end bait and switch PvP points

WillPower202

When the game shows a 35 point reward for winning a match, 35 points should be awarded. NOT 18. Not even 50.

A lot of developments in this game have disappointed me, 3* Magneto changes being the first in a LONG list (I've been playing for 679 days). I have not taken to the forums or game reviews to bemoan my fate. Things change and the game has evolved mostly for the better. I've heard other players' suspicions about the game being rigged. Running 300 unanswered points to 982 only to be counterattacked for 250 during a five minute match is enough to make anyone paranoid. But I never saw any solid proof. That has changed.

Rarely I would get a different reward than promised, maybe 24 instead of 25. Over the past few week about 25% of my rewards have been different by 20+ points. This is EXTREMELY frustrating. Make the game as hard as you want. Offer however few points per match against the 6 megateams we can cycle through. But if a player manages to squeak out a win, don't arbitrarily cut the reward in half! It's lying, it's cheating, and for those who have paid into this game it's flat-out stealing.

Other players: PLEASE respond with your own examples. We need to show the developers what's happening if we want the problem to be addressed

Starsaber

I've had plenty of examples of that but what I think is happening is either you or the person you're playing against had their point total change while you were playing, causing the points to be recalculated at the end. It is annoying, but I'd say it comes in second place to the fact that if you're attacked during the match, your score drops before your win is applied, which can make it a pain to hit a progression reward you gained enough points for.

Heartburn

i heard looking at the leader boards right before the fight can help get an better look at the value cause it has to ping the system, but losing hundreds of points in a single fight is ridiculous and needs to end. this is may be caused by getting into a new threshold where more people can see you there is one i commonly see around 750 pts. i think the points should be team based not rank based. identical teams can be worth 4 or 50 points they are still just as hard but which is going to get picked?

Unknown

Totally agree with OP, it sucks a lot. Just yesterday, during my last push in PvP, I played a match that was supposed to give me 40 points - I ended up with 9 (!) I think the value of the match should get "fixed" on the number it shows you when you start the match and not change while you are fighting.

simonsez

It looks like we've finally gotten enough of these threads that no one can any longer be bothered to answer "stop attacking stale targets".

BlackSheep101

There are plenty of instances where this happens with opponents that you just brought up via skipping.

If they were to guarantee that a winner receives the advertised points, would you want them to also guarantee that the target loses a commensurate amount of points? If not, that opens up shenanigans with score manipulation.

simonsez

BlackSheep101 wrote:

There are plenty of instances where this happens with opponents that you just brought up via skipping.

Right, and then this where I say "You have 6-8 opponents cached at a time, so just because you just did a skip, doesn't mean it's still not stale as ****"

XandorXerxes

simonsez wrote:

BlackSheep101 wrote:

There are plenty of instances where this happens with opponents that you just brought up via skipping.

Right, and then this where I say "You have 6-8 opponents cached at a time, so just because you just did a skip, doesn't mean it's still not stale as tinykitty"

I'm curious - what operating system are you guys on? I've never noticed this on Steam (I've only ever seen visible nodes go stale).

simonsez

XandorXerxes wrote:

I'm curious - what operating system are you guys on?

iOS

BlackSheep101

simonsez wrote:

BlackSheep101 wrote:

There are plenty of instances where this happens with opponents that you just brought up via skipping.

Right, and then this where I say "You have 6-8 opponents cached at a time, so just because you just did a skip, doesn't mean it's still not stale as tinykitty"

And this is not communicated anywhere in the game. The visible values not changing over time is at least a cue that maybe this information is stale, but there's no way to know how many opponents are cached behind those. It's one thing to get people to accept that the point value that's been there since last night might not be exactly up to date, but if the rule is you have to skip each node 10 times to refresh your list of opponents, then skip costs need to be removed because that's absurd.

Bowgentle

BlackSheep101 wrote:

And this is not communicated anywhere in the game. The visible values not changing over time is at least a cue that maybe this information is stale, but there's no way to know how many opponents are cached behind those. It's one thing to get people to accept that the point value that's been there since last night might not be exactly up to date, but if the rule is you have to skip each node 10 times to refresh your list of opponents, then skip costs need to be removed because that's absurd.

Not each node. 8 Skips total.

simonsez

BlackSheep101 wrote:

And this is not communicated anywhere in the game.

There's a lot that's not communicated in the game. But you either figure it out as you go along, or you pick it up by reading threads here. Or you post the same complaint for the 40th time, and get the same answers that were given in the previous 39 threads.

MojoWild

WillPower202 wrote:

When the game shows a 35 point reward for winning a match, 35 points should be awarded. NOT 18. Not even 50.

A lot of developments in this game have disappointed me, 3* Magneto changes being the first in a LONG list (I've been playing for 679 days). I have not taken to the forums or game reviews to bemoan my fate. Things change and the game has evolved mostly for the better. I've heard other players' suspicions about the game being rigged. Running 300 unanswered points to 982 only to be counterattacked for 250 during a five minute match is enough to make anyone paranoid. But I never saw any solid proof. That has changed.

Rarely I would get a different reward than promised, maybe 24 instead of 25. Over the past few week about 25% of my rewards have been different by 20+ points. This is EXTREMELY frustrating. Make the game as hard as you want. Offer however few points per match against the 6 megateams we can cycle through. But if a player manages to squeak out a win, don't arbitrarily cut the reward in half! It's lying, it's cheating, and for those who have paid into this game it's flat-out stealing.

Other players: PLEASE respond with your own examples. We need to show the developers what's happening if we want the problem to be addressed

Harumph!

simonsez

In QS PvP, I got hit by someone in Villains during the first few hours. I kept the retal node, because I know everyone in that alliance will have stupid points by the end of it. During the final half hour, as I was pushing past 1k, I opened up the node, and it said it was worth 2 points. I attacked him anyway. He was really worth 75.

Presented as a counterpoint to all the usual hard-luck stories.

XandorXerxes

simonsez wrote:

In QS PvP, I got hit by someone in Villains during the first few hours. I kept the retal node, because I know everyone in that alliance will have stupid points by the end of it. During the final half hour, as I was pushing past 1k, I opened up the node, and it said it was worth 2 points. I attacked him anyway. He was really worth 75.

Presented as a counterpoint to all the usual hard-luck stories.

I had a similar thing happen in shield sim - entered the sim, saw my nodes, left the sim without attacking anyone. Went in 5 days later and the people that were all worth 30 points in the beginning were now 75.

I'm more curious as to why caching is required at all. When I open up stale nodes, the first thing I do is hit refresh. If caching is there in order to prevent me from pinging the server each time I open a node, it's not actually preventing me from doing that - I'm always hitting refresh and pinging the server.

With the exception of retaliation nodes, is there a harm in putting a 30 minute expiration on nodes (if you've had a non-retaliation node longer than 30 minutes, it refreshes when you enter). Could also be done with a session check, but then you could have people who don't like their matches, close the game, re-open the game, get 3 new matches. Doesn't even have to be a timer per node - a global timer (don't do any node in 30 minutes, it clears nodes and waits for you to log in to the event again) would also work. You'd still have some stale-ish nodes, but shouldn't be anything too crazy.

Zen808

WillPower202 wrote:

A lot of developments in this game have disappointed me, 3* Magneto changes being the first in a LONG list (I've been playing for 679 days).

Am I the only one disturbed that he's picking on practically THE ONLY nerf that they actually did right?

As to the reason for increased point volatility recently, it's not a conspiracy. They're just not making 3* characters anymore, so placement for 3* rewards isn't as important to people who aren't in competitive alliances. And that's MOST people. What you're seeing is more and more players are racing to 1000 to get their 4* and running naked the rest of the way. If they're anywhere near 1000 when you queue them up, and they're not in a recognizable alliance, you may as well assume that they'll be down around 700 or lower in a couple hours.

simonsez

XandorXerxes wrote:

I'm more curious as to why caching is required at all. When I open up stale nodes, the first thing I do is hit refresh. If caching is there in order to prevent me from pinging the server each time I open a node, it's not actually preventing me from doing that - I'm always hitting refresh and pinging the server.

That's the thing. When you skip to a cached opponent, you're not pinging the server. So if they're caching 8 opponents in the 3 nodes, they're cutting down the number of pings to 1/24 of what they'd otherwise be. We've seen what happens during Ultron. I don't think we want the loads on the server to be 24x what they are now.

XandorXerxes

simonsez wrote:

XandorXerxes wrote:

I'm more curious as to why caching is required at all. When I open up stale nodes, the first thing I do is hit refresh. If caching is there in order to prevent me from pinging the server each time I open a node, it's not actually preventing me from doing that - I'm always hitting refresh and pinging the server.

That's the thing. When you skip to a cached opponent, you're not pinging the server. So if they're caching 8 opponents in the 3 nodes, they're cutting down the number of pings to 1/24 of what they'd otherwise be. We've seen what happens during Ultron. I don't think we want the loads on the server to be 24x what they are now.

Maybe I'm missing what you're saying - weren't you saying that you hit skip until you find a non-cached opponent so that you get accurate scores (that's definitely what I do), or did I misunderstand? The servers are already pulling all of those opponents to you at least once in order to cache them, so even if we just cut the cache in half you'd only query half the data you're already querying.

simonsez

XandorXerxes wrote:

Maybe I'm missing what you're saying - weren't you saying that you hit skip until you find a non-cached opponent so that you get accurate scores (that's definitely what I do), or did I misunderstand? The servers are already pulling all of those opponents to you at least once in order to cache them, so even if we just cut the cache in half you'd only query half the data you're already querying.

I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "query half the data you're already querying". If the cache was cut in half, people would be hitting the server twice as much as they are now. And the serving is pulling them once, not "at least once".

And to answer your first question, me personally, not necessarily. If it's early, everyone's climbing, so point drops aren't an issue. If I know the person is in a good alliance, I know his points aren't going to be dropping either. If the person has a weak team and suspiciously high points, I figure there's a good chance they have fewer points now. But if it's a weak team, I'll probably hit them anyway, since it's free points and they'll probably be afraid to hit me back. But for the folks hellbent on getting more accurate scores, yes, skipping past the cache will do that.

BlackSheep101

I had an idea in the shower that a quick fix would be to display a timestamp on the information so you at least know when your client received the opponent data.

blinktag

Starsaber wrote:

I've had plenty of examples of that but what I think is happening is either you or the person you're playing against had their point total change while you were playing, causing the points to be recalculated at the end. It is annoying, but I'd say it comes in second place to the fact that if you're attacked during the match, your score drops before your win is applied, which can make it a pain to hit a progression reward you gained enough points for.

Yes, that's is likely what's happening. That doesn't mean it's okay. We've come to accept it as part of the game (as evidenced by the "it's stale" replies above), but that doesn't mean it should be that way.

If the information can't be retrieved real-time for performance reasons, then at least deliver what is promised. No more, no less.