PvP Progression out of line

Megdar

I get that Versus is not the exact same deal, and it is ok for it to be harder then Story, being kind of an add on over Story.

But now that CC is removed, I find it weird that with my full champ 3* roster I have a hard time hitting 800 in progression to get 1 3* cover. If I don't use the boosted 4* I can't get to 800. I literally see no 3* team.

Normally when I'm around 750 points, all the team at my rank are full fledge 4* team.

At this point in the game I literally take a shower with 3* cover in the morning when I wake up. I get around 5 3* cover per day. I normally end top 50 in pvp with my 750 points and get 2 3* covers. But this ONE progression cover seems such a BIG DEAL.

By now at this state of the game, the 3* cover should be at 650 and the 4* should be at 800 for scl 7 and 8 in Versus.

We get one free 4* cover each Story event for literally clearing 3 node 4 times each sub. This is less then 30 min of gameplay per day. So why are the 4* cover in Versus mode such an holy grail !?

firethorne

Yep. PvP is broken. Looking at a slice in SCL7 right now, and the top players have 5* champions. I think there's so much competition in SCL8 because some of those people should really be in SCL10 or 11, that it really encourages players to drop down, and the whole thing just spirals out of control.

Megdar

I'm not talking about ranking, so the SCL choice mean nothing, for progression, you fight team from all the SCL. Whatever they are in my SCL or not, they will still prevent me from climbing progression. That is why progression should be made lower. As the pool of 4* and 5* player increase, the 3* player have diminishing chance to get the progression. And this does not make sense because they are so easy to get everywhere else.

I get more 3* cover in Versus ranking then in Versus progression, and it should not be the case.

DaveR4470

Personally, I'd split the intent of the progression vs. placement awards in a different way. Make progression an absolute award for playing by making your progression total cumulative (like PvE), and placement the reward for performance in those plays relative to other players (= keep it a win/lose points system). I think that incentivizes more teams to participate in PvP (because there's a fixed and predictable reward that doesn't involve a one step forward, two steps back approach), which helps those on the placement-oriented side, because now there are more teams in the pool to draw from when the system does matchmaking.

Megdar

That is another solution suggested, but they would need to increase the progression point needed a bit, because 1200 would be really easy to get that way.

Crnch73

I agree that the rewards for progression should be tweaked. I have all 3* champed, 5 champ 4*... and I have hit the 900 point threshold twice. Just like in most avenues, 4* characters are treated like gold (and 5* are like platinum), so they can not be easily acquired in quantities that matter. Sure we can get CP and hope RNG is kind, and we get a free one from progression in PVE. But I can never get the PVP reward, so my progression is stalling big time. It would be nice to have a reward system in the game overall... that accurately reflected the things we need

FaustianDeal

Should we really continue to debate how the progression awards in PVP are constructed? Can we not argue that progression (using points) is just pure silliness and try to have it abolished? Placement should be king.

If you want to have 'challenges' that you can complete in order to get additional rewards lets do that, but let's not bind those prizes to things that are as arbitrary as points. (And, to anticipate the argument, "Yes, points are more arbitrary than you might think.")

firethorne

FaustianDeal wrote:

Should we really continue to debate how the progression awards in PVP are constructed? Can we not argue that progression (using points) is just pure silliness and try to have it abolished? Placement should be king.

If you want to have 'challenges' that you can complete in order to get additional rewards lets do that, but let's not bind those prizes to things that are as arbitrary as points. (And, to anticipate the argument, "Yes, points are more arbitrary than you might think.")

The problem with that is then there's no reason for anyone but those with maxchamp 5*'s to play at all. You'd be making half of the game's content completely meaningless to 99% of the player base.

Megdar

firethorne wrote:

FaustianDeal wrote:

Should we really continue to debate how the progression awards in PVP are constructed? Can we not argue that progression (using points) is just pure silliness and try to have it abolished? Placement should be king.

If you want to have 'challenges' that you can complete in order to get additional rewards lets do that, but let's not bind those prizes to things that are as arbitrary as points. (And, to anticipate the argument, "Yes, points are more arbitrary than you might think.")

The problem with that is then there's no reason for anyone but those with maxchamp 5*'s to play at all. You'd be making half of the game's content completely meaningless to 99% of the player base.

That, and also, Faustian... I get better reward right now with placement (Always top 50 with 750 points) then I get from progression. So I'm not complaining about challenge.

3* at 800 points make absolutely no sense 3 years in the game when they are so easy to get everywhere else. If they remove progression fine, then make placement reward way better.

mpqr7

I don't mind that the only battles available to me are teams that are stronger and better than mine. What bothers me is that when players with double-champed 5*s play, instead of needing to face tougher teams, they face teams of my strength, so they don't get subject to the same challenge, at least until they've already hit max progression (whereas I'm getting massive defensive losses from 800 points onward).

FaustianDeal

I think you misunderstand what I am implying when I say we should get rid of progression. The rewards you get from progression should be added to placement in ways that actually make sense. You should still get nearly the same rewards by virtue of placing alone. I don't want to see the flow of rewards go down. (I'd like to see it tick up, actually.) I think the reason for that is that the rewards are broken up into too many different categories. Reduce the number of categories you award prizes in and suddenly you can either offer much bigger prizes, or expand the prizes so better stuff is given out to lower ranks.

Here are examples of how the prizes seem broken:
A 3* players can't make the 3* progression prize.
A 4* player can't reach the 4* progression prize.

'Progress' is in the name of the reward.
A 3* player winning a 3* cover isn't "progress" that is more like "staying where they already are". The prize tiers are built so that you are "failing to stay where you are". The prize pools are too small. They are arguably too small because there are too many pools.

There are several elements of PVP that are a little broken right now - Clearance Levels being another. There should be very little reason for people to be joining CL 2 levels below what they qualify for. This is done to grab a placement award you can't get in the bracket you belong in. That sounds like those reward tiers should dip a little lower so people stop slumming it in the wrong CLs.

Match-making could also use a little bit of a tweak. Seems like players should only be matching up against people in their on Clearance Level. That would be easier to enforce if, wait for it, there weren't progression prizes to worry about. Let the champ-5 people square off in a death match bracket. Let the top 250 people on a champ-5 bracket get a 4* cover. Those people were getting to the 4* progression prize already anyway.

Examples of 'achievements' that could have a prize attached would be "win 10 battles", or "win 25 battles". Those aren't stretch goals. You weren't going to get to a 3* cover in a PVP only winning 10 matches anyway.. Its not mathematically possible.. without a massive amount of defensive wins.

The tricky bit is that they added 'alliance' stuff to the mix. the champ-5 death bracket might wind up being lower scoring - but it could also wind up being about the same as the champ-3 bracket. Can't know till we try. Alliance goals add stickiness to the game. That's something you don't want to lose, so you would need to find ways to still reinforce that element. Alliance achievements, maybe. There could be overall team benchmarks like 'win 2,000 battles' or participation measures like '10 or more team members win 'every team member wins 10 matches'.

Just thinking out loud.

Dormammu

firethorne wrote:

PvP is broken.

This fact is the discussion stopper for me.

I don't even try to bang my head against something that is broken. Every time a new PVP starts I go in, beat the three seed teams I get, which gets me the first couple of progression prizes (+1 all boosts and 450 iso) and that's it. I go back to playing PVE.

Many people have told me that PVP is the quickest/easiest way to advance my roster, but that's tinykitty. PVE throws tokens and iso at me, all the while making two 3-star covers, a 4-star cover, and 25 CP relatively easy to obtain. Meanwhile, PVP is a nightmare of nothing but buffed teams, expensive shields, and skip taxes. No thanks.

PVP progression levels aren't the problem, it's what it takes to get there. Match making (MMR) and the point losses from retaliation are what's out of whack. Every time the developers have changed PVP to address problems (like the introduction of shields or the elimination of cupcakes) it creates two more problems and doesn't solve the first. Now it's just one messy clutter of a disaster that should be entirely scrapped for a completely different system... which probably isn't even possible.

The only PVP events that are of even moderate interest to me are Lightning Rounds and some of the off-season events like Combined Arms or Balance of Power.

Crowl

Megdar wrote:

That is another solution suggested, but they would need to increase the progression point needed a bit, because 1200 would be really easy to get that way.

Rebalancing the points required to get progression rewards would be a perfectly sensible move if they did something like this, however since they would then be fixed targets, we would probably see much wider participation in pvp since people would know they could eventually hit those targets unlike now where somebody might fail to hit 800/900 despite having gained well in excess of 1200 points before losses.