Tanking is making a mockery of lightning rounds

ClydeFrog76

I never have a spare 90 minutes to sit and exclusively play MPQ hardcore during the week, so I jump on at the beginning of a LR if I can, scoop up some easy ISO, and then leave a tanking team there for people to chew up.

This means that when the next tournament rolls around that I actually care about, I have an easier time placing and don't have to fight a constant stream of max level mofos. If they got rid of health packs entirely, maybe I wouldn't feel the need to do this. But as it stands I'm going to use the system against itself for damn sure.

Unknown

I'm not sure where the idea that tanking is time consuming originated from. Getting 100 points in a LR gets you three progression rewards. And then you're done. Seems like a good iso/time ratio.

Unknown

ClydeFrog76 wrote:

I never have a spare 90 minutes to sit and exclusively play MPQ hardcore during the week, so I jump on at the beginning of a LR if I can, scoop up some easy ISO, and then leave a tanking team there for people to chew up.

This means that when the next tournament rolls around that I actually care about, I have an easier time placing and don't have to fight a constant stream of max level mofos. If they got rid of health packs entirely, maybe I wouldn't feel the need to do this. But as it stands I'm going to use the system against itself for damn sure.

I used your tank team to get my tank team in earlier after I got attacked and lost the seed node.

The cycle of life and death continues.

NotYou13

ClydeFrog76 wrote:

I never have a spare 90 minutes to sit and exclusively play MPQ hardcore during the week, so I jump on at the beginning of a LR if I can, scoop up some easy ISO, and then leave a tanking team there for people to chew up.

This means that when the next tournament rolls around that I actually care about, I have an easier time placing and don't have to fight a constant stream of max level mofos. If they got rid of health packs entirely, maybe I wouldn't feel the need to do this. But as it stands I'm going to use the system against itself for damn sure.

This is pretty much me too. I've been doing most of the LRs in full on tank mode after building up some easy points on the seed teams. My MMR prior to LRs on Tuesday was such that I was facing mostly teams with at least one 141 character. Now my MMR has me up against level 30ish 1* teams because I keep putting in level 6 teams to tank and everyone takes advantage of me. It will make the next tournament that I care about so much easier to coast up to the rank where matches start to matter.

Unknown

So tanking means going into the LR and getting up to at least 100 then just losing from there (i.e. retreating)? And this gets you to face lower ranked teams in the next LR?

KaioShinDE

SteelBus wrote:

So tanking means going into the LR and getting up to at least 100 then just losing from there (i.e. retreating)? And this gets you to face lower ranked teams in the next LR?

Retreating lowers your MMR too, but it's not what it's about. If you do it right, you don't have to lose any health on retreating at all. The trick is to get 100 points with a useless team, say a Bagman, the featured champion and a Lv6 Daken. Then other players will see that team and attack it for easy games. And all those losses you'll get from that team will lower your MMR.

The important thing to note is that only the last team with which you won is saved as your defense team. So going to 100 points with your best people and then surrendering with a tank team does not work. You need to win at least once with the terrible team too. That's why LRs are so good - right at the start there are level 2 enemies, even if your MMR would normally place you against Level141 enemies. So you find enmies you can actually defeat with a terrible team.

NotYou13

My team is in transition from 2* to 3* members, with a couple of max cover 3* characters over 100. This is a team I was just paired with in Divine Champions following my LR tanking. Their best character is a level 38 MStorm. I think I may have over tanked, but damn if that's not broken.

vudu3

I thought this topic was going to be about how everyone uses Lightning Rounds to tank their MMR.

Unknown

jozier wrote:

A lot of multiplayer games attempt to match you against people of your same skill level.

But mpq does more than that. It's a multi-layered system. You have global persistent mmr and a local mmr that's exclusive to each individual tourney. The interaction is what's the problem here, including the rewards system. What I meant specifically was to remove the global mmr and leave the local mmr intact. People generally tank 1 event to do better in another. If it's not persistent, there would be no reason to tank in this manner.

An alternative would be to tie rewards to global mmr. Reward people for doing consistently well. The thing about other mp games is that they have global leaderboards. Mpq doesn't. There's no reason to do consistently well. It makes sense to me for a multi-layered system to reward at each layer.

KaioShinDE

ihearthawthats wrote:

jozier wrote:

You have global persistent mmr and a local mmr that's exclusive to each individual tourney.

Source? For PvE sure, but for PvP I wasn't aware of such a thing as a local MMR. It wouldn't make much sense to have both (not that this game doesn't have its share of things that don't make sense, so I don't dismiss it as impossible, I'm sceptical though).

Unknown

KaioShinDE wrote:

ihearthawthats wrote:

jozier wrote:

You have global persistent mmr and a local mmr that's exclusive to each individual tourney.

Source? For PvE sure, but for PvP I wasn't aware of such a thing as a local MMR. It wouldn't make much sense to have both (not that this game doesn't have its share of things that don't make sense, so I don't dismiss it as impossible, I'm sceptical though).

Global is obvious, I don't need to explain that one.

Local is confined by points. You can't attack someone with too many or too few points regardless of "mmr". There was a brief time when they adjusted it and you could attack people with 1000s of points higher, but I guess they didn't like it.

To further expand upon it: Global mmr is a hidden value. Local mmr is just your score for each tourney. If you have 362 points, that's your local mmr; if you have 895, that's your local mmr.

To relate back to my suggestion: The hidden value has certain implifications. Being exploited by the people in the "know" to their advantage and those who are not are left to wonder what's going on. Removing or at least softening the effects makes it less exploitable.

Making the global mmr value completely transparent and rewarding it is the other suggestion. This causes everyone to be in the "know", and so while there will still be tanking everyone can more readily see what's at stake. The rewards also provide incentive to choose not to tank.

Unknown

NotYou13 wrote:

My team is in transition from 2* to 3* members, with a couple of max cover 3* characters over 100. This is a team I was just paired with in Divine Champions following my LR tanking. Their best character is a level 38 MStorm. I think I may have over tanked, but damn if that's not broken.

Back in those "Fix MMR finally" threads devs stated there's no issue as MMR auto-fixes itself as you just win a few games. IME it's not really the case. (though certainly as yo play a little will start meeting lvl 43 mStorm and get to fragment **s).

It was also said the formula has global and local MMR mixed so in-tournament performance is more significant, I have my doubts on major effect too.

Unknown

ihearthawthats wrote:

To further expand upon it: Global mmr is a hidden value. Local mmr is just your score for each tourney. If you have 362 points, that's your local mmr; if you have 895, that's your local mmr.

For me the statement implied local being more than just the current score.

Unknown

vudu3 wrote:

I thought this topic was going to be about how everyone uses Lightning Rounds to tank their MMR.

It kind of is. It's about how people use LR's to tank and then have success in selected LR's when they decide to compete.

Tanked MMR's isn't really an issue in multi-day, multi-bracketed PvP tournaments. But its a large issue in a 90 minute, single/double bracketed LR's where just a couple dozen people can greatly effect the award handouts.

MarvelMan

pasa_ wrote:

ihearthawthats wrote:

To further expand upon it: Global mmr is a hidden value. Local mmr is just your score for each tourney. If you have 362 points, that's your local mmr; if you have 895, that's your local mmr.

For me the statement implied local being more than just the current score.

To borrow from IceIX:

IceIX wrote:

There's no way we could update the tie system before the end of Hulk. As to tanking to lower MMR: It doesn't do as much as it used to since we've been tweaking the algorithm to account for things like that. Basically, if you lose more often in a sudden fashion when you weren't losing like that before, it starts putting the brakes on your MMR losses. So while you would drop a little, you're not going to be hitting a free ride for much more than a few matchups before you recover the MMR you had before. Lightning rounds as well have a lesser effect on MMR than any other Tourney We'll continue to change around the matchmaking system as people figure out neat ways to sidestep our current methodologies. We don't consider it an exploit to do what players are doing, but it *is* gaming the system. Sort of like counting cards.

I couldnt find it, but I want to say that I read a red post that MMR within a specific tourney was paired with the "global" MMR to determine matchups. That makes me thing there is more to the local MMR than just the current score.

Unknown

MarvelMan wrote:

To borrow from IceIX:

IceIX wrote:

There's no way we could update the tie system before the end of Hulk. As to tanking to lower MMR: It doesn't do as much as it used to since we've been tweaking the algorithm to account for things like that. Basically, if you lose more often in a sudden fashion when you weren't losing like that before, it starts putting the brakes on your MMR losses. So while you would drop a little, you're not going to be hitting a free ride for much more than a few matchups before you recover the MMR you had before. Lightning rounds as well have a lesser effect on MMR than any other Tourney We'll continue to change around the matchmaking system as people figure out neat ways to sidestep our current methodologies. We don't consider it an exploit to do what players are doing, but it *is* gaming the system. Sort of like counting cards.

That's the one I was referring. IME if fails the reality test. By a large margin.

Unknown

So if we define MMR as the pool of people you will see in a PVP tournament

So lets assign a value to each MMR range, going to arbitrarily use the alphabet (a,b,c,d,e ect)

So we might say the members of S.H.I.E.L.D are in group A and will see other A's maybe some B's

people like me will be further down say at N and I will see people from group N

Global MMR will be in effect at the very beginning of any given tournament (once you disregard seed teams)

If there is a local MMR for each tournament then that should come as a modifier based on your performance. So if I am doing really well in a tournament my local MMR may move you up from a N to a K or whatever so I start seeing tougher teams as the tournament progresses. Once the tournament ends my roster will be mostly the same as it was before so I go back to being an N, and gradually move my way up the alphabet as I progress through the game.

NotYou13

pasa_ wrote:

MarvelMan wrote:

To borrow from IceIX:

IceIX wrote:

There's no way we could update the tie system before the end of Hulk. As to tanking to lower MMR: It doesn't do as much as it used to since we've been tweaking the algorithm to account for things like that. Basically, if you lose more often in a sudden fashion when you weren't losing like that before, it starts putting the brakes on your MMR losses. So while you would drop a little, you're not going to be hitting a free ride for much more than a few matchups before you recover the MMR you had before. Lightning rounds as well have a lesser effect on MMR than any other Tourney We'll continue to change around the matchmaking system as people figure out neat ways to sidestep our current methodologies. We don't consider it an exploit to do what players are doing, but it *is* gaming the system. Sort of like counting cards.

That's the one I was referring. IME if fails the reality test. By a large margin.

That's my experience as well, which is what I was trying to convey with the screenshot. I'm sure my MMR will be corrected as I win, but it'll take a bit and I'll end up going through a bunch of middling 2* teams first.