PVE Enemy Scaling suggestion

Alkyoneus

So Gauntlet is upon us again, bringing us back to the Land of Dead Rosters. After seeing everyone in my alliance quitting due to scaling difficulty, and having the same issues myself, I feel the need to open up discussion about a suggestion to change enemy difficulty. I have many years of gaming under my belt, however I don't have any coding experience - those of you who do have coding experience, please let me know if this idea has merit.

So, let's take a look at our roster. A bit of Google-fu brings up this random player's roster:



Given the current method, scaling is basically determined by the Top 3 on your roster and averaged out. This person should be running into Normal Nodes at level 200 (X-Force Wolverine at 230, Invisible Woman at 230, Spider-man at 141). Every time you win against a Normal node, the level goes up around 10%, until you run into the Hard wall after 3-4 fights. By this time, characters are dead/injured, you're out of health packs, and/or your lower level characters are essentially useless.

All that hard work leveling up your other rostered characters is useless - they sit on the bench and watch your "A-team" go down in flames. Once you progress into a higher tier of character roster, the lower level characters collect dust. What to do about those?

How about this as an alternative: Have the game register the 3 characters you choose at the select screen, average the level of those characters out, and use an algorithm to calculate increased difficulty based on number of times you've beaten that node to calculate a new enemy level based on the team you choose?

For example, let's go back to that roster above. I want to use Patch, Hood, and Iron Man against that same node I encountered earlier. Using the new algorithm, the game calculates an enemy team level of 160 (141 + difficulty modifier). This team could step in and continue the fight, allow your other characters to rest.

Every time you take a team of 3 into a node, the game would re-calculate the difficulty based on the characters you're using! I think this would definitely address the current scaling issue, give people with deep rosters an advantage, as well as letting people who've spent tons of money on the game to use all of their favorite characters . It would level the playing the field to skill, team composition, and time available to play rather than the current environment of 5 star rosters beating everyone else in speed to the best rewards day after day.

Thoughts?

Pongie

People will just bring 3x 1* toons to force easier battles and rely completely on team ups.

Gmax101

I actually quite like this....

The player ability/luck will determine the difficulty factor, but the choice of characters determines the level.

I a bigger issue than 1* teams would be the whole 270/94/94 issue where the average is much lower and the 270 steam rollers the match, as the level 150ish bad guys would flatten the 94s but take a beating...

especially where the support characters are less impacted by their levels than their covers (Loki, Hood, Iron Man 40)

But in general principle you make all characters useful.

Big question though, what value does Boosting provide in this model? ultimately, boosting would not actively make nodes easier/harder than their determined difficulty level. Which raises a "Why bother boosting" question.

Not necessarily an issue, but worth considering

TxMoose

Alkyoneus wrote:

So, let's take a look at our roster. A bit of Google-fu brings up this random player's roster:

that xfw has a red power? dang....

this doesn't look like any normal roster with dupes like that and the xfw abilty colors. and be prepared to have the image removed since the name is visible - forum rules there.

TxMoose

yeah that predates me ojsp. that all makes sense though.