The Simulator: April 29 - May 6

GumisK

pasa_ wrote:

Spoit wrote:

Yeah, I am liking that people aren't bothering as much. I probably didn't even need to play this last refresh at all to stay in top 50

Good surprize really, I couldn't play during the last 13 hours, left having about #7 (and some 7-8k points behind the leader), yet made the T50 for all the covers. Thought with the massive rubberbanding even T75 will be a problem.

For me, that's a clear indication that people are growing tired and don't care about PvE as much as before. There seems to be a shift of attention towards PvP tourneys, which are becoming more and more hectic lately. Maybe that's because you can play by your own rules, as opposed to attempting to game the scaling/rubberbanding/refreshing, and failing miserably. Seriously, the easier it is to comprehend the rules, the better.

fedlex20

Moghwyn wrote:

GumisK wrote:

There's no fun in it for me, just the rewards, which I'm not overly enthusiastic about.

To add insult to injury, we didn't even get most of the good rewards. This was yet another event where progression scores didn't even reach the halfway mark. I mean, come on, this event required us to spend more than a week of effort to place well. Now that progression rewards have been stealth nerfed from 8k ISO to 2K ISO, couldn't at least those get handed out instead of making them impossible to attain over and over again?

Well, i dont see too many people complaining about that this time... maybe its because we are fed up? Maybe because rags as an ultimate reward sucks. 1000 iso instead 8000 iso too. In my bracket first one got around 79k

Unknown

Moghwyn wrote:

GumisK wrote:

There's no fun in it for me, just the rewards, which I'm not overly enthusiastic about.

To add insult to injury, we didn't even get most of the good rewards. This was yet another event where progression scores didn't even reach the halfway mark. I mean, come on, this event required us to spend more than a week of effort to place well. Now that progression rewards have been stealth nerfed from 8k ISO to 2K ISO, couldn't at least those get handed out instead of making them impossible to attain over and over again?

I was happy to get my last Rags cover at 50k -- can't recall anything else I was remotely interested in all the prizes except the 3 falcons.

Unknown

I had zero problems with the event again. Finished 6th. It got a little hard at the end, but that's to be expected. The max level I faced was 216 (Patch/Loki node on Hard).


I found that because I had missed a few 'end times' of subs, I was unable to ever catch back up with the lead pack. Maybe if I would have been more relentless in grinding down nodes to nothing I could have come back, but this current PvE paradigm makes it foolhardy to do so.

Also, the reward structure for 3-50 was pretty much the same. There wasn't much reason to fight for position on the last day. Which is probably why so many people chose to focus on PvP instead.

Unknown

Sumilea wrote:

Oh and less my bracket really slacking no way we getting the Green rag.

28K * (1 + 1.25 + 1.5) is 105K only 95 K short.

Well we really slacked off. In the end I finished on just over 83K points that's 20K below that estimate! In fact even with the missions worth 50% more I don't think I score 28K in the final set of subs!

over_clocked

Wow, at least you hit the 50k and 75k marks. I ended up with 46k thanks to being golden with top 50 the way it were.

Unknown

I ended up at like 74 thousand. I wound up wiping on a board that would have pushed me over the edge. When I found myself back at the board selection screen I thought, "Eh...who cares?"

And that sums up the problem with PvE. Giant brackets wherein individual placement doesn't matter much and progression rewards that you either can't reach or don't really care about. And don't forget that scaling and rubber-banding actually discourage you from playing...why bother?

Unknown

I think it's good that 3-50 gets same reward. On top of all the other issues, the last thing we need is stressing about placement rewards on last day.

Unknown

That's fair--reward consistency is valuable...if there's some other incentive to actually compete. But when progression rewards are unattainable and reward brackets are all the same, there's very little activity in the event and little incentive to change that. Makes for a static, bland experience.

Unknown

WolfmanX25 wrote:

Carnajs1 wrote:

I don't understand how I got top 20 placement in both modes of this event, for each stage if the event and still barely broke 100 over all ranking. It makes zero sense.

It makes perfect sense. Sub brackets were 200 users, main bracket was 1000 users. So your main bracket could fill 5 sub-brackets and the Top 20 from those 5 subs would be the Top 100 in the main.

I realize this is oversimplified, since not all subbrackets get the same score and people will mostly end up in different brackets.

Not only that, but the higher you are in your main bracket, the less points you get per mission from rubberbanding. It's easier to rank higher in any particular sub the lower your overall score is.

Unknown

Impulse wrote:

Not only that, but the higher you are in your main bracket, the less points you get per mission from rubberbanding. It's easier to rank higher in any particular sub the lower your overall score is.

Not in this event the rubber banding was off the subs leaders.

You can tell this since when you clear the easy sub and increase you main bracket score the points for the hard bracket do not change. It also means what you can build up a lead that cannot be rubber banded away. If the rubber banding was off the main bracket then even the first 2 subs mean nothing overall as you could pull it in.

Unknown

The rubberbanding seems to be toned down like it was in The Hunt. Doing essentials twice would put you nowhere near top 10 let alone at having a shot at top 1 like it used to. It's impossible to say that the observeable less placement movement is a result of weaker rubberbanding or lack of interest. Most likely it's both.

Progression rewards have been hit and miss and don't have much to do with scaling. In the last Hunt, we were about 30K short of the top progression reward for the HT cover. That is actually much closer than most of the recent events even though it was the first event where scaling is allowed to get to level 395. For example on Unstable Isotope, nobody was even close to the 83333 reward for Captain America, and I think the top progression reward was in the 150K+ range? That event was capped at level 230 and you even had a very favorable set of heroes that can easily grind down the 230s (Patch boosted, OBW boosted) and yet I don't think we even got to the halfway mark. Heroic Oscorp had no additional scaling once the event started (at least I sure don't recall the enemy levels going up), but I'm sure anyone who remembered that event can tell you just how reachable those Wolverine X Force covers are. In general the thresholds set for the progression rewards seem to be totally arbitary that even significant gameplay issue hardly matters when you need 500K for a Wolverine X Force in Heroic Oscorp and a score in the 150K can easily finish #1 in a bracket.

Unknown

Congratulations to all the new players in this PVE! We had to push to the last minute to win this. One of our team mates, Zirtak had a bug where the enemies where high level from the get go. This is way we swapped him out in the last day. We ended up replacing our lost members who are now in xmen with members from our sister alliances and 1 new recruit.