Still want to complain about PvE rank awards?

simonsez

I have a theory on what Boss Rush was supposed to be...

There's a contingent of you out there who take every opportunity to complain that PvE should have no rank awards. Those on the other side of the argument point out that in order to maintain the same cover distribution, ie 10 people out of 1000 get all the good stuff, the difficulty would need to be ramped up to insane levels in order to keep 99% of people from finishing.

My feeling is that the devs' "we decided to try something different" was their attempt to see if they could implement such a reward structure.

So the next time you're about to type "PvE should not have rank awards!", ask yourself if you REALLY want every PvE to be a version of boss rush. I strongly suspect that's the path the devs would take if they decide to make your wish come true.

GrumpySmurf1002

simonsez wrote:

I strongly suspect that's the path the devs would take if they decide to make your wish come true.

Scarier corollary though: if in fact this was a test for such an implementation....there haven't been many (any?) tests that haven't ended up live eventually.

veny

After all that suffering i must admit Boss Rush was not that bad. Yes, Bosses were tough, but with points for damaging them we could reach pretty good rewards. Right now i am sitting at Round 7.
Problem is, there are only few cover combos capable of victory.

nigelregal

I have 1 team I can basically use in round 7. If it's a bad board I get around 2500 points. If the board is good for me I get around 15,000. I had 1 match out of 14 or so that was extremely good for me and I won. Since I can only use 1 team it is an extreme health pack drain.

I do not have any winfinite team I can use either so most of my damage comes from Cho hulk.

spectator

I also found it extremely stressful and unfun playing boss rush. Can I beat it, probably, do I want to, definitely not.

acescracked

veny wrote:

After all that suffering i must admit Boss Rush was not that bad. Yes, Bosses were tough, but with points for damaging them we could reach pretty good rewards. Right now i am sitting at Round 7.
Problem is, there are only few cover combos capable of victory.

Problem is that's a 95% wipe rate which then is 3 downed characters or 3 health packs per attempt.

BlackSheep101

veny wrote:

After all that suffering i must admit Boss Rush was not that bad. Yes, Bosses were tough, but with points for damaging them we could reach pretty good rewards. Right now i am sitting at Round 7.
Problem is, there are only few cover combos capable of victory.

Those are both big problems. I just made it to round 8, and I've been relying on Hulk shenanigans since round 5.

Players don't like losing, and we don't like being forced to use infinite engines to clear an event.

mpqr7

I don't like spending 20 minutes to defeat 3 bosses. It's extremely tedious.. the exact opposite of a "rush".

rawfsu

First, I think the devs mentioned looking at data for future runs of the event, not for PVE in general. Second, as mentioned above, this event's structure is tedious. I much prefer Galactus and Ultron with one major boss. Three different bosses is just a pain. Third, once again, another Anniversary Week ends with another poorly planned event that causes more frustration than fun. I wish they would go back to the structure from Year 1.

Pylgrim

simonsez wrote:

I have a theory on what Boss Rush was supposed to be...

There's a contingent of you out there who take every opportunity to complain that PvE should have no rank awards. Those on the other side of the argument point out that in order to maintain the same cover distribution, ie 10 people out of 1000 get all the good stuff, the difficulty would need to be ramped up to insane levels in order to keep 99% of people from finishing.

My feeling is that the devs' "we decided to try something different" was their attempt to see if they could implement such a reward structure.

So the next time you're about to type "PvE should not have rank awards!", ask yourself if you REALLY want every PvE to be a version of boss rush. I strongly suspect that's the path the devs would take if they decide to make your wish come true.

But since the event was scaled proportionally, the "best" rewards were out of the hands of most people regardless of roster depth! The point of a "progression only" PVE is that stronger rosters allow you to go farther and reap rewards proportionately useful for your roster. Here it was basically a coin toss that your roster composition randomly fell in some sweet spots where the proportional scaling was less harsh. If it is as you say so, the problem is not with the concept (a rankless pve) but /still/ with the execution of it.

Dragon_Nexus

This is so silly.
Boss Rush would have been a butt load of fun but for two major issues.
1) Why on Earth were the bosses given scaling at all? They should have kept to the regular formula of starting off at level 50 or 100 and going up by 50 levels with every cleared round.
2) Why are they STILL making the side pins increase in difficulty every 8 hours rather than as you progress through rounds? If you're not able to get the maximum points every 8 hours you're soon shut out of the event because the pins are so difficult you're drained of health packs before even getting to the boss.

The second one is a constant irritant for me in all boss modes.

If they'd crafted this event to be like a Gauntlet style Boss Event it could have been fun. No boss scaling, gradual pin scaling that goes up as you progress.

For a bonus change, I think we might all have felt a little better if the boss rush wasn't a survival node. I mean, a lot of us have trouble taking out one of these bosses, just forget about doing three in a row. I was finding it tough going by round 3.

simonsez

Pylgrim wrote:

But since the event was scaled proportionally, the "best" rewards were out of the hands of most people regardless of roster depth!

We've gotten used to how the devs look at their metrics. If they look at this event in a broad sense and see "hey, 1% of people got all 3 4* covers, just like PvE rank awards", they could easily see this event as a resoundingly successful attempt to create an "equivalent" proxy for rank awards.

simonsez

Dragon_Nexus wrote:

1) Why on Earth were the bosses given scaling at all? They should have kept to the regular formula of starting off at level 50 or 100 and going up by 50 levels with every cleared round.

Well, the regular formula would've given lots of people a Peggy... if you're going to try to come up with guesses as to what they were trying, at least my theory doesn't imply that they're stupid and/or sadistic. Misguided, for sure, but at least there's an underlying reason that makes some sense within their logical framework.

Dragon_Nexus

simonsez wrote:

Well, the regular formula would've given lots of people a Peggy... if you're going to try to come up with guesses as to what they were trying, at least my theory doesn't imply that they're stupid and/or sadistic. Misguided, for sure, but at least there's an underlying reason that makes some sense within their logical framework.

To which my counter argument has to be that that is not a bad thing.

It's the anniversary. It's the final event in the anniversary. It's a brand new event that rounds off the 3 year anniversary. Would it have just destroyed the entire game's economy if they'd set it up so 50% or more of the player base got 3 covers for a popular and fairly new 4* character as a way of thanking the community and rewarding them right as the events draw to a close?

That's what this should have been. A glorious hurrah to the devs, the publishers and the players, whether they paid or not. And hey, the later parts would still be difficult so you'd still get your likely 10% of the population that managed to beat round 8.

Like you said, it feels misguided. It feels like that weird confusion between "challenge" and "difficult" has reared its head again.

TLCstormz

simonsez wrote:

So the next time you're about to type "PvE should not have rank awards!", ask yourself if you REALLY want every PvE to be a version of boss rush. I strongly suspect that's the path the devs would take if they decide to make your wish come true.

Oh.....so.....it's US that should be blamed for believing that they could make everything progression based and more player friendly WITHOUT screwing everyone with difficulty, instead of them being PURPOSEFULLY vengeful / mean spirited / greedy / novice programmers / comply oblivious to what "fun" entails / astronomically out of touch with their playerbase, or all of the other things that people are feeling, right now?

Our fault and NOT theirs? k

simonsez

TLCstormz wrote:

Oh.....so.....it's US that should be blamed

Where are you getting that? This isn't a thread about blame. This is a thread about how if you advocate for a change away from rank awards, you FIRST need to advocate for a change away from "1% of players get the top tier awards", otherwise Boss Rush is what you end up with.

amusingfoo1

veny wrote:

After all that suffering i must admit Boss Rush was not that bad. Yes, Bosses were tough, but with points for damaging them we could reach pretty good rewards. Right now i am sitting at Round 7.
Problem is, there are only few cover combos capable of victory.

And whether those teams work is scaling-dependent. One guy I know finished the whole thing. His round eight was 40 levels lower than my round six. If I tried the same team, I would've had no chance.

Escape2victory

I stopped on round 2. It was very clear by that point that the needed Peggy covers would require too much effort and frustration.
They need a plan before releasing a new event - how to scale it down on the fly when it is obviously is too difficult. Might be difficult but surely not impossible. If I released a significant new software feature at work without a risk mitigation plan my head would be on a spike.
Maybe make these events start on Wednesday - give us an extra day to take the pressure off and to monitor the progression AND be able to sort it out before the weekend downtime.

hodayathink

Escape2victory wrote:

I stopped on round 2. It was very clear by that point that the needed Peggy covers would require too much effort and frustration.
They need a plan before releasing a new event - how to scale it down on the fly when it is obviously is too difficult. Might be difficult but surely not impossible. If I released a significant new software feature at work without a risk mitigation plan my head would be on a spike.
Maybe make these events start on Wednesday - give us an extra day to take the pressure off and to monitor the progression AND be able to sort it out before the weekend downtime.

It's not that they literally can't scale down an event on the fly. In the time that I've been here, they've actually done it once (there was a Gauntlet run that was overscaled that they turned down). It's that in a competitive event, changing the difficulty during the middle of it would be unfair to everyone that had already started playing the event. Once people started playing the event, the most fair course of action was to leave the scaling where it was.

Truthfully, the thing that got most people angry wasn't that this event was so hard, it was that their response to that was pretty much "good luck".

Smudge

Don't we already have confirmation that the devs have an event with ridiculous scaling and no placement rewards? Gauntlet has been around awhile.

This one still had placement; they just limited it to within the alliance and made that about as big a joke as they could have.

I don't doubt a progression-only full PvE would be disgusting, but it would still be nice to have some of those top .1% rewards be remotely attainable for a more casual player. I know I personally would play more - I certainly play Gauntlet to its max. I usually hit max progression and tap out, or maybe hit green checks. It's never enough for going beyond T20 in my bracket draws, though.

DTStump

mpqr7 wrote:

I don't like spending 20 minutes to defeat 3 bosses. It's extremely tedious.. the exact opposite of a "rush".

This, so much this.

I'm now officially referring to the event as "Boss Slog".