Low point for team diversity?

Unknown

Has anyone noticed that team diversity seems to be at an all time low in the game? The Sentry bomb strategy is more pervasive than either the spidey stun or patchneto strategies at their peak. It is really rare to see anything except a Sentry/Hood team. Occasionally, there will be a Sentry/Daken or Sentry/Hulk one. It's taking a bit of the fun out of the game...

Nonce Equitaur 2

I'm seeing the opposite.

The low point, without question, was cStorm+Ragnarok last year.
Spiderman or OBW teams used to be heavily dominant.
More recently, Mags/Patch was overused, but not nearly as bad as the two above.

Today, there seems to be more team variety. I'm not sure what bracket you're in, but I'm guessing it might be a special Sentry-Sentry-Sentry bracket for people that use Sentry too much.

Myself, I'm seeing Thor, Patch, Sentry, Hulk, Daken, Hood, BP, Magneto, Punisher, Captain Marvel, Falcon, Spiderman, X-Force, Fury, Deadpool, BWGS, Torch, Psylocke, Captain America, IM40, and OBW. It's the most diversity I've ever seen in a grind.

I haven't seen Beast, Loki, Doctor Doom, Ragnarok, She-Hulk, or Invisible Woman.

Unknown

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

Today, there seems to be more team variety. I'm not sure what bracket you're in, but I'm guessing it might be a special Sentry-Sentry-Sentry bracket for people that use Sentry too much.

Myself, I'm seeing Thor, Patch, Sentry, Hulk, Daken, Hood, BP, Magneto, Punisher, Captain Marvel, Falcon, Spiderman, X-Force, Fury, Deadpool, BWGS, Torch, Psylocke, Captain America, IM40, and OBW. It's the most diversity I've ever seen in a grind.

Maybe for the first 700 points or so. From 701 to infinity, it's the Sentry-Sentry-Sentry you refer to.

over_clocked

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

I'm seeing the opposite.

The low point, without question, was cStorm+Ragnarok last year.
Spiderman or OBW teams used to be heavily dominant.
More recently, Mags/Patch was overused, but not nearly as bad as the two above.

Today, there seems to be more team variety. I'm not sure what bracket you're in, but I'm guessing it might be a special Sentry-Sentry-Sentry bracket for people that use Sentry too much.

Myself, I'm seeing Thor, Patch, Sentry, Hulk, Daken, Hood, BP, Magneto, Punisher, Captain Marvel, Falcon, Spiderman, X-Force, Fury, Deadpool, BWGS, Torch, Psylocke, Captain America, IM40, and OBW. It's the most diversity I've ever seen in a grind.

I haven't seen Beast, Loki, Doctor Doom, Ragnarok, She-Hulk, or Invisible Woman.

After 1100 points, it's very rare to not see a Sentry. Sure there are some Thors and Hulks and Patches still, but Sentry dominates the scene.

MarvelMan

The types of team you see are all about where you are in the game combined with MMR. I was playing last night and saw diversity....up til I hit 600pts. I then played and skipped through about 30 matches, every single one had Sentry at some level. The second was mostly Hood, with some Hulk and a few Laken. That is FAR worse than I ever saw with CStorm or Patchneto and is probably on par with the height of Rags.

Cragger

The diversity dynamics that we are seeing are the opposite of what a normal marketplace looks like. Graphically, we could put score on the X-axis and number of players on the Y-axis and come up with something like this



Except that our populations arrange counter to the "long tail" market analysis in that we have less diversity in the tail than in the general population.

Nonce Equitaur 2

I'm sure all of you mean

Above 700, it's rare to see a team that offers more than 25 points that isn't Sentry.

That I agree with. It's a side effect of punishing the long game. I'm over 700 myself at the moment. If I broke shield right now, I could play a few games with Captain America / Captain Marvel / Hood and win most of them, earning maybe 60 points. In that time, I'd lose 150 points, because I spent too long. Cap+Hood is the best team for long games, but long games get punished in the current system, especially above 700.

Below 700, there is lots of diversity. Members of the 700 Club are forced to worship Sentry.

MarvelMan

Unfortunately, it wasnt a matter of viable points. EVERY team I saw once I hit 601 included sentry. I did only play/skip through about 30 matches, but that was because it was all the Sentry I could stomach.

Unknown

I fear the current game will settle into Sentry, The Hood + someone, or Patch + Daken at the rate it's going. Sentry's place is obvious, but let's just say he's gone, the games drag on too long and it overwhelmingly favors guys like Patch, Daken, or The Hood who excels in very long games. While you can certainly beat them in a prolonged game some of the time, they have a huge advantage in the long run and short games wouldn't be an option without Sentry.

Unknown

The second I hit 1000 points its all Sentry Daken and Sentry Hood. Occasionally there's a different team.

simonsez

Rather than a nerf, I'd be in favor of a solution that removed the incentive to have to finish your matches in 30 seconds.

Unknown

simonsez wrote:

Rather than a nerf, I'd be in favor of a solution that removed the incentive to have to finish your matches in 30 seconds.

You can do that by nerfing Sentry, but then you'd have the opposite problem. Now there would be an incentive to drag your games out as long as possible and that'd favor of guys that like to drag fights out like Patch, Daken, and The Hood. Without Sentry we'd have a lot of Patch + Daken marathons pr Hood vs Hood mirror matches instead and that's just as bad.

MarvelMan

Phantron wrote:

simonsez wrote:

Rather than a nerf, I'd be in favor of a solution that removed the incentive to have to finish your matches in 30 seconds.

You can do that by nerfing Sentry, but then you'd have the opposite problem. Now there would be an incentive to drag your games out as long as possible and that'd favor of guys that like to drag fights out like Patch, Daken, and The Hood. Without Sentry we'd have a lot of Patch + Daken marathons pr Hood vs Hood mirror matches instead and that's just as bad.

Point gain/loss are the reasons to have short matches not Sentry. He is just a tool to that end. There is no way to get rid of the incentive as the more matches the better, particularly with shielding.

Unknown

The speed at which you can win battles has been the key forever in this game. Even before shielding was introduced. The last hour of every event was just a crazy rush to see who could win more faster than everyone else.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

I fear the current game will settle into Sentry, The Hood + someone, or Patch + Daken at the rate it's going. Sentry's place is obvious, but let's just say he's gone, the games drag on too long and it overwhelmingly favors guys like Patch, Daken, or The Hood who excels in very long games. While you can certainly beat them in a prolonged game some of the time, they have a huge advantage in the long run and short games wouldn't be an option without Sentry.

Sentry has twisted this game so much that people now consider "stack 12 yellow or black, win" a "prolonged game"

simonsez

You've got these 30 second matches because of the way they've designed the scoring. But it doesn't HAVE to be that way. There's no incentive in PvE to play as quickly as possible (other than to get it over with, and get on with your life), so I can't imagine it'd be much of a challenge to design a format and scoring method that removed the timing component of PvP, while still making it competitive.

That said, I know it's not going to happen. The devs won't forego shield-hopping revenue, and deep down, despite all the complaining, too many of you guys like it exactly the way it is. You enjoy the adrenaline rush of doing a 3 battle hop and re-shielding unscathed.

Unknown

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

I'm sure all of you mean

Above 700, it's rare to see a team that offers more than 25 points that isn't Sentry.

That I agree with. It's a side effect of punishing the long game. I'm over 700 myself at the moment. If I broke shield right now, I could play a few games with Captain America / Captain Marvel / Hood and win most of them, earning maybe 60 points. In that time, I'd lose 150 points, because I spent too long. Cap+Hood is the best team for long games, but long games get punished in the current system, especially above 700.

Below 700, there is lots of diversity. Members of the 700 Club are forced to worship Sentry.

This. Very much this. The problem is that the game is practically forcing us to shield-hop if we want to score high, and therefore we have to win as fast as possible and preferably with a team that will scare off other shield-hoppers looking for easy prey.

I've just seen someone suggest a 15-minute delay between unshielding and losing actual points when being hit, and I really like the idea. D3 would still earn money from people buying shields, but it would remove the pressure to end your matches as fast as possible.

Unknown

Offense was never the only factor as long as there are shields. WYP's team in the first elite tournament had IM40 who was never top tier at that time, but it slowed people down enough to make shield hops safer. If character X lets you win in 5 minutes but also loses in 5 minutes, and character Y lets you win in 10 minutes and lose in 11 minutes, then character Y could be better when shields are involved because that extra minute you gain may matter a lot on the shield hop. Note that character X can be quite superior to Y and this scenario can still be true. Hulk is probably the prototypical such character, as he sure isn't providing much offense but he definitely slows down the opponent.

There's nothing particularly wrong with this kind of gameplay but right now the balance in this game is degenerate. Right now you get your defense either by putting an obviously overpowered character (Sentry) or you have something that's really degenerate and hope that bores you opponent to death, like Daken + Patch or Hood + someone who can clear a color. Now that latter doesn't really work because Sentry is powerful enough to smash those degenerate defensive combos so people don't use them very often, but it's fixing one broken issue with another broken issue. The first elite tournament had an Avenger only lineup, and while IM40 is definitely not the most powerful attacker in the Avengers, he had the second highest HP at that time (only Hulk is higher), so even though he didn't do much, maybe that extra health was enough to slow down the opponent and it was used to good effect. Most of the new powerhouse character have no such drawback. They're usually just high HP, high damage, and even works pretty well in teams so everything becomes just an arms race of putting up the biggest combination of package of desireable things.

By the way it is not even necessary for IM40 to actually work back in the elite event. For all we know maybe that wasn't the optimal team to run and WYP should've ran someone else. What mattered is that the game was balanced enough that roster for people to even contemplate running a character with weaker offense to slow down the opponent. You'd never even think about such a thing in the current game because it just won't work.

MarvelMan

simonsez wrote:

You've got these 30 second matches because of the way they've designed the scoring. But it doesn't HAVE to be that way. There's no incentive in PvE to play as quickly as possible (other than to get it over with, and get on with your life), so I can't imagine it'd be much of a challenge to design a format and scoring method that removed the timing component of PvP, while still making it competitive.

That said, I know it's not going to happen. The devs won't forego shield-hopping revenue, and deep down, despite all the complaining, too many of you guys like it exactly the way it is. You enjoy the adrenaline rush of doing a 3 battle hop and re-shielding unscathed.

There most definitely IS the incentive to play fast matches in PVE. To maximize rubber banding you need to do all your matches ending simultaneously at the last second. Obviously that isnt possible, so the next best thing is to push your start time on the rush as close as you can to the sub end, which necessitates short matches.

Unknown

MarvelMan wrote:

There most definitely IS the incentive to play fast matches in PVE. To maximize rubber banding you need to do all your matches ending simultaneously at the last second. Obviously that isnt possible, so the next best thing is to push your start time on the rush as close as you can to the sub end, which necessitates short matches.

There's an incentive to win quickly in PvE but that does not override the incentive to win at all. Since PvE requires too many games such that using AP all boosts is not really viable, you can't just mindless try to match green even if you're running Sentry against enemies comparable to what you'll find in PvP because you can get hit by some really nasty counterattacks for playing badly. But it's perfectly fine to mindless match the first green and yellow you see when you started with 6g+6y, and it'd be okay for most PvE nodes too except this would get stupidly expensive in PvE.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

Offense was never the only factor as long as there are shields. WYP's team in the first elite tournament had IM40 who was never top tier at that time, but it slowed people down enough to make shield hops safer. If character X lets you win in 5 minutes but also loses in 5 minutes, and character Y lets you win in 10 minutes and lose in 11 minutes, then character Y could be better when shields are involved because that extra minute you gain may matter a lot on the shield hop. Note that character X can be quite superior to Y and this scenario can still be true. Hulk is probably the prototypical such character, as he sure isn't providing much offense but he definitely slows down the opponent.

This for me is the key. One of the bigger bonuses to Captain Marvel is how long it takes for every time her yellow ticks off. That combined with generally high hit points make her useful as a delay tactic. Hulk is the same idea, as you pointed out. Honestly CMags in his post-balance form is the same kind of opponent... delay delay delay. Force you to drag the game out. It is also one of the reasons Hood is so good. He slows your progress towards the correct color volumes if things don't go quite right. It was also one of the reasons that OBW was so prevalent... she shut down the opposing offense by stealing resources.

Sentry has an incredibly cheap AP to damage resource ratio. To make up for this, his high hit point pool is used in place of AP as a resource. There is a moment in a lot of matches I've played with Sentry where I do the math "is this Sacrifice worth it?" Almost universally the answer is yes. The damage you take now accelerates the damage you dish out, and as a result shortens your opponent's ability to deal damage. Same goes with Supernova if the board is setup right. If you had to wait on higher AP costs be ready to use, you would have taken similar/great damage. He cuts out the middle man and finishes the match without grinding thru the 2 or 3 turns it would take to line up your matches.

This all comes down to the need for speed in the current meta. If you look at each nerf, it was usually either based on how much self healing a character could do or how fast they made the game. Rags... Thor... CStorm... even back to Loki. These were all made to slow the game down. Sentry hands that speed back to the player in a way nothing can compete with, and for that reason, I can't see him going too long without some kind of balancing.