Ultron 2 Progression - Some Math

simonsez

Scoregasms wrote:

I dunno, with only 2 waves, I usually have enough AP to completely nuke down the 2nd wave for these

Good point, it's not really like two separate nodes since your AP doesn't get reset.

And they keep telling us roster doesn't matter, and that selling off your roster won't lower scaling once you're there. They probably designed the calculation to be a one-way street, since they probably had no reason to think a player's performance should get worse... but of course that was before they started nerfing everything.

JVReal

mohio wrote:

I'm definitely in the "like this better" camp, but starting to get pretty upset with d3 about not communicating the changes to the second run. My alliance optimized for the first run and finished in 2.5 days so we decided to split up the heavy grinders in this second run and now it looks like neither group will finish. I'm not sure we'd have done it differently if we'd known but we absolutely should have known. Sadly it's on par with well everything they've ever done in the past with shoddy communication but that doesn't make it any less wrong.

Same here man. We redistributed our alliances, spreading out the heavy hitters... now they jack up the Health, and not by a little bit.

The worst part to me is that I don't think it had anything to do with the first run. They said they couldn't change anything in time for 2nd run, so it was the same genius doing math in his head that forgot that we can't grind more than every 8 hours, unlike regular PVE where you grind for diminishing points. He/she didn't take into consideration that they needed more than 20 million in combined health to get everyone their progression, but then thought that adding another 10 million (guestimation) was a good idea for the second run, because it is a 4* after all.

To top it off, they KNEW it was going to increase the second run, read the forums, and saw that people talked about running slower to let people hit progression on the next one, and DIDN'T say anything about it.

I love the event. I love how it works. Fix the glitches and work out the math and it's awesome. HATE how it was communicated, very poorly.
Had great luck with pulls in the first run, but these odds on this second run seem to be on par with regular Heroic tokens. I've gotten less moonstones, but more ares and 2* Dakens. I've pulled 1 Gold so far hitting all the refreshes, and it was a Purple IF. I'll take it, but after pulling 3 SW on day 1 of first run, I was expecting better pulls in this run than 2*'s.

I'm nervous that we'll even get past level 7. The cumulative increase in health just to beat level 6 this time around is another 4.175 million points. That does not include the increase in health that will be incorporated in levels 7 and 8.

Really bad design for points in this 2nd run, and really bad communication about the differences in the runs.

I read people crying for more health... and I knew that wasn't the answer. More health on levels pushes the Prime nodes further out of reach. An additional level for personal progression points alone was the right solution... not this. This is what I was afraid of, and as soon as we hit level 4, it became noticeable, and here we are still trying to clear 5, and no sigh of relief when it happens, just more stress over 3 more ridiculously high health levels.

anamosity

simonsez wrote:

Scoregasms wrote:

I dunno, with only 2 waves, I usually have enough AP to completely nuke down the 2nd wave for these

Good point, it's not really like two separate nodes since your AP doesn't get reset.

And they keep telling us roster doesn't matter, and that selling off your roster won't lower scaling once you're there. They probably designed the calculation to be a one-way street, since they probably had no reason to think a player's performance should get worse... but of course that was before they started nerfing everything.

I know this is just one anecdotal point, but I had a 220 Xforce cover maxed, 166 thor and 166 hulk I used for PVP and everything else was 110 or below that I used in PVE. This was based on the "don't use em in PVE and it won't hurt scaling" logic that had become popular. With the MMR change and the Xforce nerf he'd become dead weight that made PVP unplayable so I sold him off. Granted there were further MMR changes but now PVP is playable and my PVE at least feels like the initial levels of guys went down. No longer was it telling me a fight against a level 210 Mags and Hood was normal difficulty for my 110 level PVE squad.

Scoregasms

@Lerysh, lol, it's not that we're complaining that he has more health per se, but that some of us took precautions given the snafu's of last round to make sure more folks could hit progression based on those event numbers. This meant for some, they didn't clear as fast as they would normally thinking they could take it more slowly to spread the points out. Unfortunately, given projected numbers, even "hitting the gas" now may not be enough. If we had known, we would've floored it from the beginning to compensate for the higher health thresholds.

@Simonez, I think both you and I usually are going for top bracket spots, so the amount of effort to secure 1st or 2nd place is known. I did take some time to see if I could manually lower my scaling by only playing with lower level characters for a month in PVE and failed miserably. In fact, it got to a point someone else who has similar scaling than me before I started actually ended up with LOWER scaling than me at the end.... lol, so... yeah, I agree, scaling is a mystery. It can definitely skew ones view of events if it's borked. I'd love to see more data from folks who did sell off their 4* and provide details on scaling these days.

JVReal

No red names floating on the board today... was hoping to hear from them about this.

TxMoose

simonsez wrote:

Scoregasms wrote:

I dunno, with only 2 waves, I usually have enough AP to completely nuke down the 2nd wave for these

Good point, it's not really like two separate nodes since your AP doesn't get reset.

And they keep telling us roster doesn't matter, and that selling off your roster won't lower scaling once you're there. They probably designed the calculation to be a one-way street, since they probably had no reason to think a player's performance should get worse... but of course that was before they started nerfing everything.

I save enough ap to do the same, but in doing so, its a guaranteed health pack or two for me each time.

mohio

Lerysh wrote:

Not 24 hours ago we were wishing Ultron had more health. Now he has more health and you want to complain about it?

Does this mean that those edge cases that barely cleared round 8, or didn't make it through round 8 last Run will miss a cover? Probably. But we are talking about a 4* release which has a PvE for the exact same 4* running right beside it (never been done before, 4* cover awarded for 2 events, let alone back to back) . There are Hulkbusters to go around for those that work for them.

I'm glad Grumpy did some math on this and made everyone aware of the situation. Now that we are it's time to unleash the hounds, and get those point seekers some more action. If you have players in your camp who held at a million so others could also get a million last Run, you are probably totally fine for this run, just tell them to get to 1.5 Mil or 2 Mil. Release the big guns.

I didn't down vote you, wouldn't do that for disagreeing, but your first point is missing what we actually said. It's not that there's more health. We understand its a 4* should be harder, etc. It's the fact that they came on to say "sorry about the point mess up, unfortunately can't fix it for the next run". Yet they don't mention that they added 50% more points so a lot of us apparently assumed it was like last time and planned accordingly. Due to the nature of locked alliances it's not even something we can correct for midway through.

Tl;Dr - the complaint is in utter lack of communication of the event differences, not that a change was made (that you point out a lot of people asked for).

Dauthi

Lerysh wrote:

Does this mean that those edge cases that barely cleared round 8, or didn't make it through round 8 last Run will miss a cover? Probably. But we are talking about a 4* release which has a PvE for the exact same 4* running right beside it (never been done before, 4* cover awarded for 2 events, let alone back to back) . There are Hulkbusters to go around for those that work for them.

I'm glad Grumpy did some math on this and made everyone aware of the situation. Now that we are it's time to unleash the hounds, and get those point seekers some more action. If you have players in your camp who held at a million so others could also get a million last Run, you are probably totally fine for this run, just tell them to get to 1.5 Mil or 2 Mil. Release the big guns.

I agree mostly with this. I think that 3 4*s should not be as easy to get as 3 3*s, though I am still nervous that the scaling might be overdone. We had to hold 10 of our players back so the next 5 could hit 1 mil previously, so I hope we still have a shot. If we don't I think that they may have overshot scaling.

monstermike

Phantron wrote:

What's hilarious is that if you were only barely beating round 6 in the last event there's absolutely no way your alliance is beating round 6 this time around even with SW covers on everyone, but rather than recognizing this and immediately hand out SW cover to anyone remotely affected by the server outage (because it wouldn't matter, you'd still fail) they delayed the compensation so now everyone's going to claim they were able to get to round 6 this time, and yet D3 can't say, 'no you can't do it, we rigged this to ensure it wasn't possible', at least not without causing an even bigger backlash.

Our alliance is on the verge of round 6, so saying its unbeatable is a bit of a stretch.

Buret0

djsquillz wrote:

simonsez wrote:

So, for everyone who's always said "PvE should be non-competitive. All awards should be based on progress not rankings", you might want to be careful what you wish for. Based on these projected numbers, this format isn't doing anyone any favors.

Simon...I'll take this format over the current PVE-But-Really-PVP format any day. I like not having to compete with others for placement. if i'm willing to grind it out...i earn my reward.

easy...marc

I hit over a million last round and still didn't earn a SW cover because only a few members of the alliance were grinding and then we got locked out from completing the round by the server errors. I'll take an event where the best rewards are achievable through personal ambition any day. Extra covers for alliances completing at the top are just extras. They shouldn't be making it impossible to personally achieve SW or IMHB if you grind the event hard enough, you should just be limited to three covers instead of an alliance bonus of extras.

mohio

Buret0 wrote:

djsquillz wrote:

simonsez wrote:

So, for everyone who's always said "PvE should be non-competitive. All awards should be based on progress not rankings", you might want to be careful what you wish for. Based on these projected numbers, this format isn't doing anyone any favors.

Simon...I'll take this format over the current PVE-But-Really-PVP format any day. I like not having to compete with others for placement. if i'm willing to grind it out...i earn my reward.

easy...marc

I hit over a million last round and still didn't earn a SW cover because only a few members of the alliance were grinding and then we got locked out from completing the round by the server errors. I'll take an event where the best rewards are achievable through personal ambition any day. Extra covers for alliances completing at the top are just extras. They shouldn't be making it impossible to personally achieve SW or IMHB if you grind the event hard enough, you should just be limited to three covers instead of an alliance bonus of extras.

I didn't consider it before your comment but in light of what you said this event can almost be considered the SW release since your personal effort will get you all 3 covers. Kinda flips things around from normal

Arondite

djsquillz wrote:

simonsez wrote:

So, for everyone who's always said "PvE should be non-competitive. All awards should be based on progress not rankings", you might want to be careful what you wish for. Based on these projected numbers, this format isn't doing anyone any favors.

Simon...I'll take this format over the current PVE-But-Really-PVP format any day. I like not having to compete with others for placement. if i'm willing to grind it out...i earn my reward.

easy...marc

Good luck with that, lmao. The last round of ultron will literally be impossible for one player to hit solo without 19 others putting in equally impressive effort.

TheOncomingStorm

I take issue with the situation. We just did the event for the first time, so we have a predetermined idea of how much work is needed to succeed.

Not only do they not tell us the pve has changed (see below), they actually went out of their way to say there would be no change as far as points so that more players could hit 1 million progressive.

So, now, everyone has been set up to fail.

My other problem is, we gave feedback that the sentries scale up too fast. So, what happens? This event the sentries were tougher than last time. I don't know if scaling did not reset or what the deal was. Instead of an event that was fun like it's predecessor, they did what they seem to, make things worse. I'm just waiting for them to blame us as usual. I'm sure they'll say either this is what we told them we wanted or it was to make the game better for us.

Never mind the server issues at the beginning, or the inevitable ones in the final hours.

P.S. Think I'm wrong? Play EOTS. Remember this tokens players enjoyed in the wave nodes? In sub 1, there is now a token in only one of the nodes.

Remember Iso8 Brotherhood used to have 100 hp sub placement rewards. Now, 25 hp.

So while they have improved Tat and Heroic pves, ones that weren't our favorites, they take the ones we love playing and make then worse. Not only do I not understand why you break things that are actually working and making players happy, but to do so in silence, like they hope or think we won't notice.

The game didn't break when iso8 brotherhood had 100 hp sub rewards. The game was not turned on its head when all wave nodes have one-time tokens. Ultron vs Avengers was just needed a tweak so all players could continue to get points after Ultron prime 8 was reached and scaling to not increase so quickly got sentries nodes. This would have improved the event. Yet, they went out of their way, to take an event near perfection, and make the experience worse for players.

TL; DR: When the game gets things right, why are these taken away from players.

DrStrange-616

Assuming your alliance can get to round 8, each of us will have to fight Ultron how many times? 100? And 96 of them for 20 ISO? Whee!

dkffiv

Round 7 increased from 4.5m to 11m (+6.5 / 144% increase). Round 8 may be next to impossible.

Previous event was 17.175M total, through round 7 is already 21.8M. If round 8 is 18M+ we're looking at more than double the points.

DrStrange-616

dkffiv wrote:

Round 7 increased from 4.5m to 11m (+6.5 / 144% increase). Round 8 may be next to impossible.

Previous event was 17.175M total, through round 7 is already 21.8M. If round 8 is 18M+ we're looking at more than double the points.

11 Meellion?

Spoit

Scoregasms wrote:

@Lerysh, lol, it's not that we're complaining that he has more health per se, but that some of us took precautions given the snafu's of last round to make sure more folks could hit progression based on those event numbers. This meant for some, they didn't clear as fast as they would normally thinking they could take it more slowly to spread the points out. Unfortunately, given projected numbers, even "hitting the gas" now may not be enough. If we had known, we would've floored it from the beginning to compensate for the higher health thresholds.

^This. We retreated for the first couple days to stretch it out. Thank god we didn't split up

Unknown

If the total points are 40M, is there even enough points to get 2 million per person even if you never missed anything?

d0nk3y

DrStrange-616 wrote:

Assuming your alliance can get to round 8, each of us will have to fight Ultron how many times? 100? And 96 of them for 20 ISO? Whee!

Yeah, but how many times in a 24-hour cycle can we actually *engage* Ultron? My brain's foggy 'cuz I'm under the weather, but best I can come up with is 21 times in a day... 6 times from a full 8 hour refresh and 5 times for each of the 3 essential unlocks.

I'm starting to think that someone looked at the HP settings for Ultron statistically instead of realistically for Round 2. This many HP matched against the rigid unlock pattern makes it so only an alliance in absolute lock-step through the event might be able to grind it out and defeat Ultron in the 4.5 days of the event, but nobody else has a snowball's chance in Hades of finishing it.

MPQ is as MPQ does, I suppose.

Oldboy

Playing this event and reading the forums is like watching a comedy-horror. You can't help but laugh at the ridiculousness of things and you have that growing sense of horror as you continue to play and read about the health increase