My Solution to Fix Scaling and Discourage Softcapping

hardcorerobot

First of, apologies if this has been posted before or already beaten to death. From the conversations I have seen,, my solution has never been discussed.

Let me start with my personal experience - I have friends that that I introduced to the game within just the past few months that are able to regularly land top placements. With smart leveling/soft capping, token management, and favorable bracketing, they are EASILY generating many more higher level covers than I currently can do (Day ~500) expending similar effort.

Right now, beginner players with weak (compared to 1/2 yr + players), but smartly leveled rosters, can get max PvE progression and a legendary token in weak brackets. So theoretically they could be landing 4 or 5 star tokens before having any fully leveled 2's or any 3's at all. That seems broken.

This is not a whine thread, my friends are playing smartly in the system that they have to work with. I just don't think that's what the devs intended and I feel that's one thing they are trying to address. I'm sure everyone has similar anecdotes, and we can also see similar evidence at the top of our PvE leaderboards.

Overall, I suspect getting the scaling right with the current approach is really hard... so my solution is... get rid of it. Instead of trying to tailor each event to each roster, create difficulty 'slices', where the node difficulty is fixed for everyone, and the rewards for that slice are commensurate with the type of roster you would need to succeed.

For instance, 1/2* players would see a lot of 1/2* covers or heroic tokens, but rarely 3* (maybe top reward?). 2/3* would see mostly 2s with some 3s and rare 4s. Etc. (In a sense, this is already baked into the token drop rate percentages.) The number of divisions would most likely need to driven by how it would divide the player base, but I'm confident the devs could figure that out.

Now, the player would be able to choose the difficulty of their competition... easier success for less reward, or more challenge for more reward. It makes sense to softcap to stay in the beginner brackets now, since you can still easily rack up 3*+ covers, CP and legendary tokens. However, there really wouldn't be much incentive to soft-cap long term under my system since there will be a ceiling on the rewards.

I think there would also be a nice element of achievement with this approach. I remember feeling really pumped clearing TBE the first time... "Moving up" difficulty levels under this system would give that same feeling of progress and the rewards would be targeted specifically for what you will need for the next phase of the game. In general, it would really give the devs a lot more control over how their player base progresses.

Overall, I'd emphasize progression more and placement less for PvE... that's a bit off topic for what I wanted to cover with this post but when I think it through it makes more sense after these changes.

Anyway, thanks for reading!

Heartburn

A Tiered system where appropriate difficulty and appropriate awards has been constantly suggested and ignored, i guess to the point where it doesn't come up anymore. it now shifted to non-competative suggestions because it may be easier to implement and people are tired of competing with each other for placement on character releases as it gets more and more competitive as time goes on and more people learn to compete better driving up the curb. in addition, effort and placement in the each bracket differ, meaning the same amount of points can get you 1st in an easy bracket or 100th in a competitive bracket.

I personal hate it when developers try to control how you play their game, it just shows how sly players can be to achieve goals in efficient ways that where not thought up before. I think it it is fine for soft cappers to continue as they do because while they have an edge in this mode of releasing characters in other modes that require more strength(pvp) and has set scaling(ultron and galactus). if the devs wanted to discourage this they need to release character in other modes, since they are not to any significant extent they are their own problem. Softcapper's bag of tricks only go so far until the enemy gets to big to mess around with anymore.