The case for non-competitive PvE

morph3us

PvE placements are based on overall ranking, and are therefore competitively determined, generally within brackets of 1000 players. With the advent of time slices, initial opening brackets fill quickly, but as time passes, particularly in seven day PvE events, brackets tend to fill more and more slowly. Therefore, unless a player joins a PvE event as soon as it begins, it becomes a lottery as to whether a player can actually place competitively enough to earn a useful cover. This problem is particularly magnified by PvE events awarding 4* covers, where only the T50 are awarded a 4* new release cover.

General player response has been to therefore post to a thread in the Events subforum, with the aim of letting other players know when a particular bracket in a time slice has filled, so that they don't run the risk of being player 998 out of a 1000, and five or six full node clears behind the leaders. In the current PvE, Thick As Thieves, it appears that the devs have implemented not only a "newbie" and a "veteran" bracket for each time slice, they appear to have implemented two concurrent veteran brackets, which prevents a player from knowing if a fresh bracket has opened. I believe that this is wrong response to what is a reasonable player response in posting this information. It seems to me that the problem actually lies at the core of the PvE system, namely that it is competitive (in terms of player score vs player score), rather than difficulty and achievement based.

I appreciate that this is a difficult issue for the devs, with all sorts of experiments with rubberbanding, to try and mitigate the problem. Also, very reasonably, the devs have elected to implement a rubberband that is weak to non-existent to prevent players from joining last minute and overtaking those players who have committed a full week to the event due a strong rubberband.

I am not advocating that the devs remove the existing competitive PvE event system as it currently exists, just that the devs consider whether there might be a non-competitive PvE system that would result in awarding the same proportion of covers to the player base (in a similar way that the Gauntlet does, currently).

Unknown

the event can be very simple. A target per day and rewards 1 heroic token.

7 days a week , if average drop rate is 1/6 or 7 you get 1 3 or 4* cover per week

it will be less than competitive pvp and pve but a casual player may still get his prize there.

Unknown

Not only did I land in a mostly full bracket when I started something like 8 hours after the slice opened (I'm on holiday, can't very well play when I'm skiing!), I also missed several refreshes (again, I'm on holiday, see above), though I did play regularly. I couldn't catch up because those who had started straight away were several refreshes ahead, I only fell further behind. Now the only reason I'm still playing is to help my alliance (and to get the alliance reward) because my chances at top 50 are zero. Needless to say, I hate every tinykittying minute of it.
PvE is no fun this way.

Infrared

Here is part of my suggestion to end grinding from Quests with puzzles:

Have a new type of PvE scoring where the points earned from winning a node depends on how well it was played, and not how often it was played. If you beat a node many times, you get to keep the points from the highest scoring attempt, and not the sum of all attempts. This makes grinding obsolete, while still providing incentive to replay nodes.

Joining early gives you more time to improve your score by re-doing the nodes that you maybe didn't perform well in. Joining late does not put you at a sever disadvantage, yet also does not make the early joiners feel cheated out of their efforts. No need for rubberbanding, and no need for refresh timers.

Melevorn

+1 support for the idea of a PvE mode which considers how well you won a node, and only counts the best win per node.

Even if just as an experiment, it'd be worth trying.

DrNitroman

morph3us wrote:

I am not advocating that the devs remove the existing competitive PvE event system as it currently exists, just that the devs consider whether there might be a non-competitive PvE system that would result in awarding the same proportion of covers to the player base (in a similar way that the Gauntlet does, currently).

You're stating the problem very well, I'm with you!

morph3us

Infrared wrote:

Here is part of my suggestion to end grinding from Quests with puzzles:

Have a new type of PvE scoring where the points earned from winning a node depends on how well it was played, and not how often it was played. If you beat a node many times, you get to keep the points from the highest scoring attempt, and not the sum of all attempts. This makes grinding obsolete, while still providing incentive to replay nodes.

Joining early gives you more time to improve your score by re-doing the nodes that you maybe didn't perform well in. Joining late does not put you at a sever disadvantage, yet also does not make the early joiners feel cheated out of their efforts. No need for rubberbanding, and no need for refresh timers.

I've had that thought as well, albeit less well fleshed out than you. Personally, I think it's a good idea.

simonsez

morph3us wrote:

unless a player joins a PvE event as soon as it begins, it becomes a lottery as to whether a player can actually place competitively enough to earn a useful cover

This isn't true at all, unless you're talking about someone who joins an event 2-3 days late in the hopes of getting a fresh, easy bracket, and instead screws themself in their attempt to game the system. Why not just join within a reasonable time of the event beginning, and put in the work like the people who ARE earning useful covers?

Unknown

simonsez wrote:

morph3us wrote:

unless a player joins a PvE event as soon as it begins, it becomes a lottery as to whether a player can actually place competitively enough to earn a useful cover

This isn't true at all, unless you're talking about someone who joins an event 2-3 days late in the hopes of getting a fresh, easy bracket, and instead screws themself in their attempt to game the system. Why not just join within a reasonable time of the event beginning, and put in the work like the people who ARE earning useful covers?

what is a reasonable time? 1 day ? 12 hours or 2 hours.

morph3us

simonsez wrote:

morph3us wrote:

unless a player joins a PvE event as soon as it begins, it becomes a lottery as to whether a player can actually place competitively enough to earn a useful cover

This isn't true at all, unless you're talking about someone who joins an event 2-3 days late in the hopes of getting a fresh, easy bracket, and instead screws themself in their attempt to game the system. Why not just join within a reasonable time of the event beginning, and put in the work like the people who ARE earning useful covers?

Respectfully, I'd disagree, that isn't what this is about. I've placed top two numerous times, and top ten most of the time, so I appreciate how much work it takes, especially when you join at the beginning of a seven day event. My work commitments don't always allow me to join as soon as an event starts. Sometimes it's a day or two later, sometimes it's not until the weekend.

My issue isn't with joining a quickly filling bracket in the 900s, I've done that before too, and ground my way to a top twenty finish, being only a couple of refreshes behind; my issue is with multiple concurrent slowly filling vet brackets that take days to fill, where there's no possibility at all of placing even for one cover.