Challenge of Changing PVE

atomzed

I have read about the complaints about the harsh PVE grinding. Many has asked for increasing the refresh rate of Pve and the sub nodes duration.

More specifically, people are asking for (1) increasing refresh rate to 8 hr or even more and (2) keeping sub nodes duration at 24 hr.

While I do not like the grind and want to see improvements made to the pve, I disagree with the proposals. Because I think the proposed changes will make pve worse.

Before the forummites start throwing stones at me, hear me out.

Why increasing the refresh duration may make pve worse

2.5 hrs per refresh rate is incredibly tough, I fully agree.

And precisely because it's so tough, only a small minority (prob 5%) can get the optimal points. The remaining 95% will fall in between, with varying amount of points.

Example, grinding optimally on the 2.5hrs give you 10k points. This is the maximum amount of points you can get (disregarding RB).

Majority of people will get less than 10k, probably around 5k to 7.5k. This means that if you really want it, and you put in more effort, you will most likely to be able to reach the top end of this group, and get top 10 or top 50. It also means that if you miss a few refreshes due to RL, it's no big deal cos you could recoup by staying up later to grind one more refresh. The margin of error is bigger.

What happens when you increase the refresh rate? More ppl can grind optimally. Example, we increase the refresh rate to 12hr. Let's say 50% of the population can grind optimally easily. What this means is that if you DON'T grind optimally, you will NEVER get the top spots. The margin of error becomes less.

To give a more extreme example, if a long refresh duration like 24 hr is given, And 100% of the population can grind optimally, speed of gaining that 10k points become of paramount importance (ie leaders board of Gaunlet).

The longer refresh duration will only make it worse for us, because while your daily schedule is more relaxed (less games played per day), the schedule becomes more rigid too. Even being off the refresh schedule by 30 mins may mean that you are out of the leaders board, simply because people got the top scores faster than you.

Phantron also have similar opinions when he said this:

Phantron wrote:

That said despite all the complaints about stuff being too hard, they're obviously not hard enough for separation to occur in the top 5 or so range. They really should consider some kind of 'extra ultra hard' tiebreaker, like say a bunch of missions with fixed team requirements (the node decides who you use, but the characters levels are yours) and no boosts/TUs that's used to break ties between the very best players. Not sure how they'd determine when to use this, but ideally you'd want people to settle the virtual ties. Even as bad as the scaling gets in Simulator hard, there's still pretty close to virtual ties in the top 5 range after accounting for sleep patterns, and if you eliminate the grinding advantage then it'd just be the first person to clear wins and that's no good either.

Using Simulator Hard as an example, what should happen is that after you clear SImulator Hard for a certain number of base points the game will just stop offering you normal nodes and give you a bunch of ultra hardcore nodes instead and you cannot place lower than anyone who isn't doing these nodes. After you clear Simulator Hard say a combined 4 cycles there's no point to prove that you've the ability to abuse game mechanics and chug down boosts while maintaining an unhealthy schedule, so the game should immediately take away all these things so people can actually rest. I can imagine an 'ultra hardcore' version of all the nodes that can only be cleared once every 12 hours. They'd all pose unique team requirements on top of the usual over the top enemy stuff. For the purpose of calculation, your point in that sub should be equal to a relatively large number (say, 200K in the Simulator Basic hard bracket) plus whatever the extra hard nodes are worth. These nodes should be unlocked around half point of the sub and only if applicable (for example, Simulator normal doesn't need an extra hardcore mode because it's just not meant to be hard).

atomzed

Part 2: why increasing the node duration to 24 hr may make it worse for pve

Quick recap, some forummites have asked to increase node duration to 24 hr, so that it's easier to schedule playing time around the node.

Will it make it easier to play optionally? Sure it does.

But when you make it easier for ppl to play optimally, it becomes harder to pull ahead too. It also makes it more costly to miss the refresh.

Scenario, a 24 hr node. Great, you think because you feel that 24 hr fits into your daily biological rhythm and you can plan exactly when to play.

But hey, sometimes RL events struck. Like your meeting dragged longer than usual. Or your child is sick and you have to bring her to a clinic. Or your wife drags you to shopping and threaten to divorce you if you play mpq. Or your mobile phone battery died. And the hours that you lost from the 24 hours is gone and can not be recouped. And the points are also lost.

For the 36 hours node, you have more time to recoup the points back. Maybe you are willing to sacrifice your sleep to play one more refresh. That will help gain back ground... because 95% of the population still need sleep. For 24 hour node, you less time to recoup back the points.

I also feel that 36 hour node helps to equalise the playing field, because the alternating ending timing means no one is advantaged. You might be a night animal, so you will get one node that suits you. If you usually have your morning free, then there's one node that suits you. It's "fairer" in a limited sense.

---

Ok, so I have given my perspective on both refresh rate and node duration.

TLDR, increasing the refresh rate will reduce the margin of error, and it means that you can't afford to miss any refresh. That sucks cos the grind is harder.

Reducing the node duration to 24 hr will also reduce the margin of error and make it harder for ppl who missed the refresh rate to catch up on points. I am more in favour of 36 hrs or even more (48 hrs will be ok, I suppose but less fair).

To end off, I echo many forummite view of having a non competitive game mode. A mode that rewards us with more than covers. Even an achievement badge like "Marriage Loyalty" for using Storm and BP 500 times, or a badge of "DP vs MPQ" by using DP to defeat all enemies 500 times... Will be great.

We do need to get out of this hamster wheel grind.... And just changing the pve mode is not enough. In fact I think it will be even worse.

Unknown

The longer refresh, the easier it is for everyone, but the easier it is for everyone the more you must grind optimally to even stand out. For example in Simulator Hard it was pretty hard to even do 3 essentials every 2.5H as you can verify easily by how just doing that can secure you a top 10 finish. If the refresh time is increased to 8 hours it's suddenly a lot easier to do 3 nodes in 8 hours instead of 2.5 hours, so now the bar would just be moved up. In fact for 8 hours it'd not be unreasonable to expect the best players to clear all of Simulator Hard and we're back to where we started.

Simulator Hard in the last bracket has about 6000 base points and there are 10 cycles per day, so 25 cycles total. We can set a 'hardcore' meter that has certain objectives like 'clear every node at least 10 times'. There are in theory 6000 X 25 = 150K points in hard, so what we can do is anyone who meet these requirement automatically has 150K points in the bracket regardless of what else he did. At this point you'll be offered another set of nodes and the previous nodes would no longer be worth any points (but I guess you can farm them for fun or TUs) that are on a very long refresh timer and is on a very harsh requirement. For example the node can pick IW, Elektra, and Devil Dino as your default characters against a level 300 team. Or maybe you'll have a "DA only" node, or "Ladies only", or whatever crazy thing the game wants to throw at you. These nodes could still be worth their own set of points though these nodes should not rubberband at all. Roster restriction also prevents the case of people just mega whaling their way to victory. Now what if you can't even beat a single node in the super duper hardcore mode? Well you'll still end up with a score higher than anyone who didn't get into this mode and you'd lose to anyone who managed to beat even one node there, and that seems pretty fair. The points you earn for getting this mode obviously has to be set at a level where you no longer have to worry about progression rewards or placement relative to anyone who didn't make it (anyone who made it is still fair game to pass you up). Sure, I can see this mode being beaten by guys using a ton of health packs (boosts/TUs would not be allowed because otherwise you'd just end up using AP+3 all every fight and beg for Whales TUs), but I rather lose to a guy who went through 30 health packs than losing to a guy who didn't sleep. At least in that case that guy paid a lot of money and is picking up my share of the revenue.

IamTheDanger

I'm not one of the tin foil hat crowd, and I do NOT Beleive that D3 only cares about money or that everything is a cash grab. I've even defended them numerous times, but......

Anyone else notice the fact that refreshes take a little less than 2 and half hours, and that it takes a little over 2 and half hours for health packs to fully regenerate? Just saying...


So I would not be surprised if they changed the refresh times to 4 hours or so, and at the same time they changed the regen rate of health packs. And just curious, because I can't remember..... does anyone know about when they changed PvE to 2.5 refreshers? I'm just curious if was around the time of "true healing"? Give or take a month or so.

Okay, tin foil hats off now.

atomzed

Part 2 added.

Phantron gave an interesting suggestion about tie breakers.... I will be giving some thought.

Spoit

Point of order for point 2. The whole point of time slices was that you'd theoretically be able to choose one that worked for you, not one that worked 12 hours away from what's best for you.

And with that said, I wish they'd consider turning the rubberbanding back up. The whole reason people argued it down was because of awkward timings with sub (and mains for europe) endings, which should be ameliorated now that you can choose your own slices

atomzed

Spoit wrote:

Point of order for point 2. The whole point of time slices was that you'd theoretically be able to choose one that worked for you, not one that worked 12 hours away from what's best for you.

And with that said, I wish they'd consider turning the rubberbanding back up. The whole reason people argued it down was because of awkward timings with sub (and mains for europe) endings, which should be ameliorated now that you can choose your own slices

Agree about the point about the shard. It should make it better for the choice of timing. I am probably wrong on 90% of my second point....

What I feel strongly about is the refresh rate. If they lengthen it, I think the competition will only get stiffer and margin of error is lower.

Regarding rubberband, I am happy with the way it is now because you don't see people RB to top 10 now. Imo, that's fairer; if the person has grind to top 10 for 5 days, and he loses to someone who's catching up on the final day, that's not fair.

As to phantron suggestion, I think a tie breaker, or something to differentiate the high end players is indeed required. In sims hard, I was able to get top 2 spot with a 8 to 10k gap. But for the sims normal, I am far away from the top spot. I interpret tat to mean that I am unable to grind optimally and losing out on grinding alone. If they increase the grinding factor, it will make pve worse imo.

Any way these are my two cents.

Unknown

On the 24hr thing. It's not so much that they need to be 24hrs... its that the sub length should be divisible by 24hrs - so 48hrs would be fine. The issue with 36hr subs is that only 1 or maybe 2 slices will be OK for any one person because of inconvenient finish times in half of the subs. With 24/48hr subs I'd argue we could have less slices and reduce some of the current 'slow fill' issues.

As for refresh times, 2.5-3.0 hrs is just too much. If you want to be top 10 in a PvE (which is where MPQ targets most of the decent rewards) then you have to park your life in order to play MPQ - especially in tougher/longer subs where a full clear can take 30 mins or more... that's over 20% of your life clearing nodes in MPQ in some cases (not including PvP commitments). I wouldn't argue for 8hrs as it wouldn't create enough differentiation, but I think 4hrs would be a big improvement and gives people the chance double clear before 8hrs of work / sleep.

Not that I'm struggling with the current PvE format - I just claimed #1 in every sub of the Simulator and cruised to first overall... but I did resent the fact I was having to spend so much of my time stuck to MPQ.

mohio

I know it wasn't your intention but I dislike that your two points were separated in that way because in reality they are quite intertwined. I think there needs to be a balance between the two so that the matches still feel fun and perhaps challenging and not just repeatedly banging your head against the wall. It seems that people feel like 24 hours at 2.5 hour refreshes (so realistically 8-12 node clears?) is the lower limit of "banging your head against the wall" and I tend to think that's about right. If you really want 36 hour subs, that's fine, but give me 4 hour refresh rate so I'm not just grinding endlessly for 20 ISO and event points. I missed a couple refreshes to sleeping but otherwise hit the mystique sub in the simulator fairly optimally and it was miserable. Thankfully all that effort let me take it easier on the last sub and play whenever I felt like it, and that was a much more enjoyable experience. And before anyone chimes in, I know I can play like that all the time but I'd like to have decent rewards and playing more often than I might sometimes like is often required.

There's also the sub ending thing which a lot of people are a little miffed about since the point of choosing an end time is to make the whole event better suited to you and not just the very end, but imo just doing the same set of nodes over and over and over for more than a day is borderline torture and is the bigger reason to keep it at 24 hours instead of 36 or 48 or god forbid 60. Never again with the 60-hour subs please.

FierceKiwi

atomzed wrote:

Agree about the point about the shard. It should make it better for the choice of timing. I am probably wrong on 90% of my second point....

Not really short subs are bad (well if you're one of the people who complains about the constant need to grind to place well) it frustrates me to no end to see people complain about all the grinding and then demand shorter subs and longer refreshes which just makes grinding a bigger necessity. Subs should probably be multiples of 24hrs long but at least some of them should be longer than a day.

atomzed

DrUnpleasant wrote:

As for refresh times, 2.5-3.0 hrs is just too much. If you want to be top 10 in a PvE (which is where MPQ targets most of the decent rewards) then you have to park your life in order to play MPQ - especially in tougher/longer subs where a full clear can take 30 mins or more... that's over 20% of your life clearing nodes in MPQ in some cases (not including PvP commitments). I wouldn't argue for 8hrs as it wouldn't create enough differentiation, but I think 4hrs would be a big improvement and gives people the chance double clear before 8hrs of work / sleep.

For sims, I didn't have to do 2.5 hr refresh to get into top 10. I am not sure whether the hard sims make it easier for me to remain top 10.

DrUnpleasant wrote:

I wouldn't argue for 8hrs as it wouldn't create enough differentiation, but I think 4hrs would be a big improvement and gives people the chance double clear before 8hrs of work / sleep.

Glad that you agree that 8hr will not create enough differentiation.4 hrs may be the better balance. I just think that d3 should consider all aspects and not change it to 8 hr based on other feedfback

Unknown

atomzed wrote:

For sims, I didn't have to do 2.5 hr refresh to get into top 10. I am not sure whether the hard sims make it easier for me to remain top 10.

The Simulator had some weird brackets. I'll happily admit that I don't think anyone in my bracket needed 2.5hr clears for top 10 (my score was over double that of 10th place) but I have a few alliance members in brackets where they absolutely needed to optimally clear to be in the top 10.

Phillipes

I was 1st in last SImulator PVE. I needed to play SEVERAL hours a DAY to obtain it, for 7 days. They only need to change reward structure that so much mindless grinding won´t be needed to get decent reward.

atomzed

Phillipes wrote:

I was 1st in last SImulator PVE. I needed to play SEVERAL hours a DAY to obtain it, for 7 days. They only need to change reward structure that so much mindless grinding won´t be needed to get decent reward.

Erm, you were first! Of course the first will grind more. My bracket leaders were like 20 - 30k in front of the 3rd place, and they probably play 14 hrs.

simonsez

Phillipes wrote:

I was 1st in last SImulator PVE. I needed to play SEVERAL hours a DAY to obtain it

"Several"? That's all??? I finished top 10, and it felt like there were only several hours a day when I WASN'T playing...

Unknown

atomzed wrote:

Phillipes wrote:

I was 1st in last SImulator PVE. I needed to play SEVERAL hours a DAY to obtain it, for 7 days. They only need to change reward structure that so much mindless grinding won´t be needed to get decent reward.

Erm, you were first! Of course the first will grind more. My bracket leaders were like 20 - 30k in front of the 3rd place, and they probably play 14 hrs.

24hrs....i highly doubt that they are bots...

atomzed

benben77 wrote:

atomzed wrote:

Phillipes wrote:

I was 1st in last SImulator PVE. I needed to play SEVERAL hours a DAY to obtain it, for 7 days. They only need to change reward structure that so much mindless grinding won´t be needed to get decent reward.

Erm, you were first! Of course the first will grind more. My bracket leaders were like 20 - 30k in front of the 3rd place, and they probably play 14 hrs.

24hrs....i highly doubt that they are bots...

Yeah the two of us would know! When I see them with such high scores I know it's not possible to catch them. Indeed they didn't slack off.

atomzed

mohio wrote:

I know it wasn't your intention but I dislike that your two points were separated in that way because in reality they are quite intertwined. I think there needs to be a balance between the two so that the matches still feel fun and perhaps challenging and not just repeatedly banging your head against the wall. It seems that people feel like 24 hours at 2.5 hour refreshes (so realistically 8-12 node clears?) is the lower limit of "banging your head against the wall" and I tend to think that's about right. If you really want 36 hour subs, that's fine, but give me 4 hour refresh rate so I'm not just grinding endlessly for 20 ISO and event points. I missed a couple refreshes to sleeping but otherwise hit the mystique sub in the simulator fairly optimally and it was miserable.

It was not my intention to disconnect them. They are intertwined, but I didn't have the time to write so I broke them into two parts...

If you see my response to drunpleasant you see that I don support a 4hr refresh. It was 8hr that I have concerns with, and that was the number many brought up.

I confess that my opinion may not be right on this matter, but I decided to post this thread because so many have ask for 8 hr refresh. I thought I could give another perspective.

Unknown

atomzed wrote:

benben77 wrote:

atomzed wrote:

Phillipes wrote:

I was 1st in last SImulator PVE. I needed to play SEVERAL hours a DAY to obtain it, for 7 days. They only need to change reward structure that so much mindless grinding won´t be needed to get decent reward.

Erm, you were first! Of course the first will grind more. My bracket leaders were like 20 - 30k in front of the 3rd place, and they probably play 14 hrs.

24hrs....i highly doubt that they are bots...

Yeah the two of us would know! When I see them with such high scores I know it's not possible to catch them. Indeed they didn't slack off.

i m the 3rd guy and the 2nd guy lead me over 30K! I m in a very high point range when i check the top 10 alliance. Generally only the 1st or 2nd get higher points than me all within 10K ....but that two is 20 and 30K over me! I doubt they are 1st worldwide!

loroku

atomzed wrote:

Regarding rubberband, I am happy with the way it is now because you don't see people RB to top 10 now. Imo, that's fairer; if the person has grind to top 10 for 5 days, and he loses to someone who's catching up on the final day, that's not fair.

Just a side point: this can't actually happen, at least according to the math I did in a thread that's who knows where. It is impossible for someone to rubberband ahead of others who are grinding; rubberbands are generous but they cannot ever beat a consistent grind, due to the fact that as you get closer and closer to the lead your rubberband contracts. There may be an extremely narrow set of circumstances that exist that could contradict this - 1 node in a sub that gave HUGE points, for example - but they have never happened, and since there are almost never new events (and little variety when there are), there's little reason to think it will.

Rubberbanding, in my opinion, is the most casual-friendly aspect of the game.

As for the original point:

Part of the point of having a dozen different timing options on events seems to me to be to combat this exact problem. In other words: just because event A doesn't have refresh times or sub lengths or whatever that suit you, there's a chance events B, C, or D might. Of course, if you don't please anyone all the time, that's not particularly useful either, but that seems to be D3's choice pretty consistently: make at least a few people happy nearly every time. (Not defending the choice, just explaining how I see it.)

GrumpySmurf1002

Simulator Hard in the last bracket has about 6000 base points and there are 10 cycles per day, so 25 cycles total. We can set a 'hardcore' meter that has certain objectives like 'clear every node at least 10 times'. There are in theory 6000 X 25 = 150K points in hard

I'd be curious how close to 'optimal score' people actually come in each event. All told in Simulator there were 20250 points per cycle, 25 cycles per sub (plus final clears). so cal it 27 cycles. That's 546750 points. As best I can tell, the global leaders were around 300k, but how many were really around 300k? 50 people maybe?

If I had to guess, Simulator has the lowest top score/optimal score ratio of all the events. To me, that's why it's my favorite non-Gauntlet event. The scaling is in place to directly counter optimal play, but then people get angry that the scaling won't let them play optimally when they don't even need to. It's a weird dynamic that happens, presumably because you're so programmed to play every 144 minutes.

As far as PvE in general, I think the biggest issue is still the competitive nature of the players, not the PvE itself. 1, 3, 4, 8, 12, 24, 36, 123501236 hours of refreshes means there's an optimal path. As others have obviously pointed out, all the number dictates is how easy it is to be optimal. And rest assured, someone will always gun for optimal.

Hypothetically, if D3 were to launch six simultaneous PvEs, available to everyone, with similar rewards in all, you'd still have people playing optimally across the six events. Then, there would be complaining that it's D3's fault for launching six events, both from the those playing six events simultaneously and those claiming it's unfair that they don't have time to do so.