Increase rewards due to slower and deadlier battles

babinro

I find myself REALLY enjoying the game play results of the character balance and health changes. There are so many more viable characters for all forms of play now. I get that PvP shield hop/defensive teams will always degenerate to a select few people but the sense of a balanced roster is better then it's ever been.

This change has created a MAJOR problem though.
- Matches in general are significantly longer (easily twice as long).
- Matches are significantly more threatening. You take a LOT more enemy skill damage than ever before due to health and balance changes.
- Player Win Ratio has clearly dropped (or at least retreats have increased).
- The never ending threat of enemy cascades is more prominent than ever.
- Feeling of having LESS FUN in all modes of play despite opening up more viable character options

Combine all of this with the same 20 ISO node win or 1*/2* cover of a PvP reward and then net result is dissatisfaction when compared to our prior expectations with the resources spending vs reward system.

For clarity...when I say resources or resource spending I'm referring to things like health pack use, ISO boosts, TU's being used, more characters on the roster being on long cooldowns before we can use them again. Things like that.

Bottom Line: It takes MORE TIME and MORE RESOURCES to obtain the SAME REWARDS.
In fact, the more balanced rosters make things more competitive which makes things even more challenging to reach the same rewards with any consistency.

To illustrate...If you take a game like Diablo 2 and cut the equipment drop rates in half the end result is always going to be LESS FUN no matter how fun or balanced the combat system is designed.

Possible Solutions

Reduced leveling costs:
This is already in the works but our player base doesn't know the impact of these changes yet. This is the equivalent of increasing ISO. The question is by how much? If the net savings is 25% then I think it'll still be woefully insufficient given the impact of these changes. You guys need to be AGGRESSIVE here if people are to feel their efforts for 20 ISO, 100 ISO, or 250 ISO is to be worth it.

Increased Reward Values and Availability:
Granted, reduced leveling costs are effectively the same as increased ISO. But psychologically speaking people will still feel like their efforts are worth less when they still visually see the same numbers pop up for their time and resource efforts.

I'd strongly consider an increased value of rewards in this game even if they aren't substantial. This is more about the rewards on a match to match basis rather than placement rewards. So perhaps tripling the bonus ISO per battle in PvP would be a great way to reflect this.
- 90 bonus ISO for 0 skips
- 60 bonus ISO for 1 skip
- 30 bonus ISO for 2 skip

Deal with the base PvE Node reward of 20 ISO problem. I get that you don't want people farming the easiest node to exploit the system but I'm sure you can make the experience of getting PvE node rewards more enjoyable.

Example: Guarantee a new reward for each node clear until all 4 rewards are given out.
- clear 5 the reward is 100 ISO
- clear 6 is 75 ISO
- clear 7 is 50 ISO
- clear 8+ is 25 ISO

Finally, rather than increase the placement rewards simply stretch out the number of players who earn them. This will help ensure a more consistent experience for the more competitive balanced game. You've done this already with 4* PvE's.
- Reduce the 4* pvp prog reward from 1000 to 900 to reflect the added challenge of getting hit a LOT more in PvP.
- Extend the single 3* cover from top 100 to top 200.
- Extend the single alliance 3* cover from top 100 to top 250. (apply similar changes to PvE as well)


Improve Out of Battle Character Healing:
Characters are taking a beating now. Fury might last 2 battles before he needs a pack. This is true EVEN when you support him with Luke Cage's protect tile. The fact of the matter is that you'll take several enemy attacks per battle relative to before. The increase match length also adds to the increased threat of enemy cascades which just compounds the damage taking problem.

My ideal solution to this would be to completely remove character healing timers from the game entirely. Did your character SURVIVE the match? He or she is returned to full health. No more timer upon timer garbage that is the bane of the worst F2P/Facebook/Mobile practices. You still have limited health packs to REVIVE characters but not to heal them.

That change is super extreme though I don't see it becoming a reality. So if you can't take it that far then please STRONGLY consider a massive health rate increase. Think of it like a full heal from 1 hit point in an hour. This is enough of a deterrent to impact grind pushes for PvE's and PvP's but not enough to prevent frequent use of a character throughout the day.

Vladdy

I like your ideas although not having thought about them for a long time. I also like to think about the longer lasting matches and what could be done to improve gameplay without breaking anything.

Let us hope that some of your ideas are going to see the light of the world.

simonsez

babinro wrote:

- Reduce the 4* pvp prog reward from 1000 to 900 to reflect the added challenge of getting hit a LOT more in PvP.

Yes. Please.
I'll admit, for all my **** about everything that is MPQ lately, I have enjoyed playing with Gamora (but she's still awful at lv 166). What I'm not enjoying is being one bad hop away from not being able to hit 1k, because no one is scoring in this shard. Typically for a cover like PX blue, you could hit 1k and find yourself close to dropping out of the top 50. Now, 700s has you in the top 10. Very frustrating.

xellessanova

Agree on all observations.

Match time is easily 2x what it used to be before the health buffs/XF nerfs, without taking increased enemy levels due to new MMR into account in PVP and PVE scaling into account.

It is no longer worth it at all for me to play Lightning Rounds past the seed teams. It is also even more painful to play PVE, and PVP requires a lot more planning and out-of-game coordination.

Additional solutions:
The return of Double ISO PVPs / PVE node first-time completion rewards
20-person Anniversary/Elektra style LR
Increase healing rate of all characters by 50% and provide tank characters who take damage by design and who have been overlooked (Captain Marvel, Gamora, Colossus) additional fast healing
Fiddle with the points scoring to provide double points, 2x time spent per match should be 2x points - this would also increase the pool of available points at the beginning of a PVP
Fiddle with points scoring to Increase points gained on defense while not changing points lost during failed offense
Deal with the scaling in PVE

Unknown

I think PvP issue goes far beyond just whatever particular number is needed to hit the 4* threshold and there should be some kind of more permanent solution. With PvP you got two conflicting issues:

1. The 1000 threshold is designed to not be reasonably reachable via gameplay mechanisms.
2. Non gameplay mechanism (like shields) distorts gameplay but makes money and money is good, but you don't want to be so greedy and end up losing your players.

D3 seems to always take these two conflicting interests and figure there's some magic number you can set the progression at where these two balances out. I'm not convinced this works at all. As can be seen with the really high scores it's obviously not stopping some people no matter what, but on the other hand it's also stopping plenty of people in general and it's not like 'you didn't pay enough to hit 1000' is a convincing argument to anyone who didn't hit 1000. In fact, if the goal is that you must pay this much to hit 1000, it'd be better to simply to make this a guaranteed thing instead of subjecting people to issues like ending up in a dry shard where it's possible that no amount of HP spent (well, any reasonable amount) could get you to 1000. I know they keep track of number of games played on average to hit certain threshold. Why not just make that the progression target and put some additional requirement on the games (say they've to be within someone with 80% of your average level with a minimum average level of 150)? After all if it usually took 50 games to hit 1000 then setting 50 wins for a 4* cover should work, and the level requirement is put there so that you don't have say level 1 guys beating each other up 50 times for a 4*, as that'd make no sense. You can probably lower the average level requirement for the 2*, but I think average level 150 is what you should be expected to fight to get a 4* and there sure isn't a shortage of teams meeting that goal, and note that you can always lower your own team's level even if you have every character maxed by taking 2 3*s instead of 2 4*s.

For PvE I don't think the reward for beating the nodes themselves is a problem. The problem is that scaling makes it unfair. I don't care if there's a level 395 node that gives only 20 iso if everyone else has to face the same odds. What I have a problem is that I have to fight a level 395 node for 20 iso and the game is trying to tell me another guy with 2* fighting level 175 for the same 20 iso is totally the same thing in terms of difficulty. I'm pretty sure I have a much harder fight, but even if not, it doesn't make it any more fair if it terms out that it was indeed the 2* guy who has a harder fight. It's just crazy to think those two drastic differences in scaling can possibly be equal, so someone has to be screwed here. It's obviously bad if I'm the one screwed but even if I can somehow ensure it's everyone else that's screwed, that doesn't make the system right at all.

Polares

In PvP they need to eliminate retaliation, I know they would never do it, but it is the only thing that would work (or at least lower A LOT the amount of points you loose after each fight).

I like your suggestion of eliminating regeneration. I agree with you, if a char survives a fight it should be fully usable in the next one. This way would also help all the chars with healing powers.

In PvE they NEED to FIX SCALING ASAP, right now is super unfair, and without XForce ansd 4hor, it is really really difficult to beat those nodes (and again, even when you do, you are severely injured).

BillyBobJoe

xellessanova wrote:

Match time is easily 2x what it used to be before the health buffs/XF nerfs, without taking increased enemy levels due to new MMR into account in PVP and PVE scaling into account.

It is no longer worth it at all for me to play Lightning Rounds past the seed teams. It is also even more painful to play PVE, and PVP requires a lot more planning and out-of-game coordination.

100% agree on these statements.

Overall, I think the recent changes to MPQ are improving the play, but the game itself is starting to be a drag.
1) match time increased = more time to get hit shield hopping. Let's face it, the only way to reach 1000 pts is by hopping. I'm also noticing that while I'm hopping (around 900 pts), I'm getting nailed by people with 300-500 pts, which means I'm losing ~40 pts when I'm only gaining ~30 pts. Very frustrating.
2) Slower climbing times due to MMR. What I would have climbed in 3 hours, now takes me a day and a half due to health pack regens, character health regens, shield cooldowns, etc. Now PVP feels like a grind like PVE.
3) I don't play PVE anymore due to the ridiculously high scaling and the 20 iso rewards.
4) LRs aren't worth playing anymore due to MMR. I can play 3-6 matches, then i'm done.

To state again, the play is better with all the character balancing, but the game is becoming a chore to advance in.

fmftint

Another PVP issue that I believe needs to be addressed, lopsided retaliations. Get hit for -35 retaliate for +9. There is no upside there, retaliating just feeds points to your attacker because the will be able to again hit you for -32

Unknown

Lopsided? They're getting more points from you because they had less points than you when they attacked you and they offer less for retaliation because they still have less points than you. It's exactly the same system that you're getting all your points from every time you play pvp. You win by finding people with higher points than you and beating them.

There's...a pretty simple solution to that right now too. DON'T RETALIATE AGAINST THAT GUY. You wouldn't fight a normal match for 9 points would you? So why would you fight a retaliation one for that little?

Unknown

Wow, what a great OP.

The only thing I would add (Again. lol) in light of the apparent desire on the devs' part to diversify players' rosters is to do something about roster slot prices.

I would love to field a more diverse roster. Frankly, it would immediately take away the sting of a bunch of other changes. As things stand, I cannot afford to do so, and I'm pretty tired of dumping 2-6 cover 3* characters to make room for another who may eventually (if they don't get dumped as well) be a better choice (sorry Punisher, I'll always miss you).

I couldn't make room for the last PVE character, even though I had him, and I cannot make room for Qs, again, even though I've got one sitting in my queue.

Other than that, I agree with pretty much every word of the OP.

DBC

Unknown

Roster diversity is very important for PvE now. Let's take a level 200 Doom + Mystique + Empircist. You run your A team and by turn 10 Doom does a Diablolical Plot for 10K and you lose the game. You try again with someone else and for some reason the AI decided to do Inject Iso 8 and then you win this one relatively easily. Now what doesn't work is that you find out a guy with everyone at level 94 has a roster that is considered as more diverse than yours by the game, since his enemies are tuned for level 94 so every random 2*/3* at that level at least has a shot of beating it, while there's no way you can possibly have the same number of level 166s let alone 270s to use for scaling that's tuned against your 270s. Even if the 166s do have a good chance at beating nodes tuned for 4*s, you certainly won't have as many of them compared to someone who only needs to keep all his characters at 94. To make things worse, it takes less time for the guy with level 94 for his guy to regen their health because they have less total health even though scaling pretty much ensures that extra health do not matter for you (because your enemies just do more damage to make up for that). For example, I took Nick Fury in for a fight and he only took 7K damage (out of 13K), which is honestly a pretty low amount of damage for those nodes and need 4 hours to heal. If my scaling/level is cut to exactly half, then he'd take 3.5K out of 6.5K and only need 2 hours to heal, and this ignores that Nick Fury at half of his level is relatively more powerful because 4* gains very little from ability damage as a function of level while your non 4* enemies still scale up the same way.

A roster with 25 characters at level 94 is not more diverse than a roster with 10 characters at level 166 and 15 characters at 94 but currently the former is considered as way more diverse than the latter, and since you can't undo scaling, you'd have to get 25 characters to level 166 to be on even ground with a guy with 25 characters at 94 and that's just insane.

babinro

Phantron wrote:

Roster diversity is very important for PvE now. Let's take a level 200 Doom + Mystique + Empircist. You run your A team and by turn 10 Doom does a Diablolical Plot for 10K and you lose the game. You try again with someone else and for some reason the AI decided to do Inject Iso 8 and then you win this one relatively easily. Now what doesn't work is that you find out a guy with everyone at level 94 has a roster that is considered as more diverse than yours by the game, since his enemies are tuned for level 94 so every random 2*/3* at that level at least has a shot of beating it, while there's no way you can possibly have the same number of level 166s let alone 270s to use for scaling that's tuned against your 270s. Even if the 166s do have a good chance at beating nodes tuned for 4*s, you certainly won't have as many of them compared to someone who only needs to keep all his characters at 94. To make things worse, it takes less time for the guy with level 94 for his guy to regen their health because they have less total health even though scaling pretty much ensures that extra health do not matter for you (because your enemies just do more damage to make up for that). For example, I took Nick Fury in for a fight and he only took 7K damage (out of 13K), which is honestly a pretty low amount of damage for those nodes and need 4 hours to heal. If my scaling/level is cut to exactly half, then he'd take 3.5K out of 6.5K and only need 2 hours to heal, and this ignores that Nick Fury at half of his level is relatively more powerful because 4* gains very little from ability damage as a function of level while your non 4* enemies still scale up the same way.

A roster with 25 characters at level 94 is not more diverse than a roster with 10 characters at level 166 and 15 characters at 94 but currently the former is considered as way more diverse than the latter, and since you can't undo scaling, you'd have to get 25 characters to level 166 to be on even ground with a guy with 25 characters at 94 and that's just insane.

I'm not sure if I can agree with the whole level 94 scaling being easier than the level 270 scaling.
I'd have to rely on my memory of the game back then but it was a completely different game when I was in full on ** mode.

What I CAN get behind is your example with Fury. As levels scale up so to does the damage and as a result the vets have to endure some absurd healing times relative to any other tier of play. This added punishment always felt a bit arbitrary but with the new gameplay changes it's becoming an actual problem.

Even if you view the issue through a Lore perspective it doesn't seem to add up...shouldn't CStorm and Fury have the same rate of health since they are both basically regular humans in terms of recovery from damage? I don't recall anything about super resilience or healing being a part of Storms mutant powers. It's neat to see Wolverine and DP heal faster than others but in the interest of fair gameplay I'd love to see the recovery system streamlined for all tiers of play.

FaustianDeal

simonsez wrote:

What I'm not enjoying is being one bad hop away from not being able to hit 1k, because no one is scoring in this shard. Typically for a cover like PX blue, you could hit 1k and find yourself close to dropping out of the top 50. Now, 700s has you in the top 10. Very frustrating.

I don't want to distract from the core push of this thread (more rewards), but it is too bad there aren't mechanisms to try to help level the playing field across shards so that 1k is consistently easy to hit in every shard. I think this is an issue that could merit some solid attention.

Would introducing a multiplier for match points based on relative scoring within the shard be helpful? This can, like anything, be exploited by the broader community in time, but it does seem unfortunate that there are events where no one in a bracket in slice 2 gets to 1k, where a 1k score in slice 4 is pushed out of the t25. Could it be based on a dynamic comparison of the average score of the top 100 players in the slice and use that to dial up the points awarded for victories in slices that are lagging behind?

This could also help reduce the 'slice penalty' that people perceive in their season scores.

simonsez

FaustianDeal wrote:

I don't want to distract from the core push of this thread (more rewards), but it is too bad there aren't mechanisms to try to help level the playing field across shards so that 1k is consistently easy to hit in every shard. I think this is an issue that could merit some solid attention.

There must be a good reason, but why can't they let you target people in different shards?

Stax the Foyer

simonsez wrote:

FaustianDeal wrote:

I don't want to distract from the core push of this thread (more rewards), but it is too bad there aren't mechanisms to try to help level the playing field across shards so that 1k is consistently easy to hit in every shard. I think this is an issue that could merit some solid attention.

There must be a good reason, but why can't they let you target people in different shards?

I'd never join anything but S5 if cross-shard queueing was possible.

You'd be able to queue people from earlier shards with developed leaderboards to provide nice juicy targets. You'd also only have attacks from within your own shard in the last few hours, once there's no more overlap.

Anyone joining S1 would benefit less from cross-target queues because all of the other shards are lagging behind, and would be snipeable by anyone in the later shards during the last part of the shard.

simonsez

Stax the Foyer wrote:

I'd never join anything but S5 if cross-shard queueing was possible.

I anticipated this... my response would be that if people can and do choose their shard for strategic reasons, maybe we don't need 5 PvP shards in the first place.

Stax the Foyer

simonsez wrote:

Stax the Foyer wrote:

I'd never join anything but S5 if cross-shard queueing was possible.

I anticipated this... my response would be that if people can and do choose their shard for strategic reasons, maybe we don't need 5 PvP shards in the first place.

Clearly, I cannot choose the cup in front of me.

But I think shards are a big quality of life benefit for most people, and strategic shard picking only affects a small percentage of the playerbase. (And some of those may make the opposite choice and pick an earlier shard to chase ranking awards rather than progression awards)

Ebolamonkey84

simonsez wrote:

FaustianDeal wrote:

I don't want to distract from the core push of this thread (more rewards), but it is too bad there aren't mechanisms to try to help level the playing field across shards so that 1k is consistently easy to hit in every shard. I think this is an issue that could merit some solid attention.

There must be a good reason, but why can't they let you target people in different shards?

They don't want to have to solve the problem of how to handle what happens when you have someone queued from a shard that has closed since you originally queued them. I think there were also concerns about certain shards being able to be targeted by more people due to the overlap, which I don't think would be a big problem since I can only ever cycle within the same 5-6 people anyway without massive skipping.

Unknown

Finally, rather than increase the placement rewards simply stretch out the number of players who earn them. This will help ensure a more consistent experience for the more competitive balanced game. You've done this already with 4* PvE's.
- Reduce the 4* pvp prog reward from 1000 to 900 to reflect the added challenge of getting hit a LOT more in PvP.
- Extend the single 3* cover from top 100 to top 200.
- Extend the single alliance 3* cover from top 100 to top 250. (apply similar changes to PvE as well)

About this part, I always though that PvP should have same 3* lower prize same as PvE, for T150. Then two covers for 100 and three for T50, the rest should be more HP, more ISO, maybe more tokens and then finally the 4* for T1 like it is OR for T5.

babinro

babinro wrote:

I'd strongly consider an increased value of rewards in this game even if they aren't substantial. This is more about the rewards on a match to match basis rather than placement rewards. So perhaps tripling the bonus ISO per battle in PvP would be a great way to reflect this.
- 90 bonus ISO for 0 skips
- 60 bonus ISO for 1 skip
- 30 bonus ISO for 2 skip

This would probably make a better discussion on it's own thread but I'll see if anyone feels like commenting on it here. The more I think about this idea the more I like it.

To my knowledge, a LOT of the out of communication tactics used to inflate scores revolve around plenty of skipping. So rewarding those who don't 'abuse' this and play the game 'as intended' seems like a great idea.

Obviously 90/60/30 bonus ISO per battle wouldn't be enough to really incentivize change.
But what about something like 200/100/50 ISO?

Over the course of like 20-40+ battles in PvP this would really add up.
Thoughts?
Too open to exploits?
Wouldn't actually change anything?

Unknown

fmftint wrote:

Another PVP issue that I believe needs to be addressed, lopsided retaliations. Get hit for -35 retaliate for +9. There is no upside there, retaliating just feeds points to your attacker because the will be able to again hit you for -32

This. I'm not sure about others, but I generally don't attack nodes with less than 25 points if the opposing side has a team that can retal effectively, which given the recent changes is the vast majority of nodes I see in my queue. (The situation is different if it's the last fight before I shield, but that's a minority of fights).

Attacking a lower point node is just offering your opponent a discounted ticket to a higher score, and yourself a net loss upon retal. The incentive therefore is to attack only higher point nodes (>25) so that if there is a retaliation (i.e. the other player either doesn't understand the game mechanics, is shielding, or is just overly prideful), it works in your favor. The retaliation feature is doing is nudging you to discriminate against <25 point nodes, because the MPQ food chain works upwards remember, opposite that of the real animal kingdom... Meanwhile, you skip node after node in your queue and what do you see? Lots of 18, 20 point fights (or in dry slices 3 point fights!) -- fights which you probably are better off not attacking and skipping (at a cost of 10 ISO).

You get attacked and have the option to retal. If the other player was smart and attacked you from a lower score (which are the majority of retals I receive), then it's stupid for you to take the retal. The only good retaliation opportunity is therefore one where the other player was stupid (prideful, or shielding). These are a minority of retals.

The retal system has little upside, as fmftint said, and I just don't see much sense in it. Getting rid of it would at least make more of the 18-20 point nodes in my queue as feasible options.

(The only merit I see in it is that it may help team coordination, in that my friend can attack me from a higher score and shield, offering me a high point retal option.)