Changes to Versus Matchmaking [Update]

Lidolas

dleezphone wrote:

The thing is, instead of the game becoming a little easier with more time invested, you are now in a spot where the game is even more difficult than from your first day. I thought the old system was fine, even when I was getting beat up on, because that's just how it goes: the more your play, the better your roster gets, and the better you do later on. Sure, you can buy your way to a better roster, but there are also those that have paid very little cash and have put in a LOT of free time to be able to push past previous thresholds. There are many in my alliance, and they are just as tticked because it's like a big reset..seems like it would be better to just find something else to play...and many are.

Games, especially these types of games, are not supposed to get easier. Yes, you get more characters and you get higher levels, but the competition is supposed to increase along with you. Every video game I've ever played got harder as I progressed, that I can remember. Again, I'm not saying this system is perfect or even necessarily an improvement, but the devs are trying to find better ways. I'm going to stick with them as they make these and other changes.

skippytx

Difficulty in this PVP is totally whacked. My team is all soft capped at Lvl 94, Hulk is bumped to 164 for the event. I have 233 points right now and here are the teams I'm getting matched with

290 Hulk/230 Prof X/ 270 x-force
268 Hulk/166 Hood/ 270 x-force
133 Hulk/250 x-force/166 L.Cap
290 Hulk/166 L.Cap/222 x-force

I can normally get to 550 points in a PVP session, maybe 600, I'm not sure how I'm going to get to 300. Something is broken.

whitecat31

Demiurge_Will wrote:

orionpeace wrote:

Having 3* rosters battle 3* rosters is a harder climb than 2* rosters battling 2* rosters. So, while with a significant increase in time played the 3* player can climb higher, it is now possible for a 2* player to be in the top 50 and for very few if any 3* players to even see that player.

I think you might be misremembering what life was like with 2-star characters. The average match length (in both time and turns) for higher-level teams is significantly less than lower-level teams, and the win rate is higher.
.

Will,
I don't have to "misremember" anything, thank you very much. I got my girlfriend to play. She has basically a 2 star account with a lot of 94 two star characters. She has no max 3 star characters. I had her join a top 200 alliance called ETC. She has lots of fun, and wonders why I am cussing.
I can tell you, that she can easily and RAPIDLY shoot up the ladder now, because she is basically invisible and therefore immune to almost every solid three star roster out there. She has fun, and I have to GRIND my way up, because I have a top 0.01% roster and I am a member of a Top 5 PVP alliance.
PVE for my girlfriend is rather easy as well thanks to the scaling.
I have gotten many of my friends to play this game, and they are having fun. On the other hand I am grinding with this new matching making system. I have used the power of word of mouth to help this game, when I was having fun playing it.
IF this matchmaking change is permanent and I am not having fun because I have to constantly grind, there is an interesting question:
"Will I still recommend this game to people knowing that you are punished for doing well when you have reaching the top?"

Unknown

Lidolas wrote:

dleezphone wrote:

The thing is, instead of the game becoming a little easier with more time invested, you are now in a spot where the game is even more difficult than from your first day. I thought the old system was fine, even when I was getting beat up on, because that's just how it goes: the more your play, the better your roster gets, and the better you do later on. Sure, you can buy your way to a better roster, but there are also those that have paid very little cash and have put in a LOT of free time to be able to push past previous thresholds. There are many in my alliance, and they are just as tticked because it's like a big reset..seems like it would be better to just find something else to play...and many are.

Games, especially these types of games, are not supposed to get easier. Yes, you get more characters and you get higher levels, but the competition is supposed to increase along with you. Every video game I've ever played got harder as I progressed, that I can remember. Again, I'm not saying this system is perfect or even necessarily an improvement, but the devs are trying to find better ways. I'm going to stick with them as they make these and other changes.

Games usually get harder by progressing players to harder levels. Not taking same existing level and making it harder as you progress. Otherwise why bother progressing?

There are alternatives. For example, they can open up a 4 star required character PvP event (no loaner), where you can enter only if you have the required 4 stars. Or make a 3 stars or below PvP, where no 4 stars can enter. However, they probably took the quickest way out, which is keeping the existing infrastructure and only tweak the MMR algorithm.

I think their mentality really reminds me of the heydays of Farmville. The people there (i know people that worked there) feels like they could do no wrong. As they continue to gain new players, they don't worry about old player retention. Old player who left usually doesn't come back. Eventually, they burned through their possible addressable population of new players. Then the game eventually fades. d3p is on the same path right now. They keep adding new "characters" (items like barrel, shovel, barn, cow, corn, etc) with a lot less emphasis on new game play (ddq works, but how long did that take?). At some point, new players are gonna run out. Old players are not gonna return. But perhaps, they think that day is far from today....

Dauthi

franckynight wrote:

Dauthi wrote:

*sigh* Here are some facts:

The first time slices typically sucks. Playing PVP too early typically sucks. You all are combining both of those and trying to judge the new system. Settle down and see how it goes when the rest of the player base jumps in to contribute points.

Don't listen to the hype, having a good roster is always helpful. Many of the actual 4* folks chimed in a page or two ago about that...

I dont know what game you re playing at this very moment but its not mpq.. Because if you have experienced in the same day going through a 395 Cmag/hood node in pve, a 249 pun/gamora/dd as the opening node of the LRs then in pvp after skipping through the seed teams coping with a 290 hulk/270 xf/270 gt you wouldnt be here preaching for patience..

I scored top 50 in PVE, so yes I had that node.

I haven't played LRs since the implementation of DDQs replaced them for me, but lightning rounds are never a good representation of the MMR system, even from the start they didn't use standard MMR. That aside, the amount of players fluctuates constantly with each lightning round making it a terrible way to judge any system.

Think about how PVP works. All points generated in a time slice are directly related to how many people are playing because each attack on another player creates points. This is because when you get attacked you lose less points than they gain. The more players in a time slice the faster this happens, obviously. This happens now all the way up to 800 now, I believe was the change.

Now if you join a time slice too early, how much points do you think have been generated by it yet? If the folks with 4*s have 300 points how much do you think you should have as a 2* or 3*? Use percentages here.

Everyone knew that dry time slices were a problem, now everyone acts as if the problem never existed. The dry time slices already limited the amount of points gained because of the much lower populations, then everyone tries to join the PVP immediately so they can be the first to criticize it.

There could be other problems too, for instance what if it takes the population longer to accrue points now? High rosters could create tons of points nearly instantly by jumping off the heads of 1/2*s before, now they have to fight each other which is a slower process. In any case, it's best to see how a pvp ends rather than begins.

Lee T

skippytx wrote:

Difficulty in this PVP is totally whacked. My team is all soft capped at Lvl 94, Hulk is bumped to 164 for the event. I have 233 points right now and here are the teams I'm getting matched with

290 Hulk/230 Prof X/ 270 x-force
268 Hulk/166 Hood/ 270 x-force
133 Hulk/250 x-force/166 L.Cap
290 Hulk/166 L.Cap/222 x-force

I can normally get to 550 points in a PVP session, maybe 600, I'm not sure how I'm going to get to 300. Something is broken.

I'm facing the same wall with a roster of 94 2* characters. i usually manage to go up to 300 without having to pass a game, this time I had to pass two or three times between each games and I'm not at 200 yet.

Note : I didn't start early, my slot has 24 hour to go before the end.

spccrain

It makes me laugh to read through this forum and see the lower people saying that this is how a game is supposed to be haha just wait gentlemen you will be where we are and you will be the ones on the forum complaining that the PvP grind is too hard and something needs to be done. Mark my words brothers looool the grass is indeed brown on this side of the fence

Unknown

Based on the last two events I can say that it's currently easier to join partway through an event and grind everything in 1 shot. Last event I joined while people were already >1k points and I made it to 300 points and got the token before getting paired up against roughly equivalent teams. Last night I joined the Hulk event and got to 60 (with 180 points) rather quickly because everyone had low points. Today I logged in and top10 is at 1000 points, but since I WAS in top100 it was matching me against full 3* teams already, so today I'm sitting around with lvl 94-110 characters and full queues of 166-280 lvl teams and I probably won't even get the token in this event because at one point I made it to top 100.

So it seems the wall they were trying to fix is still very much there and even more brutal, because at least in the old system, I'd just get attacked a few times and my MMR would decay enough to pair me up with other 2* rosters.

Arondite

Lidolas wrote:

dleezphone wrote:

The thing is, instead of the game becoming a little easier with more time invested, you are now in a spot where the game is even more difficult than from your first day. I thought the old system was fine, even when I was getting beat up on, because that's just how it goes: the more your play, the better your roster gets, and the better you do later on. Sure, you can buy your way to a better roster, but there are also those that have paid very little cash and have put in a LOT of free time to be able to push past previous thresholds. There are many in my alliance, and they are just as tticked because it's like a big reset..seems like it would be better to just find something else to play...and many are.

Games, especially these types of games, are not supposed to get easier. Yes, you get more characters and you get higher levels, but the competition is supposed to increase along with you. Every video game I've ever played got harder as I progressed, that I can remember. Again, I'm not saying this system is perfect or even necessarily an improvement, but the devs are trying to find better ways. I'm going to stick with them as they make these and other changes.

mmm, not a PvP-focused game.

Your logic is fine and dandy for PvE - the higher you are, the higher the goons scale to create appropriate opposition.

In any game with a PvP focus, the players who are well developed or have farmed excellent gear (in this game, characters) generally just take big wet-n-steamies on the players who aren't/haven't.

Der_Lex

spccrain wrote:

Mark my words brothers looool the grass is indeed brown on this side of the fence

Sorry about that. I had too many taco tokens.

On a more serious note, the tougher battles are just one side of the coin, what personally frustrates me is the much larger amount of attacks and retaliations I get. In comparison, in Teenage Riot I managed to climb from 300 to 950 in two hours with only a single attack, and only got knocked down to about 700 points in a day's time, after which I was no longer attacked. In the current pvp and heavy metal, attacks started to come in from as early as 300 points, and I've lost 150 points from attacks in the last hour, while I was sitting at 600. And this is an event where I have a maxed featured character, I don't want to know what kind of pummeling will ensue in the DD event, because he's not exactly high on my leveling priority list.

The change in matchmaking does not make it impossible to score well with a decent 3-4 transitioner roster (personally I have an Xforce at 260 and enough of the relevant 3*'s at 166), but it does make doing so more time and/or shield/health pack intensive. Since I feel that enough of my day is put into the game already, this development frustrates me. For me, it's not about not having an easy climb anymore due to a lack of 'weak' targets to step on (I rarely saw a 2* team after the first 200 points in any pvp anyway), it's about the frustration of losing points every single time I am away from the game for a few hours without shielding, which is especially bad in a Hulk event, because getting through those 20.000 hit points (+another 20 tot 25000 for max xforce + maxed 3* or Thoress) take a lot of time anyway.

I'm all in favor of making the game more fun for the 2* and 2-3* transitioner tier. But that change has definitely diminished my own enjoyment of the game (fortunately I'm one of those masochists who enjoys PvE, so I mostly focus on that now), and as the forums have made clear, I'm far from the only one, therefore I'm hoping that airing my grievances in a (hopefully) reasonable manner will give the devs reason to throw players like myself a bone as well. They've made a good first effort by diminishing points lost because of attacks, but the greatly enhanced frequency of attacks more or less cancels that out, unfortunately.

TaoSpoons

I had already made the decision not to participate in PvP until things settle down, as it seems to be in a state of flux. But, out of curiosity I decided to see what I could do in the Hulk PvP event. After defeating the three seed teams, here's what I saw:

Hulk 149/Spider Man 135/X Force 165
Hulk 290/ Storm 133/ Daken 153
Hulk 245/ Captain America 127/ Patchverine 166

I have one max covered three star at level 105 (Blade), three partially covered 3 stars at level 105 (Daredevil, Luke Cage, Hood), and all 2 stars at level 94 except for Hawkeye and Moonstone. My Hulk, boosted, is level 114.

My decision to quit PvP is now firmly settled.

D2thePool

I don't like this new system.
In the old system I could at least keep playing against players that I could play against and potentially win. Yes, I did get really easy opponents (maybe 1/3 of the time), but now, I'm lucky if I can find an opponent that isn't maxed out. I like that now I don't get opponents that I can trounce in 2 moves but now 9 times out of 10 I'm going up against 166/166/270, or 270/270/270. The only characters I have maxed out are all but 3 of the 2* and 1* Iron Man, I only have four 3* characters above Lvl 100, and they're only just barely over and a handful of 4* with only X-Force getting up there because of the daily drop. How am I supposed to play against 166/166/x or 270/270/x ?!

I worked hard to get where I am in only 177 days, but as it stands now, gone are my chances of even getting close to how I was performing in the PvP and the PvP season.

D2thePool

bknfoodie

Lidolas wrote:

bknfoodie wrote:

So 2* players scoring higher than 4* players...that's somehow not entitlement?

I haven't had time or the desire to articulate all my thoughts on this subject and I apologize if I've come off curt or offensive. They were off-the-cuff remarks representing some of my feelings after reading through this thread.

I'm not saying they are mutually exclusive. Both sides can feel entitled. I have a healthy, mature roster, but I can sympathize more with those who are in the 2-3* transition. I'm certainly not saying that MMR is perfect or even close. My gripe is with all the forumites who are upset that now they have to fight against peers from the get-go instead of face-rolling transitioners for 500 points. I never enjoyed beating those guys on my climb and I hope others didn't either.

I just don't think this way is the solution. They can do a few things:

1) Expand rewards. This is probably the most important part about the transition. The reason it takes so long to transition is because rewards are super hard to come by. The problem isn't veterans beating up on new players!! The problem is the reward structure!!!!! Especially now with the crazy vaulting. More than half the characters will be vaulted soon. It will be months, possibly as long as a FULL YEAR before some characters rotate back in.
2) Split player pool AND rewards depending on roster.
3) Lower progression rewards.

ErikPeter

For the record, i have 204 points in the Smash Hit event. my team is level 100 squirrel girl, level 85 captain marvel, and 50 hulk boosted to 87. that's 235 levels total.

The combined total levels on my available nodes, after i skipped a bunch to try to find a beatable mission, is 590, 470, and 540.

repeatedly skipping to find many, many 200+ Xforces paired with 200+ Hulks. Can't even reach the token at 300 points! Not super fun.

Edit: unsurprisingly i'm now down to 200 points since I tried to beat someone... 200 hulk + 166 Thor yeah right. Even better now that the difficulty doesn't drop. If anything, the nodes I'm skipping are even higher now.
So, you wanted to get rid of the wall, but now the wall happens at 200 instead of 500? Maybe tone it down a bit so I don't just have to put the game away?

Unknown

So far I have mixed feelings. I waited until I started the smash hit tourney to judge and so far I am not enjoying it. I lack the ability to have a capped 4 star character, yet the matchmaking is determined I will fight waves of teams over 250+. I tried to climb to 600 early and from 200 forward the constant attacks were enough to frustrate me rather than make it enjoyable. I am constantly losing 15-20 points per attack only winning 25 from my victory to see a nice loss, so the climb is slow and against a never ending wave of 2 166 characters and usually a 290 hulk I get aggravated. The fights that are usually there do consist of 200's but I guess the system feels I'm good like that. I feel like this game is trying to do the right thing, but dodging the most loyal of fans. I kept my 2 stars and liked using them in pvp to start the event and transition into the three stars ;however, now they are probably getting sold off soon to keep up with the new characters that keep rolling out. I can't justify keeping them if the sit on the bench until that one off-season event. I am asking for a tweek that allows people with depth of different stars to better utilize them until a certain point. I can see making us fight more of same level opponents but after 5-6 fights I am exhaustive heals in some cases in that all the 250's that I see is more than my roster can handle.

eaise

I will start by saying I'm a 2*-3* transitioner.
When the announcement of MMR changes I saw them as good. It would allow me not too get destroyed by teams way better than me. But my PvP score remained about the same as normal, if not slightly lower.
But I see this change as bad. If my score stayed the same why should I view it as bad? Well that's because I no longer see a point in progressing my roster. All it will mean is fighting tougher teams faster.
A game should make newer players want to get the high level characters. Not push them away from leveling their characters

Kaazz

TaoSpoons wrote:

I had already made the decision not to participate in PvP until things settle down, as it seems to be in a state of flux. But, out of curiosity I decided to see what I could do in the Hulk PvP event. After defeating the three seed teams, here's what I saw:

Hulk 149/Spider Man 135/X Force 165
Hulk 290/ Storm 133/ Daken 153
Hulk 245/ Captain America 127/ Patchverine 166

I have one max covered three star at level 105 (Blade), three partially covered 3 stars at level 105 (Daredevil, Luke Cage, Hood), and all 2 stars at level 94 except for Hawkeye and Moonstone. My Hulk, boosted, is level 114.

My decision to quit PvP is now firmly settled.

I have a similar roster and am facing a similar experience in all pvp events. If the devs wanted to keep people from playing pvp, then they have succeeded. I am facing teams that are WAY above my level almost immediately. I can't understand how it's so hard to match teams to a player's existing roster. This ain't rocket science. Low level rosters should face other low level teams. As your roster develops, then you face similarly stronger opponents. I'm completely out of all pvp, which makes me sad.

Unknown

Lidolas wrote:

Games, especially these types of games, are not supposed to get easier. Yes, you get more characters and you get higher levels, but the competition is supposed to increase along with you. Every video game I've ever played got harder as I progressed, that I can remember. Again, I'm not saying this system is perfect or even necessarily an improvement, but the devs are trying to find better ways. I'm going to stick with them as they make these and other changes.

I agree about but the competition is supposed to increase along with you, but the rewards are also supposed to be increased too.
I don't see anything wrong with MMR system, the competition is also already increase along with us after we break 800 points, competing for Top 5 and getting 1.000 progression reward.

eaise wrote:

A game should make newer players want to get the high level characters. Not push them away from leveling their characters

This !!! This sums up my thoughts !

evil panda

Hey, how about we split the difference? Alternating MMR schemes per PVP?? So each group gets benefited once every other event? Assuming of course the new MMR actually does benefit transitioners, since I am reading mixed reviews...

ZorroRooster

skippytx wrote:

Difficulty in this PVP is totally whacked. My team is all soft capped at Lvl 94, Hulk is bumped to 164 for the event. I have 233 points right now and here are the teams I'm getting matched with

290 Hulk/230 Prof X/ 270 x-force
268 Hulk/166 Hood/ 270 x-force
133 Hulk/250 x-force/166 L.Cap
290 Hulk/166 L.Cap/222 x-force

I can normally get to 550 points in a PVP session, maybe 600, I'm not sure how I'm going to get to 300. Something is broken.

This right here. Though I don't have Hulk. My highest char right now is a 117 Blade, though I generally use my maxed 2* thor, Wolvie, Magneto and Storm.

I was making it to 300, 350 before the change, now I can barely break 250. I keep getting matched with 166 teams, or teams close enough to it. I've tried it before and I've learned my lesson. I get stomped if my 2* team goes up against a maxed 3* team. Which is fine and how it should be, but not in the 250 range. Screams unfairness to me.