You are going to lose... eventually

Options
2

Comments

  • JVReal
    JVReal Posts: 1,884 Chairperson of the Boards
    Options
    Maybe they did want the scaling to be too high to do an end of sub grind...but if they wanted to deter that... why not eliminate it?

    What if they were full points for 7 rounds, then only 20 points after that? Will people feel obligated to grind for 48 full hours because there is no refresh timer forcing them to break for efficiency? That would be a more interesting test to me than this scaling one...
  • GrumpySmurf1002
    GrumpySmurf1002 Posts: 3,511 Chairperson of the Boards
    Options

    That's the strategy that's been in place, not the new one. Maybe if you were a PvE only player, you might be surprised by that - but that's the definition of how PvP works, and I've skipped your name enough times to recognize you as a PvP player. There are always going to be players at a disadvantage - we usually call them Steam players, har har /sob - and people with less cash to spend will almost always have to be better to overcome those who are flush with cash when it comes to competitions where money can affect the outcome.

    In a PvP environment, I don't really have an issue with that concept.

    Now we all know PvE is really just PvP w/ stories; and so maybe it was inevitable that they'd tweak the design such that those financial advantages play a more pivotal role. However, that's a pretty big culture change from what has come to be the norm.

    From my perspective, competitive PvE sucked before and will suck after, and I've had my fill pretty much. I'm just annoyed that farming Iso in PvE just became a helluva lot harder. A resource that rare becoming even more scarce through artificially assigned difficulty is worth the ire, IMO.


    Edit: Just to add one more point, the interesting part to me is that Simulator is running and is arguably the best event at giving us "challenging but doable." Good character combos, difficulty levels spaced where you can use more of your roster, etc. I've had to dig out the tacos to get health packs to finish clearing the Iso, but it's never felt overwhelming, and there are the easy nodes to give a breather. If they can achieve that with every PvE, then it's a start.
  • wymtime
    wymtime Posts: 3,757 Chairperson of the Boards
    Options
    The biggest thing that is happening in PVE is the devs have gotten rid of the trivial nodes. These battles will now be harder and more difficult to grind down. The higher scaling nodes will have more health and the reality is players will just use more IM40/cap or 4thor, or winfinity, or 4thor Loki storm combos. The harder nodes will be at higher levels and will encourage players to use cheep combos. The old trivial nodes will be about depth of your roster so you don't have to use your A team all the time.
    I get what the devs are doing with wanting to eliminate to trivial nodes and the fact that there is no timers is good. my question is what is going to happen to soft cappers or intentionally have kept their rosters low for PVE? Since lower levels are going to scale up faster it sounds like they are going to be really punished. The other people being punished are transitioners who are getting their first or second 4* to 270. These players will start out at much higher scaling and will have much less depth to play with.
    Worst of all is the rewards are exactly the same. Harder nodes same rewards. So now players will boost on the old trivial nodes and cause the transition to take longer. If the ISO rewards were much higher going forward it might be worth the difficulty
  • carrion_pigeons
    carrion_pigeons Posts: 942 Critical Contributor
    Options
    The strategy becoming more nuanced can only be a good thing as far as I'm concerned. But two points:

    1) If the scaling starts high and goes crazy high, then there isn't much strategy involved. You use your best team until you cant anymore and then you're done. Intra-team synergy doesn't mean much if you're going to lose all your HP before you can do anything.

    2) Even if we agree in principle that the game can be more fun if it's more strategic, the game *won't* be so fun that I'm willing to spend more time on it. If they want me to have more fun that's great, but they need to find ways for me to cram that fun into the available time. 2 hours is a lot of time to commit to something every single day already; if the strategy starts to become relevant after that point, then it doesn't mean squat.

    I think the changes in this PvE are good in principle, but there needs to be a much more broad spectrum of difficulty from the beginning to the end, and they need to reduce the requirements for progression rewards to where they take a reasonable amount of time to get. Six full clears per day is more than was ever necessary before, and that was when doing six full clears in a day was much easier than it is now. Four full clears in a day was good enough for max progression before, and it still should be.
  • Warbringa
    Warbringa Posts: 1,295 Chairperson of the Boards
    Options
    Slarow wrote:
    And you are going to need to learn to avoid losing by being strategic. Something you have never needed to do before in PVE.

    I think everyone is missing the point with the PVE changes. Everyone is used to "play at optimal times, win basically every fight, and get a good placement". The only "Strategy" was timing your playing and winning fast. Losing never happened.

    The new scheme means that you are going to lose, and people need to adjust to that. Those who are talking about the game now requiring you to grind each node 11 times in a row are missing the point. You won't be able to grind 11 times in a row, because the nodes will get so hard that you will run out of health packs before this happens.

    The strategy now is to fight smart, take on teams that you can defeat, and if you can't defeat them don't try or end up losing your health packs.

    The barrier you run up against now isn't 8 hour timing or 1 point nodes, the barrier is teams you can't defeat or ones who actually cost you your health packs. Consequently, those who fight smarter, or have better equipped rosters, are those who will make placement rewards. Previously, the game rewarded those who could grind optimally every 8 hours. Now it rewards actual in-game strategy (team choices), not meta-strategy.

    The trade-off is that you are going to have to get used to losing more often, and learn to avoid it strategically.

    No the trade off is you don't get nearly as much iso and other rewards since you can't clear as many nodes. The majority of value from PvE is progression and node rewards, not placement.
  • firethorne
    firethorne Posts: 1,505 Chairperson of the Boards
    Options
    "You are supposed to lose" worked so well with Galactus that they rolled it back immediately. I'd like to think they're not so dense as to go back to that well, although I do agree that appears to be the plan.

    Yeah, the last time they pulled this, "You're supposed to lose" ****, the forums were on fire for days. Yet, now they do it again. I cannot comprehend how they listened to months of pleas to fix scalings and decided to make all matches more difficult, and further increase in difficulty with each win.

    Once I can write off as incompetence, but to go back to that well after the Galactus tinykitty show is simply malevolent.
  • Dauthi
    Dauthi Posts: 995 Critical Contributor
    Options
    OJSP wrote:
    Slarow wrote:
    The difficulty is increased with this change, that's the whole point and what people are complaining about. Your assumption is that you will be able to defeat the highest difficulty in the new setup. It will be harder to start, and get even harder each time you defeat a node.
    Look, I've already said, with Charlie's Angels, it doesn't matter how high your enemy levels are.. you could beat the Gauntlet enemies at level 395 with a 166 SW, 140 GSBW and 166 Prof X. It doesn't matter how strong they are, if they can't get any move except the first one.

    So, I'm going with my original opinion, that unless they change the opponent in this event, you could beat all of them with Charlie's Angels. It only loses to Jean Grey and the insane match damage of 5*s. It will cost a lot of health packs and take a long time.

    I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on this matter. Let me know who wins your bracket at the end of the event.

    I agree with Slarow on the new dynamics of PVE, and as I stated before it actually feels like puzzle quest. It's not this new approach to a challenging PVE that is broken, it's a combo which can virtually win any battle. The initial Galactus event should have proven that since you instantly died in (3?) turns, yet players were winning with this combo. The harder the challenge the more broken "Charlie's Angels" (Professor X, Grey Suit Black Widow, and Scarlet Witch) are.

    If the ISO gains were increased as levels increased, this is a better model for PVE in my opinion.
    firethorne wrote:
    "You are supposed to lose" worked so well with Galactus that they rolled it back immediately. I'd like to think they're not so dense as to go back to that well, although I do agree that appears to be the plan.

    Yeah, the last time they pulled this, "You're supposed to lose" ****, the forums were on fire for days. Yet, now they do it again.

    I can see you don't like the changes, but this is nothing on the level of Galactus where you would instantly die in a few turns...
    JVReal wrote:
    Maybe they did want the scaling to be too high to do an end of sub grind...but if they wanted to deter that... why not eliminate it?

    What if they were full points for 7 rounds, then only 20 points after that? Will people feel obligated to grind for 48 full hours because there is no refresh timer forcing them to break for efficiency? That would be a more interesting test to me than this scaling one...

    Because this wouldn't separate players enough towards the top. D3 has expressed concerns in the past about how players points need to seperate to create gaps where they don't finish a nose hair above another player(s). What you propose would make a majority of the top players quit after 7 rounds, creating a giant bubble of players with the same amount of points.

    This current system (if not for the "winfinite") would seperate the players towards the top very efficiently, but even with it, it should do it fairly well compared to the old model.
  • ClydeFrog76
    ClydeFrog76 Posts: 1,350 Chairperson of the Boards
    Options
    Polares wrote:
    I love Dark Souls games, you die a lot, but it is a fair game, you lose because you made a mistake, not because the game 'cheated' you,

    I think 2 liked to cheat with artificial difficulty at pretty much every opportunity it got (Ruin Sentinels anyone?) but I appreciate your point.
  • Lopan15
    Lopan15 Posts: 225 Tile Toppler
    Options
    wymtime wrote:
    The biggest thing that is happening in PVE is the devs have gotten rid of the trivial nodes. These battles will now be harder and more difficult to grind down. The higher scaling nodes will have more health and the reality is players will just use more IM40/cap or 4thor, or winfinity, or 4thor Loki storm combos. The harder nodes will be at higher levels and will encourage players to use cheep combos. The old trivial nodes will be about depth of your roster so you don't have to use your A team all the time.
    I get what the devs are doing with wanting to eliminate to trivial nodes and the fact that there is no timers is good. my question is what is going to happen to soft cappers or intentionally have kept their rosters low for PVE? Since lower levels are going to scale up faster it sounds like they are going to be really punished. The other people being punished are transitioners who are getting their first or second 4* to 270. These players will start out at much higher scaling and will have much less depth to play with.
    Worst of all is the rewards are exactly the same. Harder nodes same rewards. So now players will boost on the old trivial nodes and cause the transition to take longer. If the ISO rewards were much higher going forward it might be worth the difficulty


    I just champed HB and TeenJean in the last 2 weeks and I'm trying to get enough ISO to champ Bobby ice. I've done 3 clears (started at 11 am central US time). If I don't use winfinite IM40/Lcap or Bobby/Jean, I get beat down hard. Even with those teams I'm wiping a third of the time. (How many times can I get a yellow starved board when using IM40? 6 nodes in a row.). I'm facing 320-330 lvl teams already. If in 2 days I hit the second round and am facing maxed teams the rest of the way and wiping more than half the time (while having to use only my best teams) the reward will not be worth the time spent and I will probably just drop out. Just have to wait and see how much worse it gets. Holding out hope it doesn't get unmanageable.
  • Dauthi
    Dauthi Posts: 995 Critical Contributor
    Options
    OJSP wrote:
    Dauthi wrote:
    I agree with Slarow on the new dynamics of PVE, and as I stated before it actually feels like puzzle quest. It's not this new approach to a challenging PVE that is broken, it's a combo which can virtually win any battle. The initial Galactus event should have proven that since you instantly died in (3?) turns, yet players were winning with this combo. The harder the challenge the more broken "Charlie's Angels" (Professor X, Grey Suit Black Widow, and Scarlet Witch) are.

    If the ISO gains were increased as levels increased, this is a better model for PVE in my opinion.
    I didn't use Galactus Hungers part 1 as an example, because:
    1. our alliance only got to round 6
    2. to reliably beat Galactus, you'd need to force close the app in round 6 or 7.. which I wasn't prepared to do.. and,
    3. In round 8, I believe having Hulk instead helped? I know in part 2, I used Hulk, Storm and Luke Cage from round 1 to round 8 without losing even once.

    I never really enjoyed using Charlie's Angels. Nowadays, I'm using other teams that are faster and more sustainable. Typically, I'd use 12-15 characters per event.

    In the first sub of EotS, I've done 1 clear and got the 2 CPs in 45 minutes, with 3 health packs in total. I only had 2 leftover from the last event. However, I only used 6-7 characters in total (including the Essential ones), none named Prof X, GSBW or SW. I played the hardest node 4 times to get the CP and the Ghost Rider essential 3 times. Wolverine never had any opportunity to Slash my team even once. If I tried using the other characters I used in this event before, they wouldn't last very long.

    I think it won't be much of a problem grinding the nodes 6 or 7 times if I wanted to buy some health packs. There's just too many Caltrops. It's either that, or taking an Adamantium Slash or two. Also, I've decided even before knowing about the changes and the fact that the CP is at 156k, that I'm not going to play the survival nodes more than once per sub.

    Observing my leaderboard, the leader is probably on their 4th clear of the nodes with just over 10000 points. Their roster is predominantly championed 3*s, with 3 5*s (270,270,255) with 3 covers at most and one 4* at 250. Our usual bracket winner who has 3 maxed championed 5*s and a full 4* roster, is 4th with 8451.

    I'm guessing a player with mainly 3* characters have more options to beat their opponents than a player with max & championed 5* and 4*s.

    The first rendition of Galactus, Hulk didn't help in round 8. Someone correct me if I am wrong, but unless you cleared something like 3 of his countdown tiles, you would die in turn 4. The only way to win was force close to get a lucky game with "Charlie's Angels".

    Keep checking the top people in your bracket. They should eveventually have either 5*s or a underleveled Professor X to use the charlies angels combo.
  • Vhailorx
    Vhailorx Posts: 6,085 Chairperson of the Boards
    Options
    Sorry to say that you are wrong dauthi. Only hulk or force quitting worked in rounds 7 and 8 of galactus.

    Galactus killed everyone on round 3 unless you removed 3+ countdown (and he spawned 3 or 4 every turn). So he would kill everyone before switch's countdown would go off.

    Force quitting allowed players to restart every match, at the price of a few healthpacks. And using hulk might let you win straight up becuae each countdown did enough damage to trigger his passive. Then you have to hope that the tiles spawned enough match-5s to get gsbw/Prof X rolling. But it wasn't 100%
  • Dauthi
    Dauthi Posts: 995 Critical Contributor
    edited March 2016
    Options
    Vhailorx wrote:
    You are wrong dauthi. Only hulk or force quitting worked in rounds 7 and 8 of galactus.

    Galactus killed everyone on round 3 unless you removed 3+ countdown land he spawn 3 or 4 every turn). So he would kill everyone before switch's countdown would go off.

    Force quitting allowed players to restart every match, at the price of a few healthpacks. And using hulk might let you win straight up becuae each countdown did enough damage to trigger his passive. Then you have to hope that the tiles spawned enough match-5s to get gsbw/Prof X rolling. But it wasn't 100%

    You mean swapping Scarlet Witch for Hulk. That is still abusing the same combo (Prof X/ Grey Suit) because Scarlet Witch is only there to start it faster. Hulk would do that easier in this scenario.
    OJSP wrote:
    Dauthi wrote:
    Check the top people in your bracket. They should have either 5*s or a underleveled Professor X to use the charlies angels combo.
    I've done that.. it would just make my post longer. But, since you've asked:

      I edited my post for clarity, but I meant keep checking. It is still pretty early to find the leaders in the event.
    • Lopan15
      Lopan15 Posts: 225 Tile Toppler
      Options
      OJSP wrote:
      Dauthi wrote:
      I agree with Slarow on the new dynamics of PVE, and as I stated before it actually feels like puzzle quest. It's not this new approach to a challenging PVE that is broken, it's a combo which can virtually win any battle. The initial Galactus event should have proven that since you instantly died in (3?) turns, yet players were winning with this combo. The harder the challenge the more broken "Charlie's Angels" (Professor X, Grey Suit Black Widow, and Scarlet Witch) are.

      If the ISO gains were increased as levels increased, this is a better model for PVE in my opinion.
      I didn't use Galactus Hungers part 1 as an example, because:
      1. our alliance only got to round 6
      2. to reliably beat Galactus, you'd need to force close the app in round 6 or 7.. which I wasn't prepared to do.. and,
      3. In round 8, I believe having Hulk instead helped? I know in part 2, I used Hulk, Storm and Luke Cage from round 1 to round 8 without losing even once.

      I never really enjoyed using Charlie's Angels. Nowadays, I'm using other teams that are faster and more sustainable. Typically, I'd use 12-15 characters per event.

      In the first sub of EotS, I've done 1 clear and got the 2 CPs in 45 minutes, with 3 health packs in total. I only had 2 leftover from the last event. However, I only used 6-7 characters in total (including the Essential ones), none named Prof X, GSBW or SW. I played the hardest node 4 times to get the CP and the Ghost Rider essential 3 times. Wolverine never had any opportunity to Slash my team even once. If I tried using the other characters I used in this event before, they wouldn't last very long.

      I think it won't be much of a problem grinding the nodes 6 or 7 times if I wanted to buy some health packs. There's just too many Caltrops. It's either that, or taking an Adamantium Slash or two. Also, I've decided even before knowing about the changes and the fact that the CP is at 156k, that I'm not going to play the survival nodes more than once per sub.

      Observing my leaderboard, the leader is probably on their 4th clear of the nodes with just over 10000 points. Their roster is predominantly championed 3*s, with 3 5*s (270,270,255) with 3 covers at most and one 4* at 250. Our usual bracket winner who has 3 maxed championed 5*s and a full 4* roster, is 4th with 8451.

      I'm guessing a player with mainly 3* characters have more options to beat their opponents than a player with max & championed 5* and 4*s.
      Lopan15 wrote:
      If I don't use winfinite IM40/Lcap or Bobby/Jean, I get beat down hard. Even with those teams I'm wiping a third of the time. (How many times can I get a yellow starved board when using IM40? 6 nodes in a row.).
      6 times in a row is a lot.. but I'm puzzled, you've worded it as such you're using IM40 with Lcap in one team and Bobby/Jean in another? I think you're close to making a very strong team there.. (and I think we've got a very similar scaling)


      I use IM40 Lcap for the essentials. I've been pairing them with TeenJean sometimes. Is that what you mean? It's a good team but still wiped twice with the no yellow boards. Bobby and Jean + 3cyc has worked good twice badly twice.
    • Vhailorx
      Vhailorx Posts: 6,085 Chairperson of the Boards
      Options
      Dauthi, I don't see how that changes the basic facts.

      In the first run of galactus, the only way to reach the final level was to (1) use a variation of a winfinite team (sometimes you could also win with xfw + if if you could get enough so to start a board shake cycle), AND (exploit mechanics of the game when you got bad luck.

      It was a terrible design choice. "Your supposed to lose" is a bad design when the game rewards only happen if you win AND there are significant play-gate penalties for losing.
    • Captain_Carlman
      Captain_Carlman Posts: 208 Tile Toppler
      Options
      To me, it sounds like the only way this could work is if they run multiple difficulties of the same event with the rewards adjusted accordingly. Sort of how they used to do with the Simulator, oddly enough. I think it would be the best way for each level of play to progress with rewards appropriate to grow at an organic rate.

      But we can't have that now, can we?
    • Redrobot30
      Redrobot30 Posts: 348 Mover and Shaker
      Options
      "OJSP wrote:
      I just want to add, basically, with the newly proposed system, once you're leading the pack in the first 3 hours of the sub (assuming you've cleared all the nodes 7 times), you'll win the sub if you could grind the last 2 hours of the event (or as long as you started later than your competitors).

      So, anyone who's willing to buy health packs during the beginning of the sub will likely win the sub and subsequently the event. Just pick a slice where you're available to play for one block of 5-6 hours.. then you're good. That's the strategy.

      This was my experience so far. I went away from my usual time slice and joined one that I knew I would have ample time to dedicate a long grind. The few of us in my bracket that grinded out the nodes to refresh are pretty much guaranteed top placement. So the new norm (if this is how PvE will run) is to sprint out and do a long grind. All the while hoping you get lucky with great boards and cascades so you don't burn health packs too fast. After that it's a leisure stroll to pick off nodes. Top placement will now be for crazy people.

      I will agree with Slarow that I enjoy that the way this test is playing rewards those who play smarter by using strategy to reduce damage from the enemies so you can continue with the same team and not burn through HP. 3* Cap/Kamala/IM40 pretty much got me through the entire grind. Sitting pretty at #1 right now!! icon_eek.gif
    • Dauthi
      Dauthi Posts: 995 Critical Contributor
      Options
      Vhailorx wrote:
      Dauthi, I don't see how that changes the basic facts.

      In the first run of galactus, the only way to reach the final level was to (1) use a variation of a winfinite team (sometimes you could also win with xfw + if if you could get enough so to start a board shake cycle), AND (exploit mechanics of the game when you got bad luck.

      It was a terrible design choice. "Your supposed to lose" is a bad design when the game rewards only happen if you win AND there are significant play-gate penalties for losing.

      You can "win" fine if you are in the upper echelons of players, ie the 5* players. This would not have been true in Galactus, because while being very strong, 5*s don't infinitely chain their abilities to stop a death that will occcur in 3 turns.

      Let's look at other games for an example, you can't expect to play on "Hell Mode" in Diablo if you are lvl 1, or 5, or 20 etc. You have to level up and earn the right to play on the harder difficulties. I believe the developers are trying to do something similar here because they are making the opponents scale slower than your roster does. You can't expect to do full clears if you don't have a 5* roster, unless you have the winfinite combo. Like I said earlier, that is the big problem.
    • Esheris
      Esheris Posts: 216 Tile Toppler
      Options
      It would be worth losing if the rewards felt worthy of me losing. It just feels like a waste of time for 100 Iso. Each time you beat one of these difficult nodes then Iso rewards need to go up as well (or even reward Vault Tokens, lets make things FUN).

      Difficulty should be rewarded.
    • Xenoberyll
      Xenoberyll Posts: 647 Critical Contributor
      Options
      Slarow wrote:
      If everyone could beat every mission (as was true of the previous setup), then there is no strategy other than the meta-strategy of 8 hour cycle and grinding.

      I guess you missed the many posts asking on how to beat Magneto/Hood in TaT or Iceman/Thing/Scarlet Witch in Sim...and the many others in various events. I don't think the high level nodes in PVE were so easy it was no question if you'd win. I have a decent roster but i was using health packs fairly often in the old mode.

      It maybe true they want to separate the best players/biggest spenders by making nodes harder each win, but the way they're doing it is far from fun and people have posted countless times how to do it better.
    • Ruibarian
      Ruibarian Posts: 13 Just Dropped In
      Options
      I think a lot of people here are missing the obvious solution: Make PvE actually PvE and stop giving out the end rewards based on how many players you're ahead of... That's just PvP where you're fighting the same teams. If everything was a progression reward like Gauntlet, we wouldn't have to care about whether or not someone was burning health packs to get to first place.