New Mission Difficulty Test: Enemy of the State *Updated

Bossblack

I timed myself for clearing the sub 4, it took me 3 hours to grind everything to zero. That's a lot of work.

I have a max SS and few championed 4 stars and my scaling went up to 447 with some enemies with 67K+ health. It's not unbeatable but certainly frustrating to grind the hard nodes.

What really upsets me was the T1 was way behind me (7K+ points and was T9) when I was working on clearing the last few nodes, somehow he caught up and beat me to T1, 20 minutes before I could clear all nodes. I looked at his roster that he has zero 5* and a couple of championed 4*. Obviously his scaling would be way lower than mine which means less enemy health and quicker to clear those nodes than my scaling. I ended off at T2.

How is this fair? To place higher you need a tinykitty roster? Why do we level up our roster just to lose?

Nabistay

I couldn't clear my final node yesterday. Feeding 2* wolverine. I beat it 7 times, but the stupid command point evaded me again. THIS IS SO FRUSTRATING AND NOT WORTH IT

smkspy

Oddly enough, it's day 5 and I'm only 16k away from progression. I honestly can't remember the last time I made full progression on this event since 5 stars, CP, and massive rise in full progression began.

Guess, I was just lucky and figured out the perfect win finite for all those dreadful wave nodes.

revskip

kidicarus wrote:

I'm going to do a "Babs" here by saying that the difficulty is currently too easy.

Currently there are too many people hitting max points in the pve. I'm in a slice 5 bracket where 50ish (maybe?) hit max after 1st sub, 20+ after 2nd and it looks like 15 will get max in the 3rd sub. I missed clearing the yellow node in the main page on 1st sub so I'm just outside of the max pointers (although I've been 3rd for every sub). My point is, it's clearly too easy if that many are clearing all the nodes for the rewards.

The problem with your suggestion is that the rewards are random so you'd be punishing anyone who has bad RNG by not giving them CP, event tokens and the largest ISO groupings. I've had pretty good luck with pulling the CP early but was scaled out in the third sub and unable to get the event token on the final wave node because it already scaled to a place where I could get to the final wave but never with enough AP to win it. That was after 6 clears. What you are suggesting would inevitably result in people ending up with crit boost, 70 ISO, 70 ISO, 100 ISO while others end up with CP, Event Token, 500 ISO, 250 ISO, 250 ISO for the exact same amount of work.

The difficulty plus grind is already set so high in this event that by your count only 5% of your bracket got all rewards on sub one, 2% on sub two, and 1.5% on sub three. Exactly how few people are you hoping to get all rewards?

Smudge

revskip wrote:

kidicarus wrote:

I'm going to do a "Babs" here by saying that the difficulty is currently too easy.

Currently there are too many people hitting max points in the pve. I'm in a slice 5 bracket where 50ish (maybe?) hit max after 1st sub, 20+ after 2nd and it looks like 15 will get max in the 3rd sub. I missed clearing the yellow node in the main page on 1st sub so I'm just outside of the max pointers (although I've been 3rd for every sub). My point is, it's clearly too easy if that many are clearing all the nodes for the rewards.

The problem with your suggestion is that the rewards are random so you'd be punishing anyone who has bad RNG by not giving them CP, event tokens and the largest ISO groupings. I've had pretty good luck with pulling the CP early but was scaled out in the third sub and unable to get the event token on the final wave node because it already scaled to a place where I could get to the final wave but never with enough AP to win it. That was after 6 clears. What you are suggesting would inevitably result in people ending up with crit boost, 70 ISO, 70 ISO, 100 ISO while others end up with CP, Event Token, 500 ISO, 250 ISO, 250 ISO for the exact same amount of work.

The difficulty plus grind is already set so high in this event that by your count only 5% of your bracket got all rewards on sub one, 2% on sub two, and 1.5% on sub three. Exactly how few people are you hoping to get all rewards?

Another important consideration is that it's fairly safe to assume that most of the people that post here have been playing ~seriously and are most likely in veteran brackets.

Serious players always find a way to win regardless of how tough it gets, unless it truly is impossible to beat everything (which even sometimes isn't possible in this game - I managed to blow away level 320 Gorgon and Wolverine on that last node without them ever getting a turn due to Winfinite, and I probably would have beaten level 500+ on that play).

To see 50 players out of 1000 hit top points in a sub for this event surprises me very little in a veteran bracket. I don't think my bracket has had that kind of success, but I haven't honestly been paying much attention after I slog through my full clear. I finished around 17th for sub 1 and 2, and I think 6th or 7th in sub 3. Seems like it's been dropping off. Don't make this harder. It already tops out almost 100 levels above my middle range solid 3* - 4* roster.

David [Hi-Fi] Moore

*Update (06/14/16)

Hello,

Thanks for all of your feedback so far on the current testing. We're aware that some players are reporting tied scores and a few scoring anomalies (which are being investigated). Here's word from Anthony at Demiurge:

"We intentionally set up this run of Enemy of the State so that there was a finite number of points - meaning there's an absolute top score, and multiple players can hit it. When looking at previous runs of events with the new mission difficulty, we did not think that there would be many ties as almost no one played all missions until they were all drained out of points. Once the event has finished, we will look at how many ties there are and how well people performed in general."

DrStrange-616

David,

Would it be possible to get a quote regarding placement and why they feel the need to have it instead of a solely progression-based system that most here seem to prefer? It would be helpful to understand why they don't want to move in this direction. Also, what was the reasoning behind setting up a "play when you can" system that punished players (race for placement)?

Thanks.

Smudge

"David wrote:

Moore"]*Update (06/14/16)

Hello,

Thanks for all of your feedback so far on the current testing. We're aware that some players are reporting tied scores and a few scoring anomalies (which are being investigated). Here's word from Anthony at Demiurge:

"We intentionally set up this run of Enemy of the State so that there was a finite number of points - meaning there's an absolute top score, and multiple players can hit it. When looking at previous runs of events with the new mission difficulty, we did not think that there would be many ties as almost no one played all missions until they were all drained out of points. Once the event has finished, we will look at how many ties there are and how well people performed in general."

Here's what I read from this.

"We've been running this game for almost 3 years now, and we still don't have a solid understanding of our player base and how hard some people may be willing to push to reach the carrot we dangle in front of them so they have a chance at improving their rosters. This despite the fact that numerous people are able to point out the glaring design flaw as soon as the test information is made public, each and every time."

Guys, people play your game. Some people have a different level of sanity than the rest of us. Some people have more time than others and more drive to get those rewards because you're so blasted stingy with them. I hope you actually learn something from this mistake this time, but I'm smart enough not to hold my breath.

Ducky

"David wrote:

Moore"]*Update (06/14/16)

Hello,

Thanks for all of your feedback so far on the current testing. We're aware that some players are reporting tied scores and a few scoring anomalies (which are being investigated). Here's word from Anthony at Demiurge:

"We intentionally set up this run of Enemy of the State so that there was a finite number of points - meaning there's an absolute top score, and multiple players can hit it. When looking at previous runs of events with the new mission difficulty, we did not think that there would be many ties as almost no one played all missions until they were all drained out of points. Once the event has finished, we will look at how many ties there are and how well people performed in general."

Way to be in touch with your player base.

Edit: Maybe if you engaged us more on the forums, you'd have a better idea of how we'd play said events...

bigwhoop

The number of clears to get the max score didn't change between the old system and the new system. However in the old system, the final 6 clears needs to be done in the final couple hours. This puts a huge drain on the health packs. With the new system, players can do the 9 clears through out the day, therefore it is much easier to obtain the max score.

carrion_pigeons

"David wrote:

Moore"]*Update (06/14/16)

Hello,

Thanks for all of your feedback so far on the current testing. We're aware that some players are reporting tied scores and a few scoring anomalies (which are being investigated). Here's word from Anthony at Demiurge:

"We intentionally set up this run of Enemy of the State so that there was a finite number of points - meaning there's an absolute top score, and multiple players can hit it. When looking at previous runs of events with the new mission difficulty, we did not think that there would be many ties as almost no one played all missions until they were all drained out of points. Once the event has finished, we will look at how many ties there are and how well people performed in general."

I'm curious if you see this as a good thing or a bad thing.

Player engagement is up. That's good. Grinding is up. That's bad.

Any chance you just decide to embrace it, and go "hey, we can have the best of both worlds by just lowering the max number of clears, and shifting all the rewards into progression, and abandoning the self-contradictory idea of competitive PvE"?

If you don't want everybody to be able to grind a 4* cover every event (sigh, why not?), then you could make the top reward a 10-pack of event tokens. That could be fun and still much less useful than the 4* cover on average.

fmftint

@demiurge, do you not understand your own game mechanics?
In a standard event ties are impossible because of the way points recharge. No 2 players play at the exact speed or time. Also, in the old system YOU CAN'T DRAIN ALL POINTS

Stax the Foyer

"David wrote:

Moore"]*Update (06/14/16)

Hello,

Thanks for all of your feedback so far on the current testing. We're aware that some players are reporting tied scores and a few scoring anomalies (which are being investigated). Here's word from Anthony at Demiurge:

"We intentionally set up this run of Enemy of the State so that there was a finite number of points - meaning there's an absolute top score, and multiple players can hit it. When looking at previous runs of events with the new mission difficulty,

we did not think that there would be many ties as almost no one played all missions until they were all drained out of points. Once the event has finished, we will look at how many ties there are and how well people performed in general."

The developers know how the tiebreakers work. If the goal is to allow people to play when they want, isn't a single tie (or at least a three-way tie at the top of a bracket) too many?

If you think there are a lot of ties now, wait until you see what the brackets look like for a three-day PvE without wave nodes, or for a new release PvE.

MPQ_Daywalker

"David wrote:

Moore"]When looking at previous runs of events with the new mission difficulty, we did not think that there would be many ties as almost no one played all missions until they were all drained out of points.

I think this really comes from trying to change so many things in the tests. The last test had no limit on the points or the number of times you can replay nodes and even seemed to encourage people to score as high as possible, by making the minimum point value 20 points instead of the usual 1 point. They then over-corrected to the extreme and made it so you can only play missions a finite number of times for points, with a fixed amount of points available. At the same time, they added more rewards for clearing missions. More rewards = more vet engagement, as people are desperate for ISO. So you have a large number of people playing as many missions as they can (for the ISO, and the Command Points), and all ending up with the same score at the end, since there are no timers reducing point values.

This latest Enemy of the State test seemed their way of trying to put everyone on the same playing field (everyone gets the same amount of points, no matter when you play, and you can only get a certain maximum point value) but then Demiurge didn't realize that would cause all sorts of tied scores? Forumites were saying this would happen within half an hour of this thread going online.

These tests have tried to change so many different things, but the one thing they haven't touched yet is the rewards. D3 & Demiurge: The reason the forum community cares so much about all of this is because we know that whatever Story mode changes get put into place permanently will be how we will be able to win new characters. Right now new 4*s are only won by 10% of the players (Top 100 of each 1000-person bracket). I think the majority of that 10% are players who read these forums. But that doesn't mean only 10% of your players want to get the new character -- likely a whole lot more than that want it. The difference between the 10% and the other 90% is how much effort they're willing to put in. In the non-test, regular versions of Story mode, it's a decent amount of effort for Top 100 and an insane amount of effort (IMO, I've never done it personally) for Top 10 because of the 8-hour schedule.

The top 10% are people willing to work their lives around MPQ, if necessary, to get the rewards they want. If it means they need to play on an 8-hour schedule, they will. If they have to play through every mission at the start of a sub so they're the first to that score, they will do it. But if the goal of the tests is to put everyone on a more level playing field so you can play whenever you want, you have to realize that this sharply conflicts with the 10% reward system. Without a distinct timing aspect at play (playing every 8 hours, grinding at the end of a sub, etc), it all comes down to who can find time to play as many missions as possible in a 24- or 48-hour period. As long as you play all the missions and get all the points, you will be tied with everyone else who did that. And placement becomes who can do it fastest -- which is the exact opposite of "player whenever you want".

Please strongly re-evaluate the purpose of this test. If it is to encourage more player engagement (where I think the "play whenever you want" comes from), even if the latest test does it I argue it does it at the cost of burning out and demoralizing your most passionate players. And it makes Top 100 competitive play in this game become a once-a-day, hours-long marathon race, which I can't imagine anyone enjoying for 3 days in a row, let alone 7.

BlackSheep101

Having a reward drop every time a node is worth points is a big part of what's causing people to go for full clears. I don't have the time to full clear for points, so I've always stopped once I've gotten all green checks, and often earlier if the cp and 500 iso rewards drop sooner.

I vastly preferred a max of 7 rewards so I could get the ones I want sooner and be done. Fighting 5 wave nodes 9 times to get a gold token that yields cStorm is pretty demoralizing. At least I got the CP from that sub within the first 3 clears.

I'm in Hell's Kitchen now, and happy to see the wave battles gone. Next sub I'll get OML back, and hopefully things will get a little easier.

GrumpySmurf1002

"David wrote:

Moore"]*Update (06/14/16)

"We intentionally set up this run of Enemy of the State so that there was a finite number of points - meaning there's an absolute top score, and multiple players can hit it. When looking at previous runs of events with the new mission difficulty, we did not think that there would be many ties as almost no one played all missions until they were all drained out of points. Once the event has finished, we will look at how many ties there are and how well people performed in general.

There was no reason to drain the previous test of points because through scheduling and bracket anomalies there was little reason to. Either the rewards weren't worth it, or placement was secured without doing so.

Of course when you put a cap on what can be done, people are hitting that cap.

PeterGibbons316

DuckyV wrote:

"David wrote:

Moore"]*Update (06/14/16)

Hello,

Thanks for all of your feedback so far on the current testing. We're aware that some players are reporting tied scores and a few scoring anomalies (which are being investigated). Here's word from Anthony at Demiurge:

"We intentionally set up this run of Enemy of the State so that there was a finite number of points - meaning there's an absolute top score, and multiple players can hit it. When looking at previous runs of events with the new mission difficulty, we did not think that there would be many ties as almost no one played all missions until they were all drained out of points. Once the event has finished, we will look at how many ties there are and how well people performed in general."

Way to be in touch with your player base.

Edit: Maybe if you engaged us more on the forums, you'd have a better idea of how we'd play said events...

Are you kidding? Go back and read the thread from page 1 - it's nothing but complaints of too much grinding, people claiming they will sit this one out, and top PvE alliances boycotting the event. If the only feedback the devs took came from this thread they would expect a grand total of maybe 3 people to drain every node.

Cunneryn

Got my 25 cp during hells kitchen.

Now what....

No progression past that point, T100 seems like its going to be really grindy, with do progression rewards to go alongside it.

I don't understand the decision of putting so many needed clears. If I would have continued playing at the rate I played in the last few days, I wou;ld most likely have double the progression points, but still wouldn't be ine the T100.

That's ridicoulous...

Psuwildthing

Not only is it not fair for prior who your to not get the same rewards. Tires should ask be first place then go up from there. I've noticed particularly in my grouping that a lot of my opponents that are finishing quickly ask have rosters that have five star champions where in I don't have any yet the difficult for the hard missions is so hard that I'm required to use boosts etcetera tu best then. Here's my recommendation
Make this scoring system standard.
Add more rewards above the 25 command points maybe a tier or 2 with 100-250 hero points. And a tier for 5000, a tier fit 10k and a tier for 15k iso ,8. And then a Master tier ttha grants three extra 4 star covers depending on who the four star is for this story( example is for this run would be Jean grey)

Also I agree that we should get higher ISO 8 for missions and lose the critical boosts they suck

Also group players according to the played. Ie under 6 months, 6 months to a year, over a year, over 2 years etceteras

Psuwildthing

I reached the 25cp mark during day three it trait would've been nice to have more rewards. If you really easy to see how a test goes over you should repeat the sane story over several tests and see how ask the players fare. My suggestion would be to create a new 3 day story to run the tests on our bring back the Howard the duck event.