Tournament Points - Split from Patch Preview: R41

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Blue Shoes wrote:

Ranzera wrote:

Blue Shoes wrote:

The only problem with the shield is that people can attack pretty quickly, which could block retaliation. If you ignore retaliation then it could work. I think a lot of people are being retaliated against. It doesn't tell you when that happens. You just have to remember who you fought. I think the limited range would work well, but you might run into problems with both the shield and this. It can get lonely at the top (so I hear). You would need to have a percentage bracket. Top 20%, 20-40%, ... bottom 20%.

Well, a simple fix to that is retaliations should ignore shields.

Yep

Except a lot of the last minute hits in tournaments are retaliations, so if you're at the top you're back to taking lots of hits at the end from the people you attacked to get there.

Also, planning your last 5 fights in advance is a smart tactic so that you can speed-kill your way to victory in the last few minutes. With shields in play, it's now down to luck whether your carefully planned list of opponents can even be attacked - you might find 4 of your 5 matches blocked, and wasting time searching through the clunky match-up system, whereas one of your competitors is making matchups no problem. So it solves the problem at the defending end, only to move it to the attacking end. Of course, one way to resolve this under thee proposal would be to full your board with 5 retaliatory strikes... which makes the bash-the-leader problem worse.

I think that the only thing that we can agree on is that there's no simple solution! I'd love to hear more about games which have solved this problem and how they did it (it might also help me to understand why "shields" do work for some games. Are they also used for time-limited tournaments?)

Unknown

its funny how all the people that are in this conversation, are the super serious, fight for the top 10 spots of tournaments, such as myself, theladder, agent, ccseifert, and a couple others. (zzzwolph is conspicuously missing). the points problem is definetly exacerbated at the top end of the tournament (1-100) and not so much between 200-100000. I was only trying to maintain a 100-500 position last tournament and lord, i got attacked once an hour maybe, and even in the last hour of the tournament, i got attacked twice.

that said, i don't know exactly how to fix the issue, but it is tiresome for myself to always have to play the last hour of a tournament nonstop using boosts and powering through opponent after opponent to have the best chance, making everything i did the past 4 days moot. the solution i would back is something like if you win 30 points, the opponents lose 15. this will just artificially increase the pool higher, but doesn't stop you from getting hit multiple times. a combination of this, and protection from getting hit more than say, 3 times per 5 minutes would probably increase everyone's pool while making the losses not as steep. sleeping and waking up to a 300 point drop will still be there tho.

Unknown

Not sure if mentioned elsewhere but another possibility for the progression rewards is basing it on total points gained during the tourney, rather than final score. This would reward the people who play consistently throughout but would also keep the current madhouse at the end of the tourney as the rank prizes are still based on final score. There is something there for everyone. That said the progression scores would have to be increased (especially the top prizes) but dedicated people (even low level ones) have the opportunity for getting top prizes if they are willing to put the time in.

TL;DR Progression prizes based on total points gained over tourney, rank prizes based on final point total.

Unknown

replying to funny ruskie, that would be nice, but i see it benefitting mostly the classic storm low fodder teams, because they'll go high than drop super low, and have easier time getting points.

although then again, the top end teams will be pounding those said storm teams back out of existence so... it might just work!

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forgrim wrote:

replying to funny ruskie, that would be nice, but i see it benefitting mostly the classic storm low fodder teams, because they'll go high than drop super low, and have easier time getting points.

although then again, the top end teams will be pounding those said storm teams back out of existence so... it might just work!

Speaking as a c.storm player myself (only ** character with 13 covers) I think that it would actually benefit the *** spidey teams that can heal up every battle and are completely self sufficient. They might not be able to burst wins but over the long term I would expect those teams to be able to put in more fights in per unit time.

Unknown

Further thoughts: with progression and rank prizes divorced from the same score you would probably see a higher diversity of teams too. People field a team for consistent wins when they have time to play and a different team for burst wins when they have a short play time or end of tourney pushes. It would help keep a floating meta game rather seeing the same team compositions.

Unknown

forgrim wrote:

its funny how all the people that are in this conversation, are the super serious, fight for the top 10 spots of tournaments, such as myself, theladder, agent, ccseifert, and a couple others. (zzzwolph is conspicuously missing). the points problem is definetly exacerbated at the top end of the tournament (1-100) and not so much between 200-100000. I was only trying to maintain a 100-500 position last tournament and lord, i got attacked once an hour maybe, and even in the last hour of the tournament, i got attacked twice.

I don't think that should be too surprising - the prize differentiation is all in the top ranks as well. In a game where the difference between 2nd place and 3rd place is a cover worth 1,250 HPs (using the current tournament as an example) or even more obvious - the difference between 2nd and 11th is 2,500 HPs, it's a bigger deal for those players that try to hit those spots. Time it right in the last few seconds/minutes and you get where you want to go. Time it wrong and you can easily fall out of the top 10-25. It's frustrating.

Unknown

Make all attacks give 10 rating (on first try, maybe 5 on second, 2 on third, and 10 for surrendering at any point), and give an HP bonus to the lower rating team based on the difference in rating.

Keeps the disincentive for attacking easier targets, and we can call the HP bonus a stealth nerf to classic storm.

IceIX

ccseifert wrote:

Ice, it seems pretty clear that we're not going to agree on this so I'm guessing that even though you're only commenting on it as a player, it's not going to get addressed (fixed, in my opinion). I can only share my frustrations about it.

No, commenting as a player is commenting as a player because this is the current state of the game. I wasn't sure if I even wanted to post in the first place due to being taken precisely in this way, despite the disclaimer. Regardless of any changes that may come or may not come in the future, I can at least share my experiences with what works in the current game, as that's what every player is dealing with at this time.

ccseifert wrote:

Sure, you can do these 'pushes' over the course of the week to get to different plateaus of prizes. But you can also do that by waiting until the last day of the tournament and do it in fewer matches. All of those players exist with high scores to use against them on the last day. I could start with 0 points on Friday morning, play sporadically through the day, and finish in the top of the standings by Friday night. What's the point of that?

Yes, it's possible to do this. In order to pull off 1000 points at relatively optimal points, you're going to need to run around 40-50 matches in a row, not counting any losses you may get hit with once you start. It's definitely possible as long as you are willing to plunk down some cash for a bunch of Health Packs. But it's also neither simple, nor is it the way the vast majority of players are playing the game.

ccseifert wrote:

But I will say this - listing 'unattainable prizes' (your words) sucks. If it's unattainable, it's just taunting us.

They're only unattainable in that players have not attained them. Poor wording possibly, but not meant nor designed to be a taunt. It's definitely mathematically possible right this second and will only get easier as more players join the game.

Unknown

Ice, I completely agree with you that the tournaments should reward balance between offense and defense. People who play Storm+throwaway should get pounded for having offense and no defense.

But I do think there is a tweakable math problem with the tournaments, because they currently share an insurmountable plateau.

Every tournament appears to peak out between 1100 and 1300 points. This is true of a weekend tournament with 200 player brackets, and it is true of the SHIELD versus tournament with unlimited users that has been running for a month.

I think what you'd like to see is for the top tournament score to slowly grow over time as more and more people participate. That gives people an incentive to come back to a tournament again and again, and it makes the rewards more exciting for the most popular tournaments.

The problem is that once you hit a certain threshold, the overall point pool remains constant, because points are leaving the system as fast as they enter. If you would just slightly reduce the penalty for losses (say, make the point losses 80% of what they are now), then you would see the overall point total increase over time and the top tournament score could begin to rise with heavy participation.

Unknown

forgrim wrote:

its funny how all the people that are in this conversation, are the super serious, fight for the top 10 spots of tournaments, such as myself, theladder, agent, ccseifert, and a couple others. (zzzwolph is conspicuously missing).

looks like I joined the party too late, it's a case of TL:DR for me but i'm sure that everything I would want to argue has already been said

Unknown

forgrim wrote:

its funny how all the people that are in this conversation, are the super serious, fight for the top 10 spots of tournaments, such as myself, theladder, agent, ccseifert, and a couple others. (zzzwolph is conspicuously missing). the points problem is definetly exacerbated at the top end of the tournament (1-100) and not so much between 200-100000. I was only trying to maintain a 100-500 position last tournament and lord, i got attacked once an hour maybe, and even in the last hour of the tournament, i got attacked twice.

that said, i don't know exactly how to fix the issue, but it is tiresome for myself to always have to play the last hour of a tournament nonstop using boosts and powering through opponent after opponent to have the best chance, making everything i did the past 4 days moot. the solution i would back is something like if you win 30 points, the opponents lose 15. this will just artificially increase the pool higher, but doesn't stop you from getting hit multiple times. a combination of this, and protection from getting hit more than say, 3 times per 5 minutes would probably increase everyone's pool while making the losses not as steep. sleeping and waking up to a 300 point drop will still be there tho.

This is a very good point. If the system was broken how is it that the same players are constantly in the top 25? I don't think any one player should be assured of a 1st place victory any time. If that were the case this game would simply reward people that dump boatloads of cash into it *cough* level 115 ragnarok players cough*. Also what people seem to be failing to realize is this game barely came out 6 weeks a ago. It obviously needs tweaking, which they've done by bracketing tournaments, and the player base needs to increase. Like ice said, points have to come from somewhere.

IceIX

cepage wrote:

Every tournament appears to peak out between 1100 and 1300 points. This is true of a weekend tournament with 200 player brackets, and it is true of the SHIELD versus tournament with unlimited users that has been running for a month.

The S.H.I.E.L.D. Tourney is an interesting case study, but ultimately a red herring. The way most players use that tournament is as a "free" source of Iso, then they let themselves slip again. As the player pool grows, there are more players that are doing this, but very few players that are actually letting their point totals grow to a point where higher tiers can be reached. The number of players in the "middle" range of 300-600 is enormous in that Tourney. The players that try to push up run into the rarified heights of the few other users with that rating and just don't gain enough to keep climbing the mountain.

As for the other Tourneys, we've seen top players push from around 1000 at launch to 1300 not being uncommon fairly quickly. It's definitely rising overall, but each tourney is a little different in terms of duration and participation, so it's not quite a simple curve/upward line trend.

Unknown

How about a system that "locks" scores daily? For example, if you get 1000 at the end of day 1, come day 2 it can't go below that. There may still be a rush at the last hour of each day, but at least it potentially spreads the activity between the 5 days of the week vs the very last day. It also gives people who are busy on Friday/Sunday a better chance.

Another solution comes from the idea of people being in different timezones. Allow people to choose between a UTC-5 and a UTC+7 tournament. So there will still be rushes at the last hour, but at least it's less hectic and gives more options depending on your timezone or daily schedule.

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

The S.H.I.E.L.D. Tourney is an interesting case study, but ultimately a red herring. The way most players use that tournament is as a "free" source of Iso, then they let themselves slip again. As the player pool grows, there are more players that are doing this, but very few players that are actually letting their point totals grow to a point where higher tiers can be reached. The number of players in the "middle" range of 300-600 is enormous in that Tourney. The players that try to push up run into the rarified heights of the few other users with that rating and just don't gain enough to keep climbing the mountain.

That's because the S.H.I.E.L.D. tourney has no ending (and therefore no Rank rewards), and its Progression rewards are not worth the effort for the most part. Hero Points at 450, 1000 and 1500 are nice, but the first vaguely meaningful cover award (Thor) is at 1600. Right now there are all of eight people over 1200, and the only reason I'm one of them is for the novelty of it, something to do 'til more PvE arrives. The mathematics of it pretty much guarantee nobody's reaching the highest levels any time soon. The Unstable ISO tourney was an even bigger anomaly due to its length and grindable nature, and the tweaks to PvE retreats pretty much guarantee that won't happen again to the same degree.

As for normal tournaments, honestly, there's not a lot of opportunity for defense at this stage. Consider:

* Whoever is defending has several significant disadvantages no matter what team they're running. The attacker can use boosts; the defender can't. The attacker can target enemies intelligently; the defender can't. The attacker knows what an L or T shape looks like and doesn't have a 4-gem fetish; the defender is AI-driven and therefore... less than optimal strategy.

* Outside of those who've pumped significant money into the game, most players have structurally similar characters at this point. Unless you have extreme luck (or heavy expenditure) on pulls, you're not going to skill up rares to where they'll stand out and be really useful. This leads to tourneys that are Thor / Storm Classic / (whoever is mandatory and/or buffed) over and over again. By this time they're well-leveled Thors and Storms and (Cap / Wolverine / Widow / Iron Man)s that can tear apart the aforementioned default AI.

* The nature of the tournament scoring is that your performance dictates your score, not your team composition or other factors. This means someone starting fresh on the last day may have the exact same team as a top 20 player, but since they have 50 points instead of 950 they annihilate your score when they attack you and you get next to nothing for retaliating.

A handful of thoughts:

* The current tourney scoring system is basically an Elo system, which tends to work best when everyone's not starting at zero. Consider adding an arbitrary value (say, 1000) to both the starting score and to the progression rewards. This will keep early fights pretty similar (since everyone's starting at the same value) but might minimize the impact of latecomers depending on how you're calculating the scoring values (if it's based on both players' scores as well as the difference between them).

* Other factors might be figured into the scoring. The number of games played in the tournament (so that latecomers can still climb quickly but won't hurt veterans quite as much), strength of team members (rewarding for beating more with less), adjusting the values of how much winners gain or losers lose.

* As others have noted, current progression rewards are pure Peak Score and do not measure total point accumulation. Perhaps an additional tier of slightly lesser rewards for accumulation, so that someone who plays consistently but keeps getting plinked back down still makes meaningful progress.

Unknown

DefectiveChicken wrote:

... lots of good stuff ...

I agree with pretty much all of this.

Unknown

How about a restriction to who you can battle?
For instance say you can't attack anyone with a score that is x higher than yours and can't attack anyone with a score that is x amount lower than yours. So if you do start on the last day with your awesome buffed team you can't just immediately attack the top 20 players who have been trying to hold their ground for the whole tournament. It will also eliminate all those 0point battles from the matchmaking.

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

Yes, it's possible to do this. In order to pull off 1000 points at relatively optimal points, you're going to need to run around 40-50 matches in a row, not counting any losses you may get hit with once you start. It's definitely possible as long as you are willing to plunk down some cash for a bunch of Health Packs. But it's also neither simple, nor is it the way the vast majority of players are playing the game.

I definitely don't agree with this - build a team with three-star Spidey and it's in no way difficult to win every match you play with full health on all three members. And on the rare occasion that you do lose someone, the health packs are about to start coming every 35 minutes - I might use one once a day at most these days.

IceIX wrote:

They're only unattainable in that players have not attained them. Poor wording possibly, but not meant nor designed to be a taunt. It's definitely mathematically possible right this second and will only get easier as more players join the game.

I'm sure they're not meant to be a taunt but that doesn't make them any less unattainable. While the prizes in this current tournament are much more attainable, in past tournaments they have been thousands of points past what was doable. Sure, in magical Christmasland I have no doubt that you could, over the course of a week, hit those thousands of points when no one else is attacking you. But that doesn't actually happen. Once you're at the top, you're the person everyone else is skipping past low-point matches to find so they can get a higher score. So when you are at the top of the scoreboard and the best match you can find will net you 15 points, how are you going to hit those unattainable prizes when you get back to the matchmaking screen to find that five people have attacked you and each one took 35 points?

Unknown

CaptainBatman wrote:

How about a restriction to who you can battle?
For instance say you can't attack anyone with a score that is x higher than yours and can't attack anyone with a score that is x amount lower than yours. So if you do start on the last day with your awesome buffed team you can't just immediately attack the top 20 players who have been trying to hold their ground for the whole tournament. It will also eliminate all those 0point battles from the matchmaking.

I think I like this idea, but (I'm actually not sure about this, correct me if I'm wrong) wouldn't this severely limit how many points you're able to earn to a degree that would make it even harder to get the progression rewards.

And lets be honest, most non-payers and even some payers, know how brutal the pvp is in that last hour that we'd rather just sleep and let the chips fall where they fall (idk if that's the right saying). Basically what I'm trying to say is that all we have are the progression rewards. So doing something that would get in the way of that wouldn't make the majority of the playerbase happy.

Unknown

I do want to say that though I'm pointing out what I consider to be shortcomings of the game and may appear to be contrarian, it is not meant to be disrespectful, I actually very much enjoy the game and am very thankful that someone representing the developers is as engaged with the players as you are, Ice. That was one of the biggest knocks against Avengers Alliance, that suggestions/complaints often fell on deaf ears. So I do thank you for that and for a very fun game to play.