Ok, new PvE is bad but can we save it?

Polares

After playing for a day in my humble opinion this is not an improvement for PvE in any way, now it is so much worse for EVERYBODY.

After this sentence I think Devs have three options moving forward:

- Go back as how it was before.
- Change PvE completely to progression level events where you can complete each node 3-7 times to get max score and points don't regenerate until next sub, and you can play the nodes whenever you want
- Fix the current change.

This thread is about the last one, so lets try to come up for solutions for a fix to what we currently have, if there is any.

- I think that Easy nodes need to come back, they were great to relax, to try new combos and to use old chars, so they need to come back.
- Scaling needs to be reduced a little in general, specially in the higher part of the curve. 94 teams CAN'T have an easier time than teams of maxed 4s. Progression should be 'awarded', not penalized.
- Reduce the number of completions from 6 to 4-3 until points start going down AND to 4 the number of completions to get points to 1. This would amount to needing around 7-8 clears close to when the sub ends for a perfect score, which is much better than 11. That would reduce the time needed A LOT (more time reduction if we have the easy nodes again). And 7-8 clears is much close to what we needed in the old system (It was 8 times isnt it? 1-1-6)

I don't know if even with those changes I would prefer this new system to the old one, but at least it would make the changes much better. I like the ability of playing whenver I want but I don't think this system reaches this goal.

PS: I would probably prefer to go for a progression system, but devs want competition so I think this is not an option.

thanos8587

my biggest problem is time required. they use a week long event (which already sucks in terms of lower rewards compared to 4 day/3 day format), an event which already has high difficulty due to ninjas being very strong coupled with an inordinate number of goon feed nodes, then they ramp the difficulty 50% , increase the number of clears to compete for top 100 by 50% and say go.

all for the same awards as before. thank you but no. its not that i cant beat it, i just dont want to. see you next thursday.

firethorne

They absolutely need more "Growth Industries" type events. Those were wonderful. I'm not saying they need to up and torch the old competitive PvE immediately, but a 50/50 split or concurrent events is in order.

Though, at this rate, I'm not convinced they wouldn't make new ones too brutal for all but max 4&5* teams. They seem to have forgotten about transitioner.

Green83

Things I would like to see:

- Static points per node can stay
- Keep the trivial nodes as they were so we can also play with our lower covered chars
- Rewards only progression based (and add some reward covers there) (3 full clears = LT like it was before), but maybe add some covers for 4,5 and 6 clears.
- Placement bonus only for alliances to keep them relevant
- Not too health pack intensive difficulty wise, I like to play this relaxing and not make it to stressful.

Rogan_Josh

I think you've forgotten an option that reads "it's okay, nothing much has changed for me".

Honestly i don't think this new PvE is in anyway bad, it's not great either though. Nothing stands out as wow! There are some issues being raised but i think that may be more of a problem with the new scaling than the layout of the "optimal run" now. (FYI it's still a boring grind for sub-par rewards).

If we're listing suggestions:

- I'd highly recommend upping the progression rewards a bit, making PvE a more attractive option compared to PvP which lets face it, is a hell of the lot faster.

- Adding some more non-competitive PvE on the side, mix things up a bit but still allow people to earn stuff for their alliance maybe?

Who knows what they'll do about PvE but i guarantee they won't change anything without data. If you hate the new PvE refuse to play it.

Esheris

Polares wrote:

- Change PvE

....to be a PvE and not another type of PvP! ^_^

SnowcaTT

Here is my fix that I suggested on Page 14 of the discussion thread:

What if every node was "trivial" (way, way easier than currently) - but then each of those first seven times the difficulty increased by 20 levels instead of 10(ish)?

You could be playing level 20 through level 120 guys round one, and they would be level 160-260 when you get around to the end grind of them. Not tough enough? Increase by 25 levels each time, 195-295. Or 30 levels each time, or 40, 50....this could easily be adjusted in this test.

Sounds like this would solve lots of the issues out there:

Folks who want easy ISO for a few rounds could get it.
Folks who want shorter grinds would get it until they get past hitting the nodes the first five times.
The end tougher levels would still be a challenge for those who want the challenge.
The early levels wouldn't be so brutal for those who don't want that challenge.
Those end grinds on a harder difficulty would still determine placement (though no one seems to like that....)

Scaling from easy -> difficult (even very difficult) doesn't seem like it would offend. Scaling from difficult -> are you kidding?....that is what people seem to be having the problem with.

Polares

SnowcaTT wrote:

Here is my fix that I suggested on Page 14 of the discussion thread:

What if every node was "trivial" (way, way easier than currently) - but then each of those first seven times the difficulty increased by 20 levels instead of 10(ish)?

You could be playing level 20 through level 120 guys round one, and they would be level 160-260 when you get around to the end grind of them. Not tough enough? Increase by 25 levels each time, 195-295. Or 30 levels each time, or 40, 50....this could easily be adjusted in this test.

Sounds like this would solve lots of the issues out there:

Folks who want easy ISO for a few rounds could get it.
Folks who want shorter grinds would get it until they get past hitting the nodes the first five times.
The end tougher levels would still be a challenge for those who want the challenge.
The early levels wouldn't be so brutal for those who don't want that challenge.
Those end grinds on a harder difficulty would still determine placement (though no one seems to like that....)

Scaling from easy -> difficult (even very difficult) doesn't seem like it would offend. Scaling from difficult -> are you kidding?....that is what people seem to be having the problem with.

The problem of this is that it would probably make scaling for people trying to compete for best prices a nightmare. In fact it reminds me A LOT of community scaling.

And in my case, your supposition is wrong, my problem is not that it starts at 200 and gets to 350 instead of beginning at 100 and finishing at 350, the problem is that it finishes at 350 !!! And then, to make things even worse, for 94 level teams it just finishes at 110, which makes life for them so much easier, and discourages leveling your chars, which I find completely stupid.

Then we have much higher difficulty nodes but the same rewards. This is something that doesn't make in sense for me either.

Figure15

All the complaining about trivial, easy, normal and hard the Devs will prob just drop the labels altogether... Problem solved.

spectator

I believe scaling in this event is more based on number of covers for characters, not character level. Soft cappers will be hit hard in this event

truxcer

- Either add rewards to wave nodes, or make them 1-time only.
- rewards should be function of time/resources spent. Since we spend at least 50% more time/health packs now, increase ISO/HP rewards accordingly. And replace stupid crit boost already.

Dragon_Nexus

Someone in the main thread suggested having this as an optional type of PvE.

The way this PvE test is structured would work really, really well as progression only. Gauntlet style. You can't just grind and grind away on the first day and get what you want, but you also don't need to regiment yourself to playing every 8 hours. By itself, it's not a bad system.

What screws it up is placement rewards. Because if you want to place well, you need to clear each sub event a minimum of 6 times within 24 hours. So a complete clear every 4 hours, which is only slightly better than the old 2.5 hour refresh timer we used to have with the added 'benefit' of the nodes getting noticably harder with each clear and all of them being around the same difficulty.

If we had the old system as placement orientated and the new system as progression only it could work. You'd need to change the progression rewards to reflect this by offering more ISO and covers, also finishing with at least one 4* cover. You can make it mutually exclusive so you don't feel forced into playing two PvEs simultaniously. Give people the option right at the start. I know I would definitely play PvE that was progression only with a nice 4* cover reward at the end. You could still have a manner of placement, but not competitive. Say the whole thing if you REALLY pushed yourself was worth 60k (the equivilent of finishing top 10). If you finish with 10,000 points, you get a 3* cover. 20,000 gets you two. 30,000 gets you three. 40,000 gets you a 4* cover, 50,000 gets you two 4* covers. That kinda thing, just throwing random numbers out as an example.

Using the current system as a replacement for the old system though? Absolutely not. I really do not feel like clearing a sub event completely 6 times a day.

SnowcaTT

Polares wrote:

The problem of this is that it would probably make scaling for people trying to compete for best prices a nightmare. In fact it reminds me A LOT of community scaling.

And in my case, your supposition is wrong, my problem is not that it starts at 200 and gets to 350 instead of beginning at 100 and finishing at 350, the problem is that it finishes at 350 !!! And then, to make things even worse, for 94 level teams it just finishes at 110, which makes life for them so much easier, and discourages leveling your chars, which I find completely stupid.

Then we have much higher difficulty nodes but the same rewards. This is something that doesn't make in sense for me either.

I'm thinking more that they would be able to adjust.

If the extreme end scaling we see now is what they want (God knows why), at least you'd have easy nodes to start with that take less time and everyone could do - with higher +levels each success it could start incredibly low and end incredibly high.

But they could also see the outcry, and simply take that +levels down a bit to be able to easily keep the easy nodes, and make the extreme scaling more "tough, but possible by most"

One complaint I've seen is newbies winning brackets due to easy scaling Another thing you could do with this system is put everything on progressions instead of placement. Very loose example, if your ten nodes started at 5-50 (each node going up by base five levels, and in this example giving +40 levels each time they level, and assuming "beat each node" includes essentials):

5-50 : beat each node once, get a 2* (2* transition)
45-90 : beat each node twice, get another 2* (2* finishing transition to 144s)
85-130 : beat each node three times, get the 3* (3* transition)
125-170 : beat each node four times, get another 3* (3* finishing transition to 166s)
165-210 : beat each node five times, get some CP (4* slow transition)
205-250 : beat each node six times, get a specific 4* (4* transition)
235-280 : beat each node seven times, get a LT. (4* finishing transition, slow 5* transition)
[Grind those at the end] : another LT (5*'s, grinding the difficult end may require you to be there)

You could simply change the +40 to +50 to make this much, much harder (295-340). Or +30 to make it much, much easier. You could put your tokens/iso/boosts in between the "big" rewards. You could eliminate the multiple brackets!

Polares

SnowcaTT wrote:

...

5-50 : beat each node once, get a 2* (2* transition)
45-90 : beat each node twice, get another 2* (2* finishing transition to 144s)
85-130 : beat each node three times, get the 3* (3* transition)
125-170 : beat each node four times, get another 3* (3* finishing transition to 166s)
165-210 : beat each node five times, get some CP (4* slow transition)
205-250 : beat each node six times, get a specific 4* (4* transition)
235-280 : beat each node seven times, get a LT. (4* finishing transition, slow 5* transition)
[Grind those at the end] : another LT (5*'s, grinding the difficult end may require you to be there)

You could simply change the +40 to +50 to make this much, much harder (295-340). Or +30 to make it much, much easier. You could put your tokens/iso/boosts in between the "big" rewards. You could eliminate the multiple brackets!

Aaaah that is another completely different thing and it would be really cool, a system where depending on the difficulty of the nodes you get different rewards (or scores), I am all for that. But for some reason that only Devs now, they have expressed in more than one occasion that they want the same rewards for all players (which is also quite stupid and counter-intuitive), and that all rewards are accessible by all players.

Not even Gauntlet has different rewards depending on the difficulty of the nodes...

Jarvind

I actually would be fine with this change if they had just eliminated the grind. Do the node as many times as you want, points never change, difficulty increases each time, still 7 rewards per node. Boom.

I'm fine with tough nodes (although losing my A team to a bunch of goons is admittedly infuriating), but increasing the required clears for "optimal" play and keeping me chained to the game's clock, even once per day, just exacerbates what was already the main headache of PvE for me.

I realize with my proposed solution it would still be impossible to beat the crazies who are apparently independently wealthy and have nothing better to do than sit around milking every possible point, but I was never going to beat those guys anyway, so eh.

Phumade

Polares wrote:

This thread is about the last one, so lets try to come up for solutions for a fix to what we currently have, if there is any.

- I think that Easy nodes need to come back, they were great to relax, to try new combos and to use old chars, so they need to come back.
- Scaling needs to be reduced a little in general, specially in the higher part of the curve. 94 teams CAN'T have an easier time than teams of maxed 4s. Progression should be 'awarded', not penalized.

- Reduce the number of completions from 6 to 4-3 until points start going down AND to 4 the number of completions to get points to 1. This would amount to needing around 7-8 clears close to when the sub ends for a perfect score, which is much better than 11. That would reduce the time needed A LOT (more time reduction if we have the easy nodes again). And 7-8 clears is much close to what we needed in the old system (It was 8 times isnt it? 1-1-6)

Overall, the changes are tough but not too bad.

I have a wide and deep 4* roster (8 4* champs, 25 3* champs).

1. The scaling is pretty spot on for my roster in the regular modes. You definitely need to have multiple buffed characters. So if you just rely on jeanbuster, your pretty much screwed. But I can throw out 3 or 4 different "Top Tier" teams. Thats the real secret to winning in pve now.

2. Wave scaling is too high. The goons spam too many CD to reliably stop all of them. I suppose I could reconfigure and relevel other characters to handle survival nodes. I think the real lesson here is that you can't exclusively level your heavy hitters. You absolutely need to max out various support characters who can deal with these types of gimmick nodes.

3. Time wise its actually pretty close to doing a final grind. I pretty much used up most of my hp for Simulator, so I came into the event with only 3 or 4 hp. Excluding the wave nodes, I could easily get the clock running on the remaining nodes in about 2 1/2 to 3 hrs. Would have gone faster if I had started with full hp and full health.

4. Overall, the difficulty has gone up. If you were a Top 1/2 player before the change, you'll still be a top 5 player. With that said, overall PVE play times need to go down not up. I would prefer that they changed it so the clock is running after 3 wins and after the 7th hit, the node closes completely.

5. Overall, an appropriately scaled pve event should only require NO MORE THAN 3 hrs of play per day.

6. I honestly don't understand why they don't just make a randomized endless mode with easier scaling (maybe 70-100 lvs) and 50 iso rewards. Then people can just play casually, when they want and still get modest iso rewards.

madsalad

I was discussing this very topic with my friend this morning. It is definitely fixable but a lot of things need to change. I'm not fully prepared to list everything but some things I've thought of:

If this is the new PVE, the nodes cannot be these 7 random awards and then nothing. Each node should now have its own progression rewards rather than random.
Each node should just scale into infinity, with points increases per each run. None of this "same points for 7 tries and then a 24 hour refresh". Get rid of the grinding aspect. People should be able to just keep playing a node until they hit the wall and physically cannot beat the scenario.
The rewards need to be better.
The full PVE progression rewards need to be more frequent, and along a longer point scale.

There is more that I cannot articulate right now but I'll will be sure to make an entry in the main feedback thread before the end of EotS. In particular the fact that PVE was a good place to grind out the much needed ISO we are all starving for and this new scaling/PVE build cripples that entirely.

Smudge

One thing that would make sense to me instead of the new system is to implement scaling based on the team you bring into each particular fight. In other words, scaling isn't even calculated until it evaluates the 3 characters you are bringing in to play. Instead of evaluating my roster based on my 4 cover lvl 255 Phoenix, 12 cover lvl 200 4Thor, and 11 cover lvl 188 Nick Fury, (this is not including the boosted characters which are obviously floating more around Phoenix's level), it could determine the scaling based on my team of lvl 169-175 champed 3*s that I actually bring into the fight, or to the 250+ boosted champed 3*s I bring along.

The new system hasn't impacted me too harshly since I have Blade, DD, and Hood all champed and boosted, and I have had generally favorable boards. Depending on the boosted characters, however, my 1-4 average cover 4*s roster with 15 championed 3*s is going to be mostly unprepared for the level of scaling I face in spite of the fact that this new scaling is supposed to take the cover level of the best characters into consideration. If Nick is boosted and no decent 3*s are, it is going to annihilate my scaling in an event, and I am generally good for T100 in the PvE events I play.

If scaling considered that I am bringing a 1-cover lvl 70 4* essential up to bat, then having to bring in unboosted 3* champions would not hurt as badly. It would actually help everyone at every point of progression, and you could still base the scaling on the number of clears a player has completed. Coding would not be that major of a change either since you could change where the scaling check takes effect; instead of checking based on the roster, you simply move the check to when the player team is selected, and you can display the AI's levels at that point instead of before a match.

Maybe it's just wishful thinking, though...

hopper1979

The idea is great I cannot tell you how nice it is not having to cycle on every 8 hours to get the reward, but unfortunately the way it is now it is broken and I can play less than normal. First the scaling is off, the level they now start at is too high, if you are a collector, like I am, more cards seem to effect your starting level. I have almost every character, I am missing 1 5 and 2 4's, I have all but 3 3-stars maxed and the starting level for the gray missions is 125. Now this would not be an issue but the raise in difficulty is on average 15 levels for me, so by the time I am 3-4 fights in everything is above lvl 200, I primarily play with 3-stars and this become very difficult to a point when I have to stop playing so they can recover. I am waiting to see if the level resets after the 24 hour period, if it does not this is not going to work. This should be an easy fix if you stop playing a node the enemy level decrease some amount for every hour you do not play, set back down to the original starting level after 6 hours. Yes we are back on a cycle but the level amp is too great and with a recovery time of 3-6 hours for most characters we are cycling anyway.

Again concept good, it is a nice idea but a lot of tweaking is going to be required, right now I am about 6000 points lower than I normally would be at this time.

RoboDuck

Its fixable.

Return the actual "Easy" nodes.

Start initial scaling much much lower, so the increases for beating a node don't end up being insane after a couple wins.

If they want it to be truly "casual", remove the refresh timer altogether.

Remove Placement reward structure with a comprehensive Progression system.

Arimis_Thorn

If they were going for a "play when you want" feel, I MUCH prefer the setup of the Galactus event. They could still do the x number of clears, getting progressively harder, etc. But have the reset be on a shorter schedule. That would alleviate the grind everything down immediately and then wait 24 hours. You could just do your grinds whenever within the 8 hrs so long as you hit them before the reset. It feels less punishing to me.