New Mission Difficulty Test: Enemy of the State *Updated

Buret0

Buret0 wrote:

This wouldn't be so painful if they fixed the new lag feature.

Okay.... on hour four straight of clearing first sub. Third place, others still keeping up.

Buret0

Clock it, five hours and twenty-seven minutes to do a full clear, ended up in second place.

Only way I survived that last nodes clears was with an 11 cover surfer, a champion 4Pool, and 5 yellow cover IM40. Just tried to get enough yellow to heal blue and red, while letting my X-enforcer do big retaliations.

One caltrops was pretty much fatal to my level 89 IM40 though.

inanelit

Can someone please confirm whether or not partially completing a wave node and then dying decreases the max score you can achieve in the sub?

I suppose this was always the case even under the usual PvE system. But it still stupid that a partial complete is actually worse than if you get wiped in the 1st wave

OneLastGambit

Ok so I've cleared all nodes and prizes.

I sit 7th in my bracket overall so far (by virtue of being the 7th person to fully clear)

I didn't have to play like a madman for 5 hours in a row to get this either. Here's my breakdown of play...

1st hour - cleared all nodes once and then took 11 of 15 prizes on hardest node.

Left app for a few hours while I worked.

Then played in 2 or 3 minute spells over the course of the next 6 hours so (very manageable and actually ideal for my life) and had all nodes at the point were they are no longer max points. Went to bed.

Woke up this morning and finished my clear.

Every single test I have played the same and every single test I have placed t10.

You don't need to grind like a madman to place t10 in this new system. T2 you will have to grind and quick. T5 if I had cleared before I went to sleep I would have been 5th.

No matter what system it is t2-5 will always need a silly grind to do it. The system is not at fault it's the people in that system.

I'm in s1 after 1 flip, my roster is not maxed 5* or noob. In fact my roster is probably a fairly representative example of the forum - a few well covered but under levelled 4* One maxed 4 and 1 well covered 5* (which is unavailable in this sub so gave me No advantage)

madsalad

awarnica wrote:

Well I'm pretty annoyed. Joined shard 1 about 5-6 hours ago, at 833.
Finished grinding every single node for the maximum number of times. Tedious, and took hours (3-4 maybe?).
Now I'm third in the sub, with 1 day, 8 hours left. No chance to play more to get 1st/2nd.
Can't play again until Sunday morning.

If I was in a tie for first - id be all in on this system. Weekend saved, play whenever I want. But now im just annoyed.
Id love to give D3 the benefit of the doubt here, but I cannot. Now instead of a 2 hour race at the end of the sub it's a 4 hour race at the beginning of the sub.

You averaged 2 minutes per match, playing straight through? There are a 112 clears at 4 hours that is 2.14 minutes per match. not counting the 4 clears from the node on the main event. That's seems insane and super fast matches. And that doesn't account for any time between matches. I know I was playing a lot last night, definitely not straight through, and I only did 46 clears.

mjkick1077

I think this difficulty is good when compared to previous one.

Please modify 3 stat hulks power when compared to others he is not much powerful.

Markot

For top 5, in standard PVE, I need 8-9 clears in 24h sub and 11-12 in 48h sub. The difference for the test event isn't so big. And moreover in standard pve clears are worth no rewards after 7th clear (or after 1st clear for wave) and in test there are rewards for all clears.

The big possitive is that I can play whenever I have time.

For me there is only one main negative - that placement is based on fastest completition. It should be like i.e. in downhill skiing - when 2 people have the same result they are both considered winners.

What considers scalling - for me its hard in last clears but so far manageable. I just don't like calltrops doing over 2k AOE damage on hardest node (lvl 336 enemies). Its quite much for my roster https://mpq.gamependium.com/rosters/markot/ But I don't like calltrops in standard pve too, it has nothing to do with the test.

Dayv

I can't understand the developer's intent on making any game mode where the top rewards are not based on how well you do something or even how lucky you are, but how many times you do it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinner_box

PeterGibbons316

OJSP wrote:

OneLastGambit wrote:

Then played in 2 or 3 minute spells over the course of the next 6 hours so (very manageable and actually ideal for my life) and had all nodes at the point were they are no longer max points. Went to bed.
.....
You don't need to grind like a madman to place t10 in this new system.

I know what you meant, the 2 statements are accurate. However, playing for 6 hours arguably is worse than grinding like a madman.

Btw, if the players from the top PvE alliance aren't boycotting the event, I doubt you'd get t10.

Which is why that boycott is ****. You can't run a test on a population when a significant portion of the population you are testing decides not to participate. It invalidates the test, and in this case will likely result in a worse system for us.

carrion_pigeons

Okay, for some reason I actually convinced myself to grind out the sub completely, and I liked some things about it.

First of all, not having the timer is great. However if the goal is to get people to spread out at the top then this will never ever work. Locking in the highest possible total gives people something concrete to shoot for and as such, they WILL do so.

However I don't actually think this is a bad thing. The node difficulty was pretty perfect all the way to the end and I had great fun trying to adapt to it, which I never would bother with in a million years if there weren't a definite endpoint.

So if you can't have a concrete end without making the game noncompetitive, and the game is fun with a concrete end, then the solution seems to be to make the event noncompetitive on purpose: just make it so grinding out all the points takes a reasonable amount of time and add in a commensurate reward for people who tie for first (ie one progression reward in each sub at max points for, say, 3 cp and an extra event token).

ngoni

Why is it important for the developers to punish people who have spent the time (and probably money) to develop their roster? Any other game gets easier instead this game tells you to quit playing.

Ralph-Wiggum

I'm sure this has been mentioned (I haven't read through the whole thread), but rewards for the wave nodes needs rethinking. The first time through, you get one reward per wave. But on subsequent runs you only get one total reward. So if you don't get the event token in the final wave node of the first sub-event, you potentially will need to play that one node 13 more times with it getting harder each go. That's ridiculous. Either give a reward for each wave on all completions or, better, make the event token reward always be rewarded on the first completion of that node.

WelcomeDeath

"David wrote:

Moore"]
o In one-day sub-chapters, Easy missions increase in difficulty 4 times and are worth points the first 7 times they are beaten. Hard and Required Character missions increase in difficulty 6 times and are worth points the first 9 times they are beaten.
o In two-day sub-chapters, Easy missions increase in difficulty 8 times and are worth points the first 11 times they are beaten. Hard and Required Character missions increase in difficulty 12 times and are worth points the first 15 times they are beaten.

Is this really necessary? Under the old system the most you could get was about 6.5 clears worth of points if you hit it 3 times plus 6 at end. Why keep the amount of clears so crazy? Reduce it to 6 for a one day, 12 for a 2 day on all nodes. Point will stay about the same as before without having to move progression. And put the damn 3* and 4* rewards at the end of the progression, take out placement. Daily placement rewards? Include them in a daily progression list. Alliance placement rewards? CW type ally progression. The last one would probably piss off a few pve-ers that are in pvp only allies and can no longer merc, but everybody cant win everything. Guaranteed youd see more hybrids, especially if its slightly less play (as mentioned). Youre so close, take the final step.

Nick441234

I dont understand why they've messed with the scaling. The difficulty was largely praised in the last test. For me at least, the hardest it reached was a hard fight but achievable.

Currently, with 8 fights faced of the toughest fight in this new test, the scaling has now gone beyond all my boosted characters. By the time I reach the 10/11 fight its going to be unbeatable.

The amount of clears is bonkers too. People complained that 7 was too many, so they reduced it to 4. So whats the obvious step from that? Raise it to 15!

Two steps forward, 3 back it seems with D3.

mpqr7

One nice thing about the complete lack of timers is that there's no pressure to wait until the last few hours to do a rush of clears. You can really just clear when you want.

Sure, if you want to compete for top placement, you should spend 6 hours at the outset, completing it all. But for the rest of us, just do as much as you can/feel like, and call it a day whenever you want to. It's nice to know that you won't be penalized, points-wise, for finishing nodes too early or too late (other than for top placement).

So I'll just go for ISO and prog and just kind of see what happens for placement. It doesn't really matter, since currently it's not a big reward anyway.

Ducky

PeterGibbons316 wrote:

OJSP wrote:

OneLastGambit wrote:

Then played in 2 or 3 minute spells over the course of the next 6 hours so (very manageable and actually ideal for my life) and had all nodes at the point were they are no longer max points. Went to bed.
.....
You don't need to grind like a madman to place t10 in this new system.

I know what you meant, the 2 statements are accurate. However, playing for 6 hours arguably is worse than grinding like a madman.

Btw, if the players from the top PvE alliance aren't boycotting the event, I doubt you'd get t10.

Which is why that boycott is ****. You can't run a test on a population when a significant portion of the population you are testing decides not to participate. It invalidates the test, and in this case will likely result in a worse system for us.

Again, it does NOT invalidate the test. It shows them that engagement is DOWN, which is something they DO NOT want. That loses them players and revenue.

MissChinch

So far I think they're hitting the major points with this test:

Pros that I see:
More ISO available: option to play more and get more ISO - this alone would probably ensure that its a better alternative as nearly everyone is ISO bound once they've played enough.

Time independence: too early to tell in my slice, but so far even the worst cases of tying being reported are less than one half of the top one percent.

So a massive improvement there as the previous format had multiple fixed time requirements even within a single sub and time easily impacted the top 10% of finishers in the hardest brackets (ex hitting each node 7+ times could get me anywhere from T10 to just outside T100 depending on how rigidly I adhered to the old 8 hour windows) This change puts placement far more dependent on performance than how well someone can schedule their life around 8 hour play requirements.


Cons that I see:
Random node completion rewards - Made worse by the bigger reward pools; less chance of getting the node completion reward you want... I'll join the choir with wanting the more attractive rewards rolled into overall progression and keeping node completion just varying amounts of ISO.


Other Items:
Scaling: Need more info for this, but it sounds like 5* rosters are having a hard time, 4* rosters seem to be complaining more than 3* rosters... personally I'm not far into championing my 3*s and find scaling completely doable (this is only the first sub of a massively long event though)

Clear requirements: Need more info, but I think we can definitively say that it requires more clears to get top 10 in this format that in the old... how many clears you need to hit top 50 depends on how dedicated the top 5-10% people will be with getting all the available rewards, probably wont converge on anything predictable without being in place for several events...

Rubberbanding: Happy to see it go, it was another mechanism that put weight on shifting your schedule around the game vs your actual performance. Optimal playthrough was dictated solely based on the node cooldowns, but for the less dedicated at least this had the effect of injecting a modicum of strategy and efficiency... You had to make a good guess at how long to wait to gain the most rubberband bonus and still hit the placement window you wanted in the end...


Personally, more ISO trumps all, I don't care that I'm less likely to get the one measly CP out of the node when I know I have the option to play more and get more of the ISO that's the bottleneck for my progression. Similarly if this impacts my placement I don't expect it to be more than a shift of a single prize window, so one cover plus or minus really isn't significant compared to... more ISO. I'm very happy to know that if I wanted to vie for top 10 again or even top 2 for an event my placement is far more dependent on performance than manically hitting each 8 hour window... I cleared enough to meet max progression easily in the previous formats, I don't assume that will change... and who knows how popular this will be and if this will get the top 10% to play more or less...

So:
Better for my ISO bank
Assuming no difference on progression rewards
Unknown on amount of playing (more or less) to maintain top50 placement

thanos8587

well apparently the max points in sub one with the points from the main node page is 36490. the top 10 in my bracket are already there and i cant see how far down it goes.

crazy is as crazy does. best of luck to all you grinders out there. apparently player engagement is not a problem.

at least progression looks fairly easy. y'all have fun. hopefully i can call it quits around day five.

Vhailorx

Clearing 1 node 15 times, even over the course of two days, is too much. It's not fun, it's just tedious.

__Adam

It's kind of a bummer that with almost a full day left the top 10 is already spoken for, possibly the top 50. The longer I wait the lower I'll place; my time, effort and skill mean nothing.