Lethal Intent Versus Matchmaking Poll

wymtime

Here is my feedback on lord of thunder. First I have Lthor 166, and many 3* at 166. Early on it was a similar slug fest. I got matched up with maxed teams but they were at least worth good points, and then I hit 600 points. I started getting hit and hit hard. I lost 120 points in a coupe of hours since I did not shield. I hit retaliations back up to 590 and went unshielded and lost another 75 points. Again I played a couple of retaliations to get to 600. I then made a climb over 700 points on matches worth 20-25 points. Then the update. I tried 1 hop and in my second match had already been hit for a 33 point loss. I played a third match, won and then tried a 4th. I lost to a call of the storm and shielded.
Th Xforce Nerf really hurts as his green just does not do much damage anymore. Also with the health boosts and lack of health to Hood and Loki I was much more likely to get hit by a big power. The matches lasted longer, and I got hit for ways more points than I have in the past PVPs this season. I have no idea how I am going to transition to 4* with with this MMR. I just hope the cost to level characters comes soon so I can level my IW and hope she is as powerful as she seems.

Xforce feedback: at level 205 Xforce green at level 5 does 1800 damage to 1 person? This is on par with Gamora's red for 5AP. Deadpool can do over 3k damage for 6 AP, and HT does big damage for 8 AP and he generates 2 AP back. I think you are way over valuing the board shake up he does. Yes you can get AP back from matches, but a 4* at 5 covers should be better than this.

Unknown

Lerysh wrote:

It's more like a chess tournament, where you bring your ranking in with you and everyone gets paired based on that ranking so the top 2 rankings have the best chance to meet in the finals. Except people were manipulating their ranking to get easier matches, and the ranking system still didn't take into account player resources (roster strengths), and the best ranked people still don't want the actual top 5 rewards typically and are just there for season score and 1000 point progression.

I think you're a little off the mark here in a couple of ways. These "PvP" events are really very unlike chess tournaments, which typically are either round robin or elimination. The MPQ system is a weird ladder based on score accumulation that isn't terribly similar to either of those things. Also you're kind of tripping over your own point here, because in tournaments where players prior rankings are considered in how matches are made it is almost always specifically for the purpose of having the best players smash the hell out of the lowest ranked players in the early going so they can meet in the deciding final matches. This is almost the exact opposite of the new MPQ system, where players are matched against similarly ranked players right from the start, which you seem to be preaching the merits of.

Lerysh wrote:

If everyone joined their slice when it opened, played when they had free time, and didn't use shields to extend their scores, the brackets would settle into a ranking of "who played the most" (effort) and "who got hit the least" (roster strength). So I ask again, what's wrong with that? It takes effort to place now is the problem? Really?

There are a number of reasons why this doesn't work, and it all has to do with how messed up the construction of this game is. The equilibrium you're talking about does happen organically in normal ladder situations because the best players win and move up, the weaker players lose and move down, and everyone settles into areas where they're fighting other players near them of approximately the same power level. Even if all the weighting was taken out of MPQ "PvP" tomorrow this probably wouldn't happen because MPQ matchmaking allows people to fight across ladders, which causes all kinds of problems, most of which are compounded by the scoring system, which is just incredibly over-engineered and contrived.

Ultimately though it becomes a question of is this an open competition or not. If it's an open competition with various tiers of prizes, then there really shouldn't be any weighting to the matchmaking. Fix the system so it's more like a real ladder and let players fall into place organically. People who put in the most effort will rise to the top of their relative weight classes, and the prize tiers should be set up accordingly to allow those placement rewards to help people improve their rosters over time. Instead of artificially manipulating how matches are made, which is always going to lead to problems, fix the system so it isn't necessary. If this still isn't considered friendly enough for new players, then there really needs to be separate events with roster restrictions to allow them a "safe" place to learn the game before stepping into the meat grinder of regular play.

Unknown

So I just beat the snot out of this guy. I kinda feel bad about it actually. He should not be showing up to me at sub 300 points. He committed the sin of leveling his 3*s to 107 I guess? Which makes him a 3* roster? Or maybe because a 107 Gamora boosts to 187? Part of the consequences of this new system is it becomes much more important you hold your ISO and go directly from level 94 3*s to a pair of level 166 3*s you can use in PvP it seems.

@Thugpatrol, yea it's not a great analogy either but it's closer than "sports". I actually like the olympics analogy the most.

Unknown

I had a horrible experience (which I posted about) for the first half of the Kingpin PVP, to the point that I couldn't play. There was an update and matchmaking improved. I was able to fight to the end and even purchased health packs to continue to battle (finished just over 400 pts)! I am having the same experience with Thor, in fact I just blew through the packs I bought this evening.

Thank you!

chaos01

@Lerysh I think the problem is that this change hasn't really had a change in your play. You have a super developed roster and were placing well previous to the change and are still placing well after change. It is frustrating to those of us that have played 350+ days and we have been set back 6-7 months to when we had 94 rosters and can't rank in PVP anymore.

It is one of those problems of: it sucked for us and was a rite of passage getting to top 100-50 PVP, now newbies are gifted better brackets and thus the same thing we had to work for.

Unknown

I don't like it. I want it back to what it was In The Kamala and im40 events as those were perfect for me. Everyone in my brackets were in my level. Even the top 10 were a little bit lower than me and I was consistently paired with other 2* -3* transitioners. It was amazing. Most fun I've had playing the game. And now I get to play maybe 1 or 2 games every 5 hours because the enemy teams are either outleveling me or have better characters and still outlevel me. I mean I barely got top 100 in old pvps but I always managed to get it when gamora covers were up for grabs. Now I can't even get that and my roster is considerably better than before.

Stax the Foyer

Lerysh wrote:

So I just beat the snot out of this guy. I kinda feel bad about it actually. He should not be showing up to me at sub 300 points. He committed the sin of leveling his 3*s to 107 I guess? Which makes him a 3* roster? Or maybe because a 107 Gamora boosts to 187? Part of the consequences of this new system is it becomes much more important you hold your ISO and go directly from level 94 3*s to a pair of level 166 3*s you can use in PvP it seems.

@Thugpatrol, yea it's not a great analogy either but it's closer than "sports". I actually like the olympics analogy the most.

I totally agree with you that beating up on lowbies doesn't feel good. I'll frequently skip people who are clearly in transition, or who don't have an alliance, because I feel bad about taking points from them.

I also think that it's fair for teams to face certain team types at certain point values. It's fair to think that grinding from 100-200 points should require fighting fairly low-leveled opponents, regardless of your roster. For better or worse, the PvP setup that we have now has most everyone (with the exception of super new players) fighting for the same ranking awards. (I'm not saying that everyone needs to agree with that position, but just that it's a reasonable position for someone to take) If you artificially tweak difficulty, you're either incentivizing people to start late, once people have spilled over the edge of the low-level protected area, or you're allowing people to rank artificially high if they never spill out of the low-level protected area. Trying to force a non-equilibrium result is a band-aid on a flawed system.

I've seen plenty of posts, my own posts included, that recognize both issues and propose solutions that will benefit players at all levels, instead of improving the experience for some at the cost of experience for others. Extending seed teams for higher-leveled rosters by providing seed teams that are the equivalent of the transitioning rosters (but without a transitioning player on the other side) seems like a solution that would be fair to and good for everyone. Making progression awards more meaningful to transitioning players is another fix that should absolutely be made, as the 2* rewards are pretty much meaningless to anyone but the very newest transitioners with the wide availability of 2* rewards for anyone who participates in pvp at all.

Instead of having vets and new players spar with each other as if it's a zero-sum game, we could recognize that the zero-sum nature of the current changes is because these changes are band-aids on an underlying flawed system, and we could instead both be asking the developers why they didn't pursue solutions that would benefit both groups.

Unknown

chaos01 wrote:

@Lerysh I think the problem is that this change hasn't really had a change in your play. You have a super developed roster and were placing well previous to the change and are still placing well after change. It is frustrating to those of us that have played 350+ days and we have been set back 6-7 months to when we had 94 rosters and can't rank in PVP anymore.

It is one of those problems of: it sucked for us and was a rite of passage getting to top 100-50 PVP, now newbies are gifted better brackets and thus the same thing we had to work for.

Yea, I get that, and that sucks. But "I did it, you can do it too" is no reason to maintain a terrible transition for 2* players. Overall I'm just surprised more people aren't pro early game content.

Stax the Foyer

Lerysh wrote:

chaos01 wrote:

@Lerysh I think the problem is that this change hasn't really had a change in your play. You have a super developed roster and were placing well previous to the change and are still placing well after change. It is frustrating to those of us that have played 350+ days and we have been set back 6-7 months to when we had 94 rosters and can't rank in PVP anymore.

It is one of those problems of: it sucked for us and was a rite of passage getting to top 100-50 PVP, now newbies are gifted better brackets and thus the same thing we had to work for.

Yea, I get that, and that sucks. But "I did it, you can do it too" is no reason to maintain a terrible transition for 2* players. Overall I'm just surprised more people aren't pro early game content.

I think most people would support making things better for 2* players, the above statement aside.

Being against a tweak that makes things worse for vets doesn't mean that we don't want to make things better for 2* players. It can just mean that we're against that particular change.

Unknown

Stax the Foyer wrote:

Lerysh wrote:

chaos01 wrote:

@Lerysh I think the problem is that this change hasn't really had a change in your play. You have a super developed roster and were placing well previous to the change and are still placing well after change. It is frustrating to those of us that have played 350+ days and we have been set back 6-7 months to when we had 94 rosters and can't rank in PVP anymore.

It is one of those problems of: it sucked for us and was a rite of passage getting to top 100-50 PVP, now newbies are gifted better brackets and thus the same thing we had to work for.

Yea, I get that, and that sucks. But "I did it, you can do it too" is no reason to maintain a terrible transition for 2* players. Overall I'm just surprised more people aren't pro early game content.

I think most people would support making things better for 2* players, the above statement aside.

Being against a tweak that makes things worse for vets doesn't mean that we don't want to make things better for 2* players. It can just mean that we're against that particular change.

Ok, so if we can't go back (bad for 2*) and we don't like the current (bad for vets) what's the answer? I understand that new MMR is harder on vets and that's bad, but farming n00bs is worse. So, "change it back to how it was" isn't a good answer. I don't know what is a good answer, all I know is the current MMR is fine with me (except the point desert of 5 point matches that happens at high level points).

JVReal

Have not hit 300 since you messed with MMR and I used to hit 300+ before hitting a wall. Heres my team that i only recently leveled today, this is my health after my first non-seed battle (battle #4) and a shot of my next best opponant choice after skipping 5 times past too big of fights.
I guess i cant post images since i dont use image loading sites.
My team is Gamora 4/3/1 lvl 102 (not buffed), Luke Cage 3/2/3 lvl 102, Groot 4/4/3 lvl 140 (my highest character, next highest are 102).
Up against Gamora lvl 96, DAreDevil lvl 113, XForce 164

In order to fight them I have to use 3 health packs because the last fight brought them all down very low in health.

I think of all the MMR change events, KK's event and King Pin's event (after mid-pvp mmr change) felt the most comfortable for my roster.

Stax the Foyer

Lerysh wrote:

Ok, so if we can't go back (bad for 2*) and we don't like the current (bad for vets) what's the answer? I understand that new MMR is harder on vets and that's bad, but farming n00bs is worse. So, "change it back to how it was" isn't a good answer. I don't know what is a good answer, all I know is the current MMR is fine with me (except the point desert of 5 point matches that happens at high level points).

I gave a couple ideas above, but to expand on them:

1) Improve progression awards at low levels. Put a 3* cover or at least a token within reach of a transitioner.

2) Keep the MMR change that low levels are seeing. Add equivalent seed teams for players with improved rosters. These numbers are just examples, but: Someone like us sees the normal seed teams to 70, 2* seed teams to 200, and 3* seed teams to 300-400. A 3* transitioning team sees 2* seed teams to 200, and then fights other 3* players to 400, before spilling over and getting released into the general pool. A 2* team sees seed teams to 200, and then fights other 2* teams to 400, before spilling over and getting released into the general pool.

That way everyone gets a workable path to 400 (or whatever progression level they want people to be able to hit) without getting attacked by bigger, badder teams, but the early experience of people with improved rosters doesn't devolve with roster progression. It'll result in some extra points being injected into the pool, and it won't put ranking awards within reach of lower-leveled players, but that was already the case with the MMR changes and the reduction in points lost.

chaos01

I wouldn't be terribly upset if I had to keep slogging away. However, with PVE being a **** show of terrible scaling, PVP being unplayable someone like me has lost all interest.

ZootSax

fmftint wrote:

The problem is it's only 3* players who are forced to fight above their level, 2* fight at and below, 4* fight at and below, 3* fight at and above, mostly above

I wish the 166/270 crowds in by bracket believed this to be true. I lose 50-100 points every time I wait for my health packs to recharge, and only ~25% of my retaliation nodes are against other 94 rosters--predominantly it's 140-166's. If you're not seeing any 2*'s you apparently need to spend more ISO on skips or something, because other 3* players have no problems finding my team once I get above 150 or, at most, 200 in terms of progression points. What's more, I never see any characters below Level 84-87 (except for the loaner featured character) and there's probably less than half a dozen sub-94 characters I'll see in an entire event (again, not counting the loaner). The statement that 2*'s fight exclusively at or below is decidedly false...

I'm a primarily 2* player with only two 3*'s above 94 (at 110 & 100). Before the change, I could usually hit 300-400 on the progression until I hit the wall of 3*'s I couldn't beat. After the change, the same is true, but it takes about 3-4 times as many matches and thousands of iso for skipping the maxed 3*'s that show up after ~200. I've reached as high as 500 with the new MMR (although I promptly lost 200 of that once I went to sleep), because now if you spend enough iso you'll eventually find another 2* team (which most certainly wasn't true before), but you get hit so much that it's not sustainable...unless you maybe get lucky and make an extremely late push? (I haven't tried it, myself).

Although my results for individual events haven't changed, I voted "worse" because even after a few events it's an extremely stale format. Pretty much every match is against maxed 94's with the rare 100-120 3* here or there, until you crest 300 points on the progression where all teams become unbeatable 166/270 rosters (unless you skip A LOT to find the few remaining 94's left). Because of this, 90+% of your opponents are maxed OBW, 2* Wolverine, Ares, 2* Daken, MNThor, MNMags & CStorm...over...and over...and over again. There's less diversity of opponents than in PVE, which is saying something. Because I'm only fighting the cream of the 2* crop, I can't use any characters except my best ones. The fun of the old MMR was that I could try my under covered 3*'s out on equally undeveloped rosters, with the points available in the match being so trivial that even if I lost it wasn't a big deal. Now, a vast majority of my 3*'s are completely useless in PVP.

I would prefer a MMR system similar to the old one, but adjust the points such that rosters of significantly lower level don't have to suffer much from being hit (maybe adding in a cap of points they can lose from much higher level rosters). Frankly, I don't deserve many points for beating a level 30-40 roster, nor should they lose points if they lose to me. It would be worth it to still have the option to play those matches, though, just so my b & c teams could actually get back in the game from time to time.

Moon Roach

It's a little better for Moon Roach, with 9 maxed 166. I'm seeing decent targets worth decent points.

For Wolveroach with no 3* higher than level 117 and none fully covered, it's worse. Maybe it's the level 156 1/5/1 X-Force (and he may well now be a liability in terms of scaling), but the last few events once I hit 300 I was matched against pretty much all maxed teams. And at 300 it's not worth shielding. So, finishing points by event:

Heavy Metal - 514
Smash Hit - 316
Blind Justice - 291
Hostile Takeover - 272
Lord of Thunder - 290

In Lethal Intent I'm on 100, and seeing level 94 2* opposition for up to 33 points. I might try a climb later, when my guys have recovered from trying to clear Seeds of Destruction.

Vhailorx

Lerysh wrote:

Ok, so if we can't go back (bad for 2*) and we don't like the current (bad for vets) what's the answer? I understand that new MMR is harder on vets and that's bad, but farming n00bs is worse. So, "change it back to how it was" isn't a good answer. I don't know what is a good answer, all I know is the current MMR is fine with me (except the point desert of 5 point matches that happens at high level points).

To me, the biggest drawback of the new mmr is the lower equilibrium point. it takes a 600+ score to be in a top alliance, and 700+ to be in a top 50 alliance. If the equilibrium point is 400 or lower, then it becomes essential to make an epic 200-300 point rush at the end of an event, or use multiple shields earlier in the event. That is both more expensive (bad for players but good for demiurge) AND no fun at all because they player can no longer choose when they want to play (bad for both players and demiurge). I assume that the lower equilibrium point is a function of increasing the visibility of teams in the 400-600 range.

There are several solutions that could fix the current mmr without punishing 2* rosters.

1) reduce points lost for teams at lower scores even further so the higher attack rate is less problematic
2) cap point loss below a certain threshold
3) create phantom teams below a certain threshold (ie if mmr says you can fight Player X, but Player X has less than a certain number of points, then you fight Player X's team, but Player X doesn't lose points, just like a seed team)

I am sure that there are some unforeseen consequences with each of those suggestions, but those are just off the top of my head. I don't think this problem is insurmountable.

Inarius

hmm, I'll remain skeptical but so far I'm at 210 points (gamora event) and haven't seen any maxed out 4thor/xforce wall or any other 270 wall for that matter...usually, I'd see the wall right after defeating the seed teams.

puppychow

I begin each pvp event with the featured character, plus max patch/laken in order to make a soft climb and save on heal packs. For Lethal Intent, I went through 7 seeded teams before I hit a max wall. The other 2 nodes, fortunately, featured 3* teams but not maxed. I started getting attacked when I broke 200 points. I stopped at mid 200s to let the attacks to settle down and wait for heal packs to regen. A few hours later, w/ a full set of heals available, I began retaliating on every single attacker and broke 300 mark. when I ran out of heal packs again at mid 300s, I shielded. From there I started shielding hopping and currently I'm shielded at low 600s. Once I broke 300 points, I started seeing easier matchups, with some max teams mixed in.

This experience is pretty much the same across the board since Heavy metal event, ASIDE from Teenage Riot. TR felt like the old MMR was used because I was matched with a lot of 2* teams, which is not the case for all the other pvps since the MMR change.

My highest character is a 180 xf, and I have a handful of max 3* characters, with a bunch more at 134 or lower.

Dauthi

I can't vote. The Thor event is hard only because it showcases how strong 3* thor is (especially buffed) post 4* nerfs. If he gets 11 yellow or 14 green you will need 3 health packs. Yes, its harder because you haven't nerfed 3* Thor yet and he is buffed

Mawtful

Not really noticing a difference one way or the other.

I hit the 1000 progression both before and after Kingpin, so any changes haven't limited my ability to earn points.
Yes, the Thor event was brutal, because:

1. He's already a top tier 3* character without the feature buff.
2. IIRC, he's been in the game for at least a year, meaning a greater number of players have him covered/levelled.

I got 3 Gamora covers from the Thor event, which brings mine to 3/4/1. She's still level 40, so this event has been interesting for me. It also coincides with the huge changeset, so I've been using the opportunity to try out a whole range of different team line ups. I've been going a bit slower than I normally would, and stopped for a while at around 200 points. At that point I was seeing a lot of loaner + two max 3*'s (Hulk, Patch, Daken were all popular). But after I got past ~300 points, I started encountering lots of transition teams. Even now, at 500 points, I've got 2/3 teams in my queue with 2* characters.