Simulator Basics part 2: Electric Boogaloo (Mar 21-30)

Unknown

Twysta wrote:

reckless442 wrote:

Now, I'm in a position where I have one of two choices: (1) use Spidey, keep stunlocking, and face 230+ in the next round; or (2) tank the event completely, possibly miss out on Cap'n America, and hurt my alliance. Both options are extremely frustrating. What infuriates me is that I'm essentially being punished for being an efficient and effective player -- and for using an advantage that I pay for and that the devs provided. Frankly, I just don't understand that notion that the game has to be so balanced so that it is hard for everyone. If you have a strong roster and are a good player, the game should be easier for you. That's a benefit to having built up the roster and learning the game strategies. There is no reason why the game needs to rise to near-impossibility to compensate for you doing well.

That's the worst part about it. It punishes people who play well and rewards people for play poorly.
I know that that's not what the scaling is for or it's intent but in it's current form that's how it works.
Scaling has got mildly better over the course of each event but with the way the system works I'm not sure it will ever work as desired.

I'm pretty sure if they got rid of it, it would be a minority of people that missed it.
I can understand why it was introduced but I just don't think it has been worth it.
It would be nice to hear from the devs and why they're so adamant on keeping it despite it's flaws since it's initial implentation.

I got 230 mobs from the start and almost finished first in every bracket. It's not that hard with spider-man, and psylock was doing great with her being buffed.

Unknown

Getting a top finish is supposed to take more effort than merely doing well.

Grinding 230X3s is tiresome and dumb, but that's currently the only way to distinguish yourself above others. You're not going to do say 2 passes at each mission without Spiderman casually and somehow expect that to beat the guys who are doing more than 2 passes at each mission with Spiderman. That'd make no sense from a competitive point of view. If it's easy to score high in the top, everyone else would do it, and then your score would no longer be that great.

_RiO_

Microtom wrote:

I got 230 mobs from the start and almost finished first in every bracket. It's not that hard with spider-man, and psylock was doing great with her being buffed.

Nothing is hard when you've got "The Amazing Stunlockman" on your side.
That's like saying it's not hard to beat down a bunch of cavemen if you've got an M1 Abrams at your disposal.

Ofcourse, if you are one of those people that started playing a bit later, making it so that you could not progress and reasonably be finished assembling the necessary Spidey covers before the devs started on their downright INSANE tour-de-force of ruining the game balance, then you are now perpetually stuck on the middle ground.

Even if by some ungodly miracle you are capable of tanking your way down to baconmagic levels within time of an event closing, it still means youll miss out on a lot of point accruel & sub events, and if you do it to soon, then by the time you hit the end of the event your enemy scaling will still have 'corrected' itself to hit unbeatable levels again. I hope and pray that if the devs do not remove the scaling, eventually enough newer players will reach this nigh-passable plateau that it will herald a proverbial fecal hurricane of such epic proportions that they will be forced to remove it or watch the game go under, buried beneath its own ****.

Twysta

They need do a gamewide survey/poll if people want to keep scaling.
I'd like to see the results. If it's actually in favor of keeping it then fair's fair - I'll eat my hat if that's teh case though.

Unknown

I figure plenty of people think of the scaling system is much like the idea of having this car climb a tree.

It might work but it sure as hell isnt pretty

_RiO_

Twysta wrote:

They need do a gamewide survey/poll if people want to keep scaling.
I'd like to see the results. If it's actually in favor of keeping it then fair's fair - I'll eat my hat if that's teh case though.

Thing is, before scaling, even if you could not manage to place in high finishing positions, atleast you could still accrue points and go for progression rewards to build out your team.
As it stands now, about halfway into an event, scaling will make enemy levels climb high enough to render the entire event completely unplayable, stopping cold any attempts at accruing points for progression rewards either.

Lowering levels in an 'easy mode' for a lower point reward also won't fix this. That would in turn make most of the progression rewards that matter to mid-tier players realistically impossible to reach again. Well, unless you spend entire days on end grinding out 1 point missions. A condition more commonly referred to as "having no life" (and I truely pity those suffering from it).

There simply is no easy fix for this by tuning enemies or point rewards. Rather, the devs need to get their heads out of their collective **** and should start work on a way to bracket players fairly by average performance and roster levels. That is the only true solution to the level disparity problem. Yes, players will whine and cry about that as well. But I'll bet that most of those players will be high-tier players that like to use low-tier players as their stepping stones in PvP events. In which case; consider that another issue solved.



On the topic of this event specifically
As of right now, I've hit the first DareDevil cover in the event's progression rewards. This coincides with enemy levels having risen into the 120 range, a full 40 levels above my own team. I could continue on for further rewards, but will soon hit the impassable brick wall that will prevent me from reaching those rewards anyway, so why bother? I consider this the "turning point" at which time I will no longer compete actively for the sub-event placement rewards or for the main-event placement rewards. From this point in the event on, I will only play the occasional easier to win match to try and pick up a bit of remaining ISO or tokens.

Thanks to the broken scaling mechanic those few "easier" wins will only be possible around the start of a new sub-event. As Europeans generally get **** with start- and end-times occuring either in the dead of night or during working hours, that will mean not playing at all for most of the further sub-events to come.

This is day 3 of a 10 day event. As an otherwise active mid-tier player I have already lost all possible outlook at winning anything out of this event apart from a small pittance of ISO. We've covered less than a third of the event and I have already all but completely lost interest.

This is not just my story, but the story of many players stuck on the mid-tier plateau. If you're a starting player, then do yourself a favor: take a good long look at this. Because this is where you'll be in two months' time as well. Depressing, isn't it?

Unknown

Reckless 442, I feel your pain, like I said, I used to be in that position, if it wasn't for me dumping on the last Thor tournament, I would still be in your position. And I totally understand keeping things going for your alliance, just I found out I don't have to kill myself to do it. I am #1 in my main bracket even with finishing only #3-5 in my subs, we'll see if I can maintain it, so I'm definitely not slacking. I'm just trying to manage my MMR better I guess.

Microtom wrote:

I got 230 mobs from the start and almost finished first in every bracket. It's not that hard with spider-man, and psylock was doing great with her being buffed.

Yes Microtom, but that's not the point. Again, during the last Simulator, I had Spidey and I finished #1-2 in 7 out of 8 brackets. But it took *forever*. I had to boost +3 blue/purp and sometimes +3 red/yellow (for IM 40 so he could generate blue). This was before I had MN Mag to generate blues.

So even though I finished #1 almost everytime (and the one time I didn't I was # 3-5), I spent a small fortune on ISO's for boosts, and I also spent around 2-3 hours each cycle.....I think the original one was 8 hrs? Anyways, it was an awful lot of time. So it's not hard if you have Spidey, it's just very time consuming because the fights are so slow.

So this time...single runs, still finishing top 5, still #1 in main bracket....mobs under level 150. I miss out on a lot of 500 ISO rewards, but I'm also not boosting, so it's probably a wash, and that's being generous, because with the increased cost of boosts I'm sure I would spend more ISO than I would be getting if I was boosting as much as I was during the first Simulator.

The other downside of you continuously using Spidey and healing is your MMR is going to stay high or even higher. I'm no longer using Spidey, and I'm taking damage, using heal packs, and trying to maintain my MMR at a reasonable level.

Of course, if I continue to place well my MMR is going to creep back up. It's like you cannot continuously do well otherwise you get punished. I really don't want to have to tank another tournament (like I did with Thor), so I'm just going to enjoy the easier mobs while I can.

Frubzy

The number of battles won should be worth more when the enemies are maxed.

reckless442

Phantron wrote:

Getting a top finish is supposed to take more effort than merely doing well.

Grinding 230X3s is tiresome and dumb, but that's currently the only way to distinguish yourself above others. You're not going to do say 2 passes at each mission without Spiderman casually and somehow expect that to beat the guys who are doing more than 2 passes at each mission with Spiderman. That'd make no sense from a competitive point of view. If it's easy to score high in the top, everyone else would do it, and then your score would no longer be that great.

I don't think anyone is saying that you should be able to win a tourney by casually playing. It should take effort. What you're missing is that those of us who did more than 2 passes at each mission with Spiderman in the last event are starting out in this event facing opponents that are nearly impossible with Spiderman AND boosts. So, right now, I cannot play casually even if I wanted to, unless I just want to die with nearly every combination. That's the problem. The penalty for doing well is far too high.

Twysta

I remember one of the devs (was probably Ice) who said that they wanted new players to be able to experience all the story content of events.
At first I thought this was a valid point (and it still kinda is) but considering how much events repeat, I don't really feel this should be an issue.
Most new players come into it not expecting to do that well, it's nice that they're encouraging it I guess, but it completely throws a fridge up more experienced players excrement passages.

There's no fun in the scaling system.
At least with the old method you got a mix of levels and that was fine: because they were fixed and if you couldn't do them it's because you just needed to level more and you know that everyone else is facing the issue.
It was more fun and rewarding. Sure you'd get really easy fights but that would be mixed in with the hard fights and they kind of balanced each other out - because it's always fun to win.

But having to just hit a brick wall and being told to scale it or die (without any significant markup in reward)
"You're doing well, so for your efforts we're going to make the enemies harder but not give you anything extra for it"
That makes me feel a bit underwhelmed.

Scaling sucks the fun out of PvE for me personally, but we're here now so we might as well carry on.

Unknown

There's no such thing as a mission that's impossible and you can use Spiderman. The last simulator did not have a single mission where you can use Spiderman that went down in difficulty, and the one that you can't use Spiderman (against Devil Dino) it indeed went down in difficulty because it was actually hard.

For all the whining people have of 230X3 being too hard, it's obviously not hard enough to cause people to actually lose enough to lower their difficulty.

Eddiemon

Twysta wrote:

reckless442 wrote:

Now, I'm in a position where I have one of two choices: (1) use Spidey, keep stunlocking, and face 230+ in the next round; or (2) tank the event completely, possibly miss out on Cap'n America, and hurt my alliance. Both options are extremely frustrating. What infuriates me is that I'm essentially being punished for being an efficient and effective player -- and for using an advantage that I pay for and that the devs provided. Frankly, I just don't understand that notion that the game has to be so balanced so that it is hard for everyone. If you have a strong roster and are a good player, the game should be easier for you. That's a benefit to having built up the roster and learning the game strategies. There is no reason why the game needs to rise to near-impossibility to compensate for you doing well.

That's the worst part about it. It punishes people who play well and rewards people for play poorly.
I know that that's not what the scaling is for or it's intent but in it's current form that's how it works.
Scaling has got mildly better over the course of each event but with the way the system works I'm not sure it will ever work as desired.

I'm pretty sure if they got rid of it, it would be a minority of people that missed it.
I can understand why it was introduced but I just don't think it has been worth it.
It would be nice to hear from the devs and why they're so adamant on keeping it despite it's flaws since it's initial implentation.

Scaling was introduced to change the winner of events from the person with the most time on their hands to the people with better rosters, skills, luck and willingness to throw in a bit of coin.

If they got rid of it there would be mass desertions as most people do not want to grind 10 hours a day to win an event. Which is the model you are putting forward. Once you cannot win because you don't have the time to put in because of wife, job, kids etc then there is no point playing.

Also with time being the key factor to success instead of anything else they would lose paying customers. Why bother having a diverse roster or the boosted characters when everything remains grind able and it is all about grinding?

I'm also lost as to how it punishes people who 'play well'. What happens if you play badly? You don't win battles, you don't get points or rewards and you lose. Playing well seems to be the opposite of that. It seems to reward people who can overcome the harder battles and not reward people who cannot. In my book that is rewarding people who play well. It also rewards them because they can play well and win instead of having to play 10 hours per day to win.

Twysta

Eddiemon wrote:

Twysta wrote:

reckless442 wrote:

Now, I'm in a position where I have one of two choices: (1) use Spidey, keep stunlocking, and face 230+ in the next round; or (2) tank the event completely, possibly miss out on Cap'n America, and hurt my alliance. Both options are extremely frustrating. What infuriates me is that I'm essentially being punished for being an efficient and effective player -- and for using an advantage that I pay for and that the devs provided. Frankly, I just don't understand that notion that the game has to be so balanced so that it is hard for everyone. If you have a strong roster and are a good player, the game should be easier for you. That's a benefit to having built up the roster and learning the game strategies. There is no reason why the game needs to rise to near-impossibility to compensate for you doing well.

That's the worst part about it. It punishes people who play well and rewards people for play poorly.
I know that that's not what the scaling is for or it's intent but in it's current form that's how it works.
Scaling has got mildly better over the course of each event but with the way the system works I'm not sure it will ever work as desired.

I'm pretty sure if they got rid of it, it would be a minority of people that missed it.
I can understand why it was introduced but I just don't think it has been worth it.
It would be nice to hear from the devs and why they're so adamant on keeping it despite it's flaws since it's initial implentation.

Scaling was introduced to change the winner of events from the person with the most time on their hands to the people with better rosters, skills, luck and willingness to throw in a bit of coin.

If they got rid of it there would be mass desertions as most people do not want to grind 10 hours a day to win an event. Which is the model you are putting forward. Once you cannot win because you don't have the time to put in because of wife, job, kids etc then there is no point playing.

Also with time being the key factor to success instead of anything else they would lose paying customers. Why bother having a diverse roster or the boosted characters when everything remains grind able and it is all about grinding?

I'm also lost as to how it punishes people who 'play well'. What happens if you play badly? You don't win battles, you don't get points or rewards and you lose. Playing well seems to be the opposite of that. It seems to reward people who can overcome the harder battles and not reward people who cannot. In my book that is rewarding people who play well. It also rewards them because they can play well and win instead of having to play 10 hours per day to win.

You throw up some very good points, but I don't think people would have to grind 10 hours a day with rubberbanding in effect.
It's rubberbanding that stops the grinding, but then the scaling is also in place to oppose rubberbanding. I'm aware it's a fine balance.

I feel like because of the scaling I'm going to have to grind 10 hours whereas I might not need to without it. Or at least it'd maybe feel like less of a chore.
Either way I don't personally don't feel that you'd have to grind 10 hours a day without scaling, I could be wrong though.
There's got to be a better way to go about it.

In my opinion, it punishes people who play well because their levels increase faster and higher therefore those players have to grind out higher levels more which isn't as fun.
And people who don't do as well (granted they don't get the points), will receive a less of an increase in levels.
This works fine for people with differing rosters - I'm not opposed to that - it's when people are using relatively the same composition but are maybe not playing as efficiently so therefore the better player is "punished".
IceIX has stated that was one of the things that was wrong with scaling and if they can somehow fix that, that would be awesome. I'm just not entirely convinced with scaling in it's current form.

That's just how I feel about it however and I won't claim to speak for anyone else.

Unknown

Rubberband doesn't stop the guy grinding more from winning. Even if you make the assumption that the guy who plays last always wins, then the guy who grinds the most is the guy who is most often in the position to play last, because he'd usually be first and whoever is first is in the best position to play last.

Unknown

Eddiemon wrote:

I'm also lost as to how it punishes people who 'play well'. What happens if you play badly? You don't win battles, you don't get points or rewards and you lose. Playing well seems to be the opposite of that. It seems to reward people who can overcome the harder battles and not reward people who cannot. In my book that is rewarding people who play well. It also rewards them because they can play well and win instead of having to play 10 hours per day to win.

Except it's not always about playing well, it's about your roster as well.

The problem is with the middle-tier player, which I was one not so long ago. You reach the point where you can no longer play, no matter how good of a player you might think you are or are not. The scaling got to the point where I could no longer do any fights. In fact, it might have been during the first Simulator event, although I don't remember now.

What I do remember is I bit the bullet and bought HP and leveled my Spidey from 3 to 5 blue. Maybe this is what D3P wanted all along.

After I got my 5 blue Spidey, it was smooth sailing. Sure fights took 5-10 minutes each, but at least I could complete them. Fights I had zero chance with before using Spidey I could now do with ease.

I'm the same player I was before I had Spidey. It's not like I suddenly became a better player because I got him. I got past the inflection point because of Spidey. The difference is now I could play where as before I was staring at a wall of 230s with no real way to *effectively* fight them. Sure I could win maybe 1 in 4 times with my lvl 85 team with max boosts, but I sure as hell wouldn't want to repeat that process more than once or twice, let alone every reset.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

Rubberband doesn't stop the guy grinding more from winning. Even if you make the assumption that the guy who plays last always wins, then the guy who grinds the most is the guy who is most often in the position to play last, because he'd usually be first and whoever is first is in the best position to play last.

Grinding doesn't matter at all. It's all about playing in the few hours before an event ends. Everything that comes before that is just posturing and positioning.

If you can't play the last few hours before an event closes, you will never get a high ranking (PvE I'm talking about. PvP it would be the same if it wasn't for shielding). That's the way things are set up currently.

Unknown

Anyone else having a hell of a time beating the OBW/CMagneto/Black Panther team?

Im trying it on hard mode right now and its freaking impossible. Doom is buffed to level 128, Wolverine to 105, and every other member I try and swap in just doesnt cut it. As soon as I get OBW out of the way shes espionaged enough black AP off of me where Panther can usually launch rage of the panther in 1-2 turns. I was lucky enough last attempt to stop them from getting ANY red and blue for CMagneto, and Rage of the Panther still knocked out 2 of my 3 team members and just completely obliterated me.

I cant even imagine what I would do if these guys hit level 230

Unknown

Sooo in summation,

1) You use Spidey to stunlock, you are penalized with slower battles. In addition, your MMR/scaling increases, which cycles you back to using Spidey in order to slog through it.

[list=2]2) You use Spidey/OBW to heal in-match, or manage to beat the match with little damage, you are penalized with increased MMR/scaling where the enemies hit harder, which cycles you back to needing to use healers in your team.[/list]
[list=3]3) You use health packs, you are penalized with either waiting for health pack refreshes or paying Hero points for health packs.[/list]
[list=4]4) You opt to be a martyr and not to use Spidey to reduce your MMR/scaling, you are penalized by other non-martyr jerks who do use Spidey, which raises the community scaling anyway. [/list]
[list=5]5) You try to tank the nodes to lower your MMR/scaling, you are penalized with the AI pointing its finger at you, saying "Hey McFly you bojo, tanking doesn't work in PvE!" Also, instead of playing the game, you're spending additional time purposefully losing matches.[/list]
[list=6]6) You opt to not do well in the PvE event by playing at non-optimal times, you may be penalized with missing out on the new character, which then severely hampers your chance of doing well in the next PvE event. You also adversely affect your Alliance's ranking. [/list]
[list=7]7) You want to do well in the PvE event, you are penalized with having to rearrange your life schedule in order to play at the right times. And also penalized with a very angry spouse.[/list]

Unknown

Mizake wrote:

Phantron wrote:

Rubberband doesn't stop the guy grinding more from winning. Even if you make the assumption that the guy who plays last always wins, then the guy who grinds the most is the guy who is most often in the position to play last, because he'd usually be first and whoever is first is in the best position to play last.

Grinding doesn't matter at all. It's all about playing in the few hours before an event ends. Everything that comes before that is just posturing and positioning.

If you can't play the last few hours before an event closes, you will never get a high ranking (PvE I'm talking about. PvP it would be the same if it wasn't for shielding). That's the way things are set up currently.

Except the final stretch is decided by whoever has the better position.

This game is big enough that you'll usually luck out in an uncompetitive bracket where it takes very little to win, but in a highly competitive bracket saying the initial position doesn't matter and I'll show you someone you can never catch if you fell behind even a little bit on the positioning. Granted, you don't always need #1, but people way overestimate the effect of timing the system. Most of the time you're simply in a weak bracket that can be easily won, because the guy who grinded more than you is also timing the bracket, and he starts off with a huge position advantage.

Twysta

Bygix wrote:

Anyone else having a hell of a time beating the OBW/CMagneto/Black Panther team?

Im trying it on hard mode right now and its freaking impossible. Doom is buffed to level 128, Wolverine to 105, and every other member I try and swap in just doesnt cut it. As soon as I get OBW out of the way shes espionaged enough black AP off of me where Panther can usually launch rage of the panther in 1-2 turns. I was lucky enough last attempt to stop them from getting ANY red and blue for CMagneto, and Rage of the Panther still knocked out 2 of my 3 team members and just completely obliterated me.

I cant even imagine what I would do if these guys hit level 120

Who do you ahve in your roster?
If you're not too squeamish and have a nicely levelled Classic Storm, you could feed BP some Black and reap the rewards of her Rage - that works really well on Thor mission anyway. If you can't stop Thor from using Call the Storm, make sure you take advantage when he does! Worked for me anyway as it took everyone below 50% 3x(3x1.4k) damage.
The easiest way to do it is obviously Spiderman if you have a good number on his blue.