Meet Rocket & Groot - COMPETITIVE players feedback

Quebbster

Bowgentle wrote:

Players, days before the start of PVE: "It's a bad idea to have trivial nodes with 20 points as the lowest value. People will hit those for hours."
Devs: "We'll run this as planned."

Another sign that MPQ has no idea/doesn't care about high level play.
It would have been SO easy to prevent that, too.
Oh well, let's just have another 5 PVE tests.

Maybe they wanted too see how many players were willing to grind the nodes for minimum rewards... Some will, obviously, but how many is that exactly?

Sledge

I started slice 5 a few hours ago and I'm still sitting 7th. Everyone is holding except one fellow has slowly been climbing in increments of 20 over the past couple hours for a total of around 3000. I already know he's going to place first by several thousand points over everyone else. I can't imagine grinding 150 matches and counting, for the entire event. The devs opened up this for exploiting by increasing the minimum to 20 instead of 1.

TxMoose

Quebbster wrote:

Bowgentle wrote:

Players, days before the start of PVE: "It's a bad idea to have trivial nodes with 20 points as the lowest value. People will hit those for hours."
Devs: "We'll run this as planned."

Another sign that MPQ has no idea/doesn't care about high level play.
It would have been SO easy to prevent that, too.
Oh well, let's just have another 5 PVE tests.

Maybe they wanted too see how many players were willing to grind the nodes for minimum rewards... Some will, obviously, but how many is that exactly?

my slice 5 that has been 6 players (more than 9768), but i joined at lunch today, about 10 hours into sub1, around 250th to join. i can see down to 15th and only recently has #14 and 15 made it to 9768 (presumably that is getting all to the timer, or 4x per node). top 2 players have 13K+, so have added ~3500 pts on top of 'getting to the timer'. not sure what this means for my normal placement (15th to ~40th), but for t10, this has to just suck.

edit: me and sledge are in the same bracket. there are 2 over 13K but haven't been monitoring which is currently climbing. the other has obviously done some grinding too. will be interesting to see how it plays out. i probably won't be able to stay up here - kids activities tonight. i just hope to get the remaining 250/500 isos out.

Merrick

As one of the people that has spent time grinding the 20 point node, I sincerely hope they stop allowing the 20 point hits.

Either that, or start the scaling back up after 7 hits.

We warned them early that trivial nodes and 20 points did not mix, but it fell on deaf ears. I have seen too many brackets decided by 100 points or less to seriously have this be a thing.

jgomes32

Took me 4 hours of continuous play between final grind on the first sub and the 4 clears on the second (minus Thor essencial). That's insane for me. I don't have 4h of continuous play time every single day. Demanding this from players is a mistake.

Top 10 from my slice:

35.200
33.092
31.933
31.135
30.858
30.665
30.610
30.251
30.126
27.984

Me (15th): 25.988

Bulls

jgomes32 wrote:

Took me 4 hours of continuous play between final grind on the first sub and the 4 clears on the second (minus Thor essencial). That's insane for me. I don't have 4h of continuous play time every single day. Demanding this from players is a mistake.

Top 10 from my slice:

35.200
33.092
31.933
31.135
30.858
30.665
30.610
30.251
30.126
27.984

Me (15th): 25.988

These are not points after just end of sub 1, right? If so it's I'm affraid it's not exactly useful :<

jgomes32

Bulls wrote:

jgomes32 wrote:

Took me 4 hours of continuous play between final grind on the first sub and the 4 clears on the second (minus Thor essencial). That's insane for me. I don't have 4h of continuous play time every single day. Demanding this from players is a mistake.

Top 10 from my slice:

35.200
33.092
31.933
31.135
30.858
30.665
30.610
30.251
30.126
27.984

Me (15th): 25.988

These are not points after just end of sub 1, right? If so it's I'm affraid it's not exactly useful :<

No, sorry. Those are the current points. I assume after a full 4 clear of the second sub.

Phumade

It will be really interesting to see if the 20 pt grinder can beat an optimal player!!! Who really cares if some one grinds 20 pt nodes for 20hrs, if an intelligent optimal player can take 2nd with only 4 hrs of work? I just had this discussion with my alliance and my pt is:

1. The last 4 characters in ddb titans were MM, Venom, Nova, Gwen. These chars came out will over 4 months ago, and I'll wager that a significant % of the top 100 alliances have those 4 characters over 8 covers and 120 levels.

I think the real benchmark for success in PVE isn't top 1/2 or top whatever, rather its whether you have sufficient time to make that character viable in the DDQ titans match. From that perspective, MPQ has been fairly reasonable in giving players more than enough time to make a titans match viable.


Personally, I don't think the 20pt nodes are a big concern. The only people it really concerns are those on the edge of cutoffs/next tiers, and those players almost always monitor their rankings.

Sledge

Phumade wrote:

It will be really interesting to see if the 20 pt grinder can beat an optimal player!!! Who really cares if some one grinds 20 pt nodes for 20hrs, if an intelligent optimal player can take 2nd with only 4 hrs of work? I just had this discussion with my alliance and my pt is:

1. The last 4 characters in ddb titans were MM, Venom, Nova, Gwen. These chars came out will over 4 months ago, and I'll wager that a significant % of the top 100 alliances have those 4 characters over 8 covers and 120 levels.

I think the real benchmark for success in PVE isn't top 1/2 or top whatever, rather its whether you have sufficient time to make that character viable in the DDQ titans match. From that perspective, MPQ has been fairly reasonable in giving players more than enough time to make a titans match viable.


Personally, I don't think the 20pt nodes are a big concern. The only people it really concerns are those on the edge of cutoffs/next tiers, and those players almost always monitor their rankings.

I'm the one who noticed the player grinding for 20 points. I don't ever watch the standings between refreshes but this event is different so curiosity got the best of me. The player is likely not grinding EVERY node down to 20 points, just the ONE easiest node, leaving the remaining nodes building points as the timer winds down on them. Currently that node is only worth 119 points to me. Grinding that node down to 20 and hammering on it will do little to affect optimal play. A gain of 5000 points (estimating this number based on how much higher than optimal he is) by grinding this node 250x20 is a huge advantage if not extremely time consuming. Once there are 2 hours remaining in the sub, he only needs to grind the remaining nodes down to 20 like everyone else and he is far ahead.

I'm a top 10 PVE player when I like the rewards but if this minimum 20 point node stays, I will no longer play competitively. I have better things to do than mindlessly grind a node 100's of times for that advantage. Maybe this player is trying to make a point, that this is a dumb idea.

Merrick

That's exactly what I'm hoping to show.

That the 20 point minimum is stupid.

I waste time today in the hope that none of us have to do this in the future.

Skygazing

Merrick wrote:

That's exactly what I'm hoping to show.

That the 20 point minimum is stupid.

I waste time today in the hope that none of us have to do this in the future.

Same deal here. Haven't started the end grind yet (slice 5), but currently at 16k in sub 1. The "optimal clear" gets you just shy of 9700. That's about 6300 points that I've accumulated purely from grinding the easiest node (had a lot of time to just sit and listen to music and play on a train ride today).

Generally speaking, in regular PvE if I want T2 or T1 I can get it. It requires a lot of dedication and only works when I have no other social obligations, but the point is that I can compete if I want to. In those scenarios the point spread after sub 1 with heavy competition is maybe 500-1000 points between the top 10. If no one else pushes a trivial node, I end up with a 6300 point lead on top of optimal grinding.

And what's even more ridiculous: for the next few days that will constantly be an option.

This is an absolutely terrible system.

Smudge

S4 vet is about to end. In 6 minutes, it will wrap.

I pushed all nodes to 7 clears except the teamup node, which I only brought to 5 clears since it dropped faster and I didn't care to push harder for 20 points twice.

I also did not play optimally - I joined at #844 and hit all nodes 7 times pretty much in a row.

Currently, I am sitting at 26th in the slice with 13674.

T10:

1. 16814
2. 16039
3. 15628
4. 15427
5. 15299
6. 15184
7. 15151
8. 15059
9. 15021
10. 14947

My suspicion is that the trivial nodes were permitted to stay at 20 points to encourage the crazies who really care the most about those top rewards to get their fix and that this was a deliberate design decision to allow a wider spread among the T10-T100. I could be mistaken, but from the way we're seeing brackets play out, it certainly feels that way.

Phumade

Sledge wrote:

I'm the one who noticed the player grinding for 20 points. I don't ever watch the standings between refreshes but this event is different so curiosity got the best of me. The player is likely not grinding EVERY node down to 20 points, just the ONE easiest node, leaving the remaining nodes building points as the timer winds down on them. Currently that node is only worth 119 points to me. Grinding that node down to 20 and hammering on it will do little to affect optimal play. A gain of 5000 points (estimating this number based on how much higher than optimal he is) by grinding this node 250x20 is a huge advantage if not extremely time consuming. Once there are 2 hours remaining in the sub, he only needs to grind the remaining nodes down to 20 like everyone else and he is far ahead.

I'm a top 10 PVE player when I like the rewards but if this minimum 20 point node stays, I will no longer play competitively. I have better things to do than mindlessly grind a node 100's of times for that advantage. Maybe this player is trying to make a point, that this is a dumb idea.

We willl see how it goes. I can see your concern. In my bracket, I see someone who is a massive outlier scorewise. but its 1 person out of 500. I would want to see if this is what most brackets are experiencing. Its a new format, so I'm sure that there are ways to tweak strategies.

Personally, I'm more concerned that they haven't perfected the scaling for high level 4*/5* rosters. In the first sub, I used more hp than I typically would use. I got unlucky cascades, so I don't want to blame the scaling just quite yet... But fundamentally, competitive pve for high level rosters has two massive problems.

1. Essential characters missions need to be retuned in light of 5* scaling!
----In the 2* essential, I brought 2 5* with 30k hp each, 2* storm with 5Khp vs. 3 goons over 25k hp each!!!! Can you spot the character that doesn't belong? The 4* essential is even worse because your more than likely using a level 70 4* with less health than essential storm!!!!!

2. AI scaling needs to be dynamically determined based upon your team composition NOT your overall possible roster.
----Fundamentally, building a scaling function that accomodates rosters ranging from day 10, 2*, 3*,4*,5* rosters is hard. I recognize that.

With that said, Its not fun to fight goon battles that basically come down to either getting massive cascades, or stun locking the goons. Because, by round 8, the goons are dealing exponentially growing amounts of damange.

revskip

Sledge wrote:

I started slice 5 a few hours ago and I'm still sitting 7th. Everyone is holding except one fellow has slowly been climbing in increments of 20 over the past couple hours for a total of around 3000. I already know he's going to place first by several thousand points over everyone else. I can't imagine grinding 150 matches and counting, for the entire event. The devs opened up this for exploiting by increasing the minimum to 20 instead of 1.

Is it really exploitation though? He's putting in massive amounts of time.

I tried doing it for a bit earlier today to ameliorate the lost points I missed from not having Thoress. Mind-numbingly boring. I say anyone willing to do that deserves the first place.

Sledge

revskip wrote:

Sledge wrote:

I started slice 5 a few hours ago and I'm still sitting 7th. Everyone is holding except one fellow has slowly been climbing in increments of 20 over the past couple hours for a total of around 3000. I already know he's going to place first by several thousand points over everyone else. I can't imagine grinding 150 matches and counting, for the entire event. The devs opened up this for exploiting by increasing the minimum to 20 instead of 1.

Is it really exploitation though? He's putting in massive amounts of time.

I tried doing it for a bit earlier today to ameliorate the lost points I missed from not having Thoress. Mind-numbingly boring. I say anyone willing to do that deserves the first place.

I'm not knocking what any of the players are doing, they are gaming the game and all the power to them. If that's how the developers envision the top players should play for top rewards, they have a few screws loose.

scottee

No one still has answered the question:

How should winning in PVE be determined?
a) the player who's willing to grind the most
b) the player who has more knowledge of optimal point strategy and carries it out most efficiently
c) the player with the strongest roster who can beat harder nodes
d) ?


At one point in MPQ's history it was a). Then bounced back and forth with b). Lately it's been solidly b). This new test pushed it to c). Now with the tweaks it's back to a).

None of these answers is correct over another, it's just a matter of how you want to design the game.

Bulls

Sadly we don't have t10 list from slice 5, but we have 5 samples anyway. What we can see is that optimal clear would yeald top10 for usually 5 ppl. It's too early to make final judgements as I would like to see how this 48h sub will end but thruth is that most likely that 20 point nodes won't have such big impact as most of us think. We have event with really good reward - cyc is top5 4* char and I guess there's not many more 4* that would motivate ppl to try way harder, but instead of saying that others will farm that easy 20points node think - will you? Near everyone will say "**** no, I have better use for my time". We're worried about new releases of new chars - but those events are always more competitive and yet I bet that optimal clears would be enough for at least t20 if not t10.

Bulls

I belive that I'll sooner score t20 in that case that I'll get any of my 5* to at least 10 covers (fun fact - since gg release Ive got one 5* from lt while on averange I open 1lt/day... 10% my ****)

Lemminkäinen

I went 4/4 on all the nodes in the second sub and I'm #108? That's a lot of work for t100!

mohio

Merrick wrote:

That's exactly what I'm hoping to show.

That the 20 point minimum is stupid.

I waste time today in the hope that none of us have to do this in the future.

I'm really glad to see you say this. I almost PM'd you to say "what the hell are you doing?" since I have your line contact, but didn't want come off as rude. That said, our #1 is a good friend of mine and old alliance-mate so I was chatting with him about why he was doing it too. Basically just said he did it to keep up with you and since he's a bit faster he did it a little more.

I think he sent me a SS of our top 10 at the end of the sub. For reference I was either 7th or 8th, it was neck and neck with mr sledge I think. I did do a few 20 point nodes just to see what it was like (and to "make up" for some of the 30 point nodes that I didn't do on the 8th clear, cause tinykitty that noise), but I wanted to shoot myself after a few so I only did maybe 10-12 before moving on to do more important things.

Here it is without names - s5, I think ours opened around 9-10 hours into the event or so.

1 - 21121
2 - 20408
3 - 16635
4 - 15712
5 - 15339
6 - 14793
7 - 14498
8 - 14474
9 - 14216
10 - 14067

My guess is 6-10 did a "normal" 7/7 clear (4 early and then wait for refresh). Top 5 all cleared the easiest node a significant number of times to separate themselves from the pack.

As others have mentioned upthread, if this is what it is going to take to place top 5 (or 10 in a release) or god forbid top 1/2, I will gladly say goodbye to competitive PvE. The 7/7 clear was actually pretty easy, and that kind of effort for top 10 I am totally on board with, but I fear that more and more will start to overclear the easiest node so that "just" clearing 7/7 will not be enough to make top 10.