Lethal Intent Versus Matchmaking Poll

Vankysher

Though I voted worse, it really is slightly better but a really long slog especially if joining late and having no health packs.
After beating the seed teams using the loaner and my remaining 1* pair of IM35 & Juggs, I started to see max 2* teams to 3* 100+ with a few lvl 166 teams mixed in.
My roster is made up of max covered 2* and a mix of 3* all leveled up to 88 for PvE reasons and the other half a mix of around 50-70.
I managed to climb to ~270 points before my main team of Ares/OBW had less than 50% health and everyone else were very beat up from having grinding the end of R&G PvE.
With less than an 20 minutes left, I had 1 health pack regenerate so I healed up OBW and went into 1 more fight iso-boosting to try and minimize any damage.
No such luck as I won but OBW went down and Ares had a few hundred left so I had to stop, scored a defensive win to push me over 300 but that was the end of that.

W4LAndre

have been following a lot of topics on the forums for a while but don't post much at all and am trying to fix that while actually being able to contribute something useful to the conversation. My vote is in the current plurality of "worse than before the MMR change" but I agree with some of the others that have said that there are multiple variables in play here. Truth be told, in the couple of PVP events that I played with the new MMR but before the recent character changes, I was able to place higher but score less points. I relied on Xforce as my anchor at 209 (no covers bought) along with LCap at 166 (my first and still only max cover/level character), and I did about as well as I expected, which to me was placing somewhere in top 100, occasionally top 50 on a good day. The nerf to Xforce coupled with health increased almost across the board has slowed me down. During Lethal Intent I also came across quite a few 166 teams early on, but I also had a fairly healthy mix of lesser teams that I could more or less steamroll after fighting through the early wall. Overall I think that the new MMR could have been helpful for me as an individual since I was placing higher, but detrimental to me as a team player since I was contributing ~200+ less to the alliance. With the character balancing coupled with the new MMR I feel like I'm having less fun. Maybe once I can get a few more characters up to a viable level I may start enjoying it again but for now I think that the whole thing is taking away from my personal experience.

Unknown

I joined a QS bracket yesterday, finally had a little time today to play. Bracket has a couple players in the top 10 already shielded with more than 24 hours to go, topping out at 800+ for first, down to 600+ for 10th. There are 6 unshielded players in my brackets top ten.
3rd - 749 - 3 166s, no 4* above 115, 6-8 3* in the 115-150 range.
5th - 637 - 6 166s, handful of 130-150, no 4 above 135.
6th - 635 - 2 over 200, 9 maxed 3*
8th -634 - first six characters run from 153 to 102 with only 2 colors.
9th - 632 - first six characters run from 94 to 70, one of them is a level 74 4* with only two covers.
10th - 620 - 220 4*, no maxed 3s. Characters 2-6 run 140 down to 114.

So I figure I'll clear my seeds, do a fight or two and see what the nodes look like here.
Take a fight for 41 against a loaner + maxed LCap, 200+ XF
Now at 111 points.

Available fights:
22 - Loaner, 140 Hulk, 166 GSBW
17 - Loaner, 153 Patch/Loki
(newest, replacing the Cap/XF node) - 17 points. 87 QS, 250 Goddess, 270 XF. - SKIP
43 - 75 QS, 166 Cap, 188 XF - FIGHT! - I'll cycle the other nodes before fighting, see what else I get.
19 - Loaner, 130 CMags, 166 Hulk.
21 - 87 QS, 150 Falcon, 166 Cmags
28 - Loaner, 166 Cap, 140 Hulk
34 - Loaner, 152 XF, 166 Deadpool
32 - 87, 166 Cmags, 250 XF


So for ten fights, the lowest non featured (mine is level 40 base still as well) character I was offered was 130. If those were the only players playing the game, I could understand it. They're not. The average non featured character I was offered over 20 fights was 160. That's ridiculous.

These fights take longer, and deal my characters more damage. And unless I'm going to spend the bulk of my iso earned from fights skipping to find those bigger matches, I'm not going to be climbing very quickly to get to a point where I can actually contend with the unshielded level 94 rosters in my top ten. The average fight I was offered in 10 fights was worth 27.4 points. So without skipping it's going to take me roughly 22 matches just to hit 600. 22 matches against a 160 average opponent.

The players who I'm hitting for 40+ points from under 100 points have to have some decent scores already. But yet, I still can not queue up anyone resembling players 8-10 in my own bracket. They have a decent base score already as well. This is infuriating. I am competing with these players for rewards. They're in my bracket. I can see they are unshielded. Why is it unfair for me to attack them?

rixmith

Blue Shift matchmaking seems to have been put back to something much more normal. Are other people seeing that as well?

Unknown

Now that I have played through Lethal Intent, here is a follow up to my previous post.

My roster consists mainly of maxed 2 star characters, and I had a 1/2/1 covered Gamora for this event. The initial climb to ~250 points was mostly completed with 2 star Daken and Wolverine plus the loaner Gamora, after which I switched to Ares, OBW, and my own Gamora for most battles. Thanks to the 8 health packs I had received from PvE rewards, I managed to reach ~400 points roughly 4 hours before the event's end. A final push in the last two hours got me to the 650 point progression reward, but I was quickly pummeled back down to end with 532 points. Due to the very small bracket size of just ~500 players, this was enough to earn me rank 87, and it is the first time I have placed within the top 100 in a season PvP event. To preempt any criticism that a 2 star roster should not place that high, just be assured that in a normal bracket with 1000 players I would likely have placed around rank 200 and received no useful placement reward instead.

Excited as I am about my lucky placement in the bracket—only 2 points separated each rank in my neighborhood—the PvP experience was still a lot more fun in itself. Once the seed teams were cleared at 70 points, the matches started out easy against non-maxed 2 stars, switched to max 2 stars after 200 points, and then ramped up to a mix of maxed 2 stars and mid level 3 stars at ~400 points. Beyond that, I began to encounter and get hit by some higher level 3 star teams which I had to skip, but there were still enough winnable matches for me to continue the climb. In fact, there were so many winnable matches that I could safely skip most of the sub-20 point battles and not worry about missing them. The variety of team compositions I faced was unprecedented as well. I played against every single 2 star character in the game during this event, including the likes of Bullseye, Moonstone, Spiderman and Captain America.

From the point of view of a player like me, the match making changes have been overwhelmingly positive. Compared to the system in place beforehand, I can still hit the same progression rewards that I normally aim for at 300 and 400 points, but the journey there is substantially more fun because I am being matched against teams much closer to my level. There is far less tedious skipping involved, and the point value of matches I can win in are also higher. Even though the wall of high level 3 and 4 star teams is still around, it seems to appear much more gradually and at a higher point range than before. While it is not clear to me if match making changes are solely responsible for pushing back the wall—a large influx of 2 star players into PvP may have helped just as much—I can happily attest to having had a much better PvP experience in Lethal Intent.

sinnerjfl

rixmith wrote:

Blue Shift matchmaking seems to have been put back to something much more normal. Are other people seeing that as well?

Nope, maxed teams right after seeds teams again. I don't think anything changed.

Unknown

rixmith wrote:

Blue Shift matchmaking seems to have been put back to something much more normal. Are other people seeing that as well?

This might have something to do with your QS being level 70 boosted.

fmftint

Demiurge_Kabir wrote:

Hey everyone,
The last update to our Versus matchmaking was during the Kingpin event on Monday 4/13, and the feedback has died down since then. If you've played the current Gamora (or Thor) events, can you chime in and let us know how it's working for you?

If you think the experience is worse than before, please follow up with a post that describes how long you've been playing, and what you're experiencing. If you can include a shot of the characters you're using and their levels, that would be awesome.

Update: Added clarification for 'before'; I'm interested in hearing if our changes have made the matches you're playing more fun.

Thanks,
Kabir

More fun? No. More grindy? Absolutely

xellessanova

j12601 wrote:

I joined a QS bracket yesterday, finally had a little time today to play. Bracket has a couple players in the top 10 already shielded with more than 24 hours to go, topping out at 800+ for first, down to 600+ for 10th. There are 6 unshielded players in my brackets top ten.
3rd - 749 - 3 166s, no 4* above 115, 6-8 3* in the 115-150 range.
5th - 637 - 6 166s, handful of 130-150, no 4 above 135.
6th - 635 - 2 over 200, 9 maxed 3*
8th -634 - first six characters run from 153 to 102 with only 2 colors.
9tzh - 632 - first six characters run from 94 to 70, one of them is a level 74 4* with only two covers.
10th - 620 - 220 4*, no maxed 3s. Characters 2-6 run 140 down to 114.

The players who I'm hitting for 40+ points from under 100 points have to have some decent scores already. But yet, I still can not queue up anyone resembling players 8-10 in my own bracket. They have a decent base score already as well. This is infuriating. I am competing with these players for rewards. They're in my bracket. I can see they are unshielded. Why is it unfair for me to attack them?

I am in slice 4 with about 1d 16 hrs to go in QS pvp - I don't see the same top 10 behavior. Everyone in my bracket's top 10 has at least 2 4*s above 180, and at least 1 page of 166s.

1st - 1114 pts, Thor 220 and Fury 190, 5 166s
2nd - 1020 1st page is 6 chars at 270
3rd - 984 has 9 270s
4th - 573 has maxed gt xf 229 fury and 10 166s
5th - 513 max gt XF, 9 166s
6th - 480 max Dino xf 250 fury, max BP and Hulk and soft capped 3*s
7th - 461 max xf 250 gt, 12 166s
8th - 458 max xf 184 fury, 15 166s
9th - 456 max xf gt 260 fury 256 Dino, 13 166s
10th - 451 max xf gt 168 Dino star-lord, 18 166s

I just don't really understand the bracketing behavior that makes some slices and some shards radically different from each other, but it's definitely not my experience that there are 2* rosters cakewalking to the top ten and staying there with the new mmr. In my bracket it's more likely than not that the top ten have at least 2 cover maxed or 11+ cover 4*s.

The Gamora pvp bracket I finished in had 1st place scoring with 1451 pts and top 10 required 1040 pts.

Unknown

the very existence of this thread confuses me.

MMR WILL NEVER BE BETTER.

...so long as the recent status quo of "balancing" (aka catering to noobs) persists; so long as it is based on roster strength. why? because the clueless devs have slowed pvp down to a pve type grindfest. no matter how they try to adjust the matchmaking, pvp will from here on forever be a slog because of the health updates, nerfs, etc. there is no such thing as a quick match anymore and any team composition can take out any other team composition (e.g. lazy cap and hood can take out any 4* team, just takes time). and the cynical side of me thinks the devs know this. which is why i think this thread is utterly facetious and disingenuous...at best ignorant. this is just another example of all talk. they aint trying to fix jack squat..at least not for us. if they're fixing anything, they're fixing the matches in the ai's favor- cascades cascades cascades! all these supposed 'fixes' are simply them continually deferring any actual fixes to some point in the future that will never be arrived at. they dont give a phuc about us, they're in it for the business so again, whats the freakin point of this thread devs? to hear feedback? the devs have clearly shown that they dont listen to the tons of feedback the vet community gives. otherwise we wouldnt be in this position where a thread like this even has to exist.