Nefarious Foes - Matchmaking Test - Discussion

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  • Unknown
    edited November 2014
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    Further feedback:

    From the perspective of someone who normally scores 1300+ with a good selection of 166+ the impact of this MMR change is to essentially shorten PvP.

    In a normal PvP I have a fairly relaxing climb to 650-ish points then it's the 166 wall and I try for a rapid climb to 1k ish then 2-3 hops. The beginning of that climb (til 750-800) sucks a bit because you are stuck on ppl worth 20-25 points pretty much exclusively in your nodes til you break through about 800 when it opens up.

    With the new (bad IMO) MMR changes I got the 166 wall at 400 and a little bit (422 IIRC) i was stuck in the **** 20-25 points at best matches, requiring lots of skips just to get ppl worth 20+ through to 677 before i was able to find anyone worth better. Slogging through all those maxed teams, with above normal incoming attacks basically isn't fun. It seems like an attempt to force me to use more health packs (which i didn't) or shield very early because I will get a ton of incoming attacks.

    Personally i've seen zero positives with the MMR change of any kind.
  • MMR Failure?

    please roll it back

    There's no sense of score progression. All we're seeing is Daken Sentry Hood from like 300 on with an occasional alternate character rolled in. I understand this is part of the error in boosting 6 or 7 characters 100% because it kills roster diversity but it also further emphasizes the problem with the new mmr.

    These are small tournaments. All PVP should be treated that way and thought of that way. Now in EVERY other tournament, the 1 seed and the 2 seed don't play each other from the start. People work their way up gradually beating the easier opponents, eventually at the very end-game fighting the top opponent. I know yes, this isn't a one-and-done style tournament, HOWEVER fun = sense of progress, sense that your invested time has some decent return. We all had to work our way up from 1* land to facing the 2*s then the 3*s and on. Bypassing all of these obstacles takes out a sense of progress. And on that note, there is NO NO NO reason why a lower tier team should be able to compete against the maxed end game team for a brand new award. I mean come on! please stop thinking with your wallet for a second and fix the game.

    This MMR tweak will really drive away most of the paying user base while the complete f2p players might smile. However there will be no game left when the money disappears.

    I'm sure we're all happy we got a small stipend refund on our purchased alliance slots but rather not waste it on a beta test.
  • PorkBelly
    PorkBelly Posts: 527 Critical Contributor
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    So, after playing this for a couple of days now, my opinion remains the same.

    It's terrible.

    I don't think I've seen anything other than maxed Sentry/Hood/Daken teams the entire time. None of the "tweaks" that you've made during the event have made any difference in my gameplay.

    It's frustrating and boring.

    So, if after all of the other awful changes that you've made to the game over the past several months (C Mags nerf, Daken nerf, True Healing), your goal was to suck any last remaining bit of fun from this game. . .

    Congrats! You've succeeded.
  • Unknown
    edited November 2014
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    Finding it hard to tell which part is the MMR and which part is just this event with so many people boosted through the roof. A partially leveled sentry hood mags in normal matchmaking would be pretty safe to take on but here one mistake and you are hurting bad if not dead. But on the other hand I am still sub 700 and in the top 10! This event with these changes is painful, a normal event might be different but I am not sure. But overall I am still doing about as well as I can usually expect placement wise, just at a much lower point total. Will see how the end goes. I do want those Mystiques still but the upper progressions are going to be all but impossible.

    Afterthought, If someone has sentry hood daken can use all three at once and have the whole trio boosted well above their normal level, is there any reason they would use anything else. Maybe for a match or two but you better believe that is going to be the overwhelming defensive team of choice and MMR has nothing to do with that, all the blame for that falls on nefarious foes.
  • RWTDBurn
    RWTDBurn Posts: 291
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    I see this set up as working just fine. If everyone sees opponents close to their level, then that takes away the all the big gun players feeding off the newer ones. What I'm reading on here is a lot of people saying that it's harder now. But isn't that the point of playing a game? To be challenged?

    While that sounds good in theory, if everyone is always facing teams that are close in level, then there is no point in ever leveling your roster. You would be better served to max all covers and leave everyone at extremely low levels so they heal much faster when they die. I think we can all agree that punishing gamers for leveling their characters would be a massive game design flaw.

    And as for being challanged, players with maxed out rosters are still challenged, just in a different way. When we climb to 1100+ range, the point value for beating us goes up, making us extremely tempting for other players even with non maxed out 3*s to boost and attack us. If we get hit when we are shield hopping (or if we lose), then we can easily lose 50-100+ points for 1 battle. The challange for us is the game within the game. How early do we climb up to 800? 1000? 1200+? How soon in the event do we shield? How much HP will it cost to shield hop? Should I shield hop at 1200 to stay in the top 5 and is it worth the HP to do so? How many hops can I take before I get retaliated on and lose all the points that I just shield hopped for? Does my alliance need me to hop to stay top 50? Etc, Etc, Ect. The game doesn't become a cake walk just because you've transitioned to maxed out 3* rosters.
  • GrimSkald
    GrimSkald Posts: 2,535 Chairperson of the Boards
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    I'm going to add my voice to those who dislike this change - I am definitely seeing a lot more maxxed teams than I usually do beneath 600-650 or so. It does seem to tend to award me more points for these teams, which is nice, but I am certainly having a harder time climbing than I usually do. Of course, that may be in part due to the 100% buff on most of the teams as well.

    Honestly, this is rough. Can we have the old MMR algorhythm for the last 12 hours of the event?
  • What makes this horrible is not so much the fact that climbing is hard, because it must be for everybody, but I'm only at 400-500 and getting attacked by lv 330 maxed sentry/daken/mag, while I only got hood, ares and a lv 180 xf (which isnt buffed). Might be the fact that my buffed hood is near maxed so I'm offered to any maxed team? Makes no sense, this is obviously not considering MMR, but the roster only, checking for highest lv?
  • GrumpySmurf1002
    GrumpySmurf1002 Posts: 3,511 Chairperson of the Boards
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    "David wrote:
    Moore"]
    One of the big problems we're trying to eliminate with these changes: at times under the old matchmaking system, low-level players (some with their best characters as low as level 40) could get into a situation where they were being matchmade mostly against high-level 3* teams (we'd expect that to happen if they had climbed to the top of the rankings, but this was happening before that point). So we're particularly interested to hear if you're seeing opponents that are much higher level than your best team (taking the Event buff into account). We're also trying to smooth out the difficulty curve, so that as you advance up the leaderboard, the difficulty of your opponents increases more evenly than before.

    In re-reading this quote, the goal of this change seems to be to knock down the 166 wall for players. That's an excellent goal.

    If that's the case, then the change should've been indistinguishable for high-level players. They saw the wall just like everyone else, they could handle it. Now, seemingly every high level player is explaining that they're seeing the wall from the word go. That's a failure to achieve the goal, regardless of any improvement that lower players may have achieved.

    Collect the data for the rest of N. Foes, but please don't let this spill into Season VIII. You'll see participation plummet, and that affects everyone.
  • Since 300, every single match I've seen has been some combination of maxed Daken, Hood, Sentry, and C.Mags. So yeah, that's fun. This is a problem with Nefarious Foes generally - there's only a small handful of viable villains, and the buff is too high. In Children Of The Atom, having characters buffed to 249/141 makes it hard for unbuffed characters to match up, but they're still potentially worth using. Sure, Patch outclassed Thor by a fair bit, but Thor was still worth using if you didn't have Patch, or needed a good active yellow. In this event? Sentry has 20k health, and Supernova will one-shot Patch and leave Thor at 3k. I don't want to use sentry 24/7, because it makes it really hard to climb without guzzling health packs, but what choice do I have? Ares? Ares has half the health and does nowhere near the same amount of damage.

    Now, this makes NF a colossal pain in the **** anyways (because this is always going to happen!), but with the matchmaking change, every match I've seen since like 300 has been maxed villain teams. This is ridiculous. However, I can't tell if this is because of the event (I often climb with teams that aren't sentry, and my sentry is one of my few maxed 3*s because he's so vital to shieldhopping) or because of the matchmaking change. This was a pretty lousy test.

    Oh, but I did see someone at 900 points way before I usually do. So that's nice I guess. Not so nice for him, and probably not so nice for most of the people hanging around that number, but yeah.
  • kidicarus
    kidicarus Posts: 420 Mover and Shaker
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    I also shouldn't be able to queue someone who has 1222 points when I only have 188 points. sorry widowmaker-don't blame me - blame d3 for making this broken matchmaking system.
  • dr tinykittylove
    dr tinykittylove Posts: 1,459 Chairperson of the Boards
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    I miss the old mmr. I haven't been able to use as much of my lower tier roster as I normally do - actually, I've hardly touched most of them past the first few fights. If season sim looks like this too, I probably won't be playing it much.
  • simonsez
    simonsez Posts: 4,663 Chairperson of the Boards
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    orionpeace wrote:
    If you have any thoughts on the question or what options should be available in the poll, please free to post them here or PM me.
    One option needs to be, "If this is the new norm, I don't want to play anymore"
  • wymtime
    wymtime Posts: 3,757 Chairperson of the Boards
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    "David wrote:
    Moore"]
    One of the big problems we're trying to eliminate with these changes: at times under the old matchmaking system, low-level players (some with their best characters as low as level 40) could get into a situation where they were being matchmade mostly against high-level 3* teams (we'd expect that to happen if they had climbed to the top of the rankings, but this was happening before that point). So we're particularly interested to hear if you're seeing opponents that are much higher level than your best team (taking the Event buff into account). We're also trying to smooth out the difficulty curve, so that as you advance up the leaderboard, the difficulty of your opponents increases more evenly than before.

    In re-reading this quote, the goal of this change seems to be to knock down the 166 wall for players. That's an excellent goal.

    If that's the case, then the change should've been indistinguishable for high-level players. They saw the wall just like everyone else, they could handle it. Now, seemingly every high level player is explaining that they're seeing the wall from the word go. That's a failure to achieve the goal, regardless of any improvement that lower players may have achieved.

    Collect the data for the rest of N. Foes, but please don't let this spill into Season VIII. You'll see participation plummet, and that affects everyone.

    Completely agree. I had climbed back up into the 600 point range and got to 6th in my bracket and everything was 20-25 points and maxed out Sentry, Hood Teams. I since have been hit and dropped to 11th. I know have some matches worth 28-30 points that are not maxed teams. For me it looks like top 10 does play a part in getting maxed teams. I do have a Maxed Sentry Daken with Hood close to maxed level so my wall hits when I am in top 10. This new MMR still needs some major tweeking before being final. I would also say becuase this MMR is making scores so low that scores are probably really clumped together. This will cause 2* and transition teams to hit the 166 wall earlier probably around 300-400 points as it was 600 before becuase big teams were scoring around 800-900 points at that time. The wall has gone backwards. In this MMR format I would really look at the difficulty curve as players move up the leaderboard. I am thinking that is a major factor in the 166 wall.
  • Another comparison to this MMR issue might be the food chain.

    Removing the plants which kills the rodents which then kills the predators then the top of the food chain has nothing left to eat but themselves and we end up in the Walking Dead!!
  • I just got matched with a Level 1 Hawkeye, Level 1 MBW, and Level 18 IM35. I crushed them with my 166 roster. I'm going to go ahead and say Matchmaking is still broken.
  • Completely agree. I had climbed back up into the 600 point range and got to 6th in my bracket and everything was 20-25 points and maxed out Sentry, Hood Teams. I since have been hit and dropped to 11th. I know have some matches worth 28-30 points that are not maxed teams. For me it looks like top 10 does play a part in getting maxed teams. I do have a Maxed Sentry Daken with Hood close to maxed level so my wall hits when I am in top 10. This new MMR still needs some major tweeking before being final. I would also say becuase this MMR is making scores so low that scores are probably really clumped together. This will cause 2* and transition teams to hit the 166 wall earlier probably around 300-400 points as it was 600 before becuase big teams were scoring around 800-900 points at that time. The wall has gone backwards. In this MMR format I would really look at the difficulty curve as players move up the leaderboard. I am thinking that is a major factor in the 166 wall.

    Exactly what I experienced, as soon as I hit the top 10 (with something like 400 pts), I only saw maxed teams of sentry/dak. Then I got hit by 7 players (again maxed teams) and dropped like hell. Just... stupid.
    Looks like it badly punishes people for being top 10, whatever the score is.
  • David [Hi-Fi] Moore
    David [Hi-Fi] Moore Posts: 2,872 Site Admin
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    **UPDATE: (11/14/14)

    A quick addition to let everyone know that Beta testing will be ending shortly with the close of the Nefarious Foes Versus Event. Thanks very much for participating and for providing your valuable feedback. We got some great info that will help us moving forward. The current plan for now is that Season VIII matchmaking will be the same as Season VII.
  • killerkoala
    killerkoala Posts: 1,185 Chairperson of the Boards
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    it seems like it was tweeked since yesterday, now once you get to top 10 we are being seen by more people than usual. ty for the info about change back to normal for season 8.
  • "David wrote:
    Moore"]**UPDATE: (11/14/14)

    A quick addition to let everyone know that Beta testing will be ending shortly with the close of the Nefarious Foes Versus Event. Thanks very much for participating and for providing your valuable feedback. We got some great info that will help us moving forward. The current plan for now is that Season VIII matchmaking will be the same as Season VII.

    Yay! Thank you!
  • Well, it was nice for once to actually compete. Back to scoring top200 and getting tokens that can't even contain needed characters.