The Truth about PVE scaling and Roster Levels

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

I don't think scaling has factored how much damage you've taken for a long time.

Please stop suggesting this as it contributes to the confusion around PvE scaling. Experiments clearly show that damage taken is one of the primary factors for determining personal scaling. When you see a node jump up in level due to personal scaling—which is distinguishable from community scaling due to its much larger increments—you can always reverse the level increase with a sufficient amount of tanking, and the effectiveness of that tanking is directly proportional to the amount of health you lose in battle (health loss due to retreats have no effect). It is as if there is a "health debt" you have to pay in proportion to enemy levels in order to keep scaling in check.

Statistics are hard to accumulate because every node has a different amount of scaling, and there may well be factors other than health loss at play. The last time I experimented with enemies in the level 100–150 range however, I had to take roughly 10 damage per total enemy level in order to freeze personal scaling for nodes that seemed to have moderate amounts of scaling, and as high as 20 damage per total enemy level for those with extra deadly scaling.

Unknown

I can only say this for my situation and scaling in general.

I quit for a good long while and came back about a month ago, the first few PvE/PvP events I joined were basically all 1* grade opponents until the last few minutes of the sub, where on average they'd be anywhere from my roster level (100ish) to 166 or so, the Maggia nodes were rarely above 150.

Now that I've been playing for a while, the first node in every sub is the same trivial level 10-30s which means I can clear them with little to no damage. However, for Thick as Thieves(Anderson Inc.), the Ares/Criterion/Bullseye node started at 153(listed as "normal" difficulty... because reasons) effectively 1 shot my entire usable roster of about 18 characters until I used every boost I could(including expired 3 stacks) to beat it once. I hate to think of what that is going to look like by the end of the sub as it's beyond reasonable as is.

When I came back I placed top10 in 3 events because I was matched up against other 2-3* transitioners in my leader boards. Since then, every roster I see from almost everyone I'm up against generally have at least a full page of maxed 3*s, and I've been lucky to place top 100, that'll be about 6 PvE rotations since I was able to place. By now I'd like to think that initial rating would have degraded to the point of being irrelevant but it doesn't seem to be the case as I still have a helluva time placing top 100.

So take all of that for what you will, based on previous posts, I should see that Ares node decrease in difficulty, but generally I see it going the other way, he'll be level 200 by the time the sub is done and well beyond what I'm capable of even attempting.

Unknown

Some more truth from the past.

Originally there was no scaling at all. Those were the days, people loved the original Hulk PvE and others.

Then following the freemium recipe that was changed, scaling was added, people were sad and enraged.
And we got explanation: scaling is up due to HEALING. And stun. Because we, evil players "exploit" the game using OBW and spiderman.
So deserve punishment in form of scaled enemies.

Then some people stopped using those, and SM was nerfed. Even true healing was dropped on the game. We waited that scaling will fall back.
It didn't. They claimed it's still up as people use CMags and endless turns. Then that was nerfed to oblivion too.

And guess what, scaling just did not fell back.

Aren't we tired of all the phony claims?

or just the excessively evil idea of scaling enemies while not scaling any of the rewards? MEH.

Unknown

Linkster79 wrote:

So to sum up. Level characters as much as you want to, just don't use them efficiently. Is this right?

I absolutely refuse to believe that any game developer would come up with a system that punishes efficient use.

Uh, why do you deliberately refuse to believe the bare truth? You summed it up so well in a single short sentence.

mr_X

Interesting thread. It would be great if the mystery of scaling can be finally and conclusively unlocked.

In the three transition phase so still rely on maxed two stars but have about 3 or 4 characters that I could level up to 150, but have not because I fear my scaling will go through the roof and make pve unplayable. The downside is I am weaker in PvP than I could be.

Just" tried" tanking Anderson bio technic 4 to see if my scaling dropped. (OK maybe tried is not right the right term as all 4 efforts were serious attempts resulting in downed teams at the hand's of Ares onslaught.) and the scaling has remained steady at 185.

For me the scaling only seems to go up but never down

Unknown

I'm really confused about what "scaling" actually is, or maybe just the semantics involved.

If I, a user with nothing above 94 (2*s) and zero 3*s with anything approaching usability (6 covers on Hood, everyone else mostly between 1-3 covers, max level 55-ish), make my first clear attempt on a level marked "easy," how am I possibly facing 150+ Ares, Ms, etc.?

I could almost understand it if it were goons (almost), but a 94 player taking on a 150+ Ares? "Easy?"

DBC

fmftint

Drummerboycroy wrote:

I'm really confused about what "scaling" actually is, or maybe just the semantics involved.

If I, a user with nothing above 94 (2*s) and zero 3*s with anything approaching usability (6 covers on Hood, everyone else mostly between 1-3 covers, max level 55-ish), make my first clear attempt on a level marked "easy," how am I possibly facing 150+ Ares, Ms, etc.?

I could almost understand it if it were goons (almost), but a 94 player taking on a 150+ Ares? "Easy?"

DBC

because your weekly featured 94s are boosted to 150 and your level 70 HB is boosted 90 levels to 160, your T3/4 average for the event has gone up significantly higher than 94

d0nk3y

mr_X wrote:

Just" tried" tanking Anderson bio technic 4 to see if my scaling dropped. (OK maybe tried is not right the right term as all 4 efforts were serious attempts resulting in downed teams at the hand's of Ares onslaught.) and the scaling has remained steady at 185.

For me the scaling only seems to go up but never down

Yesterday I ended wiping out repeatedly on "normal" difficulty nodes where the goons were doing 3k damage per pistol countdown... I believe it was 2* Daken and 2 goons, and their level was in to 200 to 210 range on the first pass. It's kinda hard to keep anything alive when a Chemical Reaction is doing upwards of 3k per attack as well and the boards are garbage.

By the time I was done and had ragequit for half an hour, I had 8 dead 3* and 4* characters. When I went back in, the levels I was facing were the same or greater than when I was wiping out.

There have been two significant changes in the last week: with the drop of the R75 patch, I brought all of my underleveled 3*s up to 120 or greater. I believe this is also the first full PvE to have the weekly boosted characters. One or both of these two factors has seriously impacted scaling, and not in a good way.

*edit* okay, so I just beat a node on Anderson Bio-Technic with a level 262 Bullseye... the resulting Murderous Aim TU drop was a level 78. The fought level was 3.35x higher than the TU. How is this scaling still working as intended?

Unknown

fmftint wrote:

Drummerboycroy wrote:

I'm really confused about what "scaling" actually is, or maybe just the semantics involved.

If I, a user with nothing above 94 (2*s) and zero 3*s with anything approaching usability (6 covers on Hood, everyone else mostly between 1-3 covers, max level 55-ish), make my first clear attempt on a level marked "easy," how am I possibly facing 150+ Ares, Ms, etc.?

I could almost understand it if it were goons (almost), but a 94 player taking on a 150+ Ares? "Easy?"

DBC

because your weekly featured 94s are boosted to 150 and your level 70 HB is boosted 90 levels to 160, your T3/4 average for the event has gone up significantly higher than 94

Ahhh, so my boosted OBW is what's hosing me... not sure how that's "easy," but hey, at least I know what's happening, right?

OBW? Meet Ares, and have a nice nap for the next couple hours. Good thing I'm not interested in doing well in this PVE. lol

Thanks for the heads up!

Edit: d0nk3y - Just saw your post above this one. So if I've got a 3* that gets boosted, despite it being relatively useless (1-3 covers), I'm guessing that effects my scaling?

DBC

d0nk3y

simonsez wrote:

GothicKratos wrote:

Rubberbanding should come back.

We have 8 hour refreshes now. If someone can't find the time to play once every 8 hours, we don't need to help them catch up when they finally decide to play.

Rubberbanding isn't gone... when I did EotS, my wave nodes that started at 2900 on first run were rewarding 4000+ points during my final grinds.

GothicKratos

ArkPrime wrote:

There was one 270 character in my entire top10 in the HB pve. The vast majority of players in every top5 pve alliances have low level max cover rosters, and they do well every single event, so please don't tell me they're all taking 25 minutes to clear a node, and don't tell me average roster level doesn't matter. Clearly keeping your roster at a low level has a significant effect on scaling. As it stands I have to go into the final grind with at least 6h on the clock if I want to compete, do nothing else while I'm grinding the nodes, and I still fall out of top competition because there is always someone who can start the final grind with 2-3h on the clock, so they have a higher amount of possible points available to them. I am hard locked out of competition, and it's been making playing the events a real slog, and unfortunately, since they only release characters in those, an obligatory one.

Yeah, that's fine and well, and there's a very obvious reason why those players "do better" than other players; since their characters aren't as strong as yours, they can use those characters but still sustain a fairly decent amount of damage, which keeps their scaling "in check". It's based on performance. What you said doesn't change that one bit. While lots of other people (read: the people claiming this information is inaccurate) keep plugging away at every single node with maxed out characters and continue to kill themselves.

d0nk3y wrote:

simonsez wrote:

GothicKratos wrote:

Rubberbanding should come back.

We have 8 hour refreshes now. If someone can't find the time to play once every 8 hours, we don't need to help them catch up when they finally decide to play.

Rubberbanding isn't gone... when I did EotS, my wave nodes that started at 2900 on first run were rewarding 4000+ points during my final grinds.

I don't know for certain if it exists or not still - I certainly didn't notice it in my last PvE - but if it it's, it's miniscule, and for the reason I mentioned earlier, I feel like it's a great benefit to the community. I don't think RBing should allow a player to necessarily get back into higher rankings (unless the higher ranking missed a refresh too, in which case, they would slip without RBing in place anyways), but allow someone that couldn't get in a refresh or two to still be able to get Progression Rewards.

mr_X

There have been two significant changes in the last week: with the drop of the R75 patch, I brought all of my underleveled 3*s up to 120 or greater. I believe this is also the first full PvE to have the weekly boosted characters. One or both of these two factors has seriously impacted scaling, and not in a good way.

That is my concern. I have a roster of 41 and have quite a few underleveled 3 stars which I would like to upgrade for dual usage in pve/pvp but I am worried it will break pve.

I finally started beating Anderson 5 ( bullseye, criterion and Aries team) again using the hood and Obw. Levels were 190 so levelling up your 3 stars seems to have really pushed your scaling up to crazy levels.

Unknown

Vynyv wrote:

Phantron wrote:

I don't think scaling has factored how much damage you've taken for a long time.

Please stop suggesting this as it contributes to the confusion around PvE scaling. Experiments clearly show that damage taken is one of the primary factors for determining personal scaling. When you see a node jump up in level due to personal scaling—which is distinguishable from community scaling due to its much larger increments—you can always reverse the level increase with a sufficient amount of tanking, and the effectiveness of that tanking is directly proportional to the amount of health you lose in battle (health loss due to retreats have no effect). It is as if there is a "health debt" you have to pay in proportion to enemy levels in order to keep scaling in check.

Statistics are hard to accumulate because every node has a different amount of scaling, and there may well be factors other than health loss at play. The last time I experimented with enemies in the level 100–150 range however, I had to take roughly 10 damage per total enemy level in order to freeze personal scaling for nodes that seemed to have moderate amounts of scaling, and as high as 20 damage per total enemy level for those with extra deadly scaling.

Damage taken is an irrelevent portion of scaling. It may have been at one point it is no longer so, because this is a factor that is trivially manipulated by powerful rosters and you would never have seen any complaints about scaling if it was that easy to get around. I mean, you're suggesting say a typical level 100 roster fighting say 120 enemies take 4000 damage which is 50% of their total HP, and then somehow when you move that to a 166/270 mix roster fighting level 300 guys, we somehow takes less damage both absolutely and as a % of our character's total HP? That is simply impossible. Nobody is that good, and it's not like those guys with level 100 characters can't use the same characters a maxed roster can now that the 4* ceases to have a significant advantage. You'll notice the dominant level 100 guys have max covered guys at level 100, so it's not a cover issue. The maxed roster takes both more absolute damage and more % damage because level 300 versus 166/270 is a lot harder than level 120 versus 100. If damage taken actually dialed back scaling it'd take no time at all for all our scaling to unwind without even trying.

And if you wanted to, all you have to do is bring your enemy team's last guy down to about 2K and have a move that can do at least that much damage, then start doing dumb things like only match on the top 2 rows and don't worry, level 300 guys will quickly chew through your health, but since the AI never uses any AP they collected on the same turn, you'll always be able to win this fight no matter what kind of crazy dumb things you managed to do while having a totally beaten up team. This does used to work, which made manipulating scaling trivial. Ares was an all star back then when you just Sunder at guys with 100 HP left repeatedly. People stopped doing that because devs caught on and noticed you had some guys with maxed out roster with lower scaling than a guy with level 100 characters because it's easy to manipulate this and it becomes a runaway effect after you drop your scaling to a point where your B-team can do the same fake tough battles. Programatically, it's practically impossible for to discern the difference between just playing badly or purposely playing badly and the devs wisely stopped rewarding people for playing badly via losing a lot of health.

I guess people have this image that when a maxed out roster faces level 300 guys we somehow can't stop accidentally winning without taking any damage which drives out scaling up even further and then we come to complain it. If I can accidentally win against level 300 guys without taking damage I wouldn't be complaining about scaling in the first place. You don't need a lot of help taking a lot of damage when a villian/goon combo can do a 1K match 4 and a Chemical Reaction can hit you for 5K+. If taking damage beats scaling, Ares/Daken/Juggernaut would easily keep anyone's scaling in check.

Pylgrim

mr_X wrote:

There have been two significant changes in the last week: with the drop of the R75 patch, I brought all of my underleveled 3*s up to 120 or greater. I believe this is also the first full PvE to have the weekly boosted characters. One or both of these two factors has seriously impacted scaling, and not in a good way.

That is my concern. I have a roster of 41 and have quite a few underleveled 3 stars which I would like to upgrade for dual usage in pve/pvp but I am worried it will break pve.

I finally started beating Anderson 5 ( bullseye, criterion and Aries team) again using the hood and Obw. Levels were 190 so levelling up your 3 stars seems to have really pushed your scaling up to crazy levels.

As long as you don't play with your 3*s in PVE your scaling will not be influenced by them being a higher level.

mr_X wrote:

Interesting thread. It would be great if the mystery of scaling can be finally and conclusively unlocked.

In the three transition phase so still rely on maxed two stars but have about 3 or 4 characters that I could level up to 150, but have not because I fear my scaling will go through the roof and make pve unplayable. The downside is I am weaker in PvP than I could be.

Just" tried" tanking Anderson bio technic 4 to see if my scaling dropped. (OK maybe tried is not right the right term as all 4 efforts were serious attempts resulting in downed teams at the hand's of Ares onslaught.) and the scaling has remained steady at 185.

For me the scaling only seems to go up but never down

It never goes down. Community scaling makes sure of that. In fact, community scaling may be the number 1 element that factors in absurdly scaled nodes.

d0nk3y

Pylgrim wrote:

It never goes down. Community scaling makes sure of that. In fact, community scaling may be the number 1 element that factors in absurdly scaled nodes.

I'm not certain this is correct - I don't remember which PvE it was, but a few events back one of the final nodes was one with 3 goons. I was able to beat it pretty easily and it scaled up to Deadly at level 296. For giggles I checked it a few minutes later and it was back down to Hard at level 267. It did this scale up / scale down dance a few more times before the event ended.

Unknown

d0nk3y wrote:

Pylgrim wrote:

It never goes down. Community scaling makes sure of that. In fact, community scaling may be the number 1 element that factors in absurdly scaled nodes.

I'm not certain this is correct - I don't remember which PvE it was, but a few events back one of the final nodes was one with 3 goons. I was able to beat it pretty easily and it scaled up to Deadly at level 296. For giggles I checked it a few minutes later and it was back down to Hard at level 267. It did this scale up / scale down dance a few more times before the event ended.

Community scaling is supposed to go down if enough people are losing to something, but I think certain nodes simply have a 'level never goes down' modifier, like most of the nodes in Simulator Hard are just always going up. I see a lot of weird fluctuation with the trivial nodes, especially in Simulator Normal where you can see nodes that started out at say 70 dropped down to 50 throughout the game, probably because enough newbies can't beat it at that level, but the highest nodes that nobody should have any business beating reliably almost always just keeps going up.

StevO-J

When you say scaling only goes up do you mean to say that it goes up for all nodes, or just for the more difficult ones?

In any PVE there are usually a few trivial/easy nodes and a few normal/hard (and sometimes deadly) nodes in my experience. And then there are the essential nodes which are mostly rated easy/normal for me when a sub starts. Normally for me the easier nodes tend to scale down during the event, while the harder and the essetial nodes do indeed only scale up. Maybe this is an effect caused by not having any maxed out characters or something like that, was just wondering if I'm understanding you correctly.

Unknown

I like how many people claim certain things obviously affect scaling. Tell you what, if you're so sure, obviously you can affect your scaling by manipulating the variables you know for sure are in effect, right? Show me a maxed roster getting maxed scaling and then you lowering that scaling on purpose. Because so far all I've seen is talk, no experiments.

fmftint

ArkPrime wrote:

I like how many people claim certain things obviously affect scaling. Tell you what, if you're so sure, obviously you can affect your scaling by manipulating the variables you know for sure are in effect, right? Show me a maxed roster getting maxed scaling and then you lowering that scaling on purpose. Because so far all I've seen is talk, no experiments.

No one will agree on anything, in this thread i've shown multiple events at different stages of roster development, and people still say "levels don't matter" they clearly and simply do. Higher T3/4 gets you a higher starting point. How you play from there is a different story

Edit:
What happened to those dev claims that we can't get super leveled TUs because people farmed them and increased community scaling? Has anyone seen a slow down as a result of that?

Unknown

StevO-J wrote:

When you say scaling only goes up do you mean to say that it goes up for all nodes, or just for the more difficult ones?

In any PVE there are usually a few trivial/easy nodes and a few normal/hard (and sometimes deadly) nodes in my experience. And then there are the essential nodes which are mostly rated easy/normal for me when a sub starts. Normally for me the easier nodes tend to scale down during the event, while the harder and the essetial nodes do indeed only scale up. Maybe this is an effect caused by not having any maxed out characters or something like that, was just wondering if I'm understanding you correctly.

It seems to me at some point there's this 'just keep increasing levels' mode activated for all the high point nodes. Back in the older days you can see a node in a heroic that's say Daken + goon + goon or The Hood + Muscle + Juggernaut fluctuate going up and down and it's not hard to imagine that people are having varying success beating this, but at some point it'll just keep on go up and I doubt this is because people suddenly put on their hardcore hats and start beating it easily. It feels like community scaling is some kind of lever but at some point it's just taped to the 'up' direction for the rest of the sub, and given we've mostly 24H subs now, I wouldn't be surprised if it's just permanently taped to the 'up' direction. Now there's still an issue of how fast it is going up and that does matter, but I haven't seen a hard difficulty node go down at all in a very long time.