The Simulator (September 3-10 2014)

Pylgrim

Not sure if this has been reported but if a Deadpool uses his Life of the Party to intercept a Punisher's Retribution operating on its auto-downing capacity, that Deadpool will be downed no matter his HP. I've had a lot of fun with that little trick in that 3xDeadpool node.

FierceKiwi

ark123 wrote:

simonsez wrote:

silverrex wrote:

btw for those who knows the math, comparing to the last PvE, are the rubberband effect similar?

I don't know if math helps, since we don't know what math they're using, but if you look at the top 10, last time everyone had pretty much the same score. That suggests extreme rb... this one is a bit more spread out, suggesting the grinders are able to pull away because rb isn't letting the trailers quite catch up to them.

Seems to me like you need to grind to get 1-2 but just by rubberbanding you can get top 10 if not top 5 comfortably.

Which really is the way it should be.

1-2 probably still isn't safe here the scaling for those guys is probably getting just high enough that they have a reasonable chance of slipping up in the coming refreshes. Grinding works great on 24-36 hr subs it starts to get messy at 60.

Unknown

FierceKiwi wrote:

silverrex wrote:

im curious as why the rubberband to 30k will go away if R60 hits? is every single person running Patch/Cmag?

Phantron loves to make Mags the PvE boogeyman. The last event showed that Patch is more than enough to win just about anything if you know what you're doing. Although if the Devs are reading this nerfing Mags will totally stop the grinders and the rubberbanders it has absolutely nothing to do with the true-healing characters that can effectively fight forever.

The reason why Patch was decent in that event was because he spent most of the event being 100 levels higher than his enemies. When the DAs hit level 200 they kill him just fine and that's still 56 levels than his level. Regen abilities are designed to be somewhat balanced against enemies of the same level, so of course they're really good against enemies that are much lower than you. But Simulator is not an event that's shy on very high levels of the enemy.

Unknown

So the Deadpool Node. Whales deals 4k damage there, which is enough to wipe out everything I have excpept Patch. Quite Scary. Bringing in Widow to steal from lvl 200 Deadpools isn't the best Idea either
I was fortunate I got a lucky Patchneto Cascade to wipe out all 3 of them in one go.

In the Dino Node I wasn't even getting Bitten. The Goons were using the Green for their abilities instead of having Dino attack. So that was easy crusing.

For somebody with a developing Roster the Hard Simulator is quite the challenge. I managed to do the initial sweep but that knocked out basically all of my characters. Certainly not hitting up the Nonessentials there again.

And people were complaining about the Venom PvE. There all you needed was a patch to basically kill everything.

GrumpySmurf1002

simonsez wrote:

silverrex wrote:

btw for those who knows the math, comparing to the last PvE, are the rubberband effect similar?

I don't know if math helps, since we don't know what math they're using, but if you look at the top 10, last time everyone had pretty much the same score. That suggests extreme rb... this one is a bit more spread out, suggesting the grinders are able to pull away because rb isn't letting the trailers quite catch up to them.

The rubberband was/is pretty hefty. If you can clear the nodes, you can catch up pretty quickly. On the easy side, I didn't have much trouble catching up with one pass (I'm still a little behind apparent uber-grinder Phantron in that one).

It's the scaling that's slowing people down. It's pretty hard to clear the hard nodes without taking major damage right now, and it will only get worse tonight. I managed to get through the essentials and 1-2 more before my roster was metaphorically gasping for air.

FierceKiwi

Phantron wrote:

FierceKiwi wrote:

silverrex wrote:

im curious as why the rubberband to 30k will go away if R60 hits? is every single person running Patch/Cmag?

Phantron loves to make Mags the PvE boogeyman. The last event showed that Patch is more than enough to win just about anything if you know what you're doing. Although if the Devs are reading this nerfing Mags will totally stop the grinders and the rubberbanders it has absolutely nothing to do with the true-healing characters that can effectively fight forever.

The reason why Patch was decent in that event was because he spent most of the event being 100 levels higher than his enemies. When the DAs hit level 200 they kill him just fine and that's still 56 levels than his level. Regen abilities are designed to be somewhat balanced against enemies of the same level, so of course they're really good against enemies that are much lower than you. But Simulator is not an event that's shy on very high levels of the enemy.

Unless they ramp up scaling again you're not going to get many of those nodes though and even then most events don't limit you're roster like that did so you aren't nearly as relient on Patch taking all the damage.

Unknown

silverrex wrote:

btw for those who knows the math, comparing to the last PvE, are the rubberband effect similar?

The general structure of rubberbanding hasn't changed in a long time other than different scaling factor because each event have different base values, but just because the formula is the same doesn't mean the outcome is always the same. Even the overall leader doesn't do every mission on every cycle, but he's likely to do more of them if they're easy. Simulator Basic has a very high amount of points concentrated in the 3 (relatively) easy essential missions, so the overall leader is unlikely to pass that up and the overall leader will have a relatively high amount of points compared to other events, which means everyone else also sees a better than expected rubberband modifier. Compared to the last heroic, where the majority of the point is on the non essential missions, you'd have a weaker rubberband because it's very likely not even the overall leader is going to mess with all 4 incarnation of the level 200+ Daken on every cycle, and if he has less points, so does everyone else.

Unknown

After doing each node once in the first clear and only done the essentials each refresh I am currently on 35K. If the subs point scale up as normal on target for 120K progression reward - probably going to be close to 40K if I get up early tomorrow morning. However i am with a lots of slackers in the subs, currently have a 2K lead on normal and 5K lead on hard.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

silverrex wrote:

btw for those who knows the math, comparing to the last PvE, are the rubberband effect similar?

The general structure of rubberbanding hasn't changed in a long time other than different scaling factor because each event have different base values, but just because the formula is the same doesn't mean the outcome is always the same.

I would say the best way to compare rubberbands is to look at what percent of points in the sub does it take to increase the scaling by one. Take the normal sub the base values equal 859 and it takes 1200 points to increase the rubber band by one meaning its 140% . In the last event the base nodes totaled 1745 points and it took 2000 to increase the band by one working out at 114%.

So with all other things equal the band would extend faster in the last event than this one. However this does not take into account of people playing leapfrog the leader, the leader doing nodes multiple times before a break skipping nodes etc but its a reasonable starting point when trying to work out when you need to start pulling the band in.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

silverrex wrote:

btw for those who knows the math, comparing to the last PvE, are the rubberband effect similar?

The general structure of rubberbanding hasn't changed in a long time other than different scaling factor because each event have different base values, but just because the formula is the same doesn't mean the outcome is always the same. Even the overall leader doesn't do every mission on every cycle, but he's likely to do more of them if they're easy. Simulator Basic has a very high amount of points concentrated in the 3 (relatively) easy essential missions, so the overall leader is unlikely to pass that up and the overall leader will have a relatively high amount of points compared to other events, which means everyone else also sees a better than expected rubberband modifier. Compared to the last heroic, where the majority of the point is on the non essential missions, you'd have a weaker rubberband because it's very likely not even the overall leader is going to mess with all 4 incarnation of the level 200+ Daken on every cycle, and if he has less points, so does everyone else.

interesting to it comes down to the global leader and what he/she can do. If he cant pass every node, neither are the majority of the player base which cuts down the amount of nodes you can hit per hour in turn catching your points sort of speak.

anyways it feels more right with this PvE than the last one, however I think a 2 day sub is the perfect duration. 3 day is too long imo

Unknown

Sumilea wrote:

Phantron wrote:

silverrex wrote:

btw for those who knows the math, comparing to the last PvE, are the rubberband effect similar?

The general structure of rubberbanding hasn't changed in a long time other than different scaling factor because each event have different base values, but just because the formula is the same doesn't mean the outcome is always the same.

I would say the best way to compare rubberbands is to look at what percent of points in the sub does it take to increase the scaling by one. Take the normal sub the base values equal 859 and it takes 1200 points to increase the rubber band by one meaning its 140% . In the last event the base nodes totaled 1745 points and it took 2000 to increase the band by one working out at 114%.

So with all other things equal the band would extend faster in the last event than this one. However this does not take into account of people playing leapfrog the leader, the leader doing nodes multiple times before a break skipping nodes etc but its a reasonable starting point when trying to work out when you need to start pulling the band in.

It's awfully hard to leapfrog the overall leader unless he's gone for extended period of time, since you have to veer off from an optimal clear most of the time as 1 clear of everything is almost never enough to pass up the overall leader. I'm sure they tweak these numbers on an event by event basis but whether it's 114% or 140% is close enough for the vast majority of players. In Simulator Basic, I consider most of the nodes relatively easy since you've your full roster and most of the points are on the essential + 2 highest one which the overall leader is clearly capable of doing. Compared this to Heroic Venom, the points are roughly split something like 33% essential 33% 4 hard nodes 33% everything else put together. It's hard to imagine even the overall leader always clearing the 4 nodes with level 150+ Daken in it every cycle, and if the overall leader isn't doing it, it's even less likely anyone else would be doing it.

Unknown

how does one find out what the global leader score is?

Unknown

silverrex wrote:

interesting to it comes down to the global leader and what he/she can do. If he cant pass every node, neither are the majority of the player base which cuts down the amount of nodes you can hit per hour in turn catching your points sort of speak.

anyways it feels more right with this PvE than the last one, however I think a 2 day sub is the perfect duration. 3 day is too long imo

Well the relative standing doesn't depend as much on rubberband, but the smaller the rubberband overall that usually implies the nodes are hard, so each victory is likely to have a bigger impact on your standing. For example Heroic Venom has some very hard nodes, so if you're confident you can beat them you can indeed catch up very easily because most people won't be touching the level 200 Daken nodes. On the other hand, compared to say Iso8 Brotherhood where the nodes are pretty much trivial to any top roster, and grinding dominates here because you can't sneak up on someone who can beat every mission if all else being equal. Simulator is probably roughly in between those two examples. The nodes can potentially be all cleared every cycle, but it's likely way too much work so it gives people a chance to sneak up at the end.

Unknown

silverrex wrote:

how does one find out what the global leader score is?

There's no reliable way but usually you just have to know this guy exists. This game is big enough that you can pretty much always count on some crazy guy out there always getting at least all the easy nodes (that is, easy relative to the top player of the game, not necessarily you) and set an appropriate pace. The overall leader is like the XMen of PvE. You don't necessarily know who he is but he's always out there grinding away, and without him it'd be awfully hard for most people to come even close to the progression rewards.

Trisul

Phantron wrote:

There's no reliable way but usually you just have to know this guy exists. This game is big enough that you can pretty much always count on some crazy guy out there always getting at least all the easy nodes (that is, easy relative to the top player of the game, not necessarily you) and set an appropriate pace. The overall leader is like the XMen of PvE. You don't necessarily know who he is but he's always out there grinding away, and without him it'd be awfully hard for most people to come even close to the progression rewards.

God bless that dude.

Still, I have to imagine there's some extra sort of internal scaling after every event. If just about everyone gets the final progression reward, maybe the devs think that the point totals were too low and simply raise the points in future events. If barely anyone gets the progression reward, they adjust the required points lower in the future. Human-based community scaling, in a way.

Unknown

Trisul wrote:

Phantron wrote:

There's no reliable way but usually you just have to know this guy exists. This game is big enough that you can pretty much always count on some crazy guy out there always getting at least all the easy nodes (that is, easy relative to the top player of the game, not necessarily you) and set an appropriate pace. The overall leader is like the XMen of PvE. You don't necessarily know who he is but he's always out there grinding away, and without him it'd be awfully hard for most people to come even close to the progression rewards.

God bless that dude.

Still, I have to imagine there's some extra sort of internal scaling after every event. If just about everyone gets the final progression reward, maybe the devs think that the point totals were too low and simply raise the points in future events. If barely anyone gets the progression reward, they adjust the required points lower in the future. Human-based community scaling, in a way.

The recent progression rewards seems to be at intentionally low levels to ensure that anyone can hit a 3* cover if they grinded decently for 3-10 days, which I think is a decent tradeoff. The progression reward used to be all over the place. We had events where the overall leader didn't even have half of the score needed for top progression. We also had stuff like Thick as Thieves where you used to get the top progression reward for just showing up. I remember it was like 40K for top progression reward and the top score at the end was somewhere in the 300Ks.

Unknown

Trisul wrote:

God bless that dude.

Still, I have to imagine there's some extra sort of internal scaling after every event. If just about everyone gets the final progression reward, maybe the devs think that the point totals were too low and simply raise the points in future events. If barely anyone gets the progression reward, they adjust the required points lower in the future. Human-based community scaling, in a way.

I am not sure they even think about it. In the last event I posted after a few hours that everyone would get the maximum progression reward as all you needed to do was clear 2 refreshes of nodes at the maximum rubber band limit. This event requires a bit more work because the global leader will not be that far ahead of you. You need to work on 4 to 7 refreshes depending on how many nodes you do each refresh.

Mawtful

I'm holding at 4/3/3 currently, and am the only player in each top 10 without a Beast. It's actually making this Simulator a little more boring, since there's fewer nodes to even attempt.

Unknown

How are you people enjoying this event?
It´s really hard for me to understand, because i just feel cheated. My roster isnt all that impressive with 4 3star guys each at lvl 127, Hulk, Spiderman, Patch and Magneto. Sentry and Daken each have 3 covers, so i cant use them. Ares, Bullseye and the usual 2 star guys are my only choice. Even while using boosts and healthpacks i get wiped out all the time and pretty much in the cheapest way possible. Almost every time it´s 1 enemy round that causes 6k damage by making it rain the same pieces over and over. It´s not a mistake that i make but something i can´t predict. How much money does this game demand just so it starts to be fun? Is it only possible to win anything in an event when you maxed out every character with money anyways? Besides buying more **** i don´t see a way to be successful in this game.

HairyDave

Nocterusyan wrote:

How are you people enjoying this event?

We have deep rosters and enjoy the challenge of working out the best combination of characters to take out a node. Granted, if you don't have Sentry, Daken, Beast and even Ares well levelled you're going to have a bad time.