PVE Observation related to Scaling.

Unknown

Clintman wrote:

**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.

I got 54.3K points and #30 in my bracket as of right now, TOTW is at 202.

Keep in mind scaling may simply happen because a guy is winning more games period. I got a lot of checkmarks on my missions and I tried to compete for top 2 on every sub bracket (and fell short by one place twice). I haven't noticed any unusual jumps in levels of my enemy. It's clear that they go up as I win games and I've been winning a lot of games. I even go back and try to get the checkmarks on certain missions even when I don't need the points. If may simply be that your bracket is less competitive so you don't have to play as hard to stay ahead? There's always a lot of luck that goes into placing in an individual bracket.

So far my strategy is just try to build as much lead as I possibly can, and if scaling later gets out of hand, I'll worry about later. I figure if scaling gets out of hand for me then it'd get out of hand for people trying to make up the earlier lead I build later on, and if not it's not the first time I finished one place out of #2.

Unknown

NorthernPolarity wrote:

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.

Isn't that just community scaling? I've certainly seen my nodes go up on their own when I've done absolutely nothing. Right now I'm figuring since the community scaling seems pretty relentless, I might as well try to beat my nodes as early as possible (within reason) because nothing seems to be stopping that community scaling. I'd rather do say a mission at slightly lower than max RB at level 150, then max RB for level 180 later due to community scaling. Also, that'd seem to be consistent with what dev want, as in I can't imagine a dev would want to create a game where you only have to play at the end. Surely they want to encourage people to play early, and I do think the relentless community scaling does make a good case for making a reasonable push early on before the community scaling beats you senseless.

Unknown

I read in this thread people are sacrificing their roster in PvE. Does this reduce scaling in PvE? Do you just retreat or do you wait till you lose?

NorthernPolarity

Phantron wrote:

Clintman wrote:

**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.

I got 54.3K points and #30 in my bracket as of right now, TOTW is at 202.

Keep in mind scaling may simply happen because a guy is winning more games period. I got a lot of checkmarks on my missions and I tried to compete for top 2 on every sub bracket (and fell short by one place twice). I haven't noticed any unusual jumps in levels of my enemy. It's clear that they go up as I win games and I've been winning a lot of games. I even go back and try to get the checkmarks on certain missions even when I don't need the points. If may simply be that your bracket is less competitive so you don't have to play as hard to stay ahead? There's always a lot of luck that goes into placing in an individual bracket.

So far my strategy is just try to build as much lead as I possibly can, and if scaling later gets out of hand, I'll worry about later. I figure if scaling gets out of hand for me then it'd get out of hand for people trying to make up the earlier lead I build later on, and if not it's not the first time I finished one place out of #2.

Your main bracket seems rough. I'm sitting at 45.2k and am at #19. I think you need to stop joining so early so you don't get paired with the crazies.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

Clintman wrote:

**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.

I got 54.3K points and #30 in my bracket as of right now, TOTW is at 202.

Keep in mind scaling may simply happen because a guy is winning more games period. I got a lot of checkmarks on my missions and I tried to compete for top 2 on every sub bracket (and fell short by one place twice). I haven't noticed any unusual jumps in levels of my enemy. It's clear that they go up as I win games and I've been winning a lot of games. I even go back and try to get the checkmarks on certain missions even when I don't need the points. If may simply be that your bracket is less competitive so you don't have to play as hard to stay ahead? There's always a lot of luck that goes into placing in an individual bracket.

So far my strategy is just try to build as much lead as I possibly can, and if scaling later gets out of hand, I'll worry about later. I figure if scaling gets out of hand for me then it'd get out of hand for people trying to make up the earlier lead I build later on, and if not it's not the first time I finished one place out of #2.

I'm at 48000 points ranked 25 in main bracket and my TOTW is only at 93. I have been using patch mags and hood. Trying to let patch get hit as much as possible. I have also only placed top 50,50,2, and 100. I have been trying to play as little as possible to just let rubberbanding do the work. So it seems like going for all those rewards and top finishes is definitely affecting your levels.

reckless442

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.

Then you aren't playing Magneto optimally. Once I get 4 blue with Magneto, I can usually take out most enemies with maybe giving up 2 to 3 more turns to my opponent. And if I use boosts, I can sometimes take out the entire other team before they even get a turn.

Let me give you an example from earlier today. I was in a hurry and wanted to clear a few nodes of Alaska before a refresh. One of those nodes was level 231 Daken/Yelena/Moonstone. So I took my team of 141 LT, 135 HT, and 135 Mags (5/3/5) and used +3 blue/purple, +3 red/yellow, and +3 All-AP. I already had enough blue to use Mags' blue power, so I began creating blue match-5s against Daken. Those cleared entire rows or created critical tiles, which I kept matching with Mags' blues to generate AP in other colors. I was starting with 6 red, yellow, and purple, so I only needed to get 2 red for HT's power (3200+ damage + 2 red AP and possible cascade), 6 yellow (2530 damage + green tiles), and 4 purple (608 damage per blue tile moved). Between HT's red, Mags' purple, and LT's yellow, I reduced Daken to nearly nothing and I did the same with Yelena. With a crit match, I got enough green for LT's green, so I used that on Moonstone and killed Dkaen and Yelena. By this point, I had generated enough red AP to cast another of HT's red. I also had enough for HT's black and had built up some 9 green, not enough for LT's green, but enough for HT's. So I played HT's black and green and finally played my first tile match. That got me 3 more green AP for HT's power, as well as triggered his black attack tiles, reducing Moonstone to just over 1,000 health. She played a match, causing about 150 damage, and then HT's green tile activated and took her out.

I think Daken and Yelena each had around 8,000 health and Moonstone had around 12,000. I did that amount of damage in one turn and took only 150 points of damage in return.

Now some would say that was too easy, but it wasn't. I had to be very careful in choosing which tiles to match and which powers to activate in what order and against whom. I had some lucky cascades; I'm not always that fortunate. And, yes, I used boosts -- but having to heal three characters with purchased health packs would cost more and I didn't have time to fight one PVE node/fight two healing nodes in the prologue -- and I can often get the same result without boosts after 2 to 3 turns. And if I had not had the right board, I could have just as easily taken massive damage. But the scaling ignores that. It chalks things up to me having too easy a time.

Now that node has jumped to 248 levels. That strikes me as idiotic. The 17-level difference is not going to change anything. If the board had been bad at 231, I would have died. The same will be true at 248, except the fight will have to last longer and I'll be annoyed that I'm being penalized for playing efficiently and used the characters to their maximum potential.

reckless442

KevinMark wrote:

I read in this thread people are sacrificing their roster in PvE. Does this reduce scaling in PvE? Do you just retreat or do you wait till you lose?

It hasn't helped me.

In the last heroic PVE, I killed a bunch of teams in a row (maybe six times), including two with higher level characters so there was a lot of total damage. My nodes did drop by 10 points. But one win and they jumped back to the prior levels.

Unknown

KevinMark wrote:

I read in this thread people are sacrificing their roster in PvE. Does this reduce scaling in PvE? Do you just retreat or do you wait till you lose?

Nobody seems to have any success doing this in PvE recently, but in theory losing HPs is what causes the scaling to go down. Either retreating or losing works exactly the same back when it worked, since it works off HP loss when this tactic worked.

Unknown

I wonder if prologue contributes to PVE scaling - so if you heal in prologue that's more fights won in PVE and hence higher scaling?

I certainly use prologue healing a lot and my scaling is higher than clintman, which I very much doubt is justified by my performances!

But all just speculation for now....

Unknown

NorthernPolarity wrote:

Your main bracket seems rough. I'm sitting at 45.2k and am at #19. I think you need to stop joining so early so you don't get paired with the crazies.

Maybe, and at least so far all the scaling issue I see can be explained as 'you're surrounded by crazies'. It's pretty clear that you have to sacrifice a lot on your scaling to stay ahead of the crazies, so if you're in a bracket with them your scaling will have to be much higher for being in front. But it's always rough when you're in a bracket with crazies.

Unknown

mikeydollar7 wrote:

I wonder if prologue contributes to PVE scaling - so if you heal in prologue that's more fights won in PVE and hence higher scaling?

I certainly use prologue healing a lot and my scaling is higher than clintman, which I very much doubt is justified by my performances!

But all just speculation for now....

IceIX posted before that they do look for that.

Unknown

mikeydollar7 wrote:

I wonder if prologue contributes to PVE scaling - so if you heal in prologue that's more fights won in PVE and hence higher scaling?

I certainly use prologue healing a lot and my scaling is higher than clintman, which I very much doubt is justified by my performances!

But all just speculation for now....

huh interesting. I'm just spamming isos by killing the level one snipers so i can finally raise my IM 35, Storm and BW to their max levels

and maybe to finally increase my level 2* so I can finally be useful in these PVE's. In the Hunt, I already have a deadly node that im skipping cause the Hammer guys are in the 70s... yikes for me...

Unknown

Pamizard wrote:

mikeydollar7 wrote:

I wonder if prologue contributes to PVE scaling - so if you heal in prologue that's more fights won in PVE and hence higher scaling?

I certainly use prologue healing a lot and my scaling is higher than clintman, which I very much doubt is justified by my performances!

But all just speculation for now....

huh interesting. I'm just spamming isos by killing the level one snipers so i can finally raise my IM 35, Storm and BW to their max levels

and maybe to finally increase my level 2* so I can finally be useful in these PVE's. In the Hunt, I already have a deadly node that im skipping cause the Hammer guys are in the 70s... yikes for me...

It would be a lot faster to use shield vs for this.

Spoit

sms4002 wrote:

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.

It's not just the 1*s, it's also crazy people like phantron going for all the checkmarks

EDIT or the person in my alaska sub that has 1k more points than #2

Bacon Pants

Everything is still manageable for me in this event, but I don't see that lasting too much longer. Scaling has always been an issue in some form or fashion, but I feel that it is currently at its worst. I feel like we're stuck with it though...new players will continue to jack the scaling up, they will get affected by it and do one of three things:

Quit the game
Invest in the game
Play casually

That cycle will continue as long as it is sustainable.

Tharos

Although I hated the previous pve event, I have a lot of fun at this event. I like the scaling now: there is some challenge, but it is doable. But I know that it won't last until the end of the event.

Now, my highest opponents are level 130-160. I have pretty much all 2* maxed, but my highest 3* is Lazy Thor at 83 after the power up.
I had some wipe, but at least on this event, we have the choice of the characters, so it is much more playable.
I do not play too often, a few nodes at a time. On a sub-event, I won each node about 2-3 times, and usually finish top 50.

I just hope the scaling won't be too far in the next days...

Clintman

On the bright side, I have plenty to play the PVP because I don't want to play the PVE unless it is 2 hours before the event ends. I am still sitting #2 overall and that rating hasn't changed all day, so, no reason at all to play the PVE.

How can this be working as intended?

Unknown

Clintman wrote:

On the bright side, I have plenty to play the PVP because I don't want to play the PVE unless it is 2 hours before the event ends. I am still sitting #2 overall and that rating hasn't changed all day, so, no reason at all to play the PVE.

How can this be working as intended?

I went from #1 to #17 in my overall bracket so it seems like your bracket just has a lot of discouraged players. It seems like a lot of people have the good fortune of ending up in an uncompetitive bracket where you can take it easy and still win and that's great for the guys who are lucky. There are 3 guys ahead of me in my bracket with a higher score than the highest score of the current top 2 alliances. I know that doesn't mean much by itself, but things are far from settled on my bracket.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

mikeydollar7 wrote:

I wonder if prologue contributes to PVE scaling - so if you heal in prologue that's more fights won in PVE and hence higher scaling?

I certainly use prologue healing a lot and my scaling is higher than clintman, which I very much doubt is justified by my performances!

But all just speculation for now....

IceIX posted before that they do look for that.

IceIX only posted that it would technically be possible to do that, not that they are really doing it. I've never observed event scaling to go up in between prologue healing, even after using it dozens of times. There might be a delayed effect, it's hard to tell, gut feeling currently says no. One thing I noticed is that those deadly missions very consistently go up in difficulty whenever you beat them at full refresh. I wonder what is causing this.

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.

And if your really gaming the system you go one step father and break out your old one star team to beat on the easier unreapetable nodes. /emote whistles