On Bracketing and SHIELD Training

Bowgentle

locked wrote:

It seems like things have changed yet again, or have gone to 'normal'. Seeing tons of 2x 85 teams in the current tourney (not that they have any points to speak of though lol). My bracket itself looks fairly normal, I only see one forumite I know there.

It's definitely not normal.
In Krakadoom I see the usual maxed OBW/Pun teams I've come to love from 0 points onwards again.

Unknown

HailMary wrote:

Congrats!

As of two PVPs ago, I was able to hit 1000+ with only a single concluding shield and a 2x141 team. Previous PVP: had to throw up a shield at 950. This PVP? 3 3-hour shields to cross the 1100 barrier, and I was apparently one of the luckier ones. Oy.

The new veterancy-based sharding is a total b----. This is the first time I've needed to legitimately shield-hop, first shielding in the 960s, then 1050, then a few defensive wins and a couple of quick wins later, shielding above 1100.

Just about every Djangolier was in a bracket where, at minimum, Top 5 was 1000+ -- most of their brackets ended up with Top 10 > 1000 (as did mine, where Top 5 was 1100+) Meanwhile, two of us have relatives with low/mid-tier rosters who had ridiculous newbie brackets: 763 was good for #1 in one, and high 600+ was good for #7 in the other. Utterly ridiculous.

First of all, thanks!

This was my 6th Death Bracket in a row.

Ranking	Score	Leader 	5th 	10th
32		857		1387		1292		1152
40		853		1305		1109		1051
28		886		1401		1043		992
36		904		1280		1162		1045
52		808			
11		1063		1205		1126		1073

As you can see, with normal shielding I just have no chance. I won't say how many shields I had to use, but it was more than you (and that's not a good thing). This was more a test to see if it was still even possible with shield hopping for me. It was, but it was expensive. 450 HP expensive (well 300 after winnings). Not something I even remotely want to do on a regular basis.

My impression has been that the other members of my guild (I'm not a spokesperson, just a member, so bear that in mind) have all likewise been getting death brackets in all their recent PvPs. It's getting ridiculous. It's also been getting increasingly tough for our alliance to make the top 100 for the third cover, and I think a big part of that is that vets are been forced to fight tooth and nail to win (or try to win, as you can see from my recent rankings) any covers.

I suppose if their aim is to maximize profits, they're doing a good job (until everyone quits), but they're doing it at the cost of their community by pitting everyone against each other.

I'm starting to think Nick Fury isn't worth everyone buying into Demiurge's premise that we should all blow lots of money on shields and health packs, and grind like hell for the top 10, when we can see the writing on the wall. They're restructuring the game to make **'s 1.5*, ***s down to 2.5 *, to make way for ****'s to become the new 3-stars. Nick Fury is just the start of that. The more nasty they can make these death brackets, the easier time they'll have billing 4-stars as a way to escape them and get back to that promised land of being able to play casually/ competitively. The only way I see to really combat that is for players to simply reject seasons and 4-stars, or stop playing, but neither are especially good solutions, and the former would never happen. Too many players and alliances are invested in winning season rewards and using their 4-stars, even if the rest refuse. But if we think it's expensive right now to upgrade our heroes, just wait until 4-stars become the new norm for mid-to-late-game.

HailMary

theHappyDance wrote:

As you can see, with normal shielding I just have no chance. I won't say how many shields I had to use, but it was more than you (and that's not a good thing). This was more a test to see if it was still even possible with shield hopping for me. It was, but it was expensive. 450 HP expensive (well 300 after winnings). Not something I even remotely want to do on a regular basis.

Yep, your bracket leaders and #10s have generally scored a bit higher than mine, but that's roughly what I've been seeing. That really sucks about your shield use. 450 HP on shields for a Top 25 finish is really, really rough. I'm curious: what team are you usually fielding?

theHappyDance wrote:

My impression has been that the other members of my guild (I'm not a spokesperson, just a member, so bear that in mind) have all likewise been getting death brackets in all their recent PvPs. It's getting ridiculous. It's also been getting increasingly tough for our alliance to make the top 100 for the third cover, and I think a big part of that is that vets are been forced to fight tooth and nail to win (or try to win, as you can see from my recent rankings) any covers.

I suppose if their aim is to maximize profits, they're doing a good job (until everyone quits), but they're doing it at the cost of their community by pitting everyone against each other.

I'm honestly starting to suspect that D3 is actively pushing high-level players towards quitting the game. My guess is that players with at least 2 L141s don't contribute much to D3's revenue stream at all, since they likely won't be buying any cover packs, and win enough HP to never have to pay for another roster slot. Meanwhile, they keep dominating PVP leaderboards, scaring away paying low/mid-tier players. Ice mentioned that the new veterancy-based bracket sharding was partly intended to reduce the deterrent factor for new players when they saw brackets with leaders hitting 1000+. Ergo, veterans (which apparently means "people with more than a couple of L85s") are segregated into brackets of doom, and newer players (even those are with a couple of near-max 2*s) are shunted to brackets where 750 can get you #1.

theHappyDance wrote:

The more nasty they can make these death brackets, the easier time they'll have billing 4-stars as a way to escape them and get back to that promised land of being able to play casually/ competitively. The only way I see to really combat that is for players to simply reject seasons and 4-stars, or stop playing, but neither are especially good solutions, and the former would never happen. Too many players and alliances are invested in winning season rewards and using their 4-stars, even if the rest refuse. But if we think it's expensive right now to upgrade our heroes, just wait until 4-stars become the new norm for mid-to-late-game.

That's a very interesting thought. So far, though, it seems that 4*s are to be nothing more than trophies -- IW is viable, but not worth the massive Iso/HP cost. Fury seems to be legitimately strong, but with him only being available from end-of-Season rewards, it doesn't seem like he'll be the vehicle for a short/mid-term 4* revitalization strategy.

Unknown

I was able to break 1000 and got in 25th place. If I fought more than once when shield broke I would average about 2 attacks / fight and lose about 80 pts. for every 20 that I gained. Wasn't even worth fighting my way to 1100 for the card since it probably would've been an impossible expectation anyways.

Here's hoping for a change for better brackets or a new company to take over the license and make the game better or at least more enjoyable. I don't have any 141's and would hate to be one of those with a nice 141 roster and see lower lvl players be able to get same rewards when they haven't put the time in.

DD-The-Mighty

Subcore wrote:

I was able to break 1000 and got in 25th place. If I fought more than once when shield broke I would average about 2 attacks / fight and loose (sp) about 80 pts. for every 20 that I gained. Wasn't even worth fighting my way to 1100 for the card since it probably would've been an impossible expectation anyways.

Here's hoping for a change for better brackets or a new company to take over the license and make the game better or at least more enjoyable. I don't have any 141's and would hate to be one of those with a nice 141 roster and see lower lvl players be able to get same rewards when they haven't put the time in.

Looking at my top10 being filled with 100+ squads, starting at 1100 for 10th place, I don't think having even 141x2 is even a deterrent anymore for top 50 without cowering from shield to shield. In the death brackets the fear of intimidation is all but lost when your at 700pts+ on the boards. IF you're in a death bracket pay up or give up. Roster strength means little in the "top".

MPQ 2014 everybody!

Unknown

I'd say there was a little something wrong with bracketing. I'm making the 2* -> 3* transition, with a couple of 3* at 102, but even with my predominantly 2* roster, I managed to get into the same bracket as Beezer. I managed to shield hop my way up to my first 1,100 (thanks to the player who lost to me to bring me to exactly 1,100!), but it was intense. No way I'm going to shield hop the same way in every tournament, so this new method of bracketing is seriously going to hamper getting into 3* land.

Unknown

Guys, dont swallow the pill. There is nothing random going in here. Shield members can answer, did any of them have a trivial bracket? In heavy metal for example, i had nazerith, armando ferraz, theladder and others in my top 10. I get xmen i. Every event now and competition has been extra fierce. People being determined is one thing, but the brackets are spcertainly weighted. By either mmr, days played or some other metrics. The whole this is just a coincidence talk is ****. Here is why this is happening, and im not sure if this was pointed out, because i didnt read all 8 pages.
This is happening simply because tougher brackets mean more shields spent means more $ for demiurge and d3. Its another cash grab, disguised as a network improvement. If they dont change the weighting system, the days of buying one shield and finishing first are pretty much gone. The P2Wers will comtinuously place higher thsn the people who dont put cash on shields. Being good meant you had enough hp to keep shields going non stop. I think i used 8 shields in daken pvp, a new personal high. This is unsustainable, thankfully im retiring wednesday.

Unknown

klingsor wrote:

Guys, dont swallow the pill. There is nothing random going in here. Shield members can answer, did any of them have a trivial bracket? In heavy metal for example, i had nazerith, armando ferraz, theladder and others in my top 10. I get xmen i. Every event now and competition has been extra fierce. People being determined is one thing, but the brackets are spcertainly weighted. By either mmr, days played or some other metrics. The whole this is just a coincidence talk is ****. Here is why this is happening, and im not sure if this was pointed out, because i didnt read all 8 pages.
This is happening simply because tougher brackets mean more shields spent means more $ for demiurge and d3. Its another cash grab, disguised as a network improvement. If they dont change the weighting system, the days of buying one shield and finishing first are pretty much gone. The P2Wers will comtinuously place higher thsn the people who dont put cash on shields. Being good meant you had enough hp to keep shields going non stop. I think i used 8 shields in daken pvp, a new personal high. This is unsustainable, thankfully im retiring wednesday.

Devs, do You see what You made me do?

I AGREE with klingsor!

HailMary

fluid_dance wrote:

I'd say there was a little something wrong with bracketing. I'm making the 2* -> 3* transition, with a couple of 3* at 102, but even with my predominantly 2* roster, I managed to get into the same bracket as Beezer. I managed to shield hop my way up to my first 1,100 (thanks to the player who lost to me to bring me to exactly 1,100!), but it was intense. No way I'm going to shield hop the same way in every tournament, so this new method of bracketing is seriously going to hamper getting into 3* land.

Congrats on 1100. I think you hit me once (or twice ) on your way up, no?

klingsor wrote:

Guys, dont swallow the pill. There is nothing random going in here. Shield members can answer, did any of them have a trivial bracket? In heavy metal for example, i had nazerith, armando ferraz, theladder and others in my top 10. I get xmen i. Every event now and competition has been extra fierce. People being determined is one thing, but the brackets are spcertainly weighted. By either mmr, days played or some other metrics. The whole this is just a coincidence talk is ****. Here is why this is happening, and im not sure if this was pointed out, because i didnt read all 8 pages.
This is happening simply because tougher brackets mean more shields spent means more $ for demiurge and d3. Its another cash grab, disguised as a network improvement. If they dont change the weighting system, the days of buying one shield and finishing first are pretty much gone. The P2Wers will comtinuously place higher thsn the people who dont put cash on shields. Being good meant you had enough hp to keep shields going non stop. I think i used 8 shields in daken pvp, a new personal high. This is unsustainable, thankfully im retiring wednesday.

Yep, all of my recent brackets have been T10 > 1000 points. It's frankly insane. I have a glimmer of hope that D3 is prioritizing not scaring away newbies, and is looking to tweak the veterancy-based bracketing now that they see what utter bulls--- it is. I think the more blatant cheap shot is the slew of utterly s---ty rewards of late: reruns of Rags and Loki, with an IM40 thrown in just for kicks? It really feels like they're blatantly banking on Season placement to keep the high-level competition going (which, admittedly, is working very well). It seems, though, that they might be breaking the trend, since we just had LT rewards, and now are playing for Psy, which is... okay.

Unknown

I personally think the true outcome of their changes will be seen on Wednesday. I believe there will be a lot of veterans retiring. I keep hearing talk of finishing season 1 and done. I think most have invested in helping their Alliances. Once the awards are given and the dust settles, I think a lot will bail. Add to that the lack of communication with all the problems at the end of last week, all the open tickets a lot of people have due to those issues and the likely poor handling of those tickets to come, and this may truly be the beginning of the end. The game has definitely changed for the worse in the last month, unless you are looking strictly at the dollars spent in the short term. This is a social game. As much as friends attract other friends to play, those same friends move to another game together also.

Unknown

I hope a lot of veterans retire. Means more rewards for me.

DD-The-Mighty

HailMary wrote:

Yep, all of my recent brackets have been T10 > 1000 points. It's frankly insane. I have a glimmer of hope that D3 is prioritizing not scaring away newbies, and is looking to tweak the veterancy-based bracketing now that they see what utter bulls--- it is. I think the more blatant cheap shot is the slew of utterly s---ty rewards of late: reruns of Rags and Loki, with an IM40 thrown in just for kicks? It really feels like they're blatantly banking on Season placement to keep the high-level competition going (which, admittedly, is working very well). It seems, though, that they might be breaking the trend, since we just had LT rewards, and now are playing for Psy, which is... okay.

Apparently a lot of folks like the taste of the Kool-aid.
This is my bracket top 10 for tourney featuring a 3* minimum of easily the least desired Psylocke colour.



This #1 shielded X-Men member there has a 141 Daken amongst many maxed 3s and delightful a 250 IW and Xforce and a fully capped Psylocke.
As you can see he likes to start the party off with a bang.

And there are still 2 days left.

NoThankYou.jpg

Unknown

HailMary wrote:

Congrats on 1100. I think you hit me once (or twice ) on your way up, no?

Sorry about that, I try not to do that, but I really wanted to get lazy daken and two lazy thor covers. Hopefully you were shielded for at least one of my attacks?

HailMary

DD-The-Mighty wrote:

Apparently a lot of folks like the taste of the Kool-aid.
This is my bracket top 10 for tourney featuring a 3* minimum of easily the least desired Psylocke colour.

This #1 shielded X-Men member there has a 141 Daken amongst many maxed 3s and delightful a 250 IW and Xforce and a fully capped Psylocke.
As you can see he likes to start the party off with a bang.

And there are still 2 days left.

I... don't understand who you're referring to with the "Kool-Aid" line. You seem to be agreeing with me.

fluid_dance wrote:

Sorry about that, I try not to do that, but I really wanted to get lazy daken and two lazy thor covers. Hopefully you were shielded for at least one of my attacks?

Heh, no problem. I was shielded for all of your attacks. And yeah, the rewards for that PVP were great, so it's totes understandable.

Unknown

DD-The-Mighty wrote:

Apparently a lot of folks like the taste of the Kool-aid.
This is my bracket top 10 for tourney featuring a 3* minimum of easily the least desired Psylocke colour.

(pic taken out to save space)

This #1 shielded X-Men member there has a 141 Daken amongst many maxed 3s and delightful a 250 IW and Xforce and a fully capped Psylocke.
As you can see he likes to start the party off with a bang.

And there are still 2 days left.

NoThankYou.jpg

I just checked mine and 4 of the top 8 are shielded as well. Number 1 being at 840 points. Never seen that amount so fast as well.

Bowgentle

Well Slobofix doesn't count, she shields in every tourney right from the start.

NorthernPolarity

This type of behavior has been consistently happening for a while now. I remember when they changed boosts so that instead of having a single +3 AP boost, you would get 3 +1 AP boosts, and Demiurge said that the change wasn't supposed to change the actual pricing of these boosts. Can't say that I was surprised to see when the changes did come out that the boost prices increased by something like 20-40%. This also somewhat happened with the changes of alliance reward structure when they changed it to 1st place gets 500hp, 2nd gets 100hp to both get 250hp, which conveniently takes out 2k hp out of the total prize pool.

These changes already gave me a vibe that Demiurge was trying to nickel and dime us by jumping at the opportunity to stealth nerf things when they change a system in the game, and I'm getting the same feeling with this change. I don't know if IceIX was being genuine when he said that this system was supposed to give a "slight weighting" to hardcore players, but it's clear that this "slight weighting" is making it so that top 10 is easily 1000+ points whereas it was maybe 700+ points a month ago. I also don't see Demiurge changing this back to how it was before because they clearly would like the increased hp expenditures gained from everyone shielding.

I would hope that our feedback on the forums mattered and that they would change this back to how it was before because of the "horde" of hardcore players reducing their playtime and spending, but I doubt that the majority of us really contribute that much to their coffers. After all, if most of their comes from cover packs and hardly any of us spends HP on cover packs, then it's probably unlikely that we even constitute a decent chunk of their income. I think what's more likely to happen is that our activity is going to slowly erode over time while the newer players are going to continue spending money on the game while treating all of these new systems as the norm. Maybe this is how the game should have been from the beginning, and hardcore players shouldn't be able to trivially place top 10 in every single tournament without shielding, but the lack of progression and accomplishment that comes with that when you realize that progression and leveling actually makes the game harder in both PvE and PvP due to scaling / being placed in higher tiered MMR brackets just makes all the effort spent into progressing feel futile.

I don't think that I'm quite done with the game yet, but my disappointment with all of these recent changes have just been steadily growing. Most of us older players are used to jogging on the treadmill in order to get our shiny new heroes, but when Demiurge ramps up the speed of the treadmill and force us to start sprinting for the same rewards, I would imagine that most of us would eventually just stop running altogether. The newer generation, of course, will just continue sprinting happily for their new shiny rewards while naively believing that having a stronger roster is actually a good thing. While I doubt that this marks the steady decline/end of the game, it feels like it's nearing the end of the line for the older generation of players.

Spoit

I'm sure they look at their vaunted metrics and see that playtime and spending are both up, but like that one venturebeat article showed, sometimes they have trouble linking cause and effect with the numbers, so they'll say that the changes are actually good for player engagement

Unknown

Long term returns come from long term investments, this is short term thinking. They will see a decrease in spending once season ends, then they will rush season two, with an elite in the middle. Then i predict season two will burn the remaining vets out. Hopefully spending will decrease and they will ask why. The only thing we can do is not over spend. If people are willing to pay 500$ for a shirt People will make shirts worth $500. Instead of admiring the slobofixes or reckless of the world, pm them to chill out, and have them see they are part of the problem. By buying more shields we are making it worse. I had huge HP reserves, bought some covers and im out of hp. Thats with us virtually placing top two in every event. This bracketing change makes me glad i wont be around for season two, because its going to be ridiculous from the beginning. In last pvp almost everyone was above 1200. Shields were spent at alarming rate. This bracketing thing is producing short term results but once season ends i will never spend another dollar. Hundreds of $ gone in potential revenue. Alliances were a great change but they are being pushed in the wrong direction. The fact that iceix says its for load balancing and not player distribution based on skill means this is a concerted effort to slip one past us. Iceix knows its not just the great rewards, he is just saying what he is told to. I suggest people start refusing to enter brackets until last 4 hours and not buy more than one shield. If some nutjob wants to spend $50 to earn a $15 reward, let them, dont keep the cycle going.

After all this season, i feel like a boxer with a bad promoter, telling me to do one more fight...

LordWill

You can shear a sheep many times, but you can only skin them once.