JUGGERNAUt HEROIC! Sep 12 - Sep 15

Unknown

We didn't mean to finish first. Total accident. Blame Hailmary. Always his fault.

john1620b

Congrats to Porkchop8! Nice job maintaining the lead and taking first.

HairyDave

TheUnwiseOne wrote:

We didn't mean to finish first. Total accident. Blame Hailmary. Always his fault.

No idea how we ended up 16th especially since I was dragging the team down until six hours ago.

Unknown

Yay, this was the least fun I've had in PVE in a long time!
It's also the first new character since Mororo where I did not earn all three covers (and that's because my old alliance didn't earn the alliance only cover)! Yay!
I didn't even earn two colors of covers! Yay!
Finished 23rd which is the same thing as 150th! YAY!

But because my alliance finished 1st (which, what? Since when is Django a PVE alliance...hmmm...even TU1 put up points), I'll get a second of the cover I already got by being 150th! I mean, 23rd!

This reward structure change is ridiculous. When the alliance cover was the same as the top placement it made sense since a reasonable effort by both you and your alliance, meant that you could come out 1/1/1 if you missed the top, or 1/0/1. Coming out to 0/2/0 is just about worthless.

Devs, I legitimately feel bad about having played in this event as much as I did. Since the cover reward for places 21 and 150 is the same, and the difference is 1500 and 50 , I don't know why I bothered. I could have not played the game (I went from 14th to 48th between the refreshes I was able to play, ground like hell for an hour straight, and hit as high as 22nd before realizing the gap I'd need to overcome for T20 was not possible) for the last hour and gotten the same prizes. All of the work my alliance did doesn't even get us anything different than what we got already. A good portion of us did not even get more than 1 cover solo.

I get that there's some broken stuff with PVE that won't get touched (Euro end times being poopy (some of my alliance is Euro based, and got up at 4am for nothing)), but can there please be a re-examining of the alliance cover and the lowest solo tier being the same? It comes across to me as a way to sell cover packs to people who get shut out on a particular color in the reward structure. With this implementation, there are more people getting shut out on more colors. This stinks of cash-grabbing and makes the game a lot less fun. It doesn't promote alliance play when you get the same thing as the lowest solo tier. Making the alliance cover the same as the highest solo tier does that. Can't get to the top by yourself? Work together and achieve those results!

This whole event has left a bad taste in my mouth.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

gamar wrote:

gamar wrote:

I am confused by people raging against the 2.5 hour system; how are you defining "competetive"? It is really, really not difficult to play as "lazy" as you want and make top 20 or even top 10 as long as you hit each node once in the last 1 or 2 refreshes. It's MUCH better than grinding a half dozen nodes to zero at t-9 hours and t-1 hours.

2.5 hour refreshes have made it a lot less effort to get top 20 and a lot more effort to get top 5, and I'm fine with that.

Someday I will learn to not post things I like about the game on these forums because that just means d3p will change it

THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS

The system didn't change. It was just that once everyone figured out you're supposed to only do nodes when they're at 100% as often as possible then it turns into a worse grind because everyone else is doing the same thing.

I'm willing to bet even the non-forumers "figured that out" weeks ago. ICEIX said they turned down the rubberbanding, for this event, which gives the "frequent players" an even bigger advantage. I've been cracking top 5 the last few heroics (even though they also gave new characters) playing twice a day and then the last 3 refreshes, because I'm strong enough to hit the nightmare nodes - but this tournament I only made top 20 doing that. Usually I could make top 20 of an event just running essentials!

Sandmaker

So what do you guys think about the rubberband changes for this event?

From what I could tell, they were going for a semi-decent ruberbanding below rank 20-30ish, and then almost pure grind above that. It actually seems like an okay compromise to me. Let people who want to take it easy still have a chance at all the progression + 1/2 covers, and let grinders who want top placement get it through hard work (and no sleep.)

eidehua

Next PVE seems to be Deadpool vs MPQ

Unknown

Sandmaker wrote:

So what do you guys think about the rubberband changes for this event?

From what I could tell, they were going for a semi-decent ruberbanding below rank 20-30ish, and then almost pure grind above that. It actually seems like an okay compromise to me. Let people who want to take it easy still have a chance at all the progression + 1/2 covers, and let grinders who want top placement get it through hard work (and no sleep.)

It's always pure grind for equally capable players. It doesn't look like it until the top because below around the 20th rank or so there's a vast difference in player's ability. In this event the base point look roughly like:

3X500 for essentials
3X500 for 3 very hard nodes
2X400 for 2 pretty hard nodes
2X300 for 2 average nodes
3X200 for 3 pretty easy nodes

First you have to calculate how many points you get per cycle. Someone who can do all the hard nodes for roughly 3000 points will easily overtake someone who can do one less mission for 2500 points. To the guy pulling 3000 base points each cycle, the effort of the guy doing 2500 (or less) is practically nothing. It's only in the top 20 range do you get everyone's base point to be close enough and then of course it just comes down to how many additional missions you can grind to try to stay ahead, especially for the final cycle.

Based on my experience on the first two days, just doing 3X500 essential + 2X400 pretty hard for 2300 was more than enough to stay in top 100. This means 2300 base points is more than what 90% of the population can do. When you're better than 90% of the population, it sure looks rubberband is generous to you, but that's getting the cause and effect wrong. It's generous to you because you're better than 90% of the population.

Unknown

I managed to come in fifth. Not bad. I don't really know the best way to grind without scaling the difficulty too high.
Basically I clear in the morning and evening. The nodes refresh the rubberbanding generally keeps me close enough. Then I just do a clear with two to three hours left depending on difficulty and grind it out for highest points thereafter.
I make top ten. But then I was in a strange bracket with the people placing higher than me having a less developed and smaller roster.

Sandmaker

Phantron wrote:

It's always pure grind for equally capable players. It doesn't look like it until the top because below around the 20th rank or so there's a vast difference in player's ability. In this event the base point look roughly like:

3X500 for essentials
3X500 for 3 very hard nodes
2X400 for 2 pretty hard nodes
2X300 for 2 average nodes
3X200 for 3 pretty easy nodes

First you have to calculate how many points you get per cycle. Someone who can do all the hard nodes for roughly 3000 points will easily overtake someone who can do one less mission for 2500 points. To the guy pulling 3000 base points each cycle, the effort of the guy doing 2500 (or less) is practically nothing. It's only in the top 20 range do you get everyone's base point to be close enough and then of course it just comes down to how many additional missions you can grind to try to stay ahead, especially for the final cycle.

Based on my experience on the first two days, just doing 3X500 essential + 2X400 pretty hard for 2300 was more than enough to stay in top 100. This means 2300 base points is more than what 90% of the population can do. When you're better than 90% of the population, it sure looks rubberband is generous to you, but that's getting the cause and effect wrong. It's generous to you because you're better than 90% of the population.

What you say is true. But I feel like the dynamic is rarely between equal skill, equal time committed players except Top 5 and maybe Top 10. For Top 20/50 at the end it is usually a contest between players who's been hitting as many refreshes as possible (but hitting subMaximum points each time) vs players who only hit the last two refreshes, but is able to to maximize points every refresh.

In that situation the rubberband "turnoff" point is the kingmaker and determines how unfair/generous it feels to you. Set it too small (i.e. Last Heroic Venom), and high time commitment players who've been grinding (suboptimally) all weekend feels like they've been cheated. Set it too large and low time commitment/ high skill players will feel like they can never compete.

It's a hard balance to strike, and somebody will always complain one way or the other. But I think they did an okay job this time around.

*Edit* I just reread your post, and realized you were essentially saying the same thing. Whoops.

DrNitroman

Nice surprise this morning: I wake up to see that I'm still in top 100, dropped from #14 to #65 in the last 6 hours
No sarcasm, I am really pleased, during Venom Heroic I went from top 20 to #175 in the same period!

OK I suppose that the trick to gain a cover is to have no hope
(that and the random pull of your bracket)
RNG gods are versatile!

Unknown

Lystrata wrote:

There reeeally is something wrong with the scoring for these things. A player at 21st should not be getting the same lowly cover reward as a player at 150th. I decide to go for 'top 150' on this PvE, because I simply couldn't be bothered grinding for top 20, and it was pleasantly relaxing.

However, my partner really wanted top 20, for the two covers, and the amount of time/health packs he had to put into it to aim for it... and then to drop to 21 in the last 4 minutes, missing out by 40 points... was absurd.

Vastly different amounts of energy/time spent on the game, for ultimately the same reward (because iso/hp gains are marginal at best, irrelevant at worst, at the checkpoints between 150 and 20).

Not sure why they changed the format suddenly. I was going to cruise to around #25 but then I realized that gets me one cover so I had to change my mind halfway. Normally that'd be good for 2 covers and I figure I didn't care enough about Colossus to have to have all 3 covers, but 1 is too little.

Spoit

Is it just me, or is RBing the wrong argument to have about this. For an event like this, even if the RBing is even weaker than it is, it's foolhardy to bother trying to grind multiple days out, because the scaling will make it impossible for you to compete in the last hour, while people with the essential super boosted character and not much else of anything can go drive the community scaling to stratospheric levels through match damage alone

Bowgentle

To me, this event was everything that's wrong with PVE in MPQ right now.

1) Scaling
This needs to go. Obviously some people weren't getting scaled out because the enemy levels kept rising right until the bitter end.

2) End times.
Live in Europe? You better be satisfied with a single cover, because there's no way in hell you'll get t20.
Unless you're a vampire or a student/jobless person who can bend their lives around the final 4 hours of PVE.
Next time I'll just accept that D3 doesn't want me to be competitive and stick with t150 from the start.
I tried for t10 this time. I really tried. I was 4th 6 hours from the end, I was 40th when I got up at 5am for the final hour. During that last hour I managed to grind my way from 40th to 30th while there were alliance mates in t10 who got there because they were able to hit all refreshes during the final 9 hours.
Just pull your App from the international stores, Demiurge, it'd be more honest to us outside of the one true timezone(TM) of Murica.

3) Prize structure
Reward tier cutoffs of 2 - 10 - 20 - 150 are just stupid. There needs to be a cover as a progression reward, or at least a better cutoff for meaningful rewards.
Make it T20 for 3 covers, t50 for 2 covers, t100 for one cover.

4) Cover colours
Get back to the alliance reward being the highest single player cover.
Now I have a 0/2/0 Colossus. Of course that's _massively_ better than 0/1/0. Next time I just won't bother playing for a personal cover.

5) Old Heroics with no subs
We saw how much this sucked in the last PVE that gave out a new char. Why oh why do you insist of running these old Heroics, Demiurge?
Scrap them. Kill them with fire. They belong to a bygone era. Give us PVEs with a new structure, like Deadpool, Sentry, or the new Heroics with subs.
Anything but these horrible horrible events that you keep running over and over again.

6) Rubberband
Get rid of RB in the final 12 hours. Period. Just do it.

7) 2:25 hrs refresh cycles with timers
Look how well that turned out! People are grinding a lot less now, just like you wanted!
Seriously, please, get back to 12 hour refresh cycles. Don't literally poke people's noses in it and say "GRIND NOW".

8) Stuff ending at the same time
We had PVE, Shield Simulator and the final PVP of Season V all end within an hour of each other. End this. Make PVE end on Sunday 6am CET instead of Monday. This way there would have been a meaningful timeframe to play both PVE and finish the season in a sensible way.

9) Competitive PVE in general
That says it all, really. Player Versus ENEMIES. See? Enemies. Not other players.
Get rid of these idiotic competitive aspects of the single player campaign.
Get rid of leaderboards for PVE, get rid of giving covers out based on placement.
Make covers progression based. Please. There's enough competition in PVP. Nobody enjoys the competitive aspect of PVE. Trust me. We don't. We won this event, and we hated it. Every minute of it.

HairyDave

Bowgentle wrote:

Lots of good stuff

There isn't enough agree in the world to cover how much I concur with all of this.

(Maybe not the end times - I can cope with taking a long lunch every few days but it really does screw over you Eurobods)

yogi_

Some pretty good points in the above.

Something has changed at some point in recent PvE history.

I pretty consistently used to do well in PvE and the last few I am struggling more and earning less covers. Getting into the top X should really not be as brutal as it is.

Unknown

Yeah, so just dropping in to have my usual **** at end times - although in this particular event it was strange to have woken up at 4am in 'just 77th' place and then even stranger to grind for an hour solid only to be able to get up to 48th place so that I can have a... RED (x2) COVERED COLOSSUS! Whoop-e-dee-do.

To be fair, my growing apathy with MPQ because of the Euro end time situation led me to play 'less hard' during this event than my usual so I didn't deserve my usual top 5 or 10 but 48th and one colour cover, despite getting up at 4am, still felt a little painful.

I said I'd quit at the end of this season if PvE end times weren't addressed. The response from our new CM probably means I'll give it another season, but as the response was pretty bare-bones (and pretty much the same as the statement 9 months prior) I'm not holding out much hope.

Bowgentle - your post was spectacularly on-the-money. I now feel justified in my decision not to attack you in PvP the last few days

Unknown

I managed #4, and I'll agree that this was an awful event. Just grindy and unpleasant and the last 24 hours was just 20 iso over and over again. They need to never introduce a new character in a heroic ever again, and if they're going to insist on doing it, they need to revamp the subless heroics so they're more like the revamped ones.

FierceKiwi

Spoit wrote:

Is it just me, or is RBing the wrong argument to have about this. For an event like this, even if the RBing is even weaker than it is, it's foolhardy to bother trying to grind multiple days out, because the scaling will make it impossible for you to compete in the last hour, while people with the essential super boosted character and not much else of anything can go drive the community scaling to stratospheric levels through match damage alone

Nope not just you. This seems almost entirely a scaling issue to me. You'd have to turn the RB way down to make grinding an event like this seem appealing (and really you'd just make joining late appealing).

DrNitroman

Bowgentle wrote:

9) Competitive PVE in general
That says it all, really. Player Versus ENEMIES. See? Enemies. Not other players.
Get rid of these idiotic competitive aspects of the single player campaign.
Get rid of leaderboards for PVE, get rid of giving covers out based on placement.
Make covers progression based. Please. There's enough competition in PVP. Nobody enjoys the competitive aspect of PVE. Trust me. We don't. We won this event, and we hated it. Every minute of it.

There a lot of common sense and good suggestions to pick up in Bowgentle's post!
I don't want to repeat what he has already well stated
I just want to underline that point 9 - making pve not competitive between players- is probably the most important.
I mean we all know that fixing issues about rubberbanding / scaling / end time in a way that satisfy newbie & veterans or differente timezone players will not be easy and therefore probably not in a close future.
Accounting this, a PvE really without competition among player (no ranking) but with fair challenge and reward would please a lot of us (and not only European players who don't want to wake up early! )