This Game Isn't Fun Anymore

Meto5000

Phantron wrote:

Part of the reason why community scaling exists because your missions are worth more the later you do it due to rubberbanding and that's also not fair to the guy who did it earlier.

You can't complain about being harmed by an arbitary mechanism (scaling) when people have been benefiting from an equally arbitary mechanism (rubberbanding) in the past. I'm guessing they're meant to try to cancel each other out so you don't get this scenario where the only last two hour matters, but they're not interacting in a predictable way.

Phantron wrote:

I'm guessing they're meant to try to cancel each other out so you don't get this scenario where the only last two hour matters

Phantron wrote:

this scenario where the only last two hour matters

Phantron wrote:

only last two hour matters

Golf clap.

LordWill

NorthernPolarity wrote:

I don't think they're seeing anything wrong on their side from a metrics perspective. Sure, the forumgoers are mad, but we represent a very small portion of the population and honestly do not much that much impact on their big decisions. The key thing to think about here is how scaling is affecting player retention, and I'm guessing for 90% of the players, scalings been working fine for them and they're seeing much higher mission completed numbers simply due to the fact that everyone can theoretically do all the missions. So what can you do if you're in Demiurge's shoes? A small subset of players are complaining about scaling, but the numbers probably show that nothing is wrong. Scaling obviously hasn't changed their retention numbers, so until it does, they aren't going to drastically change the system to appease the small, vocal minority.

I would rather speak up and be heard than stay silent. I think if they truly wanted to know the answer if people liked their community scaling feature they could find out. I am sure if you look at the metrics that you could make it say whatever you wanted it to say.

What do you propose, do nothing and let the chips fall where they may? Not play?

It doesn't sound like we are asking for the moon here. Just meet us half way.

Unknown

Now while Phantron raises some good points, i can also argue the other way.

"Enemies start of easy" That may be true for some, but not everyone is in the same boat. Level 177/178 and above is not easy for me, as well as countless others.

That could be in part too how well you done in previous PVE's. But no, if that was the case, then we wouldn't have completely different scaling for people across the board.

"Now we have heroes that don't get one-shooted by a headbutt" Again, not everyone has all their heroes leveled up, which leaves them at a disadvantage. There is only so much iso in the game and if i had to choose between Patch and Moonstone on who to level up. Patch wins hands down. I'm trying to get out of the 2* and move up not down.

The buffed heroes for these events have been more miss than hit lately. Those horrible heroic ones for a start just wound people up no end. Why cant they buff some DECENT 3* most of the time instead of 80% 2*s? Who uses Loki,Rags,Moonstone and Cap anymore? The same people who are leading the boards with their 1 and 2* teams. It's all well and good keeping the newer players happy with the idea of progression but what about those who have been here from the beginning?

There may be a small minority of people who hate the scaling as Polarity said but whose to say those not on the forums aren't affected too? We just don't know. We don't know whats going on behind the scenes and until someone explains then this is just going to continue. And even if we are a small minority, we still have a right to express ourselves and ask for answers as its OUR time and OUR money we are investing in the game.

Anyhoo i have my quota of ranting today so i'm off to watch some Bates Motel and relax

Puritas

the buffs this event are also worthless =/
Usually I enjoy experimenting with new combinations of heroes but this +10 level stuff isn't feasible

Unknown

The game has to get hard somewhere, otherwise you'd just have either 30 guys tied with the same score like the first The Hulk easy bracket, or you have people grinding out one point missions to try to stay ahead in TaT (which had scaling, but was relatively easy to overcome via suicides).

Prior to scaling, a lot of people simply weren't beating the high point node that has 3 230 DAs, and that's even with the cheap boosts and Wolverine and Thor being way overpowered. With scaling, you probably won't have any node that's outright impossible the first time you see it, but then the nodes have to get up relatively quickly to make up for the fact that they stay low.

I remember when I did the first The Hunt, I can't possibly attempt the 3 level 230 guys in Jump Jets 3 which is also the highest value mission, so there was no way I could possibly get a competitive score. But you got to have something comparable to that to create separation unless you want all ties or 1 point mission grindfests. It used to be absolute in the past and now it's more gradual. The guys who can't get past the Jump Jets 3 wall in the past still can't get past the scaling now, and the guys who used to be able to do Jump Jets 3 can still handle the scaling. Scaling does add the weirdness of having very weak roster guys coming from nowhere, but without knowng their play time/opponents not to mention a full snapshot of who acutally won at the end, it's difficult to say if that's fair or not.

I think the problem is that most people don't get that rubberbanding creates the illusion of being competitive. Rubberbanding makes you think you're able to compete for top 2 or top 10 or whatever, but no matter what rubberbanding does, it doesn't change the fact that only 0.2% of the people can finish top 2 in 1000 people. I pretty much always finish #1, #2, or #3, in a main bracket so I've the opportunity to know both what it's like to be one of the crazy and trying to beat (and lose) to one of the crazy. From the general posting I get the idea that people might be say #7 and blame it on scaling for their inability to finish in top 2 (or scale down to lower ranks for weaker players), but the fact is there are still 4 pretty crazy guys at #3 to #6 to overcome even if there was no scaling, and the guy at #2, I can assure you he's totally crazy and quite willing to grind nodes down to 1 if you give him the chance, which is what happens if you get rid of scaling.

The rubberbanding's success is also its greatest enemy. It wouldn't feel too interesting if it seems like you've no hope of finishing well as soon as the event started, but in the end only 2 guys can finish top 2 and you get a lot of guys finishing #3 to #10 blaming the system even though they were never going to beat the crazy guy at #2, let alone the even crazier guy at #1.

mags1587

Maybe the answer is to keep community scaling and rubberbanding, but eliminate personal scaling or fix it at a certain level for the duration of an event? I can accept that waiting to beat nodes will result in higher-level matches for me (to go along with the higher points I get from rubber-banding), but I hate that playing well (i.e. completing matches quickly, not taking damage, whatever else might factor into this) is punished by your enemy levels increasing until playing is a chore rather than fun or until you simply can't play anymore. It's forcing me to play PvE battles sloppily that is really starting to annoy me.

NorthernPolarity

LordWill wrote:

NorthernPolarity wrote:

I don't think they're seeing anything wrong on their side from a metrics perspective. Sure, the forumgoers are mad, but we represent a very small portion of the population and honestly do not much that much impact on their big decisions. The key thing to think about here is how scaling is affecting player retention, and I'm guessing for 90% of the players, scalings been working fine for them and they're seeing much higher mission completed numbers simply due to the fact that everyone can theoretically do all the missions. So what can you do if you're in Demiurge's shoes? A small subset of players are complaining about scaling, but the numbers probably show that nothing is wrong. Scaling obviously hasn't changed their retention numbers, so until it does, they aren't going to drastically change the system to appease the small, vocal minority.

I would rather speak up and be heard than stay silent. I think if they truly wanted to know the answer if people liked their community scaling feature they could find out. I am sure if you look at the metrics that you could make it say whatever you wanted it to say.

What do you propose, do nothing and let the chips fall where they may? Not play?

It doesn't sound like we are asking for the moon here. Just meet us half way.

Let me make myself clear, I do not like scaling. I'm not a "cheerleader" advocating that we stay silent because the system is clearly flawed and has some serious issues (forcing us to play suboptimally in order to keep it down? seriously?). The point of my post was to think critically about what problems we're seeing, what problems demiurge is seeing, and see what solutions we can reasonably expect them to implement so that we can suggest solutions that might actually get looked at.

The vibe I'm getting from these types of posts is that you guys think that if all of us forumgoers hate scaling, then that means that the majority of the playerbase hates scaling, which simply isn't true. If this was the case, then people would be quitting/stop playing as much, the retention numbers would show that and Demiurge would have already canned scaling since they obviously don't want their entire playerbase to disintegrate. This hasn't happened yet since we're on the what, 2nd or 3rd month of scaling? It's clear that Demiurge (and most game companies like this) base their important decisions off of metrics, so I don't see how they would think "Oh, those guys on the forums are complaining about scaling but we're seeing a neutral/net positive increase in player retention with scaling in effect. I guess that means that we should completely can this feature to make those guys happy regardless of what the other data tells us". It's obviously fine to voice your concerns, but I wouldn't expect them to drastically change the system to solve a problem that is (probably) insignificant on a macrolevel.

Here is a question for you guys: if scaling is really ruining the game, then what would happen if we reverted back to the old system? No scaling, and everyone sees all the nodes at the same level. I'm guessing what would happen is that people on the forum would be happy and say "Oh this isn't ideal, but at least it's better than scaling", but then demiurge would look at the numbers and see that players are playing less overall because a majority of the playerbase simply can't beat the nodes that have 230 mobs. If you actually want them to find a way to fix scaling, your suggestion has to do the following two things:
1. Not require significant programming effort. Demiurge isn't going to bother implementing complicated solutions such as letting the players choose their own difficulty when they don't even know if something is even wrong in the first place.
2. Meaningfully increase their retention numbers for the entire playerbase. Many solutions that I've seen would make us happier, but probably end up hurting the zombie hoard (which I assume are casual players in the 1*-2* range) and lower their overall retention numbers.

I've been thinking of the potential solutions and I can't think of anything different that would reasonably satisfy both clauses. The best solution that I could think up of was to just keep on tweaking the scaling formula until it's to a point that doesn't infuriate the forum playerbase. If you have a good solution then by all means post it and we can discuss, but none of the ones that I've seen both solve the core issues at hand and change metric numbers enough to be implemented from a practical standpoint. We all obviously want scaling to change, but I don't think that thinking about solutions from just the viewpoint of a hardcore player is going to produce a solution that they will actually listen to. We need to think about this problem from the viewpoint of the company if we want to get anywhere.

Unknown

I think the simplest solution is to:

1. Clearly explain to the playerbase how scaling works.
2. Entirely reset activity-based scaling between events, or at least take it way down. There is simply no excuse for 395x3 on the unlock nodes. None.

HailMary

I just had a thought regarding scaling.

The devs want to maximize general player retention and expand the userbase, which likely means that they don't want sub-L60 players to feel completely pwned in PVE by veterans, and they don't want low-level players to smash their heads against a wall of L200+ nodes during the final days. Thus, there's some sense in making scaling s---ty at the outset for veterans, because it gives the newbies a nice little "Look, I'm winning!" feeling. But, it's the persistence of the problem that seems to be causing a lot of very legitimate raging.

So, a few suggested tweaks:

1. Completely lock out CMags & Spidey from PVEs. Period. Let's see what the metrics say when everyone requires highly favorable starting boards just to survive a L250 fight.

2. Preserve

some carryover scaling, but seriously fix the "random high-level people get L200+, other random high-level people get L60" problem.

3. Change the community scaling curve to affect the higher end much less. If your levels start at 20, sure, community-scale that up to 50. If your levels start at 150, don't scale that up to 295 just because the 1*s riding uberboosted Falcons blitzed through their nodes like cats demolishing toilet paper. EDIT: Better yet, base your community scaling only on people who have

similar scaling.

4. Reduce personal scaling, too. Particularly, do it in a way that actually reflects gameplay reality. For example, high-level goon fights usually end in either near-perfect health or 2+ chars dead. The scaling algorithm needs to take this into account, instead of (I assume) thinking

"Oh, they barely took damage in this particular fight, so L200 Snipers must be pure cake for them. AMP IT UP, BOYOS!"

5. Cap initial levels at something sane: giving a mid-high-tier player L295+

entry nodes is basically saying "Hey, you! Yeah, you. Go f--- yourself."

Spoit

How about caping the level of scaling differently for different nodes? That way you can still have the 230 (well, 400 now) impossible nodes, but not have the entire board be like that

Nemek

Spoit wrote:

How about caping the level of scaling differently for different nodes? That way you can still have the 230 (well, 400 now) impossible nodes, but not have the entire board be like that

I had been thinking a bit about it, and that's probably how I would do it too. Have scaling pretty similar to how it works now, but just have level caps on all of the missions. The last couple missions get to 230 (like they did before) and the first couple of missions get to 30-60ish. The low-scaling players would still see significantly reduced levels across the board and the high-level players would have a pretty similar experience to the first run-through of Hulk/Hunt.

They would have to somehow tweak the way community scaling worked, since those low-level missions would get ground out at a pretty incredibly rate, causing community scaling to skyrocket. I'm sure it could be worked out, though.

Unknown

HailMary wrote:

1. Completely lock out CMags & Spidey from PVEs. Period. Let's see what the metrics say when everyone requires highly favorable starting boards just to survive a L250 fight.

I have a strong suspicion that if you do that, no one will have a L250 fight.

Unknown

too long/rambling, didn't read: Competitive pve doesn't improve retention, nor does scaling. Make more events like the Hulk's "Something for everyone" model - that does more for retention than anything else.

NorthernPolarity wrote:

The vibe I'm getting from these types of posts is that you guys think that if all of us forumgoers hate scaling, then that means that the majority of the playerbase hates scaling, which simply isn't true.

I would argue that it isn't actually scaling that is the root issue. It's a symptom of the issue, much like a cough is a symptom of a cold. You don't treat the cough as the root issue b/c that only prolongs the root issue and possibly makes the underlying problem worse (i.e. taking NyQuil to suppress your cough actually prolongs the cough b/c your body can't expel the foreign materials in your lungs). So I would argue that "fixing" scaling won't fix people's underlying discontent with the game.

It's my personal opinion (and I state that b/c people see my green name and forget that I'm a random schmo on the forums, just like everyone else) that the underlying problem is the competitive nature they've created for PvE. I've sprinkled this across any number of other threads, but I see no reason not to keep beating my drum (whether I'm right or wrong).

The mechanic of scaling (and rubberbanding) are used to keep PvE competitive. However, their most successful event I would suspect is the Hulk event where every participant is (practically) guaranteed a single Hulk cover. That took away the competitive aspect and gave the community the goal of filling a progress bar. That made everyone happy, to know that they could contribute towards unlocking the Hulk character and your days of effort (ignoring the freeloaders for now) would not go unrewarded. The competitors (and now the alliances) could still work their butts off to get a 1/1/1 (or better) cover immediately following the event, and that was great. It was a something for everyone model.

But the more recent model is that only 2-3% of the playerbase should come out with a 1/1/1 model and only a moderate fraction more should even get a single cover. How does that model increase player retention? I 100% agree that there needs to be hooks and mechanics in place to increase player retention. They've chosen a good model of restricting ISO to keep players wanting to level their characters, and by always increasing the number of characters out there, I will never have enough ISO to level all my guys. There ya go, I'm hooked (and probably a lot of other people). All of the other mechanics and meta-mechanics should be built around feeding covers to players and then giving them ISO at a rate that keeps them hungry for more. But there is a missing component to this formula, and that's something over-arching to tie it all together. Otherwise, the treadmill aspect of the game becomes more obvious and you play one character until he's no longer featured and then he slides down the roster as the next shiny goodness comes along.

HailMary

ZenBrillig wrote:

I have a strong suspicion that if you do that, no one will have a L250 fight.

Precisely.

There will be a couple of standouts boosting and just mulching deep 3* rosters, but all in all, I think locking out infinite-turn characters will help top-end scaling in a massive way.

Unknown

HailMary wrote:

ZenBrillig wrote:

I have a strong suspicion that if you do that, no one will have a L250 fight.

Precisely.

There will be a couple of standouts boosting and just mulching deep 3* rosters, but all in all, I think locking out infinite-turn characters will help top-end scaling in a massive way.

We've had two Heroics now where neither of those covers were allowed and tons of players still reported nodes in the 300+ range in those events. Maybe it was just the one Heroic with a 400 ceiling, but scaling was not appreciably improved with or without the new ceiling in events where they're locked out. I just can't see Spidey/C.Mags being the root cause here.

NorthernPolarity

Riggy wrote:

too long/rambling, didn't read: Competitive pve doesn't improve retention, nor does scaling. Make more events like the Hulk's "Something for everyone" model - that does more for retention than anything else.

NorthernPolarity wrote:

The vibe I'm getting from these types of posts is that you guys think that if all of us forumgoers hate scaling, then that means that the majority of the playerbase hates scaling, which simply isn't true.

I would argue that it isn't actually scaling that is the root issue. It's a symptom of the issue, much like a cough is a symptom of a cold. You don't treat the cough as the root issue b/c that only prolongs the root issue and possibly makes the underlying problem worse (i.e. taking NyQuil to suppress your cough actually prolongs the cough b/c your body can't expel the foreign materials in your lungs). So I would argue that "fixing" scaling won't fix people's underlying discontent with the game.

It's my personal opinion (and I state that b/c people see my green name and forget that I'm a random schmo on the forums, just like everyone else) that the underlying problem is the competitive nature they've created for PvE. I've sprinkled this across any number of other threads, but I see no reason not to keep beating my drum (whether I'm right or wrong).

The mechanic of scaling (and rubberbanding) are used to keep PvE competitive. However, their most successful event I would suspect is the Hulk event where every participant is (practically) guaranteed a single Hulk cover. That took away the competitive aspect and gave the community the goal of filling a progress bar. That made everyone happy, to know that they could contribute towards unlocking the Hulk character and your days of effort (ignoring the freeloaders for now) would not go unrewarded. The competitors (and now the alliances) could still work their butts off to get a 1/1/1 (or better) cover immediately following the event, and that was great. It was a something for everyone model.

But the more recent model is that only 2-3% of the playerbase should come out with a 1/1/1 model and only a moderate fraction more should even get a single cover. How does that model increase player retention? I 100% agree that there needs to be hooks and mechanics in place to increase player retention. They've chosen a good model of restricting ISO to keep players wanting to level their characters, and by always increasing the number of characters out there, I will never have enough ISO to level all my guys. There ya go, I'm hooked (and probably a lot of other people). All of the other mechanics and meta-mechanics should be built around feeding covers to players and then giving them ISO at a rate that keeps them hungry for more. But there is a missing component to this formula, and that's something over-arching to tie it all together. Otherwise, the treadmill aspect of the game becomes more obvious and you play one character until he's no longer featured and then he slides down the roster as the next shiny goodness comes along.

I disagree and think that they're two separate issues. No matter what event/reward scheme you use, if you keep scaling in it's current state, people are still going to complain that while someone else breezed through the event because they're scaling is low, they're struggling vs all level 400 mobs. It's arguable which issue is more important to look at, but the fact remains that something still needs to be done with scaling if you want to make the forum playerbase happy.

HailMary

walkyourpath wrote:

HailMary wrote:

ZenBrillig wrote:

I have a strong suspicion that if you do that, no one will have a L250 fight.

Precisely.

There will be a couple of standouts boosting and just mulching deep 3* rosters, but all in all, I think locking out infinite-turn characters will help top-end scaling in a massive way.

We've had two Heroics now where neither of those covers were allowed and tons of players still reported nodes in the 300+ range in those events. Maybe it was just the one Heroic with a 400 ceiling, but scaling was not appreciably improved with or without the new ceiling in events where they're locked out. I just can't see Spidey/C.Mags being the root cause here.

True, but for players who had crazy scaling, was it typically already crazy at entry, or did it build up to crazy levels as the event progressed? If the latter, then I'd shift a lot more emphasis to my other tweaks. If the former, though, that could easily be the result of CMags/Spidey use in previous events (and a PVE MMR reset would help establish a real scaling baseline for CMags/Spidey lockouts).

Unknown

mags1587 wrote:

Maybe the answer is to keep community scaling and rubberbanding, but eliminate personal scaling or fix it at a certain level for the duration of an event? I can accept that waiting to beat nodes will result in higher-level matches for me (to go along with the higher points I get from rubber-banding),

I dunno... back in January when I was a "Thor+mStorm" tot the only way I could participate in a PvE was to play in the first couple of hours of each sub, or else community scaling meant even the easiest missions were impossible. That sucked, and I'm assuming d3p wants and needs to give new players a good experience

Unknown

Rajjeq wrote:

I think the simplest solution is to:

1. Clearly explain to the playerbase how scaling works.
2. Entirely reset activity-based scaling between events, or at least take it way down. There is simply no excuse for 395x3 on the unlock nodes. None.

It's supposed to reset. It just doesn't work all the time. Pretty sure reckless and I had some of the highest scaling from The Hunt (my essentials are in the 330s, every hard mission has been at 395 for a while) and my mission started out in the 100-150 range for Hard. More transparency would be good too so that we're not just trying random things and hoping something works. The system is sound but the implementation and the communication can definitely be improved. At this point I'm pretty sure personal scaling is based the amount of HP you lost, perhaps relative to your most powerful character, compared to the number of wins you have, but we really need to know what is considered as too little damage, and they also should nerf the two characters (Magneto/Spiderman) that enable winning while taking too little damage. I ran through a lot of my other teams in this tournament and I found that as long as you're not using those two, even trying to get a flawless victory on 3 goons is harder than it looks, because there's probably going to be a couple Pistols that you just can't stop without those two guys.

Unknown

walkyourpath wrote:

We've had two Heroics now where neither of those covers were allowed and tons of players still reported nodes in the 300+ range in those events. Maybe it was just the one Heroic with a 400 ceiling, but scaling was not appreciably improved with or without the new ceiling in events where they're locked out. I just can't see Spidey/C.Mags being the root cause here.

The levels on heroic Jugg did not go above 230, but I don't recall anyone close to hitting 230 enemies in heroic Jugg. In the case of heroic Venom, it seems like community scaling was responsible for most of the scaling, and while the deadly bracket sure felt like it was impossible, I don't remember seeing stuff hitting 395 other than the guys who mysteriously started with level 300 enemies (which is probably some other bug with the system). I know Interference was at 280 by the time first round ended and it probably shot up even more, but that mission was also especially higher than the rest of the missions. We're certainly not talking about 395s across the board and 300s on essentials. The Human Torch required mission didn't seem to ever go above 200 and they're quite beatable even in that range thanks to Yelena being present in all of them. The rest of the missions are pretty nuts but that's because they feature very nasty combinations of enemies and didn't even need the ultra high levels to wipe the floor with you when you have say Venom + 2 purple AP generators.