Unstable ISO-8: Fix the incentives and offer an alternative

Unknown

I couldn't get a really good title but it is what it is.

It's pretty obvious to everyone by now that the goal of Unstable Iso-8 was to release a new 2* to transition rosters. A look at the top 10 of most brackets where players have obvious transition rosters shows this.

I on the other hand, as an end game user, have an awful time with this PVE. My Congo node just shot up to 395. There's not a chance in hell someone without a 3* above level 110 is beating a 395 node regularly and each refresh (which the top 10 is managing to do).

I still want the new 2* even though she'll never see ISO and she'll get maxed from cover drops. Because D3 always puts them into the rotation as a mandatory essential node or a boosted character in a roster limited heroic.

But more importantly: the reward system is off. If you really, truly want to give away more 2* Ms. Marvel to transition players and not end game users, then give us an alternative. Give us a hard mode where the rewards match. We get one 2* Ms. Marvel but better ISO. Or better HP. Or better something because right now, we're just forced to slog through a much more difficult scenario to keep on the treadmill. There's absolutely no reward for being an end game user in situations like this. I don't feel special that I beat a 395 node using a combo of some of my maxed 3*s. I feel annoyed that all my hard work to get maxed 3*s is being invalidated by a system that is stacked against me.

Give us an alternative or stop tilting the playing field against users that have been loyal and worked to get where they are. It's not fun being a veteran when being a veteran means you get worse opportunities than a new player.

Unknown

But the tilting of the field isn't just because the reward is for 2*. If instead the reward was for Thor 4* you'd still have the same 395 scaling nodes for the maxed rosters versus whatever transition guys see, and it'd still totally suck as an established player. Sure if the winner gets 3 4* Thor covers everyone is going to be more willing to make sacrifices and the established players can probably still out-hardcore the transition guys if needed, but that doesn't mean everything is suddenly okay. If a hardcore guy simply rerolled with a transition roster and have the same iso/HP resources he'd otherwise use he'd still have a much easier time using a transition roster fighting more reasonable level nodes versus a maxed guy fighting 395s. Yes people always say they didn't try because the reward sucked but even if the reward is awesome you're not going to do too much better with those level 395 nodes unless you stopped sleeping.

There's a fundamental problem with how PvE scaling is roughly a linear factor on your roster strength (e.g. hard node = twice the level of your strongest characters) but the level boosts for characters are flat and thus favor the lower level rosters, and that level 270 characters have an unreasonable extra scaling factor tacked onto them. Yes X Force is powerful, but he sure isn't strong enough to justify fighting level 395 guys. Yes it used to be the other way around, as Classic Magneto used to eat level 395 guys for breakfast, but that was the past and it's no reason to swing the pendulum wildly in the other direction just because it was favorable to established roster in the past.

Unknown

I did upvote original poster because, well because they're right. But it fairness, most people should know by now how this PVE works: massive scaling and massive rubberbanding. The OP especially should know better with Sumilea in their alliance. I entered about the half-way point because I was stupid/bored. I would think most veterans would know there is no need to enter this PVE early on, especially since I would think most don't like seven day PVE's to begin with.

wymtime

I will say this for PVE. I like entering early to play the nodes and collect ISO and HP based on the event. I prefer it to simulator as I get to use different characters that are buffed. My issue with this PVE is there is a distinct lack of reward for playing. Most of the nodes have gone hard quickly, there is minimal HP reward and the progressions can be hit after a couple of days. I am now doing essentials only just waiting for the event to end. This PVE would be fine on a 3-4 day event. If they are going to make a 7 day event at least have subs and sub rewards. They also need to balance the progression rewards better. They could have added 3 more levels and still had the majority of players hit it. This specific event is too little bang for the buck especially after the aniversary week with really good rewards and short events.

Unknown

Why do people still think rubberbanding matters? Scaling quickly reaches a point where it is rarely cost effective to continue playing even when rubberbanding is strong and right now it's awfully weak. You're not going to be able to come up with anything clever when your nodes are 395 against a guy fighting something more reasonable. That guy is going to easily lap you in terms of standings unless you want to sink hundreds if not thousands of HP into the event just because those 395 nodes indeed do stop even the best rosters quite well. Yes rubberbanding matters if scaling is somehow leninent, but scaling hasn't been lenient for anyone with a level 270 character for a very long time. Even when the strong roster dominated the PvE events, most of that was because Magneto offered the established players a huge advantage relative to scaling (because he can beat basically anything by himself) to allow you to get that kind of scoring.

In the Gauntlet event, an event with as few external scaling factor as possible, I was facing level 395 nodes when people are facing 315 nodes with a standard max 166 roster. Secret info toward the game's structure isn't going to let you overcome a combined 240 enemy levels. While Unstable Iso-8 is a terrible format to begin with, if this was say, Iso 8 Brotherhood, right now you'd be looking at random 2* guys that already have an insurmountable lead and that doesn't mean it's any fairer compared to now.

Colognoisseur

I think it is really one characters fault.
Ever since they gave 2* Daken his blue power that is what has tipped the balance.
When the 3X395 have Rag or Venom I find I can still beat those two out of three.
Daken is impossible because before the calculation was to harvest green and try and match away the strike tiles. Now you have to try and cut off blue early and when the regular match-3 damage is so high you can't weather that too long. I can probably win one out of five when Daken is at 395.
If they just removed Daken it would change this but I think that will not happen.

Unknown

Colognoisseur wrote:

I think it is really one characters fault.
Ever since they gave 2* Daken his blue power that is what has tipped the balance.
When the 3X395 have Rag or Venom I find I can still beat those two out of three.
Daken is impossible because before the calculation was to harvest green and try and match away the strike tiles. Now you have to try and cut off blue early and when the regular match-3 damage is so high you can't weather that too long. I can probably win one out of five when Daken is at 395.
If they just removed Daken it would change this but I think that will not happen.

Well it's imbalanced overall but Daken is a character that gains a huge amount of advantage for every level he has over you so it's especially obvious when you're facing Daken. At any rate you can probably beat Venom 2 out of 3 at 395 with a maxed roster, but someone with a transition roster facing a level 200 version of them might be able to win 4 out of 5 and that adds up to a significant advantage given how grindy these events are.

Unknown

I upvoted this mostly because I agree but also because it's a jozier thread without any mention of tinykitties

Spoit

Phantron wrote:

Why do people still think rubberbanding matters? Scaling quickly reaches a point where it is rarely cost effective to continue playing even when rubberbanding is strong and right now it's awfully weak. You're not going to be able to come up with anything clever when your nodes are 395 against a guy fighting something more reasonable. That guy is going to easily lap you in terms of standings unless you want to sink hundreds if not thousands of HP into the event just because those 395 nodes indeed do stop even the best rosters quite well. Yes rubberbanding matters if scaling is somehow leninent, but scaling hasn't been lenient for anyone with a level 270 character for a very long time. Even when the strong roster dominated the PvE events, most of that was because Magneto offered the established players a huge advantage relative to scaling (because he can beat basically anything by himself) to allow you to get that kind of scoring.

In the Gauntlet event, an event with as few external scaling factor as possible, I was facing level 395 nodes when people are facing 315 nodes with a standard max 166 roster. Secret info toward the game's structure isn't going to let you overcome a combined 240 enemy levels. While Unstable Iso-8 is a terrible format to begin with, if this was say, Iso 8 Brotherhood, right now you'd be looking at random 2* guys that already have an insurmountable lead and that doesn't mean it's any fairer compared to now.

That's exactly why rubberbanding does matter. Only a crazy person would enter the pve early knowing that their scaling is super high, especially when it's all one big main bracket with no subs, so RBing actually can work for once

Unknown

One thing I do not agree is that the progression rewards suck this time around. Frankly, they are more or less the same rewards for a very smaller amount of points. 150 HP, 2 tokens and a 3* roster all at 40k points is very doable. Personally, I got the 40k points and called it a win since day 3. I haven't played since then because I can't be 1st for the XF cover because the scaling is nuts for a transitioning roster.

Apart from that, I totally agree with the scaling issues. Last week I did not have any char above 94 and no 3* where leveled past 70. When I got my 10 covers on LCap from last PVE, I thought it was a good idea to level him and have an advantage on this PVE since he is buffed. I have never been more wrong! I took LCap to lvl 127 to instantly start seeing enemies at 150+ lvls on day one. I never saw enemies above lvl 184 before. And that was at the very last day of the event where scaling was off the roof.

Now, how is that fair for me? I literally leveld one character to 127 and suddenly I see nodes at 280+ levels? How am I supposed to beat Daken at lvl 280 with LCap and OBW? Scaling is broken in a way that transition players (The ones that need PVE the most) are ruled out of many nodes and have the hardest time. If you think that having 166 over 395s is very hard, come and try having LCap and 2 94s against 280s. All I did in this PVE was the nodes with goons or the ones that had one hero/vilaing + 2 goons. If I saw a node with 2 heroes/vilains it was a no go for me. I like my phone, I don't want to break it and my wall is fresh painted.

But, I have also been on the other side of the problem. I had no 3* leveled and I played the Sentry PVE. I was able to hit all nodes every refresh except from when I was sleeping (I even played at work). Sure I was first in few subs and T5 in all the rest. Sure I was T10 in my main. But, what happens when the event ends at 6AM? What will I do when sleep kicks in because I have work tomorrow? I will have to settle with a T100 to get that one cover, even though I was at T10 the whole time.

Bottom line, PVE is not fair. Play time ensures you nothing. You can't even P2W in PVE. There is nothing you can do unless you can play the last 2 hours of it. It has been a year long monotony and there have been tons of complaints about it. I thought of posting one more. Maybe this post will not help, but at least I got to speak my mind while this thread has some attention.

Polares

Phantron wrote:

But the tilting of the field isn't just because the reward is for 2*. If instead the reward was for Thor 4* you'd still have the same 395 scaling nodes for the maxed rosters versus whatever transition guys see, and it'd still totally suck as an established player. Sure if the winner gets 3 4* Thor covers everyone is going to be more willing to make sacrifices and the established players can probably still out-hardcore the transition guys if needed, but that doesn't mean everything is suddenly okay. If a hardcore guy simply rerolled with a transition roster and have the same iso/HP resources he'd otherwise use he'd still have a much easier time using a transition roster fighting more reasonable level nodes versus a maxed guy fighting 395s. Yes people always say they didn't try because the reward sucked but even if the reward is awesome you're not going to do too much better with those level 395 nodes unless you stopped sleeping.

There's a fundamental problem with how PvE scaling is roughly a linear factor on your roster strength (e.g. hard node = twice the level of your strongest characters) but the level boosts for characters are flat and thus favor the lower level rosters, and that level 270 characters have an unreasonable extra scaling factor tacked onto them. Yes X Force is powerful, but he sure isn't strong enough to justify fighting level 395 guys. Yes it used to be the other way around, as Classic Magneto used to eat level 395 guys for breakfast, but that was the past and it's no reason to swing the pendulum wildly in the other direction just because it was favorable to established roster in the past.

I keep saying it all the time. Scaling for 1*, 2* and goons is totally broken. A 270lvl - 4* does around 82 in tile damage, a 270 lvl - 1* like Juggs does 180 or something like that. I think it was 150 for 2* and 120 for 3*. So If you are right and the rule is "best lvl charcater * 2" as maximum level for the node, then when you are fighting with your best character, a lvl 270 - 4* you will always end up fighting a 395 lvl juggs that does nearly triple damage in each match. This is pure and simple cheating. A 395 lvl juggs can kill The Hood in six simple moves (!!!!!), he can kill Thor in 12 (!!!!!!!!), etc, etc.

Devs HAVE TO CHANGE THIS ASAP.

It was different before when everybody had Spidey or Mags, or when no one cared to level any 4*, but now it is impossible to play competitively in these nodes against low level players.

Unknown

I really hope they address the questions on the next Q&A at least. I really don't know how this issue has not been at least "acknowledged" yet. Honestly, this feature makes me hate every node that I attack. I really do not enjoy PVE at all apart from the time when I reach those point thresholds for the rewards. I agree that you have to work for your rewards, but it is supposed to also provide some fun along with the repetition. I don't think that rewards is the only thing that keeps you playing, especially when reward priority varies from person to person.

Sure you can say that if you don't want the reward then skip the PVE, but what about my alliance members? I don't really have a choice here because I can't afford to under perform if I want to be in a good alliance. There is some stuff that contradict each other and I really think that devs need to pay some attention to them. Topics like this don't just come out of nowhere and their popularity is not just random.

Bowgentle

Okin107 wrote:

Sure you can say that if you don't want the reward then skip the PVE, but what about my alliance members? I don't really have a choice here because I can't afford to under perform if I want to be in a good alliance.

You keep bringing this up.
The answer is simple: Play the PVEs that have just the main and massive RB like this one only in the last 24 hours.
Many, many top players from T10 alliances do that, and nobody kicks us just because we have 10K less than people who grinded this mess for a whole week.

Unknown

Bowgentle wrote:

Okin107 wrote:

Sure you can say that if you don't want the reward then skip the PVE, but what about my alliance members? I don't really have a choice here because I can't afford to under perform if I want to be in a good alliance.

You keep bringing this up.
The answer is simple: Play the PVEs that have just the main and massive RB like this one only in the last 24 hours.
Many, many top players from T10 alliances do that, and nobody kicks us just because we have 10K less than people who grinded this mess for a whole week.

I know I will not get kicked that easy and that is not my point. My point is that some things just contradict each other in the way they are built. That's what I tried to illustrate in my full post.

Bowgentle

Okin107 wrote:

Bowgentle wrote:

Okin107 wrote:

Sure you can say that if you don't want the reward then skip the PVE, but what about my alliance members? I don't really have a choice here because I can't afford to under perform if I want to be in a good alliance.

You keep bringing this up.
The answer is simple: Play the PVEs that have just the main and massive RB like this one only in the last 24 hours.
Many, many top players from T10 alliances do that, and nobody kicks us just because we have 10K less than people who grinded this mess for a whole week.

I know I will not get kicked that easy and that is not my point. My point is that some things just contradict each other in the way they are built. That's what I tried to illustrate in my full post.

Was just trying to show you a way to make the PVE grind more bearable.
We all know this PVE sucks, but there's no need to make it even worse by playing this longer than absolutely necessary

Unknown

Bowgentle wrote:

Was just trying to show you a way to make the PVE grind more bearable.
We all know this PVE sucks, but there's no need to make it even worse by playing this longer than absolutely necessary

Agreed. What I do is play in the beginning before the super scale kicks in and try to get all progression rewards. After I got the 40k pts I h ave since stopped playing it. If I wanted the actual T150 cover it would suck even more to keep that rank. I see this as a "break". I will delete Ms. Marvel after the next PVE anyway. I don't want anymore 2* atm.

Pylgrim

I just... didn't care for the PVE? Even if I really wanted Ms. Marvel, she's not worth 7 days of grinding. I am positive that within a month or two from release I will have a fully covered one just by opening her in packs. So I simply hit each essential and super-hard (i.e. the most valuable) nodes like once per day to achieve the progression rewards thanks to rubberbanding and forgot about it. Between my little interest in in She-bag and bagstorm and my already maxed Hood, it also meant that I've coasted PVP at the same time. It's been a nice break after the hectic anniversary week.

Unknown

The only reason people can take it easy is because PvE usually don't have super interesting rewards and they knocked the progression reward way low because it was probably too much of a pain to figure out how to set it at an appropriately rare level. All this talk about taking it easy isn't going to work if they suddenly announced that Thor 4* is only ever going to be available for a top 10 finish in PvE. People would be posting the same stuff when they put Fury cover for top 10 and most people here would've already been mathematically eliminated from top 10 by day 3. If you can afford to play until the end you either don't care about how you finish or don't have significant scaling because scaling goes up on its own. You don't have any assurance that community scaling wouldn't make the nodes borderline unplayable for the progression reward you need to hit if you never played anything until the last 3 days. Right now it doesn't matter because they set the progression rewards incredibly low and there's rarely anything of interest to begin with, but that's a function of the event reward not the event structure itself.

I checked out the roster for Hatsune Miku who have been a regular fixture in top 5 in PvE and over half of the roster are 2* range. This isn't some kind of freak accident. It's simply a lot easier to score well in any PvE event if your roster is in the 2* or transition range than if it's maxed out. The max rosters usually can stay competitive because they've extra iso to use for boosts, but if someone has no plan to do significant PvP they don't need to save their iso 8 for 3*/4* either and getting those guys leveled up only makes things harder for PvE. They didn't have some kind of 'extra favorable to transition' setting turned on just because this event was for Ms. Marvel. It could've easily been top 10 gets Thor 4* and rest gets Sentry and the scaling will still be this bad for a maxed roster.

Unknown

So... the problem isn't really so much the incentives as it is scaling in this event. That and Daken

After the 3rd day it wasn't worth playing non-goon, non-essential nodes. I'm glad that they went with subnodes in future events to fix the scaling problem, something that Demiurge doesn't get enough credit for.

However, when re-releasing this event, it seems they didn't readjust points scaling to suit the larger community. If they lowered both the points and the difficulty too much, people would probably then complain about not being able to hit the progression rewards. I don't know whether to try and grind out a Ms. Marvel cover out today after already getting the Cap cover.

Unknown

Focusing on any particular character or even the subs is missing the root of the problem. Since scaling is linear to your roster strength it gets amplified as the nodes get harder. What starts out as a 20 level extra scaling on the first bracket of Gauntlet becomes an 80 level difference at the end. Now resetting the level helps to prevent this from getting too bad, but it was never fair in the first place. Likewise if the character you fight that's got a significant level over you is Spiderman or Falcon you don't feel the effect of their extra levels as much compared to Daken, but it's still never fair. Fight the 395 Thug + Muscle + Hitman a few times and you'll notice no matter how strong your CD denial team is, something's going to slip through at some point. A Threaten leads to cascades doing 4000+ damage. Pistol will hit easily in that range too, and Sniper Rifle is pretty much instant kill at that level. A weaker roster might have weaker CD denial, but when you don't have to worry about any move the opponent does taking at least half of your health (and often more like 100%) you got considerably more room for error. Using the numbers I collected from Gauntlet and other events, having a level 270 character means you start out with about a 20 total level deficit (your enemies start out +20 levels for a total +60 levels, but I'd guess X Force fights at best as well as a level 200 3*) and it gets bigger as the event progresses, but why should you start out with any deficit for having a high level character? Maybe it's greedy to ask for a level advantage for having a maxed out character, but you should never be penalized for having a high level character.

Unknown

TLDR: maxed out players SHOULDN'T be the ones winning PVE

At the risk of going against the majority opinion, let me provide a different perspective.

PVE is vital for the long-term sustainability of MPQ in that it hooks new players and keeps transitioning players engaged. If the scales weren't tipped to favor newer players this game would die pretty quickly. If max players like the ones on this forum won PVE all the time then the new players would never experience the rush of competing and doing well, and would likely quit early on. Scaling is d3's tool of doing this.

I started playing in July during the Ms. Marvel PVE. I was running IM35 and 1* Hawkeye. I didn't have Ms. Marvel, so I couldn't do the essentials until I hit the progression reward for her. But I took second in my bracket and won IW and 3 Hood covers. My roster was utter newbie garbage, but I felt a big sense of accomplishment and decided I really liked this game.

I'm still playing, and now provide 2* --> 3* transition fodder for all you big boys. You need people like me to keep hitting your high scores, and we all in turn need the new players. They need an incentive to play, and PVE is just that. Complaining that you're not winning PVE on top of your regular dominance of PVP is shortsighted and elitist. Think about the bigger picture.