JUGGERNAUt HEROIC! Sep 12 - Sep 15

Unknown

The most dissapointing feature of this Jugg HC has been its roster.

I mean, I collect and train heroes so I can play with them and enjoy different strategies - especially when nodes get harder and harder.
For Juggs, my selection was pretty much stuck to OBW+LThor+Wolvie, which I had to use over and over and over. That made the grind even more unbearable.

GrumpySmurf1002

Bowgentle wrote:

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

I actually like the scaling in the last two PvEs. When you don't have that scaling, it really becomes a "who can hit the nodes hardest in the last hour," which is the worst with PvE. No, I couldn't do a thing about the 3 Daken nodes by the end of the event, but I'm reasonably sure no one else could easily.

However, w/ scaling, you need the rubberband in place. It needs to be worth it to hit those nodes.

So I agree, if one goes, both have to go. But I'd much rather see events where getting the high points at the end of the event is challenging as all heck.

Unknown

ill add my 2cents considering I finished 1st with 70k points. (comparing to my last 3 PvE which I finished 1, 5, 1)

I can honestly say that true to the dev's words, the rubberbanding was somewhat toned down. It was still high but the lead 2-3 refreshes worth, was holding me up for the duration of the last 24 hrs. As the nodes became more difficult, it sort of just made everyone gain at a predictable pace.

While I enjoyed this much more than I did during the Venom: Heroic which I was mad scrambling in the last 2 hours and it was not fun. I really did not do anything different then, but this time the only gripe I have is that the nodes become so difficult for me I have to constantly enter a match boosted. Even with a L212 Thor, it was not enough. I bet everyone underestimated how powerful an extra skill for a buffed Daken became. In the past I would and could ignore him, but now I have to take him out first. His blue is too fast and oftens cripples my team early. Jugg is no fun either but at least he self-damages. Whereas Daken's healing would win every time Im down to 1 vs 1.

In Summary

The progression reward clearly needs tweaking. 20k top reward and I achieved 70k. Something isnt right here.
Rubberband feels about right, but could still could use a notch or two weaker.
Difficulty and scaling over all is fine, but somehow it feels like the stronger my feature character is, the harder it becomes. It should be the other way around. It removes any incentive to level up and max a feature character's covers. Somehow in the previous PvE matches, I had a way easier time with the last few PvE than I did this one and my feature character was extremely weak. I was looking forward to AI dominance with a L212 4/4/4 Thor and the AI easily destroyed me in half the matches in the last 24+ hours (without boost)

Moral

DrNitroman wrote:

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! )

Did this first Heroic Oscorp run.

All progression rewards. Some small ISO for placement. No rubberbanding.

Top progression reward was for anyone that could play optimally 15 hours a day for the full event. No subs, so 20 ISO per for the remainder of the 5 day event.

Developers make top prizes challenging. It's either grinding vs the clock or other players. The clock is less merciful and never gives up.

NotYou13

Bowgentle wrote:

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.

If ever there was a post that needed to "go green", this is it.

Unknown

Bowgentle wrote:

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.

+2 for this going green

simonsez

MattyMattMatt wrote:

I was in a strange bracket with the people placing higher than me having a less developed and smaller roster.

In this event, that wasn't strange, it was the norm. I blame especially bad scaling that made the "hard" nodes too trivial for people with **** rosters, and way too hard for people with good rosters.

simonsez

GrumpySmurf1002 wrote:

I actually like the scaling in the last two PvEs. When you don't have that scaling, it really becomes a "who can hit the nodes hardest in the last hour," which is the worst with PvE. No, I couldn't do a thing about the 3 Daken nodes by the end of the event, but I'm reasonably sure no one else could easily.

I'm not sure "who can hit the nodes hardest in the last hour" is any different than "who can hit the nodes (except for the ones that are too hard for anyone to beat) hardest in the last hour"

That said, one problem in this event that seemed worse than usual is that people with **** rosters (ie 1 cover Thors and Hulks) had no trouble beating the hardest nodes.

simonsez

Can I get a clarification from folks who want to turn PvE into progression awards only? Do you mean you want it to be an "everyone gets a trophy" style event? If so, that'd be pretty terrible for all the people who don't like PvP and prefer getting high end awards via PvE.

If not, what exactly is the difference between requiring a score of 70k to rank first and get all the rank awards, vs. requiring a score of 70k to get all the progression awards? At least with the former, you have constant feedback as to where you stand. If the latter, I'd have no idea during an event whether or not I'm on pace to hit the target.

Unknown

simonsez wrote:

Can I get a clarification from folks who want to turn PvE into progression awards only? Do you mean you want it to be an "everyone gets a trophy" style event? If so, that'd be pretty terrible for all the people who don't like PvP and prefer getting high end awards via PvE.

If not, what exactly is the difference between requiring a score of 70k to rank first and get all the rank awards, vs. requiring a score of 70k to get all the progression awards? At least with the former, you have constant feedback as to where you stand. If the latter, I'd have no idea during an event whether or not I'm on pace to hit the target.

The main difference is that if you could pass the bar to get the final prize at 7 pm local time, you don't have to stay up to the end and grind it out. Along with that there would be enough transparency to get a sense of what you have to do, which would be easier, because you could eliminate rubberbanding completely under the the new system. You'd get a clear sense after the first clear "oh, I'm going to need to do ten clears to get the top 3 covers. Better do 3 Friday, 4 Saturday, and then I can wrap up with 3 Sunday and not have to stay up late."

rbdragon

Bowgentle wrote:

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.

I don't know that I completely agree with everything, but a lot of valid points are made....

1) Scaling, I believe, is a good thing - but needs to be toned down. No level should become unbeatable, let alone several in one event. Nodes should reduce if you lose at the same rate they increase if you win. And make it if you retreat in PvE, either the characters are downed or the node becomes unplayable for "X" minutes - to prevent "working the system".

2) The fact that there are not rotating end times baffles me. I'm an American living in Canada on the west coast, so end times are pretty fantastic for me almost all the time (9pm/am). Having said that - I would so be in favor of rotating times...Start each PvE 6 hours later than the last one so it ends 6 hours later and have rotating end times of 12am/6am/12pm/6pm EST. Someone's always going to be unhappy, but at least it changes. But let's leave out the whole "Murica" stuff...everytime I see that word I find it offensive.....and it takes away from an otherwise great post.

3 & 4) Spot on - this change is extremely stupid. 21st is not 150th D3 - stop treating it as if it is. My suggestion: 1-3 for 4 bonus; 4 - 30 gets 3 covers; 31 - 75 gets 2 covers; 76 - 150 gets 1 cover. Alliance cover = 4-30 cover.

5 & 6) Couldn't. Agree. More.

7) I actually don't mind the 2:25 cycle, but the 12hr cycle was better....

8) They have a break now after the seasons because they don't want us getting burnt out. why the hell would you end everything at the same time, burning us out??? This has been my biggest point of contention with D3 for a long time - events should have at least a 3 hour buffer, and probably a 12 hour buffer between end times would be most suitable - that way you aren't neutering your roster in a PvE only to go to the PvP and be lacking a certain character that is needed because they were downed in the PvE event that just ended.

9) This one I both agree and disagree as I do like the challenge of going up against others, but if they changed it to all progression-based and allowed players to play at their leisure - that would fix so many of the issues above, so I'd be in favor of that.

DrNitroman

Ben Grimm wrote:

simonsez wrote:

Can I get a clarification from folks who want to turn PvE into progression awards only? Do you mean you want it to be an "everyone gets a trophy" style event? If so, that'd be pretty terrible for all the people who don't like PvP and prefer getting high end awards via PvE.

If not, what exactly is the difference between requiring a score of 70k to rank first and get all the rank awards, vs. requiring a score of 70k to get all the progression awards? At least with the former, you have constant feedback as to where you stand. If the latter, I'd have no idea during an event whether or not I'm on pace to hit the target.

The main difference is that if you could pass the bar to get the final prize at 7 pm local time, you don't have to stay up to the end and grind it out. Along with that there would be enough transparency to get a sense of what you have to do, which would be easier, because you could eliminate rubberbanding completely under the the new system. You'd get a clear sense after the first clear "oh, I'm going to need to do ten clears to get the top 3 covers. Better do 3 Friday, 4 Saturday, and then I can wrap up with 3 Sunday and not have to stay up late."

agree with Ben's explanation
more, let's say the top reward requires 15h (or 30h or 45!) of cumulated time of play to be reached you should be able to choose when to spend this time along the course of the event.
The more cumulated time is required the more difficult is the event

simonsez

Ben Grimm wrote:

The main difference is that if you could pass the bar to get the final prize at 7 pm local time, you don't have to stay up to the end and grind it out

Maybe this isn't what you mean, but this sounds to me like you want top rank style awards while being able to play less and not grind as much. Which is pretty close to the "everyone gets a trophy" idea that I don't want to see PvP turn into. XForce black wasn't easy to get, and it shouldn't be easy to get. No real difference to me whether it's rewarded via rank or progression, so long as the required level of effort is the same... what is important to me is that it doesn't get cheapened by making it attainable via casual play... and to me, doing 3-4 clears a day, and no final grind, is casual play.

GrumpySmurf1002

simonsez wrote:

Can I get a clarification from folks who want to turn PvE into progression awards only? Do you mean you want it to be an "everyone gets a trophy" style event? If so, that'd be pretty terrible for all the people who don't like PvP and prefer getting high end awards via PvE.

If not, what exactly is the difference between requiring a score of 70k to rank first and get all the rank awards, vs. requiring a score of 70k to get all the progression awards? At least with the former, you have constant feedback as to where you stand. If the latter, I'd have no idea during an event whether or not I'm on pace to hit the target.

The way I've envisioned it, you eliminate the arbitrary rubberband/scoring. Just base it strictly on what you clear.

Take the last simulator. 6 subs, 10 nodes. 60 total. Clear 1 nodes - standard token. 2) Iso8. 5) health pack. 10) boosts 15) Heroic Token 20) HP 25) Iso 30) Iso 35) Heroic Token 40)Beast 45) Thor Red 50) Thor Yellow 55) Thor Green 60) Fury Blue.

Ramp up the difficulty to make getting 60 nearly impossible (heavily scaled Daken - Hood - Don type insanity).

GrumpySmurf1002

simonsez wrote:

I'm not sure "who can hit the nodes hardest in the last hour" is any different than "who can hit the nodes (except for the ones that are too hard for anyone to beat) hardest in the last hour"

That said, one problem in this event that seemed worse than usual is that people with **** rosters (ie 1 cover Thors and Hulks) had no trouble beating the hardest nodes.

The difference is that the hardest nodes being worth the most seriously slows down people counting on the rubberband to get back in to contention. If you need to do a full pass to get back into contention but suddenly can't achieve 1/3 the points available, your ability to catch up is greatly diminished. That gives the edge to people who got in before they were scaled out from being able to complete those matches.

CrookedKnight

Ben Grimm wrote:

if they're going to insist on doing it, they need to revamp the subless heroics so they're more like the revamped ones.

I don't see why this is so complicated. Is the team so small that they can't even plug existing encounters into a new set of subs?

Wobby

Re: Thor so obtainable-- part of me thinks this was intentional to make sure more people had access to him... And thus ensure competition would be extremely fierce at the end.

Make no mistake: the end times and crossover of characters is obviously completely intentional. I was able to optimize Health Pack usage and have never bought any... But I can say with absolute certainty that their sales on health packs was probably better last night than the prior week combined. Or more.

Unknown

simonsez wrote:

Ben Grimm wrote:

The main difference is that if you could pass the bar to get the final prize at 7 pm local time, you don't have to stay up to the end and grind it out

Maybe this isn't what you mean, but this sounds to me like you want top rank style awards while being able to play less and not grind as much. Which is pretty close to the "everyone gets a trophy" idea that I don't want to see PvP turn into. XForce black wasn't easy to get, and it shouldn't be easy to get. No real difference to me whether it's rewarded via rank or progression, so long as the required level of effort is the same... what is important to me is that it doesn't get cheapened by making it attainable via casual play... and to me, doing 3-4 clears a day, and no final grind, is casual play.

Not the 4* - the 4* should still be very difficult to get. What I mean is that to get top 10, you have to play in the last hour. It is literally impossible to get one of each cover now without grinding the last hour, and maybe impossible to get two different covers. What would be better for the system would be you play about as much as you o now, but you can set the schedule. The 3-4 was just an example; don't read too much into that specific number. Just a matter of knowing ahead of time "I have to do X clears to get the covers I want." The 4* should be set significantly higher than the top 3* cover.

Unknown

The arguments for scaling is always difficult to tell because you don't get to ask the guy who passed you up what are his levels. For all you know his levels could be higher than you and he just outplayed you. Additionally in these heroic events you tend to get a lot of weird thing going on with the guy whose highest character is a level 40 Thor 3* which the game conveniently forgets is really level 130. Yes your level 166 Thor is really level 256 too, but 256 versus enemies scaled for 166 is far less dominant compared to 130 versus enemy scaled for 40. As far as I can tell for equal strength roster your score appears to be part of the scaling factor too which makes it pretty hard to leapfrog someone with any scaling trickery. There's all kinds of problem with heroic events when the roster are uneven but maybe it's done to balance the fact that non heroic events are almost always dominated by maxed rosters. Normally even heroic events are fairly max roster dominated but this one the roster is so bad that having everyone maxed out would have very little impact because you got no one useful to use besides Thor.

I'm not sure why people keep on bring up their scores relative to progression thresholds as if it means anything. If you want to go back to the dark ages the Thor cover would be at 200K and nobody would even have half of the points to get it. They must have figured that it wasn't worth figuring out how to set the progression rewards at a challenging level so now it's pretty much a 3* cover for sort of showing up for your efforts. They're already set at a 'everyone gets a trophy' level and no they're not handing out even more trophies for just showing up. Be glad you get a trophy in the first place, because for a long time nobody got a trophy at all in most PvE events.

mohio

Ben Grimm wrote:

simonsez wrote:

Ben Grimm wrote:

The main difference is that if you could pass the bar to get the final prize at 7 pm local time, you don't have to stay up to the end and grind it out

Maybe this isn't what you mean, but this sounds to me like you want top rank style awards while being able to play less and not grind as much. Which is pretty close to the "everyone gets a trophy" idea that I don't want to see PvP turn into. XForce black wasn't easy to get, and it shouldn't be easy to get. No real difference to me whether it's rewarded via rank or progression, so long as the required level of effort is the same... what is important to me is that it doesn't get cheapened by making it attainable via casual play... and to me, doing 3-4 clears a day, and no final grind, is casual play.

Not the 4* - the 4* should still be very difficult to get. What I mean is that to get top 10, you have to play in the last hour. It is literally impossible to get one of each cover now without grinding the last hour, and maybe impossible to get two different covers. What would be better for the system would be you play about as much as you o now, but you can set the schedule. The 3-4 was just an example; don't read too much into that specific number. Just a matter of knowing ahead of time "I have to do X clears to get the covers I want." The 4* should be set significantly higher than the top 3* cover.

The way I see it the progression style helps keep the following from happening (and this just happened): I joined with about 12 hours to go and played as optimally as I could for those 12 hours. I scored 65.5k and took 5th place. My alliance mate joined on the first day, scored a couple hundred points higher but "only" managed top 20. Surely he put in more effort for his points and deserves the greater reward, yet because his bracket was tougher or older or whatever, he walks away with fewer rewards than I got with a lower score. It might seem like progression style rewards would be handing out covers to everyone, but that's just cause most people here on the forum are in the top 5% of players so yeah! most of us would get all the progression rewards. Doesn't mean they couldn't find a balance where they're still handing out an amount of covers they're comfortable with.

Also as for the 4* issue, they could keep the competition part for that and hp/iso rewards to ensure that there's still some semblance of competition since many people thrive on that sort of thing.