PvE Frustrations

fanghoul

firethorne wrote:

fudgecake wrote:

due to IRL stuff.

Well, there's your problem. The developers have made design decisions where having a real life, having real connections and relationships outside of the game, will be severely detrimental to your ability to progress beyond a certain point.

I don't know that there's actually a way for the devs to win here, given that there's a segment of the population in any game that's willing to do crazy things to get 1st place in an event. If it wasn't for timers, and the finite number of points that you can get, 1st place would go to whoever could play for the most hours a day, which sounds awful to me.

hodayathink

TxMoose wrote:

to tank you have to enter pve events and place low. enter and play one match or if you're in a comptetitive bracket you can play more but finish 950ish. 2 events usually do the trick.

No you don't. I've completely skipped PvE for a couple weeks and ended up in a noob bracket.

Calnexin

DarthDeVo wrote:

I can understand dropping some after the initial 4 grinds and again after the 5th, but how was I dropping that many spots in the final hour or so? Where are all these people coming from with so many points at the end?

In this PvE your placement after the initial 4 clears only means you're in the running. It means you did the same thing every other competitor above you did, just not as fast. Your chance to catch up relies on them being suboptimal.

firethorne

fanghoul wrote:

firethorne wrote:

fudgecake wrote:

due to IRL stuff.

Well, there's your problem. The developers have made design decisions where having a real life, having real connections and relationships outside of the game, will be severely detrimental to your ability to progress beyond a certain point.

I don't know that there's actually a way for the devs to win here, given that there's a segment of the population in any game that's willing to do crazy things to get 1st place in an event. If it wasn't for timers, and the finite number of points that you can get, 1st place would go to whoever could play for the most hours a day, which sounds awful to me.

Of course there is. It has been requested over and over: more events that have no placement system whatsoever (or at least ones where placement had no effect on rewards).

Dudemon

I really wish people would stop with asking for progression only rewards.

If you want to play for progression , do that. It's easy AND you still get decent placement rewards.

If they go to progression only it will probably reduce the overall rewards and screw up alot of competitive alliances.

Do you really want many of the best players in the game to quit because they cant be #1?

Dudemon

DarthDeVo

Calnexin wrote:

DarthDeVo wrote:

I can understand dropping some after the initial 4 grinds and again after the 5th, but how was I dropping that many spots in the final hour or so? Where are all these people coming from with so many points at the end?

In this PvE your placement after the initial 4 clears only means you're in the running. It means you did the same thing every other competitor above you did, just not as fast. Your chance to catch up relies on them being suboptimal.

Maybe. I guess the point I was trying to convey is that in most other PvE where I ended up after the initial 4 clears is pretty close to where I would end up overall. So if after the first four clears I was somewhere in the 20-30 range, it was pretty safe to assume I would be Top 50 at least, provided I cleared the 5th and 6th plays at reasonable times. This was the first time where after the 4th and 5th clears I was in 20th-30th place for the sub only to end up barely in the top 100 (usually just above 100, actually) by the time the sub ended.

The only thing I can think is that the people shoving me way down the list had all essential characters (I don't have Flaptain) and saved the final two grinds for back-to-back to come from behind like that. But even then, it only looked like there were about 20 or so players getting the max points for the first four clears for all the essential characters. So I just assumed that those were all the players who had all the required characters and very few additional people would be able to come from behind like that. I was counting on dropping 10, maybe 20 spots because there can be that much of a spread over a few hundred points depending on how fast you can clear, but I was seriously dropping about 100 spots, only to claw back maybe 30 or so in the final grind.

It just seemed very... off to me, that I could drop that much in the final hour or two and not really do much about it. And frustrating. I was needing the purple and blue 3* Daken covers (already had 5 black, with two extra black waiting in rewards) and ended up getting just blue and black. The extra HP would have been nice too.

I have a feeling the same thing is going to happen in the Simulator. I don't have RHulk and after my 5th clear earlier this afternoon I'm in 24th overall and 25th for the sub for the 4th slice. And I did clear the one-time 7th node for the (much-needed) 3500 Iso. But by about 9 or 10 tonight I'll probably be around 100 (if not higher) and will be lucky to place Top 100 for the sub. I guess I'll just have to wait and see.

DFiPL

Dudemon wrote:

I really wish people would stop with asking for progression only rewards.

If you want to play for progression , do that. It's easy AND you still get decent placement rewards.

If they go to progression only it will probably reduce the overall rewards and screw up alot of competitive alliances.

Do you really want many of the best players in the game to quit because they cant be #1?

Dudemon

I, uh...

Okay, two things here.

1) If they go to progression only, the "best players in the game" will still be getting those rewards. They're ahead of the curve already, so it's not like anybody's catching up. In fact, progression-only literally prevents anybody behind "the best players in the game" from catching them, because there's no chance of somebody jumping in, throwing their wallet around, and acing "the best players in the game" out of a T10 slot or what-have-you.

TBPitG get that 4* cover, but so do newer players. Net result: treading water. The new player didn't catch up to TBPitG. They just made some progress on their own roster.

2) There is nothing preventing Demiurge from making individual rewards progression-only and still having alliance rewards to reward alliances whose players pull together. Hell, you could even create an alliance-based progression ladder, so the ones that put more time in as a whole are still getting better rewards than the more casual alliances where half the players play and half show up when there's a big event.

TL;DR: there is literally nothing about the idea of "progression-only" rewards that inherently would screw over "the best players in the game" or "competitive alliances."

HOW that implementation happens is always a concern, to be sure, but refusing to even consider a change to the rewards structure to better reflect the amount of time players spend on events because you're worried about "the best players in the game" is literally a decision to harm oneself to make sure that the "lessers" don't get better toys.

KGB

I too needed those Daken covers (mine covered almost exactly like yours). The only difference between you and me is I had 1 Flaptain cover from prior PvE where I finished 8th (thanks to 10 days of no PvE putting me in a Newbie bracket).

That 1 cover let me do that Essential node 4 times (all I could handle) on the final day. But that netted me 2800 points which is a huge amount of my overall point total (57K in my sub placed me 38th). That doesn't even include points from that sub in prior days (probably another 2000). It's very possible that the difference between T50 and where you finished was only a few hundred points (as I did my final clear I went to 70ish to 38).

I've found it's impossible to place T50 unless you have all 3 essential characters. Even T100 is difficult unless the rewards are **** (ie someone like Flaptain instead of Rulk / a new release).

Also I got my placement not by doing any kind of optimal grind. I typically clear 2 times about 12 hrs after the sub opens and then 3 more times in the final 2-3 hours. So players like me are going to add 15K to their score or more in the final few hours which is why your seeing so many pass you. This is where the new PvE scoring really really helps me because prior to the change my final clears would have netted me 1/2 the points I get now since 2 of the 3 are for max points.

KGB

P.S. I suggest taking time off from PvE on occasion to reset to newbie brackets especially when covers you want are in upcoming events. I'm starting to do that now to score 4* covers for T10 finishes in newbie brackets.

DarthDeVo

KGB wrote:

It's very possible that the difference between T50 and where you finished was only a few hundred points (as I did my final clear I went to 70ish to 38).

Yep, 500 more points and I would have hit T50, which I mostly chalked up to not clearing as fast as others, but some of it could also be the scenario you illustrate.

Le sigh. I really do like the new scoring structure, where you don't have to grind as much. But it makes these final-hour come-from-behind scenarios super irritating when you don't have all the essential characters, especially the 4 star. It seemed like before I could still do T50 without the 4 star, but maybe that won't be the case anymore.

KGB wrote:

I've found it's impossible to place T50 unless you have all 3 essential characters. Even T100 is difficult unless the rewards are **** (ie someone like Flaptain instead of Rulk / a new release).

Tell me about it. I'm a F2P player since I started at the tail end of April and used to have few issues getting T50 or typically much better in both PvE and PvP. I got a lot of early 3 star covers and a few 4 stars by placing T10 or better. But my roster is starting to get to the point where it makes it hard to rank even T100 in subs, sometimes overall. I've pretty much given up placing well in PvP, that's basically progression only for me now. And even then, I can easily count on one hand the number of times I broke the 800 barrier. It seems like without fail if I manage to get above the 725 award I hit a wall. No matter how much skip tax I pay I get about the same 5 battles to choose from with characters way outranking mine and the battles are worth about 20 points a piece if I'm lucky. I usually don't have HP to spare for shields, so I end up losing ~150 points. Even when I can shield, I still basically never hit the 800 mark because the matches at that level are way above my league for a meager amount of points. I try to line up as many battles as possible that I think I can win while the shields are up. When they come down or I break them I'll be playing something for 25 or 30 points (or less, because that's all they system will give me at that point) and win, but will have lost two battles for 40 points (or more) a piece while I was in the previous fight. Oh, and defeat the attacker to which I lost 40 points in order to win 5 points back to me? No thanks, because I'll lose 2 more matches for another 30 or 40 points each while trying to win those 5 points.

KGB wrote:

So players like me are going to add 15K to their score or more in the final few hours which is why your seeing so many pass you. This is where the new PvE scoring really really helps me because prior to the change my final clears would have netted me 1/2 the points I get now since 2 of the 3 are for max points.

It could be that I wasn't paying attention all that much when the new system was instituted. Was the first event that used the new scoring the search for the Hulk storyline or the one before it, whatever that was? I knew I wasn't going to place all that well in either event because we were visiting friends then my sister and nephew came to visit all around that time, so I knew I wasn't going to necessarily clear every node to its max. Venom Heroic was the first event I was able to fully focus on and I was really gunning for at least T50 to get those Daken covers. I even (foolishly) thought I had a shot at T25 before it started. So the huge drop in each sub took me by surprise. Gonna see how the Simulator goes to see if I have a similar experience.

I'm not sure how much of it is the new scoring or the fact that my roster is starting to gain some traction which bumps up my MMR and places me into more competitive brackets. Probably some of both.

KGB wrote:

P.S. I suggest taking time off from PvE on occasion to reset to newbie brackets especially when covers you want are in upcoming events. I'm starting to do that now to score 4* covers for T10 finishes in newbie brackets.

OK see, I didn't know this was a thing that could be done. Quite frankly, I don't clearly understand how it's determined which brackets you end up in, or which slice to choose at the outset to gain a better shot at placement rewards. When I first started I picked slice 5 a lot because it fit my schedule better, but I pretty much go slice 4 these days. I don't know if I would have a better shot at placement rewards picking a different slice, so I stick to slice 4 because it usually fits my schedule best.

I get the sneaking suspicion I've been bumped a little beyond my means recently because I've champed some of my 3 stars I probably should have held at a lower limit. But I had duplicate covers waiting in rewards that I would have had to sell, and it felt like a waste when the alternative was using CP to get the last one or two covers I needed to champ the character and use the extra covers in rewards to get champ progression rewards (namely the LT that comes with the first extra cover). But in hindsight I probably should have been more patient and just sold the extra covers if it meant keeping my MMR at a lower level. Oh well, not much I can do about it now.

Pylgrim

Huatimus wrote:

There are multiple reasons why you're losing out:
1) Late start
2) Slow clear at end (3x should take you less than 1hr 20mins)
3) Did you spend any AP/Dmg boost to clear faster
4) Did you grind trivial nodes ad infinitum

Sorry but your decision to go "hard" was probably not dedicated/hardcore enough, and thus you're not going to get #1.
And they have reduced the playing time because now you need 1 less grind at the end.

Whil I greatly dislike the setup imposed on us to be competitive, I have to agree that this is the most solid piece of advice in the thread. Going for #1 in anything requires enormous amounts of hard work and the confidence of knowing that you can meet the challenge in question (whether is "fair" or not) in a better way than 99.99% of the competition. If you are in a competitive bracket, this, for example, means having the kind of roster that can flatten any team in a minute or two plus the capacity to do perfect timing.

Regardless of the conditions, it was not the system that defeated you, but an opponent that could do and indeed did what it took to be 1st.

fanghoul

firethorne wrote:

Of course there is. It has been requested over and over: more events that have no placement system whatsoever (or at least ones where placement had no effect on rewards).

The current system isn't perfect, but no system is going to be. The devs have to weigh the benefits and costs. I'm not convinced that removing placement rewards is going to make more people happy. If there's a limit to the number of progression rewards people can get, then the game is disincetivising playing past a certain point. Or if there's more rewards than people can earn, people will complain about not being able to reach them.

The current system has the advantage of giving some fixed rewards, while enabling people to play more than that for additional rewards, to the limit where they're in 1st place. So people benefit from playing casually, benefit from going hardcore, and even have some benefits for going inbetween those extremes. I only cleared nodes 4 times or less last time. It way more than enough for progression, but also netted me 3* covers, so it was worthwhile.

With this system people still have prizes out of some people's reach, but that reach is defined by the players by what they're willing to do to get it, rather than being a top down decision from the developers on what the covers are worth.

If you do want the devs to give you better stuff for progression, then ask for that. There's no reason to ask for them to remove a feature in hopes that they'll also give you better progression rewards at the same time.

Natsufan01

Darthdevo, I think your last postbreally hit the nail on the head. You've moved from noob or maybe intermediate brackets into the vet brackets now. It means considerably harder to get placemeny rewards. Either tank some to get back into newb brackets, as suggested, or aim for a lower goal. I am a little over day 500 and I play pve only for cp. Hitting the 25 cp and the single cp from nodes is all that matters to me. And I'm perfectly fine with that. Having that as my goal keeps me from getting disappointed at low placement. And since the changes, they've lowered progression requirements, and generally made it easier for me to get that cp. I actually stopped playing a couple events before they switched, and I'm back to playing pve again with how much easier it is.

8punch

why not have leagues like in football?

when you advance a league you can get better rewards etc?

this way the best clans can fight it out which each other.

action711

I think they're about to introduce football leagues

firethorne

OJSP wrote:

firethorne wrote:

more events that have no placement system whatsoever (or at least ones where placement had no effect on rewards).

Except bragging rights..

I didn't have a screenshot of Growth Industry.. and I had a different ign back then.. Jackstar0 might have it or remember.. he came 2nd on that one..

First to win Cho. Not sure if congratulations or condolences are in order. Either way, well done.

kobu

broll wrote:

mpqr7 wrote:

The best way to score high generally is to not play for a while (or play very little), and tank your way into a n00b bracket. Then play like crazy. If you're lucky, you might get top 100 that way!!!

I was doing this for a while. You don't have to stop playing, just switch your mode. If you want to drop to noob brackets in pve do almost nothing but pvp for a few weeks or vice versa. However, I find that with the new changes the noob vs vet bracket difference isn't nearly as stark and I don't bother trying to get back to noob anymore.

I'm not sure there is such a thing as a noob bracket. In Story mode I've been thrown in with people who have full rosters of 4 and 5* characters since I started 2 months ago. Just looking at the top ranked guy in my bracket right now, he's got 6 championed 4*s. I'm even envious of his Bagman which I haven't even seen a cover for yet. Meanwhile I'm still working on champing 2*s and enjoying having my **** handed to me on the second clear of an essential node.

KGB

DarthDeVo wrote:

OK see, I didn't know this was a thing that could be done. Quite frankly, I don't clearly understand how it's determined which brackets you end up in, or which slice to choose at the outset to gain a better shot at placement rewards. When I first started I picked slice 5 a lot because it fit my schedule better, but I pretty much go slice 4 these days. I don't know if I would have a better shot at placement rewards picking a different slice, so I stick to slice 4 because it usually fits my schedule best.

I get the sneaking suspicion I've been bumped a little beyond my means recently because I've champed some of my 3 stars I probably should have held at a lower limit. But I had duplicate covers waiting in rewards that I would have had to sell, and it felt like a waste when the alternative was using CP to get the last one or two covers I needed to champ the character and use the extra covers in rewards to get champ progression rewards (namely the LT that comes with the first extra cover). But in hindsight I probably should have been more patient and just sold the extra covers if it meant keeping my MMR at a lower level. Oh well, not much I can do about it now.

It seems to me the higher you place (not score, place) the more likely you get moved up to the next competitive bracket. It has very little or almost nothing to do with your roster composition/level. So the fact you've been placing T50 or better for a while has kept moving you into more and more competitive brackets where it gets harder and harder to remain T50 or better.

Note: I play slice 5 PvE and slice 4 PvP (easier to snipe here for 3* cover).

I had heard of Noob brackets but didn't really comprehend them fully until just recently. I went on vacation for 12 days 29-July to 9-Aug in another country and could only play on WiFi. So I logged in for 15 minutes a day to do DDQ and mostly ignored the 3 PvP and 2 PvE events (I think I played 1 battle in each just so I'd get registered as playing in them). When I returned and got back into my 1st PvE event I noticed I was put into a Noob bracket because I'd never seen any of the players before (you usually see same names in your brackets after a while if you join same slice and same time repeatedly). Also the rosters of the players consisted of mostly 1-2* characters with only a handful of 3/4/5* characters and those only with 1-2 covers each (there were a few really advanced rosters that were taking top 3 spots because I assume they too were tanking to get easier brackets). I finished T20 and just barely hit progression. Then on the next event (the one that awarded Flaptain covers) I was again in a Noob bracket where I finished 8th to get Flaptain. At which point it put me back where I used to be for the Venom event because once again I recognized a lot of the same names I'd been seeing for the last few months (I was hoping to still be in noob bracket to also get Rulk covers I desperately need).

My PvP experience was similar. The first couple PvP events I was finishing top 50 even though my PvP score was just over 400. Normally 400 gets me in the 150-200 range. Now I've been re-rated in PvP too.

So my experience says you need to take at least 2 consecutive events off in PvE and PvP to get dropped into a Noob bracket.

kobu wrote:

I'm not sure there is such a thing as a noob bracket. In Story mode I've been thrown in with people who have full rosters of 4 and 5* characters since I started 2 months ago. Just looking at the top ranked guy in my bracket right now, he's got 6 championed 4*s. I'm even envious of his Bagman which I haven't even seen a cover for yet. Meanwhile I'm still working on champing 2*s and enjoying having my **** handed to me on the second clear of an essential node.

There are noob brackets. See my experience above. You've been placed in harder brackets because you've been placing well. Tank a couple events and you'll get put in easier brackets.

KGB

GurlBYE

KGB wrote:

DarthDeVo wrote:

There are noob brackets. See my experience above. You've been placed in harder brackets because you've been placing well. Tank a couple events and you'll get put in easier brackets.

KGB

Nope.
Noob bracket tanking has become rampant enough that even when you get into one, there will be some players with a few 5 stars with multiple covers and champed 4's.

A new player bracket is no guarantee of top 10 anymore.
Top 100 sure.

GurlBYE

The idea of the person in 1st in pve being "better" is kinda lol.

it's literally a roster check on top of a time check.
Add money to the equation for iso and s and it's what it comes down to.

If you don't have a set of the ridiculously strong characters that can finish every matches in 10 turns or less you likely aren't going to have an even playing field.
Even with scaling the more options and less reliant on health packs you are the better off you are.

Add into the scaling screws everyone because those with those 3 's their relying on, are in a worse position then those relying on like a roster of 20 's.

And knowing how the 4 stars are ranked here, you can cover what you need with less than 7.

With vip changing health pack charges the playing field is more uneven then ever.

Pve is "competition" (in the loosest sense) where it doesn't belong, the progressions are outdated as are the placements.
They literally created a game based on systems that dictate when to play instead of playing as much as you want.

top one should have been a legendary pack or command points months ago and have bumped the other rewards down. because no person who works for #1 actually deserves to be subjected to winning something like reed richards or cho.
I won't even get into whatever the pvp reward structure is supposed to be with its 3 star at 800 in a 4 and 5 star meta LOL.

Crowl

DFiPL wrote:

2) There is nothing preventing Demiurge from making individual rewards progression-only and still having alliance rewards to reward alliances whose players pull together. Hell, you could even create an alliance-based progression ladder, so the ones that put more time in as a whole are still getting better rewards than the more casual alliances where half the players play and half show up when there's a big event.

TL;DR: there is literally nothing about the idea of "progression-only" rewards that inherently would screw over "the best players in the game" or "competitive alliances."

HOW that implementation happens is always a concern, to be sure, but refusing to even consider a change to the rewards structure to better reflect the amount of time players spend on events because you're worried about "the best players in the game" is literally a decision to harm oneself to make sure that the "lessers" don't get better toys.

Regardless of whether it is progression-only or otherwise, they seriously need to take another look at the amount of rewards being given out, the top 1% being the only ones to get at least 1/1/1 from any pve event just seems far too stingy when even without dupes you need almost 500 covers to max cover all the current 4*'s and to max champ them all as well you are looking at over 4000 covers.