Prodigal Son was it harder than other tourneys?

Unknown

Ben Grimm wrote:

The timing of it made this one much harder for me - I was able to do #7 in the Thor PVE, and I"m going to end up 35-40 in this one in all likelihood. The hardest PVE is going to be easier for me than the easiest one is if the hardest is on a weekend and the easiest is during the week. I just don't have enough time to play during the week. There's a reason the only time I've come in #1 was during the Deadpool event; it was run Friday-Sunday.

I think the scaling bug also killed any chance of being competitive if you can't grind super hard. I started out at around #50 in the first subs when the bug was in full effect. Yes I got the bug by the second sub too but it turned out there are plenty of people who can grind super hard when the nodes are of trivial difficulty. I made it all the way back up to #5 now on Hell's Kitchen + Thunderbolt Mountains which has normal scaling for everyone. Yes, I was able to play more during these brackets, but I don't really think that along was responsible for going from #50 to #5. Certainly if the scaling stayed broken, I'm pretty sure I'd be nowhere near #5 now even if I had the same trivial scaling.

Unknown

gobstopper wrote:

Colognoisseur wrote:

Another thing at least in our bracket eight of the ten players are high level with multi 3* rosters. Then entire top 5 is high levels and in the next five one 2* roster in 10th and a 2->3* transitioner. It is a small sample but I haven't had any pressure from a mid-range roster for a long while..

This is largely due to sharding, not necessarily because veteran rosters outperform in PvE. I know this because my beginner alt is in a cupcake bracket where the top10 is full of non-3* rosters.

Just look at say WE ARE GROOT or Hastune Miku if you want examples of transitioners putting up crazy scores. This event is slightly better because double of crazy scaling cannot exceed 395, but the 'guy who never levels up his character' is still doing just fine. It's probably a good thing that max rosters are avoiding these guys either due to sharding or luck, because it's really an unfair fight for the max rosters.

Unknown

firestrand wrote:

For me there was a wall around top 50 that I couldn't overcome, so will just have to be patient for an Elektra cover.

Yeah I bounced off that wall too. I was ok when I first started, then it had the nerve to get a nights sleep. I never really recovered after that. No matter how hard I grinded I just couldn't get out of the sixties. I eventually gave up trying and settled on the DD cover.

Unknown

Prodigal Sun was easier than many of the heroics in recent, but happily fading, memory.

Having said that, the real challenge of this PVE was maintaining alliance top50. It required as much work recruiting and swapping members as it did playing the event. These tight top50 alliance award brackets have a very disruptive effect, and I suspect resulted in the fracturing of many existing alliances along with heavily taxing alliance commanders.

Given recent comments that next year holds many new 4* releases, and that the competitive play (presumably PVE) and leaderboards are the preferred method of dispensing new covers, I think many alliances will need to re-evaluate themselves and their goals. I can't imagine wanting this type of exercise to be the new norm for 2015.

lukewin

Phantron wrote:

gobstopper wrote:

This is largely due to sharding, not necessarily because veteran rosters outperform in PvE. I know this because my beginner alt is in a cupcake bracket where the top10 is full of non-3* rosters.

Just look at say WE ARE GROOT or Hastune Miku if you want examples of transitioners putting up crazy scores. This event is slightly better because double of crazy scaling cannot exceed 395, but the 'guy who never levels up his character' is still doing just fine. It's probably a good thing that max rosters are avoiding these guys either due to sharding or luck, because it's really an unfair fight for the max rosters.

As a former member of Hatsune Miku, I agree. This PVE was def a lot easier than M R&G #1 for Thor, competition wise. For MR&G1, the top 10 was filled with veteran alliances that showed up for Thor, alliances that normally only dominate the PVP leaderboards. This Prod Sun leaderboard sees the usual PVE alliances leading the way.

I had to settle for Top 10 in MR&G1, because I forgot my phone at home for a few hours. I was battling for Top 5, but missing a few refreshes took me out of contention. Had to settle for Top 10. Prodigal Sun, I went out drinking Friday night, Saturday night, went to 2 church Christmas services on Sunday, and was sleeping in the car riding between those services, so missed a lot of refreshes. I went hard in the beginning, was dueling it out with GuiltTrip and Vhailorx for 1st. GuiltTrip and I had decent separation from 3rd. Not playing that time, dropped me to 5th. I feel bad for ScrubJay, as they were within 3k / 4k of my 5th place. Then I started playing again, 11h left in sub and main, and with RB in place, I was able to skyrocket back up to 2nd in main, and went from 100 something to finish 3rd in the sub in those 11h. I finished 3rd. I didn't play as much as I could and the extra cover was only for 1st. 554 separated Vhailorx from me. GuiltTrip had over 11k on Vhailorx. No way I could've missed that much time in MR&G1 and still got a Thor cover. That competition was intense.

But a lot of PVE problems popped up, making it difficult. Prod Sun ran after all these others, so if you weren't burnt out before, this was the PVE to burn you out. Disappearing events/subs kept you from playing, scaling going off/on then back on, etc.

I would say this Prod Sun was probably easier, because I had the scaling bug, so it was a participation event for a while. I finished with 241,360 this time. Last time it was ran, I had 242,010, finished 1st, but played a lot more.

Spoit

Drastically harder. Or am I the only one who had to slog through a whole map of 395s before the subs were even half over?

I almost never had 395s before like the last day on a single map pve before this event

Unknown

The harder the scaling the more it favors quality over quantity, and this is one of the few PvE events where the nodes are not set at the level of 'almost everyone can beat' which always favors quantity. Also, the number of nodes and scaling for this event is hard enough that even if you could beat everything, the time it takes you to beat it still matters. It takes me about an hour and 10 minutes to beat everything on Thunderbolt Mountains but I'm still gaining on everyone in my bracket except maybe the #1 guy (hard to tell because the two guys ahead in my sub probably didn't sleep), and I can see at the rate my competition's score is going up that it takes them more than 1 hour 10 minutes to beat all the nodes so I'm slowly gaining on them. Now I think the number of nodes is a bit too excessive but this should be the kind of competition they strive for. A lot of the easier events are so trivial that there's no measureable difference in the time it takes to finish so once someone gets a refresh ahead of you, there's absolutely nothing you can do to catch up. I'm pretty sure I made up one refresh worth of score against people who are still grinding every refresh due to the speed I was able to clear them.

Spoit

Phantron wrote:

The harder the scaling the more it favors quality over quantity, and this is one of the few PvE events where the nodes are not set at the level of 'almost everyone can beat' which always favors quantity. Also, the number of nodes and scaling for this event is hard enough that even if you could beat everything, the time it takes you to beat it still matters. It takes me about an hour and 10 minutes to beat everything on Thunderbolt Mountains but I'm still gaining on everyone in my bracket except maybe the #1 guy (hard to tell because the two guys ahead in my sub probably didn't sleep), and I can see at the rate my competition's score is going up that it takes them more than 1 hour 10 minutes to beat all the nodes so I'm slowly gaining on them. Now I think the number of nodes is a bit too excessive but this should be the kind of competition they strive for. A lot of the easier events are so trivial that there's no measureable difference in the time it takes to finish so once someone gets a refresh ahead of you, there's absolutely nothing you can do to catch up. I'm pretty sure I made up one refresh worth of score against people who are still grinding every refresh due to the speed I was able to clear them.

Except these 2*s and transitional people can pump out the quantity too. I gave up after he continued to be able to hit every single refresh like clockwork

Unknown

Spoit wrote:

Phantron wrote:

The harder the scaling the more it favors quality over quantity, and this is one of the few PvE events where the nodes are not set at the level of 'almost everyone can beat' which always favors quantity. Also, the number of nodes and scaling for this event is hard enough that even if you could beat everything, the time it takes you to beat it still matters. It takes me about an hour and 10 minutes to beat everything on Thunderbolt Mountains but I'm still gaining on everyone in my bracket except maybe the #1 guy (hard to tell because the two guys ahead in my sub probably didn't sleep), and I can see at the rate my competition's score is going up that it takes them more than 1 hour 10 minutes to beat all the nodes so I'm slowly gaining on them. Now I think the number of nodes is a bit too excessive but this should be the kind of competition they strive for. A lot of the easier events are so trivial that there's no measureable difference in the time it takes to finish so once someone gets a refresh ahead of you, there's absolutely nothing you can do to catch up. I'm pretty sure I made up one refresh worth of score against people who are still grinding every refresh due to the speed I was able to clear them.

Except these 2*s and transitional people can pump out the quantity too. I gave up after he continued to be able to hit every single refresh like clockwork

I think a lot of the 2*/transition guy can easily beat the max roster in quantity just because there are more of them in general so one of them has to have a pretty favorable real life schedule. Excessive scaling is pretty much the only thing that gives you a chance there. Yes the 395s are absolutely brutal but if it doesn't hit 395 there's no way the transition guys will face anything remotely challenging and they've proven to be quite capable of pumping out the quantity. I lost a lot of ground during the trivial scaling phase even though I had the same scaling, because it turned out there was no shortage of guys who can pump out massive number of grinds when the nodes are trivial, and it's not until the level 395s resumed that I was finally able to make up some ground because at least somebody else isn't beating them.

reckless442

Spoit wrote:

Drastically harder. Or am I the only one who had to slog through a whole map of 395s before the subs were even half over?

I almost never had 395s before like the last day on a single map pve before this event

I didn't join until yesterday, when the final bracket in time-shard 4 opened, and by this morning, I was seeing 395s. What was brutal was having 4Thor and XForce locked out in so many nodes. At one point, I wiped out four times in a row to the Lazy Thor/Hulk/IM40 node -- even though I was just trying to get enough purple for Deadpool to cast Whales using Deadpool points. Despite those wipes, my levels never dropped.