Plea to address pve scaling

Azoic

I kmow this keeps coming around, and we have yet to get a response. First off, why in the world is there community scaling?? I walk out of a Scotland Yards node at 1/4 health, and it scaled up another 20. Now it is another 30 on top of that. Now Scotland 6 and 7 are both 220 for my 94 roster...and that is without me even grinding on them yet. So why in the world should most of the population be punished for ppl hitting these over a day before the event is over?? It seems to scale up whenever you have a good board, but won't drop if you wipe or walk out with 100 health. C'mon, D3.

*edit: since I posted this, that same node went up 20 more levels 242 for my 94 roster) and I havent touched it*

These one-shot you nodes are what makes ppl resort to gimmicky tricks, which D3 has nerfed to hell. So can you please limit scaling to a person's roster or something? A great recommendation I saw was to increase mob health, but not all the damage. A sniper does twice my healthpool. You get an unlucky board and can't prevent that first blue? Sorry! And everyone knows how bad Ares/Jugs is with scaling... Onslaught, headbutt, and sunder all pretty much one-shot a lot of the roster. Oh AI got a cascade. Wipe!

puppychow

Ah! But how will D3 sell heal packs otherwise? you can't expect to walk into a difficult node and leave unscathed. That's simply bad for business from D3's perspective. So chin up, support D3, and buy health packs!

simonsez

You're right... with no rb, there's no reason for community scaling. And they seriously need to reconsider how they compute personal scaling as well. As you pointed out with the sniper example, on too many of these nodes, the only two outcomes are to win with minimal (or no) damage, or to wipe completely. Winning a node like these with no damage doesn't mean it was too easy; it means you got a good board and some good early cascades, and were able to get things going. And it makes no sense for the node to go up every time I beat it, but to stay the same when I wipe to it.

chaos01

Azoic,

So you want reduced PVE scaling and like the new PVP? As a transitioner you should realize PVE is where new players used to be able to win 3 covers decently. Now it seems PVP might do that. You can't have both.

Azoic

Chaos...the top ppl in pve still use XF. Why should the same players with ONE max char dominate both pve and pvp? And as shown in the forums, you must have gotten your way, Teenage Riot is back to normal.

Anyways, back to pve scaling...

chaos01

Scaling sucks for everyone though. I don't have a max XForce, I have a decent roster but not great by any means. My goon nodes are over 300. Does it suck? Yes. Do I want it to be easier? Not if it means losing to someone with an underdeveloped roster because they have an easier time using stormnetoeye.

simonsez

chaos01 wrote:

Does it suck? Yes. Do I want it to be easier? Not if it means losing to someone with an underdeveloped roster because they have an easier time using stormnetoeye.

They alternative is to lose to someone who's having less bad luck than you're having, or to lose to someone who buys health packs after having the same bad luck you're having. All the great planning and strategy in the world isn't going to help you get past a lv300+ Ares/Juggs 5-6 times in a row without some seriously bad sht happening along the way.

Scoregasms

I think at some point, with all these recent changes, they should just reset everyones individual PVE scaling to 0 so we can all start over. For those that used Winfinite, the scaling is still adjusted thinking you can beat nodes with it, same with those that relied on 4hor to beat highly-scaled nodes.

In fact, it'd be nice if they did this maybe twice a year or something to keep this somewhat under control (and again if the nerf bat comes round again and destroys widely used comps).

I'm barely able to play TaT right now since I'm only using lower characters, but having my 110/94 characters facing off against a 280 Ares just isn't fun in the slightest, lol. While it does feel nice to barely eek a win with some serious board luck, that quickly goes away when I realize it just jumped to 286 an hour later and will probably be over 300 when I hit it next... (which doesn't make sense, you'd think if I have one character alive with less than 500 health, it would actually go down, not up... lol).

And agree, Community Scaling needs to go, let the nodes scale based on how well one plays them, not go up because others who zerg it early to just get it out the way. The difficulty should increase based on how quickly you re-tap a node (i.e. difficulty scales up immediately after beating it but goes back down if you wait 8 hours) along with how well you "performed" on a node, but that's just a grey area I guess, but you can keep whatever magical formula you have to determine this.

chaos01

simonsez wrote:

chaos01 wrote:

Does it suck? Yes. Do I want it to be easier? Not if it means losing to someone with an underdeveloped roster because they have an easier time using stormnetoeye.

They alternative is to lose to someone who's having less bad luck than you're having, or to lose to someone who buys health packs after having the same bad luck you're having. All the great planning and strategy in the world isn't going to help you get past a lv300+ Ares/Juggs 5-6 times in a row without some seriously bad sht happening along the way.

I would personally rather lose to luck and whales. Luck runs out and whales would buy the health packs anyways.

simonsez

chaos01 wrote:

I would personally rather lose to luck and whales. Luck runs out and whales would buy the health packs anyways.

... or we could just have scaling that's better tuned to our rosters, so we don't need luck and/or money to succeed.

Unknown

Scaling, both personal and community, has always been a really ham-handed "solution" to the problem caused by trying to make what is essentially a single player experience into a multiplayer competition. And the common misconception is that it's designed to be fair. It's not. Not really. It's about making everyone across a wide range of roster power levels think that they have a chance to win, because more people engaging heavily in the competition means more people who are likely to spend money. Extreme rubberbanding was the ultimate in this, and mercifully we've moved away from that.

That said, the way scaling works in this game, through whatever arcane witchdoctory they use to calculate it on a player to player basis, is awkward, unfun, and almost universally unfair. Interesting that they decided to blow up PvP matchmaking on a whim when PvE is at least as broken and due for a major overhaul. At the very, very least, and I do mean least because there's so much that needs to be fixed, they need to drop the max level of enemies down from 395. It's a ridiculous number that was only introduced in the first place to try and inconvenience people who were exploiting pre-nerf Spidey and CMags. Those things don't exist anymore, but 395 enemies are still alive and kicking. Why? And now they've nerfed boosts too, one of the few remaining ways to deal with this stupidity. Enough already. Lower the ceiling, if not to 230 where it used to be then at least to something far more reasonable than what it is now.

Scoregasms

simonsez wrote:

chaos01 wrote:

I would personally rather lose to luck and whales. Luck runs out and whales would buy the health packs anyways.

... or we could just have scaling that's better tuned to our rosters, so we don't need luck and/or money to succeed.

I'd take this a step further and have the enemy node levels be based on the 3 characters we choose to play. Sure, I have 4* and max 3*, but if I want to use my 2* and some lower 3*, I shouldn't be forced to only play with my best characters, this isn't fun. This already happens in PVP, no reason to restrict us in PVE too in the same manner. Not everyone can slowly and evenly level all their characters up, this takes a ridiculous amount of time. Node difficulty remains the same and goes up, but actual enemy levels should be adjusted based on what 3 characters are selected for it.

I'm sure there are holes in this logic and exploits, but I'd imagine once a node goes up to Hard or higher, then you'd want to switch to your "better" characters in that final grind which also comes with a healthy increase in enemy levels. Whether you have a deep roster or just starting out, this seems to be a fair approach, but who am I really, I'm just a day 153 player who is currently questioning their future play in this game as my definition of fun is definitely not the same as the developers.

SymmeTrey

One small thing that would help - I really think they should dramatically increase the level boosts for 3* and 4* rosters. It would help deal with scaling somewhat. A 30 level boost on a 3* character has almost no effect when you have 166 and 270 level scaling. Make these level boosts larger (doubling the current boosts or more) and start boosting some 4* characters too.

Much like Scoregasms, I'm tired of having 60 characters on my roster and 3 or 4 that are usable in a PVE event. In a way, I almost enjoy the Heroics more because I find myself using different teams and have reasonable scaling.

veneretio

Thugpatrol wrote:

Scaling, both personal and community, has always been a really ham-handed "solution" to the problem caused by trying to make what is essentially a single player experience into a multiplayer competition.

Exactly.

For this to be true PvE, every event would have to be like the Gauntlet. Otherwise, we're really just PvPing differently. Now, would having a Gauntlet style event every time be good for the profits of the game? No idea. I hope they've at least considered it though.

Unknown

SymmeTrey wrote:

One small thing that would help - I really think they should dramatically increase the level boosts for 3* and 4* rosters. It would help deal with scaling somewhat. A 30 level boost on a 3* character has almost no effect when you have 166 and 270 level scaling. Make these level boosts larger (doubling the current boosts or more) and start boosting some 4* characters too.

Much like Scoregasms, I'm tired of having 60 characters on my roster and 3 or 4 that are usable in a PVE event. In a way, I almost enjoy the Heroics more because I find myself using different teams and have reasonable scaling.

Your first point is in conflict with your second. If you increase the amount that featured characters are boosted and leave scaling calculations the same that only serves to make you more dependent on a small group of characters per event, not less. Having a group of further 'roided up heroes is only going to make scaling worse, because it would make clearing nodes easier across the board for anyone with those characters, and make the characters without boosts even less useful. Fixing scaling is still the necessary adjustment. Your fix, sadly, is just a downward spiral.

As for your second point, boosting more characters rather than boosting a few characters more would be a better solution to your issue.

Unknown

I don't bother with PVE anymore , even if its a new character. The ridiculous scaling ain't fun and I hate draining nodes, tediously grindy..

Scoregasms

Boosted characters in PVE can also be bonkers too, if you're lucky and your boosted characters aren't above your normal playing roster, you're fine, but if they get a mega boost of 90 levels and are 40 levels above your best characters, how does that make sense?

I'm 99% sure they stated that a boosted characters level doesn't impact scaling (only base level), but that's part of this whole "grey" area of scaling, lol. I know for a fact I didn't play a node, added 10 levels to KK and came back to the node only to see it go up a few levels (she's still well below my playing roster). Sure, in the 15 seconds it took for me to level her a bit and come back, community scaling may have kicked in, but that seems awfully coincidental.

I'd prefer they just do a "Bring to Maximum" buff where the featured just gets bumped to the average of your other 2 selected characters so that your node levels aren't adversely impacted. If that happens to be more than 90 levels, then cap it at 90 levels. At least this way, I can add levels to my brand new KK without her shooting well past my 110 characters. Just is easier if we're just comparing against a somewhat normal baseline where enemy levels are concerned. Keep the mega/crazy buffs in PVP to help there, but we need consistency in PVE, not this roller coaster we have now.

SymmeTrey

Scoregasms wrote:

I'd prefer they just do a "Bring to Minimum" buff where the featured just gets bumped to the average of your other 2 selected characters so that your node levels aren't adversely impacted. Just is easier if we're just comparing against a somewhat normal baseline where enemy levels are concerned. Keep the mega/crazy buffs in PVP to help there, but we need consistency in PVE, not this roller coaster we have now.

I think this would be a really cool idea for all PVE buffs! If my high end roster is 166, how about boosting the characters featured in the event to 166?

For example - Relative to TaT, I would never deliberately put ISO into IM40 at this stage in the game, but, IM40 being boosted to an actual usable level (like 166-ish) for this one PVE event would be cool. A lot of the repetitiveness of teams we all use comes from the fact that we are all so limited by ISO.

And, hey, who knows... maybe someone plays with a boosted character for an event and likes him/her so much that they invest ISO or buy covers for that character? Seems like a win/win for players and devs.

Scoregasms

Lol, sorry SymmeTrey, I made a couple edits from my original post, but generally same idea, just realized that too high a buff would probably benefit those with deeper rosters more is all.

Unknown

This scaling is pretty brutal most times...I guess maybe I wouldn't mind it as much if the points for clearing scaled with it...188 points for clearing a node with level 200+ characters seems like a waste of time to me.

Unknown

Honestly they should just recap scaling at 230 or 270 or whatever it used to be. There's no reason to make pve so ridiculous irritating that people would want to quit over it. Another route to take is reduce total stacks on the nodes to something reasonable like 3 and increase award bands to at least double-triple what they currently are. No reason to be stingy with the first wave of a new character.

Deciding who gets a cover by who beats the same node with random difficulties 21 times instead of 20 and has the final win 3 minutes before the sub ends is completely ridiculous. There is no rhyme or reason. Go back to the old school fixed node values, no community scaling. 2 stacks. Greatly increased reward bands. Win.