Time to Face the Facts [a Conspiracy Theory Thread]

Unknown

Why would they lie? They could have just as easily not said anything and left us guessing as to the reasons Hulk Anger is top 5 for all appearances and then top 100 last 2 times in a row. Cover placement by RNG actually makes MORE sense than trying to figure out why a rotating schedule keeps coming up the same.

I believe the covers are picked via RNG because I believe the RNG hates me, and you, and everyone. The RNG gods would never allow IF Purple to be obtainable easily, because watching us suffer feeds their power.

Of course, they could create and stick to a cover rotation schedule based on the initial RNG cover handouts to more fully diversify cover color handouts. Or, as I've always said, they could start giving out 1/1/1 of new characters to everyone who places, and just vary the HP and ISO rewards for top 150, thus encouraging people to buy covers for the new shiny.

Their token sales figures must be really good to continually change how covers are rewarded in PvE. Top 10 for IF ? Really? A 3* debut for top 10 for 3 covers?

GothicKratos

The facts are that for someone to buy any Iron Fist covers, they have to own one, so if they wanted to drive cover sales, they would just make getting the first one super easy and then make the rest super hard to get. That's not how this game works. The game is designed to make you progress (albeit probably slower than it should, in a small degree) over time. The game is simply not pay-to-win. You cannot open MPQ and throw down $100 and be a top player. It's impossible (barring insanely lucky token pulls).

These cash grab theories are just as asinine. Yes, they're a business. Yes, they are here as one of their primary functions to make money.

Yeah, token drop rates are piss poor, but their drop rates are publicly documented (in-game), which is something no other game I've played with a similar mechanic (which is a lot of games) has done. It could be marginally better, fine and good, but it's not supposed to be the Yellow Brick Road - it's a lottery for a chance at extra covers. That's literally what it's supposed to be.

Yes, PvE scaling can get horrendous, but the devs have told us what we're doing wrong, but everyone's too damn jaded to listen, even those there are already numerous players that keep their scaling in check by doing such things for quite a long time.

To be completely frank, the only thing anyone should be complaining about is Roster Slots, and while yes, their addressing to that preceded problem is not ideal, they have been doing things to ease the pain of those things. I think a lot of people forget it's easier to measure (and in return counter-measure) the impact of small changes over large changes.

Trisul

GothicKratos wrote:

Yes, PvE scaling can get horrendous, but the devs have told us what we're doing wrong, but everyone's too damn jaded to listen, even those there are already numerous players that keep their scaling in check by doing such things for quite a long time.

This is just an aside (as I agree with most of your points), but I don't like the fact that you have to play suboptimally to keep PvE scaling in check. It's the principle of the thing: punishing players for playing well. Playing well should be rewarded (or at the very least, NOT be punished).

GothicKratos

Trisul wrote:

GothicKratos wrote:

Yes, PvE scaling can get horrendous, but the devs have told us what we're doing wrong, but everyone's too damn jaded to listen, even those there are already numerous players that keep their scaling in check by doing such things for quite a long time.

This is just an aside (as I agree with most of your points), but I don't like the fact that you have to play suboptimally to keep PvE scaling in check. It's the principle of the thing: punishing players for playing well. Playing well should be rewarded (or at the very least, NOT be punished).

I can't remember if it was you that I talked about this last time or not, but I hear ya. It's probably not the most user friendly/user intuitive way go about about things, but I can't think of a way to do it overall better.

Sure, you could totally base it off of average roster level, but there's a lot of things that can throw this off (single cover 4*s come to mind), and I also thing it's equally as unfair to punish a player simply for leveling a guy up when he's able to. So strike this for the same reasoning.

If you wanted to use a sample size that eliminated outliers, then the devs have to code it, test it, implement it, and then wade through all the people complaining that they want refunds because the game changed lol. This would be the best long-term option for the player, but I don't know if I feel like it's worth the overhead and the investment for the developers. I don't know if I'd want to pursue this, if I were in the dev's boots. There's a lot of variables at play here.

You couldn't use something arbitrary like days played or amount of roster slots or even previous placements, because all of those things are empty statistics that have no real baring on how "good" your roster is. None of this is viable.

How well you're doing in the event seems the easiest/obvious way to baseline scaling on a personal level.

The thing that's always kind of irked me is community scaling. I understand why it exists, and I'm okay with it existing as an ideal, but the way they go about it is pretty meh. If it were me, "community scaling" would only affect the amount of points a node if worth. If people are having an easy time clearing a node, it shouldn't be worth a lot of points. That makes sense. To a degree, it makes sense that if the community is having an easy time with a node, then it should be made marginally harder, but in practice while in tandem with personal scaling, it's a nightmare.

Trisul

GothicKratos wrote:

How well you're doing in the event seems the easiest/obvious way to baseline scaling on a personal level.

I agree, and the best way to determine how you are doing is simply wins/losses. The inherent reward for playing a node well is less health wasted, sparing health packs. That reward is locked in an eternal struggle with personal scaling at the moment.

GothicKratos wrote:

The thing that's always kind of irked me is community scaling. I understand why it exists, and I'm okay with it existing as an ideal, but the way they go about it is pretty meh. If it were me, "community scaling" would only affect the amount of points a node if worth. If people are having an easy time clearing a node, it shouldn't be worth a lot of points. That makes sense. To a degree, it makes sense that if the community is having an easy time with a node, then it should be made marginally harder, but in practice while in tandem with personal scaling, it's a nightmare.

I really like this idea as long as the total points per clear remain the same. So, cleared nodes are worth less, but those lost points are then redistributed among the rest of the nodes. There is some weirdness that could occur as the nodes fluctuate though, and there's some potential for mass-coordinated abuse. Though I suppose the current system still has it too.

JamieMadrox

So I'm just going to poke one hole in this argument and then walk away because the way I see it, if they want to release covers in a specific order to encourage people to buy more covers, then great! They're a business and they deserve to make money.

Cyclops completely breaks your argument. His ideal build is 355 with being his best ability for its synergy with Goddess of Thunder. Here's the rewards breakdown for the events where he was a prize:

Eye for an Eye
Enemy of the State
Lethal Intent
ISO-8 Brotherhood

This means that if you were a top player in all of the events he was a reward in you'd have a 2 4 4 .

So a top player that only wanted him for his yellow would only need to buy, at most, 1 cover barring any lucky token pulls. 11 covers means you can level him to about level 140 which is perfectly good for him.

For me, I won all of the available covers for placement and progression and pulled a cover, which I wouldn't have bought otherwise, from an ISO-8 Brotherhood token. I bought 1 cover and left his at 2.

So tell me again how there's a conspiracy to take all of my money by giving out rewards a certain way?

NorthernPolarity

Jamie Madrox wrote:

So I'm just going to poke one hole in this argument and then walk away because the way I see it, if they want to release covers in a specific order to encourage people to buy more covers, then great! They're a business and they deserve to make money.

Cyclops completely breaks your argument. His ideal build is 355 with being his best ability for its synergy with Goddess of Thunder. Here's the rewards breakdown for the events where he was a prize:

Eye for an Eye
Enemy of the State
Lethal Intent
ISO-8 Brotherhood

This means that if you were a top player in all of the events he was a reward in you'd have a 2 4 4 .

So a top player that only wanted him for his yellow would only need to buy, at most, 1 cover barring any lucky token pulls. 11 covers means you can level him to about level 140 which is perfectly good for him.

For me, I won all of the available covers for placement and progression and pulled a cover, which I wouldn't have bought otherwise, from an ISO-8 Brotherhood token. I bought 1 cover and left his at 2.

So tell me again how there's a conspiracy to take all of my money by giving out rewards a certain way?

Not to mention that when TGT was released in PvE, they gave out her yellow covers for the top placement awards. Given how yellow is functionally useless for TGT and a 5/0/5 GT is basically as good as a 5/3/5 one, I'm inclined to believe that OP just wants to selectively remember the times in the past where the top cover was the best cover and forget all the times where that wasn't the case. If this actually was a conspiracy, then any sane developer would have easily spotted that yellow was by far TGTs worst ability, and say "hey, lets put blue as the top award".

Scoregasms

GothicKratos wrote:

The thing that's always kind of irked me is community scaling. I understand why it exists, and I'm okay with it existing as an ideal, but the way they go about it is pretty meh. If it were me, "community scaling" would only affect the amount of points a node if worth. If people are having an easy time clearing a node, it shouldn't be worth a lot of points. That makes sense. To a degree, it makes sense that if the community is having an easy time with a node, then it should be made marginally harder, but in practice while in tandem with personal scaling, it's a nightmare.

Regarding PVE Scaling, is this thought too far fetched?

Instead of seeing levels for opponents, we just see the difficulty labels (Easy > Normal > Hard > Deadly), fresh node, it's the initial set difficulty, but the minute it goes into a timer, it jumps up a level. Hit it again immediately, goes up another level. These are preset based on certain time refresh periods, so you could hit a node, wait 4 hours, hit it again and it may not not go up in difficulty. If you let it go back to a full refresh, the difficulty resets. I have never seen Trivial Nodes scale and should probably stay as-is, good free points for all.

At least we would understand scaling and now it doesn't matter who we bring or how fast or how easy a node was and we know it'll be the same 8 hours later. Folks that want to hit the nodes early can play a bit harder and folks that wait till the end will still have the deal with the instant increase in difficulty via grinding. Not sure if this will actually deter folks from being able to grind down nodes to 1, but I would think so. This isn't necessarily bad either.

There's a second part to this, but doesn't have to be included with the above, but something I'd like to see. So the enemy levels should change based on the average level of the characters you select for your team (Difficulty label stays the same). So even if you have a Xor team but wanted to run OBW/Ares/Thor**, you could, this way, the game doesn't punish folks for leveling specific characters and would provide an even playing field. May even promote different team makeups depending on Node difficulty and switch team comps up as difficulty increases.

Yes, this would level the PVE playing field completely so the more developed Rosters would now have a advantage over those who have a short bench of characters. This is obviously a CON and not sure how to bring the edge back to the lower rosters for PVE. Maybe have a factor of how many characters someone has and levels (less than 10 and under an average of level 94) and they have a bit more flexibility in Node difficulty scaling (like it takes 2 refreshes for it to jump in difficulty).

PVP is a whole separate beast unfortunately and outside of a complete re-work, I don't have fleshed out ideas for changes (though, I haven't fully read Phaserhawks most recent post fully yet).

Phaserhawk

Well it will be easy to figure out by next guy.

Cyclops 1st skill (red) hard to get

Iron Fist 2nd stkill (purple) hard to get

by pattern, the next character should have 3rd skill be hard to get, if not, then they are doing this on purpose.

morph3us

Just two comments.

Firstly, the human brain is pretty much hardwired to see patterns, so it's human nature to see patterns where none exist.

Secondly, business is business. I think it's a mistake to attribute nefarious motivations to business decisions. Milking customers for short term financial gain is how you lose customers. D3 have been doing pretty well on the goodwill front recently.

Now that I've said all that, where the tiny-kitty are my Hood blues!!!!

CrookedKnight

Cryptobrancus wrote:

I think by now the issue is not "are the reward cover orders random or not?" and more like: "Leaving the new release cover orders up to randomness is producing terrible outcomes, can you please pick them manually in a sensible fashion, thanks."

Randomly determine cover rewards.

If the same cover comes up in the same position twice, reroll.

How tough is that?

GothicKratos

Trisul wrote:

GothicKratos wrote:

How well you're doing in the event seems the easiest/obvious way to baseline scaling on a personal level.

I agree, and the best way to determine how you are doing is simply wins/losses. The inherent reward for playing a node well is less health wasted, sparing health packs. That reward is locked in an eternal struggle with personal scaling at the moment.

I think we can agree this is just two different camps of thought. K/D is definitely an adequate way to measure how how well someone is doing in a general sense. However, when it comes to overall effectiveness, I feel like it is equally measurable by how well you're using all of your resources (rooster, boosts, team-ups, etc) to accomplish the task at hand. Realistically, I feel like if scaling was based purely on wins and loses, scaling would be much worse, because the only way to counter-balance it would be to completely throw matches, but with the system the way it is, you can easily counter-balance scaling by playing more evenly across your roster. Maybe being penalized for winning decisively isn't 'fair', but nether is being penalized for winning a node you can barely finish (likely making it impossible for you to finish again) simply because you won. I don't think either system is perfect, I just understand why it's the way it is.

Trisul wrote:

GothicKratos wrote:

The thing that's always kind of irked me is community scaling. I understand why it exists, and I'm okay with it existing as an ideal, but the way they go about it is pretty meh. If it were me, "community scaling" would only affect the amount of points a node if worth. If people are having an easy time clearing a node, it shouldn't be worth a lot of points. That makes sense. To a degree, it makes sense that if the community is having an easy time with a node, then it should be made marginally harder, but in practice while in tandem with personal scaling, it's a nightmare.

I really like this idea as long as the total points per clear remain the same. So, cleared nodes are worth less, but those lost points are then redistributed among the rest of the nodes. There is some weirdness that could occur as the nodes fluctuate though, and there's some potential for mass-coordinated abuse. Though I suppose the current system still has it too.

If it were me, I'd firstly segregate Essentials from 'normal' nodes. In my opinion, Essentials are supposed to be a benefit from having that character, and these nodes should have pretty low scaling (if any at all), and a pretty low wall of entry. I would say there should be three Essential Nodes; one for new rosters (low level 2*s), one for transitioners (max 2*s or midtier 3*s), and one for vets (max 3*s and mid tier 4*s) - note that this is how I would have them start and then scale up from. I realize that this creates a bit of a "rich get richer" scheme, but I honestly feel like this is one of the only features in the game that the vets benefit from, and I think it should stay that way.

From there, I wouldn't change much - the basic structure of events are on points. There's easy nodes, there's really hard nodes, and everything in between. Like I was saying in the previous post, I would have community scaling only affect the amount of points that a node is worth (somewhat similar to how PvP points are allocated). Each node would start with a certain amount of points based on their baseline difficulty, and as players win consecutively in a node, the amount of points it would be worth would decrease.

From here, there's two options; either the points just fluctuate around or they're siphoned off to other nodes that are not being beaten. The first option would make playing the first hour completely mandatory, because there would be a flood of free points. The second option would make attaining points a little more random, though players that play optimally to refreshes would likely still reign supreme.

The biggest question still is, however, what metrics do you use to appropriately measure "success"? Straight-up with wins or detail-orientated judging by how well you do? Which just wraps my post back up to the top.

ClydeFrog76

curlymustache wrote:

videogames, like porn or bodybuilding is a niche among its main branch medias.

No it's not.

esoxnepa

Jamie Madrox wrote:

So I'm just going to poke one hole in this argument and then walk away because the way I see it, if they want to release covers in a specific order to encourage people to buy more covers, then great! They're a business and they deserve to make money.

Cyclops completely breaks your argument. His ideal build is 355 with being his best ability for its synergy with Goddess of Thunder. Here's the rewards breakdown for the events where he was a prize:

Eye for an Eye
Enemy of the State
Lethal Intent
ISO-8 Brotherhood

This means that if you were a top player in all of the events he was a reward in you'd have a 2 4 4 .

So a top player that only wanted him for his yellow would only need to buy, at most, 1 cover barring any lucky token pulls. 11 covers means you can level him to about level 140 which is perfectly good for him.

For me, I won all of the available covers for placement and progression and pulled a cover, which I wouldn't have bought otherwise, from an ISO-8 Brotherhood token. I bought 1 cover and left his at 2.

So tell me again how there's a conspiracy to take all of my money by giving out rewards a certain way?

Using outliers for statistical justification does not work.

scottee

I like how "fact" and "conspiracy theory" are in the same title.

JamieMadrox

esoxnepa wrote:

Jamie Madrox wrote:

So I'm just going to poke one hole in this argument and then walk away because the way I see it, if they want to release covers in a specific order to encourage people to buy more covers, then great! They're a business and they deserve to make money.

Cyclops completely breaks your argument. His ideal build is 355 with being his best ability for its synergy with Goddess of Thunder. Here's the rewards breakdown for the events where he was a prize:

Eye for an Eye
Enemy of the State
Lethal Intent
ISO-8 Brotherhood

This means that if you were a top player in all of the events he was a reward in you'd have a 2 4 4 .

So a top player that only wanted him for his yellow would only need to buy, at most, 1 cover barring any lucky token pulls. 11 covers means you can level him to about level 140 which is perfectly good for him.

For me, I won all of the available covers for placement and progression and pulled a cover, which I wouldn't have bought otherwise, from an ISO-8 Brotherhood token. I bought 1 cover and left his at 2.

So tell me again how there's a conspiracy to take all of my money by giving out rewards a certain way?

Using outliers for statistical justification does not work.

I'm not going to go and pull all of the rewards from all of the events just to prove you wrong because unlike conspiracy theorists, I have better, saner, things to do.

Unknown

JM, we all know you're the face of the faceless corporation. Wait, wouldn't that make it not faceless? Any way, let's not let the facts get in the way here. We all know there is a cover conspiracy. There's no denying the evidence staring you straight in the face. The conspiracty is exactly why Fist (tm S.H.I.E.L.D) rewards will be rotated next time. Oh wait....

JamieMadrox

The_Valeyard wrote:

JM, we all know you're the face of the faceless corporation. Wait, wouldn't that make it not faceless? Any way, let's not let the facts get in the way here. We all know there is a cover conspiracy. There's no denying the evidence staring you straight in the face. The conspiracty is exactly why Fist (tm S.H.I.E.L.D) rewards will be rotated next time. Oh wait....

Don't make me use my mod voice...

Unknown

Jamie Madrox wrote:

The_Valeyard wrote:

JM, we all know you're the face of the faceless corporation. Wait, wouldn't that make it not faceless? Any way, let's not let the facts get in the way here. We all know there is a cover conspiracy. There's no denying the evidence staring you straight in the face. The conspiracty is exactly why Fist (tm S.H.I.E.L.D) rewards will be rotated next time. Oh wait....

Don't make me use my mod voice...

Demonstrating absurding by being absurd worked for that Limbaugh guy (well, it made him rich, so I call that "working"). Why is that against forum protocol?

esoxnepa

Jamie Madrox wrote:

esoxnepa wrote:

Using outliers for statistical justification does not work.

I'm not going to go and pull all of the rewards from all of the events just to prove you wrong because unlike conspiracy theorists, I have better, saner, things to do.

Oh, I'm not one of the conspiracy theorists. I am imparting the knowledge that basing your argument on the statistical outliers of top is not a sound argument. If you can prove using outliers is a sound method of statistical analysis, please point me to the textbook, because then I will need a refresher.

I'd love to see D3's metrics on which customers are likely to buy packs vs covers vs never buy packs vs never buy covers, just so I could look at how the selection of placement covers impacts sales. Do they give that information to MODs? Even with you being trusted, I doubt they would risk even an accidental leak to anything that proprietary to their business model to any non-employees. Without that data, the arguments are baseless.

I don't really care how they pick covers for the rewards. D3 is doing a much better job in making the full game accessible to everyone. Some of the conspiracy theorist seem to want everything "right now." For me, for the game to be fun, I need to be able to see prizes I want to earn later on.