Heroic Chapter 3 PVE Change

Unknown

I suspect the guys seeing the crazy levels are the guys who got hit by the 'anti Spiderman factor'. I haven't seen anything higher than level 150 yet. It'll probably take some time before the 'anti Spiderman factor' decays enough.

They really should just nerf him instead of having stuff scale to level 400 to make up for the fact that Spiderman is borderline godmode in PvE.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

I suspect the guys seeing the crazy levels are the guys who got hit by the 'anti Spiderman factor'. I haven't seen anything higher than level 150 yet. It'll probably take some time before the 'anti Spiderman factor' decays enough.

They really should just nerf him instead of having stuff scale to level 400 to make up for the fact that Spiderman is borderline godmode in PvE.

I dont own a leveled spiderman or a OBW and I see the crazy high levels.

I do use C Mags which gives me great board control so maybe that helps.

I just want to vent my frustration again. right now the strategy for high level players is to not use Spidey or OBW, make sure you dont heal, and also try not to use any characters that allow you to have unbalanced board control.

not a great design decision if it penalizes players for using characters in their arsenal.

Unknown

davecazz wrote:

Phantron wrote:

I suspect the guys seeing the crazy levels are the guys who got hit by the 'anti Spiderman factor'. I haven't seen anything higher than level 150 yet. It'll probably take some time before the 'anti Spiderman factor' decays enough.

They really should just nerf him instead of having stuff scale to level 400 to make up for the fact that Spiderman is borderline godmode in PvE.

I dont own a leveled spiderman or a OBW and I see the crazy high levels.

I do use C Mags which gives me great board control so maybe that helps.

I just want to vent my frustration again. right now the strategy for high level players is to not use Spidey or OBW, make sure you dont heal, and also try not to use any characters that allow you to have unbalanced board control.

not a great design decision if it penalizes players for using characters in their arsenal.

I use Magneto all the time and didn't encounter any unusual scaling. I used OBW in Unstable Isotope 8, though I didn't make any special effort to ensure I end the fight at full health. That is, I use whatever Anti-Grav I happen to be able to use and if it's not enough I don't worry about it and just go to the next fight. Eventually OBW dies but I just use health packs there.

I suspect the 'ends fight with full HP/more than you started with' is greatly weighted against you. While using Magneto, you end up winning a fight taking very little damage, but you never end a fight with full HP since Magneto, of course, cannot actually heal anybody.

LordWill

davecazz wrote:

I just want to vent my frustration again. right now the strategy for high level players is to not use Spidey or OBW, make sure you dont heal, and also try not to use any characters that allow you to have unbalanced board control.

not a great design decision if it penalizes players for using characters in their arsenal.

/agree. And I would just like to add, there have been times where I still wipe using spidey or OBW so its not like an automatic win.

And by the way, no one asked me if I am sufficiently challenged to begin with. Thanks, I'm good. I don't need "More Challenge" at the moment....I haven't seen much on the boards about people not be challenged enough either. Where are you getting this data from?

Is there no other pressing issue right now with the game that development resources could be used for? Has the entire player base reached that maxed out roster plateau?

Unknown

LordWill wrote:

davecazz wrote:

I just want to vent my frustration again. right now the strategy for high level players is to not use Spidey or OBW, make sure you dont heal, and also try not to use any characters that allow you to have unbalanced board control.

not a great design decision if it penalizes players for using characters in their arsenal.

/agree. And I would just like to add, there have been times where I still wipe using spidey or OBW so its not like an automatic win.

And by the way, no one asked me if I am sufficiently challenged to begin with. Thanks, I'm good. I don't need "More Challenge" at the moment....I haven't seen much on the boards about people not be challenged enough either. Where are you getting this data from?

Is there no other pressing issue right now with the game that development resources could be used for? Has the entire player base reached that maxed out roster plateau?

It honestly seems like they want us to lose every other battles and or get heavily injured every battle. This is not fun. This will get people to quit. I think they are so against having a grinding game for casuals but when it comes down to it, that's what it is. The people who put in the most time and effort should reap the rewards. If someone doesn't have that amount of time they can pay to keep up. If there were no health packs and you could try unlimited tries on a super difficult node then it would be fine to have community scaling and scaling in general because everyone would be able to try multiple times with multiple characters trying new strategies ect. But as it stands now You can't even sustain two full team deaths for god sakes. Only 5 health packs means if you lose your whole team twice you are waiting 35 min to even be able to try a 3rd time (assuming your same "A-Team"). Nobody is going to do those nodes. I don't get why they want everyone to play their game less.

DD-The-Mighty

sms4002 wrote:

LordWill wrote:

It honestly seems like they want us to lose every other battles and or get heavily injured every battle.... I don't get why they want everyone to play their game less.

Yes. That is exactly what they want. They want ALL the players to lose. They don't want you to ever dominate. You will never reach a point of comfortable satisfaction. You will always be "challenged".

Now they have ensured that "top level" players are getting their teeth kicked in just like they were when they were "mid" and "Low". they thought an extra 89 or so levels over the max 3* max would do it, but they were wrong. So here we go, on the road to 400. That should set you straight. Welcome to the rest of the player base. I feel bad for the players who don't see the suffering of the endgame players, they have no idea that it will never end.

Though I do get a sensible chuckle out of folks bragging/complaining about the minority of players who luck out and have a PVE MMR low enough that their equally underdeveloped characters for a chosen event are (not really) winning it all. And perpetuating them as some sort of lucky majority.

But to be positive as always:
They seem to be sending mixed signals to players who have progressed to the point where they can beat almost anything that comes their way: They move the third covers over to alliances, where you are rewarded for grinding out points to ensure you and your other 19 goons will win all the covers, but then turn around and complain that your winning too much and ruining the difficulty for everyone else. I hope one of these meetings is them deciding exactly what they want from the players, besides more money and playtime.

Maybe let players stomp the 1-230's all day, just severely curb your community point gains after multiple stompings. Force you to prioritize leader-board placing rubber-banding or grinding out nodes for that 4/4 rewards and sweet sweet, Stark-tier 20iso's. Maybe drop all this competitive PlayerVsEnviroment leaderboard prize nonsense and let it be a race to get the progression rewards. Eliminate the community driven problems at its source, that way D3 can refocus on character balance, player balance and enemy selection.

That last one was pure wishful thinking though. Too many people here love the idea of beating someone else at everything

Unknown

Hmm I am picking out words at random but you said progression next to race ...

What if there were alliance progression awards, that the first XX alliances to get there get top tier prizes but All alliances that get there still get something good.

So first alliance to the magic number of points gets 500 HP + iso + a cover
Second through fiftieth get 100 HP + iso + cover
Everyone else who reaches that number gets their cover but nothing else

mytisbrewin

I am another who is not really finding this event fun. Play a match either win with 1 or 2 heroes lost or lose all 3, followed by another attempt with other heroes from a poor selection or straight to the prologue to heal, rinse and repeat.

reckless442

Cryptobrancus wrote:

Hmm I am picking out words at random but you said progression next to race ...

What if there were alliance progression awards, that the first XX alliances to get there get top tier prizes but All alliances that get there still get something good.

So first alliance to the magic number of points gets 500 HP + iso + a cover
Second through fiftieth get 100 HP + iso + cover
Everyone else who reaches that number gets their cover but nothing else

That's an interesting idea, but racing to progression awards creates even more time-zone and grinding issues. You would have prizes heavily weighted toward players who join and grind points early. I think that would increase the intensity by forcing a lot of play early on as teams try to reach the progressive awards early and then, the existing craziness as the end, where they take advantage of rubber-banding for individual awards. I would fear that a "race" element would mean the successful alliances were the ones that luck out by having players who can jump in when the event first starts. And if you jump in early, you tend to have to do more during the event overall. That results in increased burnout.

It also might create a problem with massively stacked brackets at the beginning if players from competitive alliances are jumping in early to start the "race" for progressive awards. I know my alliance mates try to stagger when we enter events to avoid having multiple members in the same bracket. You couldn't do that if you had to start early to get the best progressive awards.

Unknown

Progression races doesn't work as long as there is rubberband. It'd literally be the first alliance that makes a move always loses if the progression threshold is at all challenging.

You also need to make mission stacks refresh on server time, otherwise it's going to come down way too much on playing at hours to squeeze in one more refresh than other alliances. That is, instead of stuff refresh every 12 hours after you last did it, it should just be that all stacks always refresh on noon/midnight server time. That way there isn't an advantage to play early, though now that tie seems to go to the guy who got the score first, it'd still be better to start early since if there are no rubberband, the worst you can do is a tie and if you finished earlier, you'd still get the tiebreaker.

Unknown

I don't know, this might work well for long PVE if the goal is impossible to hit till like day 7-8 of a 10 day event

People could try to organize refreshes and timing within their alliance but I think after a few days of trying to organize 20 people the vast majority of players are just going to lapse back into their usual patterns and do what they can as normal. At the very least it would be a brand new meta element that the community would have to figure out. I am not so sure jumping in at the very moment an event starts would have any effect on an alliance's total score 7 days into a large event. More like people would have to keep an eye on the leaderboards and make a push when they get close enough to reach the finish.

No clue if it would be "better" than how it is now but it sure would be different, and different can be fun. I would absolutely enjoy a one off event that was a giant race but yes having all events like this would be burnout central.

Unknown

Cryptobrancus wrote:

I don't know, this might work well for long PVE if the goal is impossible to hit till like day 7-8 of a 10 day event

People could try to organize refreshes and timing within their alliance but I think after a few days of trying to organize 20 people the vast majority of players are just going to lapse back into their usual patterns and do what they can as normal. At the very least it would be a brand new meta element that the community would have to figure out. I am not so sure jumping in at the very moment an event starts would have any effect on an alliance's total score 7 days into a large event. More like people would have to keep an eye on the leaderboards and make a push when they get close enough to reach the finish.

No clue if it would be "better" than how it is now but it sure would be different, and different can be fun. I would absolutely enjoy a one off event that was a giant race but yes having all events like this would be burnout central.

No offense but it sounds like a terrible idea. It mixes all the worst gameplay design elements together. A race = grind = awful, in all circumstances.

Unknown

Just trying to think outside the box a little

Was trying for the angle that the competitive bunch would still have something to be competitive about and the casual bunch could still have goals to set and reach even if they are not top 100

Chaga

Hmmm, it's weird.
I have abused spidey stunlock in previous events, but for this one, I am getting more than balanced enemies.
So far in deadly, most nodes are yellow, so can be beaten with probably one death on my side, but the easy mode, almost all my nodes are green, and I was able to farm both events successfully.
I am hovering at 25k points in each, and logging in every 4-5 hours, playing some nodes to catch back first position in my bracket, then taking a break.
I honestly was expecting to hit a scaling wall way sooner than now, but oddly still haven't.
So I could say that I am actually enjoying my first PVE event in a long time

kensterr

I say ask the devs to get their significant other to play the game with level 400 enemies. See if their relationship suffers after a few deadly rounds... or maybe devs will get broken phones and PCs.

Unknown

- 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 have yet to see any evidence of my missions actually decreases. previous pve they might go down 10 levels here or there. this pve i've had a few legit wipes from daken/pyros and used 4-5 health packs to recover, still nothing. nodes are managable at 100-170s but they never, ever, drop in difficulty for me.

@IceIX - what makes enemy levels drop and should we see the change immediately or just on stack refresh? dying multiple times doesnt seem to... retreating - nope... health pack using - nope... not playing for 20h - nope... im at a loss to what this change is here. all i get is increased nodes by community scaling and i fight as little as possible to keep personal scaling in check. frustrating

Vohnkar

I don't understand why the game should punish us for playing it. I like MPQ and I like to play as much as I can on my free time, the scaling system sucks for me. On venom I'm unable to play anything without boosts, and tonight even with boosts I'm being deleted when the board is not favorable.

If you are trying to make people leave the game this decisions are the way to go. For now my brother refuses to play in any of the current events, a fact that is harming our alliance ranking, but I understand his decision when he tries to do a mission and is slaugtered hard due to scaling, while our lower lvls of the alliance are toping their brackets with roster of 1*.

I'm hoping next event will be a litle more fun and fair for everyone. I don't mind not being at top 100 as long as I can play the game HAVING FUN! not having to heal on prologue after every mission. And NO, I won't buy healthpacks, I've invested Money on the game and will invest more for alliance, roster slots, and maybe some cover... but not for heals or boring mecanics.

Unknown

8 health packs used within 45 minutes, no change in enemy levels, if you've got brakes in place it seems like the emergency brake is stuck in the on position. what does it take 20 health packs ...

kensterr

Vohnkar wrote:

I don't understand why the game should punish us for playing it. I like MPQ and I like to play as much as I can on my free time, the scaling system sucks for me. On venom I'm unable to play anything without boosts, and tonight even with boosts I'm being deleted when the board is not favorable.

I have a feeling that the developers are actually technically gifted psychology students who created this game for their PHD thesis on how much people enjoy mental anguish.

LordWill

So my daughter wanted to chime in...

http://youtu.be/g2vxvKkuybU

Out of the mouths of babes....

Enjoy!