Difficulty Levels Based on S.H.I.E.L.D. Clearance Levels - Update (8/4/17) *Updated

revskip

New McG said:

Wumpushunter said:

Rod5 said:

You choose the level of enemies you fight...how can that possibly be unfair?

You choose the enemies but you must also choose the reward and now the two don't mesh anymore.  Lots will be pushed from 8 to 7, those in 7 will be pushed down to 6 and 6 people can't do anything because CL5 rewards won't progress their game.

There are a half dozen ways to fix pve, this change is lazy and benefits one group on backs of another. 

1. fold placement into progression.
2. add higher CLS
3. cut brackets down from 1000 
4. Lock out characters based on CL

Best of luck on getting those changes.

Based on the changes they made to 8 for the permanent change, (dropping enemy levels by a lot), most 5s will now probably still be in 8. If they dropped lower in the test runs, it's because 8 wasn't appreciably easier than it already was for lots of folks in the 4-5 transition or low 5* realm, with close to level 400 or so enemies still being there. Why not drop down, when the drop to 7 made things laughably easy? Lower 300s looks to be a significant improvement in difficulty for my 4* roster, and I'm sure that will be enough to keep most 5s in SCL 8, while still shortening clear times by a noteworthy chunk of time. 

My guess is, you can take a 4* roster, drop into 7, still have a decent shot at 4* rewards, and not have to deal with too many 5* players dropping below 8.

I'm absolutely fine with 5* players inhabiting and dominating the top two SCLs even though that means it will likely push me out of placement rewards (4* roster). They should have been dominating those SCLs all along (although it definitely helped my personal progress in the old system).  

I do think that there should be some kind of gating mechanism to keep those rosters from dropping down to SCL 6 or below.  I can compete with my roster and take a top 50 in SCL 7 or 8 spot but a 3* roster just doesn't have the ability to clear quick enough to compete with a 5* roster in SCL 6 or lower.  In order for them to advance they shouldn't be going against someone with 550's who just just wants ten minute clears.  

DarthDeVo

acescracked said:

Let me get this straight.

Some posters think it's uncool that 5* rosters will have easier clears now and can drop CL's for t20 and better placement.

Some of those same posters think it's cool that 4* rosters (soft capped or not) had easier clears and could enter higher CL's for t20 and better placement over 5* rosters.

Do I have those positions correct?

 No, in fact you don't have it correct. 

Scaling for 5* players previously wasn't fair to them. They needed a solution that didn't punish them for putting in the time and resources to develop their rosters. 

They also needed an SCL opened to them with rewards more relevant to their roster that would make the slog of PvE more worth their time. Such a space would also allow 4* players to play at a lower SCL and eventually move up to 5* land, instead of having 5* players crowd them out, in turn forcing them to crowd 3* players out of their SCL and so on. 

We got a solution to one of problems and not the other, when realistically we probably could have had a solution to both. 

Spoit

acescracked said:

Let me get this straight.

Some posters think it's uncool that 5* rosters will have easier clears now and can drop CL's for t20 and better placement.

Some of those same posters think it's cool that 4* rosters (soft capped or not) had easier clears and could enter higher CL's for t20 and better placement over 5* rosters.

Do I have those positions correct?

Seriously, aces? You're better than this kind of strawmaning

Wumpushunter

acescracked said:

Let me get this straight.

Some posters think it's uncool that 5* rosters will have easier clears now and can drop CL's for t20 and better placement.

Some of those same posters think it's cool that 4* rosters (soft capped or not) had easier clears and could enter higher CL's for t20 and better placement over 5* rosters.

Do I have those positions correct?

Some people think because they got smacked around by a group of people for a while, that now its their turn to smack totally innocent people around cause its not the soft cappers they will be hurting but others who had nothing to do with soft capping. So soft capping is a red herring just designed to make CL slumming some how completely fine.

SpringSoldier

The only reasonable solution is for SCL8 to give a 4* as a reward for the top 100. This and the progression rewards should prevent 5* dropping levels and giving some of the 4* a chance at a good character, leaving level 7 to the 3*->4* transitioners. The harsh grinding required to be in top 100 or 50 should be rewarded better than a small amount of ISO, a small amount of hp and some elites (more Moonstones and Ares-es).

Bowgentle

I love the notion that somehow 5* players don't need 4* covers to progress.

Of course we need all the 4* covers we can get.
a) Champ rewards give out more resources for more pulls fishing for 5s.
b) Have you played against a boosted level 350+ Medusa this week?
c) The last thing I want to see are guaranteed 5* covers as placement rewards. I don't want to imagine the hours people will spend tapping for that.

In general: Guys, 5* rosters don't materialize out of thin air.
Most of us have spent either an absurd amount of time and/or an absurd amount of money to get to that stage.
Only to find out that the game would never get any easier.

Instead of moaning because 4* players will be pushed out of placement you should rejoice that, for the first time in the 4 years the game has existed, there's light at the end of the tunnel.
Enemies don't level along with your characters anymore, there's actually a point where you can reap the rewards of the hard work you put in over the years.

The problem is that MPQ has catered to its own stupid idea of "equality": handicap the stronger rosters to give smaller rosters rewards that in any other game they were never meant to get.

Yes, I think stronger rosters should absolutely crush weaker rosters - seems the devs finally got round to that idea, too.

DarthDeVo

aesthetocyst said:

And now, a moment to consider intellectual dishonesty. Happy Monday!

DarthDeVo said:

aesthetocyst said:  The "4* community" should be busy champing their 4*s, so they experience an increase in 4* champ levels...4* covers from PVE placement is one of the most anemic sources of 4*s in the game. Even in the highest 2 SCLs, available to only 1% of all players in each bracket...Don't pretend the accessibility of those very particular rewards affects the masses. It affects a miniscule minority.

... I would love to champ more 4*s so I can increase my 4* champ levels. One helpful way I (and a few others in this thread) are doing that is through placement rewards ... I don't think anyone is making the argument that T10 or T5 placement is some kind of 4* cover bonanza for everyone at that tier...

Look, daddy! A balloon man!

A balloon man, as opposed to a straw man (projecting something new onto another and reply to your own projection), is where you exaggerate what you wish to object to wildly, in an attempt to appear to be the reasonable one. Fox News loves this move.

DarthDeVo said:

 said: ... so I don't know where you're getting that strawman from ...

The person I replied to was bemoaning the loss (before he's even lost it ... he's proactively assuming he will...) of placement rewards. Once called, he corrected himself...and repeated his progress was being crimped. Are you actually reading this thread? Yes, yes, of course you are. 

DarthDeVo said: ... I happen to be hoarding ....

Hoarding! Congratualtions.

And ...

you're welcome.

 I'm not even sure what point you're trying to make, so I'll just say nice deceptive editing and taking quotes out of context or not showing them within the full context. Have a nice day. 

Alsmir

Another chance that is great for some and sucks for others. Another thread full of loud people who benefit from the change, telling others to shut up, because it's fair. There goes the myth that MPQ has good community.

Rod5

Alsmir said:

Another chance that is great for some and sucks for others. Another thread full of loud people who benefit from the change, telling others to shut up, because it's fair. There goes the myth that MPQ has good community.

Sorry to break this to you, but the main mpq community is not on this forum.

At the end of the day, the only reason that the 5* players are reacting the way they are is because of the whining that is going on. 

It will die down over time, people will readjust, and roster-based scaling in PvE will become a distant memory. And you never know, we might even get higher CLs.

Nick441234

There is one way, and a very good way to avoid all the big hitters in your bracket, just wait a while to join and for your bracket to flip. I joined ISO8 4 hours after it started and it had flipped 4 times by then. I know I've avoided a lot of the 5* big hitters this way.

I'm currently 29th, which is about where I normally am. 

jamesh

If people are worried about high level rosters dropping down to lower clearance levels to snap up all the top placement rewards, here's my suggestion from back when they first ran the test:

https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/65514/suggestion-unified-progression-rewards-for-all-clearance-levels-in-story-mode

This would essentially add an incentive to play as high a clearance level as you can in order to get maximise alliance scores.  It would also mean that an incomplete clear of a higher clearance level could give better progression rewards than a full clear of a lower one.

Starfury

As I said a while ago, this change is completely irrelevant to me for the forseeable future.

Before, my enemy levels had topped out at 325, no matter how many 4* I'd champed. Now they'll scale to 330, probably a difference won't even notice. On the plus side, the easy nodes are now essentially LR seeds so I'll save a couple of minutes on those clears. (Just get rid of those 18 pointless fights and add the node rewards to progression!)

It's nice to hear 5* players are happy that PvE isn't an unpaid part-time job anymore. Unfortunately, that quality of life improvement only really extends to them. Everyone else still faces the same time requirements.

I'll just have to wait and see how this affects my placement in SCL8. As long as I'll stay in the top 100 as before, I'm going to remain pretty indifferent towards the change. If not, it's gonna be a slight negative.

Black Duke

Well, it has taken me 42 minutes to do my initial four repetitions in 2nd sub of "Unstable ISO-8" (which is still a pretty good time due to buffed characters). But there were four players which were much faster than me. Any guesses what they have in common? Yeah, the first guy has a lvl 470+ Thanos, the second a lvl 460+ Thanos and the other two a lvl 450+ Thanos.

PVE is no longer about good and/or fast team combinations, it´s now only about the question who has the higher leveled Thanos.

mpqr7

Day 1, and I am loving it!!! Finally, I can do my four initial clears during my morning commute. For anyone who finds SCL 8 too difficult, this will give you a reason to level up your heroes, so that eventually, it won't be so bad.

broll

aesthetocyst said:

DarthDeVo said: ... 5* players ... needed an SCL opened to them with rewards more relevant to their roster that would make the slog of PvE more worth their time. Such a space would also allow 4* players to play at a lower SCL and eventually move up to 5* land, instead of having 5* players crowd them out, in turn forcing them to crowd 3* players out of their SCL and so on....

Started banging this drum the day SCLs were announced and the entry requirements and reward schemes were announced. You can find my risk/reward analysis of SCLs on the forum. It was a good time.

Failing to segregate players into power bands has plagued this game from its earliest days, and only become more acute over time, as new characters have been piled on, power creep creeping long, and new rarities released. The gulf between day 1 players and long-time players / big spenders yawns wider and wider.

SCLs should have done quite a bit to address this problem. Especially with 7 (and quickly thereafter 8 of them!) ... and they have been a miserable failure. Silghtly better than nothing (MPQ sans SCLs), but considering what could have been done, near total failure.

The problem is the devs wasted all the divisions on lower-ranking, newer players. The top 5% (or whatever percentage rank 52 – 125+* constitutes), needs to be divvied up, badly. 4* transitioners, 4* players, 5* transitioners, 5* players, and mega-whales all need to be in their own pools. Different entry gates, with appropriate reward schemes.

Instead, they are still blocking each other from progressing, just like they did pre-SCLs.

Why? Because there aren't "enough" players in each group to sill a new SCL, says the devs.

Why? Because each SCL must have 5 slices, and each slice enough players to fill multiple brackets, and brackets must fill sequentially, not simultaneously. Too many partial brackets mean too many goodies given out, too few players having a shot at placement.

Why? Uh, because the elder gods laid it down this way and change is skeery and hard.

Opening SCL 9 and 10 will be great (well, better than the current situation, possibly slightly so, possibly magnificently so), but even then, the top end of the game will have too few divisions. Marvel has decreed there can be only 10, and the devs blew 7 of them.

Players suggest having fewer slices in higher SCLs. Maybe that's doable, maybe the whole game unravels due to spaghetti code, who knows (not the devs, ha!).

Having a fixed number of brackets per SCL/slice combination, and filling them simultaneously, would address this population problem, and kill bracket sniping. Maybe that's doable, maybe the whole game unravels due to spaghetti code, who knows (not the devs, ha!). Oh, and a lot of players would howl. A lot of players like bracket sniping. Y'know, the ones sniping brackets. But it would work, and the game would go on.

Anyway, keep banging that drum. 

________________________________

* Why the '='? Because some players would be rank 200ish by now if the scale was uncapped. For those players' sakes, I wish that was me being funny.

Great post!  This a good suggestion.  Let's just take time slices away all together.  Since the real factor in the tie breaking is how quick could you do your clears, why not make it when you enter your personal clock starts.  Then you're bracket with 1000 randoms from the same SCL.  Done.  No more silly time slices, people want to start their clears at 8pm EST, fine.  They want to start at 7am, fine.  They want to start at 11:11, fine.  This would solve several problems.

@Brigby so there's at least a slight chance the devs see the suggestion.

fmftint

Black Duke said:

Well, it has taken me 42 minutes to do my initial four repetitions in 2nd sub of "Unstable ISO-8" (which is still a pretty good time due to buffed characters). But there were four players which were much faster than me. Any guesses what they have in common? Yeah, the first guy has a lvl 470+ Thanos, the second a lvl 460+ Thanos and the other two a lvl 450+ Thanos.

PVE is no longer about good and/or fast team combinations, it´s now only about the question who has the higher leveled Thanos.

You're missing the big picture, see to me you're still in the T5

Ouroboros9999

Just my 2 cents...I LOVE this new format, makes PVE enjoyable again!  I hope this is not just a test.

adamdivine

Hey ouroboros! We are bracket buddies in this pve. At least for now this change is a permanent one, enjoy! And just for reference, i have 5 champed 5* (one of which is Thanos), ouroboros has 4 champed 5* (and a high level non champed thanos) and we are both getting beaten by a solid 4* roster with no 5*'s. Same thing happened in the last tests as well. Definitely still possible for 4* rosters to compete.

Starfury

Of course, if played well enough, even a 4* roster can outpace a slow 5* player.

elvy75

So glad this is finally implemented, now please release higher CL with proper rewards for the effort and i will be super pleased