New Pve Format - Your thoughts?

Ebolamonkey84

Roster: See link in sig. Lvl 420 OML/Phx, 11 champed 4s

1)Has this new format impacted your placement in the subs or overall event?
If so, are you placing better or worse and by how much?

In the event before R&G, I was 2nd. In R&G, I was 1st. I had sandbagged the 3 previous PVEs though, so this may be unusual.

2) Understanding that the scaling cap increases has made PvE more difficult for all of us.
Do you feel there are instances where the difficulty feels too unforgiving? Unfair?

This difficulty was fine, but this is also one of the easier PVE events in terms of node composition.

3) The new format brings it's share of positive and negative changes. Setting aside the discussion of whether or not it accomplished the perceived goals or if you feel PvE should be non-competitive.
Do you prefer the new format or the old format? Why?

I prefer the new format. Slice 4 starts at 10 PM for me. With the new system, I can play before bed and not have to worry about it until after dinner. With the old system, I had to wake up an hour earlier and possibly ruin my game if work was too hectic.

4) Do you think the new format will change how you play PvE?
No. If I need the 4*, I will try my best on 1st sub and base the rest of the PVE on my placement there. If I don't, I'll get the 7 prizes and progression by playing when I feel like it.

Smudge

My roster is in one of your target ranges I believe.

I have 31 champed 3* characters, a single champed 4* (Thor), Nick Fury with 12 covers at level 188, and no other 4*s over level 152 or with more than 10 covers except IW at level 111 and 13 covers.

My roster has six 5* characters all at level 255, can't be positive on all the coverage because I'm not logged into the app right now: IM46 (4 covers), GG (1 cover), Phoenix (6 covers), SS (3-4? covers? I never use him), BSSM (3 covers), OML (1 cover, hooray day 820 resupply...).

1) Has this new format impacted your placement in the subs or overall event?
If so, are you placing better or worse and by how much?

I used to be a T50-T100 player because I work a full time job over the summer and go to school full time plus work two part-time jobs over the fall and spring.

I loved the original Meet R&G test. Burnout lately has inspired me to play significantly less.

This time, I:
A) Played sub 1 to 10,000 points (green checks on trivial nodes, 4/7 clears on essentials and hards with maybe 1 extra clear on those). Don't know what place I got exactly, but was T100.
Full cleared (green checks on all nodes) sub 2 about 8 hours after it opened, cleared once more the first night, cleared once more the last night). Placed T50 with around 20,000 points on the sub.
C) Cleared a few nodes in sub 3 until I hit the 35,000 progression, then completely threw in the towel as soon as I hit prog. No more playing. I didn't need to even reach into all of the hard nodes or touch any of the essentials for this, and I didn't. Didn't go back to the event to get any more rewards, and no regrets about it either.

Max progression in my experience in S5 *generally* is good for T100. Not even close this time - I finished 247th. If I'm only ever going to hit progression now though, so be it. I'm starting to get weary of the game anyway because I'm stuck in 3-4* hell indefinitely.

2) Understanding that the scaling cap increases has made PvE more difficult for all of us.
Do you feel there are instances where the difficulty feels too unforgiving? Unfair?

Difficulty was tough, but fair except on essentials.

My "hard" nodes topped out at around level 307 for the toughest, ~290-295 for the next, and ~275 for the bottom of those nodes. I'm used to around level 290 on the toughest by the time I've cleared a few times on the old system, so this isn't much of a problem. All of the hard nodes were above the top level of my roster (level 271 Thor), including boosted characters, but the boosted list was good enough, plus my Winfinite is more than sufficient to blast through the hard nodes.

Essentials though... I'm glad the boosted 3* characters were forgiving this week. My final clears of essential character nodes were 240-270 from 2-4*. My CStorm is fully covered but only level 15... my XFDP is like 2/1/1 level 94. If I couldn't run Thor + boosted IM40, those could have gone very differently. Doable certainly, but pushing the limits if there were board movers by the time the difficulty maxed out.

Trivials were just that - I blew through 7/7 clears using my undercovered 5*s.

3) The new format brings it's share of positive and negative changes. Setting aside the discussion of whether or not it accomplished the perceived goals or if you feel PvE should be non-competitive.
Do you prefer the new format or the old format? Why?

I'm an advocate for non-competitive PvE, especially in light of how much of a monstrosity this will be trying to get T100. If I don't live, breathe, and sleep (or I guess NOT sleep) MPQ, I will probably have to just throw my hands up and surrender any shot at new characters now. I'm not going to clear 7/7 on 7 day events for the stupid new shiny that will never stop collecting dust on my forever-transitioning roster. There are much better uses of my time.

That being said, the ability to get progression more easily is much appreciated. I do like being able to breeze through the easy nodes, call it quits after collecting the better rewards from the tough nodes, and moving on with my life. If they insist on competitive play, I'm done worrying about it.

On the whole, I prefer the new format. Not needing to worry about timing clears is nice, and when I'm stuck on campus at my job monitoring video conference connections, it will give me the opportunity to burn some time when I don't feel like doing homework. It's much more life-friendly if you're willing to surrender competitive rewards.

4) Do you think the new format will change how you play PvE?

At this rate, I will probably stop bothering on new characters, but that remains to be seen. I was on vacation this past weekend and generally didn't touch my phone, and I only logged in for DDQ (I even forgot to do that one day). The time away was glorious.

I'll probably stop worrying about anything but progression at this point. If the progression targets are high, I might just bypass PvE or try to collect some of the bigger ISO/CP rewards from nodes and call it good.

I didn't even open the two recent Heroic events which is unusual for me. I don't foresee that changing under the new system, either. Until they open up the ability to get 4*s through progression, which never looks like it will happen, I'm toning back my play on the whole.

I just can't keep up with the hardcore grinders, and I no longer have the desire to do so. If top progression is only going to get me T300 in placement, that's where I will shake out from here on out.

Evilgenius_9

Polares wrote:

And of course THE GREAT LIE, "I can't win all progression in the old format playing in one go" and "in the old format I can't play whenever I want and win all progression rewards". This is the worst. The format was changed because people assumed that the timers were screwing them, something it has been demonstrated over and over again that it was wrong. It was just a perception, and a wrong one. So thanks devs for fixing something it was not broken!

Obviously there are people benefiting from the lack of a timer, since people posting here are placing lower than they were with the timer in place...

For me - 3-4* transitioner. I love the fact that progression is lower with the new format - please, please PLEASE if you do nothing else keep it this way.

1) Has this new format impacted your placement in the subs or overall event?
I typically can finish top 50, top 25 or so if I push and have a good mix of featured characters. I had to do a push late in the end of this event to get to top 200, but I also barely played at all the last day because of Ultron starting and using resources there. Probably could have gotten top 100, but would have played slightly more.

2) Understanding that the scaling cap increases has made PvE more difficult for all of us. Do you feel there are instances where the difficulty feels too unforgiving? Unfair?
A bit. First day the last node turned red for me after 4 clears. Beat it once more, but got a good board to do it. Other than that node, no - it did not seem too bad. I beat all featured character nodes with featured character, an OML at 3/2/1 and phoenix at 0/4/2 (admittedly my deadpool 4 is 3/3/2 168 and other 2 are champed).

3) The new format brings it's share of positive and negative changes. Setting aside the discussion of whether or not it accomplished the perceived goals or if you feel PvE should be non-competitive.
Do you prefer the new format or the old format? Why?
I like lower progression points for 25 CP in the new format. Neither are ideal for me to have a chance to make top 10, so other than that indifferent - but it seems I can score better with the timers, even though I don't play anywhere near ideal.

4) Do you think the new format will change how you play PvE?
I think I will push to 25 CP progression and stop sooner (which will be less play time with the new format). Getting 2 or 3 3* covers over one isn't worth the extra play time if it stays as is.

DFiPL

I'm in the 3*->4* transition; just over half my 3* are championed, and the bottleneck for me in 4* land isn't yet ISO, but still covers. I have maybe 5-6 4* characters with between 7-10 covers. That said...

1)Has this new format impacted your placement in the subs or overall event?
If so, are you placing better or worse and by how much?

I don't play for placement, as a rule. If I find myself in a position to go after a placement reward, sure. Great. But when I begin an event, I'm focused on the progression ladder. That said, R&G found me top 10 after sub 1, so I did a few more clears than I otherwise might have. I was top overall after sub 2. I might have been able to maintain that, but for an unfortunate personal situation with a friend that required my assistance. I still finished 3rd, which is much higher than I can ever recall finishing on my main, and the two GR covers made him one of my 5-6 7+ cover 4*.

More typical for me is finishing 51-100, which is why I'm not usually super concerned about placement.

If the new format means that I can play at my pace instead of being married to timers and still have a reasonable shot at T10 finishes, fantastic. But it's not my concern. My concern is progression rewards.

2) Understanding that the scaling cap increases has made PvE more difficult for all of us.
Do you feel there are instances where the difficulty feels too unforgiving? Unfair?

I've been one of the more vocal adversaries of the idea of scaling in general, but to the extent that anything feels "unfair" to me in the new setup, it isn't scaling per se. I mean, don't take that as an endorsement of scaling, but I'm not seeing anything substantially different from the 'old' PVE setup. Feeders being able to give board movers essentially bonus AP, since they can collect AP for moving the board AND take what their feeders give them? Yeah, that's the tiniest of felines. But to the extent that that's a problem, it's also a pre-existing one, I think.

3) The new format brings it's share of positive and negative changes. Setting aside the discussion of whether or not it accomplished the perceived goals or if you feel PvE should be non-competitive.
Do you prefer the new format or the old format? Why?

If my experience (ignoring placement) in R&G is what I can expect going forward, I am absolutely in favor. Not having to play throughout the day to reach my progression goals - and being ABLE to reach my progression goals - is a gamechanger for me. I play slice 4, which means with 8h refreshes, I was having to get up at 7am even if I wasn't scheduled to work, or not scheduled to work until later in the day, just to get a clear. Now I can play a couple hours before bed and be good to go until the next evening. That's huge.

4) Do you think the new format will change how you play PvE?
Examples:
Going from tanking events to clearing each one for node rewards.
Going from pushing for top 10 to relaxed clears to get key node rewards.
Giving up on PvE for everything but new character releases.[/quote]

Unlikely. If anything, I feel like this might be less stress for me - again, assuming that R&G is typical of the experience going forward. There are clear expectations of when the Command Points are going to drop, which lessens the frustration in trying to farm them, and it seems like if I play each node 4x to get the command points, I should also get the top progression. If I do grind-down clears at the end of the sub, yeah, that lengthens the amount of time I'm playing from sub to sub, but that's also something I'm only likely to do if I'm in a position to gain an attractive reward. If I'm sitting at 91, I'm not going to grind down a sub and then spend an hour or two doing 4x clears on the next one. I'll just play for progression. Brackets being what they are - unpredictable from event to event in terms of how competitive mine will be - I would guess there will be some events like R&G where I'm in contention for the 4* rewards, and some where I'm better off just doing my thing.

I've never 'tanked' events, although I do SKIP some. This is the first time I can remember making an active push for T10, and that's because I was in place to manage it. I don't know if people were taking this event easy because of the change or what, but I found myself in a lucky spot and went after it. If I find myself in that position the next regular PVE event, I'll probably do the same. But I won't force the issue, new character or otherwise.