Oscorp Clarification

Unknown

There was a huge problem with the level scaling in the Heroic Oscorp event, and I'm sure that (going forward) the developers will take steps to fix it. That being said, that wasn't the only problem with that event--in my view, it wasn't even the biggest problem. So I wanted to take a moment to point to what are arguably far worse problems with the event.

First, the progression rewards were ridiculous. The math has been done elsewhere, but I'll summarize it here. A full clear of all of the missions in the event gave about 5000 points, and the mission point values reset after 12 hours. Since the event lasted for 5.5 days, that gave 11 cycles during which to accumulate points and a theoretical limit of 55000 points. However, earning these points (and thereby grabbing the juicy four-star progressive rewards) required you to a) beat all of the boards every time they became available, b) do so in a timely fashion so that you didn't push your timers back, c) avoid things like work, family obligation, and familial relationships so that you can pick up those playthroughs right at the reset point, and d) start playing very near the start of the event in order to get all of the resets. If any of those circumstances didn't obtain, the high-end progressive rewards were really nothing more than a fancy new UI update: "added pictures of X-Force Wolverine next to arbitrarily large numbers to the bottom of the event reward list to inspire players."

Second, there was very little incentive to play the missions themselves. Each mission only yielded four rewards (there was a bit of variety there, which was nice, although there was a noticeable absence of any boards giving away even 50 HP), and none of the prize sets ever reset. So by day two, when I'd won all of the available prizes from the event and only garnered about 7000 points, I had very little incentive to keep replaying them. The previous Heroics (at least Venom, but I'm pretty sure Juggernaut too) reset their missions entirely every day or day and a half, so you could re-earn rewards instead of just grinding out 20 ISO-8 at a time. Without those resets, profitability shrinks and the prospect of reaching even the mid-point progressives turned from a Herculean task into a Sisyphian one.

So, this:

"The rewards in this Heroic Mode are geared heavily towards progression so we've disabled some of the balancing that helps players catch up with the pack and greatly turned up the number of replays you get per missions.

We've also heard your feedback that the more expensive boosts are making the extra-tough missions impossible so we've taken care to make them available as mission and progression rewards in the event. There's a lot of Iso-8 up for grabs too. We've had a lot of fun building this event, we hope you enjoy it as well!"

from D3PCS feels pretty dishonest. Placement rewards are lessened to emphasize progression, but top progression rewards are functionally (if not explicitly) impossible to earn. Rubber-banding has been turned off in favor of mission replays, but there are still only 4 prizes per mission and then an endless string of 20 ISO-8 payouts. A tournament with "a lot of ISO-8 for grabs" ends up being less profitable than the Heroics that came before because the board prizes never reset. If these are oversights from the developers, then they are serious oversights that need to be corrected. If the prize structures were functioning as intended, then the statement that accompanied the event was just lies.

There was a scaling difficulty problem with this event that kept a lot of people from playing. A more serious problem, however, is that there were a lot of players who were competitive and could have participated but had no incentive to do so. Please fix this for future events, and please address the fact that you appear in this case to have just lied to us about the nature of this one.

Thank you for your time and attention.

Unknown

Moon 17 wrote:

There was a huge problem with the level scaling in the Heroic Oscorp event, and I'm sure that (going forward) the developers will take steps to fix it. That being said, that wasn't the only problem with that event--in my view, it wasn't even the biggest problem. So I wanted to take a moment to point to what are arguably far worse problems with the event.

First, the progression rewards were ridiculous. The math has been done elsewhere, but I'll summarize it here. A full clear of all of the missions in the event gave about 5000 points, and the mission point values reset after 12 hours. Since the event lasted for 5.5 days, that gave 11 cycles during which to accumulate points and a theoretical limit of 55000 points. However, earning these points (and thereby grabbing the juicy four-star progressive rewards) required you to a) beat all of the boards every time they became available, b) do so in a timely fashion so that you didn't push your timers back, c) avoid things like work, family obligation, and familial relationships so that you can pick up those playthroughs right at the reset point, and d) start playing very near the start of the event in order to get all of the resets. If any of those circumstances didn't obtain, the high-end progressive rewards were really nothing more than a fancy new UI update: "added pictures of X-Force Wolverine next to arbitrarily large numbers to the bottom of the event reward list to inspire players."

Second, there was very little incentive to play the missions themselves. Each mission only yielded four rewards (there was a bit of variety there, which was nice, although there was a noticeable absence of any boards giving away even 50 HP), and none of the prize sets ever reset. So by day two, when I'd won all of the available prizes from the event and only garnered about 7000 points, I had very little incentive to keep replaying them. The previous Heroics (at least Venom, but I'm pretty sure Juggernaut too) reset their missions entirely every day or day and a half, so you could re-earn rewards instead of just grinding out 20 ISO-8 at a time. Without those resets, profitability shrinks and the prospect of reaching even the mid-point progressives turned from a Herculean task into a Sisyphian one.

So, this:

"The rewards in this Heroic Mode are geared heavily towards progression so we've disabled some of the balancing that helps players catch up with the pack and greatly turned up the number of replays you get per missions.

We've also heard your feedback that the more expensive boosts are making the extra-tough missions impossible so we've taken care to make them available as mission and progression rewards in the event. There's a lot of Iso-8 up for grabs too. We've had a lot of fun building this event, we hope you enjoy it as well!"

from D3PCS feels pretty dishonest. Placement rewards are lessened to emphasize progression, but top progression rewards are functionally (if not explicitly) impossible to earn. Rubber-banding has been turned off in favor of mission replays, but there are still only 4 prizes per mission and then an endless string of 20 ISO-8 payouts. A tournament with "a lot of ISO-8 for grabs" ends up being less profitable than the Heroics that came before because the board prizes never reset. If these are oversights from the developers, then they are serious oversights that need to be corrected. If the prize structures were functioning as intended, then the statement that accompanied the event was just lies.

There was a scaling difficulty problem with this event that kept a lot of people from playing. A more serious problem, however, is that there were a lot of players who were competitive and could have participated but had no incentive to do so. Please fix this for future events, and please address the fact that you appear in this case to have just lied to us about the nature of this one.

Thank you for your time and attention.

"....and the mission point values reset after 12 hours"

Really? Never happened to me until the last 5 hours of the event. I believe others experienced the same thing. This event was a clusterkitty of ****.

Unknown

Fair enough. I realize that by only speaking about the event functioning "as intended" I exclude the experience of a lot of people for whom it was broken beyond recognition. But I don't want the developers to walk away thinking that the event would have been perfect if not for a few technical problems.

Unknown

Moon 17 wrote:

Fair enough. I realize that by only speaking about the event functioning "as intended" I exclude the experience of a lot of people for whom it was broken beyond recognition. But I don't want the developers to walk away thinking that the event would have been perfect if not for a few technical problems.

Totally understand. I didn't know my event was "broken" anyway. I thought that is just how it was and was hoping that D3 would comment on **** happened since there's no explanation anywhere.

I sent an in-game email to D3 asking **** happened and for some clarification, but am highly doubtful that they will read or reply to my email.