Tacit acknowledgement of player displeasure?

Vhailorx

When the PvP not test was announced, Mr. Moore said:

The same formula is being used as the current Enemy of the State PVE test. Due to the differences in Story and Versus modes, our hope is that players will find the experience to be an improved one.

Is it me, or does the bold text basically acknowledge that playerbase hated the pve changes?

Do you think the uproar over eots will result in actual change, or just some cosmetic patches over the underlying, okayer-unfriendly shift. The former has happened (4* alliance rewards being pushed from top 50 to top 100 in April 2015), but the latter is much more common.

rawfsu

Always a hard one to call. I must say though, I was impressed with the turnaround on the Galactus event during Anniversary Week. I feel there has definitely been more criticism from the player base surrounding the PVE changes. I also think that since veterans seemed to have been affected the most, a change in PVE will occur. As always, I'm not counting my chickens before they hatch.

CNash

Vocal dislike on the forums is often trumped by the hard data recorded by the devs during the experiment. If their metrics show positive engagement with the new PVE format, this will be used as a reason to make it permanent.

(I'm not expecting it not to be permanent at some point. Someone had to code in that nifty "enemies have leveled up!" display after each fight, as well as the rest of the changes, and in an Agile project structure you can't justify assigning resources to develop something that you might end up scrapping after one week.)

acescracked

The entire player base did not hate the pve test. Just the vocal posters do. Some negatives and some positives. Good "test". I'm hating no rewards in wave nodes but loving doing my initial sub clears when I want to. Scaling is tough but getting through.

BTW, alot of people would still read your opinion if you just quoted in original thread instead of starting a new one. Strange habit in this forum.

Vhailorx

acescracked wrote:

The entire player base did not hate the pve test. Just the vocal posters do. Some negatives and some positives. Good "test". I'm hating no rewards in wave nodes but loving doing my initial sub clears when I want to. Scaling is tough but getting through.

BTW, alot of people would still read your opinion if you just quoted in original thread instead of starting a new one. Strange habit in this forum.

I didn't say everyone hated the changes (though I would unscuentifically say that the comments are overwhelmingly negative). I said there was an uproar and I think that's fair.

Also, this isn't really about the PvP test, or even the PvP test. Its about whether the wording of the PvP test announcement suggested something about the response to the pve test. That seemed sufficiently meta to merit it's own discussion. Feel free to ignore it if a separate thread is a problem for you!

Gwythian

I can tell you just by the amount of players in my slice and other slices that very few players are even hitting progression in this PVE event. Maybe top 20 or so? It's just too much work to be worth it.

I also think using EotS was a horrible choice to use for a test. It's more difficult than most events, it takes OML out of the equation, it skews hard to the lower and higher tier rosters.

I didn't even bother playing competitively in this test, because it was too much work for too little reward. I mean really? Grind my butt off for rewards I can get with half the effort in PvP? No gracias.

Here's the main problem with PvE for me:

1.) 6 hits and wait for 24 hours, hit and grind is HORRIBLE. 11+ times a node? You've gotta be kidding me. The rewards are abysmal. Why on earth would I grind that hard for 100 ISO? 100 ISO is a drop in the bucket. I mean on a 9 node sub, if you play optimally you're looking at 100+ rounds. Except you have to do 80% of it upfront, as soon as possible. It's insane, the health packs don't support it, and most importantly... It drives me not to want to play because it's just NOT fun.

2.) Rewards - I touched on this in the first part... The rewards are almost not worth the risk, and definitely so in EotS. The only reason you do the grind is for the overall rewards or the progression rewards, but when the work becomes obscene, you don't even want to do that. The rewards should be comparatively matched with the difficulty of the node. Three hits into a node, Wolverine starts hitting me for 4.5k. I've only got so many characters who can take that hit once, and it's guaranteed to happen every time with the way this sub is designed. So you want me to go into a fight, knowing I'm going to get wrecked, and pay health packs for a **** reward of 100 or 70 ISO.

3.) Scaling - Good gravy. Wolverine's scaling is out of control. Admantium Slash is annoying to deal with even if he wasn't getting "free" red AP. But when he is, it's just a cluster. And then you're scaling him up to levels past my own in 3 rounds. It's absolutely insane, not balanced, and again.. NOT FUN.

Solutions:

1.) Make the grind have the most points up front and diminishing returns as you play it more with regen. The players who can last longer, win more, win. Even if it's only 20 points at 0, they win, but make it easier to hit progression. Right now it's just masochistic.

2.) Rewards should be proportional to the difficulty. Right now the scaling is such that it seems that the devs consider the match up versus an ideal opponent. I get that the end game of a business is to make money. Truly I do. But there should be an element of sustainability. It bothers me a lot that my opponent out levels me and gets free AP. It doesn't make the winning fun, it makes the winning suck. I get wasted, I have to use valuable Health Packs just to play again. Even if I play well, intelligently, and do what I'm supposed to do, I take a lot of damage. That's no fun.

3.) Scaling - I appreciate the change to take covers into account, but it needs to account for covers AT A CERTAIN LEVEL. Health matters a lot. If the Health is too low to absorb a 4.5k hit, or barely survive it, then that's not fun. The scaling isn't correct. It's saying "Oh if you're fully covered, then you should be able to take this. If you're not leveled it's your fault." WRONG. D3... It's your fault. If I have a character not maxed out, it's because I don't have the ISO. I'm not soft capping, but I have to move my whole roster up at one time so I maintain depth and sustainability. If the game starts to punish that, then you start having to dump into a few characters, which then creates a scaling problem. Are you taking into account the WHOLE roster? Just the top three? Why are you basing scaling and ability to win a match based off of three well covered/leveled characters when those three are guaranteed NOT to be sustainable? It's a lose lose. Unless you make ISO much more easily available, this methodology of scaling is wrong. It should be: Level * % of covers * % of max health of the champion that sets opponent level, health, and damage. Not only that, but it should take into account at least the top 20 characters, not just the top three. Also, does the formula account for boosts skewing my roster to making a bunch of hardly covered 4*s have massive levels even though they are insanely weak at 1-3 covers?

Basically I think the matchmatching is still far far away from being appropriate for midrange rosters. Top Roster will destroy things before it matters, weak rosters don't take much damage. But then in the middle, you get rated on three characters who are relatively built out, and then ignores the X amount of 3*s much less covered or leveled.

TheOncomingStorm

Vhailorx wrote:

When the PvP not test was announced, Mr. Moore said:

The same formula is being used as the current Enemy of the State PVE test. Due to the differences in Story and Versus modes, our hope is that players will find the experience to be an improved one.

Is it me, or does the bold text basically acknowledge that playerbase hated the pve changes?

Do you think the uproar over eots will result in actual change, or just some cosmetic patches over the underlying, okayer-unfriendly shift. The former has happened (4* alliance rewards being pushed from top 50 to top 100 in April 2015), but the latter is much more common.

That was not the reason for the alliance rewards change. I9 saw first hand the amount of shuffling that was going on and the amount of time commanders and players were spending on it. The developers do not like players getting booted and the like.

TheOncomingStorm

acescracked wrote:

The entire player base did not hate the pve test. Just the vocal posters do. Some negatives and some positives. Good "test". I'm hating no rewards in wave nodes but loving doing my initial sub clears when I want to. Scaling is tough but getting through.

BTW, alot of people would still read your opinion if you just quoted in original thread instead of starting a new one. Strange habit in this forum.

Yea. I like how ppl disregard the word "test. " If players really want the new scaling tweaked they have to give actual constructive feedback, not just new scaling bad.

There were things I liked and did not like about the new scaling. However, I think scaling and mmr in reality are red herrings. The true problem is pve does not have progressive reward structure. It's amazing how fair (and sane!) pve would be if they would try it (gauntlet does not count). Same for pvp. Change placement rewards to reflect 4* meta (not to mention the game is 2 years old).