Regarding the "News" "Response to Recent Changes"

Puritas

bahamut685 wrote:

jozier wrote:

Ice, I think part of the issue with the matchmaking changes is as follows:

I, and others have no problem fighting hard battles. The issue is that when you walk out of a more appropriate battle, you find out you've been knocked down 2-4x as many points as you gained because attackers always have the advantage.

This! This morning toward the end of the No Holds Barred, I scraped through a tough +31 point match (took about 4 minutes, because I used boosts to cement a top 15, only to come out with a net -186 from being hit by 7 people during the match, and dropped from what would have been 7th into the 80s. This is WAY fubar'd and CAN'T be 'as intended'.

If you've never seen a bucket full of crabs before, you should head down to the local fishmarket and check it out.
You don't even need to put a lid on those things, because if a crab comes close to climbing out, the others will pull him right back down again.




Everyone playing in the last couple hours of a pvp event is a crab.

IceIX

Puritas wrote:

Wow, wasn't expecting such a detailed response, thanks

Scaling so that everyone is able to see + clear content is nice, but why should everyone be able to compete for the same level of rewards? Obviously the past two weeks where weak rosters had a strong advantage was inadvertent (4* rewards went to new players every single bracket I was in), but those of us with filled out rosters have very little left to work towards. Even if "player challenge" manages to become balanced properly across character strengths, none of us really appreciate seeing those rewards go instead towards players who don't even have **s yet.

Can't it simply be mild scaling on the first playthrough, and then standardized level increases every repeat regardless of roster?

I'm sure I'm not alone when I say I haven't sank 5 months of play into this game in order to save 30-40 minutes of play per tournament when hitting the same rank as someone starting out

In an idealized environment, think of it like this:

New player gets into the game. Sees a level 10 Soldier to battle with his level 6 average 1* team. They can play and get through the content. If they push, they may even get enough Iso rewards that they can build their team to place in the top 50%-ish. Who knows? Maybe they'll hit an easy bracket and score a 3* reward and majorly improve their team in one fell swoop. If not, they were able to pull several thousand Iso, a bunch of Recruit tokens, and some other stuff out of the event.

A 2+-ish player goes into the game. Sees a level 30 Soldier battle with a team of 65s on average. They rock the first bit of it until the difficult ramps up. They'll have an easier time at an equal "difficulty" compared to the new player due to a larger roster and the ability to choose who is best in a given fight. Facing Countdown tile madness? Use board control. The newer player doesn't have this flexibility. This team would be hitting the 25-50% range with peaks in the top 10% of a bracket. If they place "average", they pulled a bunch of Iso out, more than enough to raise a few heroes a few levels to put them in a better position to hit the next event. The Recruit tokens may help there too, although some are just added Iso due to "useless" extras.

A 2/3* player does the same with a team of 85/100s. They are seeing harder matches level-wise than the mid 2* player, but the added utility that the other characters bring means that they're able to handle the situation more easily and thus win battles faster and with less downtime. This player would be hitting the 10-25% range with peaks in the top 5%. The extra Iso will be pumped into bringing up some laggards in the team that are Boosted for the event and giving better results. They're more focused on the meta at this point than the climb.

Continue from there. We want players to be able to experience all the gameplay that's available and to be able to continually take steps to become more powerful. That being said, everyone else is taking the same steps, so it'll be up to the player to play better or smarter to move faster than their opponents.

Unknown

A bit of a scale is fine but at the 3* stage progression starts to slow to a crawl.

Puritas

IceIX wrote:

Puritas wrote:

Wow, wasn't expecting such a detailed response, thanks

Scaling so that everyone is able to see + clear content is nice, but why should everyone be able to compete for the same level of rewards? Obviously the past two weeks where weak rosters had a strong advantage was inadvertent (4* rewards went to new players every single bracket I was in), but those of us with filled out rosters have very little left to work towards. Even if "player challenge" manages to become balanced properly across character strengths, none of us really appreciate seeing those rewards go instead towards players who don't even have **s yet.

Can't it simply be mild scaling on the first playthrough, and then standardized level increases every repeat regardless of roster?

I'm sure I'm not alone when I say I haven't sank 5 months of play into this game in order to save 30-40 minutes of play per tournament when hitting the same rank as someone starting out

In an idealized environment, think of it like this:

New player gets into the game. Sees a level 10 Soldier to battle with his level 6 average 1* team. They can play and get through the content. If they push, they may even get enough Iso rewards that they can build their team to place in the top 50%-ish. Who knows? Maybe they'll hit an easy bracket and score a 3* reward and majorly improve their team in one fell swoop. If not, they were able to pull several thousand Iso, a bunch of Recruit tokens, and some other stuff out of the event.

A 2+-ish player goes into the game. Sees a level 30 Soldier battle with a team of 65s on average. They rock the first bit of it until the difficult ramps up. They'll have an easier time at an equal "difficulty" compared to the new player due to a larger roster and the ability to choose who is best in a given fight. Facing Countdown tile madness? Use board control. The newer player doesn't have this flexibility. This team would be hitting the 25-50% range with peaks in the top 10% of a bracket. If they place "average", they pulled a bunch of Iso out, more than enough to raise a few heroes a few levels to put them in a better position to hit the next event. The Recruit tokens may help there too, although some are just added Iso due to "useless" extras.

A 2/3* player does the same with a team of 85/100s. They are seeing harder matches level-wise than the mid 2* player, but the added utility that the other characters bring means that they're able to handle the situation more easily and thus win battles faster and with less downtime. This player would be hitting the 10-25% range with peaks in the top 5%. The extra Iso will be pumped into bringing up some laggards in the team that are Boosted for the event and giving better results. They're more focused on the meta at this point than the climb.

Continue from there. We want players to be able to experience all the gameplay that's available and to be able to continually take steps to become more powerful. That being said, everyone else is taking the same steps, so it'll be up to the player to play better or smarter to move faster than their opponents.

I can get on board with the game working out like that
Can't help but feel like doing it through scaling difficulty is going to take quite a lot of time to accomplish that balance though.

NorthernPolarity

Zhirrzh wrote:

IceIX wrote:

Puritas wrote:

Scaling, similarly was created to combat something that we saw with the first Episode but was *really* hammered home in Episode 2.5 (Hulk). We have players all over the spectrum (as intended). All players want to see all the content. We had a range of levels for Eps 1 and 2, and 2.5 broadened that range as veteran players grew in strength and numbers. This unfortunately resulted in a situation where we had pieces of story that some of our userbase simply couldn't access due to it being too difficult to complete. So we brought in the idea of scaling, since getting the difficulty right for each individual player and accounting for their playstyle isn't something that can be done manually. The idea is that, as with PVP matchmaking, the player plays and through a bunch of different metrics are gathered about how well the player is doing in a given match. With enough play, that player will approach enemy levels that are challenging but doable, with some missions being easier and others harder. As their roster gets better, so does the challenge of the enemies (with the idea that the challenge would lag slightly behind the roster growth so that player power *is* actually gained). This way, newbies can still play in events and push for rankings, but longer term players have an easier time of pushing through missions in their totality due to roster breadth and strength along with evolved tactics.

I think there's one thing being missed there. If the newbie player can play and beat all the same missions as the veteran player (because they are scaled lowed) AND also get the same rewards, the veteran player feels like what's the point of levelling up at all? Being able to see people's rosters has hammered that home, it aggravates people to see their carefully built roster be less successful in "winning" the PVE event than some level 40 1-star characters...

I appreciate that it's good for newbies to be able to play all the story missions. I started playing during The Hunt and so while I was able to reach Devil Dino thanks to the boosted crit multiplier combined with environmental tiles (which was fixed just afterwards) I couldn't play every mission in The Hunt and ditto in the first playthrough of The Hulk, and that really was annoying. But the way to combat that is to make the story missions more accessible, while still having some missions which don't scale down and mean people with a mid-range roster have an advantage over newbies, and the kinds of players who have a bunch of maxed 3* characters (not me) have an advantage over mid-range people.

There is a way for everyone to have their cake and eat it too. Our current goals are that newbie players should be able to complete the entire event while veteran players shouldn't feel like they are being unfairly punished for having stronger rosters. I think an important point to understand here all players do not need to have equal opportunity to earn the same prizes: newbies do not need the opportunity to earn 4* covers for instance, since they should be mainly focusing on 2* and 3* covers. We just need to modify the current system so that veteran players are competing with each other for the top prizes, while newbies can still go through the entire event and compete for prizes that suit their current needs more. This is actually pretty simple to do, since most of what is needed to do this is already in place and seen in Heroic Oscorp:
1. Level scaling. This does wonders for differentiating between players while allowing newbies to still complete the event. I think the one change that needs to be made here is that only the level that was just beaten should have its difficulty increased: increasing levels across the board just doesn't seem very fun for high-end players that grind these events repeatedly. Hardcore players will still have a challenge since the 3rd run of each mission they do can be vs 3x level 230s. An example of this could be something like:
Level X:
1st Run: 3 enemies at level 10 each. 100 points.
2nd Run: 3 enemies at level 50 each. 60 Points.
3rd Run: 3 enemies at level 100 each. 30 Points.
4th Run: 3 enemies at level 100 each. 0 Points.

However, in order for hardcore players to actually want to grind these missions, mission rewards should be reset daily (in the case of heroic oscorp) so that there is still a reward for repeatedly grinding the same mission for a week. Levels should also reset for everyone at the same time, so that everyone stays on equal footing and hardcore players don't feel penalized for grinding a mission too much. This also fixes the silly issue where you get penalized for grinding a mission more than 3 times (such that you don't earn anymore points) and still have your enemy levels increase.

2. Shifting focus away from placement awards and more towards progression rewards. Coupled with level scaling, this is a really elegant way to reward high-end players without alienating the newer players, since most people will get a base amount of points with the first clear, but as clears get harder and harder, only the people with developed rosters are able to get the higher tiered prizes. Newbies are also competitive in this system since they can still do a full clear a day (if the levels reset daily) and keep up with a lazier high-end player who didn't want to do that.

With some changes to level scaling, I think the only thing remaining left to do is to give some more incentives for newer players to clear the event, which can easily be done by add low-end prizes as final mission rewards. Give a 2* cover as a mission reward for one of the final missions in the event. For Heroic Oscorp for instance, you can give a OBW cover as a guaranteed reward for completing Critical Data. The rewards for completing the missions feels too homogeneous right now, and adding an extra reward for completing the event would probably make players want to actually complete the event in its entirety.

Unknown

Puritas wrote:

I can get on board with the game working out like that
Can't help but feel like doing it through scaling difficulty is going to take quite a lot of time to accomplish that balance though.

Agreed. And in the meanwhile, I hope you guys lean towards tuning the scaling down, not up. It's better for things to be too easy while you adjust the scaling than too hard. Players like being challenged, but they enjoy winning too, and constantly 'working' at the game drives burnout.

mischiefmaker

NorthernPolarity wrote:

a bunch of stuff

If only we had a +1 button on posts, I would press it.

Oh hey, IceIX! Can we get a +1 button on posts? That would be swell. Looks like there's an easy-to-install plugin that does just that: https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=2147118

Unknown

Zhirrzh wrote:

I think there's one thing being missed there. If the newbie player can play and beat all the same missions as the veteran player (because they are scaled lowed) AND also get the same rewards, the veteran player feels like what's the point of levelling up at all?

PvP, in which they will destroy the newbies. Ease of clearing missions; if balanced properly, a good high-level team will find even 230s less of a challenge than a low-level team will find its tough missions. Access to better characters more suited to challenging content.

Being able to see people's rosters has hammered that home, it aggravates people to see their carefully built roster be less successful in "winning" the PVE event than some level 40 1-star characters...

The last PvE two events were botched badly, particularly when the response to Thieves' abnormally high difficulty was to make it HARDER in three different ways for its last third. (I don't always test my code, but when I do I do it in Production.) I see where they tried to go with Oscorp, but am amused that the functional relief for it started showing up with hours to go and no chance for anyone to reach progression rewards. Third time's the charm, I guess.

Unknown

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Zhirrzh wrote:

IceIX wrote:

Puritas wrote:

Scaling, similarly was created to combat something that we saw with the first Episode but was *really* hammered home in Episode 2.5 (Hulk). We have players all over the spectrum (as intended). All players want to see all the content. We had a range of levels for Eps 1 and 2, and 2.5 broadened that range as veteran players grew in strength and numbers. This unfortunately resulted in a situation where we had pieces of story that some of our userbase simply couldn't access due to it being too difficult to complete. So we brought in the idea of scaling, since getting the difficulty right for each individual player and accounting for their playstyle isn't something that can be done manually. The idea is that, as with PVP matchmaking, the player plays and through a bunch of different metrics are gathered about how well the player is doing in a given match. With enough play, that player will approach enemy levels that are challenging but doable, with some missions being easier and others harder. As their roster gets better, so does the challenge of the enemies (with the idea that the challenge would lag slightly behind the roster growth so that player power *is* actually gained). This way, newbies can still play in events and push for rankings, but longer term players have an easier time of pushing through missions in their totality due to roster breadth and strength along with evolved tactics.

I think there's one thing being missed there. If the newbie player can play and beat all the same missions as the veteran player (because they are scaled lowed) AND also get the same rewards, the veteran player feels like what's the point of levelling up at all? Being able to see people's rosters has hammered that home, it aggravates people to see their carefully built roster be less successful in "winning" the PVE event than some level 40 1-star characters...

I appreciate that it's good for newbies to be able to play all the story missions. I started playing during The Hunt and so while I was able to reach Devil Dino thanks to the boosted crit multiplier combined with environmental tiles (which was fixed just afterwards) I couldn't play every mission in The Hunt and ditto in the first playthrough of The Hulk, and that really was annoying. But the way to combat that is to make the story missions more accessible, while still having some missions which don't scale down and mean people with a mid-range roster have an advantage over newbies, and the kinds of players who have a bunch of maxed 3* characters (not me) have an advantage over mid-range people.

There is a way for everyone to have their cake and eat it too. Our current goals are that newbie players should be able to complete the entire event while veteran players shouldn't feel like they are being unfairly punished for having stronger rosters. I think an important point to understand here all players do not need to have equal opportunity to earn the same prizes: newbies do not need the opportunity to earn 4* covers for instance, since they should be mainly focusing on 2* and 3* covers. We just need to modify the current system so that veteran players are competing with each other for the top prizes, while newbies can still go through the entire event and compete for prizes that suit their current needs more. This is actually pretty simple to do, since most of what is needed to do this is already in place and seen in Heroic Oscorp:
1. Level scaling. This does wonders for differentiating between players while allowing newbies to still complete the event. I think the one change that needs to be made here is that only the level that was just beaten should have its difficulty increased: increasing levels across the board just doesn't seem very fun for high-end players that grind these events repeatedly. Hardcore players will still have a challenge since the 3rd run of each mission they do can be vs 3x level 230s. An example of this could be something like:
Level X:
1st Run: 3 enemies at level 10 each. 100 points.
2nd Run: 3 enemies at level 50 each. 60 Points.
3rd Run: 3 enemies at level 100 each. 30 Points.
4th Run: 3 enemies at level 100 each. 0 Points.

However, in order for hardcore players to actually want to grind these missions, mission rewards should be reset daily (in the case of heroic oscorp) so that there is still a reward for repeatedly grinding the same mission for a week. Levels should also reset for everyone at the same time, so that everyone stays on equal footing and hardcore players don't feel penalized for grinding a mission too much. This also fixes the silly issue where you get penalized for grinding a mission more than 3 times (such that you don't earn anymore points) and still have your enemy levels increase.

2. Shifting focus away from placement awards and more towards progression rewards. Coupled with level scaling, this is a really elegant way to reward high-end players without alienating the newer players, since most people will get a base amount of points with the first clear, but as clears get harder and harder, only the people with developed rosters are able to get the higher tiered prizes. Newbies are also competitive in this system since they can still do a full clear a day (if the levels reset daily) and keep up with a lazier high-end player who didn't want to do that.

With some changes to level scaling, I think the only thing remaining left to do is to give some more incentives for newer players to clear the event, which can easily be done by add low-end prizes as final mission rewards. Give a 2* cover as a mission reward for one of the final missions in the event. For Heroic Oscorp for instance, you can give a OBW cover as a guaranteed reward for completing Critical Data. The rewards for completing the missions feels too homogeneous right now, and adding an extra reward for completing the event would probably make players want to actually complete the event in its entirety.

This is some sound game design thinking, but who are you? You say "we" a lot, but your name isn't red.

Unknown

bahamut685 wrote:

This! This morning toward the end of the No Holds Barred, I scraped through a tough +31 point match (took about 4 minutes, because I used boosts to cement a top 15, only to come out with a net -186 from being hit by 7 people during the match, and dropped from what would have been 7th into the 80s. This is WAY fubar'd and CAN'T be 'as intended'.

My last event went just like that. I was in 4th place with 8 minutes to go, battled someone leveled well beyond me and when it was done I had lost position down to 58 an therefore losing 3 days of work and playing, to 9 players nowhere in the top ten or near my rank. Yet we are upending the system to make it more fair?

js

NorthernPolarity

Marquoz wrote:

This is some sound game design thinking, but who are you? You say "we" a lot, but your name isn't red.

My bad, I'm just used to explaining things that way. Don't think that this is some crazy conspiracy and that I'm a Demiurge dev: if I was, I would actually suggest this to the lead developer rather than posting on the forums.

LordWill

I'd just like to say that I think the idea of dynamic scaling SOUNDS really good in theory but is going to be hard to balance in the long run. Seems like you are making this a lot more difficult programming wise than it really needs to be.

Part of the reason I say this is because I DON'T think everyone should have access to everything, especially new or beginner players. There has to be some reason why we want to get better and build up our characters. I put a lot of time into my characters as does everyone else. I want it to matter. Not everyone gets to fight the Lich King

Whenever you solve something dynamically, it creates a host of problems, as the last 2 events have shown. Even the Dev's didn't know what was wrong or why it wasn't working.

What should happen is this. If you want EVERYONE to go through the same content. Make 3 of the same events.

Event A is the 1 star or beginner event with rewards geared toward them.
Event B is 2 star or mid level players with rewards geared toward them.
Event C is 3 star or higher level players with rewards geared toward them.

No one is excluded from joining any event but I don't think a higher level player is going to bother with the beginner event since the rewards aren't going to be worth their time. I could be wrong though, people often do what you least expect.

OR

You have 6 levels of difficulty, they should be able to offer a challenge without over doing it.

First Round is on Trivial, if you clear then it moves up one level of difficulty to Easy, and then to Normal, and so on. Eventually the people who can do it on impossible will get there and the people who can't won't but they got to do all the content. This actually rewards people who DO put in the time and want to just play and grind.

It just sounds like from what I hear is the better I get, the harder this game is going to be because I NEED a challenge AND it's not going to let up. Yes I like a challenge but I put in the time so I can make it easier as well. Fighting higher level guys ALL the time gets old. I started this last event right away and got caught up in the bug that made ALL the fights insanely hard. I opted to pass on this event because I really burned myself out on the last one. Killing my roster over and over and over again just to play something manageable.

I am hoping this 3rd scaling event will be good and the scaling fixed so I can at least play.

Unknown

Ice, thanks for the thoughtful responses. Even though the HP cost for the Everything Boost annoys me, I can certainly understand your team's reasoning, and I have actually benefited from not depending on boosts.

I agree with Jozier on the issues related to PVP. There is no mechanism or deterrent other than shields to being pummeled in the end. The game is not balanced, it's biased towards offensive and attacking. Builds that favor defense are time consuming to work through, which is why there is an entire theory devoted to switching teams after attacking. Really you should be able to defend and attack with the same team. This is kind of an unintended (I assume) meta game, as is playing around with the MMR.

I had mentioned a Vendetta system that would discourage repeated counters on the suggestion thread. The goal was to deter people from suiciding on you on the odds that they will improve their ranking at the last minute. A different approach would be a victory perk, like in an FPS. You win +10 in a row, you get +10% defense. Maybe this only works when you fight someone your level or above. Either way, my requirement is the same. If I have a 3 star team at level 100, I don't want to lose my spot in the tournament because someone with a 1*star Storm, a weak Patch and Ares decides it's their time to shine! This is why people are putting Hulk in their main builds, to deter aggresion. Once Everyone has a maxed out Hulk though, here comes the nerf hammer! Hulk was the first character I spent cash on, so I would hate to see him **** in the future. Anyway...

On the PVE front, scaling is very difficult to accomplish. Look at what Bethesda did. They had scaling on Oblivion and it was aweful. They fixed it for Skyrim but it made no sense when bandits were as strong as you after you played for 200 hrs. Likewise, I have spent 80+ days playing this game, I don't really expect Soldiers to kill me. I expect Galactus to kill me. not the Demolition expert. Creating a lvl 230 Ares, when his limit is 85, is BAD Design. I am a former game designer btw, for a bunch of unsuccesful MMO's. I know all about bad design...

How about stringing battles? Can't you face 3, then face another 3, then a final fight, with the same pool of HP? This way you don't have to artificially inflate the level of bad guys but you still make it more challenging for the veterans. I understand you want beginners to see all the content, but beginners should not win tournaments and get 4* legendary covers while seasoned vets are wiped by impossible PVE fights.

Spoit

IceIX wrote:

Toxicadam wrote:

ISO gain has increased per user .... What range are we talking about? The past few days compared to last week? The past month versus the month previous?

Barring a couple fractions of a percent here and there and wacky days where it dips or rises out of line with the norm (starts of events, servers exploding and such), it has slowly but steadily risen since around mid-November.

Edit: Ahh. PVP. Yes, Iso gains there have dropped slightly due to the Thorverine and Boost changes going in. That being said, they didn't drop as much as you'd think as the average user is simply putting in the extra time per battle there. The PVE event constant pace has been raising those higher as well.

November....is pretty far away. That's about when the PvE events started amping up, wasn't it? (and probably the high watermark in trust in the devs). I wonder how those numbers were effected in the last 2 events with the solid walls of 230 enemies

kensterr

klingsor wrote:

...
How about stringing battles? Can't you face 3, then face another 3, then a final fight, with the same pool of HP? This way you don't have to artificially inflate the level of bad guys but you still make it more challenging for the veterans. I understand you want beginners to see all the content, but beginners should not win tournaments and get 4* legendary covers while seasoned vets are wiped by impossible PVE fights.

+1,000,000

over_clocked

Puritas wrote:

Everyone playing in the last couple hours of a pvp event is a crab.

That's amazing to know. Am I a crab if I wish to play harder than usual in the last hours because I learned my lesson and know that other people will be doing the same thing? Especially people who weren't participating before but hope to grind in one push. And I have been playing the event during the whole time, just clearing my retaliations here and there.

Unknown

locked wrote:

Puritas wrote:

Everyone playing in the last couple hours of a pvp event is a crab.

That's amazing to know. Am I a crab if I wish to play harder than usual in the last hours because I learned my lesson and know that other people will be doing the same thing? Especially people who weren't participating before but hope to grind in one push. And I have been playing the event during the whole time, just clearing my retaliations here and there.

You're a crab with a penchant for gambling. You can get the dreaded -233 notification at any time, but it's far more likely if you're trying to push an hour from close when everyone else and their dogs are at it. The only safe thing to be doing at the end of a tournament at the moment is sitting behind a shield wincing at the sharks devouring one another. But if you don't want to spend the HP or actually like the risk, best of luck to you. It can still pay off, which is why people still try.

Unknown

Veracity wrote:

locked wrote:

Puritas wrote:

Everyone playing in the last couple hours of a pvp event is a crab.

That's amazing to know. Am I a crab if I wish to play harder than usual in the last hours because I learned my lesson and know that other people will be doing the same thing? Especially people who weren't participating before but hope to grind in one push. And I have been playing the event during the whole time, just clearing my retaliations here and there.

You're a crab with a penchant for gambling. You can get the dreaded -233 notification at any time, but it's far more likely if you're trying to push an hour from close when everyone else and their dogs are at it. The only safe thing to be doing at the end of a tournament at the moment is sitting behind a shield wincing at the sharks devouring one another. But if you don't want to spend the HP or actually like the risk, best of luck to you. It can still pay off, which is why people still try.

It almost seems like locked took the analogy personally... I don't see how (because obviously no one thinks someone else is a crab here), that's just what it seems like.

But yeah, you basically are a crab in that analogy, and Veracity's post points out the second issue here:

You have limited options in PvP. You can not participate, participate and accept your ranking won't be **** if you don't play the last few hours (which also sucks), Shield to avoid it all (which sucks because it costs HP), or participate and join the crazy climb to the top of hell.

All the options suck, but they're also not going anywhere - that's why Shields even exist. Very few games have ever come up with a system that DOESN'T result in this in PvP. The only times it doesn't that I know of, are if

- The players are actively fighting one another (which is almost impossible to program, much less pull off properly, in a game like this, unless you want to basically play a VS Match 3 on facebook where you might have to queue to play someone and then wait on a timer for them to take their turn IE Chess)
- People are discouraged from it because defense is too powerful (Which creates a whole different set of issues)

And that's ignoring the fact that ultimately MPQ is a Match 3 game - it takes time. And there's no real easy solution to preventing people from taking lots of losses at once that isn't going to simultaneously give a way to abuse the system some other way.

Of course, IMO, this whole situation pales in comparison to the real issue that hurts PvP: Matchmaking is screwed to all hell and back.

Unknown

NorthernPolarity wrote:

There is a way for everyone to have their cake and eat it too. Our current goals are that newbie players should be able to complete the entire event while veteran players shouldn't feel like they are being unfairly punished for having stronger rosters. I think an important point to understand here all players do not need to have equal opportunity to earn the same prizes: newbies do not need the opportunity to earn 4* covers for instance, since they should be mainly focusing on 2* and 3* covers. We just need to modify the current system so that veteran players are competing with each other for the top prizes, while newbies can still go through the entire event and compete for prizes that suit their current needs more. This is actually pretty simple to do, since most of what is needed to do this is already in place and seen in Heroic Oscorp:
1. Level scaling. This does wonders for differentiating between players while allowing newbies to still complete the event. I think the one change that needs to be made here is that only the level that was just beaten should have its difficulty increased: increasing levels across the board just doesn't seem very fun for high-end players that grind these events repeatedly. Hardcore players will still have a challenge since the 3rd run of each mission they do can be vs 3x level 230s. An example of this could be something like:
Level X:
1st Run: 3 enemies at level 10 each. 100 points.
2nd Run: 3 enemies at level 50 each. 60 Points.
3rd Run: 3 enemies at level 100 each. 30 Points.
4th Run: 3 enemies at level 100 each. 0 Points.

However, in order for hardcore players to actually want to grind these missions, mission rewards should be reset daily (in the case of heroic oscorp) so that there is still a reward for repeatedly grinding the same mission for a week. Levels should also reset for everyone at the same time, so that everyone stays on equal footing and hardcore players don't feel penalized for grinding a mission too much. This also fixes the silly issue where you get penalized for grinding a mission more than 3 times (such that you don't earn anymore points) and still have your enemy levels increase.

2. Shifting focus away from placement awards and more towards progression rewards. Coupled with level scaling, this is a really elegant way to reward high-end players without alienating the newer players, since most people will get a base amount of points with the first clear, but as clears get harder and harder, only the people with developed rosters are able to get the higher tiered prizes. Newbies are also competitive in this system since they can still do a full clear a day (if the levels reset daily) and keep up with a lazier high-end player who didn't want to do that.

With some changes to level scaling, I think the only thing remaining left to do is to give some more incentives for newer players to clear the event, which can easily be done by add low-end prizes as final mission rewards. Give a 2* cover as a mission reward for one of the final missions in the event. For Heroic Oscorp for instance, you can give a OBW cover as a guaranteed reward for completing Critical Data. The rewards for completing the missions feels too homogeneous right now, and adding an extra reward for completing the event would probably make players want to actually complete the event in its entirety.

Utterly brilliant, should be a Must Read for whoever is currently designing those events. Not much to add, maybe two minor improvements. Only drop 4th and subsequent runs to 1 point, to give a little incentive to those who like to grind. And add an additional reward to the rewards list for the 2nd, 3rd and 4th run. Like standard reward would be (100 ISO, Some Lesser Boost, 250 ISO, Standard Token), with first completion adding 500 ISO, second completion adding Some Greater Boost, third completion adding 10 HP to the reward pool.

over_clocked

Telicis wrote:

It almost seems like locked took the analogy personally... I don't see how (because obviously no one thinks someone else is a crab here), that's just what it seems like.

Nope, I just asked. I quite agree with the point made since at the moment it is indeed so. And I don't actually like gambling and feeling like a spider in a jar full of spiders like myself. What I'd like is an adequate reward for time spent, since time is much more valuable than money. I know the devs would have preferred my money but I couldn't give them any even if I wanted to (purchase-banned on Steam). Although I could donate some out of game, I guess.