uhh am I missing something..

Unknown

been away for a while. Came back to play recently...is something up with rubberbanding / match difficulty?

Just looking at The Simulator - Round 2 : Hard Mode.

Number 1 in my bracket, his highest character is a lvl40 IM.....how is he even able to compete. I'm taking a beating with lvl100+ 3* characters.

Eddiemon

CaptainBatman wrote:

been away for a while. Came back to play recently...is something up with rubberbanding / match difficulty?

Just looking at The Simulator - Round 2 : Hard Mode.

Number 1 in my bracket, his highest character is a lvl40 IM.....how is he even able to compete. I'm taking a beating with lvl100+ 3* characters.

Does he have a black panther? Do you?

Unknown

he has a lvl15 BP / 1 black card.

which is the same as me.


His entire roster is:
IM40 LVL40
M.Storm lvl38
C.Storm lvl16
BP lvl15
Bullseye lvl14
Wolverine lvl14

mouser

Welcome to event scaling.

Unknown

mouser wrote:

Welcome to event scaling.

ta... event scaling is tinykitty.

Unknown

Just made a similar note on our alliance thread

But it's nothing new, Phantron even opened a thread on this a few days ago -- unanswered as usual. The character buffs are not considered in the scaling formula, so he has tat 120-ish BP and fights lvl20 opponents measured against his native lvl 20 roster. That will bash all like 500 points in the 6k boss too. That outside looks 50 and heals up in 1 minute.

Let me guess the devs' answer: ok, this guy wins the subs today, his roster will grow so next PVE he will be with all you regular suckers.

Eddiemon

CaptainBatman wrote:

mouser wrote:

Welcome to event scaling.

ta... event scaling is tinykitty.

Now now lets not be too harsh.

They may not have played the first couple of subs, in which case they will do well at this sub but you will do better in the overall event.

Either that or they are seriously buying up health packs.

My steam account (headline character IM35 @ level 50) lucked into a psylocke by entering PvP 10 minutes from closing and winning 3 battles. I got a BP from my alliance position more recently.

For the Psylocke sub it was beer and skittles time, with me match 3-ing level 20 and 30 opponents to death and popping a health pack every 4 battles or so. For the second sub where I have no Doom IM35 had to face up against level 40-50 oponents and got reycled a lot. My Black Panther has been able to beat most missions once with a healing pack every couple. I'm not going to be placing well.

But scaling will be fine. If they have won enough battles to place that well on the back of Panther with 2 refreshes to go their opponents will be levelling outside of their ability to clear. Expect them to burn out and fade away.

Unknown

I understand why they don't take account of a boosted character's levels for scaling, but it does create some rather crazy cases where you have a level 15 major boosted character as your highest guy who can just match 3 his way to #1.

I don't mind low levels being competitive, but right now, they're a bit too competitive.

Eddiemon

Phantron wrote:

I understand why they don't take account of a boosted character's levels for scaling, but it does create some rather crazy cases where you have a level 15 major boosted character as your highest guy who can just match 3 his way to #1.

I don't mind low levels being competitive, but right now, they're a bit too competitive.

I don't understand. Character levels are irrelevant to scaling. They are not part of the scaling formula.

I look at my main bracket and there is nobody in the top 10 who has an unbalanced roster. They have at least a solid group of 85s and all the special event characters required.

In the sub event brackets there are top 10 people with boosted characters, but they will have low scaling because they could not do well in any of the earlier brackets so scaling hasn't affected them to this point. Even then they generally fall away by the fourth/fifth refresh because they get mauled by the scaling beast. You can match 3 level 20-30 characters out of the way but once they bump up to 50s you are SOL.

Unknown

Eddiemon wrote:

Phantron wrote:

I understand why they don't take account of a boosted character's levels for scaling, but it does create some rather crazy cases where you have a level 15 major boosted character as your highest guy who can just match 3 his way to #1.

I don't mind low levels being competitive, but right now, they're a bit too competitive.

I don't understand. Character levels are irrelevant to scaling. They are not part of the scaling formula.

I look at my main bracket and there is nobody in the top 10 who has an unbalanced roster. They have at least a solid group of 85s and all the special event characters required.

In the sub event brackets there are top 10 people with boosted characters, but they will have low scaling because they could not do well in any of the earlier brackets so scaling hasn't affected them to this point. Even then they generally fall away by the fourth/fifth refresh because they get mauled by the scaling beast. You can match 3 level 20-30 characters out of the way but once they bump up to 50s you are SOL.

Of course level matters for the scaling. The hard bracket starts with enemies in the 150 range after I beat the mission that unlocks it. Someone with a level 15 or even 50 as the highest character would have almost no chance of beating that even if the level 50 is a major boosted character, due to a severe lack of covers, so there's no way a person with a weak roster is getting the same level as I am even at the very start. That's perfectly fine.

Without seeing how someone with a lopsided roster plays it's difficult to say how bad scaling is, but if you look at the scaling thread there are guys running 141s that have relatively tame scaling, so I don't see why this couldn't happen to a guy whose highest character is level 15. I'm inclined to believe it's more likely that someone with a weak roster simply doesn't play the game often enough to finish as #1 because he's not going to know about the rubberband modifier, and even if he does he probably doesn't have the time to wait until the last hour to start playing. I've seen plenty of guys with a super weak roster that have a commanding lead as #1 during various parts of the tournament, and had that guy simply took the lead at the very end instead of earlier, that'd likely be enough to win. Right now I'd say the only thing stopping weak rosters from winning is that these guys aren't likely to know that you're only supposed to play at the last moment.

You got the rubberbanding and scaling interacting to make a very distorted field. If there was no rubberbanding, then you can still force someone to play an appropriate number of games to catch up to you and the scaling does work. If there is no scaling, then at least the guy who jumped out ahead will not have to worry about him fighting 230s while the guy trying to catch him is fighting stuff in the 150s (this assume both players are 3X141s), and if the enemy level is held constant, it's possible to still acquire a lead that your opponent can never make up. But when you put those two together, nobody can build enough of a lead, because in the process of building a significant lead you'll get all your missions to 230X3, and at 230X3 you cannot possibly play your games fast enough to hold your lead against someone fighting a 150-180 range enemy.

Unknown

why can't they just bracket people they are of similar levels together, it would make a much more even playing field than all this rubberbanding and scaling nonsense. If you're going up again LVL190 enemies then so should everyone in your bracket.

I've worked hard to get my characters where they are - and for what if I can't compete with a newcomer.

Unknown

CaptainBatman wrote:

why can't they just bracket people they are of similar levels together, it would make a much more even playing field than all this rubberband and scaling nonsense. If you're going up again LVL190 enemies then so should everyone in your bracket.

I've worked hard to get my characters where they are - and for what if I can't compete with a newcomer.

Brackets are just the 200 people (or so) that start an event closest in time to you. Filtering them into level ranges would be at best, messy. Your pve matchmaking doesn't even take your levels into account so i doubt that'll be something they'd even consider. It's a somewhat non intuitive system, but i doubt it's going to radically change. If someone's never done a pve event before they'll be seeing unusually easy enemies (low mmr) but that shouldn't be too common.

You might also see the current 1 get passed. There's 20 hours left still and the levels might rise too much to let him milk the final refresh.

Unknown

I hate rubber banding, generally. I hated it in stuff like Mario Kart and I've never seen it applied well in any game. Skill is skill, hard work is hard work.

On the 2nd round of this PvE event I was completing as many missions as I could, barely touching other events and pretty much having zero downtime with wasting 5 health packs. On the final few hours of round 2 I dropped from 1st place to 8th place and couldn't recover the position. In round 3 I've played casually, played about half of the missions I did in round 2 and yet rubber banding has put me in the top 5 with a decent chance at a push for 1st. It's stupid. Level scaling, on the other hand... makes a bit more sense, but it's incredihard to balance.

I've played a lot of games (WoW is a great example, RoB too) where you get out what you put in, and despite feeling unfair sometimes that a guy with no family or a less demanding job can put in more hours and get better stuff. That's just the way it is, and to be fair - if someone's life IS the game then they should see the rewards from it.

That's not to say I'm not benefiting from rubberbanding now - I should rank top 5 in the Lord of Thunder event and top 5 / 10 in the Simulator... but I'm not convinced I've deserve it.

Unknown

DrUnpleasant wrote:

I hate rubber banding, generally. I hated it in stuff like Mario Kart and I've never seen it applied well in any game. Skill is skill, hard work is hard work.

On the 2nd round of this PvE event I was completing as many missions as I could, barely touching other events and pretty much having zero downtime with wasting 5 health packs. On the final few hours of round 2 I dropped from 1st place to 8th place and couldn't recover the position. In round 3 I've played casually, played about half of the missions I did in round 2 and yet rubber banding has put me in the top 5 with a decent chance at a push for 1st. It's stupid. Level scaling, on the other hand... makes a bit more sense, but it's incredihard to balance.

I've played a lot of games (WoW is a great example, RoB too) where you get out what you put in, and despite feeling unfair sometimes that a guy with no family or a less demanding job can put in more hours and get better stuff. That's just the way it is, and to be fair - if someone's life IS the game then they should see the rewards from it.

That's not to say I'm not benefiting from rubberbanding now - I should rank top 5 in the Lord of Thunder event and top 5 / 10 in the Simulator... but I'm not convinced I've deserve it.

There's no rubberbanding in PVP whatsoever and someone relying on rubberbanding will never beat a grinder who plays in the same optimal fashion. Those are the facts.

Unknown

jozier wrote:

There's no rubberbanding in PVP whatsoever and someone relying on rubberbanding will never beat a grinder who plays in the same optimal fashion. Those are the facts.

I didn't say there was, I was saying that due to rubberbanding there is no point in me trying to grind my way to a good rank in the PvE event at the expense of the PvP event when I can concentrate on the PvP one safe in the knowlege that I can ignore PvE (pretty much) and then rubberband my way back to the top with just a few matches. I think Rubberbanding devalues the PvE stuff massively.

This (below) should not be almost effortlessly possible:

Unknown

The ability to easily get #1 in rubberbanding by itself is fairly illusionary prior to the PvE scaling changes simply because if anyone can easily get #1 then your #1 is not as safe as it appears, and you'll find that you can't really take #1 against someone who knows how to hold it.

With the PvE scaling, this is longer true because the early mover generally has a case where he's trying to hold his lead while fighting 230X3s against guys who are fighting much easier opponents despite having the same roster strength, and that is clearly impossible.

The rubberbanding is needed but it doesn't work at all when the scaling is uneven. I also don't think it's a good idea to have tournament success tied 100% to how close you play for the tournament end. Perhaps no rubberbanding for sub brackets and rubberbanding for main bracket missions (so people can catch back up) would be a good compromise. Also, make missions refresh on server time, not on player time. That is, everyone's missions should refresh on say server time noon PST/midnight PST or any other time they feel convenient, that way you don't have to adjust your schedule to make sure you didn't miss a refresh.