Building a Better PVE Experience

HailMary

While I see a lot of merit in the OP's suggestion (e.g. grinding is not the funnest), I see a couple of issues:

1. Game balance regarding low-level players - PVPs are largely dominated by high-level players. Sharding mitigates this to an extent, but I think it's fair to say that multi-L166 players generally whomp in PVP. As a multi-L166 player, I still support making PVEs favor the little guy a bit more. Aside from new-character debuts, they have far poorer 3*-cover ROI than PVPs for high-level players -- and new-char debuts are only better if you care about getting new covers ASAP (which I do ).

2. Cover outflow - The devs seem intent on maintaining a steady new-character cover outflow rate that's pegged to X percentages of active players. As noted by others, it'd be rather difficult to tweak scaling so that these percentages can be maintained. We know how bad the devs mispredicted player behavior in the past when setting high progression rewards in PVEs. That's not to say that proper scaling for progression-based rewards is untenable, especially since JM's model gets rid of complicating factors like rubberbanding, but it'd be a tough balancing act. I have a sneaking suspicion that controlled grinding itself exists largely as a semi-organic means to manage scaling.

There have been occasional exceptions to this: individual nodes have rewarded Hulk covers before, and one PVE node even gave you a red Sentry (not-so-coincidentally timed right after a series of aggravating server failures). However, cover outflow rate as a percentage of players has changed very rarely.

3. Providing loaner characters for Essential nodes - This breaks the business model underlying Essential nodes. Players without Essential chars are encouraged to buy event tokens/token packs in order to pull the required char(s). Giving them a loaner greatly undermines this. You could argue that this revenue drop may be balanced out by more people getting the new char and thus opening up a roster slot anyway. However, not only does that veer away from the presumably critical cover-outflow-rate target, but those willing to buy token packs for the Essential chars will need to buy the slots needed to house the Essential chars and presumably try to get the 3* cover reward as well, which nets more roster-slot purchases per willing player. Which model is better (financially) would depend on how many players currently buy token packs to pull an Essential char vs. how many more players the devs are willing to give 3* cover rewards to.

Unknown

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Phantron wrote:

The current (heroic DA) isn't really that time zone sensitive because it's so grindy that it's a lot more important whether you get your 15 cycles' worth of nodes in as opposed to doing them in the most optimal pattern. Yes missing the end of sub still sucks (I miss them both too) but if I was actually grinding like past events it wouldn't have mattered much because everyone gets very little from rubberband, even on the last cycle. Now I chose to not grind much for heroic DA and my place reflect that (started out #100 after first sub, went up to about 20 yesterday but probably fell back below 100 again since I had a block of 16 or so hours without playing).

I'm at 80k points having grinded relatively sub-optimally for both subs, so to have a 20k lead over RIO who grinded optimally but missed the end of the sub because of EU times probably means that grinding the "end of the sub" matters a lot more than you think. I think for EU players, the end of the sub is like the last 8 hours of it since they need to sleep, so they're missing out on 2-3 clears at the end which probably accounts for that extra 10k I got per sub.

I'm sitting at around 60K and missed all the end cycles but I also missed a ton of regular cycles too. The rubberband just doesn't make up for missing a cycle completely. Maybe you can squeeze out an extra 6K as opposed to the usual 3-4K at the end but that's still not going to account for 20K. If you want 20K it's more reliable to just get more cycles in. Of course whether you can even beat those nodes reliably cycle is a whole different question, and I suspect part of the reason why I didn't pay much attention to not missing cycle is why bother trying to meet a tough schedule when you've a good chance of not even winning.

Unknown

I've found the rubber banding in this last heroic to be much more mild. If I pushed to top 10 for a subbracket, I don't find myself out of top 100 in 8 hours, rather closer to 25 or so. Have been able to approximately clear nodes twice or thrice every 8 hours and maintain a decent rank, something that has been lacking for someone who works a regular job 8-4.

As for the requiring of Psylocke, d3 already mitigated that by awarding many of her covers in the past month. If you're any sort of regular player, (probably top 25% with at least a 2* roster), you should have picked up a cover in one of the events, if you didn't have one before in the last Psylocke pass.

The high levels are hard to get right because they're also trying to maintain the game for 90% of players who aren't at top levels.