early Ultron thoughts

Unknown

this event is very badly designed aside from server issue

reason: we dont control other players real life. the lock out timer keeping us from carrying the alliance.
there are private alliance out there restricted to friends in real life only, we dont want to abandon our friends and actually help them achieve round 6-8.

fix: take the timer out after the first day of event. dedicated alliance is gonna finish the event within one day anyways, right? why put it there????

Scoregasms

ShionSinX wrote:

Ultron 1: 75k HP; 6k per fight
Ultron 2: 150k HP, 8k per fight
Ultron 3: 400k HP, 10k per fight
Ultron 4: 1.000k HP, 13k per fight

Three fights against each one alredy fill that round's progeressive rewards (last being 25hp).

Ultron 5: 2.000k HP, 16.5k per fight

Taganov

noisnam wrote:

this event is very badly designed aside from server issue

reason: we dont control other players real life. the lock out timer keeping us from carrying the alliance.
there are private alliance out there restricted to friends in real life only, we dont want to abandon our friends and actually help them achieve round 6-8.

fix: take the timer out after the first day of event. dedicated alliance is gonna finish the event within one day anyways, right? why put it there????

Forgive my ignorance, but I don't see how the timer is the problem. There are only 5 essential refresh nodes. If there's no timer, how would you refresh the Ultron fight once you've exhausted the nodes?

Definitely feeling the pain of being in a casual alliance though. With only 5 of us registered for the event, and only two with scores at all, no amount of grinding on my part is going to get us to round 8.

DFiPL

updated top post with ShionSinX and Scoregasms' HP info contributions.

Unknown

Taganov wrote:

noisnam wrote:

this event is very badly designed aside from server issue

reason: we dont control other players real life. the lock out timer keeping us from carrying the alliance.
there are private alliance out there restricted to friends in real life only, we dont want to abandon our friends and actually help them achieve round 6-8.

fix: take the timer out after the first day of event. dedicated alliance is gonna finish the event within one day anyways, right? why put it there????

Forgive my ignorance, but I don't see how the timer is the problem. There are only 5 essential refresh nodes. If there's no timer, how would you refresh the Ultron fight once you've exhausted the nodes?

Definitely feeling the pain of being in a casual alliance though. With only 5 of us registered for the event, and only two with scores at all, no amount of grinding on my part is going to get us to round 8.

yea my mistake they will have to refresh all node and take the timer out

SnowcaTT

Put this over in "rating", but better here in "thoughts".

First hour: this is awesome! So many new fights, new enemies and abilities, new content and visuals! I'm a bit confused how this all works, a little more "do part A once to do part B once then back to part A" would have been nice...I have no idea what these enemies are going to do, why do they keep getting free stuff?

Second hour: This is still cool! I wish the servers would stop crashing, but playing over and over is fun, getting lots of progression rewards is fun! Using some health packs, but still playing.

Third hour: This is...getting long. Are these subs ("pins") ever going to update, or am I going to be fighting the same subs the entire event? I also notice not only is Ultron getting tougher, but all the subs are getting quite a bit tougher as well. I almost wiped on the IM essential with my covered 140 IM the first time, I don't know if I want to touch it this fourth time....

Fourth hour: Well, scaling has really ramped up already. I have to stop, it's using all my health packs (which have been regenerating this whole time as well). Good thing I'm not overlapping with the other PVE - I stopped playing those. But I have to save up the health packs for the end of the PVP. I'm also keeping an eye on the Ultron Prime nodes - I could have sworn node 8 started out around level 180 and even though only node 3 is open, node 8 now is level 210. Is it scaling up before even getting to? Server issues continue...occasionally beating Ultron for "+0" points.

Fifth hour: check-back, yeah, I can run a sub or two from recover time. Run Ultron a time or two as well. And now every character I have over level 150 is pretty much out of health. All the essentials have a few hours to recover. I tried some level 140's back when Ultron/Subs were level one...I don't think I can trust them anymore. I really wish I could run the ultron prime nodes more than once, I'm already getting a little bored with the other subs, and those were something a little different. I wonder if the top QS progression is possible - or even one QS progression.

--We'll see. It's been fun to start! But then it's been a huge grind already, and it has just started. And I've started to wonder: is this just a PVE by another name? Yeah, it's not "competitive" - that we can see. But there could easily be the same "T150/T20/T5" expectations for teams in the background - it doesn't seem like the quick/fun/easy play style that DDQ is, and I was hoping for more of. Is there an "easy" non-vet bracket? Should we put a couple non-vets on the team, will they bring team difficulty down? I can see why it took forever for the Devs to roll out - it takes forever to play it.

Vinmarc43

DEV, come on man, after round 4, battles take forever, kills everyone, scaling goes up 25 levels every round, by the time we get to the end, ultron will be at lvl 400+, give us a break, STOP WITH THIS HARD GRINDING UNPLEASANT STUFF , this is not the friggin olympiques dudes, this is a mobile game, fun time to waste time, not a second job. Nice try, was interesting and different on the outside, but same thing all over again.
And timing is the worst possible, screw what Marvel says, you should have loaded this thing monday.
thanks again

SnowcaTT

Vinmarc43 wrote:

DEV, come on man, after round 4, battles take forever, kills everyone, scaling goes up 25 levels every round, by the time we get to the end, ultron will be at lvl 400+, give us a break, STOP WITH THIS HARD GRINDING UNPLEASANT STUFF , this is not the friggin olympiques dudes, this is a mobile game, fun time to waste time, not a second job. Nice try, was interesting and different on the outside, but same thing all over again.
And timing is the worst possible, screw what Marvel says, you should have loaded this thing monday.
thanks again

I really, really liked round one. I wish we just repeated round one eight times, honestly: that would have been a fun event. Or even repeated round one thrice, round two thrice, and round three thrice: scaling would have gotten a bit more difficult, health packs would have been used and waits would have been made, but I wouldn't be skipping nodes.

Round four though...how many more to go? I think "Scaling" has gone above "Roster Slot prices" and "PVE length" in things I really dislike in the game (perhaps only trumped by "back-to-back character releases")

rixmith

For me there's a lot to like here. The positives:

1. Everyone in the alliance can contribute, no matter how strong their roster. Why? Because even losing to Ultron brings his overall bar down. Just for fun I used 2*'s on some Ultron fights in rounds 1 through 3, though I'm not sure whether they'd make it in round 4. Too bad that alliance members that couldn't jump in early have already missed all those easy rounds. Round 4 might be too hard for them to handle the survival nodes.

2. The Sentry bots defeat all the usual strategies. I can't stick a Captain America protect tile in the bottom corner and let Falcon pump it up to where I never take any damage. There's so many special tiles that Falcon can't stop even a small percentage of them. With all those tiles a Berserker Rage is that much harder to take clean up after. So I'm having to figure out new strategies and try new combinations.

3. The dropping bombs make for a great puzzle. Each move needs careful thought, and almost everything has tradeoffs. Want to do some board shake? You may drop a bomb down to the bottom yourself. Ouch! Put some special tiles out there? They won't be there for long! This is truly Puzzle Quest!

4. The non-competitive nature is great. If my alliance can manage to get through 6 Rounds we can get a cover. I'm not sure if we'll be able to make it with a pretty casual alliance, but hopefully having a few dedicated players will make it possible.

So overall, based on the first 6 or so hours of play (and putting technical issues aside), good job on the event. Hopefully I'll still feel the same way about it after repeating those nodes so many times in the next few days and dealing with high scaling.

udonomefoo

I've been in and out a couple times. My biggest issue (aside from the obvious technical difficulties) is that only one of my alliance mates was able to play for most of the first 3 rounds and basically did it all himself. So he got all the easy tokens/rewards and when I got in it's already at the grindy feeling rounds. Guess that's the catch with alliance based events.

Unknown

SnowcaTT wrote:

I really, really liked round one. I wish we just repeated round one eight times, honestly: that would have been a fun event. Or even repeated round one thrice, round two thrice, and round three thrice: scaling would have gotten a bit more difficult, health packs would have been used and waits would have been made, but I wouldn't be skipping nodes.

Round four though...how many more to go? I think "Scaling" has gone above "Roster Slot prices" and "PVE length" in things I really dislike in the game (perhaps only trumped by "back-to-back character releases")

Just posted as much in another thread. Round one, even with my roster? "Look at me! I'm doing it!" Got locked out for a few hours, and my alliance is doing round 4... aaand I'm toast. *Sigh*

DBC

Unknown

I dont remeber the HP of the sentries on the first ultron, but on 2 it was about 2.8k or something like that, on ultron 3 it was 3k to 3.3k on harder nodes... and on ultron 4 its 5.5k.

Dont want to think about how painful will be fighting 8 sentries on ultron 5 onwards, pretty sure Im not gonna make all 5 anymore, let alone 2 or 3.

Scoregasms

Scoregasms wrote:

ShionSinX wrote:

Ultron 1: 75k HP; 6k per fight
Ultron 2: 150k HP, 8k per fight
Ultron 3: 400k HP, 10k per fight
Ultron 4: 1.000k HP, 13k per fight

Three fights against each one alredy fill that round's progeressive rewards (last being 25hp).

Ultron 5: 2.000k HP, 16.5k per fight

Ultron 6: 3.000k HP, 19.7k per fight (Ultron level 300 for me anyway)

ojcAust

Given Ultrons increase of 50 levels per turn, we are looking at a Level 500 monster by round 10
This will make Ultron the biggest and baddest boss battle we have had, and you know what. Good. We have taken down a Level 395 Hulk before so lets get our sleeves rolled up and tear tin man apart. MPQ at least is portraying Ultron as the mega villian that he is. Yeah it is going to be hard, but that is why we are all in a team of 20.
I am really enjoying this change up to the normal pve runs. Shame that the server issues delayed my start but it will all balance eventually. Lets all try and have fun with this.

wymtime

ojcAust wrote:

Given Ultrons increase of 50 levels per turn, we are looking at a Level 500 monster by round 10
This will make Ultron the biggest and baddest boss battle we have had, and you know what. Good. We have taken down a Level 395 Hulk before so lets get our sleeves rolled up and tear tin man apart. MPQ at least is portraying Ultron as the mega villian that he is. Yeah it is going to be hard, but that is why we are all in a team of 20.
I am really enjoying this change up to the normal pve runs. Shame that the server issues delayed my start but it will all balance eventually. Lets all try and have fun with this.

And Ultron Prime at level 500 will suck big time

Unknown

wymtime wrote:

And Ultron Prime at level 500 will suck big time

Prime has 'normal' level, its not like the Vanilla Ultron, hes kinda easy actually and if you have problems just whale him.

DFiPL

Overall, I liked the event.

I say 'liked' because it isn't looking as though my alliance is likely to put much of a dent in round 6, if we even get there.

I did have some quibbles. As others have pointed out, Demiurge kinda stealthed a competitive mode in there. While the fact that it was pseudo-competitive for the progression rewards isn't ALL bad (if your alliance locked you out of the progression rewards, the trade-off is that you had access to Scarlet Witch's three covers), it does have the potential to cause hard feelings where hard feelings never needed to exist.

The Gunner Sentries were overpowered. Spawning two crits at once at 7+ enemy special tiles frequently turned into a critscade (by which I mean, a cascade spawning more critical tiles). So you were managing the tiles so that there were more than 5 to turn off Swarm but fewer than 7 to avoid Core Fuckyou, and then three enemy tiles dropped after the AI ran a cascade? Bend over.

I felt like having the Quicksilver nodes be the ONLY ones to offer hero points and event tokens hurt the people who didn't have QS.

Like, I don't mind that I'm probably not going to get the top two progression rewards despite all the play I've put in. Why? Because the 20+ event tokens I've gotten got me a Scarlet Witch and 6 or 7 other 3* covers; two which I didn't have, and covers for three or four characters I did have (and of those characters, Iron Fist got 2 or 3 all by himself).

So even though I'm probably not going to get to 750k, I'm not walking away from this event feeling like it was a waste of time. There was a material benefit for me to multiple characters AND I managed to get a cover for the new character despite my alliance probably not finishing six rounds to open up Ultron Prime's 6th.

If PVE events were always this generous with event tokens, I would have less of an issue with it when progressions seem unreachable.

But here's the thing: by putting that largesse in essential nodes, there are going to be people who didn't have my good fortune. A friend in the same alliance in the same alliance as me got kinda ****; the alliance tore through the first few rounds, so between real life and the server issues, by the time he even got in, we were already in round 4. He missed out on at least three event covers from vanilla Ultron as a result. He didn't have Quicksilver, so he wasn't able to get the hero points/event tokens from each of those two nodes over the course of the part of the event he could play. The few tokens he has gotten from vanilla Ultron have all been 2* covers he didn't need.

At 163k points, he might get one more token from the progression, but it's been a largely unsatisfying experience for him. He's gotten to bash his head against the Sentries and their ****, and he hasn't gotten any kind of a return for his anguish. Had he gotten the same number of tokens I did, or at least gotten more than the maybe 3 or 4 he's had the opportunity to get from vanilla Ultron, maybe he's feeling better about the event. Instead, he got locked into three Sentry nodes per refresh which were harder for him than most PVE nodes, but with essentially the same reward level, and a vanilla Ultron node that gave some hero points and a token but quickly became a 20 minute fight for 20 ISO.

An experience like the one I've had, and not being able to hit the progression is probably not a big deal. An experience like the one he's had, where he gets neither the token/HP shower nor the progressions, casts a pallor for him over the entire event. If a future PVE (probably not counting the rerun, since I'm sure that's set already) ever follows this format, I'd probably suggest putting event tokens in the accessible-to-all nodes and increasing them some for the essential ones. Let everybody feel like they're getting something for their time, and overall goodwill goes up.