A couple upcoming changes to PvP events

Unknown

Chops wrote:

Example (numbers totally off the cuff, but you'll get the idea:
You run across this rather average-ish opponent in a PVP tournament ranked 50 spots ahead of you with a 85 Thor, 69 Spidey, 75 Wolvie-2*.

If you crush him in 90 seconds with an unbuffed team of 140 Hulk, 130 BWGS, and 85 Thor you earn 20 points (10 base points 5 for rank difference, 2 for the fast win, 3 for no buffs)

If you slowly beat him in 4 minutes with 3x buffs on a team of 50 OBW, 65 Spidey, 45 IM35 you earn 27 points (10 base points, 5 for rank difference, 10 for level difference, 2 for Star-level difference)
If you beat him at an average time of 3 minutes with 1 buff on a team of 85 Thor 69Spidey, 75Wolvie-2* (same as you're attacking) you earn 15 points (10 base points, 5 for rank difference)
If you beat him in 60 seconds with a silly example team of a non-buffed team of 45 OrigHawkeye, 50 IM35, and ModernStorm 50 you earn 31 points (10 base points, 5 for rank difference, 5 for very fast win, 3 for no buffs, 8 for Star-level difference)

These are all great ideas ... on paper. In practice, going against the team you mentioned (a 85 Thor, 69 Spidey, 75 Wolvie) with a 1* team is suicide which means you just lost valuable time if you are in the final 3 hours of an event/tournament, and I don't count the healing packs since I assume you have better heroes but chose to go against them with your C team. Although I have to admit that a bonus 5-10 bonus points for rank and level difference would be interesting to test.

Time is one of the most valuable resources and, ideally, you would like to spend it attacking higher ranked players that give 35+ points who have teams of similar strength with your own. Having a healer is a plus since he ensures you can play many games in a row without spending healing packs. Having a hard hitting or very high health hero is a second plus since it can scare players with similar teams or players with no healing packs left. I don't think a speed bonus is needed because everyone is already trying to win a match as fast as possible.

Unknown

There is only a possible of 475 HP for getting first place and this is only if you didn't need any of the rewards. It's pretty clear with the raised prices and the change in HP rewards such as shield training that they do not want the rankings to pay for themselves. They don't make money this way.

Unknown

Wow. Not what I expected to come into this morning.

TL/DR; Not a fan of the changes. It's demoralizing.

I feel all these changes are going to have a negative effect on the game. I'm hoping these changes were already in progress, and they decided to just try them out, because I feel they are counter-intuitive to the feedback I went in and gave them this week =\.

The ratings change, I understand. But something needs to change as far as point losses go, then. I was at the top of my bracket last night. And I got to 2400, after hard grinding of points. And then came to the actual match screen, no reward. I skipped one opponent, and got the the attacked message. And it brought me down nearly 50 points. Next 2 matches I played, same or worse. I got pulled down another 100 points before I said **** it and shielded before I lost everything. (I did at the end make one more attempt, but I was also stuck in a MMR bubble with a constantly shrinking group of ppl to attack, none of them easy choice, everyone of them with characters leveled higher than me. *shakes fist at Bucky =P* So, never was able to hit 2400 and have it actually reward me). This system where you can lose twice as much as you are gaining is just demoralizing. I almost threw my device last night in frustration.

Combine that with double the costs for shields? This was the first PVP event I competed for the top in a while. And it'll probably be the last again. Because I can't justify shields at those prices. And shields will be the only way to retain a rating worth a damn with the change in matchmaking. I thank god for shields last event. It's the only thing that allowed me to walk away from my device for any length of time and not lose hundreds or thousands even of points. (I'm pretty sure if you tallied all the points I would have lost yesterday at work, it'd be over 100. Now granted, if I actually been losing those points, it would have been less, but it's still horrifying to think about). The only way to achieve those 2400 rewards will either be paying out the HP to shield, and hope to get lucky, or marathon play sessions, and hope to get lucky. I certain feel I'd be better off ignoring the top end of tournament progression, if not placement, until I get a team that's much scarier, since thats the only other prayer for defense. But at 50 points a whack, even a tough team is worth a swing if the rest of your matches are ****.

I'm especially worried with the logic. "some of us think the choice to throw one down is too obvious right now - top players easily have enough Hero Points to shield the whole time they're not playing, and it's exceptionally hard for others to catch up." You are attacking the symptom, not the problem! And what is wrong with having it be hard to catch up to the top end? Mind you, I'd don't consider myself a top end player. None of my 3 star characters are above 80. I only have 1 maxed level 2 star (those many are maxed cover-wise). I play hard and smart to make my bones, and use boosts to make up the difference.

And it really kills the frugal player. Which a lot of the high end players are! Instead, those who are willing to spend freely get the protection, which doesn't change how they will play. It really feels like the first move towards pay to win. EVERYONE needs to stop playing at some point (most of us for 2 8 hour periods basically, sleep and work), and without shields to protect you, you can easily lose everything you gained in a play session, especially at the higher end. Combined with the escalating costs of losing matches, unless you are willing to spend money HP on shields, the top progression rewards are completely out of reach, as are the top placement awards if you get bracketed with a couple people who having the HP to spend to reach and protect those higher scores.

As for skips, I'm not a fan of anything more that will cost me Iso ATM. It's a scarce enough resource as it is, with leveling characters and boosts. I guess I'll have to see how this implemented. But unless you also change matchmaking, you are just penalizing players for being in a broken situation. We'll see how everything goes, but I am really rather demoralized at seeing the first changes since giving feedback be such negative ones. The only 'good' one is the rating one, but other broken parts of the system make that have a nasty downside to it too.

Unknown

I don't like paying Iso-8 for skipping. Please don't implement it.

Unknown

Congratulations Devs, you've just made a broken system even worse and have now made me completely uninterested in playing the PvP tournaments any more. Great job.

So, I can now start the tournament and have lots of targets giving me plenty of points? That's fine, I like that. However, after I've spent a few hours playing and then find myself at the top of the leaderboard, I'm now attacked by loads of people for near 50 point losses. What do I do then? I either retaliate for 0 points, giving them another chance to hit me for 50 points, or I pay ISO to skip them. And if I want to throw up shields so I can go to bed and not wake up with 5 hours work undone by a multitude of attacks? It'll now cost me more HP than I'll earn in the tournament.

The only people who will benefit from these changes are those players with monster teams who no-one wants to face. The rich get richer and the poor get screwed over.

The only good thing is that you've at least had the decency to tell us ahead of time you're going to screw us over again.

Unknown

Emotive wrote:

Thanos wrote:

Maybe i'm being a little naive but why cant the PvP events be run like the PvE events? Instead of losing points from retaliations just have a cumulative score. That way you get rewarded for the amount of time you put in. I know i'd be more likely to play lower ranked opponents if i did'nt have to fear losing a ton of points on the retaliation. If you still really needed to have a point loss system maybe just make it a fixed amount of points per loss, like 5 or 10 points instead of 30, 40 or 50.

PVP is all about risk for a high reward, if you can't lose points that what's the point? No reason to play.

Actually i lose a LOt of points, and i don't even reach 400-500 in tournaments.
High level ones don't lose so much as they have shields on them permanently.

I don't understand why they haven't limited shields to... say 1 use. And even in this case, it kills last hours tournament as everybody is shielded. As far as i'm concerned, i don't like all this kind of "last minute farm" at all, if a tournament lasts 2 days, everyone could play it when he want to, not the last hour to grind whatever he has to do in real life during this precious hours (precious in the real life, a game is just a game ^ ^) to be sure to gain at least a poor recruit token.

Unknown

Kyosokun wrote:

I'm especially worried with the logic. "some of us think the choice to throw one down is too obvious right now - top players easily have enough Hero Points to shield the whole time they're not playing, and it's exceptionally hard for others to catch up." You are attacking the symptom, not the problem!

Yup. I'm sitting on more than 5k HP, all earned from playing. There are others here with more than double that. If I want to spend on a shield, I'm going to, that simple. This hurts people for whom HP is a scarce commodity far more than me.

And they have repeatedly attacked the symptoms, not the problem (basic PvP structure that rewards players for quick kills against weak opponents rather than against quality opponents and shoddy matchmaking), presumably because they don't see it as a problem like we do, or perhaps it is too difficult a problem to fix. The proposed skip tax is a perfect example.

And it is easy to sit here and pick things apart, but it's not like I think I have all the answers. But I'm not sure that the right questions are being asked.

DaveyPitch wrote:

The only people who will benefit from these changes are those players with monster teams who no-one wants to face. The rich get richer and the poor get screwed over.

That was the concern I expressed yesterday. As mentioned above, they said they wanted to make using shields an interesting tactical decision for those at the top, but what about those that aren't, but are trying to claw their way there? How do the shield cost and matchmaking changes affect them? Suppose we will see.

Kiamodo

Why not have an easy and a hard tournament going on at the same time entry would be based in the total number of levels of all characters a person has. This will separate the veterans from the new players. And then set rewards accordingly.

Unknown

Kiamodo wrote:

Why not have an easy and a hard tournament going on at the same time entry would be based in the total number of levels of all characters a person has. This will separate the veterans from the new players. And then set rewards accordingly.

Interesting idea, though I don't think you need to force the player into one bracket or the other. If chosen appropriately, the rewards will do that on their own.

Unknown

If the developers were really interested in preventing players from shielding the whole time they aren't online, but still want to allow access to shields for people who want to sleep or work or have a life (and not create the giant scrambles in the last half hour of every tournament like we used to have), the clear solution is to have shield increase in cost the further you are from the end date of the tournament.

i.e.
Last day of the tourney, shields cost 50/100/200
Second to last day of the tourney, shields cost 100/200/400
Third to last day and before: shields cost 200/400/800

This seems to meet both goals 1) prevent really rich players from shielding the whole time and 2) allow not as rich players to shield when the tournament end time is during work or sleep

Edit: Or even simpler: Do 50/100/200 and if your shield doesn't last 'til the end of the tournament or you break it before the end of the tournament, the cost is doubled or tripled.

Unknown

This is bad. Think I'll be done playing if this new system stays in effect. It's just ridiculous. The worst part being that several times I've lost 100 points in the time it takes to finish 1 match but you're gonna **** penalize me next for skipping to find a decent opponent.....

Use your brains developers. Almost every change you implement makes things worse.

Unknown

ApolloAndy wrote:

If the developers were really interested in preventing players from shielding the whole time they aren't online, but still want to allow access to shields for people who want to sleep or work or have a life (and not create the giant scrambles in the last half hour of every tournament like we used to have), the clear solution is to have shield increase in cost the further you are from the end date of the tournament.

i.e.
Last day of the tourney, shields cost 50/100/200
Second to last day of the tourney, shields cost 100/200/400
Third to last day and before: shields cost 200/400/800

This seems to meet both goals 1) prevent really rich players from shielding the whole time and 2) allow not as rich players to shield when the tournament end time is during work or sleep

Or, a similiar suggestion, have a increasing cost each time you use a shield in an event. Each shield you use increases the cost of the next shield you purchase by 25 or 50 HP.

Unknown

Or just add free shield - that extends till end of tourney, but cannot be removed at all, meaning you stop gaining points.
But that won't be implemented - they need your HP, as anything that reduces costs. Same reason as behind skip tax. As I see it, shields were implemented as option to make us pay, it backfired - players started to pay for them from prog rewards and get better results. So they increase cost of shields as answer.
Oh well, it moves into pay2win zone more and more. Nothing really unexpected. But it was fun to get some high-end results. Guess I'm back to 50HP rewards. Or maybe just drop it as whole.

Unknown

ISO-8 to skipping? Well then you better not match me with 0 point targets like what happened yesterday. I kept getting matched with people that had a rating of sub-100, where I was at 1400+. Cost me my patch wolverine since I couldn't gain rating back, and my rating kept slipping from my hands because I was at 2000 at one point. I kept getting demoted from attacks since I couldn't gain any ground.

itstime1234

These changes are terrible. Some of the worst ideas I have ever seen. So what if someone is shielded, that means more points in the pool for others to climb. I like the idea of a wider net but with higher shields this new rule makes things worse. If shields stayed as is, the people with 1800 points and are shielded would be showing up on lots of peoples screens and people would catch up 50 points at a time, whereas now with no sheidl there will be no one at 1800 points as it will take way too long and if somhow you get there since you are on everyones radar will get creamed all the way back to at least 1000 points.

The iso skip cost is also ridiculous as the matchmaking is terrible and without the skip you have terrible options available. Overall probably the dumbest new rules IMO and this is from someone who stuck up for the Rags nerf, even if it was overdone IMO.

This feels like a cash grab and really hurts the game. I suspect many people will start to lose interest and play far more casually than at present. Me being among them.

NorthernPolarity

Im going to reserve judgment for the iso cost on skip until we see the exact numbers. As others have said, reducing the reward would functionally lead to the same result, although this would be harder to implement from a design and probably programming point of view.

Unknown

The change to matchmaking doesn't really work well. I'm still not finding good matches, most are below me, but I'm successfully being attacked by people ~5-600 points below me. That just means I get hammered and have no way to compensate.

Unknown

What I really don't understand on any level is why the devs think it is acceptable to expect players to spend 4 consecutive hours playing a simple little Match 3 game.

It's easy to make a game that forces an unholy grind onto a player and makes it 'tough' through dodgy mechanics. It's harder to make a game that helps a player feel good about themselves. That's where the talent is.

Unknown

Narkon wrote:

These are all great ideas ... on paper. In practice, going against the team you mentioned (a 85 Thor, 69 Spidey, 75 Wolvie) with a 1* team is suicide which means you just lost valuable time if you are in the final 3 hours of an event/tournament, and I don't count the healing packs since I assume you have better heroes but chose to go against them with your C team. Although I have to admit that a bonus 5-10 bonus points for rank and level difference would be interesting to test.

Time is one of the most valuable resources and, ideally, you would like to spend it attacking higher ranked players that give 35+ points who have teams of similar strength with your own. Having a healer is a plus since he ensures you can play many games in a row without spending healing packs. Having a hard hitting or very high health hero is a second plus since it can scare players with similar teams or players with no healing packs left. I don't think a speed bonus is needed because everyone is already trying to win a match as fast as possible.

Yeah, that particular example is clearly silly as I stated. But incrementally it could make the difference in who wins vs loses. And yes, everyone is trying to win as fast as they can generally, but not everyone is as successful at it. This would create a ton more variability, and if someone ranks higher than you, you can feel good knowing that it is quite likely they played better and smarter than you, not just more than you and at the right time of day.

Unknown

Hi all I'm new here:) nice to see you ppl here given that there is no way to communicate in game.

Wow the change hurts. I noticed that the shield cost has doubled! With that, players are penalized for sleeping/working/schooling (how much does players pay to sleep?) Doubt anyone can stay up clocking points 24\7. i understand that there are people getting scores as high as 2400. but they have done their part grinding too don't they? (rewards aren't there for show? players certainly deserve the rewards if they grind that much). With the change (increase in shield cost) it will mean other than spending alot of time grinding, they have to spend alot of money safeguarding their effort.

Shield implementation was great as it enables players to clock scores high enough to get the rewards they could only scroll to the bottom of the page to take a look in the past.

The issue with new players not being able to grow is due to how matching is done in pvp. A low level player may be matched with players full of level 100 teams and that is impossible to win. not to mention the lightning event in which a player can be simultaneously attacked by multiple players resulting in negative outcome.

The increase in shield cost does not resolve the existing issue. It merely increases the difficulty for players staying in game.