PvE scaling with featured heroes

Bacon Pants

pasa_ wrote:

reckless442 wrote:

Which would explain why I'm so screwed on PVE. I generally have used Spidey, used blue boosts, done a lot of stunlocking to avoid damage, and healed at the end of matches in PVEs. My scaling in Heroic Juggs was insane. In the last clear I had level 173 opponents. That's what I get for not buying health packs.

Yep, another braindead idea to ruin the fun with the game, and aligns well with a spend-more agenda.

And for this one I actually doubt the connection was even intended in that blatant way. A way of thinking seem to settle in designers brain and they come up with those schema in their sleep.

A braindead idea indeed. I'm being punished for healing at the end of a match, but I wouldn't be punished if I used the HP provided health packs or rested up. Which, makes perfect sense if the goal is too bleed us dry of HP on health packs. (of course the argument here will be..."Don't play the game so much and rest up" During events, this isn't a great option) Why even have healers in the game if you are punished for using their healing ability during a match?

There are more ways to look at it of course:
-if you're not healing (or without a healer) in game and buying health packs you're essentially paying to extend your play time.
-if you're healing in game you're still extending your play time, but you're also making the game more difficult for yourself as this affects your rating.

I just want to understand this dynamic better. I'm still a little unclear on if the Prologue healing affects PVE or PVP difficulty as well...anyone?

Unknown

Bacon Pants wrote:

I just want to understand this dynamic better. I'm still a little unclear on if the Prologue healing affects PVE or PVP difficulty as well...anyone?

I highly doubt it, but lets not speak of it anymore. :wink

Unknown

It seems to me the devs look at whatever data they have available to determine how hard a given match was. Boosts are one thing they can look at but, win/loss and damage are the only things easily reduced to useful data

Obviously a loss = too hard.
A win but every character coming out badly injured = difficult but doable
A win with some damage = winnable, repeatable
A win with no damage = effortless, grindable, too easy

If every match you play looks like it was effortless then yes the scaling will ramp up the difficulty, that only makes sense. A fun game is not one that is win effortlessly repeat until your eyes bleed.

Bacon Pants

Cryptobrancus wrote:

It seems to me the devs look at whatever data they have available to determine how hard a given match was. Boosts are one thing they can look at but, win/loss and damage are the only things easily reduced to useful data

Obviously a loss = too hard.
A win but every character coming out badly injured = difficult but doable
A win with some damage = winnable, repeatable
A win with no damage = effortless, grindable, too easy

If every match you play looks like it was effortless then yes the scaling will ramp up the difficulty, that only makes sense. A fun game is not one that is win effortlessly repeat until your eyes bleed.

Therein lies a problem though, these wins are not effortless. Most of them are battles, but the data is perceived as effortless because I healed my team before delivering the final blow.

Unknown

Bacon Pants wrote:

Therein lies a problem though, these wins are not effortless. Most of them are battles, but the data is perceived as effortless because I healed my team before delivering the final blow.

Exactly. Even though Spidey is OP in a lot of respects, it doesn't always mean matches are easy. I know on several occasions I've only just managed to survive a match, but like you, have healed up right at the end with one opponent left and stunlocked. I leave with full or nearly full health after a really tough match, yet the "data" would suggest I breezed through it. It's not always that simple.

Unknown

I did not mean to imply there was no skill or talent required to make a match look effortless. But if a team wins and comes out smelling like daisies, is it not fair to say it can handle more of a challenge?

If you are only winning 50% but every win is at full health then it can rank you based on win/loss first health second and have a clearer picture of what is going on. If it sees 100% win 0 perceived damage then I would assume it is not challenging you appropriately.

If the majority of teams can win every match effortlessly then the game becomes who can grind the fastest and longest and every casual player sees that the only way to do well is grind more or give up and leave.

Unknown

Bacon Pants wrote:

I just want to understand this dynamic better. I'm still a little unclear on if the Prologue healing affects PVE or PVP difficulty as well...anyone?

IceIX wrote:

jozier wrote:

Sounds like you should be leaving your matches with damage and then healing in the prologue instead of at the end hm...

It accounts for that somewhat. Pretty easy for the system to see that you went out of one match in the Event near dead then entered the next one pretty quickly at full without Health Pack usage.

Well this quote seems pretty clear to me.
Starting your matches with full health and no health packs used ramps up your PVE scaling.

For PVP there is no real scaling system. I believe MMR is purely determined by wins and losses and not performance. Otherwise I would have ended up in MMR hell ages ago, I use Spidey a lot.

Unknown

They could just remove healing alltogether if this becomes too much of an issue.
Spidey and OBW could get a new yellow/blue, attack/shake up skill.

Unknown

Jeremychen wrote:

They could just remove healing alltogether if this becomes too much of an issue.
Spidey and OBW could get a new yellow/blue, attack/shake up skill.

'Healer' is a pretty standard character archetype in video games. I'd hate to see it go away.

In other games, the healer character is hindered in other ways. Low defense or given a small amount of 'mana' per battle to use. MPQ doesn't really do this, as defense is represented as hit points and both healers have a decent amount for their star class. Also, there is no limit on their heals per match (or per hour). So, you can keep healing away as long as you are engaged in any fight.


You wonder if Spider-man had 3300 max HP's and Widow had 1900 max hp's if it might help bring more balance to their powers. Or maybe even a seperate timer on their healing powers.

Unknown

Jeremychen wrote:

They could just remove healing alltogether if this becomes too much of an issue.
Spidey and OBW could get a new yellow/blue, attack/shake up skill.

Well, FWIW if healing is just removed from the game without changes to other stuff I definitely leave it, now for good. Not for rage but it getting unfit to may play habits any longer.

MarvelMan

pasa_ wrote:

Jeremychen wrote:

They could just remove healing alltogether if this becomes too much of an issue.
Spidey and OBW could get a new yellow/blue, attack/shake up skill.

Well, FWIW if healing is just removed from the game without changes to other stuff I definitely leave it, now for good. Not for rage but it getting unfit to may play habits any longer.

I just wish they would remove the penalty for healing in the prologue. Seems to me that the people who go out of their way to employ that technique to extend play arent their target market for $$ anyway. I get, but dont like, why they would scale when seeing people leave matches with full health but this makes one of the three ways to heal (prologue, time, health pack) worse than the others.

Eddiemon

MarvelMan wrote:

I just wish they would remove the penalty for healing in the prologue. Seems to me that the people who go out of their way to employ that technique to extend play arent their target market for $$ anyway. I get, but dont like, why they would scale when seeing people leave matches with full health but this makes one of the three ways to heal (prologue, time, health pack) worse than the others.

How would that be fair?

People who don't have healers have a limited amount of playtime before they must rest or buy Health Packs.
People who do have healers can play for longer, but get harder scaled enemies to offset that advantage.

Your argument is that the people healing in the prologue aren't the target market for $$? Then why on earth would you give them an advantage over paying customers by letting them heal for free and giving them easier fights by disabling scaling? What is in it for D3?

akboyce

pasa_ wrote:

Jeremychen wrote:

They could just remove healing alltogether if this becomes too much of an issue.
Spidey and OBW could get a new yellow/blue, attack/shake up skill.

Well, FWIW if healing is just removed from the game without changes to other stuff I definitely leave it, now for good. Not for rage but it getting unfit to may play habits any longer.

I believe that removing healing would result in short term disaster. Health packs would be VERY pay to win. The amount of time you can not play the game if you rely only on free health packs when fighting some of the super high level PVE fights is simply too high. This problem is mitigated by the healers but this just results in excessive scaling.

However removing healing would bring the huge problem of overly harsh lose penalty and slow hp recovery to light. It would be a VERY rough transition but I believe changes to how heroes recover health and what happens when you lose would occur. It would also prevent the disaster that happened to me where suddenly literally every fight in PVE including gatekeepers are 230s because you used an ability at the end of the fight.

More short term I believe scaling should be based on or at least factor in lowest health you reached in a fight. If I dropped to 10% and then healed up that was still a close fight that could have gone either way if I did not get my yellow or blue AP. Sure it is exploitable but if someone wants to sit there and let the AI wail on them to 10% more power to them. And that is just ASKING for a lucky cascade to ruin their day.

In short I think we should remove healing for the long term benefit but in the mean time adjust how healing impacts scaling.

Unknown

MarvelMan wrote:

I just wish they would remove the penalty for healing in the prologue. Seems to me that the people who go out of their way to employ that technique to extend play arent their target market for $$ anyway. I get, but dont like, why they would scale when seeing people leave matches with full health but this makes one of the three ways to heal (prologue, time, health pack) worse than the others.

I'm not sure the penalty is really there or is significant in the first place. IceIX looks like a good feller but told his load of @#! in the meantime, sometimes and hi words way too often not match the game reality. So I would not sweat about that at all. I definitely keep that prologue healing penalty in the 'unlikely rumors' category until someone shows a hint of evidence.

While the health-loss in the games definitely had serious impact several times, so that one is plausible.

Unknown

Unless you enjoy playing the game simply for the sake of playing the game, progress in this game is almost always measured relative to your opponent (Heroic Oscorp is the one notable exception I can think of where the best prizes are progression-based). You being able to play less doesn't change your relative positioning to other players with similar capability because they also will be playing less.

In the villians only PvP people generally played far fewer games because it's a pain to bring people to prologue to heal, and that didn't stop people with strong characters from doing well, because if you win 6 games versus someone who can only win 5 games before you run out of health packs, that's generally still sufficient to achieve your usual ranking.

Frankly all the argument about healing seems to be more about how it gives the player an advantage, except it does not because people who you ought to be competing against will have it too. You might have an advantage if you're around the 2* transition area but even then, it's not like there's a shortage of 3* guys with Spiderman that are in your overall PvP/PvE brackets.

MarvelMan

Eddiemon wrote:

How would that be fair?

People who don't have healers have a limited amount of playtime before they must rest or buy Health Packs.
People who do have healers can play for longer, but get harder scaled enemies to offset that advantage.

Your argument is that the people healing in the prologue aren't the target market for $$? Then why on earth would you give them an advantage over paying customers by letting them heal for free and giving them easier fights by disabling scaling? What is in it for D3?

I should have been more clear. My read of the posts is that a player going to the prologue faces a bigger scaling hit than those who either wait or use health packs. I feel people who heal outside of a (non event) match should all be faced with the same scaling bump. Right now D3 punishes the player who prologue heals above and beyond the other methods.

To your point of the gap between those with a healer and those without: D3 obviously wants it that way as they took away the prologue healer. By taking that healer away D3 intentionally widened that imbalance. When a healer was provided (even if he sucked) it took some serious effort to get healed up that way and was a trade of time for return.

Unknown

Let me toss in an additional point for consideration... the "pain" factor.

Sure, you can run to the Prologue to heal... but look at the health of the characters being released as of late.

BP has 7250 health.
Modern Thor has 8700 health.
Gold Captain America, based upon 2** Cap health, is likely to end up around BP health in the 7000 range somewhere.

Spidey nerf is coming any day, week, month, century nowadays, which everyone is in agreement will nerf his healing ability.

OBW only heals for 1228 per cast. To heal any of these characters, 6 to 7 casts of AGD is needed plus additional casts to the incidental match damage incurred in gathering 60-70 blues in the Prologue.

Assuming that Spidey's heal is normalized to be the equivalent in power to OBW's heal for a 2** for a normal 3*** character (which in another thread I calculated to be around 2000ish), how much "pain" would players endure in a post-Spidey nerf world to continually prologue heal instead of buying health packs. OBW is definitely "obsolete" in healing these massive health pool characters, but will Spidey be much better in this regard? Healing Ares with OBW is a pain in the ****; would players spend 10-15 minutes in the prologue with Spidey to cast healing 4-5 times for these new massive health characters after most fights?

In any event, Spidey's heal rebalance is going to be a very thorny point to balance. Too little adjustment and the status quo of healing in the prologue remains. Too much adjustment and the forum is going to erupt into Ragnapocolypse 2.0.

Unknown

MarvelMan wrote:

Eddiemon wrote:

How would that be fair?

People who don't have healers have a limited amount of playtime before they must rest or buy Health Packs.
People who do have healers can play for longer, but get harder scaled enemies to offset that advantage.

Your argument is that the people healing in the prologue aren't the target market for $$? Then why on earth would you give them an advantage over paying customers by letting them heal for free and giving them easier fights by disabling scaling? What is in it for D3?

I should have been more clear. My read of the posts is that a player going to the prologue faces a bigger scaling hit than those who either wait or use health packs. I feel people who heal outside of a (non event) match should all be faced with the same scaling bump. Right now D3 punishes the player who prologue heals above and beyond the other methods.

To your point of the gap between those with a healer and those without: D3 obviously wants it that way as they took away the prologue healer. By taking that healer away D3 intentionally widened that imbalance. When a healer was provided (even if he sucked) it took some serious effort to get healed up that way and was a trade of time for return.

between those with a healer and those without.

Pretty sure healing in prologue is the same as healing during in a game. There's certainly no reason to go to prologue to heal when you can use Spiderman normally and stuff scale up pretty fast too.

And people can pretend winning with Spiderman is hard, but no, it's really not that hard when the game pretty much always ends as soon as one person dies, and sometimes it ends even before that. The scaling is quite appropriate for how effortless it is to win with Spiderman. If the enemy doesn't have a powerhouse like Daken or Juggernaut, even level 230 enemies aren't really much of a threat for a team with Spiderman.

MarvelMan

Lyrian wrote:

In any event, Spidey's heal rebalance is going to be a very thorny point to balance. Too little adjustment and the status quo of healing in the prologue remains. Too much adjustment and the forum is going to erupt into Ragnapocolypse 2.0.

Im fearful of the over adjustment which eliminates prologue healing. If MPQ is similar to other games, and Ive seen stats that it is, where the whales are the source of income what happens if you kill the way a F2P player heals/extends play time? It would definitely scare away some players, possibly putting the community into decline.

As is there is a trade off of time for health, which seems fair to me. Im not sure how long a match in prologue to heal would take, maybe 5-6 min? Look at a LR, if you did that a couple times that is a HUGE disadvantage vs those players willing to drop cash on Health Packs. Again, seems fair to me. Could it be tweak? I spose, but only as long as it only adds a very minor amount of pain.

Unknown

Lyrian wrote:

Let me toss in an additional point for consideration... the "pain" factor.

Pain has never stopped people from doing things that give a perceived advantage.

It's true if Spiderman can only heal 1K it'd take probably as long as waiting for health packs to heal 1K at a time on someone like lazy Thor, but that wouldn't stop some people from doing it. It might even be a little bit faster, so some people will still do it. And if it doesn't give any advantage (because healing 1K is no faster than waiting for health packs) then you're inconvenicing a small portion of the population for no reason.

If anything it'd be even worse because it's possible some guys who are pain-tolerant now have a rather significant advantage in the events. Right now everyone with a 5b Spiderman can effortlessly heal to full and at least these guys sort of balance each other out. It'd be very bad if you can only be competitive if you can put up with healing 1K at a time for an hour because that still gives you a small advantage in health packs.