2 months since achievable progression rewards

Meto5000

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but has it really been since mid March that the top progression awards have been achievable?

At the beginning of April D3 was asked about this at Pax East and said they'd be fixing it for followup events.

Now we have this royal muck-up an event where we're supposed to have at least 3 sub brackets, but we'll likely only have access to the final node for about 12 minutes total.

See:



48 hours into this sub and we're just under 55% done.

As far as I can tell, not a single word has been issued on the state of progression rewards on the forums by D3. I'm not even angry anymore, just disappointed in the state of this game.

Unknown

They created a system in which it makes no sense to play events before the final 15 hours and now they are shocked, shocked to discover no one wants to play their new event before the progression bar hits 90%.

Changing from hours passed to points earned makes absolutely no sense with their rubber-banding and scaling mechanics. At least, not from a gameplay perspective. If this clusterkitty of an event ends up generating record amounts of revenue then we will have to get used to it.

Meto5000

Ghast wrote:

They created a system in which it makes no sense to play events before the final 15 hours and now they are shocked, shocked to discover no one wants to play their new event before the progression bar hits 90%.

Changing from hours passed to points earned makes absolutely no sense with their rubber-banding and scaling mechanics. At least, not from a gameplay perspective. If this clusterkitty of an event ends up generating record amounts of revenue then we will have to get used to it.

Presumably they meant they'll fix it in the same way a pet owner fixes his pets... By removing their players' cojones.

HailMary

Demiurge_Will mentioned that they're looking to reduce the progression target if we're progressing too slowly.

That's not what worries me. What worries me is the possibility of that adjustment completely resetting rubberbanding the way it seemed to do last time.

Unknown

Hey but look, you can reach PvP progression rewards so they did fix it

mohio

Not only did they make the top rewards unachievable, but they also made the rewards not very good. Funny how they don't even want us to play their game.

Unknown

mohio wrote:

Not only did they make the top rewards unachievable, but they also made the rewards not very good. Funny how they don't even want us to play their game.

I agree. I couldnt care less about those progression rewards. I play just enough to get the two daken covers and that's it

ThatOneGuyjp189512

I think they're trying to be a lot cheaper with the progressives ever since me and at least 600 other people in my bracket got all the progressives from a PVE a while back(3 punishers and a ton of iso/tokens), they're holding out those top progressives as the proverbial dangling carrot that is nigh unreachable

Bowgentle

As long as grinders get hit with scaling, and the devs refuse to acknowledge that scaling is _NOT_ a good design choice, the rewards will continue to be unreachable - unless they're covers that people really need.
I don't think anyone wants to ruin their PVE MMR for the next 5 events to get his/her 20th red Patch cover.

If we see Dakens as progression rewards, it might be a different story.

Meto5000

Bowgentle wrote:

As long as grinders get hit with scaling, and the devs refuse to acknowledge that scaling is _NOT_ a good design choice, the rewards will continue to be unreachable - unless they're covers that people really need.
I don't think anyone wants to ruin their PVE MMR for the next 5 events to get his/her 20th red Patch cover.

If we see Dakens as progression rewards, it might be a different story.

I think the devs are trying to find a sweet spot between rubberbanding and scaling but so far they have been erring on the side of caution instead of doubling point totals and slowly scaling them back. I mean tiny tap dancing kitty, would it be the worst thing over the next month if more people than expected actually hit the progression rewards and then you scaled them back?

Right now, even if the covers were 5* Galactus x3 I don't think it would be possible to hit the progression rewards in the current state unless the entire population was spending hundreds of dollars per day on health packs to grind 1 pt nodes. There simply are just not enough points being awarded.

Unknown

If you look over the history of the PvE events, the top progression rewards are almost always not achievable.

Spoit

Toxicadam wrote:

If you look over the history of the PvE events, the top progression rewards are almost always not achievable.

*In the past 2 months*

Remember when they reran the hulk event because people just missed the top progression reward?

Unknown

I am only on day 56 so i have never seen an achievable top progression reward, but to be fair they have added some rewards that im sure were not there before like the season rewards(including a hulk and a 10pack), although that just seems to make getting top spots in tourneys harder for newer people like me. But adding covers to pvp rewards also helps alot.

but yeah, they should probably get rid of it if they dont want it to be achievable as seen in this most recent pve when people were earning points super fast and they put an end to that in a hurry lol, they could have just raised the total community points needed, but instead they nerfed points and increased community points required

DD-The-Mighty

It should also be noted that all of the worthwhile progression prizes have been systematically pulled from the progression rewards for quite some time now 2*/3* covers. and the few left are the ones so far away on the stick most dont even think of them as even there. Oh boy. Boosts. 25HP. MORE ISO. yay.

But hey at least now the top gunners in the nightmare brackets can get to the 1100~11300/11400 progression rewards. even at the cost of the point spread. I'm glad at least SOMEONE is getting what they want.

ThatOneGuyjp189512

Spoit wrote:

Toxicadam wrote:

If you look over the history of the PvE events, the top progression rewards are almost always not achievable.

*In the past 2 months*

Remember when they reran the hulk event because people just missed the top progression reward?

i remember the last PVE they had progressives that people could get was just daredevil cover, i know the top people in my bracket got every progressive but i missed out on the last progressive(Red Daredevil cover)
it was back when they had a PVE where all the progressives were 3 punisher covers and the usual token/iso/2*, it was me and at least 600 other people got every single progressive with a day left in the event. i think it's events like that is the reason they're trying to cut back on the achievability of the progressives.

Unknown

They need to have them obtainable, it's what makes people want to play the game. But in a nutshell we cannot push for the progression because of the scaling system. This is another basic design mishap, frowny face. I bet without scaling we could get there, they are using old data points, especially since they change scaling every gosh darn event.

mohio

I agree the one where everyone got a ton of Punishers (which I think was followed by the Daredevil one, but could be wrong) is probably what set the ball rolling towards unreachable progression rewards. But it seems they've done 2 things, which is what I was trying to bring up earlier (although succinctly and perhaps not that well):

1) Lowered the overall value of all progression rewards
- went from 3x 3* covers (and probably a couple 2* covers too but I forget), 2x Event Token (or 3?), 2x 50HP, couple large iso rewards to 3x 2* covers, 1x or 2x 3* covers, 2x Event tokens, 1x 50HP, and pretty shoddy iso rewards.
2) Put the most valuable progression rewards (to most players) far out and made them practically unreachable.

point 1 doesn't look completely terrible, but in conjunction with point 2 you see that they've essentially eliminated 3* covers from the reward pool since they are unreachable as well as all the high value iso and sometimes even one of the tokens. So the real progression rewards are a few 2* covers (a lot less meaningful now that PvP was changed to rewards covers some % of the time), a single event token (i.e. Bagman), 50 HP and maybe around 2500 iso. This is pretty far from where things were before imo.

The thing is, I don't mind that there are carrots out at the end of the progression rewards and that they might be 99.9% unreachable. What I mind is the overall nerfing of progression rewards to the extent that I've just shown. If the last 3 rewards were generally unreachable but we still picked up one or two 3* covers and 100HP, 2 event tokens, and 5000 iso along the way, I don't think people would be so upset that the top rewards have been too far away.

tl;dr - Bring back the structure of the rewards for whatever the event was that gave out a million Punishers (Hulk event?) but make the last few "unreachable" and people will not be as upset about not getting all the progression rewards.

Spoit

Actually, yeah, I'd like to hear from IceIX or Will. Has anyone actually reached the 3* rewards in any of the PvE events in the last 2 months? I'm fairly sure the top of my brackets didn't, anyway

mohio

Spoit wrote:

Actually, yeah, I'd like to hear from IceIX or Will. Has anyone actually reached the 3* rewards in any of the PvE events in the last 2 months? I'm fairly sure the top of my brackets didn't, anyway

The latest simulator had both Rags in there as progressions. First one was like 1/2 the points of the 2nd, so most people got it I think. Other than that, most of the 3* have been set at either the top reward or 2nd/3rd to last, and we haven't really even gotten close.

edit: I don't think this is something they necessarily HAVE to comment on, as we can essentially see where they stand by where the next set of progression rewards are. That said, if they are attempting to make them more reachable but just haven't gotten the formulas right or if they are intentionally placing them out of reach as incentive for people to grind, it would be nice to hear that. At least for me, a little communication can go a long way.

Unknown

Spoit wrote:

Actually, yeah, I'd like to hear from IceIX or Will. Has anyone actually reached the 3* rewards in any of the PvE events in the last 2 months? I'm fairly sure the top of my brackets didn't, anyway

I'm super new to the game and I manged to grind out a two Power Falcon(***stars) in that Event. That was only like what, 2-3 weeks ago.

Same thing for the ***star Cap America PvE event. Got the Red/Yellow cover reward.

Then again I will seriously sit here at work and grind this game for 4-5 hours (I work overnights at a desk, LOTS of time to grind this great game!)

Spoit

BuzzKillingt0n wrote:

Spoit wrote:

Actually, yeah, I'd like to hear from IceIX or Will. Has anyone actually reached the 3* rewards in any of the PvE events in the last 2 months? I'm fairly sure the top of my brackets didn't, anyway

I'm super new to the game and I manged to grind out a two Power Falcon(***stars) in that Event. That was only like what, 2-3 weeks ago.

Same thing for the ***star Cap America PvE event. Got the Red/Yellow cover reward.

Then again I will seriously sit here at work and grind this game for 4-5 hours (I work overnights at a desk, LOTS of time to grind this great game!)

...what? I'm fairly sure that there's only been 1 falcon progression reward, which was in pvp?