Lightning Rounds

Unknown

junshengkeh wrote:

Not everyone is in the same plight. I had a mid-level Doom before and I could not get anywhere near to 250 points. I can finish a battle in 2-3 minutes, and I come out to 2 or more attacks every single time. I count myself lucky to get 150 points.

This seems impossible to me. In 1 1/2 hours the best you can do is win 5-6 battles (25-30 points each)?

Sorry dude, I just don't buy it. Especially if you (and you should) be using max AP boosts for each match.

Unknown

Misguided wrote:

Who in the world said anything about Ragnarok? If you are seeing high-level Ragnaroks you can tank your matchmaking rating.

Taken out of context: Except that high level Rag players also tank their ratings.

In context: 250 progression and diabolical token rewards are very doable without seeing Rags. Past that and you'll bound to see a few.

Unknown

panthroq wrote:

I have not scored more than 100 points in any lightning round this week due to the high volume of high level rag. I thought that was how one does tank their rating.. Yet I've seen no change after 2 days of winning 1 match per lightning round.

I like how you dodged the issue here, that rag is making the game unplayable for anyone that doesn't have one.. But you do, so I'm not surprised.

Not dodging the issue at all, but it's a different issue, that didn't even seem all that connected to what I had originally said, because you neglected to mention this part. Ragnarok is an issue that should be and has been discussed in a multitude of threads. This isn't the place for it.

If you had said, "hey, why isn't this working?" we could have tried to help, instead of sitting there getting frustrated. To answer your question, I had thought for a long time that it was solely based on ranking, but there are others that have said the key component is losing a bunch of matches in a row. I think they are right, or at the least, it is some combination of the two. The way to get attacked a bunch in a lightning round is to run your score up higher, say 250, then put in a scrub team. Do this early in the round, and pick a popular round ('Magneto/Ragnarok) during the busiest part of the day.

Unknown

Toxicadam wrote:

junshengkeh wrote:

Not everyone is in the same plight. I had a mid-level Doom before and I could not get anywhere near to 250 points. I can finish a battle in 2-3 minutes, and I come out to 2 or more attacks every single time. I count myself lucky to get 150 points.

This seems impossible to me. In 1 1/2 hours the best you can do is win 5-6 battles (25-30 points each)?

Sorry dude, I just don't buy it. Especially if you (and you should) be using max AP boosts for each match.

Even if I start on the dot, I'd start getting hit by lower point value players about half an hour into the tournament. And then the flurry of attacks start. Yeah, I count myself lucky to get the 150 pt reward.

Unknown

panthroq wrote:

And I'm sorry but I am telling the truth in regards to not scoring more than 100 points in any round and it having zero affect on the following round.

How many points you score is completely irrelevant to your MMR. It's who beats you, and who you beat that matters.

If you don't put in a **** team so everyone can steal points off of you then you're not tanking your rating at all. You're just playing -- which typically has the effect of increasing your MMR, not decreasing it.

That said, Rags (and all the villains really) is hideously overpowered in the LR due to the 200% boost. I've long said that. It needs to be severely reduced (to 50-100%) so that you can actually have a decent chance without a high level villain of your own.

Without the buff I really don't think Rags is OP. The Lightning round just makes things completely absurd.

Unknown

junshengkeh wrote:

Even if I start on the dot, I'd start getting hit by lower point value players about half an hour into the tournament. And then the flurry of attacks start. Yeah, I count myself lucky to get the 150 pt reward.

What's your team?

Unknown

Toxicadam wrote:

I don't have a Rag (just a mid-level Doom) and I am able to finish anywhere from 25-200th place in all of these lightning rounds. I can even finish top 20 if I wanted to, but many of those covers I already have.

I salute you because I have a 75 Hood, a 61 Doom and a 51 Mag, and I have a very hard time even hitting 26-50. In this last Mag round, I was burning boosts on every fight and missed another Mag cover by 1 or 2 slots. I have to agree with some of the frustrations of people that don't have a high Rag, because it makes it sooooo much easier to get the other villains. I'm just hoping that there will be another round of villain Lightning rounds because I am just starting to gain traction (and the really high people are starting to complete their villains). I think though that this was the last round though. There will probably be an event over the holidays and I predict something new will take the place of the villain Lightning rounds next year. Sadness...

Unknown

ihearthawthats wrote:

Taken out of context: Except that high level Rag players also tank their ratings.

In context: 250 progression and diabolical token rewards are very doable without seeing Rags. Past that and you'll bound to see a few.

True, but even if you get attacked by/see a couple of those, your whole list is not going to be populated by them (the number of people doing this relative to the size of the player are is very small) and they can be easily skipped.

Toxicadam wrote:

junshengkeh wrote:

Not everyone is in the same plight. I had a mid-level Doom before and I could not get anywhere near to 250 points. I can finish a battle in 2-3 minutes, and I come out to 2 or more attacks every single time. I count myself lucky to get 150 points.

This seems impossible to me. In 1 1/2 hours the best you can do is win 5-6 battles (25-30 points each)?

Sorry dude, I just don't buy it. Especially if you (and you should) be using max AP boosts for each match.

If his rating has gotten high enough, it is entirely possible he's seeing high level Rags from the first fight. This is exactly the reason why people started tanking ratings in the first place. The matchmaking system leaves a lot to be desired and it can put you in a lousy situation with no way out. When you get matched up with vastly superior teams, you hit the skip button. You don't think "hey, I should lose to these guys so I can get matches more appropriate for my team" so it is a vicious cycle.

Unknown

ihearthawthats wrote:

junshengkeh wrote:

Even if I start on the dot, I'd start getting hit by lower point value players about half an hour into the tournament. And then the flurry of attacks start. Yeah, I count myself lucky to get the 150 pt reward.

What's your team?

Used to be my level 50-ish Doom, and a mixture of these : 85 Thor. 85 Cstorm, 69 Wolv

I gave up on Lightning Rounds until I could get a decent-leveled Ragnarok of my own, and only rejoined Lightning two days ago.

Unknown

Misguided wrote:

Toxicadam wrote:

junshengkeh wrote:

Not everyone is in the same plight. I had a mid-level Doom before and I could not get anywhere near to 250 points. I can finish a battle in 2-3 minutes, and I come out to 2 or more attacks every single time. I count myself lucky to get 150 points.

This seems impossible to me. In 1 1/2 hours the best you can do is win 5-6 battles (25-30 points each)?

Sorry dude, I just don't buy it. Especially if you (and you should) be using max AP boosts for each match.

If his rating has gotten high enough, it is entirely possible he's seeing high level Rags from the first fight. This is exactly the reason why people started tanking ratings in the first place. The matchmaking system leaves a lot to be desired and it can put you in a lousy situation with no way out. When you get matched up with vastly superior teams, you hit the skip button. You don't think "hey, I should lose to these guys so I can get matches more appropriate for my team" so it is a vicious cycle.

Yup, this is completely the case. That's exactly what happens when you don't tank, you see a bunch of lvl100 teams from the first match set. I don't even see the seeder teams if I don't tank in a previous round.(and I only just started to be able to compete for top 8 this week)

Unknown

I tanked the LR that just ended. Huge difference. The more you tank, the easier the teams get. I got up to 600 in the last Mags round fighting teams that didn't have a Rag at all.

Unknown

Elementalor wrote:

Misguided wrote:

Toxicadam wrote:

junshengkeh wrote:

Not everyone is in the same plight. I had a mid-level Doom before and I could not get anywhere near to 250 points. I can finish a battle in 2-3 minutes, and I come out to 2 or more attacks every single time. I count myself lucky to get 150 points.

This seems impossible to me. In 1 1/2 hours the best you can do is win 5-6 battles (25-30 points each)?

Sorry dude, I just don't buy it. Especially if you (and you should) be using max AP boosts for each match.

If his rating has gotten high enough, it is entirely possible he's seeing high level Rags from the first fight. This is exactly the reason why people started tanking ratings in the first place. The matchmaking system leaves a lot to be desired and it can put you in a lousy situation with no way out. When you get matched up with vastly superior teams, you hit the skip button. You don't think "hey, I should lose to these guys so I can get matches more appropriate for my team" so it is a vicious cycle.

Yup, this is completely the case. That's exactly what happens when you don't tank, you see a bunch of lvl100 teams from the first match set. I don't even see the seeder teams if I don't tank in a previous round.(and I only just started to be able to compete for top 8 this week)

OK, this explains why there is no competition anymore at the top, people who aren't abusing the system get trapped and bottlenecked at the bottom. I was informed Ice doesn't see this as abuse, but it most definitely is.

Unknown

panthroq wrote:

Elementalor wrote:

Yup, this is completely the case. That's exactly what happens when you don't tank, you see a bunch of lvl100 teams from the first match set. I don't even see the seeder teams if I don't tank in a previous round.(and I only just started to be able to compete for top 8 this week)

OK, this explains why there is no competition anymore at the top, people who aren't abusing the system get trapped and bottlenecked at the bottom. I was informed Ice doesn't see this as abuse, but it most definitely is.

Well keep in mind most of those guys have maxed(or close to) villains up there anyway. Or at the very least near maxed 3* teams, including the main villain that round.

Aside from that you basically need a team that can clear any non-villain team in under 60 seconds. And the villain teams in under probably double that.

Unknown

The closest I get to tanking is trying to compete in a hood round lol...

Unknown

Toxicadam wrote:

junshengkeh wrote:

Not everyone is in the same plight. I had a mid-level Doom before and I could not get anywhere near to 250 points. I can finish a battle in 2-3 minutes, and I come out to 2 or more attacks every single time. I count myself lucky to get 150 points.

This seems impossible to me. In 1 1/2 hours the best you can do is win 5-6 battles (25-30 points each)?

Sorry dude, I just don't buy it. Especially if you (and you should) be using max AP boosts for each match.

If you are lucky, you can pull 8 or 9 matches with the AI generated teams of level 1-50 1 stars before you hit a human team. You should be sitting at around 200 points by then and can push to 400 pretty quick before retaliations.

Unknown

panthroq wrote:

OK, this explains why there is no competition anymore at the top, people who aren't abusing the system get trapped and bottlenecked at the bottom. I was informed Ice doesn't see this as abuse, but it most definitely is.

The system is lousy, but it is the system we have. Take the moral high ground if you want to, but it's just a game. More fun to play along.

There are situations (such as the one you appear to be in) where you either have to "abuse" the system or give up because the game becomes too difficult. Your situation did not arise because others are abusing the system, it happened because you have been playing the "right way". This is a flaw with the matchmaking system. Again, this is why people started tanking in the first place.

I was in the exact same position a month ago. Here's the proof

I am also on record in this forum saying Ragnarok is overpowered and calling for transparency in the matchmaking system. I can provide links to those if you like.

Unknown

panthroq wrote:

OK, this explains why there is no competition anymore at the top, people who aren't abusing the system get trapped and bottlenecked at the bottom. I was informed Ice doesn't see this as abuse, but it most definitely is.

He stated it wasn't abusive because such a small portion of the userbase is doing it. I'd be all for eliminating it as a tactic, but that requires significant changes to the matchmaking system, and those are going to be long in coming. Changing such an important part of the game is non-trivial.

Ultimately the issue with the matchmaking system is that players can end up in a situation where the matches being offered are too hard (or they perceive them to be too hard; even in the Lightning rounds you can probably defeat any team you want because the AI is so bad; it may require more than one try, and your heroes will probably be pretty bad off afterwards, but it's possible), so they don't enter PvP, which means that nobody else plays them either, which means their rating can never go down... it's a poor cycle.

Plus apparently a surprising number of players don't know about the Skip button.

I'd also love to know why the match making system gets "stuck" and gives you only about a dozen opponents; based on previous statements in Lightning rounds there are around 5000 players per round, so at the very top I could see that happening. But I've seen it get "stuck" when my MMR was nowhere near the top. And in regular tournaments there's apparently in excess of 50k players, so even at the tip top you shouldn't have fewer than 100 opponents.

Anyone want to shoot holes in my idea for level-based match making? For limited entry tournaments (e.g. -- Dark Avengers) it would be based on the average level of all your characters. For less limited ones it would be based on the top 6 heroes you have. Matchmaking would show people with similar teams within +/- 5 levels, with "escape hatches" in the code to increase the scope if the pool became too small, either because there's too few people near your level or too few with enough points to be worthwhile (perhaps in such a situation it should spin up appropriate dummy AI teams, similar to the seeder teams?).

Added to that fix the scoring so that you only lose, at most, 90% of the points that an opponent takes from you and that would go a long ways toward improving things I think.

Unknown

Zathrus wrote:

Anyone want to shoot holes in my idea for level-based match making? For limited entry tournaments (e.g. -- Dark Avengers) it would be based on the average level of all your characters. For less limited ones it would be based on the top 6 heroes you have. Matchmaking would show people with similar teams within +/- 5 levels, with "escape hatches" in the code to increase the scope if the pool became too small, either because there's too few people near your level or too few with enough points to be worthwhile (perhaps in such a situation it should spin up appropriate dummy AI teams, similar to the seeder teams?).

Just a quick shot here. Dark Avengers style tournament. Let's say I have a bunch of open slots in my roster at the time. I'll just recruit a bunch of 1* bad guys and leave them at level 1. That should drag my level down considerably, probably drop the average to around 20-40 or so with just a few extra guys. Then I can just sell them after the tournament for the usual 100 ISO.

As for No Holds Barred with a top 6 level ranking. I feel like there's a definite flaw in that if people level up the wrong characters. God help the guy with a high level bag-man and other mostly useless characters. Although, it would be funny to see complaints from people that this one bag-man keeps kicking their ****.

Edit: Too many quotes

Unknown

Zathrus wrote:

Anyone want to shoot holes in my idea for level-based match making? For limited entry tournaments (e.g. -- Dark Avengers) it would be based on the average level of all your characters. For less limited ones it would be based on the top 6 heroes you have. Matchmaking would show people with similar teams within +/- 5 levels, with "escape hatches" in the code to increase the scope if the pool became too small, either because there's too few people near your level or too few with enough points to be worthwhile (perhaps in such a situation it should spin up appropriate dummy AI teams, similar to the seeder teams?).

Added to that fix the scoring so that you only lose, at most, 90% of the points that an opponent takes from you and that would go a long ways toward improving things I think.

Everything I come up with has major flaws. I think we are putting the cart before the horse though. Right now, the game rewards you for rapid kills of weak teams. What really needs to be looked at is what kind of play should be encouraged. Do I think that's going to actually happen? No, so what's the point.

I will say that any level based system should eliminate from consideration and characters below the average team level (or some other value, so that having a bunch of extra low level characters doesn't pull your rating down.

Unknown

Zathrus wrote:

panthroq wrote:

OK, this explains why there is no competition anymore at the top, people who aren't abusing the system get trapped and bottlenecked at the bottom. I was informed Ice doesn't see this as abuse, but it most definitely is.

He stated it wasn't abusive because such a small portion of the userbase is doing it. I'd be all for eliminating it as a tactic, but that requires significant changes to the matchmaking system, and those are going to be long in coming. Changing such an important part of the game is non-trivial.

Ultimately the issue with the matchmaking system is that players can end up in a situation where the matches being offered are too hard (or they perceive them to be too hard; even in the Lightning rounds you can probably defeat any team you want because the AI is so bad; it may require more than one try, and your heroes will probably be pretty bad off afterwards, but it's possible), so they don't enter PvP, which means that nobody else plays them either, which means their rating can never go down... it's a poor cycle.

The mere fact that only a small amount of players can or are taking advantage of clearing their MMR is exactly what makes it abusive. It's quite easy to fix, new round new MMR, if what you are saying is true, this wouldn't affect the overall standings in the least, just allow people that don't have tons of extra covers lying around from taking time to force lose multiple times.

Exploit - the use of a bug or glitches, rates, hit boxes, or speed, etc. by a player to their advantage in a manner not intended by the game's designers.

It's clear this was not intended, more just not being fixed due to the relatively small population of players doing it. Hence why I deem it abuse.