Another scaling post... Solutions, no complaints.

babinro

1) Scale rewards based on enemy level.

This has been said countless times and that's because it's a general rule for gaming. RPG's like Diablo, Final Fantsy and so many others continually scale up XP and Gold throughout your adventure as the content becomes more and more challenging. It's all about giving the player a sense of progression and feeling of worth for their efforts.

MPQ rewards superior rosters through it's placement rewards for the most part but this doesn't take things far enough. 5000 ISO for those 5 out of 500 players is nice but it's not nearly enough to deal with the demands of 4* and 5* leveling. Meanwhile we are playing for the same node and progression rewards as players in 2* land.

2) Gradual difficulty scaling.

We've seen both extremes of this in the last week. Plenty of people praised Civil War early on despite the level 35 nodes sticking around in round 6. While it's fun to feel like you're cheating the system I'd be lying if I said I actually wanted MPQ to have difficulty that tame all the time. Level 35 nodes open up roster diversity but at the cost of any challenge whatsoever.

Then the nodes jumped to something like level 450 in Round 7...what?

Now look at the Gauntlet enemy levels:
Sim 2 = 43
Sim 3 = 55
Sim 4 = 70
Sim 5 = 89
Sim 6 = 112
Sim 7 = 141
Sim 8 = 177
Sim 9 = 222
Sim 10 = 278
Sim 11 = 310
Sim 12 = 453

Here we see the beginnings of a great progression difficulty that could have spanned all 3 tiers of play. That gradual increase of difficulty from Sim 2 to Sim 6 is great. Content gradually gets difficult as you go further in. It's exactly what you'd expect without the reward scaling. Then for some reason the levels skyrocket to level 453 in the span of a few nodes and the rest of the event just adds 3 levels per node.

If Sim 2 was level 43 enemies and Sim 42 was level 453 characters with everything in between being a gradual climb without spikes then the event would be a lot more fun. Players would have the freedom to play around with their roster and they would feel the impact of their hundreds of hours of play leading up to this point by effectively breezing through more content then they would have 6 months ago or a year ago.

Maceo511

babinro wrote:

1) Scale rewards based on enemy level.

This has been said countless times and that's because it's a general rule for gaming. RPG's like Diablo, Final Fantsy and so many others continually scale up XP and Gold throughout your adventure as the content becomes more and more challenging. It's all about giving the player a sense of progression and feeling of worth for their efforts.

MPQ rewards superior rosters through it's placement rewards for the most part but this doesn't take things far enough. 5000 ISO for those 5 out of 500 players is nice but it's not nearly enough to deal with the demands of 4* and 5* leveling. Meanwhile we are playing for the same node and progression rewards as players in 2* land.

2) Gradual difficulty scaling.

We've seen both extremes of this in the last week. Plenty of people praised Civil War early on despite the level 35 nodes sticking around in round 6. While it's fun to feel like you're cheating the system I'd be lying if I said I actually wanted MPQ to have difficulty that tame all the time. Level 35 nodes open up roster diversity but at the cost of any challenge whatsoever.

Then the nodes jumped to something like level 450 in Round 7...what?

Now look at the Gauntlet enemy levels:
Sim 2 = 43
Sim 3 = 55
Sim 4 = 70
Sim 5 = 89
Sim 6 = 112
Sim 7 = 141
Sim 8 = 177
Sim 9 = 222
Sim 10 = 278
Sim 11 = 310
Sim 12 = 453

Here we see the beginnings of a great progression difficulty that could have spanned all 3 tiers of play. That gradual increase of difficulty from Sim 2 to Sim 6 is great. Content gradually gets difficult as you go further in. It's exactly what you'd expect without the reward scaling. Then for some reason the levels skyrocket to level 453 in the span of a few nodes and the rest of the event just adds 3 levels per node.

If Sim 2 was level 43 enemies and Sim 42 was level 453 characters with everything in between being a gradual climb without spikes then the event would be a lot more fun. Players would have the freedom to play around with their roster and they would feel the impact of their hundreds of hours of play leading up to this point by effectively breezing through more content then they would have 6 months ago or a year ago.

I'll take the blame on this one. After reading your thread on how scaling was too easy in CW, I was reminded how Gauntlet was easy last time, so I wrote a PM asking that they make sure Gauntlet is challenging this time. (Who wants easy and playable anyway). So thanks for the reminder. See you tomorrow in LRs (pew, pew)