Progression Rewards for the Human Torch Event are Broken

Unknown

Spoit wrote:

illmatic wrote:

@NazgulPrime I sent an email to mobile support, they've been good in the past, I think if enough people complain, they'll do something about it. I placed first in my bracket and was nowhere near the progression rewards in the end, in my email to support I mentioned that I think it was an honest miscalculation on their part, rather than a deliberate ploy to annoy their player base.

While they may be good at responding and compensating individual tickets, D3 seems to be unusually reluctant to offer compensation to whole classes of users at a time. The only time they offered something to the userbase as a whole for their mistakes was the limited time thorverine buyback (still waiting for word on what they decided about the Rags nerf, I'd be more than happy to sell my maxed one if it offered any degree of HP back).

For the sake of comparison, the other F2P games I play give out tons of free stuff, even to people who weren't effected by mistakes. Like one time in puzzles and dragons, when they said there was a godfest (increased drop rate for the equivalent of 3*s) but it wasn't actually turned on, they refunded the cash spent, let people keep the extra rolls that were made in error, and gave enough premium currency for 2 free rolls to everyone as compensation

I agree with you, they won't compensate everyone who missed out, and as past experience shows they are not very generous (the thoverine buyback was horrible value AND they ran Thor and Wolverine events right after, so a lot of people were screwed).

I'm pretty annoyed with this event, at least people can read this thread and maybe get individual compensation by sending in a ticket.

Unknown

ranking and reward are broken.
look at simulator rewards, and or 1300 rewards in pvp while first place are always around 900...

ennemys should lvl up only if u defeat them, event should have a cap when u clean all nodes and ppl should rank 1 when full content is clean.

just do it harder, we got useless boost x 30 and ennemy ia perfect without any damage taken. ( thx cheated heroes )
healer are broken but hp regen is broken too.
to continue, huge heal nerf ( bye obw or spidey in all team ) and heroes recover 100% if not down is the way to go.

Bowgentle

They miscalculated progressions rewards, simple as that.
Probably someone made a mistake somewhere, yeah.

But I don't see the argument for "compensation".
Yes, the rewards were unobtainable.
Is it annoying? Yes. Did it impact the game in anyway? No.

After the second set of nodes it was clear that the progression table was miscalculated and the rewards weren't reachable.
Big deal - the point of the event was to win Human Torch covers.

We also had events were the bracket leaders had twice the amount of points needed for the final progression rewards, I didn't see people complaining then.

Just take your Torch covers and the ISO and move to the next event

Kikujiro

In past recent events almost all the rubberbanding was dictated by the leader of subevents, so there was less stagnation in the main bracket. Maybe they calculated the progression based on that model.

Bowgentle wrote:

Big deal - the point of the event was to win Human Torch covers.

Human Torch was the main point, but Captain too. They usually run 2-3 events where a recent released cover is awarded and this was one of them to get Captain covers. If progression rewards arent an incentive for playing they could remove them totally.

Anyway, I agree with your post. It was to be kinda expected when two events ago a huge portion of players got all the rewards. We should low our heads and move on, and if they feel impeled to "compensate", great.

Moral

Their idea of compensation is to throw out another event with softball targets or boosted rewards, like mission 7 on the first simulator run. This event was already cheap with only 2 of the possible covers offered.

Regarding the horror of Heroic Oscorp, Heroic Venom is listed as 7 days. Really hoping for 2 runs in that time.

Unknown

Please yes, two runs!

Unknown

The last time they ran Heroic Venom (I think it was the last time) they just refreshed the missions entirely every 24 hours or so. So unlike Heroic Osborn, you got new prizes and didn't have to just grind for event points and 20 ISO insult prizes.

I mean, don't misunderstand me. 2 runs (a la Heroic Juggernaut) would still be better.

scottee

Didn't read the whole thread, but it's possible more people are catching on to the rubberbanding effects and are only playing every 12 hours. Cumulative rubberbanding would have greater increase of points for the overall player pool if everyone played constantly, as if there were no rubberbanding. A lot of people only playing every 12 hours would less the effect.

Unknown

scottee wrote:

Didn't read the whole thread, but it's possible more people are catching on to the rubberbanding effects and are only playing every 12 hours. Cumulative rubberbanding would have greater increase of points for the overall player pool if everyone played constantly, as if there were no rubberbanding. A lot of people only playing every 12 hours would less the effect.

That assumes there's not one player that grinded out the points, which seems really unlikely. Rubberbanding is set based on the overall leader, not on how many are playing

scottee

Impulse wrote:

scottee wrote:

Didn't read the whole thread, but it's possible more people are catching on to the rubberbanding effects and are only playing every 12 hours. Cumulative rubberbanding would have greater increase of points for the overall player pool if everyone played constantly, as if there were no rubberbanding. A lot of people only playing every 12 hours would less the effect.

That assumes there's not one player that grinded out the points, which seems really unlikely. Rubberbanding is set based on the overall leader, not on how many are playing

But rubberbanding has greater increases when there's more than one person grinding. And even further when there's multiple people grinding. If two people grind, they only affect each other's rubberbanding. Swapping between #1 and #2 doesn't have much effect. If lots of people are grinding, the person in #1 drops down to #100, and he gets a greater rubberband effect. More instances of rubberbanding will increase point disparity, which will increase the magnitude of rubberbanding.

Unknown

scottee wrote:

Impulse wrote:

scottee wrote:

Didn't read the whole thread, but it's possible more people are catching on to the rubberbanding effects and are only playing every 12 hours. Cumulative rubberbanding would have greater increase of points for the overall player pool if everyone played constantly, as if there were no rubberbanding. A lot of people only playing every 12 hours would less the effect.

That assumes there's not one player that grinded out the points, which seems really unlikely. Rubberbanding is set based on the overall leader, not on how many are playing

But rubberbanding has greater increases when there's more than one person grinding. And even further when there's multiple people grinding. If two people grind, they only affect each other's rubberbanding. Swapping between #1 and #2 doesn't have much effect. If lots of people are grinding, the person in #1 drops down to #100, and he gets a greater rubberband effect. More instances of rubberbanding will increase point disparity, which will increase the magnitude of rubberbanding.

It doesn't work like that. Anyone who can overtake the overall leader has no reason to grind more because he's virtually assured of a #1 finish in his bracket. Rubberbanding only increases in the last refresh and if people are all near a major progression reward.

scottee

Phantron wrote:

scottee wrote:

Impulse wrote:

scottee wrote:

Didn't read the whole thread, but it's possible more people are catching on to the rubberbanding effects and are only playing every 12 hours. Cumulative rubberbanding would have greater increase of points for the overall player pool if everyone played constantly, as if there were no rubberbanding. A lot of people only playing every 12 hours would less the effect.

That assumes there's not one player that grinded out the points, which seems really unlikely. Rubberbanding is set based on the overall leader, not on how many are playing

But rubberbanding has greater increases when there's more than one person grinding. And even further when there's multiple people grinding. If two people grind, they only affect each other's rubberbanding. Swapping between #1 and #2 doesn't have much effect. If lots of people are grinding, the person in #1 drops down to #100, and he gets a greater rubberband effect. More instances of rubberbanding will increase point disparity, which will increase the magnitude of rubberbanding.

It doesn't work like that. Anyone who can overtake the overall leader has no reason to grind more because he's virtually assured of a #1 finish in his bracket. Rubberbanding only increases in the last refresh and if people are all near a major progression reward.

I'm saying if more people are trying to grind, more people will pass the overall leader, leading to original leader having a strong rubberband effect when he tries to retake #1, increasing the overall amount of points in the event.

In the theoretical case where only two players exist, and they keep retaking the #1 spot, there's almost no rubberbanding effect, because, as you said, they won't keep grinding once they're number one. When hundreds, or thousands, or players keep trying to grind out to overtake #1, the original leader who was overtaken now has greater rubberbanding at his disposal. As do all the other people trying to constantly grind for #1.

Nemek

I don't know if you're really disagreeing with each other, but you're both right.

The more people that grind to the top, the higher rubberbanding is going to be for the original leader (and, subsequently, everybody else.) Since each leader pushes the top score up by a little bit, it's 'easier' for the next leader to push the score farther up. The more leaders there are, the more likely that the score gets pushed up higher.

So, yes, one single dedicated person cannot push up rubberbanding just as quick as a group of dedicated people.

What it looks like we're seeing with this past event is that there weren't very many dedicated players to push up rubberbanding and there's a lot of reasons for that:

• It was impossible to build a lead
• There weren't any intermediate goals (sub-Events)
• Playing more increases scaling
• Getting top 50 was almost as good as getting 3rd
• Many missions didn't have the 500 ISO prizes

I suspect most players played like I did - won a couple of missions, got back into the top 10 ever so briefly, and waited for the next refresh and contributed absolutely zero points to the community rubberbanding effort to get the progression rewards.

scottee

Also, it sounds like interest in HT wasn't very high. A lot of forumites only wanted a cover because they knew he'd be required in future events. This is magnified with the masses, as we know the majority of players only value characters they like in real life. Which is why Cap is so popular. People won't go for characters just because they're new. Every scrambled for Hulk covers, even though he's been around, and it sounds like no one was scrambling for HT covers.

Unknown

Nemek wrote:

I suspect most players played like I did - won a couple of missions, got back into the top 10 ever so briefly, and waited for the next refresh and contributed absolutely zero points to the community rubberbanding effort to get the progression rewards.

Yup. Once I hit top 20 or so I stopped grinding - I didn't want to risk driving the scaling up. In my bracket, even at the end the grinding was pretty light - I kept waiting for someone to jump out far enough for rubberbanding to really take off, and in the end I was grinding nodes under 200 points, until I finally had my last total team death with about 15 minutes left. I watched myself drop from #21 to #35 or so, but top 50 was never in danger.

Subs really help, because everyone's jockeying for the extra tokens being number 1-2 (or whatever) provides, and that drives the scrum that fuels rubberbanding. Here, no one had an incentive to hurry, and a lot of the people who did probably ended up with terrible scaling.

scottee

Yeah, subs would have helped greatly.

Basically, everyone on the forum was actually trying to keep the scores LOWER in order to place higher with minimal work.

Unknown

I won my bracket pretty easily I think (300+ points) and these mission are pretty trivial to me minus Daken + Bullseye, but I still have no reason to do the missions. I guess I could've grinded them for the boosts/500 iso but it just doesn't seem like it's worth it. Scaling this time around is not a concern because everything that was actually hard was 230 for me the first time I did it, and stuff like the Captain required node are presumably relatively low level even if done repeatedly (didn't see their levels go up at all in fact).

There's no point to build a lead that you cannot keep, not to mention any person who can surpass the overall bracket leader almost certainly has no need to worry about finishing well. The only exception would be if in a particular bracket, you have say 5 out of the top 10 overall scorers in that bracket. Only in such a case would there be a need to build a lead over other guys who are also in contention for overall bracket leader, and that kind of circumstance has to be very rare.

Dauthi

Nemek wrote:

I don't know if you're really disagreeing with each other, but you're both right.

The more people that grind to the top, the higher rubberbanding is going to be for the original leader (and, subsequently, everybody else.) Since each leader pushes the top score up by a little bit, it's 'easier' for the next leader to push the score farther up. The more leaders there are, the more likely that the score gets pushed up higher.

So, yes, one single dedicated person cannot push up rubberbanding just as quick as a group of dedicated people.

What it looks like we're seeing with this past event is that there weren't very many dedicated players to push up rubberbanding and there's a lot of reasons for that:

• It was impossible to build a lead
• There weren't any intermediate goals (sub-Events)
• Playing more increases scaling
• Getting top 50 was almost as good as getting 3rd
• Many missions didn't have the 500 ISO prizes

I suspect most players played like I did - won a couple of missions, got back into the top 10 ever so briefly, and waited for the next refresh and contributed absolutely zero points to the community rubberbanding effort to get the progression rewards.

This is what I was also thinking. Essentially their own mechanics killed reward progression. Jumping from top 2 to top 20? Ridiculous. Hopefully they are learning from this.

Unknown

Spoit wrote:

illmatic wrote:

@NazgulPrime I sent an email to mobile support, they've been good in the past, I think if enough people complain, they'll do something about it. I placed first in my bracket and was nowhere near the progression rewards in the end, in my email to support I mentioned that I think it was an honest miscalculation on their part, rather than a deliberate ploy to annoy their player base.

While they may be good at responding and compensating individual tickets, D3 seems to be unusually reluctant to offer compensation to whole classes of users at a time. The only time they offered something to the userbase as a whole for their mistakes was the limited time thorverine buyback (still waiting for word on what they decided about the Rags nerf, I'd be more than happy to sell my maxed one if it offered any degree of HP back).

For the sake of comparison, the other F2P games I play give out tons of free stuff, even to people who weren't effected by mistakes. Like one time in puzzles and dragons, when they said there was a godfest (increased drop rate for the equivalent of 3*s) but it wasn't actually turned on, they refunded the cash spent, let people keep the extra rolls that were made in error, and gave enough premium currency for 2 free rolls to everyone as compensation

I play Quiz RPG rather than Puzzles and Dragons but I believe it's the same guys running it, and yeah they are very generous with compensation because after all it's free to them and the stuff they give out isn't SO much that anyone who was going to buy 30 crystals (like HP) is suddenly not going to do so because they get one or two for free or they get a free invoke (equivalent of one free heroic token) or a bit of gold (like ISO), and in fact I think the little influxes of freebies as compensation for even minor mistakes helps keep people interested and thus spending money on the game.

Unknown

Let's be realistic here. Even if it's broken into say 4 sub brackets, if it was the same number of base points, it'd be very doubtful anyone could've gotten close to 93333 let alone any other higher rewards. I calculated Simulator Basic to finish at around 248K based on pace, and that as about 20K off compared to reality (since people played considerably more in R4). But, the missions on Simulator Basic R4 is worth up to 600 base and there are quite a few of them worth that much. The lowest point mission was probably around 200. I'd estimate Simulator R4 had at least 3 times the base points compared to Heroic Jugg, so if you scale that back you'd get about 7K more points than expected. That's hardly enough to hit 93333 since I'm pretty sure nobody finished above 55K. Even if you repeat that 4 times, you get 35K + 55K = 90K, or still not quite enough to hit 93333, and that's assuming for some inexplicable reason everyone played every day as if it's R4 of Simulator Basic.