Shields in Tournaments - What do you think

Unknown

For me shields have made tournaments easy. With patience I can easily get all progession awards and score in the top 10. I haven't been interested in #1, and I've been scoring as high as I care to.

I realize that I don't play for the same reasons as other people. I like to play MPQ because it's challenging. This morning I felt disappointed when I was playing. I started at 1221 and easily reached 1900 points. I stopped playing and didn't bother to shield. I think it's nonsense and I now regret putting out a "Bagman" team yesterday. We have players at 500 points using the best lineups they have and are attempting get a decent ranking, and I'm here scoring an extra 700 points without breaking a sweat. I don't even have to think. It's not a challenge. I could beat those teams with my "bagman" team. I don't think this is the right way to go about a tournament. It's not fun.

Unknown

Can't please everyone. I always thought of shields as being good for those with conflicting schedules and still allow them to compete, i.e. convenience factor. So for that, I think it's good overall for the game. Of course, you'll have those crafty people who use shields to give them bigger advantages, as well as those who throw money at the game, but overall I'd say that I think it's better.

P.s. I don't use shields.

Unknown

Well, PVP in other games is fun and challenging. In MPQ it's just tedious. It's basically another PVE event with much more potential to frustrate and sometimes better rewards.

I often got dragged down from top 5 to something like rank 50 to 100 because I wasn't able to play in the last hours of the tournaments. And I could rarely get to 800, 1000 let alone 1200 points.
Shielding helped with both. Strategic use of shields to cover the times I don't play or I get attacked to often took really out a lot of frustration and helped getting some covers I was looking for.

But the new prices are too much. The first pricing was ok, with one or two shields paying for themselves if you progressed far enough.

MarvelMan

Personally I dont really see a huge benefit in game play to shields. Im not quite retentive enough to write down scores, or skip through to re-find the guy i noticed who was shielded. I do feel it has made progression rewards easier to get, but pushing them out to 2400 has meant it requires more time which is better than before (Dec on, I liked Nov scoring) when it took extreme luck to not get hit harder than you earned points.

disclaimer: I had a couple extra hours last night so I pushed past 1800 and ended up shielding for the second time ever (first was only to play with what you could do under one). That was because I had almost a 1300 pt lead in my bracket by the end though. Otherwise they would just be too expensive.

Unknown

I sincerely want to know what people think. I hope others will post. I thought I might try to help others get out of that 500 - 700 hump but that didn't work out so well. Now I feel like I'm being power-levelled.

I want to feel like I earned my rank. Right now it's being handed to me.

Unknown

With the varying end times of these events, I like the shields because I can only play for about 3 hours a day. Shields allow me to hold onto my place while I'm working/spending time with the family.


As someone who was able to earn a couple of the top progression rewards (back when shields were cheaper and the rewards topped out at 1800) I understand where you are coming from. I had difficulty getting from 700-1000, but after that it was just an exercise in how much time and patience I had. It felt dull like walking on a treadmill.

Unknown

I'm one of those people at 500 with my best team (82 Wolv, 73 OBW, 54 Ares) and struggling to get a reward. I've just shielded at #13 because I'm just not going to get any higher, and because a three hour shield now costs me a zero sum, paid for by my eventual reward.

I do wonder how people, as you say, breeze through picking up an extra 700 points, and it makes me wonder if I'm doing something terribly wrong. I'm using Lightning Rounds to tank after the first few progression rewards, in the hope it will stop matching me against 3*** 100+ teams but I'm barely ever out of the 200s before I'm having to buckle up and boost.

I'd have been overjoyed to find a shielded high-score BagMan tank team to claw some points from, but I guess I'm just unlucky in that regard and I'm yet to be matched with one, even after a tremendous amount of skipping.

As it is, from your description of your experience, multiple shields do seem to be the only way to aim high, which really is a "pay to win" deal.

darkmagearcanis

I don't always use shields, but when I do I use bagman for the profit of others. This actually placed me at 4th in the areas tourny to get me a set of Patch covers.

Unknown

Shields were awesome before the price hike. Placed better in tourneys and had a general peace of mind. Now, I could care less for PVP.

Copps

With shields I've placed at the top of my last 3 tourneys with all progression rewards. And my 2400 tank team has allowed me to easily win every lr I've tried in this round (around 7 of them). I like shields but they need to do something to prevent this kind of a mechanic.

Edit: autocorrect changed lr to or

Deimos12

I preferred the old pricing system, I didn't mind purchasing an 8 hour over the last night while I slept and the a 3 hour for the last two hours when I had to be at work (tournaments always seem to end at 10 am here and I start at 8). Those two usually paid for themselves in progression rewards and the prize at end. Current pricing I'll only ever buy the 3 hour shield to cover me for the last three hours when I'm working and that's only if I didn't get annihilated while I slept. I'll never buy shields if I can't at least break even on HP's

Unknown

Bugpop wrote:

I sincerely want to know what people think. I hope others will post. I thought I might try to help others get out of that 500 - 700 hump but that didn't work out so well. Now I feel like I'm being power-levelled.

I want to feel like I earned my rank. Right now it's being handed to me.

Things will changes once everyone has the same level / characters you have. Currently this game give alot of advantages who has better team they own.

Trust me, when they start implementing the skip iso thingy in later stage, high lvls team won't even bother to shield. Low lvls ones will struggle with no or low chance to get high ranking while high lvls team just attack all the way.

Unknown

darkmagearcanis wrote:

I don't always use shields, but when I do I use bagman for the profit of others.

Have a Dos Equis. You are the most interesting man in the world.

Unknown

I was mistaken. I had just under 1800 points when I decided to stop playing. I didn't get the Purple Loki cover. I have been unshielded for 4 hours and I have not been attacked. I am at #3 in my bracket at 1786.

I did lose 32 points in SHIELD training.

Unknown

Honestly I'm just barely participating in PVP in general, and I'm still getting top 5-10 rankings. I'd love to get the Loki at 1200, but that's not nearly as feasible for me now due to my low HP count. Shields can't help me if I can only get 15 point games or teams with LV 85 Ares/Thor/C. Storm. I'll be taking my Punisher covers now, D3.

Unknown

The original problem was losing points en-masse and for no sensible reason at all.

Instead of making 0 point loss or reduce it to a fragment, shields were introduced, so select poeple can pay up to compensate for a resign flaw.

As even a workaround is better than nothing, it gained traction. Also proving all the fuss about how not losing 150 points in a 3-minutes would hurt the environment. We see it is cool.

Then came the devs with vengeance and shot the cost of using the workaround to infeasible territory. Great job all around.

In situations like this I normally ask questions like what is the aim here really. As solutions can only evaluated correctly against the goals.

Unknown

I think the idea of shields is great. The current implementation might need tweaking. The best part about shields is that I can reach a decent score, put up a shield, and go to sleep instead of staying up and engaging in a frenzy during the final hours. However, you're penalized for starting early due to the increased cost, so I'd like to see everyone get a free (or at least discounted) permashield that lasts until the tournament ends, but cannot be broken for any reason. This would work well for allowing everybody to play at their own pace, but still rewards those who play later because they can pass permashielded players without fear of getting leapfrogged.

Unknown

Why Is there never any options on the polls to say that the options given are ridiculous. How about this:
Do you think shield were an improvement?
Yes
No

Ta-Da!!! Less effort and it doesn't look like a jumbled mess where you were unnecessarily scrounging to suit the needs of everyone who has ever posted about it.

Unknown

The only time I used a shield was in the tournament just before their price went up. It really helped. I managed somehow to get to 1200 points and I shielded for 8 hours (100HP cost) because the end was 7am. Next day I saw I dropped from top 5 but I still was in top 15. I think the prize was 2 Wolverine (Patch) covers. Since the cost went up I haven't used and I don't intend to use in the future. My roster is 25/25 right now and I have 200HP. The problem is that since my team is weak (Wolverine - OBW - Ares/other) it's extremely difficult to get to top 5 - top 15 and shield with one push. I would need to use multiple shields which I can't afford and even if I did the end result would be uncertain.

If you don't have a strong team to at least scare off some opponents and drop the number of retaliations, by the time you attack 2-3 teams and try to shield again you lose more points than you gain. So at this point, shields are mostly for those with strong teams and a lot of HP saved. I don't mind though. I played a lot less in the last days, going only for the free standard token at 50 in Lightning Rounds and the 3 tokens for placing 200-250 in Divine Champions, and enjoy some other games (Warframe, The Banner Saga, Hearthstone) so it's all good. I guess in 2-3 months of casual play, if I am still around, I will have some more ISO (mostly from PvE tournaments) and expand a little my roster. I realized in the last few days that I don't enjoy at all the type of competition this game offers. Too cutthroat for my taste and too expensive to progress at a reasonable pace.

EDIT: Nothing from the DC tokens. 2 blue iron Man * and 1 red Storm, but I am used to this short of draws.

Eddiemon

Bugpop wrote:

For me shields have made tournaments easy. With patience I can easily get all progession awards and score in the top 10. I haven't been interested in #1, and I've been scoring as high as I care to.

I realize that I don't play for the same reasons as other people. I like to play MPQ because it's challenging. This morning I felt disappointed when I was playing. I started at 1221 and easily reached 1900 points. I stopped playing and didn't bother to shield. I think it's nonsense and I now regret putting out a "Bagman" team yesterday. We have players at 500 points using the best lineups they have and are attempting get a decent ranking, and I'm here scoring an extra 700 points without breaking a sweat. I don't even have to think. It's not a challenge. I could beat those teams with my "bagman" team. I don't think this is the right way to go about a tournament. It's not fun.

I don't get what part shielding played in the story apart from your starting score. You obviously have the time to put into grinding, and you didn't get attacked enough to adversely affect your climb. You're able to easily defeat your opponents, which is great but hardly the fault of shields either.

Unknown

The problem with shields is that right now they make the top end progression easier than the tier below it because you end up fighting guys who aren't even fighting back (because they're shielded) that's running a weak team even though that really doesn't even matter as long as they're not fighting back.

There's no way you can 'help' people in the 500-700 range because there aren't enough people shielded to lift more guys out of that range, and ironically if there was nobody would get very far either in the 1000 range assuming guys lifted out of that range still aren't likely to have spare HP to shield.

It's been stated officially that the goal of shields isn't to get those #1 with 1000 point lead over #2. However there's a paradox in that if this isn't the result people wouldn't be inclined to use shields in the first place.