PVE Observation related to Scaling.

Clintman

I am sitting here looking at The Hunt: Alaska. I am currently Rank 27 in this Sub and there is over 21 hours remaining. If I want to maximize my points, I could grind my subs down at the 14-15 hour mark then leave it alone till the end for maximum rubber banding.

I would enjoy sitting down and grinding out some missions and earn some ISO and take out some no stress PVE teams. I mean who cares if I maximize my points right now, I can just knock these fights out and have some fun right? Right?

Well no, if I do then I might scale my PVE up to 400 which I would rather not do. In fact I would rather not have my PVE scale up to 400 so much that I am not even going to play this event until a couple of hours before the refresh ends and take my chances with Rubberbanding. In fact it might not even matter that much if I missed the Sub as my PVE Scaling might go down some more.

Now I have come to the realization that I do not even want to play this event anymore than I ABSOLUTELY have too. I mean I want to, but since I have no idea what kind of crazy method is used to determine scaling as it does not follow any straightforward methodology, I can only conclude that the best strategy is to play as little as possible while taking damage and not winning too fast.

Summary: This is just dumb, I do not like the fact that I am disincentivized to play one of my favorite events.

MarvelMan

I agree. Im min/maxing the event in that Im minimizing my play time, maximizing the damage tanking which in turn has minimal effect. Ive been trying to suicide my entire roster about twice a day....and it does little to nothing to halt the scaling. Ive been placing in the top 10-50 range so far and with one maxed 3* Im facing 190s.....

mags1587

This x1000. When you are pushed to play the game as little as possible, there's a problem.

Unknown

Total agreement, why is the new game mode avoiding playing? It would be nice to play some on my lunch hour, but nope I have a much better chance of ruining the game for myself for the next 6 days.

Clintman

MarvelMan wrote:

I agree. Im min/maxing the event in that Im minimizing my play time, maximizing the damage tanking which in turn has minimal effect. Ive been trying to suicide my entire roster about twice a day....and it does little to nothing to halt the scaling. Ive been placing in the top 10-50 range so far and with one maxed 3* Im facing 190s.....

Makes me sad to think that we go through these kinds of gyrations, in order to avoid a mechanic like this. God allowing scaling up to level 400 is such an abysmal idea, talk about the ultimate disincentive.

What we are trying to do is tell the game, Look!! I am not doing so well that you need to pit me against teams that I have to stunlock in order to survive!!
- If you keep my scaling reasonable, I will not use Spiderman to heal
- if you keep my scaling reasonable, I will sacrifice my roster every time they heal back up in order to show you how tough of a time I am having.

No one thinks it is fair that the scaling in effect strives to keep us on par with Joe 1*, making us do fights that take 8 minutes while Joe 1* does fights that take 2 for the same reward. (If anyone DOES think it is fair, please elaborate on why you feel it is.)

NorthernPolarity

This scaling system is just stupid. Players are punished for playing the game efficiently and rewarded for playing the game badly. I've never played a game where you're actually rewarded for taking as much damage as possible, and it just feels like extremely poor game design. d3 needs to give their playerbase more credit and design the system while considering how players would play optimally. It seems like they designed this thinking that their playerbase is dumb and don't think about how to place well in the events in the most efficient manner, which just completely breaks down when you actually think about the system and how to play well within it. Give us more credit, and please fix the system so that the best way to play doesn't involve repeatedly dying to nodes or minmaxing by trying to trick the system into thinking that you're a weaker player than you actually are so that the nodes don't scale to ridiculous levels. Even something as simple as giving us more rewards for facing higher level enemies would help this goal and at least give us some incentive to deliberately scale the levels.

Unknown

In this event your scaling is almost directly correlated to your total points due to whatever they did to the rubberband (missions are worth very little base, but usually are high on rubberbanding).

So if you want less scaling just do worse in PvE. If you do the one clear and done strategy you'll give up about 1000 points each sub bracket and unless scaling gets truly ridiculous, you likely won't be able to catch the guys who are doing more than one clear but that may or may not matter depending on how tough competition is in your main bracket.

One thing I'll note is that it's probably not worth fighting for top 2, though competition in top 10 is just pretty tough for the extra 50 HP.

Unknown

What if they just increased the health pools of some of the baddies? (I personally don't care for this idea either, but it would be better than straight scaling to 400) Then you could at least have a challenge and take some damage from a sustained fight, I think that would be more enjoyable to have a fight than be nuked by Ares with 5 green.

Clintman

I want a screenshot when someone faces and beats a level 400 Daken + 400 Bullseye team.

Unknown

Everyone's experience is different. I don't have any issues with scaling or rewards or any of that. So, it's hard for me to be empathetic or even try to understand people who are getting screwed over by this system.

I play a little each day, I get a few rewards and then I move on. I still make top 50 and get my usual 2 star reward (via tokens) that I throw away. I get my new three star hero (with one or two covers) who sits on my bench for another 30-45 days until I get some more covers to actually make it useful. Rinse and repeat.

I don't chase down (and feel entitled to) every 4/4 reward, every top 2 submission reward and every progression reward (and rage when I can't reach that 3 star carrot dangling at the end of the rope).


So, if you're someone that plays 3-5 hours a day chasing down every single reward you can get, maybe you need more of a challenge. Doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

MarvelMan

Toxicadam wrote:

Everyone's experience is different. I don't have any issues with scaling or rewards or any of that. So, it's hard for me to be empathetic or even try to understand people who are getting screwed over by this system.

I play a little each day, I get a few rewards and then I move on. I still make top 50 and get my usual 2 star reward (via tokens) that I throw away. I get my new three star hero (with one or two covers) who sits on my bench for another 30-45 days until I get some more covers to actually make it useful. Rinse and repeat.

I don't chase down (and feel entitled to) every 4/4 reward, every top 2 submission reward and every progression reward (and rage when I can't reach that 3 star carrot dangling at the end of the rope).


So, if you're someone that plays 3-5 hours a day chasing down every single reward you can get, maybe you need more of a challenge. Doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

Sounds like we have a pretty similar play style. Im placing top 20-50 in subs so far, around 30 in the overall and dont go for much more than one pass through with certain nodes repeated within the last hour.

NorthernPolarity

Toxicadam wrote:

Everyone's experience is different. I don't have any issues with scaling or rewards or any of that. So, it's hard for me to be empathetic or even try to understand people who are getting screwed over by this system.

I play a little each day, I get a few rewards and then I move on. I still make top 50 and get my usual 2 star reward (via tokens) that I throw away. I get my new three star hero (with one or two covers) who sits on my bench for another 30-45 days until I get some more covers to actually make it useful. Rinse and repeat.

I don't chase down (and feel entitled to) every 4/4 reward, every top 2 submission reward and every progression reward (and rage when I can't reach that 3 star carrot dangling at the end of the rope).


So, if you're someone that plays 3-5 hours a day chasing down every single reward you can get, maybe you need more of a challenge. Doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

This isn't about needing more of a challenge, it's about getting punished for playing the game optimally. Player A uses C. Mags/Spidey would have their levels increased dramatically because they aren't taking damage, and eventually hit 400 scaling where their team gets killed through match damage alone. Player B uses Thorverine, gets damaged during matches, and don't have their levels scaled because they're "being challenged". The problem is that the difficulty for player A increases dramatically whereas player B is left unchanged, and yet all player A is doing is trying to play the game efficiently. Since the rewards don't change for either player, player A is effectively fighting significantly harder battles for no extra reward at all.

What this does is force player A to play like player B. Even though he has a roster that can beat the levels more efficiently, he's going to deliberately take damage, use a weaker roster, and generally have a lot less fun throwing matches and making the game think that he's on player B's level so that he can fight reasonable enemies. Normal games have elite dungeons for the hardcore and more powerful rewards in those as well. This game has elite enemies that give exactly the same reward as lower level enemies, so all that player A gets for having a better roster is feeling like he's being screwed over by game mechanics, which is obviously terrible.

Unknown

MerC 47 wrote:

What if they just increased the health pools of some of the baddies? (I personally don't care for this idea either, but it would be better than straight scaling to 400) Then you could at least have a challenge and take some damage from a sustained fight, I think that would be more enjoyable to have a fight than be nuked by Ares with 5 green.

Increasing health does nothing against the Spiderman stunlock. If you can beat a level 230 with Spiderman, they could have 100 times the health and it'd still be pretty much the exact fight. The enemies must be able to do more damage to have a chance of beating Spiderman.

Unknown

NorthernPolarity wrote:

This isn't about needing more of a challenge, it's about getting punished for playing the game optimally. Player A uses C. Mags/Spidey would have their levels increased dramatically because they aren't taking damage, and eventually hit 400 scaling where their team gets killed through match damage alone. Player B uses Thorverine, gets damaged during matches, and don't have their levels scaled because they're "being challenged". The problem is that the difficulty for player A increases dramatically whereas player B is left unchanged, and yet all player A is doing is trying to play the game efficiently. Since the rewards don't change for either player, player A is effectively fighting significantly harder battles for no extra reward at all.

What this does is force player A to play like player B. Even though he has a roster that can beat the levels more efficiently, he's going to deliberately take damage, use a weaker roster, and generally have a lot less fun throwing matches and making the game think that he's on player B's level so that he can fight reasonable enemies. Normal games have elite dungeons for the hardcore and more powerful rewards in those as well. This game has elite enemies that give exactly the same reward as lower level enemies, so all that player A gets for having a better roster is feeling like he's being screwed over by game mechanics, which is obviously terrible.

I see no unusual scaling for using Magneto beyond the fact that Magneto lets me win much more games than I would be able to without him which leads to higher scaling, but winning more is always going to lead to more scaling. My placement so far is #2/#3/#3 and my levels are inline with what I'd expect for being at the top of PvE. It's certainly lower than the guys using Spiderman repeatedly.

I think your viewpoint on this event changes a lot depending on who your powerful hero is. A max LT has 10K HP and can pretty much fight anybody that isn't Daken straight up. With OBW and another support (Magneto obviously best, but say The Hood is still quite good) you can pretty much lockdown any team that doesn't have Daken. A Call the Storm does basically 10K damage. Now if you don't got LT you still use LC, though LC is not as good as LT (though no one is as good as LT in terms of raw power). If you have neither, it's going to be pretty rough, but reliance on boosted character is hardly a new thing in PvE. It's not even as broken as the 'Major buffed Magneto destroys everyone' round in Simulator Basic in terms of dependence on a certain character.

mohio

Toxicadam wrote:

Everyone's experience is different. I don't have any issues with scaling or rewards or any of that. So, it's hard for me to be empathetic or even try to understand people who are getting screwed over by this system.

I play a little each day, I get a few rewards and then I move on. I still make top 50 and get my usual 2 star reward (via tokens) that I throw away. I get my new three star hero (with one or two covers) who sits on my bench for another 30-45 days until I get some more covers to actually make it useful. Rinse and repeat.

I don't chase down (and feel entitled to) every 4/4 reward, every top 2 submission reward and every progression reward (and rage when I can't reach that 3 star carrot dangling at the end of the rope).


So, if you're someone that plays 3-5 hours a day chasing down every single reward you can get, maybe you need more of a challenge. Doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

This was me maybe 2 weeks ago. I was just starting to play with my maxed 2* team and scaling didn't have a large effect on me. Maybe it's their change, or maybe it's my performance going up so my scaling goes up like normal, but it's really hit me the past 2 events, at least near the end. Already I'm seeing more Hard and Deadly nodes than I usually do and I'll try them once and if I win, great, if not I don't throw more guys away hoping the levels go down by some miniscule amount.

Basically it doesn't make sense that all the rewards in place say grind away, yet the way scaling has been implemented you would be foolish to do so or else you will just get locked out of playing the game later in the event.

Also, I agree with your last comment about it not being unreasonable to increase the challenge for those who attempt to grind for all the best rewards. I don't think most people even disagree. The issue is that whatever the current implementation of scaling they are using to increase the challenge, it is broken and creating far too large of a challenge for some people. Even if someone has "no trouble" beating level 300 goons, coming out with minimal damage, I would say there's still something wrong with that fight taking 10+ minutes. The is a mobile game after all, and there's just no reason for battles to take that long simply because you were smart and choose good teams that can control the board and minimize damage taken.

NorthernPolarity

Phantron wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

This isn't about needing more of a challenge, it's about getting punished for playing the game optimally. Player A uses C. Mags/Spidey would have their levels increased dramatically because they aren't taking damage, and eventually hit 400 scaling where their team gets killed through match damage alone. Player B uses Thorverine, gets damaged during matches, and don't have their levels scaled because they're "being challenged". The problem is that the difficulty for player A increases dramatically whereas player B is left unchanged, and yet all player A is doing is trying to play the game efficiently. Since the rewards don't change for either player, player A is effectively fighting significantly harder battles for no extra reward at all.

What this does is force player A to play like player B. Even though he has a roster that can beat the levels more efficiently, he's going to deliberately take damage, use a weaker roster, and generally have a lot less fun throwing matches and making the game think that he's on player B's level so that he can fight reasonable enemies. Normal games have elite dungeons for the hardcore and more powerful rewards in those as well. This game has elite enemies that give exactly the same reward as lower level enemies, so all that player A gets for having a better roster is feeling like he's being screwed over by game mechanics, which is obviously terrible.

I see no unusual scaling for using Magneto beyond the fact that Magneto lets me win much more games than I would be able to without him which leads to higher scaling, but winning more is always going to lead to more scaling. My placement so far is #2/#3/#3 and my levels are inline with what I'd expect for being at the top of PvE. It's certainly lower than the guys using Spiderman repeatedly.

I think your viewpoint on this event changes a lot depending on who your powerful hero is. A max LT has 10K HP and can pretty much fight anybody that isn't Daken straight up. With OBW and another support (Magneto obviously best, but say The Hood is still quite good) you can pretty much lockdown any team that doesn't have Daken. A Call the Storm does basically 10K damage. Now if you don't got LT you still use LC, though LC is not as good as LT (though no one is as good as LT in terms of raw power). If you have neither, it's going to be pretty rough, but reliance on boosted character is hardly a new thing in PvE. It's not even as broken as the 'Major buffed Magneto destroys everyone' round in Simulator Basic in terms of dependence on a certain character.

Magneto is different because you take a lot less damage than if you used other characters. Jungle in particular: match 6 blue, make a crit tile on env, and win the game off of the resulting AP/ability spam. It's obviously not as bad as spidey, but scaling makes me afraid that any efficient character I'm using will make the scaling increase significantly since I'm taking less damage overall.

Clintman

Phantron, seriously dude, all problems in the game do not revolve around Spider Man and Classic Magneto.

Unknown

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Magneto is different because you take a lot less damage than if you used other characters. Jungle in particular: match 6 blue, make a crit tile on env, and win the game off of the resulting AP/ability spam. It's obviously not as bad as spidey, but scaling makes me afraid that any efficient character I'm using will make the scaling increase significantly since I'm taking less damage overall.

I had my share of lucky wins and didn't notice anything unusual on the scaling either. It's not like you win a game without taking damage and then everything goes up by 30 levels immediatey to compensate. Besides, those are still lucky wins. I just finished a Captain required node against a level 180 Daken. My team was LC/LT/Magneto and Thor took at least 5K damage even though the other side never used a special move.

It'd probably help if we actually know what causes you to get extra penalized by the scaling. I suspect you've to have multiple flawless victories in a row to get the scaling really go up, and there's no way that's happening with Magneto. There just aren't that many match 5 -> crit -> match environment -> Thorned Rose awesome openings that'd drive the scale. I do find myself just taking 1K damage instead of using an Anti-Grav to be on the safe side, though these games are becoming increasing rare with the scaling. If LT took 5K damage, then that's certainly completely out of the question to heal up completely with OBW, and that happens a lot.

Clintman

Phantron wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Magneto is different because you take a lot less damage than if you used other characters. Jungle in particular: match 6 blue, make a crit tile on env, and win the game off of the resulting AP/ability spam. It's obviously not as bad as spidey, but scaling makes me afraid that any efficient character I'm using will make the scaling increase significantly since I'm taking less damage overall.

I had my share of lucky wins and didn't notice anything unusual on the scaling either. It's not like you win a game without taking damage and then everything goes up by 30 levels immediatey to compensate. Besides, those are still lucky wins. I just finished a Captain required node against a level 180 Daken. My team was LC/LT/Magneto and Thor took at least 5K damage even though the other side never used a special move.

It'd probably help if we actually know what causes you to get extra penalized by the scaling. I suspect you've to have multiple flawless victories in a row to get the scaling really go up, and there's no way that's happening with Magneto. There just aren't that many match 5 -> crit -> match environment -> Thorned Rose awesome openings that'd drive the scale. I do find myself just taking 1K damage instead of using an Anti-Grav to be on the safe side, though these games are becoming increasing rare with the scaling. If LT took 5K damage, then that's certainly completely out of the question to heal up completely with OBW, and that happens a lot.

I think the uncertainty is what makes it all the worse. I have been using Hood, OBW and LT for almost all my nodes and finish at full health. I haven't seen my scaling go up by too much even though I finish every fight at full health. Clever Girl III on Alaska is around 139 for me, so nothing is unruly with my scaling so far. Not knowing what triggers the scaling and not knowing how to bring it down make it so uncomfortable to play for fear of scaling kicking in and finding myself against skyrocketing teams, that I don't play anymore than I absolutely have too.

The new meta game of how to defeat the Developers artificial handicapping is not a fun meta game.

**Edit, I saw that your TOTW is at 181, mine is at 113. I have run with Hood, OBW and LT for most of my fights and usually end up full health at the end. I wonder what is different between our playing that juiced up your scaling by such a large degree. As I write this I am first in my main bracket with 50,400 points. I noticed that Reckless posted her TOTW was in the 200's. I just can't make sense out of the triggers for higher scaling.

NorthernPolarity

Clintman wrote:

Phantron wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Magneto is different because you take a lot less damage than if you used other characters. Jungle in particular: match 6 blue, make a crit tile on env, and win the game off of the resulting AP/ability spam. It's obviously not as bad as spidey, but scaling makes me afraid that any efficient character I'm using will make the scaling increase significantly since I'm taking less damage overall.

I had my share of lucky wins and didn't notice anything unusual on the scaling either. It's not like you win a game without taking damage and then everything goes up by 30 levels immediatey to compensate. Besides, those are still lucky wins. I just finished a Captain required node against a level 180 Daken. My team was LC/LT/Magneto and Thor took at least 5K damage even though the other side never used a special move.

It'd probably help if we actually know what causes you to get extra penalized by the scaling. I suspect you've to have multiple flawless victories in a row to get the scaling really go up, and there's no way that's happening with Magneto. There just aren't that many match 5 -> crit -> match environment -> Thorned Rose awesome openings that'd drive the scale. I do find myself just taking 1K damage instead of using an Anti-Grav to be on the safe side, though these games are becoming increasing rare with the scaling. If LT took 5K damage, then that's certainly completely out of the question to heal up completely with OBW, and that happens a lot.

I think the uncertainty is what makes it all the worse. I have been using Hood, OBW and LT for almost all my nodes and finish at full health. I haven't seen my scaling go up by too much even though I finish every fight at full health. Clever Girl III on Alaska is around 139 for me, so nothing is unruly with my scaling so far. Not knowing what triggers the scaling and not knowing how to bring it down make it so uncomfortable to play for fear of scaling kicking in and finding myself against skyrocketing teams, that I don't play anymore than I absolutely have too.

The new meta game of how to defeat the Developers artificial handicapping is not a fun meta game.

**Edit, I saw that your TOTW is at 181, mine is at 113. I have run with Hood, OBW and LT for most of my fights and usually end up full health at the end. I wonder what is different between our playing that juiced up your scaling by such a large degree. As I write this I am first in my main bracket with 50,400 points. I noticed that Reckless posted her TOTW was in the 200's. I just can't make sense out of the triggers for higher scaling.

This is a big factor. My alaska nodes have increased from 39 to 55 since I started, and thats telling me that I should be playing even less optimally than i currently am so that it doesn't continue to go up. It would be nice if the devs could explain exactly how the scaling algorithm works, but i doubt that we'll get too much more information with all of the complaining that we've been doing in the thread.

Unknown

I think the big question here is how much is personal scaling and how much is community scaling? I have said it many times but I just don't see the point in community scaling. Why should all the new players grinding out all the level 20 nodes 100 times affect me and my already level 100's? With the presence of health packs, people aren't going to play matches they know are impossible, they will just do the possible ones more. This is prolly why the community scaling only goes up and never goes down. It's a pretty flawed system.