PVE Observation related to Scaling.

reckless442

So I think 395, not 400, must be the cap. I opened Florida and cleared everything but the essential nodes (will wait for those to go up in value) and the three highest-value nodes, all of which are 395s. That's 1/3 of the repeatable nodes that are at max and virtually unplayable. I have killed 15 characters on the Ares node, including all of the my 141s, seeing how far I could get wihtout boosts. The best I managed was take out about 1/2 of Ares' health. At least the matches are short, because by the time three green matches have occurred, Daken's strike tiles are doing +1200 damage per match.

None of the levels have dropped.

What I want to know is how I'm supposed to remain competitive in the main event (for me and my alliance) when I have to leave so many points on the board because the nodes are impossible.

Bowgentle

reckless442 wrote:

What I want to know is how I'm supposed to remain competitive in the main event (for me and my alliance) when I have to leave so many points on the board because the nodes are impossible.

The obvious answer seems to be: you don't.
PVE has been geared towards new players, and the idea seems to be to drive off the veterans.
The devs seem to think that this is a sustainable business model because the influx of new players is greater than the attrition of the veterans.

Colognoisseur

Bowgentle wrote:

reckless442 wrote:

What I want to know is how I'm supposed to remain competitive in the main event (for me and my alliance) when I have to leave so many points on the board because the nodes are impossible.

The obvious answer seems to be: you don't.
PVE has been geared towards new players, and the idea seems to be to drive off the veterans.
The devs seem to think that this is a sustainable business model because the influx of new players is greater than the attrition of the veterans.

tl/dr the 1*'s are not there at the end and the vets are at least in my last month worth of brackets.

While that is the cynical view I think the creation of Alliances was for those veterans and the super Alliances was just what the devs expected. The top 50, maybe 100, 20-man alliances are those veterans and they pretty much have a pretty easy path to one new cover. Joe or Jane 1* better know someone if you want to get into an elite alliance.

As for those players finishing highly I have spent time looking at the top 10 of both my PvE and PvP brcakets and have found a pretty even distribution of rosters winning the top 10. It has averaged out to 5-high tier (multiple 3* at >lvl 120), 4 mid-tier ( unleveled 3*'s plus the best 2*'s), and one low tier (1* and 2* teams). That single low tier team is always in the 5-10 spot and has never challenged for first at the end. They are often there early but you need to take a look at the finish and you'll find they drop away because they just can't compete over the length of the event. Granted this is just my single bracket experience but it has been pretty reliable for about the last month.

I just looked at my top 10 for The Hunt and there is nothing but high level and mid-tier rosters right now and over the first few days the 1* teams were in those spots. Now the scaling has caught up to them and they are gone.

This is the difference between a best of 7 series or single elimination. In best of seven the strength and depth of the better team almost always wins. In single elimination anything can happen. It is the difference between March Madness and the NBA playoffs. The longer an event goes on the less chance the low tiers can capitalize and the vets should have the strength and depth to outlast them.

Unknown

Colog makes a good point. Depth of a roster is king in these typical PvE events. I can easily race through my nodes (taking damage) and swapping out heros as I go. Avoiding using health packs (except for essential heros) and never facing the paywall until I get my share of rubberbanded points. I don't think mid-tier and newer players have that same luxury.

The other great advantage that experienced users have (with a deep roster) is the probablity that they will have the 3-star (and sometimes 4 star) characters that are required for some of the nodes. These nodes are always worth a good chunk of points and are usually easier than the other 'mainline' nodes.

Unknown

reckless442 wrote:

So I think 395, not 400, must be the cap. I opened Florida and cleared everything but the essential nodes (will wait for those to go up in value) and the three highest-value nodes, all of which are 395s. That's 1/3 of the repeatable nodes that are at max and virtually unplayable. I have killed 15 characters on the Ares node, including all of the my 141s, seeing how far I could get wihtout boosts. The best I managed was take out about 1/2 of Ares' health. At least the matches are short, because by the time three green matches have occurred, Daken's strike tiles are doing +1200 damage per match.

None of the levels have dropped.

What I want to know is how I'm supposed to remain competitive in the main event (for me and my alliance) when I have to leave so many points on the board because the nodes are impossible.

Looking at your score amongst other SHIELD members, I don't see how you could possibly finish below the median point for your alliance unless you just stopped playing together.

I'm in the same situation where all my high point missions are 395 and basically unplayable, so I have to slow down for the final stretch too, but there's also no way I'm falling below the median score of my alliance.

I understand people do want to be able to do more for their alliance, but sometimes one person can only do so much.

Unknown

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.

My playing style is quite similar, I'm perfectly happy placing in the top 50 or top 100 (200 in the main) for a few tokens or a cover and a steady drip of HP & iso, which I think is a reasonable goal with two maxed **, a few more in the 50s-60s and a few *** with 1-3 covers. And yet on the current Florida sub I haven't cleared four nodes because they're deadly (in the 150s) before I played them once. The last three I haven't even opened yet. I have exactly three open nodes I can even attempt with a reasonable chance of success and without three boosters. Unsurprisingly I'm somewhere in the 400s placement-wise. Similar for Savage land, where there's four playable ones - bullseye starts in the 200s, so I have no chance in hell there.

At this point I don't even want to place anywhere usable, I just want to clear each node once for the iso, but I can't do that without wiping my health packs several times and even then chances are I wouldn't make it. And I can't say that the difficult is inciting me to spend money either, because I know that if my levels rise, the enemies will just rise with me after a match or two, so I won't be any better off. I can't say I see any point in this kind of intense community scaling.

reckless442

Phantron wrote:

reckless442 wrote:

So I think 395, not 400, must be the cap. I opened Florida and cleared everything but the essential nodes (will wait for those to go up in value) and the three highest-value nodes, all of which are 395s. That's 1/3 of the repeatable nodes that are at max and virtually unplayable. I have killed 15 characters on the Ares node, including all of the my 141s, seeing how far I could get wihtout boosts. The best I managed was take out about 1/2 of Ares' health. At least the matches are short, because by the time three green matches have occurred, Daken's strike tiles are doing +1200 damage per match.

None of the levels have dropped.

What I want to know is how I'm supposed to remain competitive in the main event (for me and my alliance) when I have to leave so many points on the board because the nodes are impossible.

Looking at your score amongst other SHIELD members, I don't see how you could possibly finish below the median point for your alliance unless you just stopped playing together.

I'm in the same situation where all my high point missions are 395 and basically unplayable, so I have to slow down for the final stretch too, but there's also no way I'm falling below the median score of my alliance.

I understand people do want to be able to do more for their alliance, but sometimes one person can only do so much.

I'm in the median score of my alliance, but I don't know why that is relevant. The current scaling means I can't contribute to my full potential and availability. That hamstrings the alliance, especially because we have some members who have RL constraints that limit how much they can play this PVE. So scaling is not just hurting me; it's hurting the other 19 members of my alliance.

You also never addressed the fact that I'm also basically being taken out of competition for the main Hunt rewards. I had been leading my bracket, but now I can't get anything close to full points from a sub-event, so my lead over second and third has effectively disappeared. If values increase significantly in the last sub-events, who knows what that will mean for staying in the top-10. After investing a week of time on this PVP, to basically be told that I either have to drop out or continue to slog through these ridiculous battles is pretty infuriating.

And the joke of the entire system is that it has basically forced me to play in the very manner that the devs want to prevent. The only way to beat 395 Ares node in Florida is to use Spidey + boosts and stunlock everyone. One match-4 from Venom did 1200 damage, so I can't even let the enemies get multiple matches. I suffer more damage against level 150 opponents because I can go against them unboosted, knowing I can survive one of Ares' assaults or one of Venom's devours. But once the game crosses the 200-level threshold, I can't even really risk that. The strategy has to be to avoid damage and allowing opponents to use AP powers. And whether my opponents are level 230 or 395, if I beat them, it will be with minimal damage. It just is a slow, boring process that makes the experience of playing the game particularly unpleasant.

Unknown

Clintman wrote:

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.

I clear enough to expose the essential nodes and then just do those. Easy.

Grinding the nodes to lvl 400 is madness in my opinion. I haven't really gone past level 200 personally and avoid everything past 169.

reckless442

klingsor wrote:

Clintman wrote:

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.

I clear enough to expose the essential nodes and then just do those. Easy.

Grinding the nodes to lvl 400 is madness in my opinion. I haven't really gone past level 200 personally and avoid everything past 169.

You're assuming we are grinding heavily and that is causing the values to increase. But it seems just as big a factor is not taking damage. Once you get into scaling hell, though, you can't take damage, so even doing what you suggest -- clear enough to get key nodes and do those -- continues to drive up scaling. Meanwhile, there are plenty of people in the community who don't have scaling concerns who ARE grinding, and that also increases your scaling.

The devs should just concede things are broken. For a person who can beat 230 using spidey, it is just as possible to beat a 395 using spidey. It just makes the game unpleasant to play. Increasing the amount of time it takes to win that match while also making it one mistake/poor board and you're slaughtered doesn't solve the problem. Which, frankly, I'm still not sure has ever been clearly explained. It shouldn't be that winning effectively without taking damage is a "problem," when doing that at a level 150+ either means you are a very good strategist/player (and/or using boosts, which makes the devs money) or you are using spidey and going extremely slowly. How is that a problem again?

Unknown

reckless442 wrote:

klingsor wrote:

Clintman wrote:

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.

I clear enough to expose the essential nodes and then just do those. Easy.

Grinding the nodes to lvl 400 is madness in my opinion. I haven't really gone past level 200 personally and avoid everything past 169.

You're assuming we are grinding heavily and that is causing the values to increase. But it seems just as big a factor is not taking damage. Once you get into scaling hell, though, you can't take damage, so even doing what you suggest -- clear enough to get key nodes and do those -- continues to drive up scaling. Meanwhile, there are plenty of people in the community who don't have scaling concerns who ARE grinding, and that also increases your scaling.

The devs should just concede things are broken. For a person who can beat 230 using spidey, it is just as possible to beat a 395 using spidey. It just makes the game unpleasant to play. Increasing the amount of time it takes to win that match while also making it one mistake/poor board and you're slaughtered doesn't solve the problem. Which, frankly, I'm still not sure has ever been clearly explained. It shouldn't be that winning effectively without taking damage is a "problem," when doing that at a level 150+ either means you are a very good strategist/player (and/or using boosts, which makes the devs money) or you are using spidey and going extremely slowly. How is that a problem again?

I'm not saying it isn't broken, it is, totally and I agree with you. I'm just sharing my tips...Here is something else I do, I force myself to take damage, and I try to not let Spidey heal me to full health, or I time it to take a hit or two after. This way I avoid the full scaling effect, and it also seems to help with MMR. In theory the Spidey Nerf should translate into less community scaling and there would be no need to go to lvl 400.

Unknown

scaling has nothing to do with boosts, spidey, grinding or stun lock.

the only ingredient is damage and then community.

Unknown

davecazz wrote:

scaling has nothing to do with boosts, spidey, grinding or stun lock.

the only ingredient is damage and then community.

Which are both directly affected by boosts, spidey, grinding, and stun lock.

Unknown

Ben Grimm wrote:

davecazz wrote:

scaling has nothing to do with boosts, spidey, grinding or stun lock.

the only ingredient is damage and then community.

Which are both directly affected by boosts, spidey, grinding, and stun lock.

not really, because you can cause scaling not grinding, not using spidey, and not using stun lock.

on the other hand, you can grind, use spidey, use boosts, and use stun lock and not have your levels scale provided you take damage.

Unknown

davecazz wrote:

Ben Grimm wrote:

davecazz wrote:

scaling has nothing to do with boosts, spidey, grinding or stun lock.

the only ingredient is damage and then community.

Which are both directly affected by boosts, spidey, grinding, and stun lock.

not really, because you can cause scaling not grinding, not using spidey, and not using stun lock.

on the other hand, you can grind, use spidey, use boosts, and use stun lock and not have your levels scale provided you take damage.

There's a chicken and the egg problem here. A lot of the people who are badly scaled need to use Spidey and need to take no damage because a lot of these battles one hit=death. Even for lower levels, that can be true. Taking just some damage isn't an option on a lot of these.

And in any case, sure, some people do that. But most people using Spidey to stunlock are driving up community scaling. The exceptions to that are probably in single digits. And people using boosts are doing the same.

Unknown

Ben Grimm wrote:

davecazz wrote:

Ben Grimm wrote:

davecazz wrote:

scaling has nothing to do with boosts, spidey, grinding or stun lock.

the only ingredient is damage and then community.

Which are both directly affected by boosts, spidey, grinding, and stun lock.

not really, because you can cause scaling not grinding, not using spidey, and not using stun lock.

on the other hand, you can grind, use spidey, use boosts, and use stun lock and not have your levels scale provided you take damage.

There's a chicken and the egg problem here. A lot of the people who are badly scaled need to use Spidey and need to take no damage because a lot of these battles one hit=death. Even for lower levels, that can be true. Taking just some damage isn't an option on a lot of these.

And in any case, sure, some people do that. But most people using Spidey to stunlock are driving up community scaling. The exceptions to that are probably in single digits. And people using boosts are doing the same.

yea once you levels are scaled you are screwed, the only option is to waste an event just focusing on getting those levels down to a reasonable level and then use preventative measures on the following events. I was fairly screwed over on heroics and used that one since I didn't need the covers. It's hard to do that when there is a bright shiny new falcon available.

Spoit

klingsor wrote:

I'm not saying it isn't broken, it is, totally and I agree with you. I'm just sharing my tips...Here is something else I do, I force myself to take damage, and I try to not let Spidey heal me to full health, or I time it to take a hit or two after. This way I avoid the full scaling effect, and it also seems to help with MMR. In theory the Spidey Nerf should translate into less community scaling and there would be no need to go to lvl 400.

It's pretty easy for 'just one hit' to turn into a cascade that kills someone, when match 3s are doing almost 1k each, before daken.

And even without spidey, that won't help aggregate grinds (from 1*s and crazy grinders like reckless and phantron) driving the community scaling up.

Unknown

I haven't really seen this level of negativity concerning any new feature in the past. in particular with this compared to something like the skip tax, the negative sentiment just isn't going away. I'm sure demiurge is reading the forums but I hope they realize it's a real problem and not something that just needs time to work through.

Literally, high level players are between a rock and a hard place once they accidentally push their levels over a certain value. Like everyone is saying here, you find yourself in a position where one hit can kill your whole team, even a controlled hit that you prepare for in order to reach the damage threshold for scaling can wipe you out.

It doesn't even take a mistake to push you into this problem area, community scaling has been crazy during this event and even if you are careful with your scaling management, sooner or later you will run into 200+ baddies regardless. which in turn will cause you to stop taking damage in order to win.

What's ironic is that IceIX said that the whole purpose of the new 400+ scaling was to release pressure on community scaling, the idea that if the high end players were having more of a challenge, they wouldn't affect community scaling as much.

Of course the exact opposite happened. Community scaling is off the charts because the devs underestimated the drive of players to win at all costs and not take it easy (exasperated by the fact that there is a new cover at stake).

They also don't have a good understanding for how a match is played at a high level. It's either take no damage or die. It's not linear, it's not like as you creep the level up by a certain percent, the average damage dealt to a player creeps up at the same level and eventually you will find an equilibrium where the player is playing at the most appropriate level where they are losing 10% of the time.

High level players have awesome teams and they normally have a huge advantage over the AI because of how bad it strategizes. Players cruise through matches for the most part killing everything in their path. every now and then the AI gets a lucky cascade and does a bunch of damage. As the levels get higher and the length of the matches get longer, the more likely the AI will have one or more of those lucky cascades in every single match AND ON TOP OF THAT, the damage of those lucky cascades increases where it only takes 1 to wipe out the entire party. You can't afford to take damage at this level (even controlled damage) which is way lower than level 400.

With this vicious cycle, the most die hard players are grinding up to level 400 where matching damage is enough to skill you quickly. the only way to compete is with spidey and boosts.

This is what the devs don't understand. players want to win. They would rather push themselves too hard and burn themselves out on the game and never come back rather than to just pull back a little and play more casually.

And this is exactly what is happening, the hunt is making it even worse considering it's the most brutal event available. The 3 concurrent subs and the staggered sub end times and duration makes it so we have to grind at least two subs a day to get the falcon cover. This event should really be called the burn out special.

It would be great if IceIX or one of the other devs addressed these issues. talk about the community sentiment and wether they view it as growing pains or a real problem that needs to be solved.

Unknown

This event is probably very bad for scaling. Not only do you have Daken in roughly half of the nodes, you also have a rather powerful list of the characters that are buffed. In fact I'm hard pressed to think of a stronger set of characters to buff. Sure you can buff Magneto or Spiderman, but raising their levels really don't actually help that much because they're just there for their ultra cheap combos as opposed to the actual damage. Between LT/LC/HT + The Hood or OBW you can definitely fight the non Daken teams in the low 300s quite easily, and even Daken is beatable with this roster without anything outrageous cheap. So community scaling is likely inexorable even if Spiderman and Magneto are excluded from this event, and of course they're actually not excluded.

I'm actually having a lot of fun fighting the level 395 guys that don't have Daken. They really need to make Daken's scaling from level go way down after level 109 (the maximum he could be when used by a player with a +40 level minor boost, assuming Daken never gets major boost), so that you don't just instantly wipe to Daken when he's at level 200+s. In fact, I think they should scale levels like this:

1*: Use 4* base scaling after level 50
2*: Use 4* base scaling after level 125 (85 + 40 from minor boost)
3*: Use 4* base scaliong after level 231 (141 + 90 from major boost)
4*: No change

That way the scaling for these characters when used by a player is not impacted, but they'd be more sane in the level 300+ range. The disparity between some of the enemy at level 300+ is just staggering. Does anyone even want to fight Juggernaut at level 395?

Clintman

I do believe that scaling is why we don't have any chance of hitting 170k, people are disincentivized to play so they only play as much as they absolutely have too.

I am very mindful that if I grind up too much on this event that I will be screwed on the next one, So I only join my subs 3 hours before end and am comfortably in 2nd in main.

Unknown

i join late, no spiderman, no c.mag, very little healing in fights... and i still have 395 enemies now. it's annoying I think one of the drivers is beating the high level nodes in a sub. that's the match that always seems to send my totw up another 20 levels.