OSCORP HEROIC - MAY 8-14

IceIX

Alright. So it's 11:22 Boston time and there has been no concrete plan put into place at the moment. Even if a plan was put into play, if it requires action it also requires further engineer interaction for the next several hours and tomorrow morning, which is untenable. I would not expect movement on this until tomorrow.

What I would suggest is to at least earn some points on this refresh of mission pins that everyone has available now so that you don't miss out on any currently available points. If it's the case that the event resets, you've earned some progression rewards. If it gets rolled back, same. If nothing happens, you'll at least have some points out of this refresh that you wouldn't if you wait. I simply don't have a "this is what we're looking to do" right now. I apologize for being the bearer of the bad news in that I have no immediate solution at this time. However, that's currently where this issue stands.

Unknown

I only joined early because alliance member told me first sub was almost over. Totally would have waited if I knew this **** was going to happen.

Unknown

Let's say you get 4K for starting late on a sub and the current leader has 8K, you can basically think of you being able to make up half of the difference the leader has (8K) per cycle, even though this makes the assumption that the leader can somehow get 8K each refresh (this is no longer possible).

So if this sub bracket continue for 2 more refreshes (current projected rate based on 27% progress so far) the lead will get cut down to about 1K, which is likely to be pretty insurmountable looking at the mission values.

But if the sub sbracket continue for say 5 more refreshes (double the number of points needed), the lead will get cut down to 125. It probably goes down quicker that, because 'cut lead to half' starts with the bracket leader having the luxury of double valued missions while the latecomers only have regular valued mission. Still, 2 more refreshes is unlikely to be enough to equalize things which is the current rate this sub event is projected to finish.

NorthernPolarity

IceIX wrote:

Alright. So it's 11:22 Boston time and there has been no concrete plan put into place at the moment. Even if a plan was put into play, if it requires action it also requires further engineer interaction for the next several hours and tomorrow morning, which is untenable. I would not expect movement on this until tomorrow.

What I would suggest is to at least earn some points on this refresh of mission pins that everyone has available now so that you don't miss out on any currently available points. If it's the case that the event resets, you've earned some progression rewards. If it gets rolled back, same. If nothing happens, you'll at least have some points out of this refresh that you wouldn't if you wait. I simply don't have a "this is what we're looking to do" right now. I apologize for being the bearer of the bad news in that I have no immediate solution at this time. However, that's currently where this issue stands.

Thanks for the update IceIX. Now to decide whether or not I join now and risk it not resetting and getting stuck with all the other forumites who join now or just wait till tomorrow...

noobprime

tldr reset.

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

Alright. So it's 11:22 Boston time and there has been no concrete plan put into place at the moment. Even if a plan was put into play, if it requires action it also requires further engineer interaction for the next several hours and tomorrow morning, which is untenable. I would not expect movement on this until tomorrow.

What I would suggest is to at least earn some points on this refresh of mission pins that everyone has available now so that you don't miss out on any currently available points. If it's the case that the event resets, you've earned some progression rewards. If it gets rolled back, same. If nothing happens, you'll at least have some points out of this refresh that you wouldn't if you wait. I simply don't have a "this is what we're looking to do" right now. I apologize for being the bearer of the bad news in that I have no immediate solution at this time. However, that's currently where this issue stands.

That sucks to hear, but it's far, far better than not hearing anything.

Unknown

So I finally registered on the forum for this mess.

So the original configuration of the sub looked like it was going to finish in 10 hours - I suspect that would have stretched out to more like 16 between the "everybody grinds it into submission" effect and Europe and the east coast falling asleep. This was apparently too fast for dev team preferences, and I suppose I'm sympathetic to the idea of not desiring a sub (other than maybe the **** end of a long event) to end in less than 24 hours.

The action of extending the sub to double the points makes sense, and is even right about on target for that one-day goal. ...but the node points have been cut in half as well, which means we're looking at notionally 4 times the initial length. Except that nobody's going to be really excited about grinding these miniscule nodes and so actual player throughput will decline by some unpredictable amount. So 10-16 hours becomes... what, maybe three days?

I really don't understand what the thought process is here. Extending a sub for fairness's sake doesn't actually help if the details of extending the sub make it even harder for a player caught out by the timing or joining later. Since there's no telling when this is going to end, the last-three-hours rubberbanding grind isn't going to work for any but the luckiest players. You know that people are having monstrous problems with scaling, and it's widely thought that scaling is somehow tied to positive individual fight results, and now you've made a whole class of people need to grind grind grind HARD. I'm not even going to start listing the ways this will hose alliances.

Three days at the original node values would have been somewhat boring, but tolerable since they would mean I'd have a reasonable chance of reaching the prog-rewards Patch. Three days at these nerfed numbers means there's no tinykittying way I'm going to be anywhere near Patch, and I suspect we'll have yet ANOTHER PvE go by with no actual players hitting the top prog tier. Once was fine. Twice was a nerf. I hoped that the Rags in middle values last event was a good sign for the future, but here we are back to badly nerfed prog rewards, no first-clear anything, and the so-called "PvE" competitive rewards which honestly have more to do with when you go to bed and how badly your scaling is messed up on a given event than any real competition are even more of a mess than usual.

And oh yeah, rubberbanding is completely **** right now. So I'd basically done one clear (a little less and no prereq nodes since I don't have a Patch yet) before you guys pushed the button. This left me about 6k behind in the sub and 5k behind in the main (not sure how that works). My Rampage! node, which had been above 1200 on the initial clear, dropped to around 400. I came and checked the forums, went back, and it was 279. And in the last two hours it's gained TWO points. The lowest-point node, which I had not cleared yet, also dropped twice. I think all of them did, but wasn't keeping so close track that I can list them out.

At this rate, even grinding isn't going to help tinykitties now. And people know this instinctively: my tank team in the LR is getting trashed a lot more often than usual tonight, meaning people are not wasting time on this mess.

I love that D3 tried some new things with this Oscorp. The last Heroic left everyone pretty well burned out. But you need to to be more careful, and at least marginally more generous - this game has turned into a mess of navel-gazing metagaming at the top end, and not of the healthy rock-paper-scissors sort but the "oh my god how have they buggered up completely undocumented rule x, and how does it change invisible scaling factors y and z" sort of way.

Scoping out even further, the changes to 2-star drops are going to make this game a lot friendlier (I'd argue there's actually borderline too many 2-stars floating around now, but whatever) in the 15-60 day range. Three-star covers seem to be getting harder and harder. Events like this are what your mid-to-end game players rely on for progression, and you keep making them more frustrating. I'm getting close to the point where I'm going to need to decide whether to start dropping $50 increments to buy specific 3-star covers up to full or nearly-full. If simply winning the first covers gets too hard to do at any consistent pace, at some point I'm not going to have the covers to spend on, even if I wanted to.

Unknown

So your response to screw ups/problems is to spend more money on the game? You are not encouraging the correct behavior.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

Let's say you get 4K for starting late on a sub and the current leader has 8K, you can basically think of you being able to make up half of the difference the leader has (8K) per cycle, even though this makes the assumption that the leader can somehow get 8K each refresh (this is no longer possible).

So if this sub bracket continue for 2 more refreshes (current projected rate based on 27% progress so far) the lead will get cut down to about 1K, which is likely to be pretty insurmountable looking at the mission values.

But if the sub sbracket continue for say 5 more refreshes (double the number of points needed), the lead will get cut down to 125. It probably goes down quicker that, because 'cut lead to half' starts with the bracket leader having the luxury of double valued missions while the latecomers only have regular valued mission. Still, 2 more refreshes is unlikely to be enough to equalize things which is the current rate this sub event is projected to finish.

IceIX has stated that your rubberband depends mostly on the leader of your own sub, not the global leader of all subs. Please note that the main bracket is much larger than the sub brackets, so most disadvantaged players are stuck in a high points main bracket, low points sub bracket. I suspect that those players won't care much about being able to catch up to their sub leader as long as they still stay way behind in the main event.

I've done some grinding, increasing opponent levels by about 50%. I'm close to the top in my sub event, rubberbanding almost depleted. My main rank is 451. If I keep it up, I might even get to rank 250 before scaling locks me out for this and the next half a dozen events.

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

Alright. So it's 11:22 Boston time and there has been no concrete plan put into place at the moment. Even if a plan was put into play, if it requires action it also requires further engineer interaction for the next several hours and tomorrow morning, which is untenable. I would not expect movement on this until tomorrow.

What I would suggest is to at least earn some points on this refresh of mission pins that everyone has available now so that you don't miss out on any currently available points. If it's the case that the event resets, you've earned some progression rewards. If it gets rolled back, same. If nothing happens, you'll at least have some points out of this refresh that you wouldn't if you wait. I simply don't have a "this is what we're looking to do" right now. I apologize for being the bearer of the bad news in that I have no immediate solution at this time. However, that's currently where this issue stands.

IceIX, you earn a lot more brownie points in my books with this answer. It was honest, helpful and straightforward. Thank you for bearing through this and communicating with us!

daveomite

From my estimates, I'm not sure rubberbanding can catch up at all.

I started the first node in the main at approx 3pm est. And started first node in a sub approx 3:20pm est. I had finished one clear by approx 4:30pm est. With each completion starts the 12 hour refresh clock.

All of this is detailed in this thread starting on page 2 or 3.

Based on all of those nodes, the 4 in the main, and the 9 in the sub, all game me a combined total over just over 3,300 points. But even at that point, I wasn't even top 20.

Jump 45 minutes later, another member of our alliance had also cleared the nodes, he has closer to 8k total points now as he did them before the change, and some nodes 2-3 times.

Then, D3P makes the change to the progress total, which in turn, changes point totals.

Given all of this, and yes, I understand it has not been a full 12 hours yet, but I do not see how the points can catch up to where they would need to be in my refresh. I'm roughly 8 hours into that 12 hour window, so, 2/3 of the way through. Normally, the points reflect that with a percentage of total refresh points shown rising over the time period, right?

Using one node as an example: "Rampage". That node, if I'm not mistaken, was approx 1,400 on my play of it. After clearing all the nodes, it was 764. After the change, it dropped to 220.

Since that change that D3P made, that node has increased slightly, but only to 317 points. At this rate, at my 12 hour refresh window, it may reach 400, which is less than 35x points off of the actual half of the original total. Hopefully that makes sense.

In the meantime, people were already grinding the nodes down to 1 BEFORE the change happened. Since I only did that one clear early, before the points started rising, they not only got more points on their first play of said node, but on every replay as well.

So if someone grinded Rampage down to 1 before the change... rough est. 1,400, 760, 400, 200, 100, 1.

now, because I did that one early clear, mine looks like it would be something like this: 1,400, 400, x, x, x.

so, it's like we're going to lose an entire play through point value, a 3-400 drop easy, maybe more for some, per each nodes values.

In the meantime, my bracket leader now has just under 8k+, less than 800 points behind the main bracket leader.

I still had not played any nodes more than the one time clear of each of them. From of looks of it, because I did, I may have a few more points than others. But, at the same time, because I did not grind those nodes then and there like other people apparently did, after the point changes, it will never balance out, regardless of rubberbanding.

kensterr

Moghwyn wrote:

Phantron wrote:

Let's say you get 4K for starting late on a sub and the current leader has 8K, you can basically think of you being able to make up half of the difference the leader has (8K) per cycle, even though this makes the assumption that the leader can somehow get 8K each refresh (this is no longer possible).

So if this sub bracket continue for 2 more refreshes (current projected rate based on 27% progress so far) the lead will get cut down to about 1K, which is likely to be pretty insurmountable looking at the mission values.

But if the sub sbracket continue for say 5 more refreshes (double the number of points needed), the lead will get cut down to 125. It probably goes down quicker that, because 'cut lead to half' starts with the bracket leader having the luxury of double valued missions while the latecomers only have regular valued mission. Still, 2 more refreshes is unlikely to be enough to equalize things which is the current rate this sub event is projected to finish.

IceIX has stated that your rubberband depends mostly on the leader of your own sub, not the global leader of all subs. Please note that the main bracket is much larger than the sub brackets, so most disadvantaged players are stuck in a high points main bracket, low points sub bracket. I suspect that those players won't care much about being able to catch up to their sub leader as long as they still stay way behind in the main event.

I've done some grinding, increasing opponent levels by about 50%. I'm close to the top in my sub event, rubberbanding almost depleted. My main rank is 451. If I keep it up, I might even get to rank 250 before scaling locks me out for this and the next half a dozen events.

I'm 2000 pts behind my sub leader and 3200 pts behind the main leader. As it is at the moment even if I grind all the nodes in my sub I will get less than 1500 points but will increase my personal scaling so much that I can't play the next sub.

Best solution that the engineers can think of without doing much work - GIVE FREE LAZY DAKEN COVERS TO EVERYONE! Thank you!

Spoit

And that still doesn't address the alliance disadvantage

daveomite

kensterr wrote:

Moghwyn wrote:

Phantron wrote:

Let's say you get 4K for starting late on a sub and the current leader has 8K, you can basically think of you being able to make up half of the difference the leader has (8K) per cycle, even though this makes the assumption that the leader can somehow get 8K each refresh (this is no longer possible).

So if this sub bracket continue for 2 more refreshes (current projected rate based on 27% progress so far) the lead will get cut down to about 1K, which is likely to be pretty insurmountable looking at the mission values.

But if the sub sbracket continue for say 5 more refreshes (double the number of points needed), the lead will get cut down to 125. It probably goes down quicker that, because 'cut lead to half' starts with the bracket leader having the luxury of double valued missions while the latecomers only have regular valued mission. Still, 2 more refreshes is unlikely to be enough to equalize things which is the current rate this sub event is projected to finish.

IceIX has stated that your rubberband depends mostly on the leader of your own sub, not the global leader of all subs. Please note that the main bracket is much larger than the sub brackets, so most disadvantaged players are stuck in a high points main bracket, low points sub bracket. I suspect that those players won't care much about being able to catch up to their sub leader as long as they still stay way behind in the main event.

I've done some grinding, increasing opponent levels by about 50%. I'm close to the top in my sub event, rubberbanding almost depleted. My main rank is 451. If I keep it up, I might even get to rank 250 before scaling locks me out for this and the next half a dozen events.

I'm 2000 pts behind my sub leader and 3200 pts behind the main leader. As it is at the moment even if I grind all the nodes in my sub I will get less than 1500 points but will increase my personal scaling so much that I can't play the next sub.

Best solution that the engineers can think of without doing much work - GIVE FREE LAZY DAKEN COVERS TO EVERYONE! Thank you!

your fear of grinding=scaling is EXACTLY why I haven't done anymore beyond my initial one time clear in the beginning. I'm not willing to start grinding like crazy to try to catch up, only to not be able to make ground as all nodes combined may equal 1,500-1,600 points...and that grinding would result in higher personal scaling that I don't want to do at all.

Unknown

kensterr wrote:

I'm 2000 pts behind my sub leader and 3200 pts behind the main leader. As it is at the moment even if I grind all the nodes in my sub I will get less than 1500 points but will increase my personal scaling so much that I can't play the next sub.

Best solution that the engineers can think of without doing much work - GIVE FREE LAZY DAKEN COVERS TO EVERYONE! Thank you!

Unfortunately, given d3's historic practices, handing out covers for free is a completely unrealistic expectation. Remember, the panicked reaction that started this whole mess was because the playerbase was accumulating points at too fast a rate, and that rubberbanding would make nearly everyone who tried push through the entire progression reward list before the end of the event. From the history of the last several PvE events, the devs obviously don't want anyone to get the last several tiers of progression, so point gains had to be chopped, severely and immediately.

kensterr

Then give all the grinders who started this mess level 400 enemies to even up the playing field.

Unknown

Reset the event. Hand out free hot dogs and beer along with Health Packs and Boosts.

daveomite

Bugpop wrote:

Reset the event. Hand out free hot dogs and beer along with Health Packs and Boosts.

I would so be there...beer and hotdogs...hell yeah.

ClydeFrog76

Wow, tribal tattoos AND a mohawk. Daken just needs to take up poi and he'll be the ultimate ****.

Unknown

Based on Ice response it sounds like our solution is to grind so hard that by the 3rd day your enemys are scaled to 400. Maybe at that point you will be in the top 50, but you still have like 3 days left and the people that got out to the unfair lead can continue to coast into top spots with low scaling... But don't worry, you can spend 500 HP for a +3 all AP damage boosts, its a steal if you really want your 3*** Daken!

MONEY, MONEY, MONEY!!!