PVE Scaling Feedback & New Test : Prodigal Sun

TxMoose

ElAkkra wrote:

Both previous tests sped up my first 3 clears and allowed me to use far more of my roster than currently. And my 3 "optimal" clears were no longer at the whim of scheduling conflicts or bad wifi. So for me, it's already a vast improvement. When a single clear takes an hour and you can only use the same 3 characters for 5 of the nodes, that's a heavy time commitment, and it uses up most of your healthpacks, preventing any further grinding.

wow, that's the exact opposite of my experience. in the old system I routinely used 40-60 characters over nearly every event. first test I could only reasonably use 10 (ice and cyke boosted, completely borking scaling). second about 20 (no champs boosted). I fully expect this one to be horrible with hb and rulk boosted.

so I'd love to understand the difference here. I have 7 champed 4*s, and nearly half of the 3s champed. what is your roster level?

tanis3303

MissChinch wrote:

*Snip Fantastic, well laid out idea. *Snip

Seriously. This is pretty brilliant. It simplifies the whole thing and gives almost everyone in both camps what they want. I really like this!

ElAkkra

TxMoose wrote:

ElAkkra wrote:

Both previous tests sped up my first 3 clears and allowed me to use far more of my roster than currently.

wow, that's the exact opposite of my experience. in the old system I routinely used 40-60 characters over nearly every event. first test I could only reasonably use 10 (ice and cyke boosted, completely borking scaling). second about 20 (no champs boosted). I fully expect this one to be horrible with hb and rulk boosted.

so I'd love to understand the difference here. I have 7 champed 4*s, and nearly half of the 3s champed. what is your roster level?

4 5 stars (single cover), no usable 4 star beyond Wolverine (who's at 9 covers but level 125, everyone else is level 70ish but I've got a couple with 3 or 4 covers I could level a bit), 10 championed 3 stars (not necessarily the strongest 3 stars), rest of the 3 stars between 120 and 114 but nearly fully covered bar Deadpool/Punisher, all 2 stars championed between levels 125 and 143) and most of the 1 stars maxed (bar Venom / Yelena).

My clears mostly come down to "who's boosted?" plus the championed 3 stars for the nodes they might have a chance. Considering boosted 4 stars are irrelevant, and boosted 2 stars may be a bunch of Dark Avengers and therefore unusable in a bunch of nodes (see Webbed Wonder sub 1 with boosted Ares / Moonstone), I'm left with trying to find pairings of 3 stars that work with an undercovered / levelled 4 star for the required node, and the required/boosted characters for the 3 normal/hard nodes. Yeah, I can use who I want for the trivials but beyond that I'm severely limited.

For reference, current scaling of Webbed Wonder (slice 3, 2nd sub, after 3rd clear):
Exit, Stage Right: 241, 242, 242
Curtain Call: 224, 225, 224
Against Type: 190, 191, 191
Spider-Man (Classic): 165, 166, 166
Wolverine (Astonishing X-Men): 166, 167, 167

5 star: BSSM, GG, Phoenix, SS 255
4 star: Thoress 144 (with 2 red, 1 yellow), Prof X 140 (2 purple) and Falcap (1 blue, 1 red)
3 star: Daken 248, Switch 202, Spider Man 196, Sentry 185, Colossus 180, Storm 174, Daredevil 173, LThor 173, LCap 172, Gamora 171, Beast 170, BPanther 170, Cyc 170, Vision 170
2 star: Woverine 216, Ares 190, Moonstone 190

I'm fairly sure fixing the scaling for stupid 5 stars would be half the battle, but they seem to determined to fix the baby with the bathwater.

revskip

Vhailorx wrote:

Revskip,

If you will forgive me do,tpressing the point, in your post you start by saying that the timer change doesn't make much difference for most people, but still identify it at the huge improvement in the new system that justifies the whole change. You then list at least 3 major problem (scaling, number of hits before point decay, trivial nodes).

Why jump to a new system where the improvement doesn't make,much difference for you and there are several significant problems?

You cite jobs and children as key reasons that no timer is an improvement (and those things certainly do affect free time available for gaming). But you haven't addressed my argument that unless you can/want to play 1-2+ hours a day, the point is kind of moot whether or not there are real life factors in pkay)

What I actually said was that it didn't affect me as much. I own my own company and set my own hours so when I play isn't a problem for me. I prefer to get all my play time done in one sitting or two sittings maximum but if they stick with the old system I'll be just fine. For others I know who play the game however the timers were prohibitive. With the new system if I want to play for 3 hours at a clip I am not penalized, while under the old system I had to play three shorter 1 hour sessions. The entire mechanic of an 8 hour timer strikes me as silly, why should someone who can set an alarm have a leg up on someone who can't?

Having said all that yes, I think there are improvements that can still be made to make the new system even better. The removal of the timer is just one improvement that they have made, hopefully they will continue to move to an even more improved system.

Philly484

Well I still say the issue is the fact that the reward factors for more difficult scaling are not being addressed. Sorry But the scaling was never an issue for me, its the fact you get nothing after completing the 7th clear of a node. Sorry but bring back 20 iso at least to give something. I see no point in grinding after you do the 7 clears. I don't need to be number one, but I expect to be rewarded for something that takes longer to complete and I put time and effort into. Sorry D3 but If your not going to take the players feedbacks into legit consideration, don't sugar coat it and make it look like you are. Only addressing scaling is far from the issues of the new system.

Vhailorx

Revskip said:

I prefer to get all my play time done in one sitting or two sittings maximum but if they stick with the old system I'll be just fine. For others I know who play the game however the timers were prohibitive. With the new system if I want to play for 3 hours at a clip I am not penalized, while under the old system I had to play three shorter 1 hour sessions. The entire mechanic of an 8 hour timer strikes me as silly, why should someone who can set an alarm have a leg up on someone who can't?

Absolutely agree that the pve timers are stupid. I dislike competitive pve and optimal scheduling. We agree there.

But i disagree with your contention that you were actually penalized for playing 3 hours straight under the old system relative to the new system. Yes, playing 3 clears in a row under the old system prevented you from getting an optimal score. But getting an optimal score under the new system is even harder. So if you really cared about optimal scoring, you would be worse off in the new system anyway.

And if you didn't care about optimal scoring and just wanted the max prog reward or top 100 placement, then you could already get everything you wanted by playing 3-hours straight without regard for the timer under the old system.

So while I absolutely endorse the abstract idea of getting rid of refreshing points and optimal scheduling, these specific changes are just bad. They are bad if you care about high scores and placement. They are, at best, no change if you don't care about high scores (but generally a bit worse in that they require more clears to get the same prog rewards). And that's before considering scaling and the loss of trivial nodes.

TxMoose

ElAkkra wrote:

4 5 stars (single cover), no usable 4 star beyond Wolverine (who's at 9 covers but level 125, everyone else is level 70ish but I've got a couple with 3 or 4 covers I could level a bit), 10 championed 3 stars (not necessarily the strongest 3 stars), rest of the 3 stars between 120 and 114 but nearly fully covered bar Deadpool/Punisher, all 2 stars championed between levels 125 and 143) and most of the 1 stars maxed (bar Venom / Yelena).

My clears mostly come down to "who's boosted?" plus the championed 3 stars for the nodes they might have a chance. Considering boosted 4 stars are irrelevant, and boosted 2 stars may be a bunch of Dark Avengers and therefore unusable in a bunch of nodes (see Webbed Wonder sub 1 with boosted Ares / Moonstone), I'm left with trying to find pairings of 3 stars that work with an undercovered / levelled 4 star for the required node, and the required/boosted characters for the 3 normal/hard nodes. Yeah, I can use who I want for the trivials but beyond that I'm severely limited.

For reference, current scaling of Webbed Wonder (slice 3, 2nd sub, after 3rd clear):
Exit, Stage Right: 241, 242, 242
Curtain Call: 224, 225, 224
Against Type: 190, 191, 191
Spider-Man (Classic): 165, 166, 166
Wolverine (Astonishing X-Men): 166, 167, 167

5 star: BSSM, GG, Phoenix, SS 255
4 star: Thoress 144 (with 2 red, 1 yellow), Prof X 140 (2 purple) and Falcap (1 blue, 1 red)
3 star: Daken 248, Switch 202, Spider Man 196, Sentry 185, Colossus 180, Storm 174, Daredevil 173, LThor 173, LCap 172, Gamora 171, Beast 170, BPanther 170, Cyc 170, Vision 170
2 star: Woverine 216, Ares 190, Moonstone 190

I'm fairly sure fixing the scaling for stupid 5 stars would be half the battle, but they seem to determined to fix the baby with the bathwater.

ok, so a 2->3 transitioner with a few 5*s mixed in. if one of those is OML yellow, I'm guessing we're having a different conversation so I'm assuming you don't have that one. so 2nd sub after 2 clears (slice 5 - one clear short of your event) my nodes are: Exit, Stage Right at 294, Curtain Call at 277, Against Type at 244, Spider-Man (Classic) at 215, Wolverine (Astonishing X-Men) at 217, and my Howard node at 217.

it does appear that your nodes are much higher difficulty for your roster than mine. my memory of when I was at your stage - was that my nodes weren't nearly that high. I think the 'old' system is screwing you over because of your 5s. that can be adjusted without putting the screws to the top guys (I'd think). I do have thoress boosted to 356 and my other 6 champs in the 270s. plus witch, x23, daken, and my 5*s in the 250s and it goes down from there.

what I don't get is that they specifically stated that one of their goals in their scaling adjustment was to allow for some advantage to those with stronger rosters (or at least make it to where its not a disadvantage). and what they've tried so far has done the exact opposite.

Pylgrim

JVReal wrote:

Now if you want to say that most of the forum base doesn't like the change, ok, you have a point. The forum is filled with mostly dedicated players that do grind and competitively go for top placement. Those are the guys that rightly have a complaint about the new system. But to dismiss everyone else because the competitive folks feel a "need" to grind for 6 hours... that's a problem too.

It's ridiculous to expect them to grind for hours on end, it's ridiculous, but they do it anyway. They know it's crazy to do it, but they still do... why? Because they want top placement and have created in themselves a "need" that they will fulfill regardless of how insanely it "makes" them grind. Yet they do it. And because all the rest of the top 10'ers have that same mentality, they are egging each other on. It's a bidding war... and their remorse at the end comes back as negative feedback because they can't accept that they spent an insane amount of time and energy (and sometimes money) on something that shouldn't cost that much time and energy. Can't blame themselves, or fellow grinders... so it must be the format! God forbid they have some accountability for their own actions.

This illustrates perfectly the flawed belief that the more casual playerbase has regarding the competitive players and which makes them feel fine disregarding and mocking forum complaints when changes that benefit them come at the expense of those competitive players. "Eh, they are obsessed freaks that play only for the thrill of competition and for the fake achievement of being "top players". What's the problem with making them work more for it? They always prove that they are willing to go whatever length anyway."

As one of them I can tell you most of us are not doing it for the joy of it. I don't feel a rush of ecstasy when I see my name a top of a ranking list in a mobile game, nor find validation in my capability to do so. I just need the tinykitty rewards. Why do I say "need", you ask? Because I'm engaged with the game, I like it. And as such I crave progression. Top 10 PVE is one of the extremely few ways of progress incipient 4* characters for a 3* player. NOT going for it greatly slows down an already glacial process.

Stagnation in a game for a person engaged with it kills the fun. What's the point in playing an RPG if your characters never level up nor acquire better gear? What's the point of building a city if you are not unlocking new things to do? Perhaps you as a casual player are just not wired the same way and feel fine just playing in bursts, enjoying the playing itself, and that's fine. We have different mentalities but one is not superior to the other. That's why introducing features that benefit one group while screwing the other are NOT OK and that's why you have an outraged segment of the playerbase resenting the other segment.

A funny thing is that due to the way the game as been haphazardly built up from inefficient skeletons, many "casual" players don't realise a "need" to be competitive until reaching the point of transitioning to 4*. 2* and 3* covers are given away like political pamphlets in election time so even a casual player will progress at a decent speed just by playing the game, without pursuing specific goals. It's when you get to that point though, that you'll realise that you have been playing with your same maxed 3*s (plus some championed covers) for months without change and that you keep accumulating 1-4 covered 4*s that you opened randomly and that you'll probably never get to play with, because characters keep being added to the pool so your chances of opening more covers of a specific character that you already have are ever-decreasing. Going for what I see in the forums, what happens when a more casual player reaches that point, is that they make a huge quitting post, ranting about the game being stagnant, a hopeless mill, and stingy with rewards and then they are gone.

We, "competitive" players are the ones that love the game enough that when we reach that point, we actually double down and work hard to achieve regular (if slow) progression and keep playing. I see no reason why us, of any, should be the ones bearing the strain of changes introduced to the system aimed to improve the quality of life of players that, by definition, already have it easy.

SnowcaTT

Falcon and MrF for rewards?!?!?

It's almost like you don't -want- people to push hard in your tests!

fmftint

Awesome rewards for this,


104k

Test this because?

TheWerebison

I think you're kinda making his point, that you feel a "need" to do the nodes to ridiculous levels to be competitive. What a lot of us more casual folks are after for Story mode is something more "fun", something that involved collaborative play as opposed to competitive play. That's why a lot of us are fighting to remove placement rewards from Story mode.

Imagine if all there was for Story mode was progression rewards, and decent pools of iso in the nodes. Increased progression rewards. If the folks starting out could easily get a couple 2* covers and a heroic token or two. Further on would be a 3* cover or two, maybe one of the current featured character, and one for the featured character for the next Story. Follow that up with a guaranteed 4* cover of the featured 4* if you can make it that far, and the usual 25cp after that. And then rewards beyond! Maybe for the folks who currently do the competitive stuff and really want to grind it out, there can be rewards way out there that will give you one each of the other 2 featured 4* covers. And another 25cp after that! And naturally there would be rewards in between with iso, HP, all that stuff.

Story mode is worse than Versus mode for casual players, because we have almost NO chance at getting any of the rewards. We have to compete with the people who can put in more time instead of doing a mode that allows us the chance to play on our own time, and win rewards on our own merit. I would like to see enemies start very small and scale infinitely, so that you can keep doing a node over and over and over and over again until you hit a point where you decide it isn't worth it anymore to keep going for progression points with that node. I'd like to see the iso rewards for each node go up drastically the higher you can beat the enemies.

I don't like having a mode where I always know I'm going to lose, because I have to drive 35 minutes to work, do an 8 hour shift with an hour lunch, drive 35 minutes home, play for 45 minutes, then go immediately to bed because I have to be up earlier the next day, knowing full well that I couldn't do a full completion, and won't be able to do much more before work, and that I've already lost.

Leave the pvp to Versus mode. Let Story mode challenge the individual (or the Alliance!), instead of pitting everyone against each other. That already exists in Versus mode.

slidecage

testing a 3rd time Means THIS new PVE WILL BE THE PVE.... o well looks like im going pure PVP cause its not worth grinding at the start 3 hours and then grinding for 3 hours at the end... have fun but im done when this finally happens.. sucks i have

12,000 HP and 116 slots and now it will just sit and rot

Vhailorx

I think that all competitive v casual sniping is both unhelpful and also beside the point.

I see two bottom line conclusions from all 3 tests.

(1) scaling is worse for almost everyone (some, but not all, 3* transition rosters seemed a bit better,off), and loss of trivial nodes is bad for everyone.

(2) the new scoring system is much worse for competitive players, and a push at best for anyone who doesn't play enough to compete for top 100 placement or max prog rewards.

Seems like an easy call to reject a system that is actively worse for a large group of players and offers no offsetting advantage for everyone else.

TheWerebison

Vhailorx wrote:

I think that all competitive v casual sniping is both unhelpful and also beside the point.

I see two bottom line conclusions from all 3 tests.

(1) scaling is worse for almost everyone (some, but not all, 3* transition rosters seemed a bit better,off), and loss of trivial nodes is bad for everyone.

(2) the new scoring system is much worse for competitive players, and a push at best for anyone who doesn't play enough to compete for top 100 placement or max prog rewards.

Seems like an easy call to reject a system that is actively worse for a large group of players and offers no offsetting advantage for everyone else.

It seems like D3 REALLY wants to implement this new system, too. And the fact that they've basically abandoned us completely on the forums shows that they don't really 100% care what changes we'd like to see, they've already decided on the changes they're going to make, all they're testing for now is the severity.

Vhailorx

Agreed werebison,

This testing process now seems to be entirely an exercise in demiurge figuring just how bad they can make the player experience without tanking player engagement.

That's why I intend to continue voicing my conerns and frustrations in strong (but hopefully always polite and constructive) terms.

My engagement will go way down under this new one system.

rastafari7

7 day event, Mr. F as the top prize, top progression reward set almost 20k higher than normal.
What a joke!

fmftint

Prodigal Sun progression the old way 86k
Prodigal Sun progression the new way 104k

Bar raised 21% because of the 6x full point tax

Enjoy reaching that "casually "

Pylgrim

TheWerebison wrote:

I think you're kinda making his point, that you feel a "need" to do the nodes to ridiculous levels to be competitive. What a lot of us more casual folks are after for Story mode is something more "fun", something that involved collaborative play as opposed to competitive play. That's why a lot of us are fighting to remove placement rewards from Story mode.

Imagine if all there was for Story mode was progression rewards, and decent pools of iso in the nodes. Increased progression rewards. If the folks starting out could easily get a couple 2* covers and a heroic token or two. Further on would be a 3* cover or two, maybe one of the current featured character, and one for the featured character for the next Story. Follow that up with a guaranteed 4* cover of the featured 4* if you can make it that far, and the usual 25cp after that. And then rewards beyond! Maybe for the folks who currently do the competitive stuff and really want to grind it out, there can be rewards way out there that will give you one each of the other 2 featured 4* covers. And another 25cp after that! And naturally there would be rewards in between with iso, HP, all that stuff.

Story mode is worse than Versus mode for casual players, because we have almost NO chance at getting any of the rewards. We have to compete with the people who can put in more time instead of doing a mode that allows us the chance to play on our own time, and win rewards on our own merit. I would like to see enemies start very small and scale infinitely, so that you can keep doing a node over and over and over and over again until you hit a point where you decide it isn't worth it anymore to keep going for progression points with that node. I'd like to see the iso rewards for each node go up drastically the higher you can beat the enemies.

I don't like having a mode where I always know I'm going to lose, because I have to drive 35 minutes to work, do an 8 hour shift with an hour lunch, drive 35 minutes home, play for 45 minutes, then go immediately to bed because I have to be up earlier the next day, knowing full well that I couldn't do a full completion, and won't be able to do much more before work, and that I've already lost.

Leave the pvp to Versus mode. Let Story mode challenge the individual (or the Alliance!), instead of pitting everyone against each other. That already exists in Versus mode.

(emphasis mine)

See that's still is a misconception. In fact, it's precisely the misconception I wanted to clear. I don't "need" to grind to be "competitive". I am competitive because I need the rewards in order to progress my roster. Progression is fun, stagnation is not. I don't care at all at being able to say that I am a top player and feel better than my peers by my grinded scores. I'm all for making the rewards progression-based instead of placement-based; the rewards is all I care for. We're all on the same side here.

What you guys are saying is "I can't (and don't want) to schedule my life around MPQ and I don't like that people who can always will get better rewards than I." What we are saying is "I don't want to have to grind even more than I already do just to get the same rewards I'm getting right now and I don't like that this change at my expense is made to benefit people who are not even competing for the same rewards as me". Players act like these two statements are at odds with eachother, but they actually could be addressed at once by changing the reward scheme instead of the play-timing scheme which is what the devs have been focusing on all this time.

Vhailorx

Pylgrim wrote:

What you guys are saying is "I can't (and don't want) to schedule my life around MPQ and I don't like that people who can always will get better rewards than I." What we are saying is "I don't want to have to grind even more than I already do just to get the same rewards I'm getting right now and I don't like that this change at my expense is made to benefit people who are not even competing for the same rewards as me". Players act like these two statements are at odds with eachother, but they actually could be addressed at once by changing the reward scheme instead of the play-timing scheme which is what the devs have been focusing on all this time.

And what I'm saying is that the changes don't even benefit non-competitive players!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The only people who actually benefit from these changes are demiurge and d3, who seem likely to give out fewer CPs and sell more healthpacks.

(sure there might be a small number of edge case rosters who see better scaling with the new system. There are also clearly several edge case rosters who see markedly worse scaling. Those edge cases seem to be a wash. and EVERYONE sees the "smoother" difficulty curve that requires top tier teams in every node)

Keegan

fmftint wrote:

Awesome rewards for this,

104k

Test this because?

104k for 25

It's a seven day event, no one has lost their minds completely