Please revisit 4* PVE rewards in CL8 and above

orbitalint

So, I haven't pushed in a PVE in ages but saw 4* Marvel available and thought I'd give it a go with the weekend on the way. Just finished the first sub and first through 20th are separated by a mere 400 points. I know what I was getting into with Marvel on the line but I'm sitting at 16 and did an optimal grind to dust plus whatever was left on goon nodes as they regenerated. It looks like I started my final grind about 15 minutes earlier than I should have. 

It's just disheartening because I'm probably out of the running for Marvel now - needing top 10 and all - and this is only the first day of the event. I'm now at the mercy of those in front of me to be less optimal than me the rest of the way, which doesn't seem likely. I'm not upset about this particular event but more the design philosophy that still thinks it's 2 years ago with only a few 4*'s created and no 5* tier. 

There are more than 10/1000 people in the 4* transition or above at this point and top 25 or 50 also rewarding one 4* cover is much needed. I'm not saying hand them out but 1% is ridiculous.  

By this time in the 3* tier development, IIRC, Top 50 or even 100 got people the nice shiny 3*. It is just shocking that 4*'s are still considered so valuable to the devs with few purposeful ways to acquire them. I'm sorry, tokens are not a purposeful way. 

I'd like more than RNG to get some of the key covers that I want for characters. This and the PVE/PVP900 progressions are about all that are available for purposeful progression of desired covers. I appreciate the Heroes for Hire attempt but 3600HP is just way too expensive for one cover. Heck, I'd actually consider it for 2000HP if I really wanted a certain cover. 

Nepenthe

Agreed. Since top 10 get two 4* covers, top 20 should get one 4* cover. Last pve I was #11 by only about 100 points and that's pretty frustrating.

While you're at it, CL8 should also have the iso rewards in progression bumped up to differentiate more from CL7. 4* transitioners need iso!

Ezrius

I feel like chiming in just because I happened to attempt SCL 8 last event, so I can still look at the leader board.

Checking the rosters of the T10 in my event group (I placed 19th in SCL 8 on what I thought were near-perfect clears): All 10 possess functional 4* champion rosters, and two possess functional 5* champion rosters.  Hindsight prevents me from determining to a certainty how many went in with 4* Rulk as a champion, but 8 have Rulks more than 5 levels over 270, so they most likely had him as a champion before the event or have a lot of covers on the vine.  So 2 people out of the 1000 in my group managed to earn Rulk covers that didn't already have them.  And it took functioning 4* rosters for them to do so.

It was my mistake though, I guess.  I qualify for SCL 8, yet I don't have a single 4* champion (although I do have an X-23 with 13 covers).  A T10 finish in SCL 8, paired with the progression reward from the current event, would have fully covered him for me, so I got ambitious.  Still, if I have no business being in SCL 8, then why do I qualify?  Is the requirement structure wrong? The difference between T20 in SCL 7 and SCL 8 is 500 ISO.  T10 in SCL 8 get two 4* covers and T20 drop straight to 3*s (don't even get me started on the fact that it's Spider-Man).

I really hope SCL 9 and 10 are enticing and have remotely appropriate requirements to help better separate out who someone at my stage of the game competes against.  I fear there will be some measure of sandbagging going on even after that happens, but hopefully nothing too extreme.

Rick_OShay

It is very lopsided in terms of progression vs placement as well.
What percentage of players in CL7/8 earn the 4* as the progression reward, 80%+? Whatever the percent is, that's hundreds of players.
Then, placement only rewards a 4* to 1% of players? Why such a difference?

I realize they have recently expanded new releases to top ~100.

Dragon_Nexus

Missed optimal by 15 minutes, huh? I vastly underestimated the combined power of a champed 4* Blade and Red Hulk.
I started with an hour and a half to go, remembering the previous event where it took me about that long. I got it all done in 45 minutes. I had 45 minutes to spare.

I'm *totally* screwed, I imagine.

That said, I completely agree with you. Nothing worse than, like an above poster said, finishing just outside of top 10 because you couldn't conjur up 50-200 extra points.

Frustrated1

I don't participate for placement because of this. 

Again, the underlying problem is they think their rewards are too precious to just give away to anyone who actually plays their game for several hours every day. 

revskip

Rewards could definitely be better at scl8.  There is really only an incremental difference from scl7.  

Opening up the 4* covers to the top 25 would be a much more forgiving system I think.  

Phumade

Competitive PVE is actually the hardest game mode in MPQ.  Optimal strategy has been discussed and well understood by pretty much every comp player in the game.  In addition, there is no alliance support or help, if you run into trouble no one can bail you out with a cc or snipe..  It literally boils down to know how fast your roster clears against the various types of opponents.

I've played against some of the best pve players in the game and make no mistake about it.  At the T5 level, misjudging a clear by 10min will cost you T1/2 and leaving points on the table for a failed clear will put you at the back of the tier about to drop to Top10 or lower.

Yes there are major differences between 4* and 5* scaling, but ultimately those issue really resolve themselves in how those players budget their time.  Dont forget that most comp players are focused on T5 finishes.  Even at SCL8,  the bonus for finishing 1st is 1k iso and 1 or 2 more event tokens.

But the risks involved in shaving your times down to T1/2 levels are massive.  Misjudge a clear and you are at a real risk of missing T10.  App crashes, your done in the sub.

My only real advice is learn how fast your roster actually is.  If you have more than 3 min left on your clock after grinding all nodes to 0, then go back to the drawing board and reasses your clear times.

T5 players need to consistently make sub 70min clears.
T10 players need to consistently make sub 80 min clears.

Anything slower than that is really just casual mode pve.

orbitalint

Phumade said:

My only real advice is learn how fast your roster actually is.  If you have more than 3 min left on your clock after grinding all nodes to 0, then go back to the drawing board and reasses your clear times.

Yeah, I know the situation. I just find it terrible design that 3 minutes a sub can mean the difference between a 4* and not. Let that sink in...

They tell us play as you like but decent rewards aren't anywhere on that pace and somehow they don't understand why some were grinding easy nodes thousands of extra times for placement. Honestly, being on the eight hour timer was a little more forgiving, imo. 

NewMcG

It's a fine line you walk when shooting for top tier rewards at the upper CLs, but it isn't always down to the split second timing some are making it out to be. I play competitively basically only on release events, and I've got a roster with about a dozen champed 4s. On the C&D event, I blew the calculations on my clear times on all 3 days (I continually underestimated how slow the matches were with Medusa), and left a clear of a node undone each day. (Once a regular fight, twice a wave node.) I left at least 800+ points on the table and still got 11th, missing 10th by about 300 points. It stunk, but I could have just as easily cleared all of them starting 30 minutes earlier, gotten those missing points, lost the point or two per node for being half an hour earlier, and pretty comfortably finished top 5, despite finishing significantly earlier than some say is ideal.

There's so many factors in the non-release events (desirability of the 4* covers being the main thing) that it's hard to tell how you're truly sitting until after some of the people who are playing strictly to the last progression CP hit that and possibly taper off. Carol covers are hyper-valuable right now, since she's a top-tier 4* in the game, so it isn't surprising that any less-than-optimal clearance would make hitting top 10 tough. 

All that said, yeah, the devs could really stand to loosen the purse strings when it comes to the 4* awards at the high CLs. (1 cover to at least top 25, and ideally maybe top 50?) These are players who have huge amounts of time in the game, and these covers are some of the only things that represent real progress for players at that level.

Zalasta

It's not really PVE when you're competing against other players for prizes. The only true PVE in this game is Deadpool's Daily.

fnedude

If you can't place in T10 to get the Carol Danner 4* cover, then just aim for the 25CP, and then the NEXT PvE event will have Carol's cover (color TBD) as progression.

Don't stress yourself out about it.

BatteryHorse

The developers have said there just aren't enough players to open up an SCL9 yet, and that even SCL8 is underpopulated compared to the lower clearance levels, though I wonder how much that has to do with players deliberately choosing lower clearance levels and later slices instead of joining a meat grinder SCL8.

I'm shield rank 89, I should be in SCL8, but I play exclusively in 7 and often wait until the third flip before I join, because it gives me an easier path to the top 10.

A system that incentivizes me to not play, to miss most or all of the first day of an event in order to get a better reward, that incentivizes me to play at a level well below what I'm eligible for, is fundamentally broken.  And that break stems from the developers misunderstanding of the reward structure, in my opinion.

NewMcG

BatteryHorse said:

The developers have said there just aren't enough players to open up an SCL9 yet, and that even SCL8 is underpopulated compared to the lower clearance levels, though I wonder how much that has to do with players deliberately choosing lower clearance levels and later slices instead of joining a meat grinder SCL8.

I'm shield rank 89, I should be in SCL8, but I play exclusively in 7 and often wait until the third flip before I join, because it gives me an easier path to the top 10.

A system that incentivizes me to not play, to miss most or all of the first day of an event in order to get a better reward, that incentivizes me to play at a level well below what I'm eligible for, is fundamentally broken.  And that break stems from the developers misunderstanding of the reward structure, in my opinion.

Yeah, I think the argument of "not enough playing CL8" as a reason to not open 9 has the fundamental flaw you mention. That flaw is what you mention, and that is a minimal difference between 7 and 8 in terms of rewards. I'd hope that they'd be looking at raw numbers of people at or above whatever the cutoff for the theoretical SCL 9 would be and go from there. (Or adjust the cutoffs downward slightly if that would move the threshold they're looking for a little closer.)

And realistically, if they wanted to motivate a lot more SCL 8 level players to play in SCL 8, then opening up a 4* reward to the top X # of players (where X is significantly more than 10) would encourage more to jump in. If they knew a top 25/50/100/whatever finish would be a 4*, (and not just the same top 10 that SCL 7 has, with just an extra cover tacked on for the increased threshold) I think the numbers of SCL 8 level players playing SCL8 would jump significantly.

jredd

i can hit top 20 for new releases. 

playing like that is not healthy, and my wife ends up glaring at me a lot, haha.

played the best i could for unstable iso 8 first sub and still ended up 36th.

gotta agree, they need to push out at least 1 4* cover for top 50. hitting top 10 is pretty much impossible for the majority of folk. even if you try to.

orbitalint

jredd said:

i can hit top 20 for new releases. 

playing like that is not healthy, and my wife ends up glaring at me a lot, haha.

played the best i could for unstable iso 8 first sub and still ended up 36th.

gotta agree, they need to push out at least 1 4* cover for top 50. hitting top 10 is pretty much impossible for the majority of folk. even if you try to.

Right there with you. I think release events are about right even though the difference between 21st and 100th is negligible. I'd be happy with something between release and non-release events in terms of rewards. 

This ideology of "you get one shot to get a single cover within reason, rng the rest or fight like dogs for covers every 4 months" is pretty bad. And yes, 4* marves was released in January.

TimGunn

they said they were working on a complete overhaul of scaling, so i wouldn't expect anything on SCL9/10 until that.  Expected early summer

Skrofa

I would think that a mobile game would like to see players invested in the game at all times of the day.
Sure they do that with time slices and stuff but that just means that the same players play at the same time of day.

Because, at the moment, a competitive pve player's schedule is mostly play for 2-3 hours straight and then just forget about the game.

In pvp you are encouraged to play for a while and then towards the end of the event to shield and stop playing for higher rewards because of the berserker barrage of attacks.

I am guessing that this is not working as intended for a game...

NewMcG

Skrofa said:

I would think that a mobile game would like to see players invested in the game at all times of the day.
Sure they do that with time slices and stuff but that just means that the same players play at the same time of day.

Because, at the moment, a competitive pve player's schedule is mostly play for 2-3 hours straight and then just forget about the game.

In pvp you are encouraged to play for a while and then towards the end of the event to shield and stop playing for higher rewards because of the berserker barrage of attacks.

I am guessing that this is not working as intended for a game...

It can also kind of go the other way. Sure, they'd love for everyone to be constantly playing all the time. Maximum money invested in the least amount of time. That assuredly also leads to rapid burnout among players. That's why some things like the old "clear every 8 hours" format got pushed aside in favor of the current "play in one big chunk once a day" setup for optimal PVE clears. I think many prefer one big window as opposed to having to figure out a way to fit in half an hour two extra times during any given day. (I know I certainly do, after losing out on many, many events in the old format, due to things like "work" and "real life" not allowing for a half hour of mobile gaming exactly every 8 hours when chasing a new character release.)

If someone wants to play, there's always something they CAN do in the time between clusters of story mode clears, whether it's the currently-running PVP event, Simulator, or DDQ. My slice 5 clear time falls around midnight for me, and works the best for my schedule. During the day, I play less, but it isn't like I'm completely deprived of my ability to play the game in some productive (in a VERY relative meaning of the word) manner, just because of the way the Story mode events are formatted. I'm assuming keeping people invested long-term, even if they're playing once a day, is more efficient for their bank accounts than burning out players with a constant stream of events that would make a competitive player be in the game constantly, and kill the enthusiasm in short order.

Dragon_Nexus

Zalasta said:

It's not really PVE when you're competing against other players for prizes. The only true PVE in this game is Deadpool's Daily.

Yeah, it's been mentioned many times over the years that PvE is still PvP.

Gauntlet is the only other real PvE the game has. Well...that and boss events. The standard PvE events, to get the best rewards, are PvP.

Phumade

Skrofa said:

I would think that a mobile game would like to see players invested in the game at all times of the day.
Sure they do that with time slices and stuff but that just means that the same players play at the same time of day.

Because, at the moment, a competitive pve player's schedule is mostly play for 2-3 hours straight and then just forget about the game.

I think you've misunderstood the fact that the game is also played in ASIA and Europe which are on opposite time schedules.

So every hour a different player group enters into their "2-3hr" play window.  Their is no such thing as overnight in this game.  People hit each other when its convenient for them to play not when its convenient for you to shield.  Once your score has exceeded the shard's equilibrium pont (rough average score of all players) expect to be shield hopping till the end of the event or your score falls below the equilibrium point.