On Bracketing and SHIELD Training

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

Rajjeq wrote:

Ice:

My son started playing exactly two days after me. My roster is somewhat better because I got into the awesome Djangos! Yet since this change, he has in every PVP been placed in a significantly easier bracket, where his scores allow him to easily place top 10 with 600-700, while in my brackets I'm falling outside top 50 with 800s, since my Top 10 is always over 1000.

Are you saying this is merely coincidence? Or is there some other parameter happening as well?

More likely coincidence than not. I'd have to look at precise data in each case to make 100% sure. But overall within statistical variances (because random is indeed random), it's working out how we want.

IceIX you know i love ya man and what im about to say next is nothing personal at all but if the part i highlighted is in-fact true then you're soon to have alot of pissed off players who quit the game because this "gentle push" isnt all that gentle. I also have had the past few pvp events be pretty much just not worth the effort and headaches due to these brackets.
I think a major thing that needs to be remembered is that all it takes is 2% of a bracket to have the top end have completely ridiculous scores compared to the average masses.

Ugh this can easily go into TLDR even for myself sooo the long of the short is simply:
This change like many others recently have been contributing to player dissatisfaction, and plenty of us are really starting to resent the feelings of being punished for playing and progressing in this game.

Rootbreaker

Yeah, there's nothing about this push/nudge that seems gentle. Top 10 scores have gone up hundreds and hundreds of points recently in every pvp event, and the same is true for the top scoring members in my alliance.

IceIX

MTGOFerret wrote:

Ugh this can easily go into TLDR even for myself sooo the long of the short is simply:
This change like many others recently have been contributing to player dissatisfaction, and plenty of us are really starting to resent the feelings of being punished for playing and progressing in this game.

Understood. And just because something is working to give us the *numbers* that we want, doesn't mean that it's having the *effect* that we want. There could be a way that's less impactful on players and a more elegant system for our servers to implement. We're always finding little ways towards this as time goes on. That's why there are often changes to these systems.

IceIX

Rootbreaker wrote:

Yeah, there's nothing about this push/nudge that seems gentle. Top 10 scores have gone up hundreds and hundreds of points recently in every pvp event, and the same is true for the top scoring members in my alliance.

To be fair there, top scores are going up on *every* bracket the closer we're coming to the end of Season One. That's a pure function of players playing more and pushing harder. Even players that were averaging 1K points earlier in the Season are now pushing themselves to 1200 before they shield to eke out a few more points.

mags1587

IceIX, can you share the reasoning for why there's any weighting at all? I guess I'm not understanding the purpose of newer players being grouped together when the rewards are the same across brackets.

Unknown

People speculated roster strength, MMR, shield rank, etc. At least those make somewhat sense. Days played makes no sense to me, other than to motivate newer players--but at what cost to the older players?

Sure, days played may loosely correlate to strength, skill, and knowledge, but moreso than that it correlates to loyalty. Not sure why loyal players should be disadvantaged.

Usually in games, players are rewarded for loyalty. And so a simple solution is to give the 'high-end' brackets 'high-end' rewards. Else, rid of the segregation.

HailMary

durrem wrote:

Wow, this is a horrible way to handle a PVP game. You shouldn't be playing favorites to anyone, at all. New players need to build up their rosters normally and then sink or swim like the rest of us.

Personally, I think it makes some sense to nudge things a bit so that L85 players have a sane chance at 3* covers at all without, say, shield-hopping like mad.

That said, and I realize that there must be a good deal of selection bias happening, this "gentle push" seems like anything but. Every one of my recent brackets has seen the Top 10 threshold settle north of 1000 points. This has been true for, AFAIK, most of the Djangoliers (I believe TU1 had one or two brackets which were maybe a hundred points weaker), including our 2* players. Meanwhile, Rajj's son consistently enters brackets where Top 10 is merely 600+.

Sure, this could all simply be a fluke, but if these flukes are significant enough to make veterans quit from sheer frustration, then player perception becomes a very real concern.

EDIT: Whoops, Ice totally addressed my comment already. That shows me for forgetting to actually hit "Submit."

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

MTGOFerret wrote:

Ugh this can easily go into TLDR even for myself sooo the long of the short is simply:
This change like many others recently have been contributing to player dissatisfaction, and plenty of us are really starting to resent the feelings of being punished for playing and progressing in this game.

Understood. And just because something is working to give us the *numbers* that we want, doesn't mean that it's having the *effect* that we want. There could be a way that's less impactful on players and a more elegant system for our servers to implement. We're always finding little ways towards this as time goes on. That's why there are often changes to these systems.

You guys have been so informative about a lot of these recent changes like with character nerfing and this new bracketing scheme.

However there are a lot of changes where we haven't received any comment at all by you guys despite a LOT of complaining by the players here.

Is there anyway we can have an official state of the union address about issues like tanking, PvE scaling, new PvP matchmaking, token nerfing, level 65 daken nerfing and an overall sense of the game getting harder as you progress in the game. I think it's important because I don't think demiurge has acknowledged that there are a lot of people who are dissatisfied by a lot of the changes that have happened so we don't know if these are indeed changes that seem to be working as intended on your end and are just upsetting a small part of the audience (better known as 90% of forum goers), or they are changes that demiurge recognizes as something that still needs a lot of work in order to bring the more seasoned players back on board.

I know that as an alliance, a lot of us are getting burned out. Might not seem like it based on our scores but having to force ourselves to take damage every PvE and now having more competitive brackets where it's much harder to get into the top 30 really has the potential of souring a lot of loyal players.

I understand that sometimes you have to be cryptic and tease that things are always improving and just because we try something now doesn't mean we wont try something different in the future. But I think we could use some frank guidance as to the future of the game.

btw, I really appreciate the work you guys do on the game and as a fellow game designer I know that it's a very tough balancing act to keep everyone happy. As a player though I feel like I have to make sure I communicate our experience.

[/compliment sandwich]

IceIX

mags1587 wrote:

IceIX, can you share the reasoning for why there's any weighting at all? I guess I'm not understanding the purpose of newer players being grouped together when the rewards are the same across brackets.

Players that haven't been playing as long tend to not be able to progress as easily or as quickly due to lack of tools (in characters/levels). Coming in to a bracket for the first or second time and seeing that the top score is 1200 to get into 10th is a bit of a shock, then they see that they get 25 points per win in a Tournament. Top this off with the fact that they only have 4-5 characters and a limited number of Health Packs and it comes as something akin to sticker shock. These new players often stop playing not because they can't compete in theory, but because they don't think they can even attempt to compete. Being put into a bracket that tops out at 600 is less likely to induce this. However, putting *only* new players against one another is bad as well, since as noted, only the newer players will win against other newbies and the older players fight tooth and nail for the same prizes. That's not fair to anyone. The new players can't really make use of the 1-2 3* covers they got and the older players have too hard a time competing for the prizes in comparison.

Clintman

There are definitely two different drivers frustrating the playerbase right now.

1. We are getting grouped with a MUCH MUCH greater density of veteran players. Last night was brutal with the number of high scorers in my bracket, most of whom I recognize, which is a rare thing before this change happened.

2. With seasons, people are pushing FAR harder than they ever have in the past for low value tournaments (Loki/Rag) covers. So the top 10 of every bracket I have seen for the last 3 tournaments has been like this. Prior to those 3, it was business as usual.

empirical evidence suggests this is not a gentle push at all.

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

mags1587 wrote:

IceIX, can you share the reasoning for why there's any weighting at all? I guess I'm not understanding the purpose of newer players being grouped together when the rewards are the same across brackets.

Players that haven't been playing as long tend to not be able to progress as easily or as quickly due to lack of tools (in characters/levels). Coming in to a bracket for the first or second time and seeing that the top score is 1200 to get into 10th is a bit of a shock, then they see that they get 25 points per win in a Tournament. Top this off with the fact that they only have 4-5 characters and a limited number of Health Packs and it comes as something akin to sticker shock. These new players often stop playing not because they can't compete in theory, but because they don't think they can even attempt to compete. Being put into a bracket that tops out at 600 is less likely to induce this. However, putting *only* new players against one another is bad as well, since as noted, only the newer players will win against other newbies and the older players fight tooth and nail for the same prizes. That's not fair to anyone. The new players can't really make use of the 1-2 3* covers they got and the older players have too hard a time competing for the prizes in comparison.

the solution to this is providing a juniors tournament. for people who are under a certain number of days in their shield resupply.

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

mags1587 wrote:

IceIX, can you share the reasoning for why there's any weighting at all? I guess I'm not understanding the purpose of newer players being grouped together when the rewards are the same across brackets.

Players that haven't been playing as long tend to not be able to progress as easily or as quickly due to lack of tools (in characters/levels). Coming in to a bracket for the first or second time and seeing that the top score is 1200 to get into 10th is a bit of a shock, then they see that they get 25 points per win in a Tournament. Top this off with the fact that they only have 4-5 characters and a limited number of Health Packs and it comes as something akin to sticker shock. These new players often stop playing not because they can't compete in theory, but because they don't think they can even attempt to compete. Being put into a bracket that tops out at 600 is less likely to induce this. However, putting *only* new players against one another is bad as well, since as noted, only the newer players will win against other newbies and the older players fight tooth and nail for the same prizes. That's not fair to anyone. The new players can't really make use of the 1-2 3* covers they got and the older players have too hard a time competing for the prizes in comparison.

From what I could understand the weighting is based only on days played to separate new players from old players. That makes a pretty big assumption that every new player has a weak roster and every old player has a stacked roster.

I'm playing since the game was released on Steam, and I played it very casually for a good while, just playing Prologue and getting the daily reward. That means I'm at Day 127 with a L85 roster and no usable 3*. With the recent changes to cover drops in PvP, I'm pretty sure a new player could catch up to me in a month.
So if you guys really think it's necessary to weight the brackets, at least consider some metric that might be a better representative of roster strength.

tbighead21

In a recent even I was attacked and lost 45 points but was only offered 3 points to retaliate. Obviously it was not worth it so i skipped it. We should not be able to lose that many points and not have a chance to get most of them back. Im sure that was too help out only new players...
Also, where are the 40 point matches? All i see is a maxed Thor/OBW for about 15-25 pts each match.

Clintman

Now is the time I hope the development team is having a serious conversation about risk versus reward. Fights against veteran players take longer, much longer and are more dangerous. If you have truely broken the code on getting the veterans grouped together, then increase the reward structure for that population. Give us some incentive for excellence... The perception that the veteran players are being punished needs to be combatted.

Unknown

Clintman wrote:

Now is the time I hope the development team is having a serious conversation about risk versus reward. Fights against veteran players take longer, much longer and are more dangerous. If you have truely broken the code on getting the veterans grouped together, then increase the reward structure for that population. Give us some incentive for excellence... The perception that the veteran players are being punished needs to be combatted.

+100

Unknown

Yippee, i'm veteran and tough guy. I did not know that. WOW. Only becouse 148days in game? My best char are 85lvl Thor and Ares. With that little change my brackets change into hell (top 10 from 700-800points to 1100-1300). And i'm only "unlucky", its totally randomly. Yeah, sure. And this little random/bad luck happen to me every tourney after this wonderful bracketing modification. But now i hardly can get 25HP from PvP events, so... I see no point to take part in them. The less you play, the easier to win. it's logical. :b

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

At this very second and with the understanding that we continue to noodle with it, it's random with some slight weighting so that newer users will tend towards brackets with other newer users and vice versa. It doesn't by any means preclude a Day 200 user from dropping into a bracket with 999/1000 Day 5s, just that weighting gives a gentle push to the RAND function when the event server looks at which shard to give a player to. It's FAR more likely that you got "unlucky" than anything nefarious from the sharding tech shoving you into a bracket full of hardcores.

I don't think you know what the word "slight" means. There is a massive change in bracketing which has massively increased the points levels for top 10 in some brackets and massively reduced the points levels for others with the EXACT same reward. While you seem to have enormous interest in new players you seem happy enough to continually piss off your longest serving customers between mindless scaling and now punishment bracketing and it is literally a punishment. Harder, longer matches with a lot more competition for LITERALLY nothing in return.

Also... you claim that the points totals put off new players in one breath then say SHIELD needed to be bracketed because of ALL THE NEW PLAYERS in another. Completely contradictory.

Unknown

I will concur that the push is far from gentle. I went from routinely placing top 10 to being outside top 50 with the exact same scores. Needless to say, I am not happy.

Also, we players do not appreciate changes being secretly sprung on us. I shielded early and stopped playing on Friday like I always do and ended up getting zero Patches before the heroic, which made the heroic MUCH more difficult, because you guys didn't bother to drop a simple line like "We made some bracketing changes, scores may be higher for longtime players." Would that have been so difficult to do?

Realize that better communication = happier players and stealth changes plus stonewalling = unhappier players. And communication is free.

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

mags1587 wrote:

IceIX, can you share the reasoning for why there's any weighting at all? I guess I'm not understanding the purpose of newer players being grouped together when the rewards are the same across brackets.

Players that haven't been playing as long tend to not be able to progress as easily or as quickly due to lack of tools (in characters/levels). Coming in to a bracket for the first or second time and seeing that the top score is 1200 to get into 10th is a bit of a shock, then they see that they get 25 points per win in a Tournament. Top this off with the fact that they only have 4-5 characters and a limited number of Health Packs and it comes as something akin to sticker shock. These new players often stop playing not because they can't compete in theory, but because they don't think they can even attempt to compete. Being put into a bracket that tops out at 600 is less likely to induce this. However, putting *only* new players against one another is bad as well, since as noted, only the newer players will win against other newbies and the older players fight tooth and nail for the same prizes. That's not fair to anyone. The new players can't really make use of the 1-2 3* covers they got and the older players have too hard a time competing for the prizes in comparison.

I don't really agree with this. This is partially because of the rewards restructuring (i.e. Demiurge's own doing).

When I first started playing, I had terrible luck getting covers in prologue. Partially that was my own doing because I leveled the only character I had decent covers for (Modern Black Widow) to 30 which worked against me since it made drop chances near 0 for anything other 20 iso and matches were very tough since she's by no means a tank. Eventually I shifted over to PvP, coming back to prologue as ability to progress permitted. I'd pick up some covers from lightning rounds and pvp tokens. So anyway, back then the top rewards were 3 sets of *** covers, and there was a second tier of 3 sets of ** covers. It was a long time before I could actually win any *** covers, but I regularly managed to pick up the **s. It was hard (perhaps a bit too hard for a casual player), but I eventually progressed through **'s to start earning *** covers.

I also spent some money on this game for extra slots, some covers for my OBW, etc.. Recently, I purchased a stark salary, not to be #1, but so that I could fill out some of my ***s to be more competitive while still playing casually. Lately this game has increasingly been feeling like a chore/job than a game/ legitimate fun, so my idea was that I could finally stress a little less about reaching the top 10, and play this game as a game again. I have no expectation of winning 4-stars every PvP, but as soon as I bought my stark salary, you switched to this sharding system - so now, point rankings that would've yielded me 3x ***'s (factoring in my alliance cover) or a 4-star (if I was very lucky) occasionally place me in the top 25, but usually only top 50 now. I have to work twice as hard just to get into the top 50. I hardly see how this is fair.

New players should have the expectation of being able to progress (this was a big gripe for me when I started out, given how broken some of the balancing was, and the way covers were given out in prologue), but so should veterans. I don't want to win every PvP in #1, or compete with the ultra-hardcores in the top 10 alliances. I just want to keep getting covers, and being able to stay current while being casually competitive. Most of the recent changes have made the game both much more of a grind, and substantially tougher to be competitive.

So maybe the thing to do is bring back the better rewards for players who don't make the top 50, so newer players actually have something attainable to aspire to by competing in pvp. Bring back the 3 sets of ** covers in pve rewards so they can still feel they accomplished something even if they didn't have the required heroes. Expand the rewards given out a bit, more in line to how things used to be. This is a casual game after all (sorry if some think otherwise, but the primary target audience for match-3 games are casual or semi-casual players, not pro gamers).

Lately, all you've been doing has been restricting rewards, and making it harder to earn them, whether intentionally or not. I feel like anytime I've spent money on this game, you've just made it proportionally tougher and more of a grind-fest. If this continues, it won't encourage me to spend more money. It will just encourage me to quit. I've had fun this past Heroic tournament (a lot more fun than I've had in a while in this game, but that's only by fluke because getting 3 covers seems almost attainable this time without playing this game professionally), but to be perfectly honest, the only reason I'm still playing at this point is to help my alliance get their Fury covers and alliance rewards. Grinding like hell for minimal rewards/ progression isn't fun at all. I'll keep playing through the end of the season, but if nothing changes, I'm very likely out after that. I'm not the type of person who normally plays MMOs.

So to recap, new players SHOULD be able to expect to progress somewhat consistently without feeling like they're constantly being punished every time they level a character (actually this goes for higher levels as well), but new/ low level players should NOT expect to be able to place top 50 from the get go. This has more to do with problems you created by constricting the reward brackets and effectively eliminating meaningful rewards for players working on their */** rosters.

If you're doing any kind of weighting in your new sharding system, what you SHOULD be doing is weighting it so that there's an even spread of new players and veterans in every bracket, the way it used to be, and so that everyone has a solid shot at rewards that are appropriate for their progression levels. If I have a few high ***'s and medium *** / strong ** lineup, I should be able to regularly get new *** covers without grinding this game like it's a job. And again, note: I still spent money on this game to help me progress to a state where I finally thought it would be casually playable, but now it's just switched to "screw you" mode. If this was intentional, then you really need to rethink where you're going with this game or I think you'll alienate a large portion of your player-base, paying and non. If it was unintentional, then you need to fix it, like yesterday, so that your customers can have fun again.

On some partially related notes:

• While I love the idea of seasons, you really need to step it back a little. We shouldn't have to grind every single PvP if our alliance wants good rewards.
• In the same vein, you seriously need to add breaks between pve events - at least 3 days, preferably more like a week (especially if you're going to keep them as grindy as they've been for a while). If you want to give people something to do in the meantime, just run some shorter pve's that are a few days or so and don't have significant rewards other than iso. It's important for people to be able to feel like they can take time off this game and still be able to play.

The more you try to force us to play this game and grind the hell out of it, the less most of us want to have anything to do with it. Maybe some people feel different, but I am a paying customer, and that's my viewpoint.

Dayv

Clintman wrote:

empirical evidence suggests this is not a gentle push at all.

I think you're confusing "empirical" with "anecdotal".