PVE Scaling Testing - Enemy Of The State (03/17/16)

simonsez

bluewolf wrote:

Not sure if anyone else has suggested this, but what if there was a mix of nodes that leveled up and ones that didn't?

Or what if we just kept it like it was? For all the complaining people have done about PvE, "these nodes are too easy!" was never one of them.

simonsez

Electrovirus wrote:

I am really liking the new format. Maybe it is because I don't try to get all the rewards

Agreed, this format is best for people who don't really play.

Polares

simonsez wrote:

bluewolf wrote:

Not sure if anyone else has suggested this, but what if there was a mix of nodes that leveled up and ones that didn't?

Or what if we just kept it like it was? For all the complaining people have done about PvE, "these nodes are too easy!" was never one of them.

I guess devs 'tried' to do something impossible, nodes that dont' need to ble completed at particular times, but still having leaderboards and possitions. For that reason they needed to ramp up difficulty a lot, so people can't do all the clears, and just the best/stubborn can do all the clears.


The difficulty in the second sub is absurd, and I think one of the reasons is because the devs were so lazy that they didn't check which were the enemies of each node and how they were scaling. Now we have the 'easy' nodes, which are no longer easy, that have most of the time the worst enemies together. In the first sub the hardest node was by far the first survival (wolvie+ 2 feeders in the first round, and then I think it was 3 more rounds). And the worst part is that these nodes have rewards as if they were easy and the points you get are the lowest in the sub. I am not bothering to do those more than once or twice.

This unforgivable because it is a problem based on laziness, you can just ramp up the difficulty of the nodes and don't check that now the difficulty is higher that in the supposed hard nodes.

And again I needed to play 2-3h when the sub started to do six clears of just the essentials and two hardest nodes. The rest I did them just them just twice. And this was of course after playing the old sub around 1-1.5h more to do a couple of clears. It is INSANE the time needed to do all the clears.


I just want to point out again, THIS IS NOT FUN, MPQ is not my work, I don't want to play it for 7 hours in one go to get all rewards!

Nick441234

The progression reward points have been set way too high too. 155,000 for the 25cp? Unless we earn some crazy numbers in the last 4 days, how many people are going to get anywhere near that?

Ralph-Wiggum

You know what's fun? Having to fight Wolverine and two Shinobi's at level 330 because you failed to get the CP point on your first six times beating that node....

Daiches

nick_chicane wrote:

The progression reward points have been set way too high too. 155,000 for the 25cp? Unless we earn some crazy numbers in the last 4 days, how many people are going to get anywhere near that?

Found the new guy.

EotS has crazy high value wave nodes in the last two subs. T10 usually gets easily over 200k in this event.

However very little people will actually get progression this time because the event is literally sapping the will to live from them.

This event is not fun. At all. It's a pain and a chore. And right now, I hope the very first sentence of the devs post on our feedback will be:

We're sorry, we are so very sorry. From now on we will post our ideas on the forum first before implementing them into the game for a beta test.
Please accept 25CP to all players who entered this event.


But that will never happen.

ErikPeter

...IF/HB. Nope, neither of them was powered up, but it made short work of 'em.

I don't think this event is the nightmare it sounds like ("Oh Tinykitty CHANGE!!!"), but I think it does show the flaws in the system.

The thing about the current system is that the grind every 8 hours is tedious and takes over your life--but doing well only requires 3 grinds every 24 hours (plus as much as you want to do near the end to get better placement--so let's call that 4 1/2). This system passively encourages 6 full grinds, or, you know what only the most hardcore people were doing before. That's kind of nuts. That plus the added and uneven difficulty (caltrops-caltrops-caltrops-Adamantium Slash). It's possible that if this new system was adopted (with tweaks) people would just change their habits and the norm would be "finish the missions you can comfortably complete".

I think the base difficulty of every mission should be lower--so everyone can get a "full clear" with only a little challenge in the final nodes--and then difficulty can ramp more than it currently does on subsequent clears. 350 Wolverine with two feeders was painful, but doable for the CP (and yes it took 7 to get the second one ) But the first run could've been a softball.

Let people run through the nodes a couple time 50 levels easier than curve, to differentiate the casual players from the committed ones. THEN bump the difficulty to more dangerous levels. How about beating the final node and thinking "Oh man, after the next few clears when this is 150 levels higher it's going to be beastly" instead of "Well that was hard. 3 heal packs x 6 clears??? Not going to happen."

Bryan Lambert

What this test proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that you can have challenge, or you can have grind, but challenge + grind is a nightmare.

The reason Gauntlet is tolerable-to-fun is that nobody needs to play those levels more than once unless they feel like it to get node rewards. There's no placement, and progression is based on one-and-done. Challenge, but no grind.

Old PvE was grind, with only a little challenge. And it was also tolerable-to-fun.

This new format just throws the risk-reward balance of actually playing the game way out of whack. Especially using Enemy of the State, where, to hit progression rewards, you have to regrind wave nodes vor zero node rewards. Wave nodes that are now either a little or a lot tougher than they were before thanks to the "smoothing" (I do not think that means what they think it means) of the difficulty.

Sure, I've found some team combinations that get me through these nodes pretty effectively. But I did that with old PvE, too, and it took me less time, less effort, and with less chance of a bad board or a bad cascade ruining my day.

HaywireII

Xzasxz

Before I used to play 3-4 hrs a day. Only if I were extremely unlucky I missed Cp rewards from the nodes, but always earned all the progression rewards and very seldom been outside final top 100. How many hrs do I have to play to achieve the same result now? 6? 7? 8?! No, thank you. I'm not even going to discuss scaling issues and other aspects of the gameplay. the absurd increase of time needed to spent every day for the same rewards is enough to say NO to the changes. Will it be goodbye? MPQ do something with this time consuming grind.

scottyray1

I like the update. I just believe the 7 prizes you get should correspond to the difficulty your on. Say I beat a node n get a command point, why should I play again on a harder difficulty for say 70iso. I believe the harder the node the better the prize. Such as I beat it once I get the 70 iso the when I beat is the 7th on. The hardest difficulty I get the command point.

mazerat

I'm sure these thoughts have been said but I feel like writing out my feedback is more effective than just +1'ing other peoples'. Some are test related, some are PvE related, and one is EotS specific:

- Enemy of the State needs a rework. Wave nodes that only have a drop the first time you clear but are worth twice as many progress points are major feelbads. Am I intended to clear the wave nodes six or seven times like I do with the others or just once? It seems unclear.

- The new system is is more of a slog without adding much convenience. Under the old system, 3ish full clears in a 24-hour period would get you an LT. So if the rollover was at midnight and I didn't get my first clear until 2am, then I could do my second clear anytime between 10am-2pm and then my final between 6pm-10pm and midnight, for example. Also, since you only lose 1/6 per clear--which means you're leaving most of the progression on the table anyway; if I had a particularly busy day I could just do a less than max clear or two if I needed to. Under the new system I need to clear twice as many times over the same duration.

- Having a 48-hour sub-event first was confusing. Do I clear six times? 12 times? Some arbitrary number of times? It turns out that the 48-hour nodes have the same six-hit limit as 24-hours. So probably just six times? This is another area where expected number of clears needed for LT progression could be a lot clearer.

- Speaking of, why back-load PvE events so much? Currently you can pretty much skip the first day or two and still LT. Having each day worth equal points so that I could look at EotS, for example, and see that I need 156,000 for my LT and divide by seven for approximately 22286 points per day and know whether I'm on track or not would be much better than the current system. As is, I'm starting Day 4 and have 31003 points and have no clue whether I'm way behind or about on par. That doesn't seem like very many but I've cleared a ton of nodes so who knows?

- I'm firmly in 2-star land with four championed 2-stars and my most covered 3-star having eight covers. I've found the challenge level to be good. I've failed a couple times on the harder nodes when the computer has gotten five-matches and cascades (either through my fault or bad luck) but I haven't felt like I've hit any of those walls like the Juggernaut + 2x Muscle or Hood/Muscle/DABullseye from Day 1 of Rocket and Groot were. I haven't had to use any boosts yet. I didn't really care for the old trivial nodes. Even when I messed up, I took insignificant damage so they were more of a chore to get through than a puzzle.

- On the other hand, now that everything is at a challenging level, I do take a lot more incidental damage (especially caltrops, why caltrops?!?). I've gone from steamrolling clears and maybe having to burn health packs on the required character and last few hard nodes to needing to health pack a few times as I go. Since I need to clear everything six times, that's a lot of health packs and ultimately leads to me needing to play a lot more at approximately eight-hour intervals as my characters heal and health packs refresh.

Overall, if this is binary--I would rather keep the old way of PvE. If I could make my dream PvE I would have: the new scaling, the old eight-hour/three-clear rotation, and make every day worth equal points.

Keegan

So on the one hand, \o/ all the people that bailed from the sub to play pvp, which allowed me to finish t200. The top ten still had over 40k points.

On the other hand, dammit, everyone went to play pvp and my ranking tanked overnight without shield and the scaling monster struck

fmftint

mazerat wrote:

I'm sure these thoughts have been said but I feel like writing out my feedback is more effective than just +1'ing other peoples'. Some are test related, some are PvE related, and one is EotS specific:

- Enemy of the State needs a rework. Wave nodes that only have a drop the first time you clear but are worth twice as many progress points are major feelbads. Am I intended to clear the wave nodes six or seven times like I do with the others or just once? It seems unclear.

Only going to address this point, Survival nodes, like Join Forces nodes, should trigger 24 hour recharge after a single play through, not 6

MojoWild

Seems like every command point node has been making me complete it 6-7 times to pop out the command point. By then I'm into hard level territory. Yay?

Unknown

End of Sub 2 grind coming up followed by 6 clears of sub 3 and I'm already burnt out...and there's still 4 days left...

Moon Roach

I find the unstructured "play when you want" model means I play less, because the structure has gone. I could stick to the old schedule, even though it's suboptimum, but I find I can't be bothered, especially as the fights are scaling from "fun yet challenging" to "insane health pack drain" / "lose if you blink". I'd rather do something else, whether it's PvP or even something not MPQ-related. Like family.

If this is the future, I'll certainly no longer be competitive in PvE.

Unknown

Also I have to question why they picked 6 clears...It made at least some sense in the first sub, but shouldn't the 24 hour subs have dropped to 3 clears required?

bbf2

I hate this. It feels like a burden. Before, I would be able to clear the nodes when the sub started and feel a sense of accomplishment, because I've done all I can do so far optimally and can now focus on PVP or DPD or something (or do something else, or sleep) while I'm waiting for the 8 hours reset, then do it again. But now I'm expected to clear each node a million times, which is just not feasible given the scaling that forces me to only use a few characters and lack of healthpacks.

So I never get that feeling of accomplishment anymore, because no matter what I can give, every time I play I still fall way short of what you're supposed to be doing in order to do well.

Implementing this new grind strategy while also removing the easy nodes (where I could actually use different combinations of characters and try to have fun with my roster) is an absolutely brutal 1-2 punch. Each one of them would be more bearable on their own but still bad. If I was able to use my roster diversity to actually do the full 6-time clear of a node that's fixed at level 55 that would be a little bit better.

There is no way that using the exact same characters to play the same node multiple times in a row, and then having it feel like you're STILL coming up short and have no sense of accomplishment or satisfaction, is totally horrible, and it makes it feel like a chore.

wymtime

So round 3 comes around and I decide to play this round similar to what I would play normal PVE. The easy nodes with underleveld buffed 4* and 3*. My nodes started at level 220. I decided to use my 150 iceman 4,2,5 Psylock, hood for the fist 2 nodes. Worked really well as iceman stun was huge. First survival mode Blade and 121 Spider-Man, 120 falcon. Got rolling and cleared just fine. Now for the hard nodes I used Dare Devil, Cyclops, Hood. This was a fun team as I moved cyclops to 5 in yellow. I got trap tiles out and was flooding the board with red. DD stun was again huge as atamantium slash was nullified right away. Hood did die on the 2nd node as it was the 4th match he was in. Now the last survival mode with the same survival mode team. All I can say is Caltrops. Yup caltrops killed me so quickly it was not even funny. I went back an winfinity the survival node and almost killed my team with caltrops.
In the essentials the survival mode I used Psylock, and Hood with Beast. Once I got Beast o heal a couple of times I had enough shields to deal with turn to smoke. The scaling on caltrops and turn to smoke are so huge it makes it difficult to keep hitting the waves.

Overall I was able to do a full clear without my A team. Th problem would be is if I was going to do all clears necessary. The health pack drain would be gross. I will continue to play EOTS but it will be one full clear and then CP hunting. I might do so ISO hunting as well, but the scaling is still to hi for me to attempt to place in this event. It will be just way to grindy for me to get that many clears in.