Tournament Points - Split from Patch Preview: R41

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It's especially fun when 2-3 guys attack you over and over for a whole tournament just because they can, stealing 30+ points each time while you only get 10 back for beating them

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ZzzWolph wrote:

It's especially fun when 2-3 guys attack you over and over for a whole tournament just because they can, stealing 30+ points each time while you only get 10 back for beating them

Active playerbase just isn't big enough to warrant the numbers of the current points system.

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CaptainBatman wrote:

Domino wrote:

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.

Only if you are one of those people that like to attack teams that are significantly higher up the ranks than you. It would depend on the limit that was set. I think maxing out at 20points per battle is fair, 5 battles to reach the next reward, provided you're not attacked. It would in turn though ensure you couldn't lose more than x amount of points for losing a battle, making it easier to hold your ground and keep climbing the ladder.

Maybe a two score system would also work. A Current Score and Base Score (which is a percentage of your current score). Your base score can only increase and never decrease and your current score can't fall below your base score. As a rough example:
At the start of a tournament both your scores start at 0 points. Say you win a match worth 20points. Your current score increases to 20 and your base score is now 12. If you are attacked by multiple people then your current score will never drop below 12. If you kept winning rounds and reached 1000 points then your base score would be 600 and you can go to sleep happy that night knowing that you will at least be able to resume from 600points the next day if you happened to be attacked a million times in the night. Ranking and progression rewards etc uses your current score as normal.

Nope. I represent the vast majority ( i would imagine) that does not have the time or patience to scroll through opponents and just go with whoever is listed first.

The two score system seems like it could work though.

Unknown

Just an anecdote...here's me after playing half the night in the free for all tourney, starting from about 770 or so:



Here's the first thing I saw this morning: (sorry for the superimposed volume control)

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someguy wrote:

Just an anecdote...here's me after playing half the night in the free for all tourney, starting from about 770 or so:

You gained over 400 points in a few hours?

Wish I could match that any time it's not near the start of the tournament. I'm currently at 833 pts, #2 in my bracket, and it's clawing to get 100 points per day. If I'm lucky I'll break 900 before the insanity starts tomorrow evening. I'm looking forward to the daily reward tomorrow since currently my Thor is maxed out at L45, while I'm having to play against people with L60+ ones.

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Zathrus wrote:

someguy wrote:

Just an anecdote...here's me after playing half the night in the free for all tourney, starting from about 770 or so:

You gained over 400 points in a few hours?

It wasn't a few hours. I started in the late afternoon and...let's just say I'm not proud of the trajectory that last night took for me.

Zathrus wrote:

Wish I could match that any time it's not near the start of the tournament. I'm currently at 833 pts, #2 in my bracket, and it's clawing to get 100 points per day. If I'm lucky I'll break 900 before the insanity starts tomorrow evening. I'm looking forward to the daily reward tomorrow since currently my Thor is maxed out at L45, while I'm having to play against people with L60+ ones.

This is generally my experience whenever I'm decently busy, but yesterday, I decided to be a no-lifer. I doubt I'd be able to keep that up forever.

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someguy wrote:

Zathrus wrote:

someguy wrote:

Just an anecdote...here's me after playing half the night in the free for all tourney, starting from about 770 or so:

You gained over 400 points in a few hours?

It wasn't a few hours. I started in the late afternoon and...let's just say I'm not proud of the trajectory that last night took for me.

Zathrus wrote:

Wish I could match that any time it's not near the start of the tournament. I'm currently at 833 pts, #2 in my bracket, and it's clawing to get 100 points per day. If I'm lucky I'll break 900 before the insanity starts tomorrow evening. I'm looking forward to the daily reward tomorrow since currently my Thor is maxed out at L45, while I'm having to play against people with L60+ ones.

This is generally my experience whenever I'm decently busy, but yesterday, I decided to be a no-lifer. I doubt I'd be able to keep that up forever.

hey at least you hit the 500 HP threshold

PS: Stop attacking me someguy

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DumDumDugn wrote:

PS: Stop attacking me someguy

Sorry man

Yesterday, if I had bought a cat, it literally would've been an improvement for my social life

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ZzzWolph wrote:

It's especially fun when 2-3 guys attack you over and over for a whole tournament just because they can, stealing 30+ points each time while you only get 10 back for beating them

There's perhaps the mentality of don't retaliate, as they might leave you alone, but it doesn't seem to work that way! I'm pretty sure I attack certain people over and over and they probably think the same. So not necessarily complaining, but wish the matchmaking was a bit more intelligent - more diversity and perhaps limit attacks against a particular player to once per hour or something. Not sure how viable that is.

Unknown

I don't know how it is at the top end of the tournament ladder -- I don't frequent it often enough to tell -- but I just skip people who attack me/retaliate against me if their points are too low. Getting an attack on someone with low points just means possibility of losing a lot in the retaliation. Only time when I attack who I see is in SHIELD training where I focus on farming ISO rather than farming points. I don't get the huge swings everybody here is claiming but then again, my target pool is likely larger as well.

Unknown

Couldn't agree more with everybody's comments. But, this was a freemium game and if there are rushes in the last hour of the tourney' it's more than likely money is being spent. Which in the end is what Dark Reign wants people to do spend money. So those of us that play all week and try to keep a good ranking without spending money are penalized in the end.

Unknown

Yeah, that pic is me most mornings too. I'm starting to not like this game so much. I don't mind the guys I can retaliate against. Heck, we bounce off each other and both get more points but it's those damn 500 point leeches that stop all progress.

Unknown

I know I made a dumb suggestion about a third type of reward, but it's really sounding like the main theme here is, we don't like having all our hard work (all the points we build up after playing for hours) to disappear suddenly when we get attacked 7 times within 2 minutes and lose hundreds of points.

Rather than add a third type of reward, I think progression rewards should just be decoupled from tourney points, and you never go backwards. They could instead be scaled off of your total number of wins in the tourney. i.e. 5 wins = small ISO. 10 wins = slightly more ISO 15 wins = slightly more iso. 20 wins = standard token.

I would be fine with progression rewards having extremely high victory conditions to get (i.e. reward of a Doom or Hood or whatever at several hundred wins). Many of us are playing a TON these days. Having guaranteed progression rewards simply for playing a lot will reward those of us who are hardcore enough to play that many times and will keep us happily playing if we know there's a guaranteed reward on the horizon.

To add further diversity to tourneys, I would suggest adding bonus achievement rewards for unorthodox team comps or for competing under different conditions, e.g. stun the enemy at least once per match 5x for a reward, win 10x straight matches with Bullseye, etc. These achievements could be separate from tourney progress but if they are tuned properly, I think they could definitely encourage more players to deviate from Thor/C. Storm/X.

Unknown

Just within the last 30 minutes went from top 5 to number 40 losing about 150 points. Which is ridiculous really makes you want to stop playing.

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i'm pro decoupling the progression rewards compared to the ranking rewards. everytime i pushed for 1200 the past day, i would get close and get shot back down after i come back out from a battle and 1-2 people have hit me or retaliated against me. i wouldn't also mind making the rewards harder to get (more wins etc) so that at least we have a goal to strive for. right now, the progression rewards is just hit everyone as fast as you can and pray that u don't get hit. which is kind of ridiculous.

Nemek

I'll go ahead and go against the grain from a lot of what I read here...

While I don't think everything is perfect, I don't think things are as dire as some people make it out to be. Losing 150 points in 30 minutes is to be kind of expected if you overreached by 150 points. Every team has some sort of equilibrium amount of points, and will shift up or down temporarily. That equilibrium is generally defined by your team's defense, or at least it's perceived defense (sometimes it's better to be scary or annoying, rather than actually powerful.) The upward shifts above the equilibrium is defined by your offense - how quickly can you go through as many opponents as possible before people start clobbering you. Since offense is heavily favored in this game, there will always be somebody to destroy you.

So, you should have two goals for most any tournament, how do I get the most total points at a single point in time? and how do I get the most points at the exact moment that the tournament finishes?

There are a lot of complaints about the fall back down to equilibrium, and I think a lot of players just don't 'understand' the meta of the tournaments (I know that sounds condescending). It's not intended to be a steady progression and I'd hope that some people wouldn't really want it to be, anyway. If it were...if Aioli is playing 10 hours a day, guess who wins every darn tournament? Variability isn't necessarily a a bad thing - the fact that Aioli/ZzzWolph/TheLadder/other top players don't win every single tournament because they play more than everybody else is a GOOD thing.

If we're looking for steady progression in the game - it's there too. You average something like 100 ISO for every win you make in PvP. ISO then makes your characters stronger, so then you can make your defense/offense stronger, so then your equilibrium point level is higher, and your upward shifts are higher. This whole game is a giant steady progression. Then, the Unstable ISO event was like the definition of steady progression...and we'll likely be seeing more of those in the future.

Having said all that, I can understand if you know the game very well and understand the point swings...and just don't like it. But, I'm not sure if I really consider it 'unfair'.

Unknown

Honestly, once you figure in boosts, the 3 Tries system and the retaliation system, there really is only one viable defense at this point: firepower SO overwhelming that even the legions of 85 Storm / 85 Thors look at you and go "nope." That means maxed rares with full skills. Good luck building that.

Outside of that, the nature of current PvP is simple. If you spend hours beating up on lots of players and building a high score, every one of those victims:

a) has a team that's likely to be structurally similar to yours,
b) can attack you with the benefits of boosts and not being **** by CPU AI,
c) will hurt your score when they beat you (especially if, having not spent hours racking up points, their score is at or below yours now), and
d) has a BIG RED DOT on their screen with your name and address on it so they can attack you.

So OF COURSE you're not going to keep all those points.

Going for a high score with days or even hours left in a tourney is like leading an eBay auction with three days left to bid. Sure, it feels good to be in the lead, but is it likely to last? There are progression rewards, of course, but your positioning doesn't mean much until the home stretch.

The key to tourney success is (a) being around for the tail end of it, (b) choosing targets wisely during that period, (c) having your health packs and boosts available then and (d) having a decent point total to build upon. Lightning Rounds are good practice because they're ALL tail end, so you get the hang of learning who's worth attacking, who isn't and who's just going to trade shots back and forth with you and waste both your resources.

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Nemek wrote:

So, you should have two goals for most any tournament, how do I get the most total points at a single point in time? and how do I get the most points at the exact moment that the tournament finishes?

Those very goals are a problem to those who can't schedule their life around the tourney or live in an unfavourable time zone.

Unknown

I tried getting up to a point where I could push heavy in the last hour of the free for all tourney, and I ran out of heals 25 mins in. I was up to #7 when a series of insane enemy luck killed two members of my team and I just couldn't last. By the time I was healed up with decent characters I'd dropped to 68. In the last ten mins I got up to 29 after see-sawing up and down. Before the last hour I hadn't moved much all day and had been between 40-60 I think. So yeah, the amount you can gain in short time and the amount you can lose in a short time just seems off.

If all lengthy tourneys pretty much plateau as to how many points you can get, and an amazing team would sit grinding for 1 or 2 at a time, why bother with long tournaments? They don't prove anything. #1 isn't the guy with the best team or skill, but the person who has free time 30 mins before the end of a tourney and maybe the hp to heal whenever needed. So a long tourney only benefits guys by giving the progress prizes, and you have to be lucky or super devoted to get any of the cool prizes, which sucks for the casual gamer. I know many of the mechanics are good for making money, as this is freemium, but still.

This has all been said, but I wanted to throw in another real example that just happened tonight.

Unknown

I think this post will just get lost in this mega thread but I see a lot of highlighting what the problem is here and not a lot of proposed solutions. I want to throw my two cents in to help us find away to work this out because these forums are flooded with unhappy people, myself being one of them!

1. Point loss should be a fixed rate
Each and every loss, regardless of current ladder position, should be worth a set amount of points, say -10 for example. This would allow continuos upward movement and prevent unfair and sporadic last minute beat downs. It will let people play on their own time as they can play earlier in the week, at their own pace, building up points and not spend Friday night with their fingers crossed for good luck. This idea was inspired by the behavior I noticed of high scoring players during the Red Iso event. I was able to secure a top 10 position early and didn't need to play during the last day of the tournament and I think the pvp portion would benefit from similar principles.

2.Retaliations should not cause more retaliations
Retaliating right now means that this particular person has beat me and probably caused me to lose a lot of points. If I retaliate, I will maybe get half of those points back... until he retaliates again. I basically choose my retaliations based on the likely hood of having my retaliation retaliated against, causing a retaliation spiral of agitation. I think a retaliation should not put you back on your target's mission list.

3. Bonus for retaliation
Make retaliations worthwhile by sweetening the deal somehow. For example: Iso rewards can be worth 140/210, or 100/170 instead of the usual 70/140. Or throw in an extra +5 points for a retaliation victory on the first attempt. Point loss is so severe that I don't ever want to come up against someone who can beat me time and time again because I almost always lose more points in the long run. I'd almost rather target weaker opponents for fewer points at the end of a tournament because there really is no point in retaliating but the matchmaking prevents that from happening.

Are these changes that you would want to see implemented?