CW scaling goes boom

Pylgrim

Let's be honest. The scaling for the first 6 rounds was not "reasonable", it was laughably easy. A team of 1*s could have finished those nodes, no exaggeration. Can people really be upset that they literally gave away two covers of one the best character in the game (if you picked team IM, that is) just because for the third one they ramped the difficulty to where it should be?

TheWerebison

I'm trying really hard to bite my tongue. Really, really hard.

I appreciate the update, I really do. But now I want to know how this "test" turns out.

I'm trying to understand the logic. Everything was going SO well. Oh my gosh, the beginning of this was amazing! The hope that seemed to fill the air as people were able to play the special, one time only event, and enjoy it fully! It felt so good.

And now this.

Now. I am a man with an intellect well above average. And I'm wracking my brain to think of a reason why you took something that most players would agree was running PERFECTLY...and do something to suddenly tick everyone off.

The closest I can figure is that everyone is doing a little TOO good. The way things were going, a lot of guilds could have probably completely beaten one side, and then switched to the other and maybe made it all the way to round 7 or 8. Which would give away a TON of rewards, more than were intended.

But geez, guys. Some playtesting would probably have revealed that. OR you could have looked at what was going on and said, "Oh. Oh dear. Well, we need to make some tweaks to the second run."

Forumites, help me here. When the first run of Galactus went through, and everything was a mess, did they make changes to it during that first run? Or did they tweak the second run so it wasn't as brutal? My memory really sucks, so please tell me they made a POSITIVE change in the middle of a special event, instead of just making NEGATIVE changes in the middle of a special event.

*sigh*

I guess I can't complain. I got an Alliance with a good group of folks, and we're definitely going to get round 8 done. But it's not as fun anymore. Now it's a civil war of attrition.

TheWerebison

Pylgrim wrote:

Let's be honest. The scaling for the first 6 rounds was not "reasonable", it was laughably easy. A team of 1*s could have finished those nodes, no exaggeration. Can people really be upset that they literally gave away two covers of one the best character in the game (if you picked team IM, that is) just because for the third one they ramped the difficulty to where it should be?

Yeah, I thought that, too, but it seems like it's happening for people in early rounds, too. Which is a shame. If it was just an upgrade for the last two rounds, it'd be wholly acceptable, even generous.

Steellatch

It makes no sense for required hero nodes to scale like that. My 2 star Hawkeye at level 15 (boosted to 91) I picked up just for the required mission has to fight 2 waves at 190? Cool, thanks D3.

jdoe893

Pylgrim wrote:

Let's be honest. The scaling for the first 6 rounds was not "reasonable", it was laughably easy. A team of 1*s could have finished those nodes, no exaggeration. Can people really be upset that they literally gave away two covers of one the best character in the game (if you picked team IM, that is) just because for the third one they ramped the difficulty to where it should be?

it was timer wise regardless on which round you were

actually i wouldnt mind playing with increased difficulty in level per rounds but this??this kills off the fun

when sub nodes were harder than the boss itself definitely something is wrong

UncleSmed

Pylgrim wrote:

Let's be honest. The scaling for the first 6 rounds was not "reasonable", it was laughably easy. A team of 1*s could have finished those nodes, no exaggeration. Can people really be upset that they literally gave away two covers of one the best character in the game (if you picked team IM, that is) just because for the third one they ramped the difficulty to where it should be?

Spot on... why are they so gorram inconsistent?
Boss battles scale off round you're on.. why do the sub nodes not scale similarly?
They've chosen an arbitrary measure to inflict scaling and it's inconsistent with the meat of the encounter.

D3 needs to wake the tinykitty up and build events which allow everyone to compete to their ability.

Even an alliance of 1-2*'s can make it to a four star cover if they persist and chip away. And the difficulty should be harder to get the higher rewards.. that makes gorram sense.

What makes no sense if for 24 hours to pass and a switch to flick which literally removes some players from competition.

I play as a casual rl friends alliance, our plan was simple, bigger and more developed rosters push as hard as we could on one side to get the alliance rewards.. others once they couldn't compete switch and contribute to the flip side and get everyone as much as we could collectively.

It wouldn't net us the best rewards, but it would be the best result for alliances like ours to have a chance at 4 4* covers and maybe a legendary token and a bunch of event tokens.

Instead, arbitrary scaling will likely destroy that chance, because scaling that makes sense is too hard to implement.

And you wonder why the money i was going to spend is not going to be now.

herm1978

But at least we have 25% of rewards = boosts

Cant complain there, can we!?

Pylgrim

UncleSmed wrote:

Pylgrim wrote:

Let's be honest. The scaling for the first 6 rounds was not "reasonable", it was laughably easy. A team of 1*s could have finished those nodes, no exaggeration. Can people really be upset that they literally gave away two covers of one the best character in the game (if you picked team IM, that is) just because for the third one they ramped the difficulty to where it should be?

Spot on... why are they so gorram inconsistent?
Boss battles scale off round you're on.. why do the sub nodes not scale similarly?
They've chosen an arbitrary measure to inflict scaling and it's inconsistent with the meat of the encounter.

D3 needs to wake the tinykitty up and build events which allow everyone to compete to their ability.

Even an alliance of 1-2*'s can make it to a four star cover if they persist and chip away. And the difficulty should be harder to get the higher rewards.. that makes gorram sense.

What makes no sense if for 24 hours to pass and a switch to flick which literally removes some players from competition.

I play as a casual rl friends alliance, our plan was simple, bigger and more developed rosters push as hard as we could on one side to get the alliance rewards.. others once they couldn't compete switch and contribute to the flip side and get everyone as much as we could collectively.

It wouldn't net us the best rewards, but it would be the best result for alliances like ours to have a chance at 4 4* covers and maybe a legendary token and a bunch of event tokens.

Instead, arbitrary scaling will likely destroy that chance, because scaling that makes sense is too hard to implement.

And you wonder why the money i was going to spend is not going to be now.

I'm not sure it was arbitrary or a change chosen on the spot. To me it's pretty clear that difficulty was intended to ramp up gradually up to the point where it is now, in the later rounds, but there was a bug and the difficulty just never went up at all. By the time they fixed it, it was too late to start the slow ramping up so they just skipped to the levels at where it should be at the time. The sharp change sure is annoying but in exchange for it, we got a whole day of ridiculously easy nodes. Cannot we just be happy about that? It's absurd that some believed that the whole event was intended to be a chumpfest that a new player with a level 15 Juggernaut could cruise through.

herm1978

Pylgrim wrote:

UncleSmed wrote:

Pylgrim wrote:

Let's be honest. The scaling for the first 6 rounds was not "reasonable", it was laughably easy. A team of 1*s could have finished those nodes, no exaggeration. Can people really be upset that they literally gave away two covers of one the best character in the game (if you picked team IM, that is) just because for the third one they ramped the difficulty to where it should be?

Spot on... why are they so gorram inconsistent?
Boss battles scale off round you're on.. why do the sub nodes not scale similarly?
They've chosen an arbitrary measure to inflict scaling and it's inconsistent with the meat of the encounter.

D3 needs to wake the tinykitty up and build events which allow everyone to compete to their ability.

Even an alliance of 1-2*'s can make it to a four star cover if they persist and chip away. And the difficulty should be harder to get the higher rewards.. that makes gorram sense.

What makes no sense if for 24 hours to pass and a switch to flick which literally removes some players from competition.

I play as a casual rl friends alliance, our plan was simple, bigger and more developed rosters push as hard as we could on one side to get the alliance rewards.. others once they couldn't compete switch and contribute to the flip side and get everyone as much as we could collectively.

It wouldn't net us the best rewards, but it would be the best result for alliances like ours to have a chance at 4 4* covers and maybe a legendary token and a bunch of event tokens.

Instead, arbitrary scaling will likely destroy that chance, because scaling that makes sense is too hard to implement.

And you wonder why the money i was going to spend is not going to be now.

I'm not sure it was arbitrary or a change chosen on the spot. To me it's pretty clear that difficulty was intended to ramp up gradually up to the point where it is now, in the later rounds, but there was a bug and the difficulty just never went up at all. By the time they fixed it, it was too late to start the slow ramping up so they just skipped to the levels at where it should be at the time. The sharp change sure is annoying but in exchange for it, we got a whole day of ridiculously easy nodes. Cannot we just be happy about that? It's absurd that some believed that the whole event was intended to be a chumpfest that a new player with a level 15 Juggernaut could cruise through.

Really, what would be the harm in letting everyone clear the nodes since IM/cap is where all the points are anyway and they scaled just fine?

revskip

herm1978 wrote:

Really, what would be the harm in letting everyone clear the nodes since IM/cap is where all the points are anyway and they scaled just fine?

The main harm would be that there would be no real inherent benefit to having a superior roster and/or superior alliance.

If everyone gets every progression award and every alliance gets every progression award it isn't a contest it is a participation trophy. Now there are plenty of parents all over the country who love when their kids get that trophy for coming in absolutely last in their soccer league because it gives the kids that warm and fuzzy feeling that they did something even if all they did was show up. But I would argue that giving everyone the rewards not only dilutes the reward but also dilutes any sense of accomplishment for finishing the event.

As it stands now you need a top roster to hit top progression in Civil War. Which is exactly as it should be. I am in the 3* transition group and at no point did I expect to hit the top rewards because honestly I don't have the time put in to merit it. I don't have the entitlement that suggests I should get everything that people playing 2 years longer than me should.

I've progressed faster than most people with my days in by joining some top alliances early and grinding things out for those alliances. Why should casual alliances reap the same rewards as organized and grindy alliances? And if they did why would anyone ever aspire to actually be in a competitive alliance?

I have enjoyed getting my butt kicked by Cap at level 8 and by the wave nodes at level 8 a bunch more than I did kicking the snot out of under-leveled nodes in the early levels. I didn't mind chugging away early knowing that I was limiting my overall points for the betterment of the other people in my alliance precisely because I knew that when rounds 7-8 came around I'd be lucky to win anything without throwing deadpool whales at it. I am on pace to hit the second Black Panther cover by chipping in what I can with my limited roster and my alliance mates have been awesome about doing the heavy lifting in the late rounds. Which will net me a bunch of covers that would normally take me far longer to collect.

firethorne

revskip wrote:

herm1978 wrote:

Really, what would be the harm in letting everyone clear the nodes since IM/cap is where all the points are anyway and they scaled just fine?

The main harm would be that there would be no real inherent benefit to having a superior roster and/or superior alliance.

Nonsense. Because the actual node where the points are, the bosses, still are there. Our alliance had people start wiping on round 5. I've got one of our better rosters, and I was having one man downed most of the time, with the other two fairly bruised. House party protocol is no **** joke. The precious top one percenter's still were the only ones who'd win the final rounds, even without the brutal and demoralizing scaling. The "you're supposed to lose" design philosophy was still in place for all of us plebeians.

Marty17

TBF, if they kept the difficulty as easy as they were, I don't see a huge loss from d3 for "giving away" as lets face it, it isn't easy to obtain those, so I don't see the harm for allowing one or two for almost every player. Plus it's near impossible to have one that's useable anyways.

So the ramping in scaling is a bit absurd, as there's no progression of difficulty but a skip.

Linkster79

Pylgrim wrote:

Let's be honest. The scaling for the first 6 rounds was not "reasonable", it was laughably easy. A team of 1*s could have finished those nodes, no exaggeration. Can people really be upset that they literally gave away two covers of one the best character in the game (if you picked team IM, that is) just because for the third one they ramped the difficulty to where it should be?

Would it be a bad thing that newer players could compete in an event that brought them to the game? I know if I downloaded the game because if this event to find myself wiping out to the nodes before the big boss I would be uninstalling asap.

Tony_Foot

Although the scaling on nodes has gone mental I feel the rest of the scaling for boss fights is fine. It's doing exactly what it's supposed to. I'm a three star players and so is 995 of my alliance. We topped out in wave 7 of team Cap. We were doing 3 or 4k damage to IM with our rosters and after two flaptain covers switched to Team IM and will get two of the HB covers at least.

This is how it should be, we all need 4 star covers and we are getting the rewards our roster deserves. The trouble is everyone expected to hit max progression and nail two covers on one of the 5*. Yeah that would be nice but realistically it's not going to be that useful right now. I just hope they do the same 4 stars for the 2nd run but flip the colour order. I'm enjoying the event tbh despite the brutal nodes.

wirius

If you're all scratching your head at the sudden scaling, D3 only wants a certain percentage to win the 4* and up covers. During the event, they might not have implemented gradual scaling by mistake, or were experimenting. At the point that the scaling went wonky, they probably saw the percentage of players winning was too high, so they bumped it up.

Their entire monetary system is based on math. People spend more money when there's a chance of losing then if they do give aways. Even if everyone had a top roster, D3 would find a way to make sure only a certain percentage could win the top rewards.

DeNappa

I'm okay with the difficulty increase, even if it means that we won't be able to reach the final rounds with our (mostly) 2-3* alliance. However, in my opinion:

• The Civil War recruitment token should have been a bit more reachable
• Sub node difficulty should be tied to round progression -- not time progression. Now, if you hit a wall on one side, you might want to switch to the other side so at least you'll be able to play a few more matches and hopefully earn more points towards reachable rewards. But the sub nodes have become unbeatable for light rosters, so you can't even initiate the (easier) boss fight any more.

herm1978

revskip wrote:

herm1978 wrote:

Really, what would be the harm in letting everyone clear the nodes since IM/cap is where all the points are anyway and they scaled just fine?

The main harm would be that there would be no real inherent benefit to having a superior roster and/or superior alliance.

If everyone gets every progression award and every alliance gets every progression award it isn't a contest it is a participation trophy...

Like I said, the "bosses" scale just fine. And that would be (and should be) the divider.

Dragon_Nexus

herm1978 wrote:

Really, what would be the harm in letting everyone clear the nodes since IM/cap is where all the points are anyway and they scaled just fine?

This was going to be my counter.
"Oh dear, we've put the scaling down too low and the nodes are too easy. People are having fn and throwing themselves into the match whole heartedly. Well, it IS broken, I guess we'd better fix it."

Can I just ask...does anyone remember a time when an error was completely against the community and they fixed it? I seem to recall a lot of the time the response was "Sorry, we're too far into the event now to change it, but we'll fix it for the next time."

I cannot fathom the developers, really. This just baffles me.

Linkster79

revskip wrote:

herm1978 wrote:

Really, what would be the harm in letting everyone clear the nodes since IM/cap is where all the points are anyway and they scaled just fine?

The main harm would be that there would be no real inherent benefit to having a superior roster and/or superior alliance.

If everyone gets every progression award and every alliance gets every progression award it isn't a contest it is a participation trophy. Now there are plenty of parents all over the country who love when their kids get that trophy for coming in absolutely last in their soccer league because it gives the kids that warm and fuzzy feeling that they did something even if all they did was show up. But I would argue that giving everyone the rewards not only dilutes the reward but also dilutes any sense of accomplishment for finishing the event.

As it stands now you need a top roster to hit top progression in Civil War. Which is exactly as it should be. I am in the 3* transition group and at no point did I expect to hit the top rewards because honestly I don't have the time put in to merit it. I don't have the entitlement that suggests I should get everything that people playing 2 years longer than me should.

I've progressed faster than most people with my days in by joining some top alliances early and grinding things out for those alliances. Why should casual alliances reap the same rewards as organized and grindy alliances? And if they did why would anyone ever aspire to actually be in a competitive alliance?

I have enjoyed getting my butt kicked by Cap at level 8 and by the wave nodes at level 8 a bunch more than I did kicking the snot out of under-leveled nodes in the early levels. I didn't mind chugging away early knowing that I was limiting my overall points for the betterment of the other people in my alliance precisely because I knew that when rounds 7-8 came around I'd be lucky to win anything without throwing deadpool whales at it. I am on pace to hit the second Black Panther cover by chipping in what I can with my limited roster and my alliance mates have been awesome about doing the heavy lifting in the late rounds. Which will net me a bunch of covers that would normally take me far longer to collect.

Having a good roster and being in a top alliance rewards the effort/money spent all year round, again I ask is it really a bad thing that for 1 or 2 events a year that almost every one can earn the best prizes? Those top alliances can still get the top awards they seek but with less effort and freeing up their time and resources for other events. New players and alliances can get the same but with a bit more effort and can encourage them to stick around long term. Allowing (almost) everybody the opportunity to get a 5* cover is hardly going to break the game, after all a single covered 5* isn't going to all of a sudden push somebody to first place in versus events. It isn't about giving folks a "participation" trophy at all, I see it as more of a thanks from D3. For the more experienced player it can be a thanks for sticking with them and for a newer player a thanks for giving their product a chance in a cut throat market. In business you have to speculate to accumulate and by throwing newer players a bone it may encourage them to spend a bit more in the future.

Dragon_Nexus

Linkster79 wrote:

again I ask is it really a bad thing that for 1 or 2 events a year that almost every one can earn the best prizes? Those top alliances can still get the top awards they seek but with less effort and freeing up their time and resources for other events. New players and alliances can get the same but with a bit more effort and can encourage them to stick around long term. Allowing (almost) everybody the opportunity to get a 5* cover is hardly going to break the game, after all a single covered 5* isn't going to all of a sudden push somebody to first place in versus events. It isn't about giving folks a "participation" trophy at all, I see it as more of a thanks from D3. For the more experienced player it can be a thanks for sticking with them and for a newer player a thanks for giving their product a chance in a cut throat market. In business you have to speculate to accumulate and by throwing newer players a bone it may encourage them to spend a bit more in the future.

You'd think for something like Civil War doing really well at the box office, you'd have a lot of people drawn into the game.
The point of an addiction is you start off with the good stuff and gradually withdraw it. I'm making this game sound insidious but that's how this sort of thing works.

So the new players come in, they get a ton of stuff including 4* characters and even a new 5* one if they're lucky and they spent little energy in doing so. Makes the game feel easy and rewarding. But then after a month of spending money they realise it's much harder work, but by then they're hooked.

By whacking the difficulty up to stupid and painful levels in this event you're just assuring people see a massive hill they need to climb with an ogre following them and occasionally slapping them in the head if they think they're walking too quickly. People will instead just give up and go somewhere without the abuse.
And again, as stated, would it really have hurt to give away a single 5* cover for a big new promotional event that's supposed to be joyous and fun?