This Game Isn't Fun Anymore

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

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.

I certainly got into the 210-230 range for Heroic Juggs, and I played it sparingly. 1 is hardly a useful sample size, I know, but that was my experience. The scaling for Heroic Venom was lower than what we saw for Hunt and are likely to see for the end of Sim, certainly, but the limited roster for Heroic made those levels just as sticky as 300+s in a regular PvE.

My point is that if you take Spidey/C.Mags out, the scaling does decrease, but it also means that you just need to hit a lower threshold before things become intolerable again, so you've made no relative gain in the playability or fun of the event. The community scaling is what needs to be tweaked as you mentioned. I feel like the level ceilings per node proposed earlier in the thread would be an excellent compromise. You could even make the ceilings higher for the character required nodes to even out the advantage given to those who possess that cover.

TazFTW

More personal scaling, less community scaling? I think the grinders affect community scaling a lot. Maybe make the 4 rewards easier to get? **** progression rewards? *shrug*

Maybe reset scaling to a base level for everyone before every PvE event? These events are 6-9 day slogs. Use round 1 to determine personal scaling. Make round 1 limited/low points so that it should not affect the final standings much. If a noob transitioning to 1* can't handle round 1 then round 2 and 3 would scale down. More aggressive mid-event scaling for later rounds to prevent intentionally no-showing/tanking round 1 or tanking in the later rounds. Personal scaling should be per node because I think everyone should be able to clear every non-essential node at least once (in the later rounds). So, maybe have completion % of nodes won/nodes available be part of the equation.

Unknown

TazFTW wrote:

More personal scaling, less community scaling? I think the grinders affect community scaling a lot. Maybe make the 4 rewards easier to get? **** progression rewards? *shrug*

Maybe reset scaling to a base level for everyone before every PvE event? These events are 6-9 day slogs. Use round 1 to determine personal scaling. Make round 1 limited/low points so that it should not affect the final standings much. If a noob transitioning to 1* can't handle round 1 then round 2 and 3 would scale down. More aggressive mid-event scaling for later rounds to prevent intentionally no-showing/tanking round 1 or tanking in the later rounds. Personal scaling should be per node because I think everyone should be able to clear every non-essential node at least once (in the later rounds). So, maybe have completion % of nodes won/nodes available be part of the equation.

Since there's a big gap between different players, doesn't that argue that personal scaling is the biggest factor?

Unknown

The total amount of scaling is a relatively fixed number, because the enemy has to get hard enough to create separation between players. Whether that's done by personal or community scaling, at some point whoever is #1 has to win more games than whoever is #2 and that will drive up the scaling, and this has to happen in all the major tier cutoffs as well.

Right now it feels like it's about half and half between personal and community. You can make it 100% personal but then you'd just be winning one game and have everything go up by 20 levels because there's no community scaling now. People who have problem with the scaling will still have problem with enemies that simply started on a high level with no scaling. The point of the scaling is that it is supposed to filter out the weaker players. If it didn't knock out some players, then it clearly didn't do its job. The top 5 or so tiers of PvE rewards can basically be considered as increasing levels of craziness, and they're fairly insurmountable in general. That is, to the guy finishing #7, the 2 guys in the #1 and #2 are far crazier than anything that guy can do, and to the guy finishing #17, the 8 guys in the #3-#10 are far crazier than anything that guy can do. But something has to be there for the separation in the tiers of craziness. If there is no scaling it'd be some mission starting at 230X3 or 395X3. If missions are all easy then it'd be some guy grinding missions 1 point at a time. The PvE tiers will happen no matter what you do, but scaling at least stops some of the crazier ways this can happen like seeing who can grind more 1 point nodes.

Unknown

While I understand your points, Phantron, and I think they are valid, the underlying problem for me is very simple. I'm not having fun. Whatever that is attributable to, and whether or not it reflects a majority experience, it is my experience. I'm not a game designer and it's not my job to make MPQ fun to play, so I will offer no suggestions myself.

The big dilemma to me is that alliances are a team effort and everyone needs to keep up their scores in order to validate the efforts of your mates with appropriate prizes. I can "go casual" at any time and no longer care if PvE is fun or not. But that leads to either letting down my alliance mates, or quitting my alliance. One of our members already did that.

So while I see what you're saying about the necessity of scaling, etc. It doesn't resolve my underlying problem.

One last thing. I've seen a few people claim that the devs don't care or won't listen, but I expect that you're wrong about that. IceIX is, in fact, in my alliance, he does participate in chat and he is a regular guy that enjoys the game and takes pride in his work, just like anybody. He gets hit by scaling, MMR hell, and all the other things we complain about as much as anyone, so he recognizes what is good and what is not so good. He might get hit worse than many of us, since he does not take the drastic measures to 'game the system' that many of us do. So while I can't speak for everyone there, I know at least one of them and I figure the rest are the same.

Unknown

Personally, I'm not finding the game less "fun", but rather less engaging.

As stated in this thread, how many times can you run the same event before you start seeing participation start to decline? Twice? Three times? For example, the Army of One event. First time, woohoo! Punisher is buffed, alright! Second time? Oh, ok, it's this one again, guess I will play it. By the third run? Psh! Why would I want to do it again? The same with PvE. Is this the plan, to rerun every chapter from 1 everytime a new chapter is in the works? Hello Red ISO event! Nice to see you for the umpteenth time. It gets tiring doing rehashes of everything all the time. Doesn't make it any less fun, but it doesn't hold the same allure as the first time you see it. Forcing a character to be grouped in a themed event doesn't make it engaging, at least IMO. It's supposed to encourage team comp building? Well, that's awesome except for the fact when the characters that would go best with are under covered/ under levelled characters that makes no sense to try to 0- max in the span of the event, for a reward that no longer is relevant.

Once you reach high level characters, you have nothing left to work for, to be brutally honest. Collecting another new character just to spend the 200k iso you have stockpiled? And then wait and stockpile until next new character ad nauseum? That's no longer engaging, that's doing the time on the treadmill until you are done running it.

Nothing has changed in essence. PvP events still saddle you with a 3rd you don't really want to play, and buffing them from 15 to 28 (scary!), pve has become predictable in the fact that you just know that the next event will have "essential" nodes with a featured new character buffed into oblivion, which can be obtained easily from a 10 pack, so why bother trying hard in the release event?

A point that kinda grinds here is that there is nothing differentiating two characters apart. My 141 spidey undoubtedly will be the same as the one sitting across from him in the encounter. Maybe make it so that characters can have some kind of equipable item that modifies an ability in some way, or gives them a permanent boost to something just for having it equipped. Maybe theme events can have like an item token for that particular character.

The point being after all that, is that nothing has really changed to make it feel special and different anymore after you get over that new car smell when it first got released. What differentiates it now from other match 3's out in the market? Most have abilities that you can activate during the game that affects the outcome. The only real difference is instead of increasing your score, you are trying to take away a "player two's" score.

Something has to make it feel fresh again. Which is hard, not saying otherwise. And it can't stop at there. Innovation has to keep on happening, or you lose customers. Focusing too much on a single aspect just doesn't cut it.

I realize that this reads a bit disjointed, and admittedly, I didnt think I would get that much into writing a post here, but I love that this is a marvel game and a puzzle quest game yet it saddens me that from my experience my interest is waning because everything is getting recycled and thrown back at us, which kinda screams laziness to me as a player.

kensterr

Well, one event that will make everyone happy... erm, rather, small whales like me happy, is to offer 500% extra Hero Points or 500% extra ISOs for the same current prices. P2W FTW!

Imagine no longer having to rely so much on placing in events once you have some covers - you can just easily buy those covers since you've got much more Hero Points to spent! And ISOs are more abundant! No need to spend 30 minutes going through level 400 enemies just to get 20 ISO! Players win. Demiurge win. Only ones losing out are those who refuse to pay for anything.

Spoit

That would be even more silly on their part since it would cannibalize the big whales

kensterr

Spoit wrote:

That would be even more silly on their part since it would cannibalize the big whales

level 400 enemies in PVE is already silly, so it's not like they aren't used to doing silly things

Unknown

dlaw008 wrote:

While I understand your points, Phantron, and I think they are valid, the underlying problem for me is very simple. I'm not having fun. Whatever that is attributable to, and whether or not it reflects a majority experience, it is my experience. I'm not a game designer and it's not my job to make MPQ fun to play, so I will offer no suggestions myself.

The big dilemma to me is that alliances are a team effort and everyone needs to keep up their scores in order to validate the efforts of your mates with appropriate prizes. I can "go casual" at any time and no longer care if PvE is fun or not. But that leads to either letting down my alliance mates, or quitting my alliance. One of our members already did that.

So while I see what you're saying about the necessity of scaling, etc. It doesn't resolve my underlying problem.

One last thing. I've seen a few people claim that the devs don't care or won't listen, but I expect that you're wrong about that. IceIX is, in fact, in my alliance, he does participate in chat and he is a regular guy that enjoys the game and takes pride in his work, just like anybody. He gets hit by scaling, MMR hell, and all the other things we complain about as much as anyone, so he recognizes what is good and what is not so good. He might get hit worse than many of us, since he does not take the drastic measures to 'game the system' that many of us do. So while I can't speak for everyone there, I know at least one of them and I figure the rest are the same.

I avoided talking about alliances because alliances force you to play in a way that is likely to hose your scaling. It's not clear to me how this can be reconciliated so I'm focused solely on the solo experience. But if you want to talk about alliances, even if there is no scaling you can still let down your fellow alliance by simply being in the wrong timezone. It's not something I know how to resolve.

There has to be better transparency with the whole scaling because you shouldn't have to feel like there's some way of playing that somehow gets you a huge advantage personally (and by association in an alliance). If you decide to just grind everything down to 1, that should never be worse than not grinding everything down to 1. The advantage for doing so can be very small, but you shouldn't feel like you're somehow worse for playing more and that's the current problem with scaling because something like that can easily happen. The game should not encourage you to play more (the crazy 1 point grinds in TaT is what happens when playing more always works) but being punished for playing more is completely backwards. Playing more should offer an advantage, however minimal, over playing less, and this is something the current scaling/rubberband system fails to do.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

If you decide to just grind everything down to 1, that should never be worse than not grinding everything down to 1. The advantage for doing so can be very small, but you shouldn't feel like you're somehow worse for playing more and that's the current problem with scaling because something like that can easily happen.

I think that you should reconsider that opinion. Isn't part of the attraction of games that you can figure out how to win by playing smarter rather than harder? If grinding all the nodes to a nub is the best strategy, then why even bother playing, we can all put on our Juggernaut hats and run into the wall until our ears bleed.

Unknown

ZenBrillig wrote:

Phantron wrote:

If you decide to just grind everything down to 1, that should never be worse than not grinding everything down to 1. The advantage for doing so can be very small, but you shouldn't feel like you're somehow worse for playing more and that's the current problem with scaling because something like that can easily happen.

I think that you should reconsider that opinion. Isn't part of the attraction of games that you can figure out how to win by playing smarter rather than harder? If grinding all the nodes to a nub is the best strategy, then why even bother playing, we can all put on our Juggernaut hats and run into the wall until our ears bleed.

Ignoring issue like time and whether you can actually beat everything mission enough times to get down to 1, there's no way not grinding down to 1 should ever be better. If there exists some strategy that is better than grinding down to 1 that doesn't involve grinding down to 1, an even better strategy would be to take whatever that strategy is and then grind whatever's left to 1, because that'd be even more points, and yet that strategy is just grinding everything down to 1.

At any rate to put in more precise terms, currently the popular strategy is do some missions with 2 hours left. Let's say you do 15 missions with 2 hours left and you already know what they're going to be ahead of time. It should be better if you start even earlier and do missions that aren't part of the last 15 you plan to do, because you'd still have the exact same missions left with 2 hours left plus something extra from the nonconflicting missions. Unfortunately, this might not work because of scaling, because the scaling can potentially make you no longer capable of doing the 15 missions you plan to do. You're not playing 'smarter' because you're strictly doing more on top of whatever your previous winning strategy was, so it should never be worse than whatever your previous strategy is, and yet right now we don't know for sure if that's really a good idea, due to the difficulty of figuring out how scaling works.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

Ignoring issue like time and whether you can actually beat everything mission enough times to get down to 1, there's no way not grinding down to 1 should ever be better. If there exists some strategy that is better than grinding down to 1 that doesn't involve grinding down to 1, an even better strategy would be to take whatever that strategy is and then grind whatever's left to 1, because that'd be even more points, and yet that strategy is just grinding everything down to 1.

At any rate to put in more precise terms, currently the popular strategy is do some missions with 2 hours left. Let's say you do 15 missions with 2 hours left and you already know what they're going to be ahead of time. It should be better if you start even earlier and do missions that aren't part of the last 15 you plan to do, because you'd still have the exact same missions left with 2 hours left plus something extra from the nonconflicting missions. Unfortunately, this might not work because of scaling, because the scaling can potentially make you no longer capable of doing the 15 missions you plan to do. You're not playing 'smarter' because you're strictly doing more on top of whatever your previous winning strategy was, so it should never be worse than whatever your previous strategy is, and yet right now we don't know for sure if that's really a good idea, due to the difficulty of figuring out how scaling works.

Well, but as you point out, that strategy only holds true if the node values and difficulties are stable. How the node values change is well understood, with the unfortunate consequence that every knows how to game that system. Scaling, on the other hand, is more opaque - but I'd argue that's a good thing. If scaling were transparent, then this game truly *would* be boring, as everyone would just follow optimal strategy and that would be and end to it. But even though the exact scaling formula may remain a mystery, the broad outlines are pretty clear from the forums.

Actually, the whole thing reminds me a lot of trying to figure out agro mechanics in MMORPG raids. You have to figure out what will allow you to avoid getting pwned. That's the key component in playing smarter in MPQ PvE.

Unknown

ZenBrillig wrote:

Well, but as you point out, that strategy only holds true if the node values and difficulties are stable. How the node values change is well understood, with the unfortunate consequence that every knows how to game that system. Scaling, on the other hand, is more opaque - but I'd argue that's a good thing. If scaling were transparent, then this game truly *would* be boring, as everyone would just follow optimal strategy and that would be and end to it. But even though the exact scaling formula may remain a mystery, the broad outlines are pretty clear from the forums.

Opaque and makes sense are two totally different things. You'd be hard pressed to know exactly what your rubberband modifier ought to be at any given time (without seeing the missions themselves) let alone how it's expected to change over time, but the system makes sense. The scaling system has some rather large, fairly unpredictable (at least so far) jumps as you clear stuff, and this may have a huge impact on your ability to clear later missions. While we have some idea of what causes these events, it's certainly far from solved. In general I've found the standard 'play more' strategy still works especially if you avoid using Spiderman/Magneto, but you just can't know for sure most of the time. In my case I'm prepared to take the 'Magneto/Spiderman penalty' if needed so it doesn't affect me, but someone without those two characters can have their playing experience adversely affected if they accidentally triggered some scaling factor that makes enemies too hard to be beaten without those two characters.

I'd say in general the sudden level jumps in Magneto/Spiderman-less team is actually from the community scaling which obviously doesn't care about what you're doing, but there's just no way to know for sure, and it's this specter of uncertainty that makes it very hard to formulate any kind of coherent strategy. It's bad enough that community scaling kicks in at unpredictable time, but you don't even know whether your levels increased because of community scaling or something you did to your personal scaling. It's also causing a lot of unneeded grief. Suppose if you know everything went up by 100 levels because of community scaling, then at least you know everyone else is hosed. Sure, it might affect you more than another guy, but at least you're not singled out for doing something wrong. One huge improvement they can make is just have the community scaling displayed prominently so that you can know whether your missions are going up because of what you did or because of what the community did.

Spoit

Honestly phantron,with how much you complain about how trivial the game is, and how willing you are to go ahead and deal with lvl 400 enemies anyway, it's hard not to take those kind of statements with a handful of salty

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

Opaque and makes sense are two totally different things. You'd be hard pressed to know exactly what your rubberband modifier ought to be at any given time (without seeing the missions themselves) let alone how it's expected to change over time, but the system makes sense. The scaling system has some rather large, fairly unpredictable (at least so far) jumps as you clear stuff, and this may have a huge impact on your ability to clear later missions. While we have some idea of what causes these events, it's certainly far from solved. In general I've found the standard 'play more' strategy still works especially if you avoid using Spiderman/Magneto, but you just can't know for sure most of the time. In my case I'm prepared to take the 'Magneto/Spiderman penalty' if needed so it doesn't affect me, but someone without those two characters can have their playing experience adversely affected if they accidentally triggered some scaling factor that makes enemies too hard to be beaten without those two characters.

I'd say in general the sudden level jumps in Magneto/Spiderman-less team is actually from the community scaling which obviously doesn't care about what you're doing, but there's just no way to know for sure, and it's this specter of uncertainty that makes it very hard to formulate any kind of coherent strategy. It's bad enough that community scaling kicks in at unpredictable time, but you don't even know whether your levels increased because of community scaling or something you did to your personal scaling. It's also causing a lot of unneeded grief. Suppose if you know everything went up by 100 levels because of community scaling, then at least you know everyone else is hosed. Sure, it might affect you more than another guy, but at least you're not singled out for doing something wrong. One huge improvement they can make is just have the community scaling displayed prominently so that you can know whether your missions are going up because of what you did or because of what the community did.

I disagree. My data show that the community scaling effects are both gradual and reasonably predictable, with out any sudden jumps. I believe all sudden jumps are the result of personal scaling.

Unknown

Just wanted to point out that the idea behind Heroic Oscorp was brilliant. Competition was made less important because the real prizes were progression based. Such a model could obsolete scaling and rubber banding by making the competition irrelevant. Heroic Oscorp was a failure, but it was a failure because progression numbers were impossible, node prizes were super limited, and scaling was violently sodomizing everyone from the get-go.

The things that were wrong with that event have only unevenly improved. The things that could have been right with it were basically tossed out with the bath water.

Spoit

Moon 17 wrote:

Just wanted to point out that the idea behind Heroic Oscorp was brilliant. Competition was made less important because the real prizes were progression based. Such a model could obsolete scaling and rubber banding by making the competition irrelevant. Heroic Oscorp was a failure, but it was a failure because progression numbers were impossible, node prizes were super limited, and scaling was violently sodomizing everyone from the get-go.

The things that were wrong with that event have only unevenly improved. The things that could have been right with it were basically tossed out with the bath water.

If anything, it seems like those are the things they're implementing now!

Unknown

Three points.

1st, I thought scaling was okay last pave. I was able to play all nodes except two, the first go around. I was able to have fun and experience close to the entire first set of sub events before scaling really kicked up a notch. And in fairness, I love the new progressive MMR ceiling for PvP events. It is so nice for more rewards to be obtainable.

2nd, whether you can be competitive with scaling misses the point. This is a game and should have a "fun" element. I'm going to go out on a limb to say if people rather write and complain than play the game, the "fun" element needs work.

3rd, and the biggest issue, if your "hardcore" players are going to take the time and effort to communicate that their in game experience needs improvement, why are we continually ignored. It's like telling. A store you hate stale bread, but they insist the stale bread is a fine product. To me it seems clear that there is not a sufficient customer satisfaction element to the current businnes paradigm. Short of every alliance banning an event, we will continue to be dismissed. And let's face it, that will never happen.

I will say when iiceix (sorry for the spelling) began communicating changes and the reason for the changes, I really felt customer relations was turning the corner. But with changes like single 2* covers in PvP, no more guarantee covers in packs, the new progressive MMR ceiling, it seems like a big step back into the abyss.

I guess that's my long way of saying that I guess we need more communication, preferably in both directions.

Unknown

Heroic Oscorp didn't scale beyond your roster for the initial starting point. I sure don't remember seeing any of the missions got higher, not that they needed those extra levels to beat you up. And, for as much as people knock Heroic Oscorp, even not counting the mysterious guys that are close to the X Force that nobody ever saw, people definitely were able to hit the first 3* cover, which is something that cannot be said with any recent PvE event. When you don't have rubberbanding you also don't have any false hopes. If you pulled 1000 point the first day and the event went for 5 day you know you had a shot at the 5K reward and no shot at the 10K, instead of right now where you figure you have no shot at anything but maybe a miracle happens and rubberbanding somehow takes you there. Of course this doesn't actually happen and we all come here and complaint about how nobody got the progression reward is dumb. There were a whole mess of unobtainable rewards in heroic Oscorp too, but it is very easy to see you had no shot at getting them so at least you wouldn't have wasted time trying to get them.

An event like Heroic Oscorp running for a month should work well. Make it like an elite event where you got to pay 300 HP to enter and give relatively generous progression rewards. Placement work can be weak like they were in heroic Oscorp (a single 3* cover). Heck just pull the same trick for elite event, make the progression reward at 100, 200, and 300 heroic token and an intro mission that gives 300 PvE points, and call it 'guaranteed to get at least 3 heroic tokens!'