Is the bracket system fair?

Xenoberyll

Depending on what time slice you picked and what bracket you get assigned to the scores required to get a certain rank can vary drastically.

In my PVE bracket the high score was ±83k, i scored ±81k and came in 7th. Alliance mates and people posting in chats show other brackets won with 40k or lower scores. Others probably took even more points to win.

In PVP the variation is just as big with some brackets taking 1100+ to score top 100 and some winning with 300 points.

People organize in chats to find fresh (winnable) brackets or just gambling by joining late.
For me it's sometimes hard to honestly congratulate a guy winning with a fraction of my score. Do you find the System is fair? Should it be changed?

Bowgentle

I don't really care about the required score for T10, but the bracketing itself is totally crazy.
Every time I compete in PVE I get thrown into a bracket like ours, where I have to optimal clear plus grind to 1 just to make sure I get T10.
This is what _really_ drives me crazy about PVE.

Ir0nF1sh

Yes! This!!!!!!

I don't really care about the required score for T10, but the bracketing itself is totally crazy.
Every time I compete in PVE I get thrown into a bracket like ours, where I have to optimal clear plus grind to 1 just to make sure I get T10.
This is what _really_ drives me crazy about PVE.

babinro

Just thinking aloud here but an alternative way to handle competitive PvE placement could be through percentile placement among all players.

You could still keep time slices for people to clear nodes optimally on their schedule. After shard 5 completes the system would award the top 1 percent of the player base the 1st place rewards, the top 5% the next tier of rewards and so on.

This removes bracketing from the experience while keeping the flexibility benefits of time slices.

Mawtful

The bracket system is designed to create an "unstable" playing field for as many people as possible. This sort of environment maximises the possible number of players spending money on any given event. Demiurge have discussed this before - it's a revenue raising method, so it almost never will be changed to the players' benefit.

Is that fair? Unfair? You tell me.

IlDuderino

Mawtful wrote:

The bracket system is designed to create an "unstable" playing field for as many people as possible. This sort of environment maximises the possible number of players spending money on any given event. Demiurge have discussed this before - it's a revenue raising method, so it almost never will be changed to the players' benefit.

Is that fair? Unfair? You tell me.

It's unfair

Linkster79

Mawtful wrote:

The bracket system is designed to create an "unstable" playing field for as many people as possible. This sort of environment maximises the possible number of players spending money on any given event. Demiurge have discussed this before - it's a revenue raising method, so it almost never will be changed to the players' benefit.

Is that fair? Unfair? You tell me.

Unfair!

Versus events are for players to pit their wits, might and possibly wallets against each other. Story events should be about advancing a said story and not be worrying about leaderboards. I have been saying for ages now that leaderboards have no place in Story events, each node should be worth x amount of points and that number decreases each time you beat it just as all rewards should be progression based. Also please drop that cursed 20iso "reward" until all 4 other rewards for a node have been claimed. Being awarded 20 ISO for beating a 3 or 4 wave node when there are 3 better rewards yet to claim is akin to having to pick up soap in a prison shower block.

dr tinykittylove

Linkster79 wrote:

Being awarded 20 ISO for beating a 3 or 4 wave node when there are 3 better rewards yet to claim is akin to having to pick up soap in a prison shower block.

Got no comment on the rest of the comment, but wave nodes are the only nodes that you only need to beat just ONCE, ever, to get all the node rewards. That's part of the reason they're my favourite sort of nodes.

Compare with the anniversary simulator where there were nodes with 500/1k iso and after enough clears to get the legendary token and top 20/50, placement, all I got out of them were standard tokens and critical boosts...

Raffoon

I think that it's far from ideal. I'd argue that it wouldn't make as much of a difference if they weren't so stingy with their rewards, though.

You need to get Top 20, or top 2% of the population, to get more than one cover for the new 4*. How this played out for me last PVE for example: I only got 1 regular clear, plus a full grind on the first sub instead of getting 2 clears +grind. I played close to optimally for the rest of the PVE. After 3.5 days of dedicated work that put me well past the Legendary token progression, I ended up with a single cover in the top 50. I was doomed from the first 24 hours.

If they loosened up the rewards, then all these other issues would matter less, since more people would get rewards anyway. As it stands, some people can play their **** off consistently for days or a week and get nothing, while others swoop in to a fresh bracket and get better rewards for a fraction of the time/effort. I don't care so much that the people can swoop in at the end, but the people that are playing consistently over the week aren't being rewarded to scale with their effort.

Malcrof

We need the bracket system. Imagine a world without it.. A million players, and only 10 get 3 covers of a new release... the outrage that would cause.. would take the game down.

Brackets allow for a much much higher number of people to get the rewards each event, by limiting the number of competitors for any given reward set.

Yes it has it's flaws, but unless they go to a pure progression based system, or a minimum score required to be able to win top rewards, it is the best possible option.

Dragon_Nexus

Malcrof wrote:

A million players, and only 10 get 3 covers of a new release... the outrage that would cause.. would take the game down

Errrr....why would it still be limited to the old system of reward? Why wouldn't it simply be the top 10% of players, for example?

Raffoon

Malcrof wrote:

Yes it has it's flaws, but unless they go to a pure progression based system, or a minimum score required to be able to win top rewards, it is the best possible option.

What's wrong with those? For something labeled "PVE" it sure matters a lot what other players are doing in the current system.

slidecage

Xenoberyll wrote:

Depending on what time slice you picked and what bracket you get assigned to the scores required to get a certain rank can vary drastically.

In my PVE bracket the high score was ±83k, i scored ±81k and came in 7th. Alliance mates and people posting in chats show other brackets won with 40k or lower scores. Others probably took even more points to win.

In PVP the variation is just as big with some brackets taking 1100+ to score top 100 and some winning with 300 points.

People organize in chats to find fresh (winnable) brackets or just gambling by joining late.
For me it's sometimes hard to honestly congratulate a guy winning with a fraction of my score. Do you find the System is fair? Should it be changed?

Not sure how your saying people in chats to find FRESH winnable bracket i mean there is no way this could happen. A fresh bracket you can go into these boards and ask even if you get put in a FRESH bracket who knows who else is going to join that bracket or if you will be put in a newbie bracket or a killer.

someone needs 70K to take first while another person takes 50K might be a vet bracket vs a newbie bracket. Put all the vets into the newbie bracket and it will change it right back into a vet bracket... there is no way to fix it other then skip PVE and hope the system sticks you in a newbie when you want the rewards

HERE IS A VERY SIMPLE WAY TO FIX PVE.... Us the ultron or whatever that other dude name was .. Put them in the top node where every round they either gain a little HP or a new cover

Round 1 he might have 1 cover
round 2 he has 2 covers
round 3 3 covers
round 4 3 covers and more hp
round 5 2 of each cover
round 6 3 over each cover and hp
round 7 4 of each cover
round 8 max and more hp

if hes a bad guy make the sub nods into villian nodes if they are good make the sub nods good guys..

There now PVE is now fix and everyone can get at least one 4 star cover

Crowl

Linkster79 wrote:

Versus events are for players to pit their wits, might and possibly wallets against each other. Story events should be about advancing a said story and not be worrying about leaderboards. I have been saying for ages now that leaderboards have no place in Story events, each node should be worth x amount of points and that number decreases each time you beat it just as all rewards should be progression based. Also please drop that cursed 20iso "reward" until all 4 other rewards for a node have been claimed. Being awarded 20 ISO for beating a 3 or 4 wave node when there are 3 better rewards yet to claim is akin to having to pick up soap in a prison shower block.

Making pve rewards progression-based seems like a no-brainer to players, but by making it competitive the devs get more HP from players buying health packs etc so it is clear why it doesn't happen.

A better setup for the players would probably be to make the pve events more like a live updating prologue, have a set amount of clears per 24 hours per node that reward you with the standard rewards along with points towards the event's progression rewards and after that additional clears would payout the base iso reward, this would give people the flexibility to play when it suited them rather than on such a strict schedule and would drastically reduce the chances of burnout since you could fit MPQ into your time rather than fitting everything else around MPQ's schedule.

Such changes to pve could have a positive impact on pvp participation too, people could get their pve clears out of the way early and then they could devote their health pack regen to more pvp instead.

Salgy

Xenoberyll wrote:

People organize in chats to find fresh (winnable) brackets or just gambling by joining late. For me it's sometimes hard to honestly congratulate a guy winning with a fraction of my score. Do you find the System is fair? Should it be changed?

while this is true, there is a risk/reward situation in playing the waiting game... there are several i know who waited on brackets to fill, that never did... personally, i waited for a fresh bracket for x23's release and took 7th with 28k points... i consciously chose the easier pve experience over getting a legendary token or alliance cover... it was worth more to me to have all 3 colored covers for x23 than either of those other rewards... brackets are fair...

kalex716

Salgy wrote:

Xenoberyll wrote:

People organize in chats to find fresh (winnable) brackets or just gambling by joining late. For me it's sometimes hard to honestly congratulate a guy winning with a fraction of my score. Do you find the System is fair? Should it be changed?

while this is true, there is a risk/reward situation in playing the waiting game... there are several i know who waited on brackets to fill, that never did... personally, i waited for a fresh bracket for x23's release and took 7th with 28k points... i consciously chose the easier pve experience over getting a legendary token or alliance cover... it was worth more to me to have all 3 colored covers for x23 than either of those other rewards... brackets are fair...

Curious, how can you tell when you are going to be able to join a fresh bracket?

lukewin

It's fair in the sense that the people joining in the same time frame as you did, are the ones you are competing against, so unless your bracket takes a long time to fill, then everyone in the bracket should have the same amount of time to get the highest score they can.

As the person who started the bracket count threads here on the forums, before time slices, it was more of a way to get people information and make things fair. I actually had FYI in the title FYI Juggernaut Heroic - Current bracket is at ___ people. I'd hate to be the the 1000th person to join and not have a chance at competing, due to joining a stale bracket late. So since D3 and Demiurge weren't forthcoming or care to let us know when we have a chance to play on equal footing, I figured why not have it come from the players.

I've even taken it a step further, and made more adjustments to the current system, to better my chances at getting t2.

babinro wrote:

Just thinking aloud here but an alternative way to handle competitive PvE placement could be through percentile placement among all players.

You could still keep time slices for people to clear nodes optimally on their schedule. After shard 5 completes the system would award the top 1 percent of the player base the 1st place rewards, the top 5% the next tier of rewards and so on.

This removes bracketing from the experience while keeping the flexibility benefits of time slices.

I upvoted your post and agreed with it upon initially reading it. There's no way that I can think of now, that I could adjust or do anything to better my chances of getting t2 rewards with this system.

There are 2 downsides I can see off the bat.

One is that you have to play the whole event optimally, if you want top rewards, so people like me, that can play optimally, will still get the rewards. But people like me, that can still top 2 by not playing optimally, (by making other adjustments) will not like having to play more to get the same rewards. I don't think I'm alone in not wanting to play optimally for 7 days, or even 3 or 4.

Two, is unless they had a leaderboard of the top scores across the time slices, you don't know how you are progressing. I like knowing that my lead will allow me to make adjustments to slow my play. I do like doing the least I can to get the most I can. If they did have a leaderboard, it'd create another problem regarding time slices. People in slice 1 would have to play as optimal as possible, and hope that their scores hold. People in later slices would be able to see what scores they have to beat.

I'm not going to vote, b/c there are factors that make the bracket system fair and some that don't. But until a better system can be thought up, and then sit on the shelf because it won't be implemented, I'll do what I can do to adapt and adjust to the current system.

udonomefoo

babinro wrote:

Just thinking aloud here but an alternative way to handle competitive PvE placement could be through percentile placement among all players.

You could still keep time slices for people to clear nodes optimally on their schedule. After shard 5 completes the system would award the top 1 percent of the player base the 1st place rewards, the top 5% the next tier of rewards and so on.

This removes bracketing from the experience while keeping the flexibility benefits of time slices.

Yes, this. It would eliminate the "late join" benefit, so I'm sure there would be some complaints about that but it seems more than fair to me. I guess the only problem is that the people in earlier slices don't know how hard they need to go to get into a certain percentile while the s5 people know exactly how hard they have to play.

Xenoberyll

Salgy wrote:

Xenoberyll wrote:

People organize in chats to find fresh (winnable) brackets or just gambling by joining late. For me it's sometimes hard to honestly congratulate a guy winning with a fraction of my score. Do you find the System is fair? Should it be changed?

while this is true, there is a risk/reward situation in playing the waiting game... there are several i know who waited on brackets to fill, that never did... personally, i waited for a fresh bracket for x23's release and took 7th with 28k points... i consciously chose the easier pve experience over getting a legendary token or alliance cover... it was worth more to me to have all 3 colored covers for x23 than either of those other rewards... brackets are fair...

Heh, you won the same as I did, minus the legendary token but with a third of my score and effort. Why isn't it surprising that it seems fair to you? I know there is a risk to playing the bracket game but from my experience it mostly works out well for those who do it.