Tournament Setup

Unknown

So, I won the Dark Avengers tournament. That's cool and all, but what I had to do to win it was ridiculous.

With about 60 minutes left, I had a very comfortable lead on 2nd place with 150 points, and 3rd was around 250 back. I thought I could just coast in...but when I look at 30 minutes people I hadn't even seen in the top 10 had jumped up and were gaining on me. So, to keep my spot I had to sit there and grind nonstop. It was especially hard since, unless someone attacked me, the people I was paired against were giving 0-1 points.

Matchmaking needs to be fixed. OR let's just dispense with the whole 3-4 day tournaments and make them an hour long....because that last hour is really all that matters. People who wait around until the last minute are being rewarded, while people like me who get to the top early and try to stay there can't since we can't get any more points off our opponents.

Unknown

I also won and I had the opposite experience, too many people to attack and I barely survived all the retaliations.

Unknown

You're better off getting there early because retaliations usually give a huge chunk of points which means it's easier for you to get started on regaining points at the last minute. Moreover, your suggestion doesn't even make sense. You're free to not participate in tournaments until the last hour. No one is forcing you to. Just pretend that the tournaments ARE one hour, just that you know about it 3 days in advance and you can earn some rewards earlier.

Unknown

just like the venom tournament now. it's easy to be in top 10 at the earlier entry. and then...woooossshh...wiped out. no one can be king of the hill for too long. before tournament, one must stack his heal point/pack, a lot of iso to upgrade our fa character to regain the lost hp/down. and with endurance and luck stay in top 10 ^^ [not to mention don't lose]

Unknown

Shire5k wrote:

So, I won the Dark Avengers tournament. That's cool and all, but what I had to do to win it was ridiculous.

With about 60 minutes left, I had a very comfortable lead on 2nd place with 150 points, and 3rd was around 250 back. I thought I could just coast in...but when I look at 30 minutes people I hadn't even seen in the top 10 had jumped up and were gaining on me. So, to keep my spot I had to sit there and grind nonstop. It was especially hard since, unless someone attacked me, the people I was paired against were giving 0-1 points.

Matchmaking needs to be fixed. OR let's just dispense with the whole 3-4 day tournaments and make them an hour long....because that last hour is really all that matters. People who wait around until the last minute are being rewarded, while people like me who get to the top early and try to stay there can't since we can't get any more points off our opponents.

Try your method and you'll see yourself ranked in the high hundreds if not thousands. Not sure what team you're running with but putting up 1000+ points in 60 mins seems unlikely. I say 1000+ because that's usually the total of 1st place. If you don't want to participate early on be our guest. I like free ISO

Unknown

I was lucky enough to win my bracket and finally get my yellow spiderman cover.
I made my climb about 3 hours before it finished from rank 50 but that last hour was brutal.
Got knocked back to third a few times and had to climb back up.

My team was a bit underpowered though and now in the venom tournament all the fights are so powerful even with 100 points on the board
Time for some more ISO grinding

Unknown

It is true that tournaments are more intense towards the end. A bit more heat is fine, but the Devs need to do it such that people don't just go for gangbangs in the last hour (and ignore the first 7 days or something). The first part of the tournament needs to count for something.

Unknown

Alienrespawn you hit me twice in the last 5 minutes, dropped me to #3. I get all the bad luck

Unknown

MissMarvelBoobs wrote:

just like the venom tournament now. it's easy to be in top 10 at the earlier entry. and then...woooossshh...wiped out. no one can be king of the hill for too long. before tournament, one must stack his heal point/pack, a lot of iso to upgrade our fa character to regain the lost hp/down. and with endurance and luck stay in top 10 ^^ [not to mention don't lose]

The issue is that you aren't rewarded for being king of the hill early. That is, aside from the rewards you get for reaching thresholds (which you get anyway if you grind it out the last couple of hours). So I get to first early and extend my lead as much as possible, and then can gain no points. I still have to work as hard in the last hour or two as those who are just then really trying.

The "just don't play until the last hour then" argument is asinine. I will do that from now just because there's no reason not to, but the status quo should still be changed to either reward who actually battle throughout the entire tournament or just drastically shorten tournament length.

Unknown

junshengkeh wrote:

Alienrespawn you hit me twice in the last 5 minutes, dropped me to #3. I get all the bad luck

Sorry to hear that junshengkeh it was so intense didn't even look at names just points, chars and levels.
So badly wanted that yellow spiderman and it was down to the last minute in my bracket

I firmly believe its the lost points relative to victory points that is causing this mad rush problem and lost ground

Dninot

I finished around 28. Didn't have the team or time to do much better than that.

I don't ever have the time to play for hours straight, specially not near the end of a tournament. I built myself up to rank 28 over the entire week, and chose my battles carefully to stay roughly that high. If the tournament were shorter I'd never have achieved that.

I get the problems that the last hour causes and maybe something can be done about it, but shortening all tournaments would benefit some, and really hurt others.

Unknown

There really is absolutely no advantage to playing the tournament early on, or fighting to get highly ranked -- because highly ranked players are at a huge disadvantage in the last hour. You get targeted by low/mid ranked players which causes a huge point loss while they get a huge point gain -- a double whammy. And retaliating against them may get you more points than you lost (but only if they've gotten close to your point level), but they lose far fewer than they gain. End result is that people who play through the entire tournament to work their way up just get completely screwed. The level rewards aren't even an incentive -- they get the same ones as they rocket up the bracket.

Heck, I'd be willing to see the timer disappear entirely -- if nobody knows when the tournament is going to end then you can't pull this ****.

I'm not sure what the solution is here, but actually rewarding people that play throughout the tournament instead of punishing them would be a nice change.

Dninot

How about this for a double solution

Make it so that you can't fall behind the progression reward levels. If you get up to 1000, no matter how much you get beat, your opponents will gain their points, but you won't lose any. If you go above 1000 to like 1050, you could fall back to 1000, but no lower.

Unknown

Dninot wrote:

How about this for a double solution

Make it so that you can't fall behind the progression reward levels. If you get up to 1000, no matter how much you get beat, your opponents will gain their points, but you won't lose any. If you go above 1000 to like 1050, you could fall back to 1000, but no lower.

That is exactly what I was about to suggest.

This would probably require the least changes and provide the most fair solution. And it still allows for "last hour madness", but at least it's no longer so completely biased toward short term players. Plus you never have to wonder what the last reward you earned was, or weep about attacks knocking you further and further away from the one you really want.

The downsides I can see are some score inflation (but less than a lot of other options) and possibly the elimination of losing points for Yielding a match. The latter isn't that big of a deal though -- in all likelihood you've already paid the price of having dead or heavily damaged characters, and the Yield points are never very significant anyway.

Unknown

Dninot wrote:

How about this for a double solution

Make it so that you can't fall behind the progression reward levels. If you get up to 1000, no matter how much you get beat, your opponents will gain their points, but you won't lose any. If you go above 1000 to like 1050, you could fall back to 1000, but no lower.

I think thats a good idea as well and might actually make all the reward prizes actually achievable too

Unknown

I had a strange but pleasant experience with my bracket, I went to bed with a top place, fully expecting to get beaten into the dirt in the last 3 hours. Instead I only got attacked once, and woke up to a top 2 finish and yellow Spidey.

Having said that, basing tournament results on highest score attained, rather than final score, might be neat. I'd not recommend freezing rating itself as all that would do would be to make you an infinitely exploitable target.

Unknown

The last hour rush is even worst for the European players... The tournament ends 4~5 am, even if you work for a good place the entire tournament you have to wake up in middle of the night to defend it.

Unknown

Agent Coulson wrote:

I had a strange but pleasant experience with my bracket, I went to bed with a top place, fully expecting to get beaten into the dirt in the last 3 hours. Instead I only got attacked once, and woke up to a top 2 finish and yellow Spidey.

Same here, had no intention of defending the points I had (something like 1100), as the rewards were essentially not worth it for me. Still finished in top 2! Shame I couldn't gift the yellow spidey to 3rd placed finisher really.

pacmanreis wrote:

The last hour rush is even worst for the European players... The tournament ends 4~5 am, even if you work for a good place the entire tournament you have to wake up in middle of the night to defend it.

I woke up at 2am for one of the early ones to finish up there, man did the next day at work drag. Not keen on repeating that again, but expect I will if the rewards demand it!

Unknown

Agent Coulson wrote:

I had a strange but pleasant experience with my bracket, I went to bed with a top place, fully expecting to get beaten into the dirt in the last 3 hours. Instead I only got attacked once, and woke up to a top 2 finish and yellow Spidey.

I wish that would happen to me; highest I've ranked at any point in a tournament was 3rd. I believe I ended up in the 20s or 30s that one; it was the first bracketed tournament as I recall.

Agent Coulson wrote:

I'd not recommend freezing rating itself as all that would do would be to make you an infinitely exploitable target.

Not really -- others would eventually pass you if you did that. But more importantly there's no way to attack a specific player repeatably unless both players retaliate back and forth. You could just try to skip repeatedly hoping to find your friend that isn't going to retaliate, but with a large enough player base that's less likely to happen. There could also be backend tweaks to prevent this kind of thing -- if nothing else, you could keep track of who has played who and reduce rewards on both sides after a certain number of matches -- this could also prevent endless retaliation between two people (which is currently an exploitable method for endlessly increasing both players score, although slowly).

With the bracketed tournaments maybe they can bracket based on region as well, so that they could have tournaments end at a reasonable time in different brackets/regions. I'm in the "right" time zone, but it's really unfair to a lot of people as it stands.