Can anyone explain what determines enemy difficulty?

Zifna

Can anyone explain to me what determines enemy difficulty? My husband and I both play this game and are pretty similarly situated. He started playing about six weeks ago, I started playing about five weeks ago. Our rosters/ISO earned are pretty comparable, although I have gotten luckier with tokens and have a few more *** covers than him.

However, in this latest event, it seems like all the enemies are WAY harder for me than for him! He is seeing level 100 enemies where I am seeing level 220 enemies all over, many of which I cannot beat even boosted. I have only one character who is leveled much past 50, a level 85 Thor... Careful and strategic gameplay only takes you so far, I'm afraid. =(

I was hoping things would adjust after the first "day" was over. But no, they are still much harder for me, even though I placed 30th in my bracket and my husband was top 5.

What gives?

Unknown

What level is your husband's highest character?

Unknown

Based on what dev says it's a mix of community performance (more people beat it the harder it is) and your personal performance (the more stuff you beat the harder it is). This event is supposed to have a higher weight on your performance than community performance.

Although the enemy seems excessively hard even for relatively weak personal performance, I think it's probably intended because otherwise it'd just be a matter of whoever can grind the most mission wins.

Unknown

It's the magic of hidden "MMR" (or Match-Making Rating). The more matches you win, the higher your MMR, and thus the more difficult your matches. This scales down as you lose matches - in general, though for some events scaling down (often referred to as 'tanking' in MPQ) doesn't have an immediate impact. It's an algorithmic attempt to ensure that you're always challenged, and it doesn't always result in "fair" matches, especially when you go from PvP to PvE.

Zifna

Lyrian wrote:

What level is your husband's highest character?

His highest level is 77 because he is missing the cover he wants to finish his Thor. Then, after that around 55.

It's the magic of hidden "MMR" (or Match-Making Rating). The more matches you win, the higher your MMR, and thus the more difficult your matches. This scales down as you lose matches - in general, though for some events scaling down (often referred to as 'tanking' in MPQ) doesn't have an immediate impact. It's an algorithmic attempt to ensure that you're always challenged, and it doesn't always result in "fair" matches, especially when you go from PvP to PvE.

I did win my bracket in the daredevil pvp event because I actually put points into leveling my daredevil... but since then he has done much better than me in anything that happened. Did winning the daredevil bracket screw me forever??

Unknown

Zifna wrote:

I did win my bracket in the daredevil pvp event because I actually put points into leveling my daredevil... but since then he has done much better than me in anything that happened. Did winning the daredevil bracket screw me forever??

Nope, but you may need to lose matches (or 'tank')! Which feels kind of stupid when you're doing it, but in the long run, you'll be better off doing it. Lightning Rounds are great events to tank because they're short, but it doesn't matter so much. Just go out there and lose matches, and your MMR will fall. It actually doesn't matter where you place in somewhere, MMR is calculated using your win/loss ratio, not your actual success in the event, which is kind of a weird concept to get your head around. The difference between you and your husband is probably more of an issue of you playing more often than him - no matter how you actually place or succeed in events.

For the PvE event, there is an additional effect that the rest of your bracket will have on difficulty scaling. Don't try to enter PvE events as soon as they open, it will help out a little bit.

Unknown

I'm currently #1 in the main bracket and both of my sub bracket. In the last round I did:

All stacks (5) of the 4 required character missions.
The 1000 bonus Iso mission
2 times of level 230X3 final mission in Namibia

This took roughly 3 hours to do. Everything is 230X3 for me.

Now since this was good enough for #1 (and I'm #1 in the my overall bracket too) I'd assume my performance is near the top. Now the question you have to ask is, should it take more than 3 hours in the final stretch run, plus another 3-4 hours before, which is 6-7 hours in a period of 24 hours, to place first? And if so, how much more time is reasonable? And if my time is reasonable for first place, then it must be the case that people who place lower have to be play even less if they see the same enemies as I do (otherwise they'd be first instead of me), and since you can't just tell people to stop playing, you really do need level 230X3 stuff to limit how much people can play.

The rubberband there generally ensures you cannot play more than 3 hours in an 8 hour stretch in PvE, because that's all you'd need to place first. If it was easy to be able to play that long against 230X3s, then 3 hours would no longer be enough to place first and it'd just escalate and that benefits no one.

Zifna

starsrift wrote:

Nope, but you may need to lose matches (or 'tank')! Which feels kind of stupid when you're doing it, but in the long run, you'll be better off doing it. Lightning Rounds are great events to tank because they're short, but it doesn't matter so much. Just go out there and lose matches, and your MMR will fall. It actually doesn't matter where you place in somewhere, MMR is calculated using your win/loss ratio, not your actual success in the event, which is kind of a weird concept to get your head around. The difference between you and your husband is probably more of an issue of you playing more often than him - no matter how you actually place or succeed in events.

For the PvE event, there is an additional effect that the rest of your bracket will have on difficulty scaling. Don't try to enter PvE events as soon as they open, it will help out a little bit.

This is very helpful and explains a lot, because my husband says he did this a bit a few days ago, not because he understood what you were talking about but because he wanted to win 3 **-covers instead of one *** cover. So that is probably it.

Do you know, is it only effective if you lose PvP matches? Or could I just take some lamer dudes into Namibia (or whatever replaces that) and get their faces stomped in?

Unknown

I think the difficulty of enemies you face isnt tied to your MMR it seems more directly tied to your global ranking in the current PvE. when i hit #6 in my global bracket my enemies are all 230s vs when i was 57th they were more in the 180-200 range

Unknown

Zifna wrote:

Do you know, is it only effective if you lose PvP matches? Or could I just take some lamer dudes into Namibia (or whatever replaces that) and get their faces stomped in?

You can lower your MMR by losing PvE, and as I said, it will help - in the long run - but don't necessarily expect an immediate response. Some players have reported a -5 levels per 5 losses difficulty effect of 'tanking' for the current PvE event, but don't depend on that. Again, MMR is a calculation of your total win/loss ratio (further complicating things, the effect of the loss or win varies according to the difficulty of the match), so to balance out a lot of wins, you have to take a lot of losses - and the results are far more visible with new events than currently running ones because of various other issues that other folks have mentioned, such as bracket scaling.

It's a system designed for the long-term, and the short-term can (and does) often suck. It's just a mathematical algorithm that's theoretically designed to put you in matches where you feel challenged. The super-big issue is that when it's PvP, the "challenge" quotient is mathematically infinite (because it's just a comparison of you to other players), whereas it's not so cut and dry in PvE. Nonetheless, the sooner you start in on stupidly losing matches, the sooner you reap the rewards. It will balance out, you're not screwed forever, but you may be screwed over for this event - and the next one, depending on how things go for you.

And, congrats for winning the Daredevil event.

Unknown

The PvE stuff also looks at your personal performance and it's pretty hard to not get high level enemies if you were doing well in them, unless your character is way low level.

If you have a level 85 character and you came in top 20 in a sub bracket, you probably should expect 230X3s. The game has no reason to assume this stuff is too hard for you since you placed above 90% of the players.

Unknown

Catalyst wrote:

I think the difficulty of enemies you face isnt tied to your MMR it seems more directly tied to your global ranking in the current PvE. when i hit #6 in my global bracket my enemies are all 230s vs when i was 57th they were more in the 180-200 range

I agree with this. I started playing again 5-6 days ago after taking a break for 2-3 weeks. I entered the event 5-6 hours before the end of the first set of sub-missions. The most difficult enemy was 68-70lv. I finished 2nd on both missions and 7th in the main bracket. For the second set of missions (Namibia, China) I entered again 5 hour before the end and the enemies were significantly more difficult. The hardest was around 150lv the first time I fought them. By the end of the missions they were 200+. Thankfully, I finished 1-3 in the missions and 3rd in my main.

@Zifna: In my experience it helps having some key characters maxed. I think for players who can't depend too much on 3* characters having a maxed OBW and Ares are almost mandatory after Thor and Wolverine were nerfed. The downside of Ares is that since he is a Dark Avenger he will be your enemy quite often so you won't be able to use him in many PvE matches, but he is a amazing when you get him on your team.
From the 3* heroes you should try to get The Punisher. Mine is level 70 and has only 4 red covers, but he can be very helpful against some high health enemies. These 3 are my favourite team right now.

akboyce

Phantron wrote:

The PvE stuff also looks at your personal performance and it's pretty hard to not get high level enemies if you were doing well in them, unless your character is way low level.

If you have a level 85 character and you came in top 20 in a sub bracket, you probably should expect 230X3s. The game has no reason to assume this stuff is too hard for you since you placed above 90% of the players.

Will doing poorly in a subevent have the opposite effect? Everyone is now 230 in both my sub events so I know I will not do well this round. I want to hold out hope that things may get better though

Puritas

I'm starting to think your performance in the previous main event weighs heavily
Typically my enemies are in the 130-230 range every event
In sim basics I couldn't be arsed to clear each node more than once, so I ended up with barely 75th place

This time around, my enemies are level 20-120

Also talking about MMR in pve is so flawed I don't even know where to start

Unknown

Starsrift is incorrect. PVP has no bearing on PVE.

Unknown

jozier wrote:

Starsrift is incorrect. PVP has no bearing on PVE.

There is a matter of debate of whether PvE affects PvP and vice versa. If you want to take the time, look over the various and numerous threads (especially Event threads), and conduct your own experiments.

The bottom line is, though, to get easier matches, lose matches to lower your rating.

Unknown

The devs have outright said that PVE and PVP are separate.

Unknown

As an aside, it seems that the 1000 ISO bonus missions do not open up for me. Any guesses why?

Unknown

Jester Day wrote:

As an aside, it seems that the 1000 ISO bonus missions do not open up for me. Any guesses why?

Because the community has not yet filled up the green bar for the event to unlock the 1000 ISO mission for each sub.

Given the current scaling, Hard mode tends to be unlocked in the last 6-8 hours of the sub and Normal mode has yet to be unlocked in any sub so far because of increased community requirements to unlock the mission over Hard mode.

Unknown

Puritas wrote:

I'm starting to think your performance in the previous main event weighs heavily
Typically my enemies are in the 130-230 range every event
In sim basics I couldn't be arsed to clear each node more than once, so I ended up with barely 75th place

This time around, my enemies are level 20-120

Also talking about MMR in pve is so flawed I don't even know where to start

I had pretty tame first sub brackets, was mostly low 100s and then everything shot up to 230 after I finished top 5 in both of my sub brackets.

I suspect it's a combination of your history and how well you're doing right now.

Unknown

The level difference of your heroes verses the opponents seems to play a factor.

I have a
3/5/5 MN.Magneto at level 45
5/5/3 C.Storm at level 30
3/1/1 Psylocke at level 43

I have several other characters around level 30 that I use if needed.

Most of my battles begin at average level of 25 and get no higher than average level 100. The greater the average level of the opponent the lower the level my opponents tend to be. That is, using lower level versions of the boosted characters will help keep the level of the enemies down.