A Plea to keep scoring & progs until end of season XV

Colognoisseur

Tl;dr: Scoring and progressions should remain the same because they help the three to four-star transition more than anything the devs have done in a while.

I want to get this out there now because I fear the devs are looking at the escalating scores in PvP and are getting ready for another hot fix. I want to ask them to stop and to please let this stay in place at least until the end of this season.
I think we have all felt the lack of passion among those who play the game at the level most who are on the forums play at. I also realize what I am about to say really does apply only to those firmly in three-star land. It might also be better for the two to three star transitioners but I would need to hear from them whether that is true.
What is true is that with the change to scoring which happened at the beginning of the season the 800 and 1,000 point progressions are easy to achieve for a moderately leveled roster. Which means one three star cover and one four star cover every PvP. Three PvP’s a week means three 3 star and three four star covers. We’ve been asking for a version of DDQ for four stars. I say the devs have given it to us with the increased scoring and current progressions.
Where things have changed drastically is for placement. Top scores have soared again back to the 1500-2k level for t5 placement in competitive shards. The devs controlled this previously with shield cooldowns and this is what led to the current progression structure as top progression came down to 1,000 from 1,300. I can’t know what effect those scores have on the majority of players who play way below the level I am talking about but that group is the vast majority of players for sure. I understand the concept of them seeing 1500 as a top score and them struggling to hit 500 might be counterproductive and if you have numbers from when this was true previously I would understand your reluctance to let this continue.
This is why I would like you to keep it in place for the whole current season so you can see if those players are still discouraged by these high scores. I would urge you to get your data and look at it and see how it compares to what you saw before.
If you can find that this can stand more than anything you’ve done recently you will have really done something to ease the three to four star transition you said you wanted to achieve.

CrookedKnight

Agreed. This scoring increase is, for the first time ever, making a four-star transition possible. Even someone hitting 1000 on every PvP will still take a very long time to fully build any character without buying covers; after all, there are 13 covers per character, and each 4* comes around, what, twice per season? But there's finally a light at the end of the tunnel. It's dim and far away but it's there and that's huge.

jffdougan

I consider myself into the 3* transition. I did not break 400 points in any season 14 event. Ive broken 500 on both events so far, and nearly hit 575. I haven't hit those benchmarks since December, before time slices became a thing.

Xeonic-Ice

I definitely want scoring and progression to stay the same as it is right now.

I've been playing the game since launch and this is the first time in about 6 months that I feel like I can actually progress again. Getting that top progression reward is a huge improvement. The previous difficulty was obnoxious and I was on the verge of quitting because the game just felt like I was running in place. Before the change I managed to hit the 1k progression maybe 10 times since January so I'd get a single cover every couple weeks. I still think obtaining these covers is too slow but now I can at least move forward.


As a side note, I love the game and when I complain about stuff here on the forums, it's because I'm passionate about the game and I want to see it improve. There's a reason I've been playing for roughly 600 days. So don't read too much into the negativity.

Unknown

Actually, I want to 1-up this.

I want the current rewards to remain the same, but I also want a 10,000 point progression reward for the season that would be a different cover of the 4* offered for alliance placement.

I am completely thrilled about the new PVP scoring and has really re-upped my long term interest in the game. It REALLY shouldn't change.

Dragon_Nexus

ShazamFTW wrote:

Actually, I want to 1-up this.

I want the current rewards to remain the same, but I also want a 10,000 point progression reward for the season that would be a different cover of the 4* offered for alliance placement.

I am completely thrilled about the new PVP scoring and has really re-upped my long term interest in the game. It REALLY shouldn't change.

That's something I thought about as well. Something harder to obtain, but still possible if you work hard enough.

As for the PvP progression, I'm okay with them adding more steps after 1000, but I hope to God they don't put the 4* cover at the end of it. Have the 4* stay at 1000 but have an extra token at 1100, then 1000 ISO at 1200 then 100 HP at 1300 or something, ya know?

TxMoose

as someone who is hoping to hit 1000 for the first time soon, I'm all for keeping it as long as possible. just hope I can find the right matches since my A team is a slow one.

babinro

I agree completely as per my post in the main thread:

Figured I'd chime in now that I've had some solid time with the changes.

1) This is amazing for vets and 4* transitioners
Sure it'll take free to play vets over 6 months to cover a new 4* but this offers a realistic transition to probably 5 times more players than it did before.

The Falcon PvP was for a Star-Lord Yellow, Thor Yellow first and Captain Mavel Covers. It was also the first pvp event of the season which plenty of people will deliberately skip for season bracket reasons. That's about as low priority as you can get these days and yet my score of 1027 was barely keeping me in the top 25!

2) Losses on offense are FAR less punishing.
Simply put the cost in health packs was punishment enough and this game respects that on offense. Losing like 10 points when you typically gain 35-60 leads to better experience and encourages taking on more risky battles than you might have before.

3) This change helps separate placement and progression rewards.
Don't want to be competitive? Well now you don't have to fight it out with top elite just to get a 4* prog reward. The 'competitive' placement folk will be fighting it out around 1300-1700 ranges most likley. You are less likely to get in their way and they are less likely to bring you down out of fear or taking their place.

Concerns:

1) Getting battered down below 1000 is still highly discouraging.
I'm not sure that this demands any kind of fix or attention but if you get hit for -150 in the span of a single match around 950 points then it's extremely discouraging. The game is designed to take it easy on players below 1000 points so it might be worth considering a safety net to hits until 1000 as well. Beyond that point it's free for all competition for placement.

2) Rank 101 - 200 = 500 ISO and a single 3* cover.
I don't have the data on this but if my placement is dropping from top 5's and top 10 finishes to top 25 or possibly even top 50 finishes then that means others are experiencing the same things as well. Scale this back enough and you'll probably find plenty of people struggling for that single *** cover. I STRONGLY recommend you increase the accessibility of these for lower tiers.

Fantastic changes all around D3.
Thank you for making the game genuinely more fun.

That said I will call out that saving a change until the end of the season is completely arbitrary and silly. Suppose this change lead to top players being unable to even break 500 points. Do you think anyone would ever plead to enforce the changes until end of season? Of course not.

If the devs plan on 'fixing' this then go ahead and do so.

For all we know this is Christmas time for vets while hundreds of ** transitioners are quitting the game out of a new found sense of hopelessness.

Do what's best for the game.

CrookedKnight

My non-selfish reason for wanting any change to wait until the end of the season is that otherwise anybody who played the SHIELD Simulator with boosted points would get a huge advantage in seasonal rankings over people who waited.

Unknown

I managed to score top pvp progression rewards twice now, so yeah. I agree.

slidecage

i highly doubt they would change the scoring in the middle of the season, way too many problems.. Someone who plays sheild early and puts up 1500 pts while someone who waits to the last week and the point system has been changed.

i do say points will change Maybe not next season (might take 1 or 2 to do it)

Season 10 packs will jump from 4000 to 6000 to 7000 pts easy.


my scores last season
470
490
525
585
580
505
430
494
465
444 all without shields

This season
824 before being crushed in last 5 mins down to 600
803 before being crushed in last 5 mins down to 615

even with being crush scoring at least 20 to 30% higher

Unknown

I don't think these scores are good for the game, but since there's no assurance any other kind of fix would be any better for the game I think they should leave it alone until they figured out what they want to do with PvP. Right now I feel the game is at some kind of impasse since it's not really that hard to figure out you don't need 70 characters to do well in this game so transition itself is kind of meaningless, especially compounded with scaling that more than negates any advantage from your roster. It seems to me starting from the time when nobody ever hit 1300 for the 4* progression to now, the amount of effort you need to hit 4* is something that's determined by purely accident. There's no particular ulterior motive back when it was impossible (no shields, 1300) or that when it was 1300 and you can hit people who are shielded so it literally takes no effort to get there. I don't think having a random amount of effort for the 4* is helpful for the game, but if they're going to switch from one form of randomness to another, they might as well keep it at something easier until they figure out something that makes sense.

I still don't get why don't they just ask for 500 HP plus some number of PvP games for a 4*, since if you look at what the devs posted they're clearly monitoring the amount of HP spent to get to 1000. I'm guessing they're looking for a number in the range of 500-1000 HP and just hope they somehow get lucky by putting some random mechanisms. Well, that just does not work.

TheWerebison

Keeping things this way may help their bottom line. I was a person who almost never used shields. I would get to a certain place, know I couldn't go any further, know I would never hit 1000, and I'd just stop, using cheap shields and fighting to keep my place. Now that 1000 is achievable for me in every pvp event, I've been buying a lot more shields. If there are others like me, and I'm sure there are, it could increase their profit margin. Impatient people, rich people, and the really competitive will still buy covers, but I wonder if there will be an increase in bought shields as well. If so, they may keep it. I hope they do.

GothicKratos

I endorse this 100%.

I said this in another thread, but I pray they use this opportunity to flesh out the tier system for Progression Rewards with more rewards to make climbing feel more rewarding, and give more meaningful rewards in each event.

This would give them the opportunity to add some smaller rewards like some random 25-100 Hero Point rewards, as well as more Tokens and covers.

Imagine being a 3* player and being able to climb to 800 and earn two covers 3* for the next PvP?

Or being a top end player and actually being able to earn enough HP in an event to cover your shield hops (now that they're more expensive).

Perhaps they could add an additional 4* cover at, say, 1500 points?

Since the ceiling for every level of play is higher, you can give more rewards to each level of play.

SnowcaTT

TxMoose wrote:

as someone who is hoping to hit 1000 for the first time soon, I'm all for keeping it as long as possible. just hope I can find the right matches since my A team is a slow one.

Ditto here. I'd like to see this not just this season, but every season.

TxMoose

SnowcaTT wrote:

TxMoose wrote:

as someone who is hoping to hit 1000 for the first time soon, I'm all for keeping it as long as possible. just hope I can find the right matches since my A team is a slow one.

Ditto here. I'd like to see this not just this season, but every season.

I just have to figure out how to hop correctly. winning 2 matches (and not slow ones mind you, although my only viable team is a slower one - need to start timing them) and getting hit once every time feels hamsterish...

GrumpySmurf1002

Phantron wrote:

I still don't get why don't they just ask for 500 HP plus some number of PvP games for a 4*, since if you look at what the devs posted they're clearly monitoring the amount of HP spent to get to 1000.

Is it? From memory (which I'll admit sucks these days), the metrics they've expressed in relation to top progression have been number of matches played and the length of matches. That speaks to total playing time more than HP spend, which I don't recall seeing specifically mentioned.

HP spend is a natural byproduct of the above, but likely harder to truly quantify for a player. For instance, if they play PvE for 3 hours and buy health packs/boosts to start PvP, or vice versa, how do you quantify the spend split? You can estimate, but point is it's not as simple as "they bought 3 shields, that's a good PvP spend number."

Unknown

I really hope they overhaul progression and placement to make progression much more meaningful, easier to obtain, and placement less mandatory. Right now, I'm in the middle of a transition as well. I'm still playing, but the Taco tokens for over a month have yielded nothing but 2*'s (i.e. worthless) and Taco Daily only barely feels worth it getting 1 3* out of it (i.e. it doesn't). Event tokens have likewise been terrible to me, and I generally have not felt that I've been getting any meaningful value for the amount of time put in for over a month.

Likewise the health increases and boosted heroes and other changes has made the game feel a lot more grindy. Sharding also has not been kind to me in PvP.

PvP for me went from being able to reliably place well to a grindy mess in death brackets that I just don't have time for.
PvE has become somewhat mandatory, although I was never a fan of needing to adjust my day in any capacity to accommodate MPQ refreshes in order to progress (i.e. place) since if we're honest there's zero meaningful rewards in this game if you don't place, especially lately with how useless tokens have become. And they never improved PvE to make the rewards more commensurate with the amount of effort required.

So right now I'm in a 3-4* transition, but really I'm in a "still playing MPQ in some capacity" -> playing some other game that doesn't feel as stagnant.

I'm hanging in there a bit since the devs do seem like they finally started to care about retaining customers somewhat, but if they don't substantively rethink / rework their systems in a way that's more respectful to players who don't want / are tired of playing this game as a professional sport (with minimal health benefits unlike a real sport), I'll probably be out within the next month.

JVReal

Scoring slightly higher, but still haven't hit 1000. Placing lower due to losses from being attacked and not having HP to shield.

I think it would be interesting if they looked at everyone that hit 1K progression and look at what their finishing score was so they can see how much damage the increased points for a loss have done to placements.

To me, the high scorers aren't getting hurt as much by the losses because they have bigger rosters to scare away attacks, so they win more than they lose and shield hop.

Medium rosters like myself lose more fights while not playing than I actually play when climbing. My number of fights hasn't changed, but with the increased point values, my scores have increased slightly, but my losses have also increased dramatically. I have performed no different than previously, but due to the changes in point gains and losses (especially losses) I have been pushed out of the range for T100.

Nothing I can do about that until my roster grows, and I have more HP which I can no longer rely on placement for.

I liked it better prior to these changes personally as I never expected to hit 1K before, nor do I expect to now... I just now don't expect to get T100 personally anymore. I have a net loss with this point change. I do see many people benefiting from it though, so I guess I just have to wait a big longer... again.

mouser

We're currently at a run-rate of about 13 PVP's per month--approximately 156/year. There are currently 9x 4*'s in the cover rotation (poor Devil Dino), with another one on the way now, and assuredly multiple more before the end of the year.

Right now if the only way you acquired your 4* covers was via the 1k pvp progression reward it would take approximately 9 months to acquire 13 covers for any given 4* if you could hit 1k for each of their pvp's. A few months from now it will take over a year as more 4*'s are introduced.

Unless Demiurge introduces some alternate method of acquiring 4* covers, we're approaching a point where the only high spenders are going to have fully covered 4*'s, and 3*->4* transition time will be on glacial scales. I don't know what Demiurge's desired target # of 4* covers being acquired via 1k progression reward is, but I think the current rate under the new scoring is much more appropriate for what's becoming an ever more difficult 3*->4* transition timeline.

puppychow

I have been able to reach 1,000 points every pvp event this season, after not being able to reach even once last season (although I was real close a few occasions). I also achieved the holy grail of this scoring change---being hit for 75 points (me at 1060, my attacker at 38) this week.

I agree that, for the sake of continuity if nothing else, scoring, progression rewards, etc. should be kept as is for the remainder of this season. Also, it would be interesting to see if players are choosing to buy slots to keep their 4* covers. If this indeed is the case, then it provides more incentive for the publisher to keep things as is even next season.