Story events: end stale brackets' terror reign

over_clocked

Omega Red: the current system allows for the horrible levels of grinding, despite high scaling. Do you feel like beating lvl 300-395 Juggernaut 6 times non-stop to secure your rank? For 7 days straight? It's always Juggernaut, Ares or Daken, or all three.
There is no certainty either with the current system: you might start strong but just one hiccup in your schedule, as I said in the OP, is enough to downshift you a reward tier. Or two, or more. Your cable company might deprive you of connection for almost the entire duration of the event (my alliance mate had it happen to him), he neither got a good score for the alliance nor any personal covers.

Cymmina wrote:

simonsez wrote:

over_clocked wrote:

player engagement are ensured since everyone would know they should never get a 5 day old bracket with no hope for any worthwhile placement

Am I supposed to feel bad for people who sat on their thumbs for 5 days and didn't get the rewards that went to people who were grinding hard that whole time?

I understand the sentiment, but it is a royal kick in the pants to sit there and grind for the full 7 days and only end up with a single cover while those guys sitting on their thumbs get lucky and have a fresh bracket open up with <30 minutes left on the clock and score the same or better. It makes me feel really stupid for not doing the same.

You absolutely MUST start doing the same, Cymmina. Only the grindiest and the nolife-est motherlovers can afford to jump into pre-registered brackets or day 1 brackets, everyone else must game this ridiculous system in order to keep their sanity. Win big, or win small, since not grinding for a week counts as a victory for most people.

simonsez, I never offered to feel bad for risky players that prefer to avoid the grind. See the other side of the medal in Cymmina. I am severely tempted to start the next 7-day release late myself. You know and I know there will be more of those for sure.

simonsez

over_clocked wrote:

simonsez, I never offered to feel bad for risky players that prefer to avoid the grind. See the other side of the medal in Cymmina. I am severely tempted to start the next 7-day release late myself. You know and I know there will be more of those for sure.

The simpler, and more straight-forward solution to all this is to simply stop having 7-day PvE events. They should all be 3 days. Problems solved.

over_clocked

simonsez wrote:

over_clocked wrote:

simonsez, I never offered to feel bad for risky players that prefer to avoid the grind. See the other side of the medal in Cymmina. I am severely tempted to start the next 7-day release late myself. You know and I know there will be more of those for sure.

The simpler, and more straight-forward solution to all this is to simply stop having 7-day PvE events. They should all be 3 days. Problems solved.

Events like Iso-8 Brotherhood, Enemy of the State, the Hulk simply have too many subs to fit into smaller time frames. I don't mind them being cut in half but that's... design work. I wouldn't count on it happening. I sincerely hope that adding progressions and doing work on brackets takes less effort.

Kojubat

Not saying it's the best solution, but a way around the events with a large number of subs is to break the event into two parts. Just about every long event has a 'dun-dun-dun!' moment in the story (not that anyone is paying attention to the story for the nth run of Hulk), so make that an event cliffhanger. Roll credits, end the current event, dole out some rewards, and get the next one running.

Or heck, throw in a short event in between as a palate cleanser.

You could even change the reward structure so that only two of the three colors are awarded each event (but not narrow the tier bands), so as to encourage playing both.

And while I am not a game developer, they have demonstrated they can rearrange the structure of subevents with little impact to the operation of the game (from a technically perspective, not a gameplay one).

simonsez

over_clocked wrote:

Events like Iso-8 Brotherhood, Enemy of the State, the Hulk simply have too many subs to fit into smaller time frames.

And people would notice and/or care that 4 subs got eliminated?

over_clocked

simonsez wrote:

over_clocked wrote:

Events like Iso-8 Brotherhood, Enemy of the State, the Hulk simply have too many subs to fit into smaller time frames.

And people would notice and/or care that 4 subs got eliminated?

Enemy of the state is nice the way it is... Most subs have event tokens in them
Frankly, no, don't think anyone would care. Everyone seems to hate week-long events for sure.

Omega Red

over_clocked wrote:

Omega Red: the current system allows for the horrible levels of grinding, despite high scaling. Do you feel like beating lvl 300-395 Juggernaut 6 times non-stop to secure your rank? For 7 days straight? It's always Juggernaut, Ares or Daken, or all three.
There is no certainty either with the current system: you might start strong but just one hiccup in your schedule, as I said in the OP, is enough to downshift you a reward tier. Or two, or more. Your cable company might deprive you of connection for almost the entire duration of the event (my alliance mate had it happen to him), he neither got a good score for the alliance nor any personal covers.

What kind of argument is that and what does it have to do with your original complaint over bracket-playing? The guy who waits to join until the last fifteen minutes can also be screwed by his ISP and be left with nada. If I miss a clear for whatever reason then I adjust my expectations accordingly. Sometimes that means I'll only land a top 100 spot so what? That means I can take it easy and play the rest of the event more casually. Why should I let something like that frustrate me?

When Carnage was released I noticed I did not care enough to even land a top 100 finish. I cared enough for Thing so I worked to get at least a top 25 finish but after a couple of days it was clear I would only be able to secure top 100 so I relaxed and played casually. I also wanted antman but enemy of the state clears take way too much time, I always do bad in that event and after a day I realized I could use my time in more productive ways, I finished out of top 100. Finally, I wanted to compete for Jean, was lucky to land in a not crazy competitive bracket and finished top 10.

So, you win some, you lose some. I am not neurotic nor ultracompetitive to the degree where not finishing every event with at least four covers frustrates me or makes me resent those who did it with less effort. There is an element of luck in the way you join a bracket. It benefited me with Prof. X and Jean, while it went against me for Kingpin and Thing releases. That is ok, I do not need to have everyone covered right now, despite this, I still have at least one cover of each four star character.

Plenty of threads complaining over too many four star character releases, lenght of events and bracket playing. Honestly, they all read like sour grapes from guys who didn't get their shiny new Jean. They think they are obligated to play everything, win everything and cover each new character within one month.

alphabeta

What about only allowing entry to any event for pre start sign up and have the bracket allocation random rather than by time of sign up.

Keep all pve to 4 days - Monday - Friday and Friday - Monday cycle.

Removal all possible strategy from timing selection and bracket lottery.

I know it's likely to be controversial but how about we all play on a level playing field.

over_clocked

Omega, I'm not defending the late joiners' right to anything. What I was trying to say was that the progression-less reward structure punishes those who play diligently but get screwed by some real life accidents, and that's why having a guaranteed progression would be nice. Having a progression reward would welcome less risky behaviour, which would be a good thing.
I exactly agree with your first post except that there is still no certainty for early starters either, and all their efforts sometimes go for naught.
If we didn't have stale brackets at all, players would be joining more evenly during the run of an event. Why is that a bad thing and how ending stale brackets would hurt you, personally? You'd still join early for the progressions and the loot, and so would I, likely. People with less patience for grinding would have a better shot, too.

JVReal

Perhaps they should reduce bracket sizes to 500. People are more inclined to join a bracket in the high 400's than if they see it in the 700's.

This would distribute more rewards to more people, and hopefully would have a similar impact as expanding the reward tiers. More active players, more players winning rewards.

I do like the idea of a 4* progression reward for those high scoring PVE monsters.

Scoregasms

I like the idea of 3 Day PVE's, who says the subs have to be cut. Just split the PVE's up? Prodigal Sun I and Prodigal Sun II for example, 3 1 day subs each. They also don't have to be sequential either, mix them up for a bit of variety. I for one would LOVE the chance to just do first part of PS and just skip the second half, rewards be damned! Just make sure the cover rewards and next round of essential system basically stay the same. But maybe with 3 day PVE's, they just do 2 Covers max you can win, 3 for top 2 (double on 1), 2 for top 20, and 1 for top 100 and make the 3rd Cover the Alliance Reward (make it more important). Then rotate them around the next time they pass through.

I haven't read through any of the "Story elements" in forever, just happy there is a skip button. 3 Day PVE events are short enough that folks would want to start early. Also agree that a 4* Progression would be great to see as the top Progression, only achievable after 2.5 days worth of playing. This would also cut down on those that join late probably, but I am sure that system will continue on in some fashion.

I get it though, shorter PVE makes grinding all that more important, but it is for a shorter time at least. I dunno, hopefully something comes from this thread that catches the developers attention, I like a bunch of what has already been said.

Unknown

I was one of those who watched that thread, and chatted on Line for days to avoid having to grind. Yes, it was more rewarding to not play the game, than to play it. Both literally (in that I scored 3 JG covers for 24 minutes of play, and a total of 6 nodes of the sub played), and figuratively (I was a lot more sane and happy).

The slices I was monitoring in the last few days added maybe 100 players over the last 24-36 hours. I joined the near last minute slice 3 bracket, did little playing (albeit it faster than others), and enjoyed some easy success. That bracket added 90+ players in those last 30 minutes. That should point out the easiest fix here:

Stop displaying the numbers on brackets. Same as PVP. The only thing it does is allow people to game the system like I and others did. It reduces the potency of the line chat rooms, the forum thread, the out of game communication. The thread can still work, as people will report "hey, I just joined and I was player 300, maybe you should wait a while to join" or "Hey, I just joined and I'm player 950... probably good to go in a couple hours". But as you'd only get updates once someone jumps in, you're not going to have the craziness you have now with people monitoring the brackets while still vying for placement.

That's a lot different than the stagnation and then a sudden flood once a bracket closes.