Venom Heroic - Aug 29 - Sep 1

LegendReborn

While I'd be ok with shifting everything to progression rewards, it's clear that D3 wants PVE to be something that is worth doing until it closes so I doubt they'd ever shift everything away from placement. But just shifting PVE rewards from super juicy in 1-20, good at 21-150 and ok elsewhere to just good in 1-150 and ok elsewhere (in conjunction to moving a cover to progression) would be a big boon.

Unknown

I think making placement awards just HP, ISO, and tokens might solve all of the problems - let 1-2 get a 10-pack of event tokens, 200 hp, and 5000 iso, 3-10 get 5 event tokens, 100 hp, and 300 iso, etc., while putting all the covers in progression awards.

Unknown

If you put everything on progression and no rubberband, a lot of people will never come close to the best PvE rewards. Right now you can at least get lucky. Figuring out where to place the 4* on progression is going to be pretty tricky too.

_RiO_

Phantron wrote:

If you put everything on progression and no rubberband, a lot of people will never come close to the best PvE rewards. Right now you can at least get lucky.

Still better than people putting in the actual effort getting **** at the last moment.

FierceKiwi

Phantron wrote:

If you put everything on progression and no rubberband, a lot of people will never come close to the best PvE rewards. Right now you can at least get lucky. Figuring out where to place the 4* on progression is going to be pretty tricky too.

That's my biggest concern with trying to move things to progression the devs have shown that they either massively overshoot the high scores or massively undershoot them.

CrookedKnight

They've also done wildly different reward tiers for PvP; e.g. the top 40 in a bracket a few events ago got three Spidey covers, and in this one you needed a top 10 finish to get three Beasts. There's always going to be some degree of wonkiness, but at least a progression-based reward system would give you something concrete to aim for instead of grind-and-pray.

squirrel1120

Adding another voice to the 'get rid of this tinycat 2.5hr, rubberbanding, etc., garbage'.

I stayed up and sacrificed my sleep I should have been getting for work. Regretted it every second of the 90+ degree day I just had to work through. I at some point realized that I wasn't getting anything for beast covers if I didn't do so, however, and had already put a ton into this event. I managed #5 with 60080 or something close (last 2 digits might be off), but as terrible as I've felt all day through working in the heat and being tired, I really don't know if it was worth it. That's a pretty terrible thing to have to do to yourself for what equates to an imaginary reward in a hand-held phone game.

Not to mention all the work for 20iso rewards... not to mention the amount of iso I spent in boosts on the last day as everything scaled up so much. All for a lvl 45 beast who will likely as much still be dead weight in his own required nodes. >.<

SunCrusher

I haven't opened the game since the end of the event; I'm still too pissed off to bother.

I don't understand; whenever a 'newbie' complains about not being able to battle against the big guys and gals in PvP or some such, everyone's so quick to jump on the wagon and say that a 'newbie' needs to learn to climb ranks and such and learn to build their roster etc. I fully agree and currently, I'm straddling the 2* territory with a foot into 3*.

And yet people are arguing that those who have put in more time and effort into a PvE are - in effect - supposed to be punished while those who join late, get the best rubberbanding, and game the scaling and MMR are entitled to their top placements?

I was told that if I worked hard enough, I could earn my 25K points to get my Patch and then work my way to the Patch-needed nodes when I posted about my frustrations.

Well, you know what?

I did exactly that, though I must have done it incorrectly because it SO **** SCREWED me over for this event.

In my scramble to get my first Patch cover, I forced myself to faithfully play each refresh at least once to climb my way to earn 25K. Just in case anyone wonders, 25K is no easy feat (but doable) when you don't have any of the 3* covers and your Torch (the character most commonly recommended in the event if you don't have the 3*s) is not fully built. I ran 90% of the event with OBW, CStorm, Hawkeye, Iron Man, and my undeveloped Torch.

In the end, the rubberbanding in my bracket went insane and though I was faithfully completing the nodes (including Patch nodes) on the last refresh like I had faithfully completed my nodes on previous refreshes, I was hardly making any progress at all and at one point, I actually fell behind.

To make matters worse, I was on a map where suddenly where the easier nodes were once doable and gave out okay points, they dropped in levels by 10 levels or more and dropped in points while the harder nodes' difficulty levels and points just soared.

I ended my event with 51K+ points and barely hit top 300 so NO, 'working hard' got me a Patch but screwed me over otherwise and I will never recommend the same 'working hard' experience to anyone else.

danae

When I found out that there were no subs for this PVE event, I knew that it would take less effort to get Beast covers by joining late than starting early. I joined maybe 5 hours before the end and played roughly two hours total during that time. After my first node, I took note that first place person already had 32000+ but in the end I was still able to get to #13 (52k) and could have probably made Top 10 if I pushed a bit harder as I still had several 600+ nodes to play but work got in the way .

Not really sure why they still structure PVE this way as it really doesn't reward those that actually put effort throughout the entire PVE. In my opinion, the best format would be one that has subs and no nodes that open up in the main bracket. It provides incentives to play each sub and doesn't screw someone over in the last two hours if you've built up enough of a lead early on.

Unknown

By the way, are people aware that if they put the 3 covers on progression while aiming for the same distribution (only 1% get all 3) that also means if you joined late by a single cycle you probably have no chance of ever hitting the third cover? After all, far more than 1% of players will have 1 more cycle on you and if there's no rubberband, that's likely an amount you can never catch up assuming you're not especially hardcore compared to others. If we use this event as an example, the 3 cover threshold will likely be around 61000. Let's say each cycle is worth 3000 point to account for sleeping (3 day = 30 cycles = 2K average per cycle) with no rubberbanding. Well, if you joined late by one cycle, that's one less cycle of 3000 points and you can forget about hitting a threshold at 61K if it was set correctly, because nobody was getting 64K in this event at all.

SunCrusher

I don't know if I necessarily agree about putting the covers on progression versus ranking and in fact, I will even admit that I can't think of a more doable idea, but the fact that someone can join in on the last few hours and slam home to the highest ranking rewards AND progression rewards completely flies in the face of the whole notion that "hard work" will pay off in the end.

I guess I could just cave and do the same thing and see what happens, but people said that 25K was possible with a lot of hard work and though I got my Patch because I believed in that 'hard work', that 'hard work' also ultimately ended up effectively penalizing me because I went about it 'the wrong way' and I'm not sure how to feel about that except that it doesn't feel fair.

I do know this, though, and it's probably an unpopular opinion: Just like I don't expect to be competing well in PvP because my roster is undeveloped, I also don't expect to get the same rewards when compared to someone else who's been 'working hard'.

Maybe people feel like they ought to be able to join in super late and grab the exact same rewards as those who have played the entirety - or near the entirety - of the event, but I don't. I sincerely don't and I wouldn't expect myself to join in super late and come away the victor. If I miss out, I miss out and trust me, I'm a working person myself who's had to miss out on plenty due to work, life events, and sleep.

It falls into the category of tanking one's MMR and manipulating scaling; it's something I understand that people do and understand why they do it, but it's not how I would like to ultimately have to play the game to play 'fair' and have fun.

I know that people have lives and that rubberbanding helps to mitigate some of the whole, "Well, I have work, a life, kids, etc," issue with trying to earn rewards and such but this rubberbanding was a bit too much.

Miss a few refreshes over the course of a few days... fine. Maybe that could be mostly made up compared to someone else who has been on top of each refresh. But missing all of the refreshes save for the last one or last few?

That's a slap in the face to the people who who participated throughout the event and played most of the refreshes and it also goes against the whole, "With hard work, you can earn, blah blah blah," attitude.

Rubberbanding was utilized to help cut down on the grindiness of the events and to help make up for lost time; the problem is, people simply just jump on the biggest rubberbanding because they know they can do it and win... even if the refresh they jumped on was the last one or last two.

Well, since that's the case, then why even bother with refreshes and multiple day events like this one when it's plainly obvious that starting early and participating often isn't going to reap anything aside from a massive rubberband-triggered fight in the end to maintain reasonable ranking?

Unknown

FierceKiwi wrote:

Phantron wrote:

If you put everything on progression and no rubberband, a lot of people will never come close to the best PvE rewards. Right now you can at least get lucky. Figuring out where to place the 4* on progression is going to be pretty tricky too.

That's my biggest concern with trying to move things to progression the devs have shown that they either massively overshoot the high scores or massively undershoot them.

Once upon a time, Demiurge actually experimented with releasing new covers mostly via progression.

-- One cover was rewarded via mid-tier progression level.
-- One cover was rewarded via maximum tier progression level.
-- One cover was rewarded via PvE placement.

I think most complained about the system, as the maximum progression cover was almost never reachable (the mid-tier progression cover was roughly about where the max-tier cover is now pointswise). I think the lone PvE placement cover was limited to a very narrow range, maybe top 50 at most, if I remember right (could be wrong).

Over time, the need to "chase the carrot" overtook this system, as players realized that all they needed to do was to hit the mid-tier progression prize to earn the 1 cover needed to unlock the next event's Essential nodes. The devs know that the players know that the cover prize is needed to future short-term success, so they have moved the covers to purely PvE placement only to ensure that no player easily obtains a new character cover.

After all, any player that does not obtain a cover of a new character is forced to either a) play the token lotto or b) grind extra hard in the "second chance" PvP event for those covers, either of which means more revenue for Demiurge (assuming the player doesn't ragequit and leave the game permanently).

In other words, "working as intended".

rbdragon

The way I see it, the issue I have the most problem with is the people who join early, don't play for almost all of the event, and then ride the rubberband to the top at the end. That is completely unfair to the rest of the bracket who put in the time and effort grinding the nodes to get their points throughout the entirety of the event.

There should be specific cut off times for when people join a bracket, and definitely no sharding into long established brackets when joining late. If someone joins with three hours left and join a bracket with a bunch of other people who joined at the same time, then I could care less about their placement. At least it's fair within their bracket. But when someone can join when the event starts...hover near the bottom for 3 days and then push in the final half day to end up in the top 10 because their nodes are worth 1000 while mine are worth 100 - how is that fair?

Gaming the system should not be how you win these events. I get frustrated because in the back of my head I know I should just exploit the rubberbanding, but I'm one of those crazy people who prefer to play the game rather than play the game within the game.

Unknown

FierceKiwi wrote:

Phantron wrote:

If you put everything on progression and no rubberband, a lot of people will never come close to the best PvE rewards. Right now you can at least get lucky. Figuring out where to place the 4* on progression is going to be pretty tricky too.

That's my biggest concern with trying to move things to progression the devs have shown that they either massively overshoot the high scores or massively undershoot them.

A lot of that has to do with rubberbanding, though. If they take away ranking (or make it much less critical) they can also get rid of rubberbanding. And I think the 3* covers should be gettable with reasonable, but not crazy-grinding effort - relatively easy for one, more for two, quite a bit for three. 4*s should probably require near-perfect play, while accounting for sleep. It'll be much easier to establish benchmarks if they ran it a few times like that.

I think PVE should be easy to predict. You should be able to figure out on the first day "If I put in x amount of effort, I get reward y; therefore I will put in that amount of effort." Right now it's borderline random. And I say that as someone whose finishes in the Deadpool and Beast events were #1 and #4 respectively; I got all the new covers. I just didn't enjoy it, and it was incredibly stressful.

dkffiv

Ben Grimm wrote:

FierceKiwi wrote:

Phantron wrote:

If you put everything on progression and no rubberband, a lot of people will never come close to the best PvE rewards. Right now you can at least get lucky. Figuring out where to place the 4* on progression is going to be pretty tricky too.

That's my biggest concern with trying to move things to progression the devs have shown that they either massively overshoot the high scores or massively undershoot them.

A lot of that has to do with rubberbanding, though. If they take away ranking (or make it much less critical) they can also get rid of rubberbanding. And I think the 3* covers should be gettable with reasonable, but not crazy-grinding effort - relatively easy for one, more for two, quite a bit for three. 4*s should probably require near-perfect play, while accounting for sleep. It'll be much easier to establish benchmarks if they ran it a few times like that.

I think PVE should be easy to predict. You should be able to figure out on the first day "If I put in x amount of effort, I get reward y; therefore I will put in that amount of effort." Right now it's borderline random. And I say that as someone whose finishes in the Deadpool and Beast events were #1 and #4 respectively; I got all the new covers. I just didn't enjoy it, and it was incredibly stressful.

Save for this Venom Heroic I've enjoyed the last 6 or so PvEs. That one a month or two back where the main event kept rotating nodes somewhat randomly was weird but I did get a few Cap Am covers. Since then all have offered a ton of ISO's / rewards with subs and have been quite fun. The Hulk 12 hour subs were a little stressful but gave out a crazy amount of tokens. I think I've placed first every PvE since the DP reward or so. This venom one would've made me quit if I didn't place top 10 after the amount of effort I put in.

Unknown

Ben Grimm wrote:

And I think the 3* covers should be gettable with reasonable, but not crazy-grinding effort - relatively easy for one, more for two, quite a bit for three. 4*s should probably require near-perfect play, while accounting for sleep. It'll be much easier to establish benchmarks if they ran it a few times like that.

Once upon a time, progression did work out this way. I remember a heroic event where a full set of X-Force covers was given out for progression prizes. In the event, there were 55,000 possible points obtainable via perfect play. The covers were granted at 50000, 52000, and 54000 points respectively. Granted, one night's sleep was more than enough of a point loss to ensure that the covers were not reachable.

IceIX claimed that people were hitting 55000 points, which I don't believe anyone believed him as the vets (back then) maxed out well below 40k points for the event.

EDIT: Oooh! Found the thread for the event! Nostalgic read http://www.d3pforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=2926

EDIT 2: You even posted about the difficulty of obtaining the 4**** covers, Grimm! (on Page 55):

Ben Grimm wrote:

I'm guessing the number to hit the 50k rewards was in the single digits, unless the devs tell us different.

EDIT 3: Found one of my original posts from my n00b days!

Lyrian wrote:

Finished second, at 9k; first was at 12.5k.

Second place for less than 20% of the max progression score in a PvE.... Those were the days!

EDIT 4: Scanned the thread even more and realized that this was the first event where the devs very very badly introduced scaling into MPQ. Oh my, this was a trainwreck of an event!

NorthernPolarity

Lyrian wrote:

Ben Grimm wrote:

And I think the 3* covers should be gettable with reasonable, but not crazy-grinding effort - relatively easy for one, more for two, quite a bit for three. 4*s should probably require near-perfect play, while accounting for sleep. It'll be much easier to establish benchmarks if they ran it a few times like that.

Once upon a time, progression did work out this way. I remember a heroic event where a full set of X-Force covers was given out for progression prizes. In the event, there were 55,000 possible points obtainable via perfect play. The covers were granted at 50000, 52000, and 54000 points respectively. Granted, one night's sleep was more than enough of a point loss to ensure that the covers were not reachable.

IceIX claimed that people were hitting 55000 points, which I don't believe anyone believed him as the vets (back then) maxed out well below 40k points for the event.

EDIT: Oooh! Found the thread for the event! Nostalgic read http://www.d3pforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=2926

EDIT 2: You even posted about the difficulty of obtaining the 4**** covers, Grimm! (on Page 55):

Ben Grimm wrote:

I'm guessing the number to hit the 50k rewards was in the single digits, unless the devs tell us different.

EDIT 3: Found one of my original posts from my n00b days!

Lyrian wrote:

Finished second, at 9k; first was at 12.5k.

Second place for less than 20% of the max progression score in a PvE.... Those were the days!

EDIT 4: Scanned the thread even more and realized that this was the first event where the devs very very badly introduced scaling into MPQ. Oh my, this was a trainwreck of an event!

I very clearly remember this as the worst event in mpq history: there were so many issues with it that it really just felt like a sick joke. The sad thing about this event was that they probably looked at the metrics and saw that participation was at an all time low, and thought "guess this prize steucture didnt work out" even though it was really the 10 other problems with the event that caused it to bomb.

Spoit

Eh, even with the problems, it was still better than 2/3s of the TaT runs. One of which made me want to rage quit, and the other that did make me rage quit

Polares

Spoit wrote:

Eh, even with the problems, it was still better than 2/3s of the TaT runs. One of which made me want to rage quit, and the other that did make me rage quit

Wow! For me this has been one of the worst events ever, because of the rubberbanding. The only good thing is that it was just 4 day long. I was top 10 all event long, I got all progression rewards, and then the last day I woke up at 4:40 am (I am European and I got screwed again) to play and I finished 26, all because the **** rubberbanding. All my hard work during all the event was for **** nothing. I am really tired of this type of events. Events with just one node are a **** ****. I wont play anymore of that to win, just casually for the iso (and even for that this events are horrible).

Unknown

Lyrian wrote:

Once upon a time, progression did work out this way. I remember a heroic event where a full set of X-Force covers was given out for progression prizes. In the event, there were 55,000 possible points obtainable via perfect play. The covers were granted at 50000, 52000, and 54000 points respectively. Granted, one night's sleep was more than enough of a point loss to ensure that the covers were not reachable.

IceIX claimed that people were hitting 55000 points, which I don't believe anyone believed him as the vets (back then) maxed out well below 40k points for the event.

(snipped some to save space)

I remember that event - I think that that part of it was a good idea that got buried in the train wreck of the introduction of scaling.