over 300 points lost in pvp inn under 5 mintues

Unknown

rooter wrote:

I completely agree. However, they won't change it because they make money by people shielding themselves. I really wish they could come up with some other cash grab that wasn't game breaking. They could at least limit it to one attack per 10 minutes or one attack on the player for each attack they make over an hour.

I think your mistaken its quite easy to shield every event without spending a dollar. Assuming you get over 900 points and therefore likely finish top 25 you would be getting 150HP which is enough for a 8hr shield. Anything you get from your alliance is just gravy. Also the companies report verifies that shielding is a very small portion of revenues (http://venturebeat.com/2014/04/08/marve ... f=obinsite).

Now for the advice part of this post. Shielding is necessary! Personally I try to never play the last hour of a PVP event and try hard not to play last 3 hours. Personally I shoot for 600 points the first day of the event, then go for 1000+ and shield. I say 600 because I have generally found that the number of attacks you will recieve before reaching 600 points is substantially less than after, so I camp out the first night right around 600. I usually lose 50 to 100 points over 24 hrs. But you also need to consider who your using, if for example your running the cMags infinte turn strategy you can be sure that the AI isn't doing that on defense. So have a look at your roster and work in some of the better Defensive characters like Hood, Hulk, Storm, etc. as not only will this possibly result in wins but also people will consider skipping you.

That said I agree they need to scale the gains and losses back a bit. During this last Doom event I was at 1000 point with 12 hours to go and got attacked by someone with 50 points. If I retaliated I would get only 1 point, so of course I skipped. I can only assume that I attacked the person near the start of the event and they didn't play/retaliate till the last 12 hours. I also don't think that they can really limit the number of attacks you get but they certianly can limit the number of points you lose. Say limit it to 50 point per 10 minutes and eveyone who attacked you still gets points as per usual, at least then with a fast team you could hold your ground.

Unknown

The ELO system is setup that a rating of +200 means you win about 75% of the time.

This means if you win 100% of the time on offense, someone with a score 200 will fail to win against you 50% of the time while your team is on defense, which is pretty much the limit of the most powerful defensive teams in the game can do against even fairly weak teams (e.g. 2X85 + featured). Of course, in reality it's helped by the fact that if your team has even a halfway decent chance of winning on defense (say, 20%), people will probably skip you for something else, so even though nobody actually wins 50% on defense at the top, you certainly could have a team strong enough that acts as if he wins 50% on defense from the extra skips. Still, 50% defensive win is still pretty much the limit of team strengths go.

Any deviation from this is quickly corrected by the point gain system.

In practice this means no matter how strong your team is you should expect to stablize at 200 points above where the masses currently are. Certainly as you hit the 1000 point range there's almost no way someone with 800 points will actually lose to your defensive team 50% of the time. Part of being good at this game is knowing when your rating is obviously far beyond your limitation and then shield to protect it. From what I can tell these threads you got guys whose team are actually below the power level of a particular rating (e.g. rating 1000 is generally occupied by max roster teams) that doesn't realize the system will quickly correct itself if your rating is wrong. Rather than protect the incorrect rating with a shield, people try to tough it out and get beaten down just as the system predicts.

Unknown

Slarow wrote:

tcourtney wrote:

SirKopath wrote:

tcourtney wrote:

I wish they would just make it so the defense team could not actually lose points, just the winning team gaining points that way. Coming out of a win to a -90 + is just pathetic and utter ****. Having close to 500pts and 5min later having 234 just pisses me off to no end...what exactly is FUN about that?

This doesn't work. If you can't lose points, then the game becomes a total grind fest, and whomever can play the most and sleep the least wins.

Works better than 15 teams hitting you in the time you can hit 1...how the fudge is that fair?

You are being retaliated against for all the attacks you made earlier. Remember that every time you attack in your grind up to the top, you are opening yourself up to a retaliation. Also remember that you are not the only one playing at the end of the tourney to get the top spot. There are 1000 other players in your bracket, if only 1/3 of them are competitive and playing at the end, you are up against 333 other people, many of whom are better than you. Not everyone gets top 10, as much as people feel their work deserves it.

The game has shields, which puts it miles ahead of another marvel game I play where that mechanic does not exist, and you have no choice but to get pounded at the end of a tourney.

While that is true, the fact that people from other brackets can be hit and can definitely hit you makes that whole struggle to get top 50 or higher kinda pointless. Especially if you being taken down by however many people that are playing outside your bracket. That's not actually top 50 by any stretch of the imagination.

Unknown

Slarow wrote:

Oletheos wrote:

I wish there was a way that when your attacked the game takes you out of anyone else's Que then once the fight is over you gi back in so only 1 person can attack you at a time.

This change would make it so 0 people can attack you at a time, not 1. It also would be a free shield, just start a match and don't end it.

How does 1 person attacking you and removing you from the que go to 0 people attacking you. I don't get the math where 1= 0.

And I don't mean against retaliations either. 5 or more people hitting you in the last 30 min isn't all retaliations. It's new people hitting you. People should still be able to retaliate you when ever

MarvelMan

Oletheos wrote:

Slarow wrote:

Oletheos wrote:

I wish there was a way that when your attacked the game takes you out of anyone else's Que then once the fight is over you gi back in so only 1 person can attack you at a time.

This change would make it so 0 people can attack you at a time, not 1. It also would be a free shield, just start a match and don't end it.

How does 1 person attacking you and removing you from the que go to 0 people attacking you. I don't get the math where 1= 0.

And I don't mean against retaliations either. 5 or more people hitting you in the last 30 min isn't all retaliations. It's new people hitting you. People should still be able to retaliate you when ever

It can equal 0 in that if you work with someone you can create a loophole where you are effectively shielding without paying for one. There are definitely MMR bubbles (although less so the last few weeks) where you would be able to coordinate with someone to simultaneously attack each other, or have a group (alliance) that agrees to work that way. I know I see my alliance mates more than I would like (often skip, sometimes dont notice: sorry pasa_).

Unknown

MarvelMan wrote:

It can equal 0 in that if you work with someone you can create a loophole where you are effectively shielding without paying for one. There are definitely MMR bubbles (although less so the last few weeks) where you would be able to coordinate with someone to simultaneously attack each other, or have a group (alliance) that agrees to work that way. I know I see my alliance mates more than I would like (often skip, sometimes dont notice: sorry pasa_).

Coordination doesn't matter much unless shields are also involved, and when shields are involved there are obviously all kinds of interesting results that can happen. Even if the top 5 alliances all agree to purposely lose any guy whose name start with 'k' to pump their scores score up, it'd only take a handful of guys not on the plan to ruin this plan. Back when shielded opponents show up, I could be hitting a guy with 2000 rating who has a Bagman tank team, and even though I'm getting 48 points win, it's still hard to increase your score when 3 guys are hitting me for 35 each game too.

MarvelMan

Phantron wrote:

MarvelMan wrote:

It can equal 0 in that if you work with someone you can create a loophole where you are effectively shielding without paying for one. There are definitely MMR bubbles (although less so the last few weeks) where you would be able to coordinate with someone to simultaneously attack each other, or have a group (alliance) that agrees to work that way. I know I see my alliance mates more than I would like (often skip, sometimes dont notice: sorry pasa_).

Coordination doesn't matter much unless shields are also involved, and when shields are involved there are obviously all kinds of interesting results that can happen. Even if the top 5 alliances all agree to purposely lose any guy whose name start with 'k' to pump their scores score up, it'd only take a handful of guys not on the plan to ruin this plan. Back when shielded opponents show up, I could be hitting a guy with 2000 rating who has a Bagman tank team, and even though I'm getting 48 points win, it's still hard to increase your score when 3 guys are hitting me for 35 each game too.

My point was in reference to the suggestion that if you were attacked it would lock you out from a second attack. I like the idea of reducing the volume of hits you take if youre unshielded the last 4 or 9 hours since all the shielded people arent showing up it reduces the pool, often to the severe detriment of the people around the average or higher.

Unknown

MarvelMan wrote:

My point was in reference to the suggestion that if you were attacked it would lock you out from a second attack. I like the idea of reducing the volume of hits you take if youre unshielded the last 4 or 9 hours since all the shielded people arent showing up it reduces the pool, often to the severe detriment of the people around the average or higher.

Although only D3 can verify this, I thought the game already drops you off of new matchups if you're inactive for a very long time? I remember seeing a lot of guys sitting unshielded with relatively high points at the end of tournament untouched. Yes it could be that their roster is considered strong relatively to their opponents, but usually when I look at their roster I see nothing that'd indicate why people should be avoiding this guy. Of course you're still responsible for any existing debt you may have (retaliations and whoever already queued you up).

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

MarvelMan wrote:

My point was in reference to the suggestion that if you were attacked it would lock you out from a second attack. I like the idea of reducing the volume of hits you take if youre unshielded the last 4 or 9 hours since all the shielded people arent showing up it reduces the pool, often to the severe detriment of the people around the average or higher.

Although only D3 can verify this, I thought the game already drops you off of new matchups if you're inactive for a very long time? I remember seeing a lot of guys sitting unshielded with relatively high points at the end of tournament untouched. Yes it could be that their roster is considered strong relatively to their opponents, but usually when I look at their roster I see nothing that'd indicate why people should be avoiding this guy. Of course you're still responsible for any existing debt you may have (retaliations and whoever already queued you up).

Not really. You still show up but I believe newly unshielded people often jump to the front of a queue.

Also, unshielded people sometimes luck out in their MMR bubble. Them's the breaks of the game.

Phaserhawk

The thing to remember is that as you play you show up in searches. Once you shield, it takes a bit but you get washed out of the search opponent feature assuming everyone was playing. When you unshieled and a vast majority of players were, it was slim pickings hence you getting smashed. It's a game of hide and go seek right now in PvP. You have to time your runs and shields and know that after about 10-15 mintues of being sheilded you will starting getting a big target especially if you aren't scary enough to some teams.

Vinmarc43

Like I mentioned before, your availability as a target should exist only once, meaning you cannot get it multiple times when your playing, after someone beets you ,your tag goes back behind queue in another bracket, so this would be fair for everyone, there`s enough player out there to fill the void.

Unknown

Vinmarc43 wrote:

Like I mentioned before, your availability as a target should exist only once, meaning you cannot get it multiple times when your playing, after someone beets you ,your tag goes back behind queue in another bracket, so this would be fair for everyone, there`s enough player out there to fill the void.

The Devs seem very mindful of limiting complexity in queues, whether that's to save data transferred, reduce lag, reduce server load or laziness who knows. I imagine mostly to reduce player side lag since they seem to queue 5 ish players up for you in advance (I have been able to skip a few times without any connection to the MPQ servers when they have been their usual sturdy self before receiving blanks instead of players). Therefore you exist both in players retaliation listings AND in people's to hit queues at any given time.

That would make for a very large overhaul to get what you want. You'd also have the problem of several people attacking you in the time it takes someone to beat you meaning even then you could be hit multiple times.
On top of that people often queue up targets to attack before, say, unshielding for a push including spending ISO to skip so it seems unreasonable to have a person you've skipped to disappear from your queue because someone else beat you to it.

Probably the most straightforward way to mitigate the effect the OP encountered would be to remove the late event points bracketing which overwrites people's MMR bracketing. The trouble with that is you dilute any benefit to having advanced your roster because literally anyone in a favourable mid level MMR position will have a better time than a levelled 3* roster facing other 3* rosters AND it would massively benefit anyone who has managed to tank into a lower MMR bracket. The way things bracket now means you at least have to use a shield to keep your ill gotten gains intact.

I don't think there's any way to stop people being hit hard late on in events if they are a juicy target for their score which doesn't introduce other problems. I agree it's frustrating as hell to see your score evaporate far faster than you can gain it but I don't see a decent and fair solution TBH.

Having said that I would be all for retaliations on people who hit you netting a minimum of, say, 2/3 of the points they took from you to at least make it worth hitting them back. Having someone 500 points below you hit you for 50 points with the tempting offer of 1-2 for the retaliation is a bit dumb.

Unknown

bonfire01 wrote:

Vinmarc43 wrote:

Like I mentioned before, your availability as a target should exist only once, meaning you cannot get it multiple times when your playing, after someone beets you ,your tag goes back behind queue in another bracket, so this would be fair for everyone, there`s enough player out there to fill the void.

The Devs seem very mindful of limiting complexity in queues, whether that's to save data transferred, reduce lag, reduce server load or laziness who knows. I imagine mostly to reduce player side lag since they seem to queue 5 ish players up for you in advance (I have been able to skip a few times without any connection to the MPQ servers when they have been their usual sturdy self before receiving blanks instead of players). Therefore you exist both in players retaliation listings AND in people's to hit queues at any given time.

That would make for a very large overhaul to get what you want. You'd also have the problem of several people attacking you in the time it takes someone to beat you meaning even then you could be hit multiple times.
On top of that people often queue up targets to attack before, say, unshielding for a push including spending ISO to skip so it seems unreasonable to have a person you've skipped to disappear from your queue because someone else beat you to it.

Probably the most straightforward way to mitigate the effect the OP encountered would be to remove the late event points bracketing which overwrites people's MMR bracketing. The trouble with that is you dilute any benefit to having advanced your roster because literally anyone in a favourable mid level MMR position will have a better time than a levelled 3* roster facing other 3* rosters AND it would massively benefit anyone who has managed to tank into a lower MMR bracket. The way things bracket now means you at least have to use a shield to keep your ill gotten gains intact.

I don't think there's any way to stop people being hit hard late on in events if they are a juicy target for their score which doesn't introduce other problems. I agree it's frustrating as hell to see your score evaporate far faster than you can gain it but I don't see a decent and fair solution TBH.

Having said that I would be all for retaliations on people who hit you netting a minimum of, say, 2/3 of the points they took from you to at least make it worth hitting them back. Having someone 500 points below you hit you for 50 points with the tempting offer of 1-2 for the retaliation is a bit dumb.

Again the simplest fix is to simply limit the amount of points that can me lost in a given time period. Say for example in a ten minute period you were going to be attacked by 4 people. One for 40 points, one for 30 points, one for 20 point and one for 10. The attacks happen in that order. Under the current method you would lose 100 points but under what I am sugesting you lose only 50 but your opponents still gain the 100 as normal. Basically the first guy hits you for 40, second for 30 (but you only lose 10), third for 20 (you lose 0), fourth for 10 (you lose 0). Players gaining points while you lose none already occurs when people are shielded so it shouldn't distort the game. And it should be very easy to program.

Unknown

The amount of points gained should be based on level and # of stars differential. A team of level 1's that beats a team of level 3's should gain relatively more points than a team of 1 *'s that beats another team of 1 *'s and conversely. So a team can feast on lesser teams, but the points will not be the same of facing lesser or greater talent.

Moreover, every loss should count the same amount of points, maybe 5 or 10. Why penalize someone because they have built a strong 3* star team or they made playing pvp a priority over other events?

Rusalka

PVP is the one thing in this game where being in Australia has actually worked out for me. Half the events end at 2:00 AM my time, so my only practical strategy is to do a final push late in the evening and then put up a three-hour shield just before I go to bed. Amazingly enough, that's also the best strategy! (Well, best for me, anyway, since I'm satisfied with a top 10 finish and don't belong to a competitive alliance. If I was trying to win the 4* covers or get my alliance into the top 100, I might not be so mellow about it.)

Moral

PVP over 500 is a zero sum game by design. If you lose 30 points, your opponent gained 30 points. The developers aren't interested in unchecked point infusions into the system, which is why shielding prevents a player from being placed into additional nodes. Attacks on shielded players inject extra points in the system driving up global scoring.

Why is increased global scoring a problem? It depends if you want to see all the progression reward numbers double or triple. I'm sure more than a few of us recall 3000 points to get your xforce or invisible woman progression reward cover.

As to why you're getting pounded? In the last 3 hours better than 80% of the top 10 shield. In fact, so many shield that above 700 points MMR seems to go out the window so high point players don't see the same 4 players if they skip.

The shielded players are not visible.

You are.

To everyone

Many of those not shielded have two level 141 characters. How does your roster compare? And would you attack his 141 CMags-lazy Thor or your team in their position?

Take it from a guy who was in your position 6 weeks ago: aim for your target score at least 4 hours before the event ends, shield up and let it ride. Break shield and some guy with a 141 CMags-patch duo is going to use you for a 2 minute win on his sprint to get 1100 in the last 100 minutes of the event.

Unknown

This game is very good at correcting anybody whose rating is significantly higher than their roster would indicate.

Let us imagine a moment frozen in time and you found out that all the 141X3 guys are hanging out at 1000 rating, and for whatever reason you got 1000 rating with 3X100 characters.

Now for anybody that queues up a random 1000 rating opponent, they'd see either a 141X3 or you at 100X3. What target will they attack? You, of course. Also, people remember when an extra-weak player is available. See Kyipgate to see how easily it is for people to identify mysteriously weak players with high rating (Kyip's rating was insanely high due to the bug and his team was weak for that rating even if he wasn't bugged). They'd simply beat you, and then skip until they see you again, and again.

Being good at this game is recognizing when you're above what your rating ought to be and put up a shield, or suffer the consequences. This isn't exclusive to weak rosters too. Suppose another player with 141X3 somehow hit 1200 and becomes unshielded, he will be attacked by a lot of 3X141 guys sitting at 1000 because his rating is significantly higher than the expected norm.

Unknown

Hey, brochacho, I'm quite certain I remember seeing your name come up in my queue an awful lot. You know that "MMR hell" that we're always talking about where only four names come up over and over? You were one of mine. Maybe other people saw the same thing?

Some info on what causes this would be nice. Seeing the same names over and over again is rough, and it's gotta be even worse for those people that are the only name showing up for god knows how many people.

EDIT: looks like some info on this got posted right above me as I typed this...

Unknown

thecapnjoe wrote:

Hey, brochacho, I'm quite certain I remember seeing your name come up in my queue an awful lot. You know that "MMR hell" that we're always talking about where only four names come up over and over? You were one of mine. Maybe other people saw the same thing?

Some info on what causes this would be nice. Seeing the same names over and over again is rough, and it's gotta be even worse for those people that are the only name showing up for god knows how many people.

EDIT: looks like some info on this got posted right above me as I typed this...

I don't really see the MMR hell problem anymore, but even though the amount of players you'll see on average has been increased significantly, as Kyipgate shows, people will always track down anyone who has a particularly weak roster relative to their rating. Even if you have the strongest roster in the game, if you happen to be about 300 points higher than the average 141X3, they'll still hunt you down and take 40 points from you per game.

kensterr

Can someone please explain how shielding works?

In the recent DO tourney I was shielded at around 986 points. Everyone else in the Top 10 was shielded as well. I wanted to break my shield to push to 1000 points and 1100 points if possible. So I skipped lots of matches through the nodes and found 2-3 players who are shielded in my Top 10. These people were not in my nodes before this.

If I understand the replies in this thread properly shielding should have made these people including myself invisible to others, but this is not the case. I myself was hit 2-3 times by the same player while shielded. So at which point range do shielded players appear in people's nodes?