Flagging a future concern about 4or and PvP reward structure

yogi_

New Thor (4* and Thor = 4or) is a very strong character.

In many instances now, very high scoring PvP players do not need the 3* covers they are winning in prizes but they need the ISO, HP, 4* covers or whatever.

Everyone is going to want 4or. When she eventually makes it into PvP, all the usual top players are going to be at it, similar to now, but there will be even more intense competition for the top few spots and this is going to make it even harder for the people who need the 3* covers.

So devs, I just wanted to flag this with you for the future. Perhaps you can have a long suggested "elite PvP" running alongside the standard one or at minimum can flatten out the very top prizes a bit and lower the reach of the 3* covers or something, but with the exact same reward structure as now, people who do not have a competitive 3* roster are done for (even worse than now).

Unknown

Rotate the covers too. If you gave top 100 blue one PVP, next time that character is up again give top 100 a different color. I don't mind spending money for HP to raise certain powers but getting the first cover can be a **** sometimes.

Unknown

I have to agree with Yogi_

F-Thor is absolutely deadly... i understand she is a 4* and all which is why she is that powerful, but as yogi_ said, now that people have had a taste of her powers, there are going to be a lot of top level players after her and her covers, meaning a lot of 3*'s covers are going to be dumped in the process which more than likely would have been useful to transitioning players...

Also, since now the player base has expanded so much, and since you guys are now planning on rotating characters in and out of coupons, any chance you can maybe allow lower ranking members in PVP to also score some 3* covers, and those in the top 100, maybe add a cover to their rewards in the process?

I know this maybe wishful thinking, but still wanted to throw it out there in case you guys are feeling nice and generous...

wirius

I agree that the game has enough end game users that there needs to be a greater division between them and the end game transitioners.

Unknown

yogi has a point. But having new Elite PVP or anything like that I think is not the solution. High end players will still compete in both. And it also takes away the idea of everyone competing against everyone. It is an open PVP world, no division between players should be made.

What can be done though is lower the rank needed for giving covers. Currently we have been getting 1 cover at T100. They can lower this to T150 maybe. Make the 2 covers at T50 and 3 covers at T10. Since many players are joining every day and many others are transitioning enough to start competing for these covers, it has started to become more of a luck thing (Because of end times as well) because you just reach an amount of points, shield and hope that you will stay up there for the cover. This is a very common phenomenon in EU. I do it and 99% of EU players does it. It was OK 2 months ago when 600pts would guarantee T100 and maybe even T50 some times. Now it is a 50/50 chance that you will stay T100 with an 8hr shield. It has happened to me 2 times to spend the HP for the shield and in the morning I was #102. You can imagine the disappointment.

So yeah, competition is growing. More people growing in power does not make it any easier to gain rewards. I think they should start to think of a way to cater for the increased population over the last year.

yogi_

Okin107 wrote:

yogi has a point. But having new Elite PVP or anything like that I think is not the solution. High end players will still compete in both. And it also takes away the idea of everyone competing against everyone. It is an open PVP world, no division between players should be made.

Yeah, there are a number of possibilities here. One that I and others have suggested is running multiple variations of the same event at the same time and you can only enter one of them or maybe there is a reward path you can pick. In terms of a single event, the only way around is something like expanding the 4* cover/s to the top 5/10/15?, but only introduce the 3* reward at this end mark and then push them out to at least another 50. Something like this could be done now.

hamsingame

I feel like an option where, when you would be rewarded a cover, instead you get the option of immediately selling it for double iso and then it passes on to the next person. Would be very difficult to code though, I think. But I think it would fix these kinds of problems.

Unknown

hamsingame wrote:

I feel like an option where, when you would be rewarded a cover, instead you get the option of immediately selling it for double iso and then it passes on to the next person. Would be very difficult to code though, I think. But I think it would fix these kinds of problems.

That is actually a brilliant idea! People on top places that do not need the rewards (Whichever reward) they can press a "Pass" button and automatically pass it to the next person in the ranks. This way, people that do not need the rewards they can just discard them and people who actually need them will keep them. The window of "Accept or Pass" should have a limited amount of time (Say 5-6 hours after the event max) for you to make a choice. Then the timer resets for the next person.

I don't know how hard it will be to program. It depends on how they keep track of winners and how they are linked with the rewards. But it would definitely be a very very very nice addition to the game.

Apart from all that, we all understand that it might have a negative impact on their revenues. Because of the only reason that lower level players might be getting more covers, this translates to less purchases of covers and HP. But still, it does not stop being an awesome idea for this game.

yogi_

This seems far more complicated than I imagine the devs would want and introduces far more questions and concerns than the problem it is seeking to solve.

Things like - How many times can you skip? What if the one person gets the offer of more than one cover? What if you don't want to give it to the next person? What if you hit the wrong button? What if the next person doesn't want it? How far does the chain go? How long do the devs allow the system to go on for? Is it going to infer with other cover giving? Does this work / not work with alliances? How many people will actually get new covers? How is it different to sharing a cover within an alliance (which from memory the devs already ruled out). And so on. Think of all the customer support tickets they will get with variations of concerns.

Within the way the current system works, it would have to be - you got place A, therefore you get prize B, the end.

Unknown

yogi_ wrote:

This seems far more complicated than I imagine the devs would want and introduces far more questions and concerns than the problem it is seeking to solve.

Things like - How many times can you skip? What if the one person gets the offer of more than one cover? What if you don't want to give it to the next person? What if you hit the wrong button? What if the next person doesn't want it? How far does the chain go? How long do the devs allow the system to go on for? Is it going to infer with other cover giving? Does this work / not work with alliances? How many people will actually get new covers? How is it different to sharing a cover within an alliance (which from memory the devs already ruled out). And so on. Think of all the customer support tickets they will get with variations of concerns.

Within the way the current system works, it would have to be - you got place A, therefore you get prize B, the end.

I can play this game too.

If I go out of the house to buy groceries, will a car hit me? Will the sun instantly burn me? Will someone randomly shoot me dead? Will the groceries store explode on my way there? Will my car be stolen?

My point is, if you decide not to do something because it requires work or because you are afraid of the unknown then you are not pointing out a valid argument. Questions arise with every little change they make in the game. All the questions you typed where asked before the launch of this game too. Did they stop developing it? Nope!

I agree that it requires work, but they do have the capacity to answer all your questions and maybe a lot more. They can implement a lot more into the game if they want to. It is their decision at the end of the day. I just wanted to point out what a nice feature it would be to have. All the technicalities you asked are minor and can all be fixed by programming.

JamieMadrox

In theory shouldn't sharding and MMR make it so that the "elite" players get lumped in together? I know when I go big in an event my next event is full of "elite" players. I've won a bracket with a score of 1300+ only to get my next bracket need 1600+ for top 5.

Unknown

How is this any different from how it's always been? This was the same case as when Nick Fury was introduced as a reward.

Trisul

If I understand the OP correctly, you are asking for stronger sharding.

I'm not sure that's a good idea. MPQ veterans frankly SHOULD be at an advantage competing for 4*. Getting 3* covers SHOULD be pretty hard for transitioners.

I'm not hearing much more than "Give us more covers", a thought that might be popular with the player base but is a terrible business idea. The devs made it pretty clear that they want to pace the transition pretty slowly.

Unknown

Theory and practice differ due to MMR tanking. It would be nice if all the X-Men were in the same bracket, 100th place can be 2,000 points for them.

In practice sharding makes getting top 100 trivial, and top 25 should be your realistic goal if you need 3* covers. Even 2* rosters should be able to get 100th place. If you can consistently place top 25 there is a top 100 alliance out there who wants you, so go join it. Maybe shield hop for the 1100 cover if needed, but probably not. I built my roster off of top 25 finishes and 8 hour shields to the end. Net gains in and covers.

Also, always get the PvE progression reward. It's crazy simple to get those now. If you don't care about the awarded covers, just get the progression 3* and bail.

Zen808

Okin107 wrote:

hamsingame wrote:

I feel like an option where, when you would be rewarded a cover, instead you get the option of immediately selling it for double iso and then it passes on to the next person. Would be very difficult to code though, I think. But I think it would fix these kinds of problems.

That is actually a brilliant idea! People on top places that do not need the rewards (Whichever reward) they can press a "Pass" button and automatically pass it to the next person in the ranks. This way, people that do not need the rewards they can just discard them and people who actually need them will keep them. The window of "Accept or Pass" should have a limited amount of time (Say 5-6 hours after the event max) for you to make a choice. Then the timer resets for the next person.

100 people per bracket in the prize bucket x 5-6hrs to make a decision = Oh no! And it has to be real time - maybe I don't want the prize if it's only the bottom 1 cover, but I need the second cover, and I don't know whether it will get passed down to me or not.

Elite PVP, meanwhile, or anything to separate the weak players from the strong will be conplained about as "punishing for improving."

The simplest solution is still to make non-Season PVPs with older 3* prizes, and scatter them throughout the Season. These have less incentive for the big fish to play, while still not wicking the cannon fodder away from regular Season events.

CrookedKnight

I've had the idea of an "elite" bracket where the prizes are 4* covers (still just for the top finishers)and giant amounts of ISO, while the transitioners get 3* covers and less ISO, for a while. Not sure how it would work, but it would reflect the vastly different priorities of the transitioning and established players.

Unknown

Not counting the 1300 progression reward for 4* I don't see anything particularly wrong with heavy PvP players getting price because the amount of shields/boosts you got to go through is going to cost you an amount of HP that's pretty close to just upgrading the character (e.g. you might spend 500 HP trying to place first but there's no guaranteed you'll place first in an appropriately sharded bracket). The 1300 4* is obviously greatly in favor of the top PvP players but maybe Sentry nerf will fix some of that, and at any rate that's more of D3's problem (if you give a Thor 4* cover for 500 HP consistently that's less money you're making compared to selling those covers) and not our problem.

If anything I'm more worried about Thor not being available enough to make them money, because if you're sitting at 1/0/0 it wouldn't make sense to start buying 200 tokens and hope you pull the other two covers you need and she doesn't look like she's going to be a P2W character unless there's some serious shakeup at the top, so any lack of availability hurts D3 and not the players because you can do without her (X Force should still dominate in the forseeable future) and if the covers are too hard to get, people will just stick with X Force instead, who also has a huge advantage in cover availability.

Zifna

Jamie Madrox wrote:

In theory shouldn't sharding and MMR make it so that the "elite" players get lumped in together? I know when I go big in an event my next event is full of "elite" players. I've won a bracket with a score of 1300+ only to get my next bracket need 1600+ for top 5.

No, that doesn't work that way. If a bracket has 500 players, it always has 500 players. It doesn't put the 500 highest-scoring players in the same bracket - there is no bracket where someone finishes 300th with 1,000 points.

Many times in the past, I have gone in to try to get a character covered and notice that everyone in the top ten has max covers for the hero being competed for. This means that the third cover for the top five players - well, there aren't 5 extra covers being handed out per bracket, there are 0. Or 1 or 2 or whatever. It's.... it's a mess, frankly.

They should just have two options: "Compete for X Hero Covers" / "Compete for Heroic Tokens" radio button - you'd select which way you wanted to go and be bracketed accordingly. This would encourage people who don't need the hero on offer not to take him away from the people who do, since they'd get the hero tokens which offer a chance for something useful.

Unknown

Zifna wrote:

They should just have two options: "Compete for X Hero Covers" / "Compete for Heroic Tokens" radio button - you'd select which way you wanted to go and be bracketed accordingly. This would encourage people who don't need the hero on offer not to take him away from the people who do, since they'd get the hero tokens which offer a chance for something useful.

I'd br in favor of this. Thanks to token day, I need seven covers, plus a respec, at the 3* level. If a pvp isn't awarding Cmags, Doc Ock, Colossus, or Beast, I don't need any covers, and for three of those four, I only need one color of cover. The result has been that I've been putting less and less effort into pvp, since it's not fun, and I get very little out of it. Tokens would at least give em something to play for.

Spoit

Tokens aren't really that worthwhile a prize either. Even with the newly rotated in ones, the only characters I need covers for are like the last 3 releases, all of which are rather lackluster. I'm probably going to have like 15 10-packs by the time 4hor releases at this rate.

vudu3

Zifna wrote:

They should just have two options: "Compete for X Hero Covers" / "Compete for Heroic Tokens" radio button - you'd select which way you wanted to go and be bracketed accordingly. This would encourage people who don't need the hero on offer not to take him away from the people who do, since they'd get the hero tokens which offer a chance for something useful.

This won't work. If we did this then we'll essentially be self-sharding ourselves. Most top-level players already have the majority of 3* characters fully covered. So naturally we'd all opt for heroic tokens/extra ISO/etc. But then we'd need to score higher just for the same rank because everyone in our bracket has at least a halfway competent 3* roster. Eventually, people would pick up on this return to the cover brackets because they can place top 5 in the cover bracket with the same score as a top 25 win in the token bracket.