inevitable decay of revenue from cover purchases and gently nudged decay of revenue from token purchases (by mistakenly lowering the pull percentages).

Unknown

All they need to do is put HP spent as a stat next to scores

Unknown

Oh and Sentry is OP

OR if you really want to get into it, every other character in the game is vastly inferior to the average sentry.

The best way to 'fix' sentry is just remove color boosts. Obviously D3 isn't removing anything that makes them money but maybe they'll understand this better when they see every team on the high end eventually including sentry. (nearly every single team above 1200 last pvp featured sentry + 1 other.

Short of removing color,they could just make his green and his yellow both cost more (or half the yellow sword damage)

Scoring is mostly high because there are a bunch of people who just want to score as high as possible every event. There's really no reason other than to see if they can get to some point mark but the trickle down effect is that it's easier for everyone else to get the progression awards. Since 99.9% of the players don't actually care about any BCS-style ranking other than the actual trophy(covers in this case) it purely becomes a single-player meta-game. It sucks for 2* players who have to work harder than 3* players to get the same rewards but maybe they shouldn't expect the same rewards with a vastly inferior roster without having to basically buy the characters outright.

The game is definitely and completely Free to Play. But depending on your definition of 'win' - definitely a pay to 'win' game

But you can still have fun without having to spend 3 days watching your shield status each event to prevent burnout.

Now what's this talk of an über-raid-style boss for an alliance to take on as a group!

And new stuff!! Other modes? Practice mode?

Unknown

When you've characters that are virtually guaranteed to win every game like Sentry or even Magneto (for offense) that obviously removes most of the incentive for roster-related expenses except for the hoarders. Why would I want to expand my roster if I already win nearly 100% of the time?

I don't think it's ever intended to replace roster-related revenue with shield/boost. I remember those two combined is nowhere close to 5% of the revenue, so even if that doubled that's still 10% of the game's revenue and that'd hardly be worth it in the long run to get 5% more out of a small expenditure while losing your big ticket sales. But I do think they just haven't figured out how to make the game that encourages the big ticket sales. Especially for PvP you can probably do every event with just Sentry + Daken, and even if you want to get a 1XXX score or 2XXX score that's still all the characters you need since at that point it's almost irrelevent who the featured character is. Although part of this is because certain characters are way overpowered, the lack of meaningful modes of play doesn't help here. Someone's always going to be top of the food chain especially when you've a format as limited as the featured + 2 guys. If there are alternative modes where the rules are completely different that are played consistently, people would have reason to invest in other characters.

Spoit

LoreNYC wrote:

Oh and Sentry is OP

OR if you really want to get into it, every other character in the game is vastly inferior to the average sentry.

The best way to 'fix' sentry is just remove color boosts. Obviously D3 isn't removing anything that makes them money but maybe they'll understand this better when they see every team on the high end eventually including sentry. (nearly every single team above 1200 last pvp featured sentry + 1 other.

Short of removing color,they could just make his green and his yellow both cost more (or half the yellow sword damage)

Scoring is mostly high because there are a bunch of people who just want to score as high as possible every event. There's really no reason other than to see if they can get to some point mark but the trickle down effect is that it's easier for everyone else to get the progression awards. Since 99.9% of the players don't actually care about any BCS-style ranking other than the actual trophy(covers in this case) it purely becomes a single-player meta-game. It sucks for 2* players who have to work harder than 3* players to get the same rewards but maybe they shouldn't expect the same rewards with a vastly inferior roster without having to basically buy the characters outright.

The game is definitely and completely Free to Play. But depending on your definition of 'win' - definitely a pay to 'win' game

But you can still have fun without having to spend 3 days watching your shield status each event to prevent burnout.

Now what's this talk of an über-raid-style boss for an alliance to take on as a group!

And new stuff!! Other modes? Practice mode?

There wasn't any reason to go so high in season 3. But now that sharding means you need 1.4k to feel reasonably safe for top 5? Or even 1.2k for top 10!

Unknown

I certainly think a contributing factor is the lack of complete dud rewards. LCap, BP, Sentry, CM, Patch, Lthor, Hood, Mostorm, Deadpool, HT. You can say that some of those aren't A-listers, but they are all playable, or at very least new enough where there's some demand out there. Not a Rags or Loki in sight.

Spoit

clean_cut_hippie wrote:

I certainly think a contributing factor is the lack of complete dud rewards. LCap, BP, Sentry, CM, Patch, Lthor, Hood, Mostorm, Deadpool, HT. You can say that some of those aren't A-listers, but they are all playable, or at very least new enough where there's some demand out there. Not a Rags or Loki in sight.

Eh, the competition for LC was waaaaay stiffer than the laken ones just a tourney or two earlier

atomzed

Spoit wrote:

clean_cut_hippie wrote:

I certainly think a contributing factor is the lack of complete dud rewards. LCap, BP, Sentry, CM, Patch, Lthor, Hood, Mostorm, Deadpool, HT. You can say that some of those aren't A-listers, but they are all playable, or at very least new enough where there's some demand out there. Not a Rags or Loki in sight.

Eh, the competition for LC was waaaaay stiffer than the laken ones just a tourney or two earlier

Of course the race for LC was more competitive. We didn't have a pvp rewards for LC for 3 months. He was one of the highly sought after covers. All the other characters mentioned (except CM since she's new) have a pvp within the last 3 months including Lthor.

Unknown

wymtime wrote:

I have seen a lot of threads about death brackets and crazy scoring and I wanted to give my opinion on why it is hapening. First I want you to know I am a F2P player and my main teams I play with are BP 166, Pun 166, Sentry 153, patch 153, Cmags 91 (4 in blue). I have a couple other 140 3* but I don't really use them.
So are you ready for the answer to why scoring is so high? The answer is for a 3* rster to climb above 1100 points consistantly is.... IT IS EASY!!!

Here is why. When you have a 3* roster and you are making an initial climb o 700 points or so I sill see a lot of 2* teams.

Realised at this point you are not in the same ballpark as most people. I basically never see 2* teams and haven't for ages. From 0 points up, it's 3* teams. So no, it is NOT easy to climb above 1100 points consistently let alone climb to 700-800 without being attacked back. Once above 600 I'm likely to start getting attacked almost as far as I can climb. Above 800 or so there's really no option but shield hopping. I can get lucky and climb 100-200 points but you never know when will be that one game too many and you cop a -150 or -200 (that happened to me in Category 5... I got to 1070, tried one more game to get the cover at 1100, and came out of the game to -181).

It has only got "easy" for 3* teams to score high because of shield hopping inflating the points in the system (since every time you score points off someone who has now shielded, you gain points but no-one loses them). Shield hopping like that requires occasionally paying for more HP, since you will spend more than you can win back. Happily, with the lousy season prizes this season, there's only incentive to spend on that kind of shield hopping for covers one actually wants (like the Deadpool covers in Category 5) and not for every single tournament.

Spoit

atomzed wrote:

Spoit wrote:

clean_cut_hippie wrote:

I certainly think a contributing factor is the lack of complete dud rewards. LCap, BP, Sentry, CM, Patch, Lthor, Hood, Mostorm, Deadpool, HT. You can say that some of those aren't A-listers, but they are all playable, or at very least new enough where there's some demand out there. Not a Rags or Loki in sight.

Eh, the competition for LC was waaaaay stiffer than the laken ones just a tourney or two earlier

Of course the race for LC was more competitive. We didn't have a pvp rewards for LC for 3 months. He was one of the highly sought after covers. All the other characters mentioned (except CM since she's new) have a pvp within the last 3 months including Lthor.

Yeah, after giving almost enough covers to max cover 2 copies of him.

Reguardless, the people pushing to the 1.5k required for a top 5 finish rarely actually needed all those covers (except for DP of course)

Unknown

For those interested I dug up the chart that shows the revenue breakdown back in April: http://venturebeat.com/2014/04/08/marve ... au-part-1/

As you can see even if shield hopping revenue (assuming every shield/boost is used for shield hopping) doubled as a portion of overall revenue since then, it'd still come nowhere close to the big ticket sales items, so it'd make very little sense to cater to this behavior when there are much better opportunities to make money elsewhere. Shield hopping revenue also appear to be less than health pack expenditure and this chart was before true healing went in.

The more total games played the more available points in the system is, because even at the 900 range there is a small amount of point reduction on losses. It's on the order of attacker gets +25 and you lose 24 so it hardly matters on an individual bases, but for MPQ as a hole this still steadily adds points into the system. It doesn't matter for the high end of the 1XXX scores but the low end of the 1000s benefit from this.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

When you've characters that are virtually guaranteed to win every game like Sentry or even Magneto (for offense) that obviously removes most of the incentive for roster-related expenses except for the hoarders. Why would I want to expand my roster if I already win nearly 100% of the time?

I don't think it's ever intended to replace roster-related revenue with shield/boost. I remember those two combined is nowhere close to 5% of the revenue, so even if that doubled that's still 10% of the game's revenue and that'd hardly be worth it in the long run to get 5% more out of a small expenditure while losing your big ticket sales. But I do think they just haven't figured out how to make the game that encourages the big ticket sales. Especially for PvP you can probably do every event with just Sentry + Daken, and even if you want to get a 1XXX score or 2XXX score that's still all the characters you need since at that point it's almost irrelevent who the featured character is. Although part of this is because certain characters are way overpowered, the lack of meaningful modes of play doesn't help here. Someone's always going to be top of the food chain especially when you've a format as limited as the featured + 2 guys. If there are alternative modes where the rules are completely different that are played consistently, people would have reason to invest in other characters.

I think gobstopper is on to something, the game has got to evolve as the ranks grow. In the growth stage of the game you can rely on ppl trying to build their rosters, but as rosters start to top out you need to look to other areas of revenue. Big ticket may not be the way to go, they may be able to get more from less. If you can get more people to drop a few bucks every month you could make more than a few people who are willing to drop the big bucks (they may do that still anyways). And you are right too that having a few overpowered character can discourage middle ranked players. ( OK maybe I was going to rant about this in suggestion lol).

Unknown

Spoit wrote:

atomzed wrote:

Spoit wrote:

clean_cut_hippie wrote:

Yeah, after giving almost enough covers to max cover 2 copies of him.

Your veteran slip is showing. Not everybody gets 3-4 covers per PvP. I mean I do of course, but still...

Spoit

clean_cut_hippie wrote:

Spoit wrote:

Yeah, after giving almost enough covers to max cover 2 copies of him.

Your veteran slip is showing. Not everybody gets 3-4 covers per PvP. I mean I do of course, but still...

Lemee tell about the time they gave enough for almost three patches

Unknown

eris-wtga wrote:

I think gobstopper is on to something, the game has got to evolve as the ranks grow. In the growth stage of the game you can rely on ppl trying to build their rosters, but as rosters start to top out you need to look to other areas of revenue. Big ticket may not be the way to go, they may be able to get more from less. If you can get more people to drop a few bucks every month you could make more than a few people who are willing to drop the big bucks (they may do that still anyways). And you are right too that having a few overpowered character can discourage middle ranked players. ( OK maybe I was going to rant about this in suggestion lol).

That's the 'P2W ammo' model of F2P but I don't think it'll work very well here. For one there really isn't anything that's actually worth all that beyond your pride. We can see that people who spend a lot on this game easily spend more more money on boosts/shields than whatever prize they won. It might work if there are some kind of big events (like the original Elite) or at least some kind of prestiege to go with it but right now the game has neither. At any rate a game like this usually does fine by just periodically introducing new characters that shakes up the meta game without completely obseleting everyone, but MPQ has a real hard time figuring this out. I think part of the problem is that format as you really only have 2 characters for PvP. If the game allows 5 characters to be used at once there's going to be a lot of interest in previously borderline characters.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

That's the 'P2W ammo' model of F2P but I don't think it'll work very well here. For one there really isn't anything that's actually worth all that beyond your pride. We can see that people who spend a lot on this game easily spend more more money on boosts/shields than whatever prize they won. It might work if there are some kind of big events (like the original Elite) or at least some kind of prestiege to go with it but right now the game has neither. At any rate a game like this usually does fine by just periodically introducing new characters that shakes up the meta game without completely obseleting everyone, but MPQ has a real hard time figuring this out. I think part of the problem is that format as you really only have 2 characters for PvP. If the game allows 5 characters to be used at once there's going to be a lot of interest in previously borderline characters.

I wouldn't discount pride as a motivator lol.

OK still new & not up on the lingo, what exactly do you mean by 'P2W ammo' model of F2P

Unknown

eris-wtga wrote:

I wouldn't discount pride as a motivator lol.

OK still new & not up on the lingo, what exactly do you mean by 'P2W ammo' model of F2P

Imagine a FPS game where you can pay for special ammo that does double damage. It's different from the usual P2W model where you'd say buy a premium gun that does double damage because your ammo runs out. There are some very successful F2P games that run on this model, but from what I can tell you got to have something that is perceived to be worth a lot of value for this to be sustainable. Sure pride is a motivator but you need more than that, and MPQ doesn't have that at the moment. Usually these games have tournaments with cash prizes, since otherwise it's silly to spend $100 on premium ammo to win $10 worth of stuff. But if it's $100 of premium ammo for $1000, that might seem like a good investment, at least if you win.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

Imagine a FPS game where you can pay for special ammo that does double damage. It's different from the usual P2W model where you'd say buy a premium gun that does double damage because your ammo runs out. There are some very successful F2P games that run on this model, but from what I can tell you got to have something that is perceived to be worth a lot of value for this to be sustainable. Sure pride is a motivator but you need more than that, and MPQ doesn't have that at the moment. Usually these games have tournaments with cash prizes, since otherwise it's silly to spend $100 on premium ammo to win $10 worth of stuff. But if it's $100 of premium ammo for $1000, that might seem like a good investment, at least if you win.

Well if that where 100% true, then the top out players would have left ( I'm sure some have but others have not). Yes you have to have something of value to be sustainable, but I wouldn't totally discount gameplay its self as a reward (I've dropped $60 on a console game for nothing more then the enjoyment of playing, I would not doubt you have as well).

But yeh I'm with you that the game does need to be worked on. I'm getting frustrated cus I feel I can't get anywhere no matter what I do (and yet I am still horribly addicted lol)