Alliance PvE

Unknown

Although I really dislike alliance for PvP, I think this has a lot of potential for PvE. Take something like the current heroic Juggernaut (all obvious cheese removed so that you actually have reason to have more than one guy with an uber roster), there should be a separate version of the event that's for alliance only (though any single player is welcome to try, they probably just won't get very far). It'd feature enemies that are greatly increased in difficulty, but damage they take from any alliance member is persistent. So for example we could be going against a 50K HP Juggernaut. If I hit him for 10K then the next guy on my alliance will see Juggernaut starting with 40K HP. Damage is only tallied at the end of a match, so if 5 guys all did 10K to Juggernaut, nobody would win but the next guy that starts the fight will see Juggeranut downed immediately. This is only for the sake of simplicity and if damage can be updated real time that's obviously fine too. Also, any outsanding match ends immediately whenever any alliance members wins, so if I down the 50K HP Juggernaut on my screen, any other alliance member fighting him will just see the match ending immediately with Juggernaut downed. The alliance would naturally only get credited with a single alliance victory for whatever number of points that encounter is worth, though multiple players might get credit for completing the mission which ought to have the usual completion rewards.

This would mean it'd be a good idea to actually coordinate with your alliance members, and you might even want to divide up who is doing what encounters. Maybe one of your alliance guys has a level 141 lazy Thor so you'll have him tackle the hardest encounters while the rest work on clearing the lesser missions. Heck, maybe you even have a guy with a level 141 Daredevil whose sole goal is soften up the 6 digit enemies you encounter. There would actually be a point to work with other members in your alliance toward a common goal.

Unknown

This would be awesome.

In my mind alliances lend themselves more to PVE as far as leader boards and such go but this idea is better than any of the simple stuff I was thinking about.

Nemek

My only fear with alliance PvE is that it will likely require such an enormous time commitment, which will lead to frustration. It's not too hard to have your alliance members spend like 30 minutes to get up to 200 points and not feel like you're imposing. But PvE...sheesh.

I do agree that they could come out with some REALLY cool stuff for it, though.

Unknown

Yeah, I'm sure we'll see something similar to Fearless Defenders soon for PVE. Just a different set of placement rewards based on total alliance points.

Hoping they test the waters with that in the second round of the Juggs heroic.

Unknown

Nemek wrote:

My only fear with alliance PvE is that it will likely require such an enormous time commitment, which will lead to frustration. It's not too hard to have your alliance members spend like 30 minutes to get up to 200 points and not feel like you're imposing. But PvE...sheesh.

I do agree that they could come out with some REALLY cool stuff for it, though.

Working out the rewards would be pretty hard, but if they're going to go the route 'alliance gets better rewards', I rather see alliance gets rewarded for doing something that actually requires teamwork. In PvP, right now the only teamwork involved is 'don't attack your own alliance members'.

KaioShinDE

Figuring out the rewards wouldn't be hard at all for them, because they'd just take them from the current solo rewards. Whatever we get would be less than we get now (except for first place, maaaybe top5). So think twice about if you really want this **** in PvE.

HailMary

Phantron wrote:

If I hit him for 10K then the next guy on my alliance will see Juggernaut starting with 40K HP. Damage is only tallied at the end of a match, so if 5 guys all did 10K to Juggernaut, nobody would win but the next guy that starts the fight will see Juggeranut downed immediately. This is only for the sake of simplicity and if damage can be updated real time that's obviously fine too. Also, any outsanding match ends immediately whenever any alliance members wins.

Unless you're implying that such missions allow alliance members to retreat without a health penalty, then your setup requires members to be truly simultaneously tackling the same enemy, or take turns that necessitate damaging retreats or team wipeouts.

Thus, the overwhelmingly superior strategy that doesn't involve downing entire teams would be bursts of constant real-time communication, so that alliance members can schedule staggered fight entry while all keeping the same fight open. This is a terribly high bar to set. I really like the general idea of a combined Alliance attack on enemies, but the mechanics of true real-time multiplayer would be very inconvenient.

Perhaps I'm grossly misunderstanding your proposal.

HailMary

Oh, I thought of an alternative that doesn't require death or simultaneity: instead of 1 50K Juggs, have 20 2.5K Juggs, i.e. an unlock that requires 20 net Alliance completions of a certain mission.

Unknown

This would be great, but not in a game where stunlock exists. Invisibility could also make things trivial.

Puritas

I'd be on board with this only if

a) spidey's nerfed
b) events are max 3 days instead of the 7-10 slogfests

Unknown

I'm assuming they don't have the technology to update HP in real time. That is, suppose you've a single Juggernaut with 50K HP, and 5 guys from your alliance started fighting him and each did 10K damage and is still fighting, while that adds up to 50K, I'm assuming the data is not updated so each of the 5 players still sees a 40K HP Juggernaut because their damage is only registered at the end of a match. This means when those five games end, Juggernaut will register as taken 50K HP of damage, so the next guy starting the fight will see him downed instantly. Obviously if they've technology to update the HP immediately that's even better, but I assume that'd require work. Therefore if your team has good communicatino you can actually tell each other like 'hey we did enough damage to win this, let's retreat and save some health'.

Of course this kind of fight is only possible if you take out all the cheese, which is why I used heroic Juggernaut as an example. Otherwise all you'd do is have your 3 guys with Spiderman/whoever/whoever slog away for 20 hours on some guy with 6 digit HPs and that's dumb. At the very least I'd think you'll need to exclude Magneto classic and Spiderman from list of available heroes for this to work, though it'd probably be faster to simply approve a list of heroes that are clearly not capable of being super cheesy. These encounters should not be reasonably beatable with one guy, at least not on the first try. I'd say the enemy should have level 230 attack stats with increased HP, since otherwise a level 2000 hero would be doing 1000 damage per match 3 and that wouldn't be too interesting. Certain powers would have to be removed/changed, like you can't have Daken that heals 5% of his health because otherwise you can actually get negative progress. He'd likely have to have his healing simply removed for Alliance PvE events (but I'm sure he'll still do just fine). Likewise you can't have say a Lieutenant on the other side, because otherwise you'd have to worry about what if some jerk just purposely let the enemy heal, or just a guy who simply isn't very good but is trying to help.

I don't want things like 'beat 20 level 230 Juggernauts', because that is the same thing as just adding everyone's individual score together, and the only teamwork would be 'play more' if you have to beat 20 Juggernauts to get some alliance rating. In the example I have, it'd almost always be advantageous if you can get all X members of the alliance to play at the same time while doing 1/X of the encounter's health and then retreat, compared to hoping some guy can magically do 50K damage to a level 230 Juggernaut in a fair environment, though it's certainly possible to see a couple of superstars each dealing 25K damage by themselves, so it's not an insurmountable advantage.

Unknown

Oh, and for this to work, you'd have to make the stacks all refresh at server time, e.g. all available stacks always refresh at noon/midnight server time. Otherwise you can actually fall behind because someone beat a mission while it's not on max stacks when it's about to refresh. Come to think of it, PvE should be like this anyway. It's pretty stupid you're penalized for beating a mission at the wrong time of the day if you forgot when last beat it.

Unknown

You could have an alliance Pve event where it was like lvl 400 dr doom with 2x lvl 100 doom bots or something like that.
Max roster size = 20 x 10 attempts = 200 attempts per alliance. Attempts are divided evenly among alliance members. IE alliances with 10 members get 20 attempts each. Tank is off most successes.

It could be like a 24 hour node where each alliance is given 100 attempts. Day 2 would be vs the hood lvl 400 and 2 Maggia thugs lvl 130 blah blah blah. Same deal 100 attempts per alliance.

You could make it to where the alliance leader or a commander has to enter the alliance into each node. Once entered no one can leave or join the alliance until the node ends. If someone is inactive their turns are lost. This makes smaller alliances able to compete well but only if they are super active. Big alliances has to have an even strength to score high but missing 1 or 2 people out of the 20 isn't a killer.

HailMary

Phantron wrote:

In the example I have, it'd almost always be advantageous if you can get all X members of the alliance to play at the same time while doing 1/X of the encounter's health and then retreat

That's actually precisely the part I disagree with. I'm in a talkative forum alliance of very active players, so simultaneous assault would be quite feasible for us. But, it's pretty rare, and creates even more geographical prejudice than awkward event end times, since simultaneity is much easier for players in similar time zones.

Phantron wrote:

It's pretty stupid you're penalized for beating a mission at the wrong time of the day if you forgot when last beat it.

Taken by itself, completion-based refresh timing makes sense, in order to make sure players don't play a single longer session that straddles the refresh line (and again, geographic prejudice). But, rubberbanding does undermine that argument, since it allows some low-play-time players to leap ahead of some high-play-time players. Hmmm, food for thought.

Unknown

HailMary wrote:

Phantron wrote:

In the example I have, it'd almost always be advantageous if you can get all X members of the alliance to play at the same time while doing 1/X of the encounter's health and then retreat

That's actually precisely the part I disagree with. I'm in a talkative forum alliance of very active players, so simultaneous assault would be quite feasible for us. But, it's pretty rare, and creates even more geographical prejudice than awkward event end times, since simultaneity is much easier for players in similar time zones.

Phantron wrote:

It's pretty stupid you're penalized for beating a mission at the wrong time of the day if you forgot when last beat it.

Taken by itself, completion-based refresh timing makes sense, in order to make sure players don't play a single longer session that straddles the refresh line (and again, geographic prejudice). But, rubberbanding does undermine that argument, since it allows some low-play-time players to leap ahead of some high-play-time players. Hmmm, food for thought.

Well if you have 20 guys all doing 1/20th of say 50K (2500) and retreat, they still each take the retreat penalty, so if you have stronger players you'd still be better off using fewer players and spread them out on more nodes. For example if I can send 5 guys each doing 10K then the other 15 guys can be grinding out some of the easier nodes. As long as the event has a mix of hard/easy missions it shouldn't be overwhelmingly advantageous to be able to use all 20 guys at the same time. You can do simple guidelines like 'guys with level 141s do these missions first, weaker players do these easier missions first' and if someone wants to go fancy, more power to them if it works.

Rubberband favors the guy who completes it last regardless of how the stacks refresh. Right now, let's say you do a mission and it's worth 2500 points, and then it drops down to 1017 points. You come back 7 hours later and it's worth 1315 points. You don't necessarily know for sure if that's because there has been very little activity on the sub bracket leader and that this is actually the current 100% value, or the more likely case where this is the 80% value and simply went up due to rubberband. If you forgot when you last did the mission, you'll be forced to wait and that's already a problem on the individual level, but it'd make alliance-based events pretty much impossible, and I see no reason why it shouldn't be just based on server time.

Moral

Alliance progression rewards.

Unfortunately, it would still put 20 member alliances at a gross advantage.