PvP Diversity, Split progression and placement scores.

esoxnepa

With the changes to Shielding, I believe even less diversity will occur in PvP. The changes do little or nothing to benefit the majority of the 1*-3* transitioning teams. Therefore, split the placement points from the progression rewards in PvP.

Currently, teams in PvP are either about speed kills to shield-hop, or high health defensive teams to discourage anyone who is hopping from targeting your team.

Splitting the placement vs progression reward counters would allow people to battle with the full depths of their rosters being less concerned about reaching a high placement until the last day. You would not be concerned as much with each loss, as losing would drop your MMR and let you face other similar teams, while still preserving the progress you have made to a reward for the event.

As more and more characters are added, the time to transition becomes significantly longer, and the ability to compete for higher PvP prizes becomes more difficult, discouraging your more casual player base.

Splitting the two still allows the elite/hardcore players to battle for the top rewards, but allows the rest of the player base to enjoy PvP and not be shut out of the better rewards. There are plenty of characters and covers at the maturity level of the game to allow more direct earning of covers.

The ability to earn a greater variety of covers through progression, would allow you to rework the PvP placement rewards, and even adjust token drop rates. It would allow you to plan for player progression with less randomness.

san

I really like this idea. I haven't heard it before, but it makes perfect sense. You would still have to battle quite a bit (1300 is no easy task), but you'd have a carrot dangling in front of you (in a 4*) that is actually achievable! It would also allow us mortals to be able to earn some of those HP points and 3* covers severely needed...

FaustianDeal

A given fight could arguably carry 2 different point values.. a number that would contribute to your 'progression' score, and a number that contributes to your 'placement' score.

The 'progression' value of the fight is a pure evaluation of the relative difficulty you should experience based on your roster. They know how to roughly approximate these values because they scale PVE fights to control it. 'Progression' points are independent of the 'placement' score of the opponent and are instead based purely on the relative strength of the 2 rosters in the contest. Another key difference would be that you shouldn't lose 'Progression' points for losses on offense or defense (similar to PVE).

'Placement' values would continue to function exactly as they do in PVP today.

Would you want to have the event have a split track though? Essentially turning every PVP into an optional PVE, or would you be trying to compete; at a meta-level in both contests?

Here is another element of this that I really like: it re-normalizes the relative value of a fight across the different end times. Right now the 'classic' PVP end time tends to be higher scoring than the other time windows due to the relative scores of the other opponents. This has led me (and I am sure others) to make a conscious decision on which end time to participate in (if I want progression I go slice 4, of I want to compete for placement I pick 'not 4').

You could extend the same split to a season level:
From a season perspective a progression prize could either be based on the percentage of events where a certain number of other progression marks had been achieved. Its a finish line - and it doesn't have to be timed.

The question becomes how to remap placements here. Is it enough to just award a new 'made up' category of points for placement in an event and then total up a players 'victory points' across a season in order to determine their placement in a season? I would assert that is possible. And you could award placement prizes within a season based on accrued 'victory points'. (This would also alleviate some of the discrepancy introduced by having different scoring potential across the different end times.)

This also potentially allows you to add things like "achievements" to seasons... things like "win a match with Thor on your team", "win a match with only 2*s", and so on.. There could be 3-5 per season, or there could be a long list of them that you are focused on in groups of 3-5 at a time. And now we have a 3rd category of prizes that can be awarded. These shouldn't be meaningful, maybe packets of ISO....


This was a little stream of conscious... but I am intrigued by where it ended up...

Accident-eLe

I like this idea except they would need to equalize Pvp and pve progression rewards. Doesn't make sense to have to grind a weak of pve to get a 3 star when every 2 and a half days all I have to do is push and then tank PVP a few times to get a 4 star.