MarvelTeamUp Thread (20/20)

Unknown

Dormammu wrote:

Strategy Tip: Lightning Rounds
*snip*

1) Be waiting when the lightning round starts. They start every two hours and always right on the hour. Sit there and watch the timer countdown.
2) As soon as the timer stops, jump into the event and quickly look at all three of your nodes.
3) Determine which nodes contain seed teams. They are generally weak 1* teams. If you're unsure, tap on the players name and see if a roster comes up. If no roster comes up, it's a seed team. Seed teams are bot teams and can't retaliate.
4) Leave the node with the seed team alone, don't fight it. Use the other two nodes to gain your 100 points and the first three progression prizes.
5) Once you have the progression prizes, it's time to tank. You've saved the seed team node for this purpose. Put together the weakest team you can that is still able to defeat the seed team and defeat it.
6) Don't do anything else and let the losses on defense pile up. You don't care, you've gotten what you want out of the lightning round. The losses will lower your MMR (your hidden PvP rating) so that your opponents in future PvP tournaments are much easier.

This is the clearest explanation yet - thanks for this. I'm going to start trying this out. There are times when I don't have access to a seed team, so what I've been doing is finding the highest rated opponent I can and retreating from them - I only lose 1 or 2 points and lower my MMR. I'll sometimes do that 4-5 times in a row and usually one win against a 20 point team is enough to bring me back to even, more wins pull me ahead. Is that a bad strategy?

Separately, can you do a similar walkthrough for how to maximize points on PVE events?

Finally, +1 to the kudos on this Alliance and Dormammu's leadership. My squad has definitely benefited and the positive peer pressure has been motivating. Thanks!

Dormammu

ThirstyYao wrote:

There are times when I don't have access to a seed team, so what I've been doing is finding the highest rated opponent I can and retreating from them - I only lose 1 or 2 points and lower my MMR. I'll sometimes do that 4-5 times in a row and usually one win against a 20 point team is enough to bring me back to even, more wins pull me ahead. Is that a bad strategy?

No, it's not a bad strategy. A good way to start ANY PvP tournament is to do this. Win one fight, then retreat from 8-12 fights with characters on your roster that you don't use. This will mitigate your MMR nicely. Retreating does lower MMR.

Dormammu

ThirstyYao wrote:

Separately, can you do a similar walkthrough for how to maximize points on PVE events?

There are two concepts you need to be familiar with in PvE events (The Hunt, Heroic events, Simulator, etc...)

1) Scaling. This is why your enemies get stronger as the event progresses. There are two types of scaling, community scaling and personal scaling. Community scaling increases the difficulty of nodes the more everyone else plays that same node. Personal scaling increases the difficulty of a node the more you play (grind) the node. Most events, like The Hunt and The Simulator, have both types of scaling in effect.

2) Rubberbanding. The way rubberbanding works is that nodes increase in event-point value the further you are from the overall leader. This is why the value of nodes decrease as you gain more points. So if you are ranked 2nd overall, the nodes aren't worth many points. If you are ranked last, they can be worth thousands. Rubberbanding is generally always in effect.

Because of scaling, you're shooting yourself in the foot if you are grinding nodes over and over because you're just making things more difficult for yourself and the community. Because of rubberbanding, you don't have to grind. When an event, or sub-event starts my strategy is to let it wait for a few hours and then play through every node once. This is when they are easiest, because community scaling hasn't taken effect. You build up a base amount of event-points and get a sense of what nodes are out there. Then I stop. I wait until there is about 6 hours left in the event/sub so that rubberbanding has increased the value of the nodes - then I play the ones that offer the most points. Then I stop. When there is about an hour left, I grind like crazy to get as many points as I can before it ends.

The easiest nodes are goon fights (HAMMER and Maggia guys) that can't do match damage. Remember, they can't hurt you unless one of their countdown tiles goes off, so you want to use characters that can negate their countdown tiles. It doesn't matter who it is. I was defeating level 320+ goons during the Hunt with 1* Storm, OBW, and a lvl 10 2* Magneto. It took a while to do enough damage to defeat them, but they couldn't hurt me because I was using a roster that could easily destroy or delay their countdown tiles. Classic Magneto is good at this too - his blue can overwrite any tile on the board, but you need it maxed at 5 to be cheap enough.

Other easier nodes are the team-up nodes where there is a required character. Usually this is a 3* character. Because not all players will have that character in order to play the node, community scaling won't be as harsh - they remain the easier nodes to play throughout the event/sub.

In an event with sub-events, like the Hunt and The Simulator, decide what your goal is to finish at in the overall event. That's what you want to target for subs. So if your goal is to place top 50 in the overall event, try to finish in the top 50 of each sub-event.

Unknown

Good info on the PvE stuff.

One thing I've noticed is that the battles that have a required character are usually worth considerably more points than the others, and tend to be considerably easier than many of the others (especially towards the end). I would guess that's because they aren't as affected by the community scaling, since not everyone has those characters.

I will grind those near the end of the event, because I can do them 3 times in a row and they'll still be worth more than most of the other nodes.

Dormammu

I'm curious - what's everyone's goal for final placement in season 1?

The individual awards don't really interest me but I'm going to try and get as many points as I can to see if we can place top 100 in alliance ranks. Not that 1 purple 4* Nick Fury cover will be of any use, but it would be kind of neat to get.

Unknown

I agree on 1 Nick Fury cover being useless, but being a shiny 4* I still want him.

I suspect that he will be the season reward for top 100 alliances for several seasons to come, so we might have a shot at building a useable one.

There is also the remote chance that he will be required in some event. I remember an IW node in one of the Hunts, and she was on the list for one of the Heroic events, so Fury being required at some point isn't an impossibility.

Dormammu

I'm looking for two Facebook friends, but I'm going to be picky about it. The way Facebook sharing works is that you can send to three friends (who play MPQ) at a time. I only have one MPQ friend on Facebook currently and I am his only MPQ friend, so whenever we share we are always sharing to each other every time. I believe this is the way to best maximize the sharing profits.

So what I'm looking for is two people who don't have more than three MPQ friends on Facebook. You'll get a reward every time I have the option to send, and vice versa. I would prefer to share with alliance teammates.

If you fit this criteria send me a PM with whatever you need to add me on Facebook (I'm not a Facebook user for anything else, so I'm pretty ignorant on that site.) It'll be first-come-first-serve on this, just to be fair.

Unknown

Dormammu wrote:

1) Scaling. This is why your enemies get stronger as the event progresses. There are two types of scaling, community scaling and personal scaling. Community scaling increases the difficulty of nodes the more everyone else plays that same node. Personal scaling increases the difficulty of a node the more you play (grind) the node. Most events, like The Hunt and The Simulator, have both types of scaling in effect.

2) Rubberbanding. The way rubberbanding works is that nodes increase in event-point value the further you are from the overall leader. This is why the value of nodes decrease as you gain more points. So if you are ranked 2nd overall, the nodes aren't worth many points. If you are ranked last, they can be worth thousands. Rubberbanding is generally always in effect.

Do we know if scaling is capped and/or subject to diminishing returns? If not, is there a way for us to find out aside from logging in every hour and plotting out point values (not that I'm volunteering)? Basically trying to understand if waiting and bingeing is optimal versus playing every time nodes hit a certain point value.

LuckyDog

I know the results for Top Gun were up for a while in game, but I thought I'd go ahead and post them here as well. Congrats to Dormammu for raking in an impressive 1,118 points.

Top Gun (PvP)
13568 points (109th)

1118 Dormammu
963 SensoZakku
960 jmg13
926 KKilz
869 koeya
864 Pylos
800 Omegablue14
721 fakespam
710 Red Warriors
652 Kraqi
589 DijiDiji
578 fireal574
571 Luckydog
559 ThirstyYao
547 Quondam
535 Bainee
511 Radness303
469 Stanfan6
327 Laika
299 Brutu

I know we didn't crack the top 100 on this one, but I'm very impressed that all 20 of us were at almost 300 or more points and 17 of 20 were over 500 points.

LuckyDog

I captured alliance totals for the end of round 1 on The SIMULATOR. Great job everyone!!! We finished Round 1 in 21st place overall 447,147 points.

The Simluator (Round 1)
447,147 points (21st)

26480 Bainee
26475 fakespam
25883 Dormammu
25726 fireal574
25701 jmg13
25177 Luckydog
25156 Red Warriors
25045 Omegablue14
25043 Pylos
25038 SensoZakku
23943 ThirstyYao
23247 Quondam
21826 kKilz
20108 Brutu
20088 Radness303
19911 Stanfan6
18210 DijiDiji
17597 Kraqi
15824 Laika
10669 koeya

Great job to Bainee & Fakespam as they finished 1-2 within 5 points of each other. Good luck to everyone on the last day of Army of One PvP.

Dormammu

We really tore it up in The Simulator, look at those point totals! It's funny because I was simply hoping for a top 250 finish to get us a Falcon cover. Now I think we'll place very well.

Dormammu

ThirstyYao wrote:

Do we know if scaling is capped and/or subject to diminishing returns? If not, is there a way for us to find out aside from logging in every hour and plotting out point values (not that I'm volunteering)? Basically trying to understand if waiting and bingeing is optimal versus playing every time nodes hit a certain point value.

Scaling is capped at lvl 400, the highest lvl your enemies can reach. You probably meant rubberbanding - can the point-worth of a node reach a maximum? Honestly, I'm not sure. I think it depends on the event and bracket sizes. The math of it all is so obscured that it gives me a headache, and I was never very good at math to begin with.

HailMary

Dormammu wrote:

Scaling is capped at lvl 400, the highest lvl your enemies can reach. You probably meant rubberbanding - can the point-worth of a node reach a maximum? Honestly, I'm not sure. I think it depends on the event and bracket sizes. The math of it all is so obscured that it gives me a headache, and I was never very good at math to begin with.

Rubberbanding reaches a maximum at 10x the base point value of a node. So, if a node has a base point value of 170, then the maximum value that it can possibly attain is 1700 points.

Unknown

HailMary wrote:

Rubberbanding reaches a maximum at 10x the base point value of a node. So, if a node has a base point value of 170, then the maximum value that it can possibly attain is 1700 points.

I did mean rubberbanding, sorry about that. If 10x is the cap, that's good to know. I'm going to suspect that there's some kind of diminishing returns in play based on how I suspect points are distributed within each ladder, but that requires more math+sampling than I care to do at the moment.

LuckyDog

Great job on Army of One this evening. A strong late push had us breaking through the top 100. At last check, with less than a minute to go, we were ranked 91st. 7 teams over 700 points and 17 of us over 500 points. Nice!!!

Army of One (PvP)
12344 points (91st)

946 Dormammu
782 SensoZakku
775 Red Warriors
744 Omegablue14
744 fakespam
717 Pylos
711 fireal574
688 DijiDiji
673 jmg13
625 koeya
581 Kraqi
572 Luckydog
571 Stanfan6
535 Brutu
526 Quondam
505 Bainee
502 KKilz
475 Radness303
339 ThirstyYao
333 Laika

I'll try to post an updated Alliance Rank at some point this weekend.

Dormammu

Outstanding work on Army of One from everyone - all of us had over 300 points, that's great! We've shown we can consistently place in the top 100 so far, which bodes well for all of us and our collections. I think we have a really great alliance going here and if we keep this up we'll only get stronger.

LuckyDog

Since there are no events finishing up today, I figured it would be a good time to update the Alliance Ranking. Data is taken from all events except for LR's and started on (4/24) and will conclude at the end of Season 1 (5/18).

Alliance Ranking
#1 Dormammu 2.83
#2 SensoZakku 4.83
#3 Pylos 4.88
#4 fakespam 5.33
#5 jmg13 5.67
#6 fireal574 8.08
#7 Omegablue14 8.33
#8 Bainee 9.58
#9 koeya 9.92
#10 Red Warriors 10.42
#11 Luckydog 11.17
#12 ThirstyYao 11.42
#13 Stanfan6 12.00
#14 Kraqi 12.75
#15 Brutu 13.17
#15 DijiDiji 13.17
#17 KKilz 13.75
#18 Radness303 14.00
#19 Quondam 15.08
#20 Laika 16.25

The idea of doing this ranking was to give us a fun way to see how we are doing in events overall versus other alliance members. We are all playing at different levels and it is not intended or suggested that anyone compare themselves to others that are clearly at a different place in the game. This was created because I enjoy being able to expand on what we do and sharing it for us to have fun with it. Please don't view any posted data as a judgement of any type. We came together as an alliance to help each other.

Unknown

Anyone else looking for FB friends to share MPQ loot with? I created a fake account explicitly for this purpose, so PM me if interested. Thanks!

Unknown

I'd like a couple fb friends to share with. Right now it's pretty much just wasted on people who don't play any more.

Quondem

Thanks Dom for the reply to the slacker but also I now have 3 toons at 85 and managed to get 8 covers total for the Hawk. Put in some work on Top gun but i think I'm going to miss out on Yellow ill try to eek it out with 8 hours to go.