Current PvE completely dominated by weak rosters

Unknown

I'm counting at least 8 out of 10 in top 10 without anyone with level 166 characters in Prodigal Sun and I joined almost right away, so this isn't some kind of backwater bracket. Yes people will say the rewards for Spiderman suck but that's never stopped from the competitive PvE guys from putting up crazy scores in the past over stuff that didn't matter. I decided to think about the problem and I realized that community scaling has been the only balancing factor keeping the game fair for maxed rosters. Yes, it's not actually the rubberbanding that's doing that. We're all used to seeing the guys with random weak roster start with a huge lead. People seem to believe (and I used to too) that eventually these guys fail to some 'rubberbanding magic', but that's not true. These guys get knocked out by community scaling. Let us imagine rubberband is so strong that whoever plays last always wins, and that nodes remain trivial enough for the nodes such that weak roster can rack up such scores in the first place (even the early scores imply they must have won a lot). Well, the number of weak rosters vastly outnumber the max rosters, so just by probability alone you'd expect the winner to be someone with a weak roster. Further, in the case where rubberband is so strong that the last person to play wins, it's the person who started out as #1 that has the best chance of winning because he started out in the best position to afford him to play as late as possible. The reason why rubberband magic works is that at some point, community scaling goes high enough that the weak roster guys end up clearing less nodes than you can, and combined with any halfway strong rubberband modifier this allows you to overtake them. It also helped that back in the past the max rosters have Magneto to offset the unfair scaling.

Scaling has always been unfair to the top rosters. My data from Gauntlet shows I have +80 levels on all my opponents by the finale bracket compared to even max 166s because I have X Force maxed, and I think those 166s have around +80 levels on their opponents over a max 95 roster. I guess D3's logic is that 166s are about 72 levels higher so it balances out, but 3*s are more like 50 levels higher (prior to level shift the level difference was 56 and a +40 level boost made most 2* as good as 3*s if not better) not to mention the boosted 3*s usually don't work well as a team (BP/GSBW/Punisher wouldn't work well at all as a team versus the higher nodes) while the 2*s tend to be pretty self-sufficient, perhaps due to having fewer number of them, so that it's easy to make use of the boosted 2*s on the nodes in a team. It used to be that if you're maxed out you pray to the community scaling to bring his terrible wrath to all the infidels, and for the most part the community scaling god does answer to our prayers. Well, due to extremely weak rubberbanding the wrath of the community scaling no longer arrives at a point where it'd matter because at that point the weak rosters already have an insurmountable lead. So just play more? Well that's akin to XMen's 'play harder' strategy. You can't just play harder when your nodes start out in the 200-250 range because that's an amount nobody can reliably beat without using a lot of boosts, and what's the motivation to do when you realize weaker rosters are probably fighting guys that are lower level (especially after level boosts)? The reason why community scaling helps the max roster is because our scaling starts out so messed up that it generally cannot possibly get any worse, and some cases it literally can't get any worse when you've 395s during the height of the scaling. Sure, your levels are still going up, but whether it's 250 or 350 really doesn't mean much for you. They're all barely beatable if you pull out all the stops and certainly not worth the effort to grind continously. While your nodes go from 200 to 350 you're waiting for the weak roster's nodes to go from 85 (trivial to them) to 225 (very hard) so that you'd at least be on an even playing field, and sure max versus 350 looks pretty bad, but it's still far more doable than trying to outpace a 2* roster fighting 85s while you're fighting 250s.

The arbitary process of slapping an extra +80 levels to everything solely based on roster needs to end. X Force is powerful but he's not worth +240 total enemy levels on the Gauntlet, and this applies to any other separation between 3* and 2* or even 1*s. The game isn't so simple that you can say '+200 total levels between a max 166 and a max 94 looks about right'. It can be wrong in either direction though historically it's always been wrong in favor of the weaker rosters. I understand they want the newbies to have a chance at competing, but this can't come at the expense of handicapping all the established players. Roster should be scaled up to match the content as opposed to scaling the content up to match the roster. Given 1*/2* cover now grow on trees I think it's pretty safe to assume most people ought to have a maxed 1* or 2* fairly quickly, so you can apply a Combined Arms type modifier to everyone's rosters (can't do Balance of Power type modifier because otherwise the guy with 3 level 1 1* max covered is going to have a huge advantage due to super fast healing) and then keep the enemy level static. Actually you can then increase enemy level by community scaling and since everyone's faces the same enemies that'd still be fair, though we probably don't want to do that right away because you don't want to risk the event locking out too many players on your first attempt.

Unknown

1) not that many advanced rosters need Spidey rewards.

2) a lot of players are still burnt out from the heroic pve grind last week that lasted forever. BTW, I thought MPQ had decided we hate marathons. This previous decision was correct.

3) a lot of ppl joined late just to get the doc ock progressive.

4) I'm in 10th in my main. And believe me when I say, it's not BC I'm trying to do well. The iso is just too hard to resist.

5) the pve coincides with the ending of the season. So I'm thankful for Spidey reward, so I can relax and focus more on PvP and shield training.

Unknown

My top ten:
6x110 , fully covered 94 XF
4x94, very early into the transition stage.
1x166, 2x139, 2x119, all mostly to fully covered.
2x270, 2x165, 6x160, 12 other @ 100 or higher.
7x94, early transition
2x270, all maxed except (153)
6x120
2x166, 8x100+
1x166, 8x100+
6x166, 10x100+

I didn't jump right in, but I did join during the 1st sub. Still plenty of strong players doing well, but I don't think anyone is going to grind that hard for a shot at a single when it's not a sure thing, and rewards are kind of ...bad.

Unknown

As a player with a 'weak' roster let me just say, leave us PVE.

It's nice to have a place where we can grind 8-10 hours on a weekend and actually rank top 10, let alone top 50 for once. It's not as futile as PVP where we hit the 166 wall at 600 pts. Even if we do manage to win 1 out of 3 battles, we're knocked back down faster than we can climb. With PVE, what a change it is to have a place where winning actually means going up in ranks. It's not like weak roster players don't ever lose nodes (particularly the red/green feeders with Juggernaut nodes). If you take PVE away from us, where will we go to find victory? What is the point for a developing player who can't rank despite huge effort, but to deprive the community of future veterans?

Let us join you (eventually) in 3* land. You already have PVP where the best rewards are. Leave us PVE.


How many additional levels above 166s should a maxed XForce/Fury be worth? If not 80, then 40? Dependent on the current rubber band at the time?

GrumpySmurf1002

My top 10:

270 XF + nine 166s (SKYNET)
No Max 166s, 4 above 125. (immortal r4ge)
6 max 166s (immortal r4ge)
192 XF, max Patch, 6 above 140 (xstatix)
3 166s, 6 above 149 (koinonia)
270 XF + eighteen 166s (shield)
165 patch, 137 thor , mostly 2* (deadpoolrings)
2 166s, 6 above 140 (Dormammu U)
2* roster
114 punisher + 2* roster.

I'm in 24th and partially surrounded by more max rosters. The big guns don't seem to be struggling here, unfair or not.

Unknown

daibar wrote:

As a player with a 'weak' roster let me just say, leave us PVE.

It's nice to have a place where we can grind 8-10 hours on a weekend and actually rank top 10, let alone top 50 for once. It's not as futile as PVP where we hit the 166 wall at 600 pts. Even if we do manage to win 1 out of 3 battles, we're knocked back down faster than we can climb. With PVE, what a change it is to have a place where winning actually means going up in ranks. It's not like weak roster players don't ever lose nodes (particularly the red/green feeders with Juggernaut nodes). If you take PVE away from us, where will we go to find victory? What is the point for a developing player who can't rank despite huge effort, but to deprive the community of future veterans?

Let us join you (eventually) in 3* land. You already have PVP where the best rewards are. Leave us PVE.


How many additional levels above 166s should a maxed XForce/Fury be worth? If not 80, then 40? Dependent on the current rubber band at the time?

+40 would still be +120 total levels since all 3 enemies get that modifier. X Force is good but he's probably not worth 120 levels. And this can easily go the other direction. If you say there is no additional level given to enemy for having a maxed X Force then the situation is now reversed. Back when Magneto was way overpowered the extra leves for having a 166 clearly in no way made up for the extra firepower Magneto brings. There is no way this system can possibly work in the long run. Nobody knows the game well enough to say, "Well X Force should be worth exactly +13 levels on all enemies compared to a 166, but Nick Fury, he's only worth +3 levels over a 166 because he's weaker." That'd require an understanding of the game that goes far beyond comprehension. So they need to do this the other way around. If we think X Force is worth +20 levels over all enemies, then what we should do is have all characters not X Force increased by 20 levels for a PvE event. If this number works out great. If this number is too small we can collect data and increase it next time (note that this is essentially what happens with pre nerf Magneto as no amount of +level on the anybody but him would've made up for his insane power resulting max roster's utter dominance). And if it turns out we added too much? The guys with 4* also have the 3*, so if his X Force isn't doing as well as his level 186 3*s then he'd just switch to those guys instead. This should be applied for all the tier differences, so that if you made some of the lower *s too good, there's always the option of having a max roster guy going back to use them. Right now we don't have this option because even if you've an event with a strong 2* buffed (OBW, for example), your enemies are scaled for a 166 3* or even a 270 4*, so even OBW at level 134 isn't going to do well against the 250+ stuff despite being one of the strongest 2* in the game. But she sure would do fine fighting stuff scaled for a 94, which is why this is fine for the transitioning guys.

Unknown

GrumpySmurf1002 wrote:

My top 10:

270 XF + nine 166s (SKYNET)
No Max 166s, 4 above 125. (immortal r4ge)
6 max 166s (immortal r4ge)
192 XF, max Patch, 6 above 140 (xstatix)
3 166s, 6 above 149 (koinonia)
270 XF + eighteen 166s (shield)
165 patch, 137 thor , mostly 2* (deadpoolrings)
2 166s, 6 above 140 (Dormammu U)
2* roster
114 punisher + 2* roster.

I'm in 24th and partially surrounded by more max rosters. The big guns don't seem to be struggling here, unfair or not.

The guys who are doing well are probably just boosting every fight, which technically is an advantage a max roster have (due to not needing iso as much) but it's certaily not exclusive. If I wanted to go negative 10K per day doing PvE I can easily handle these nodes, but I'm not sure why I'd want to play over stuff I don't need while losing iso. But yes there are enough guys out there who don't care about that. Just look at the PvP guys that spend more HP than anything they could possibly win in that event. But just because such outliers exist doesn't mean the game is fine. Also having a 4* maxed seems to add a very considerable amount of extra scaling to all your nodes, so just max 166s isn't the highest standard of scaling anymore. Unless Gauntlet had some unusual initial scaling, the scaling a max 166 face is quite generous compared to the scaling faced by a max 270.

Unknown

daibar wrote:

As a player with a 'weak' roster let me just say, leave us PVE.

It's nice to have a place where we can grind 8-10 hours on a weekend and actually rank top 10, let alone top 50 for once. It's not as futile as PVP where we hit the 166 wall at 600 pts. Even if we do manage to win 1 out of 3 battles, we're knocked back down faster than we can climb. With PVE, what a change it is to have a place where winning actually means going up in ranks. It's not like weak roster players don't ever lose nodes (particularly the red/green feeders with Juggernaut nodes). If you take PVE away from us, where will we go to find victory? What is the point for a developing player who can't rank despite huge effort, but to deprive the community of future veterans?

Let us join you (eventually) in 3* land. You already have PVP where the best rewards are. Leave us PVE.


How many additional levels above 166s should a maxed XForce/Fury be worth? If not 80, then 40? Dependent on the current rubber band at the time?

I don't really have a dog in this fight, since I have never had a problem with PvE.......yet. Possible because I level my characters evenly? Not sure, but anyways.

PvE is the only way new characters are released, so no one is going to stop caring about a perceived unfairness while that is the status quo.

Unknown

Paintsville wrote:

daibar wrote:

As a player with a 'weak' roster let me just say, leave us PVE.

It's nice to have a place where we can grind 8-10 hours on a weekend and actually rank top 10, let alone top 50 for once. It's not as futile as PVP where we hit the 166 wall at 600 pts. Even if we do manage to win 1 out of 3 battles, we're knocked back down faster than we can climb. With PVE, what a change it is to have a place where winning actually means going up in ranks. It's not like weak roster players don't ever lose nodes (particularly the red/green feeders with Juggernaut nodes). If you take PVE away from us, where will we go to find victory? What is the point for a developing player who can't rank despite huge effort, but to deprive the community of future veterans?

Let us join you (eventually) in 3* land. You already have PVP where the best rewards are. Leave us PVE.


How many additional levels above 166s should a maxed XForce/Fury be worth? If not 80, then 40? Dependent on the current rubber band at the time?

I don't really have a dog in this fight, since I have never had a problem with PvE.......yet. Possible because I level my characters evenly? Not sure, but anyways.

PvE is the only way new characters are released, so no one is going to stop caring about a perceived unfairness while that is the status quo.

I don't consider it an imbalance. I look at it as the opposite. Newer players are at a disadvantage in PvP already, so I got no problem with harder times for older rosters in pve.

I do find it funny the have penalizes leveling your roster in PvP and pve. That makes little sense to me.

GrumpySmurf1002

Phantron wrote:

The guys who are doing well are probably just boosting every fight, which technically is an advantage a max roster have (due to not needing iso as much) but it's certaily not exclusive. If I wanted to go negative 10K per day doing PvE I can easily handle these nodes, but I'm not sure why I'd want to play over stuff I don't need while losing iso. But yes there are enough guys out there who don't care about that. Just look at the PvP guys that spend more HP than anything they could possibly win in that event. But just because such outliers exist doesn't mean the game is fine. Also having a 4* maxed seems to add a very considerable amount of extra scaling to all your nodes, so just max 166s isn't the highest standard of scaling anymore. Unless Gauntlet had some unusual initial scaling, the scaling a max 166 face is quite generous compared to the scaling faced by a max 270.

Whether or not they are boosting, the title of your post is "weak rosters are completely dominating the PvE." They're not. They're probably dominating your bracket, but that happens sometimes. The 2* grinders are every bit as capable of joining early as the hardcores.

Weak rosters have more opportunity for success in PvE, and there is zero wrong with that. In fact, I would argue that the scaling that comes with 270 XForce is every bit the equivalent of the 166 wall in PvP, if not still easier. If you can boost through it, you can still beat it. It would take an awful lot to boost a 2* roster through a 249-166-166 once, let alone often enough to get to the top prizes.

OnesOwnGrief

You people that can't place in PvP and do well in PvE. You can keep that. I on the other hand will get those same covers from the proceeding PvP that will get me a full set of covers for far less work.

I got ill during the last PvE for Ock and completely missed the end of my first sub. Dropped from potential top 5 to having to work for just one cover for placement. No big deal.

over_clocked

Phantron, pretty sure the game tells you to move on to PvP x)

And Bowgentle of DjangoUnbuffed also had a maxed XF at the time of the Gauntlet, his scaling while high was lower than yours, Phantron, so past PvE/ongoing PvE success must have counted a bit too.