Improvements to PvE events.

Mawtful

I'm a little reluctant to create a new thread about PvE and level scaling and reward:effort ratio since there are a lot of threads that are more or less about these sorts of things already, but I think that what I have to offer doesn't really fit into any of those other categories neatly. This will probably also be a little bit "wall of text", so apologies in advance.

First of all, well done to the devs. This event is by far the best in recent history. I was a little upset at the rate of increase in enemy levels at first, but that was simply a knee jerk reaction. Taking a look now, I am in the top 10 for my brackets in each of the main event and both subs and I haven't had to grind; I played through each mission once when they opened, once again 12 hours later (I actually skipped redoing the Hard 5k battle, as Wolvie/Daken/Mook were all 230 at the time, I knew I could do it, but it would be a boring Spiderman stunfest and I couldn't be bothered), and once again just now after the 24 hour mark (I noticed levels had dropped significantly - 5k battle was back down to about 170). So I think if I continue to play through these missions every 12 hours or so, I think I can probably walk away with a Psylocke cover, maybe 2 if I'm lucky, without too much effort.

So with all that said, why am I going to suggest that it needs "fixing"?

I think the biggest problem is actually a problem of player perception. We take a look at the event and think, "Ah, one of the rewards is a new hero. I *deserve* that reward." and we award it to ourselves before the event even starts. From there it becomes a battle to "retain" our prize, and anything that slows or hinders our progression is viewed as "taking away" that prize. Unfortunately, this isn't something that the devs can fix, but I think they could actually implement something that kind of obscures it with a bit of smoke and mirrors.

The next problem is one of community scaling on mission difficulty, which could put certain missions beyond a player's capabilities before they've even unlocked it. Given my experience over the last 24 hours, I no longer think that this is as big of an issue as it originally was, it can "team up" with missions locked by required heroes to devastating effect. This turns events into a matter of having the right timing for when you start, rather than having the right team, and that's not really very good.

Fortunately, I think both of these issues can be resolved with the same "fix".

Enemy Scaling by Points & Points-Buy Reward List
The first half of this is relatively straight forward; enemies increase in difficulty as your personal points total increases. This should provide a relatively smooth increase in difficulty for you based on when and how often you play. If the scaling is based off earning the maximum possible points for each mission, this should also play nice with the current rubber-banding and should mean that you only have to slog through 230's to earn the very highest progression rewards.

However, speaking of progression rewards, what if we get rid of them all together? Instead we replace that progression reward list with a "Reward Shop", where all the "progression rewards" are listed with a point value cost and you "spend" your points to buy the rewards you want. This actually achieves a few things:

1. Spending points lowers your point pool, which lowers the difficulty of fights, which means you can progress further.
2. Allows you to cherry pick rewards, so any required heroes could be added to the prize pool. This is another form of spending points to progress.
3. The final ranking rewards list will still be used, so now it creates a tactical decision - do I want the progression reward or the placement reward? - and should also result in a "fair" ranking of players. People with 3* rosters will be less likely to buy prog rewards and be more likely to be able to handle 230 teams, so should end up higher up the list than players with 1* teams.
Note: Each player's "shop" will not have infinite items, if an even has three Patch covers as prog rewards, then there would be 3 patch covers in the shop. Since players get to choose what they get with their points, this allows devs to add things like required or powered up heroes as possible rewards during the event.

Having people's points see-saw up and down could play havoc with rubber-banding and could be open to exploitation, so perhaps the total points earned in the event needs to be tracked and any rubber-banding would be based off that.

I feel that these two changes would help address the issues of scaling and provide appropriate reward for effort to players. An event will be as difficult as you want it to be, and at the end you will be rewarded accordingly. For example, I have one cover for Loki, so I can actually attempt all the missions, but if I thought I was going to miss out on the 3* rewards I could look and see that the 2* reward (Wolverine) is "useless" to me, since I don't need those covers. I could then decide to focus on spending my points at the Reward Shop to get a Loki cover and a Patch yellow which I need, plus a bunch of the ISO rewards and maybe some boost rewards.

This was the best solution I could come up with to handle the perception problem I talked about; it provides options, which I think a lot of people don't have or can't see right now. Happy to discuss this or other ideas for improving the game. Let me know what you think. (Please be gentle)

Unknown

I actually really like the this idea. I imagine it'd be difficult to implement and I can see a good amount of people not liking this idea, but for what it's worth, I like it.

Unknown

I really like this idea too. If it works, it could be a way to make the game a lot more casual for some players (those who just play for progression with a lower difficulty) and more strategic for hardcore players (even hardcore players need to decide to buy boosts and health packs sometimes).

Only thing is, I can see that the placement rewards will need to be more than three covers to make it worthwhile to compete after for 7-9 days when those same covers will make an appearance in a two day tourney two weeks later.