Heroic Chapter 3 PVE Change

IceIX

We're trying out a change to help out scaling overall starting in Heroic Chapter 3, to go Live very soon.

- Smoothed scaling over all brackets of PVE rating so that players will see a more gradual bump on enemies

- Keep in mind that some pins will still be harder than others, this just makes the huge instant bumps less prevalent, although if you join on second one then come in 20 hours later, you should expect to see a change due to Community Scaling.

- Smoothed the route back down in PVE rating if you're losing in missions so that enemies will get easier quicker. We've put in brakes however so that you can't just retreat your way to easy-dom.
- Increased the maximum level of enemies from 230 to 400. >230 enemies are intended to only regularly be seen by those players that are already beating up on 230s.

Increasing the maximum enemy level allows us to provide more challenges for the players that are higher in overall roster level and not create a roadblock where those players that are beating down 230s with ease are making scaling work harder for all the other players who aren't there yet.


Here's what happens right now with 230s in-game:
Player 1 can fight 230s but will come out of it pretty damaged. They're the intended audience for "230s = HARD". They've hit the point where their Deadly/Impossible pins are at that level. Great, fine for just those pins.
Player 2 can fight 230s and win fairly easily. They may be healing in battle, they may be stunlocking, they may be that good. They're still beating the 230 encounters without issue.
Player 3 can't fight 230s but they can win against 180s decently well.

The game sees that the Deadly pin for Player 1 is being beaten regularly by players that are capable of taking down 230s (Player 2). They're both at the high end of PVE rating, so there's no real difference in difficulty as far as the system can see. The game *does* know that users are still defeating those pins pretty easily though, so it raises the floor to try and help difficulty go up for everyone on nodes that were apparently too easy.

Player 1 sees that a couple of his Hard pins went to Deadly 200s from 180 as a result of being near the top of scaling while his bretheren is knocking down 230s like nothing. Player 1's game just got harder even though it shouldn't have, but the system has little way of knowing that without adding in much more complexity to the scaling system. Player 3 sees their nodes go from 180 to 185 since their rating isn't as high, so they're affected fairly little but still hit. A theoretical player 4 fighting 90s may be fighting 91s, so no big deal there.

By raising the bar to 400, we've left room for Player 2 to grow while essentially pushing Player 1 into the same position Player 3 now enjoys. It's also the reason you see newbies hanging out in the points ranking for so long. They get hit by scaling less because the people that are pushing the community scaling up aren't hitting them as hard (as they shouldn't). They still hit difficult fights relatively quickly though as their individual rating climbs, so that ends up being self balancing by the end of any given PVE Event.

Edit: Yes mods, there's supposed to be a Shadow Topic in General that leads to Events for this. Don't kill it.

Clintman

Ice, the level 230's suck enough as it is. The thing that is really frustrating the community is that I am now fighting level 400 enemies for 10 minutes, forced to use a sustainable healing team in order to do the fights, while at the same time a level 35 roster is blowing through missions, taking less time per fight while I have to slog through quagmire to win another 20 ISO reward. If it sucked equally then it would not be so bad, but this kind of imbalance is not fun.

I like not using Spiderman on every fight, he is a great character but there is no way you can do a level 400 fight without having to go with a specialized team that can try to mitigate and sustain through insane match damage. Since there is no increased reward for a fight that takes forever to finish its going to kill the enjoyment of these events.

Right now, this instant, I am having a waking nightmare thinking about a level 400 Daken, Bullseye, Goon fight... Christ I have a twitch in my right eye.

Unknown

Most people who can kill 230s are also sick of it. Increasing that to 400 doesn't give anyone a new challenge as much as it'll probably drive people away. We'll see how it goes but I won't grind 230s right now let alone 400s. Why do it if it's not fun?

morgh

Why am I already dreading this?

Hopefully only people with stun-locking Spidey be hit with >230 enemies (which will not be hopefully possible in THIS event)

I wonder what you guys mean when talking about "brakes"... I think that this might mean that health lost is taken into consideration - which would mean that you DO NOT retreat, but have to fully wipe for the system to record anything...

What is more - this change (>230 enemies) will cause 2-3 characters to be mandatory - 1) Punisher with 40% retribution, 2) Venom+Spidey with devour stunned things... this cannot be good for the game...

Unknown

400s make me less likely to play those events at all. 230s are beatable but are already beyond annoying. There should be a bonus for beating 400s. It's not at all fair for a low level person to sweep through all the matches while I have to lose at each one

Unknown

Yes the trudging for just 20 ISO is frustrating, especially with the unattainable progression rewards. Are we going to get any incentive out of the new changes? It sounds like you're punishing people with higher rosters who have put time and effort into this game for 6 months or more. You say scalng, I say communism

Unknown

Sounds like they are giving the entire system more flexibility, and players a bit more control over it.

If you grind through so many 230's you push yourself up to 400 the game is literally telling you to slow down...

Unknown

I'm guessing at this point the winning rosters will mainly have low level 1* characters.

NorthernPolarity

What Clint said. The main issue that I have with level scaling is that it punishes players for doing well without giving them any additional reward. This is very counterintuitive since now the optimal way to play is to make the system think that we're doing average instead of doing well so that the enemies don't scale as much. There should be something in place to compensate for the increased difficulty of the missions, whether that be increased iso gains (which probably would all be spent on boosts to begin with...) or more points gained.

If you think about the optimal way to play this event, it's to manage MMR as much as possible by retreating until we hit the brakes and make the game think that we're losing so that the levels don't scale as much. This obviously seems like an extremely unfun way to play the game, and so the design seems very flawed as a result. Someone at blizzard said that games should be designed to be fun while considering how their players would play optimally, and it's obvious that this isn't the case here.

Unknown

Creating a tougher challenge to fight against is always a good thing. Obviously, the stronger your options and characters are, the better off you are when it comes time to take down baddies.

I'm looking forward to testing my mettle against higher than 230's in the future then.

Clintman

How about that Roster Diversity?

Hello Punisher required X/X/5 Red so you can take down that 35K goon
Hello Spiderman 3/5/5 so you can have protect tiles to potentially survive 400-500 match damage
Hello level 20 required hero that was just released last week.

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

Increasing the maximum enemy level allows us to provide more challenges for the players that are higher in overall roster level and not create a roadblock where those players that are beating down 230s with ease are making scaling work harder for all the other players who aren't there yet.

I thought Spiderman (the real one) wasn't allowed...

NorthernPolarity

morgh wrote:

Why am I already dreading this?

Hopefully only people with stun-locking Spidey be hit with >230 enemies (which will not be hopefully possible in THIS event)

I wonder what you guys mean when talking about "brakes"... I think that this might mean that health lost is taken into consideration - which would mean that you DO NOT retreat, but have to fully wipe for the system to record anything...

What is more - this change (>230 enemies) will cause 2-3 characters to be mandatory - 1) Punisher with 40% retribution, 2) Venom+Spidey with devour stunned things... this cannot be good for the game...

Remember that you can't even use Spidey during Heroic Venom, making 400s even more terrible.

Unknown

Let's not forget they plan on nerfing Spidey soon. Then where will we be?

Clintman

Cryptobrancus wrote:

Sounds like they are giving the entire system more flexibility, and players a bit more control over it.

If you grind through so many 230's you push yourself up to 400 the game is literally telling you to slow down...

Let me interpret that comment "the game is telling you that you can't have the new character, Joe with a level 35 roster takes all."

Unknown

morgh wrote:

I wonder what you guys mean when talking about "brakes"... I think that this might mean that health lost is taken into consideration - which would mean that you DO NOT retreat, but have to fully wipe for the system to record anything...

With 400 level enemies, getting wiped might not take any longer than retreating.

Unknown

Anyone who can beat level 230 teams can probably beat level 400 teams just as easily (although not as quickly) so isn't the effect of this change just to increase community scaling? Or does community scaling only take into account that nodes are being beaten, not the difficulty they are when beaten?

Unknown

kevind722 wrote:

Let's not forget they plan on nerfing Spidey soon. Then where will we be?

Those without 5 blue Spidey will be better off, because community scaling won't be killing us like it is now.

Unknown

Oh dear lord.

JamieMadrox

Ben Grimm wrote:

I'm guessing at this point the winning rosters will mainly have low level 1* characters.

Considering my current fieldable roster is:

1. Lvl 46 IM35
2. Lvl 46 MStorm
3. Lvl 40 MBW
4. Lvl 22 MNThor
5. Lvl 21 CStorm

That sounds fine to me.

mags1587

IceIX wrote:

Smoothed the route back down in PVE rating if you're losing in missions so that enemies will get easier quicker. We've put in brakes however so that you can't just retreat your way to easy-dom.

I'll believe it when I see it, but I'm hoping this actually works. And a question - do you take into account that not a lot of people like losing, so people will skip fights they know they'll lose instead of actually playing and getting killed?

IceIX wrote:

Increased the maximum level of enemies from 230 to 400. >230 enemies are intended to only regularly be seen by those players that are already beating up on 230s.

Increasing the maximum enemy level allows us to provide more challenges for the players that are higher in overall roster level and not create a roadblock where those players that are beating down 230s with ease are making scaling work harder for all the other players who aren't there yet.

Seriously? 400 level enemies. That's not a challenge anymore, that's just cruel. Having one or two challenging fights is good, yes, but slogging through high-level fight after high-level fight is not fun. This is a game. It is supposed to be fun. If all my nodes are 230+, why would I put myself through trying to get through those fights at all?

Especially for just 20 ISO. It is incredibly frustrating it is to see that 20 ISO reward after squeaking by a tough fight.