Does rubberbanding hurt casual play that it intends to help?

Unknown

I understand that we want a competitive environment for varying playing styles, but in order to get the most points possible and earn good rewards in PVE events I feel like I need to break out an abacus and do some calculations to figure out how I can play. I just want to play a game, I don’t want to figure out an algorithm to calculate the best time to enter events, the best time to complete missions after points regenerate etc.

I feel like the game is hamstringing me and discouraging me from playing when I see miserable point rewards for missions.

mischiefmaker

I don't think rubber banding is intended to help casual play so much as it's intended to make it possible to compete without incessantly grinding. In that regard it works great.

Also, if you're trying to get the most points possible and earn the highest reward possible, then by many definitions of casual, you are not casual.

Unknown

I played about 80% of the last PvE event and still scored a top 100 finish. I say that it worked pretty well. If you 'put in the work' you will be rewarded, but at the same time you can miss a few subs and still get into the top tier of rewards.


It's certainly a huge improvement over the first time rubberbanding was tried out.

Unknown

mischiefmaker wrote:

I don't think rubber banding is intended to help casual play so much as it's intended to make it possible to compete without incessantly grinding. In that regard it works great.

Also, if you're trying to get the most points possible and earn the highest reward possible, then by many definitions of casual, you are not casual.

This. But, it does help casuals get higher placement and progression rewards. Won't be top, but they'll get higher than without it, certainly.

Unknown

Rubberbanding doesn't help you in terms of placement. If I play 'causal' and somehow beat someone who is 'hardcore' by just some quirks of the system, that's not really fair. You might as well make placement random in that case. And that's not what rubberbanding is about. Unless the 'hardcore' guy missed the last mission refresh, you're never beating a hardcore guy by playing casual.

What rubberband help is on the progression reward. If there are 80000 total progression points and you only play half as much as someone hitting 80K, you should only have 40K without the rubberbanding. With rubberbanding you'll have around 60-70K depending on exact details of the system and your playing times. Your relative placement to the guy who can get 80K isn't going to change, and it should not.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

What rubberband help is on the progression reward. If there are 80000 total progression points and you only play half as much as someone hitting 80K, you should only have 40K without the rubberbanding. With rubberbanding you'll have around 60-70K depending on exact details of the system and your playing times. Your relative placement to the guy who can get 80K isn't going to change, and it should not.

So to catch myself up on what everyone else probably already knows, I'm assuming this is exactly the reason why many people think rubberbanding should go? If it's about progression, then lower the rewards to 40K. If rubberbanding helps everyone who completes at least <some number> of missions get rewards, then that's how it should work. Needlessly complicating the system won't ever make anyone happy.

Unknown

Lot of sandy **** on this board...

I think the rubber banding does a good job of not overly penalizing grinders while still giving the players with less free time a chance at decent prizes.

I get the overwhelming sense that everybody thinks they're entitled to a 4* wolvie or a top 5 finish... it's a free game, you're not entitled to ****. Put in the time, or money, or both... and stop ****.

Unknown

mischiefmaker wrote:

I don't think rubber banding is intended to help casual play so much as it's intended to make it possible to compete without incessantly grinding. In that regard it works great.

Also, if you're trying to get the most points possible and earn the highest reward possible, then by many definitions of casual, you are not casual.

I agree, but I think it's important to state how we define casual. There are two types that I would think are noteworthy:

1. Casual with a lot of free time but doesn't wanna put in a lot of effort. They want an easy game to relax to. Perhaps play while watching a movie or inbetween breaks. These would prefer grinding easy missions over and over.

2. Casual that doesn't have a lot of time, but willing to put in effort. These would prefer high difficulty-high reward missions. So rubberbanding is ideal.

I think OP is thinking more along the lines of the first one.

To be honest though, this is a competetive game. The very nature of that limits the casual aspect. Perhaps they could implement non-competetive events in the future. Perhaps take note of other games with co-op big boss fights.

Unknown

The rubberband in all its various incarnation is basically exponential dampening. If I start out playing twice as you do, I should expect to have twice as much as points. Instead my efforts are dampened so I might only have 10% more points than you on the list, which is good for the guy who plays less in terms of progression rewards (so he can actually hit them). It doesn't change the placement and if the guy plays less tries to catch up to me, he'll find that 10% difference in points requires a ton of playing to catch up.

The one exception is that if the guy playing a lot for whatever reason decides to stop playing, then it is actually possible to pass him up quite quickly depending on the exact system involved (very easy on The Hulk, considerably harder on The Hunt). Though for the most part there's really no reason to assume the guy playing a lot is suddenly going to just take a day off without a good reason.

MarvelMan

Phantron wrote:

Though for the most part there's really no reason to assume the guy playing a lot is suddenly going to just take a day off without a good reason.

Does boredom count? I got burnt out in the last even and stopped playing the last 3 iterations. Still managed to place top 100 though due to my efforts early on.

Unknown

Completely agree with the OP. As a new player it was so frustrating to do the Alaska Ares mission, which only had missions you could play once. I would play them all, then watch helplessly as I slipped out of the rankings when other players waited a few hours to complete everything. After a few tries, I figured out that waiting for the points to "charge up" was the way to go, but it's stupid and unintuitive to be that way.

Really, I don't see why the PvE small mission areas need a leaderboard. It's not really fun as a competition -- I can't see your team or how well you're doing or how much you're playing. The leaderboard could be completely fake and it wouldn't affect my enjoyment of the game at all.

In effect, the leaderboard was just a confusing way of saying: You have 36 hours to complete missions. If you complete 15, you get a red Ares. If you complete 25, you get red and green. If you complete 40, you get a Punisher. And so forth. So why not just make that the payout table and skip the confusing-**** point system that nobody understands?

Unknown

I'm pretty sure if instead the leaderboard shows the number of missions completed, weighted by difficulty (the level 240 missions is worth about 5 of the easiest ones on the point scale), people complaining about rubberband will notice all the guys above them almost certainly did more missions total. I've been in several competitive sub brackets and toward the end it is pretty clear all the guys in the top 10 are just pumping out missions as fast as possible. You shouldn't expect to compete against that while playing casually. I don't always compete on those brackets depending on my schedule for the day, and have no expectations to be competitive when I don't have time for them.