Structural analysis, PvP model (long)

pheregas

Thank you OP and contributors.  This has been an interesting and fairly civil conversation and enlightening.

To suggest that in order to make the game more inclusive, we need to divide the two types of players into the casual versus placement styles is a stroke of genius.

Right now we have two PVP modes.  PVE and PVP.  Now that wasn't a typo.  Sure, you are not actively playing against individual player rosters in PVE, except that you kind of are because ultimate placement prizes are dictated by how optimally fast you play the game.  That's a competition of roster strength, alarm clock use, and now including tapping (which I just can't bring myself to do).

My greatest dream would be to play PVE and earn all the rewards from progression, by using whatever fun teams I want.  There may be some synergy between players that I haven't seen since I got into the "end-game."  It's been suggested before, and I'll say it again, PVE should be progression only.  I have 188 roster slots and the majority of them are exclusively used for milking the prize machine.  This makes me a little sad.  You could even extend it to being a single play through for progression.  If this is an option, it makes a win-based PVP a little more palatable since there would be a gameplay-time tradeoff, especially if they took max progression down to 25-30 wins.

The Casual vs. Placement modes would work very well with PVP and, IMHO, allow early level players to actually try PVP out.  In PVP, characters should be at full health afterwards.  Limiting my gameplay to Healthpack-regen is silly.

My wife has been playing casually for over a year now and she still refuses to play PVP because of the experience she had early on.  I also remember my early days where I'd fight tooth and claw for my 300 points, get my event token, then virtually run back and hide under my covers.  That's no fun.

Anyway, that's my 2 cents!

shartattack

The whole thing is just about different perspectives:
some people think doing a 3 hop to hit a reward is exciting vs some people find that stressful

some people like the idea of progressing your roster over time vs some people want access to most of the rewards early in their gameplay

some people want a game that requires strategy and tactics vs some people want a game to play on the toilet at work

some people want to make pvp a linear progression system vs some people realize that game mode exists already in pve


that being said, top level pve is way way more hardcore than top level pvp.  I am a professional adult with 3 kids.  I can do a hop while drinking my morning coffee, while on lunch break, on the toilet ( the "plop hop"), and throughout the evening.   7 minutes at a time every few hours. I have t5 in pvp many times.

Top level pve is 2-3 hours straight at the same time every day. For 3-7 days straight. Not even including tapping.  I have t10 1 time, over the summer, for fantastic covers in a later bracket.  Those people are way more hardcore, and no one is trying to drastically make pve more casual.

Spudgutter

shartattack said:

Top level pve is 2-3 hours straight at the same time every day. For 3-7 days straight. Not even including tapping.  I have t10 1 time, over the summer, for fantastic covers in a later bracket.  Those people are way more hardcore, and no one is trying to drastically make pve more casual.

All good points, with a minor correction.

Most people who have a problem with pvp is because the progression is just as difficult placement. Those two are way more intertwined. Pve on the other hand, allows you to get max progression just by playing at your leisure over the course of those 3 to 7 days.  Heck, by taking advantage of bracket flips, i can place top 50 in cl9 just by doing 6 clears per node(not even 7), and doing those clears spread throughout the day.   

They arent trying to make pve more casual because progression already is, its the high end players that are deciding to make the placement hardcore.  Make progression simpler and easier, without taking anything out, is all people are asking for.  I definitely lost out on covers and cp during wins based, but i understandand what they are trying to accomplish 

The rockett

shartattack said:

Top level pve is 2-3 hours straight at the same time every day. For 3-7 days straight. Not even including tapping.  I have t10 1 time, over the summer, for fantastic covers in a later bracket.  Those people are way more hardcore, and no one is trying to drastically make pve more casual.

What if you play both PVP and PVE at a very high level?   

MacEifer

The reason I find PvE is not nearly off as bad as PvP is because it scales well on rewards, transparency and challenge level.
You can look at your roster and say "I'll put in this much effort at a challenge level that suits me and I should get X out of it".
PvP doesn't scale that way. You either go all in or get almost nothing at a challenge level you can not really gauge beforehand.

alaeth

I like your ideas, and think they might help.

I agree the Ranks are messed up (and I think they know it too - hense the change to only gaining on "roster improving" things.

But, it's still broken.  Re-rostering the same 2* character every couple months shouldn't increase my rank.

Making the PvP brackets/arenas/dojos/whatevers purely based on roster (and then SCALING the entire roster to be competitive at that tier?!  Holy **** dude, that's crazy... but interesting.

Would I like to face a 370 OBW?  hmm... interesting, but better than the sea of Panthos or Gambolts I'm facing now.

RedLion

I like the idea of splitting to competitive/casual...I don't like the idea of 24-7 Balance of Power.

MacEifer

RedLion said:

I like the idea of splitting to competitive/casual...I don't like the idea of 24-7 Balance of Power.

Balance of Power was the "all characters boosted" event, right?

It's not supposed to be like that, more like a limited rotation the way boosts work right now.

You could argue that 4-8 characters on rotation would be enough to shake things up without just giving everyone a full competitive roster without having any actually qualified characters. If you could just field maxed 2* and 3*s you would run into real problems.
Also your champion levels would carry over, but there's no actual boost going on. a 3* with 50 champion levels would scale to a 4* with 50 champion levels the 4* bracket. Champion levels for 2*s would obviously be just double when scaled up.

The general idea is that unlike now, the roster capping would give you options for rewarding a wide collection as opposed to a narrow collection which you have now and greater variety.

RedLion

That would function better, and I appreciate what it solves. I still like other facets of the original idea better.

MacEifer

Wanted to give an update on my current PvP situation to put all this in context, this is for Doc Oc.

At the lowest CL I currently can select (CL6), I'm facing champed C4rol and DP (4*) and I couldn't pay my way out consistently. My Roster is literally a 300 Daredevil, then a few 255 5*s and then Kamala Khan at 196. My highest 4* are 4/0/1 C4rol at 131 and then a 127 Yondu and Coulson. I have no idea how this is supposed to work for me. If I could cap my roster to take out the Daredevil, I would be midfield in 3* land.

I'm not going to pout and yell "mwaaah fix this!", but I'd be hard pressed to find someone to make a sound argument on how I'm supposed to get any form of enjoyment out of this.

The rockett

SL doesn't matter on who you see.   You see all in the slice you play.  SL only matters for rewards.  Also remember there is a major holiday and not many playing.  

WelcomeDeath

MacEifer said:

Right now I would need to consider selling a 10 cover 5* to get placed more accurately, but even that is only guesswork.

In a well designed system you would not have this kind of penalty and frankly just because it works for a selective and small group of people doesn't mean it's well designed, you just designed your workaround well.

MacEifer said:

Wanted to give an update on my current PvP situation to put all this in context, this is for Doc Oc.

At the lowest CL I currently can select (CL6), I'm facing champed C4rol and DP (4*) and I couldn't pay my way out consistently. My Roster is literally a 300 Daredevil, then a few 255 5*s and then Kamala Khan at 196. My highest 4* are 4/0/1 C4rol at 131 and then a 127 Yondu and Coulson. I have no idea how this is supposed to work for me. If I could cap my roster to take out the Daredevil, I would be midfield in 3* land.

I'm not going to pout and yell "mwaaah fix this!", but I'd be hard pressed to find someone to make a sound argument on how I'm supposed to get any form of enjoyment out of this.

Maybe I'm the only one that noticed this.  How is it possible that you have a 10 cover 5* daredevil and your best 4* is at 5 covers....and your best choice for 3* is a level 196 KK?  I'm assuming that's 196 before boosts because otherwise this *really* makes no sense.  Just really want to clarify.

MacEifer

Bane of my existence. I just got really lucky. I put him as a favourite after I got my first cover. Started pulling LL after Ock went off circulation. Got 2 Spider man, 2 Thor, 7 Gambit and 11 DD so far. I got more 5* bonus covers than 4*.
But here I am, put in this dead end by the luck of the draw and the absence of a warning sign that says "Hey, if you actually level your shiny new toy, you will regret it for the next 18 months."



In case you thought I'm making this up. My highest possible 4* is 140-ish for a 5/0/1 Sandman and the Yondu caps out at 147.



The BP Panther is from the Gambit buyback, had a 0/1/0 Gambit split off because I wanted the 5* to battery red and shoot purple.

Rod5

Wow, that is some interesting roster. Not it sure what to say really, other than that is unfortunate. 

What I would say though is that you can’t proclaim that PvP is broken in the back of your bad luck and lack of research.

Rod5

Your best bet is probably to keep on pulling Latest and hope you get enough Gambit to make him functional, then you at least have a team that is usable at lvl 300. Stop pulling after that, or pull Classics to get cheaper 4* covers. 

The rockett

That is truly insane. Not even 1 champed 4* but almost a champed 5*.  I have to be honest, I have not idea what to tell you.  Your roster and 5* pull rate is insane.  In fact if you would have a champed 5* and no champed 4*, there is more than a few people that would report you to see if you were cheating. To comment PVP is broken, as Rod stated above, your roster is doing that to you and it seems like you do not have enough time in the game to see and work through some of the mechainces.  

Pants1000

PVP can be tough for anyone with a lopsided roster.  Even in 5* land, today the people with multiple champed 5’s (but no Gambit) are struggling.

My advice:

Keep the DD, but don’t level him any more.

Focus on PVE, and try for 575 in PVP.  In PVP use DD and your best boosted 3.  

Spend your CP on classics for now.  You’ll get more 4’s, and covers for the classic 5’s that you’ll want when you’re ready for CL7 PVE.

I think if you do that, before long you’ll have some level 200+ 3’s, you’ll be starting to champ some 4’s, and then your 5’s won’t affect your PVP MMR anymore.

MacEifer

Yeah, I'm perfectly aware that I'm not quite the statistic median, but not quite as much as you would think.
I did a quick count and I have about 185 4* covers so far. at 1/7 draw rate, that should put me somewhere between 20 and 25 5* covers. The only anomaly here is the clustering on two characters out of a pool of 4. This is not freakish, except for the fact that I had more 5* BHs than 4*. With 60-ish 4*s the average covers per character should be 3, weighted towards latest releases, which also checks out in my case.

So yes, the roster looks weird to someone playing for a longer time, but the numbers check out for someone moving into LL pulls at this stage after champing about 60% of their 3*s.

One of the major complaints here is that the system is not learnable and makes no attempts to compensate for it.

There are significant differences between having to read strategy guides to improve progress and the situation you have here where people have to actually read up on third party information to not break their stuff.

Frankly, all this would be fine if you could cap your roster for PvP, which is the aim of the proposal.

You don't even get a popup telling you "You will face significantly stronger opponents in PvP if you go past level 270 on this character" or such.

And so, yeah, there are significant design flaws in the game and chiefly its challenge ranking. I'm not some statistical outlier, I just don't think people like me come to the forums often or know enough about game systems in general to see where this game put their pants on wrong.

Rod5

Dude, I’ve been playing a long time and I’ve never seen a roster anything like yours.

If anything is broken in the game it’s allowing newbie rosters access to enough to CPs/tokens to do this to a roster.

Bowgentle

MacEifer said:

I'm not some statistical outlier

Yes.
Yes, you are.

Usually people only get that amount of 5* covers from champ rewards.
Your roster is one of the weirdest outliers I have ever seen, and I've been playing for over 4 years.