The Hulk event scorecard

TheVulture

Please post your own!
(Or just a thank you to the devs.)

Content: A
Tons to do - positive overload at some points, such as having 4 mission zones on the go at once!
A good mix of paired easy & hard zones, a meta progress bar to monitor and even a meta tournament for the entire player-base to participate in - top notch.

Story: A
For a puzzle game, this had it all; globe-trotting, banter, Stark-snark, character development for Hulk/Juggernaut/Daken, plot teasers in the finale...
Perhaps could have benefited from Bruce Banner showing up to elaborate on his mystery device though, as the 2nd week did have quite a bit of following Hulk around without further context.

Difficulty: B
As I said before; a good mix of paired easy & hard zones - plus some uber-finale fights to top it all off!
The vs Hulk missions were also a nice development, being on-curve difficulty wise but having a completely different tempo to the usual battles.
I do have 2 grumbles, however:

1. Too many 'guest star' party members + 2 is 1 too many recurring 'guest stars'.
This would not have been a big deal, if it weren't for the fact they were massively under-levelled relative to opponents and it was very impractical (if even possible) to have enough covers & ISO to level our own versions of them.
I am fine with including mild temptation/pressure to buy covers/ISO for an event, but in some zones if felt like every mission had a handicap guest star and sometimes even 2!

2. The Dark Avengers would benefit from some middle-ground between Moonstone and Ragnorak/beyond-1*-cap-Juggernaut.
At the moment there's a huge gulf between Moonstone (11 red to take off 20-33% of a character's health) and Ragnorak/beyond-1*-cap-Juggernaut (2-6 red/green to begin a relentless cascade of death), which does lead to big spikes in difficulty - all the more so if either heavy-hitter is teamed with green-generating henchmen (limits their versatility rather).
It doesn't help that Ragnorak had 5/5 covers even when in his 50s, which was a bit of a shock!
If the Dark Avengers could get new characters or 'elite' henchmen - or even just start mixing in The Hood and Doctor Doom (both of which are mid-power and don't feed off henchmen) - it would ease the pressure/randomness of having a 3 red tile drop sway the course of battle.
(Alternatively, if possible, utilize high level Ragnorak with 1-3 red covers only?)

Rewards: A
I think the rewards were truly excellent, from the 3* cover for everyone to the 1000s of Hulk sets given out at the end & the sheer volume of rotating mission zones.
Aside from Hulk, I would actually single out the standardized mission rewards as the greatest refinement - having 99.9% of missions using the same loot table of boost > 100 ISO > 500 ISO > standard token gave the event incredible replay value and dramatically increased the overall productivity relative to previous PvE events.
I very much hope this is the model going forwards, though I do think that the boosts could be tailored more as HAMMER target locks every time was excessive - especially from Dark Avenger team missions when the Dark Avengers were clearly the toughest fights of the event.

Thanks for this event, D3 devs - you certainly raised the bar!

Unknown

Great observations that I generally agree with.

The only rough spot is the lack of clarity regarding the final progression reward that resulted in many of us missing out just barely despite having the time, resources, and willingness to play for them.

Overall, this was an improvement over The Hunt. The game feels like it's getting better. The community has been helpful as well to support newbies who struggle with mismatched expectations relative to their own progression vs. rewards.

Unknown

Loved the event! Loved the story and prizes! A* A* A*
49995 left me feeling robbed right at the last! Would happily do it all again! Can't wait for next ep of the story!

Unknown

I agree this event was a blast. My only complaint 49450 with 6 hours to go

Dayv

I'm a little disappointed that I missed the last progression reward by 17 points, but much happier that the end scores were relatively stable, unlike the end of The Hunt. I think that's the real trade off here. What exacerbated it is the bug where missions don't show you their correct available points. I did the first one, looked at it again and saw it was replay able with points still showing, and decided to do each mission right away before farming any one mission. By the time I realized I'd seen false points, it was too late to do anything (wait for a little bit of rubberbanding) to get my score higher.

That said, I got three Hulk covers and a 4* Wolverine for the display case, and I don't even like Punisher that much. Some goals *should* be difficult to reach.

KidInsomnia

ghostlightning wrote:

Great observations that I generally agree with.

The only rough spot is the lack of clarity regarding the final progression reward that resulted in many of us missing out just barely despite having the time, resources, and willingness to play for them.

Overall, this was an improvement over The Hunt. The game feels like it's getting better. The community has been helpful as well to support newbies who struggle with mismatched expectations relative to their own progression vs. rewards.

As one of those "newbies" I really have to say it was like 70% dev event refinement and 30% community still treating those valid complaints as "newbies." ;D

They made all the right changes to lead to a totally fair and achievable end game. I started in the 300-1500 zone and ended there.

Have to give a community shout out, though, to that guy with the Black Widow tactic for Final Showdown. TOTALLY got me my final -1500 placement.

Unknown

Necrofessor wrote:

I agree this event was a blast. My only complaint 49450 with 6 hours to go

Agree completely.

Also, Great post OP/TC.

And also, and this may just be on iPad, when the event is over I would like to see where I was ranked. Instead I just get you were top 5000.

Unknown

Personally I would have liked to know that I needed to grind out 250 more points earlier in the week to get that red Punisher. After a week of effort thinking I'd be able to get it (and constantly being rubber banded to where it required a LOT more effort than people who didn't play nearly as much just because I was actually playing the events) that was incredibly frustrating. Still glad to have my 2/1/2 Hulk (I am not a power player who can afford to buy cover upgrades--I buy some, but only the random shots), but would really like to have a 1/1/1 Punisher to go with it.

Unknown

Yeah they could still "fix" this common complaint by just doling out a red punisher to everyone just like they did with the hulk cover.

Imagine all the happy posts here if they had done that this morning with the event rewards. All the puzzled (no pun intended ) posts about "what is this? But I am so happy" would have been terrific.

Unknown

After having just entered 500+ grades in the last week for my students this feels like a fitting end to the semester for me

Using the categories from the op:

Content: A+, nicely done with the sub events and global goal.

Story: B, Meh for me, plus lack of devil dinoish guest stars

Difficulty: A, A tough category for the devs considering the varying range of teams we all can produce. The more difficult battles were fun, even though I never left them without full health

Rewards: A++, I was close to the final progression reward but I didn't get it because I refused to grind at all in this event. Given that fact and the amount of iso I received this event was awesome. And I wanted two hulk covers so the free one they gave everyone was a pleasant surprise.

Unknown

buckfanana wrote:

Personally I would have liked to know that I needed to grind out 250 more points earlier in the week to get that red Punisher. After a week of effort thinking I'd be able to get it (and constantly being rubber banded to where it required a LOT more effort than people who didn't play nearly as much just because I was actually playing the events) that was incredibly frustrating. Still glad to have my 2/1/2 Hulk (I am not a power player who can afford to buy cover upgrades--I buy some, but only the random shots), but would really like to have a 1/1/1 Punisher to go with it.

But that thinking is poisonious. If you had grinded that extra X many points, it would have affected your rubberbanding in future. You would have lost some of those points as a result (much like some of us lost points during the last 12 hours as we completed events, getting less than we hoped).

Additionally, if the top folks had grinded a little more, or a little less, everyone's rubberbanding would have been different, which also would have moved the goal line.

D3P is not in control of player's actions. The best they could do is maybe try to adjust point scoring on the fly, but I think the majority of the playerbase would prefer they didn't try that.

In all, my scorecard:
Content - B: Honestly, I think there was too much, sometimes. But very happy with it.
Story - B: The end was really interesting, but some of the middle fell a bit flat.
Difficulty: A: There was a very wide range of difficulty, some challenge for all levels, and it was awesome to see that. I would, some day, like to see an opponent that was immune to stuns, or couldn't be stunned more than one round, so that 5blue Spidey wasn't the end all be all of PVE events though ;P
Rewards - A: Lots of opportunity for tokens, including buff-pack characters, tons of Iso, good progression rewards. Would have liked to see some HP mixed in some events like the hunt, but least there was were chances for it in the sub-events.
Scoring - A: Lesser rubberbanding in effect allowed players to stay competative, without grinding themselves to death, and still allowed for the ranks to be fairly stable. Kudos to the team. It sounds like almost everyone on the forums who was trying to got a top 1500 placement got one, and most people who expected a top 300 stayed in that range as well. While there may be improvements to be had, they should be minor tweaks at this point, and probably to event values, rather than to the rubberbanding algorithm.

Net Score: A-
Some minor tweaking to be done, but if they used this event as the template for all further PVE events, I would not be displeased.

Unknown

HulkSmash wrote:

Loved the event! Loved the story and prizes! A* A* A*
49995 left me feeling robbed right at the last! Would happily do it all again! Can't wait for next ep of the story!

It just came up starting over, the exact same Hulk mission, not sure if this was intended or not, but seems cool!

Unknown

I think the repeating event makes everything better!

ONWARD TO 50,000!