This is not PVE

Varg138

Halfway into a week-long PVE grind for a new character, and I am miserable. Yes, I know, I could have taken a later fresh bracket, but I need ISO. And yes, I know I didn’t HAVE to play, but I’ve been waiting two years for WS; that wasn’t going to happen. My point of this post is that players should WANT to play, not feel obligated, and the only way for that to happen would be if the developers finally listened to what players actually have asked for in PVE: progression based rewards ONLY, not placement and progression.

As many people have said repeatedly, MPQ PVE is PVP in disguise. I would argue that MPQ PVE is, in fact, more like PVC (PLAYER versus CLOCK). The top three in my bracket are going back and forth between those three placements within 100 points of one another. Each sub top 3-4 are finishing within 30-50 points of one another. It isn’t a matter of who can beat the nodes, it become a matter of who is setting their alarms and doing their runs right at the refresh and who can wait the longest to do their final grind and get the most points out of waiting. This is not PVE.

I don’t like MPQ PVE. It is a (somewhat) necessary evil in the ISO draught. I can live without new content (for now), but why PVE is still pitting players against each other after nearly three years is beyond me. PVE should be progression based only, like it is in other games I’m playing (and are quickly getting more of my attention than this game). Developers spend their time testing new timers and scaling, but have never taken, say, a Heroic PVE, and tested it as purely progression based, both individually and for alliances. Why? THIS is what players have asked for in PVE.

FaustianDeal

I want to preface this statement with the following disclaimer: I agree with your point of view; competitive PVE seems ludicrous, especially like we are playing it now. Even drawing a parallel to people who try to set records for speed climbing mountains is specious because those people aren't forced to do the same route again every 8 hours, and then, once a day, do the route 6 times as quickly as possible (with only 10 protein bars - just go with it) before moving to another route and repeating the slog. If we want to do something like this create a metric that is based on a single run. Pick whatever arbitrary criteria you want... hell have a different criteria for each sub, or each 8 hour window of a sub.

Anyway - my point here is that I believe they have metrics for what percentage of the player population they are willing to grant a certain award to. in a new character PVE that is 2/1000 people (0.2%) get 4 covers, 10/1000 (1%) get 3, and so on. As long as this is their model (effectively that only 1% of the population should have a 1/1/1 copy of a character when their launch event ends) this is impossible to control strictly with points. If everything was progression based then they wouldn't be able to control what percentage of the population managed to get to that 1/1/1 version of the character. I'm sure it helped spur envy and the purchase of cover packs many moons ago. But now we get to use a 1/1/1 loaner for PVP (instead of the vastly inferior 1/0/0 loaner of old) so the other 99% aren't nearly as crippled as we would have been in the before time.

Its unfortunate that they have pinned themselves to modeling the playerbase this way because it has given us the PVE we have now. All of the scaling tests run to date fail (in my mind) because the rewards offered do not scale based on the risk. But again - they don't care about risk/reward - they are just trying to find a way to have 1% of people win a given prize tier and do it in the way that induces the smallest number of people (specifically spenders) to quit in frustration.

frostCoH

Varg138 wrote:

Halfway into a week-long PVE grind for a new character, and I am miserable. Yes, I know, I could have taken a later fresh bracket, but I need ISO. And yes, I know I didn’t HAVE to play, but I’ve been waiting two years for WS; that wasn’t going to happen. My point of this post is that players should WANT to play, not feel obligated, and the only way for that to happen would be if the developers finally listened to what players actually have asked for in PVE: progression based rewards ONLY, not placement and progression.

As many people have said repeatedly, MPQ PVE is PVP in disguise. I would argue that MPQ PVE is, in fact, more like PVC (PLAYER versus CLOCK). The top three in my bracket are going back and forth between those three placements within 100 points of one another. Each sub top 3-4 are finishing within 30-50 points of one another. It isn’t a matter of who can beat the nodes, it become a matter of who is setting their alarms and doing their runs right at the refresh and who can wait the longest to do their final grind and get the most points out of waiting. This is not PVE.

I don’t like MPQ PVE. It is a (somewhat) necessary evil in the ISO draught. I can live without new content (for now), but why PVE is still pitting players against each other after nearly three years is beyond me. PVE should be progression based only, like it is in other games I’m playing (and are quickly getting more of my attention than this game). Developers spend their time testing new timers and scaling, but have never taken, say, a Heroic PVE, and tested it as purely progression based, both individually and for alliances. Why? THIS is what players have asked for in PVE.

I love the new stories and content but I totally agree the whole "grind until your neck hurts from looking at your phone and oh, do it so much that you literally can't do anything else in life if you want to place" is a really cruel way of doing "PVE".

Maybe they mean Player vs Everything instead of environment.