Heroic Chapter 3 PVE Change

NorthernPolarity

viewtopic.php?f=20&t=3492&p=56141#p56141

This was their original reasoning for having scaling by the way: it doesn't have a bad theoretical foundation, but is going to take ages to get right in practice as we've all experienced so far.

Unknown

Guys, we whine about rewards not scaling with levels during every PvE event. I suggest we change tactics. Let's clamor for community scaling to reach 500 and 600 - maybe next PvE they will increase the 20 ISO reward!

There's an affliction that infects many a F2P, and I'm afraid it has spread to this game: Developer out-of-touchitis stemming from not actually playing their own game.

Unknown

All the complaining won't do anything. Only not playing this event and not using hp to level or health pack will prove your point. So I may try random nodes through out event but I'm not about to play hardcore like last events. Guess the 1 day rest will turn into a week rest from the game. If they see a huge drop in play time the message will be much louder

Unknown

NorthernPolarity wrote:

morgh wrote:

And bottom line is:

Nothing we write here will make them change their mind - get used to high levels of enemies and people with weak rosters/new players grabbing everything...
Has there been a single time that D3 changed anything based on forum feedback?

...

Thought so...

Give the devs more credit. Anyone remember back when the skip tax was initially planned and they scrapped it entirely and changed it to the victory bonus? That happened 100% because of the forum suggestions. The announcements regarding the Thorverine nerfs were also made before the nerfs actually happened, and the only reason why they did that was because of forum complaints about being blindsided by the rag nerfs. It's easy to fall into a mob mentality of flaming the devs, but they've proven over time that they are receptive to feedback and will patch things up to make us happier (as long as it doesn't hurt their bottom line). With this scaling issue, I believe that they think they can make it work, and I'm willing to give them more time to fix it. There are definitely tweaks that can be made to it to make things a lot fairer (rewards for people playing harder missions, caps on scaling in a certain time period so you can still grind, etc etc), and so this isn't a completely lost cause. Voice your opinions and give them feedback to point them in the right direction, but don't go all mob mentality on us and start a flame war against the devs.

I totally agree that we have to give them credit. They are not trying to go out of their way to penalize people, they are trying to do what they think is the right thing. for the players but also for their business (which is totally ok).

The problem is that there is a sea of feedback and it's hard to tell which feedback is legitimate vs just people not used to a new system that "should" be better for everyone in the long run.

Yelling and threatening to quit doesn't help our cause. It's much better to formulate an argument as to what you are experiencing and why it's not fun. If you can talk about it from their side and the goals they are trying to achieve then all the better. They do read the forum posts and I think a well constructed argument will go a lot farther than just being dramatic.

That said, quantity also helps, we need to communicate that this is an issue that a lot of people have problems with.

NorthernPolarity

gobstopper wrote:

Guys, we whine about rewards not scaling with levels during every PvE event. I suggest we change tactics. Let's clamor for community scaling to reach 500 and 600 - maybe next PvE they will increase the 20 ISO reward!

There's an affliction that infects many a F2P, and I'm afraid it has spread to this game: Developer out-of-touchitis stemming from not actually playing their own game.

Our only hope is IceIX: hopefully him being on Django will whip him back into shape and get him to a point where the crazy scaling affects him too

LordWill

I guess one of the biggest problems I have is all they do is look at the metrics and not ask the player base.

It's not really a fair way to collect feedback. If all you give them is 2 limited choices, doesn't mean they like either one. It's just the lesser of two evils. (Kinda like our current politics)

mouser

I'm going to look at this as optimistically as possible and hope it means the devs will now be more comfortable releasing new characters with Stun or Healing abilities since the mobs can scale so much higher.

Unknown

LordWill wrote:

I guess one of the biggest problems I have is all they do is look at the metrics and not ask the player base.

It's not really a fair way to collect feedback. If all you give them is 2 limited choices, doesn't mean they like either one. It's just the lesser of two evils. (Kinda like our current politics)

Or that if you asked the player base "should we hand out 3* covers to the top 500 of every event and put HP rewards on every node" the player base would say HELLS YES, but that doesn't exactly help the arpdau, or even make the game better/more fun...

Unknown

NorthernPolarity wrote:

http://www.d3pforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=3492&p=56141#p56141

This was their original reasoning for having scaling by the way: it doesn't have a bad theoretical foundation, but is going to take ages to get right in practice as we've all experienced so far.

yea it seems like he is saying that they want to reduce grind. so they are actively trying to get people to play less.

I guess the goal is to make it so casual users don't have to grind nodes down to 1 in order to compete for prizes. I can understand that.

The way they are trying to make it happen is by forcing everyone to take a lot more damage during the event and making it so that the rewards are not worth spending HP on boosts and health packs in order to play more.

The big issue is wether they can really get the hardcore types to just play a match every couple of days and yet have it still feel like a competition. If you are trying to get 1st, are you really going to not buy those boosts or health packs.

also, the lack of uniformity with scaling among players makes it so some people are not able to play at all and yet some people with really good teams have low MMR and are able to grind like normal.

It seems like this creates a strategy where you have to take it easy for a bunch of events and get your mmr down to the point where you can compete again (pushing the next few events out of your reach again). or you have to just be casual and not compete too hard because you will basically be screwing yourself out of the rewards of the next PvE. You just have to be happy with whatever reward you manage to win.

Mawtful

This seems like as good a place to ask, and it's something I've not ever seen addressed/answered in the past.

What's the "decay" on scaling for PvE?

Speaking from personal experience, when I hit a wall of 230's that I can't get over I stop playing. Health packs are a ridiculous commodity; burning through them only to die to the same team in the same manner once and then to be in short supply so I can't do it again means I'm simply going to stop playing. Dying twice like that isn't enough to see a significant drop - if it was, the prospect of shelling out for some more health might just be tempting - and returning after 6-8 hours usually means that, if anything, community scaling has pushed levels higher.

Moral

I'm doing the only thing I can do against a 308 deadly team: throw my best team at them and get mowed down. Didn't even get close to half Venom's health despite going around 15 turns in. Venom was even kind enough to match some countdown tiles to drag out the fights.

LordWill

gamar wrote:

LordWill wrote:

I guess one of the biggest problems I have is all they do is look at the metrics and not ask the player base.

It's not really a fair way to collect feedback. If all you give them is 2 limited choices, doesn't mean they like either one. It's just the lesser of two evils. (Kinda like our current politics)

Or that if you asked the player base "should we hand out 3* covers to the top 500 of every event and put HP rewards on every node" the player base would say HELLS YES, but that doesn't exactly help the arpdau, or even make the game better/more fun...

Nothing so extreme. But it just seems like a long painful process to go through for everyone involved if the end goal is to make the overall experience better for the end user, why not try asking them instead of having countless meetings and theorizing just based on spending habits. There have been a lot of great ideas to make the game better but they insist ramping up enemy levels to insure we are "challenged".


The community has been very vocal about these changes as well as the skip tax, and enough "feedback" was given to make them rethink it. Clearly they are bound and determined to move forward with this instead of an alternative. I think whoever developed the whole scaling issue has painted themselves in a corner and at this point they can't get away from it. If they purely made it individual instead of community, I think it would solve SOME of the problems, not all.

I think part of the problem is they want this to be a casual game and we're hardcore players who make up probably less than 2% of their revenue.

warcin

Why do heroics have any type of event memory? What does it matter how I did in the last pve event if you are not going to let me use any of the same characters. If they are going to pull this **** scaling they should start all players on a level playing field

Unknown

This event just jumped the shark into a total IAP money grab. Very limited roster, most of them new 3*'s that most people don't have so they need to spend $$$ to get tokens that MIGHT give you the covers... as a mid-level player, this is impossible. I could barely beat the first 2 easy missions, that is, was killed in the 2nd easy mission (level 30s venom and goons). Well, this is the much needed break I needed. thanks D3, for letting me have a life again!

mags1587

And now I have level 200+ enemies in easy mode. Really hope that scaling down of enemy levels kicks in soon because I'm losing quite a bit here.

hsk808

I started playing this game a while back on my phone (I'm on day 171 now). When I started lurking on the forums here to get some tips I learned about the scaling and immediately stopped leveling up my strongest team. They are still at L65, 60, and 50. I've only put ISO into everyone else on my roster to bring them up to level 50 as needed for the events. As a result, I have a deep, 37 character roster (just sold Yelena to make room for Torch) if not particularly strong. This has worked out pretty well so far, because I'm still able to earn the progression rewards as well as anyone else, and so I end up with the required covers to complete all of the Essential missions in the following event. As it is, I'm not inclined to spend any money on this game, especially if leveling up my characters is just going to make the missions take longer. My play time is already limited. If rewards were to scale with mission difficulty, however, I probably would be spending money. It makes sense to scale rewards because it takes so much more ISO to to level up high level characters.

As a side note, I started a new game on my iPad and I'm keeping all of my characters at level 40. Breezing through all of the missions with the low level but maxed covers. At the moment, I have to say that the game on my iPad is way more fun!

Bacon Pants

mags1587 wrote:

And now I have level 200+ enemies in easy mode. Really hope that scaling down of enemy levels kicks in soon because I'm losing quite a bit here.

I do not understand how your levels are so high and mine are so low. I'm pretty sure we event talked about our use of Spidey in the last event and had similarly leveled opponents.

It's Mind Bottling.

Unknown

So my hope is that the increase to level 400 is to help them collect data for releasing either more 4*s or a 5*.

My thoughts on how high level fights take longer for the same rewards.

What is more Iso really worth? More Hp? If you could beat level 230 opponents back when that was the upper limit, what did you need more rewards for? To improve some character that you weren't going to use anyways. To link back to the WOW comparison someone used earlier, what made the rewards for beating 25 heroic man better than 10 man casual was that they enabled more in the game. If the heroic bosses dropped just more copies of same equipment that normal heroic dropped, it wouldn't be worth it.

I think the idea of raising the reward roof from 3*s to 4* would solve a lot of peoples concerns, though it would obviously create a bunch of new ones as well. Currently I'm giving D3 credit and assuming that they are trying to plan long term and will make that move but want to make it a momentous one.

JamieMadrox

So just to put this in perspective, I started this PVE with IM35 and MStorm both at lvl 46 and the only other usable character I had was my red cover Torch that I got as an alliance reward from the last event. Torch buffs +90 levels to lvl 105 !

I'm #1 in my bracket with no real problems getting there or keeping it.

So yeah, this has been a good change for me.

Unrelated, the buy behind me in #2 has a suspicious roster I think. Or I could just be witch hunting.

ClydeFrog76

Here's where I do my bird impersonation: cheap, cheap, cheap!

There is nothing creative about this "solution", and it's even more ridiculous than community scaling in the first place.