Gating 5* levelling

Rod5

We’ve all seen threads from people who are finding PvP impossible because they have levelled their under-covered 5* characters beyond the rest of their roster and now can’t compete with what MMR serves up.

Idea to avoid this - restrict the ability to level 5* characters by Shield Rank. 

This is probably not a perfect solution but at least it might slow down the rate at which noobs lvl 5s, which I suggest would improve player longevity/turnover.

Persephone

I think you're suggestion is a great idea.  

broll

I also think this is a great idea.  I've long said that there should be something in game that tells players that leveling up 5*s instantly is a really bad idea.  Having this forced restriction would ensure it wouldn't happen.  All for this.

Punter1

Our alliance of lazy vets went public for a bit and we saw an endless stream of 1*/2*/3* rosters with all their under-covered 5s level maxed. 

Now I can see a new players thinking, the game has handed you a shiny rare cover why wouldn't you put ISO into it.  It's surely the most powerful, so will be beneficial. 

Possibly in the short-term yes, with CL scaling, PVE may be easier with that slightly more powerful 5*.  Most likely also PVP may be relatively unaffected, at least initially. 

The issues appear as players try to grow more and dip their toes into PVP.  Now that 0/0/5 lvl 330 Doc Ock comes back to haunt you as they wonder why when they are playing with Doc Ock and some 2*s they are getting beaten up by 4* and 5* rosters.  This could be pretty depressing and not a thing that would encourage you to play more. 

Not only that it's a waste of ISO that could be better spent improving your relevant characters for the tier that will make you stronger.  Getting 3s and 4s to champ status and steadily bringing in the champ rewards are key to progression. 

Also, as we all know here, not all 5s are created equal so that 0/0/3 Wasp at 300 looks great but isn't going to do much. 

So the crux of the suggestion is to have something in game that attempts to help focus players progression.  I was "lucky" I started before 4s so had no choice but to slowly grow through the tiers as they were opened up.  New players don't get that "benefit", gating leveling of 5s (and you could argue even 4s) at least would help.

Jwallyr

Shameless Copypasta from my comment on another thread:

It's my opinion that the existing implementation of 5star characters is awful, and as a result I'm highly skeptical that the introduction of a 6th tier is going to be handled gracefully.

For the first 4 tiers, a freshly-recruited character starts out significantly lower than the level of a well-developed character of the tier before, their match damage seems mostly commensurate with level, and as a result you can gradually build up your characters in each tier organically without unduly impacting your PvP MMR or skewing your PvE gameplay. Your 1star characters should be well past level 15 when you begin to accumulate 2stars; your 2stars will be well past level 40 by the time your 3stars are accumulating enough covers to be effective, and 3stars will be handily past level 70 (not to mention that 4s accumulate much more slowly and are gated by ISO for full leveling) by the time you have built up a stable of low-covered 4s.

5stars start at the level of an all-but-champed 4star with one cover and therefore have an outsized impact on player MMR from the get-go. Recent 5s have twice the match damage of equal level 4s, breaking the ability of characters to use level alone as a reasonable gauge for opponent difficulty in pvp, and leading toward boosted 5s being "god mode" for match damage in story mode for no obvious good reason.

So what's supposed to happen with 6-stars? Are they going to start at level 450 and do twice the damage of an equal level 5star? Or are they suddenly going to scale more gradually as with the previous levels, leaving players with the impression that they are "not that great" as compared with the 5star tier? Certainly that would cause players to be less than excited about the new tier.

Given the relatively small number of 5stars, the known poor balance within the 5star tier and the abrupt jump in scaling between the 4 and 5star tiers, I would much prefer that they rework the 5star tier entirely to be on a more consistent scale with the previous 4 tiers before introducing another tier of character that has no chance of being scaled reasonably off the existing character set.

TL,DR version, summarized for the current thread: 5stars are grossly out of line with the scaling paradigm existing on tiers 1 through 4. It would solve a lot of problems for the entire tier to be rebalanced to fall more in line with that existing paradigm. "Gating" mechanisms are often clumsy and badly implemented (see: restricting me to SCL7 in PvP because they won't fix the reward scaling to naturally draw me up to higher tiers when appropriate) so I'd prefer the actual scaling concerns be addressed.

Sadly, that would take a lot of effort and probably annoy some high-end players who might feel that having 5stars that were less insanely stronger than all other tiers is a slap in the face, so it'll probably never happen.

TPF Alexis

I was looking at the numbers for single-cover Characters a while ago, and what we have as 5* actually fit in pretty nicely where the progression from 1* to 4* would predict 6* characters to end up. But because of the way the tiers build, and the way CP are awarded, it's way too easy for a low-level Player to end up with something that should be a 6* character.

Rod5

The problem is not so much rewarding them as not preventing noobs from levelling them. 

We are where we are with 5*s. Rather than suggesting that everyone who spent a ton of time and effort (and in many cases money) building rosters have it thrown in their faces just because noobs don’t make the effort to understand game mechanics, better to implement a simple solution from the get-go.

Jwallyr

It's not even remotely fair to dump on "noobs" for not "[making] the effort to understand game mechanics" when those game mechanics are not mentioned in-game, and are badly understood on the forums due to there being no official communication on how MMR works.

From the context of the rest of the game, it's expected that higher-tier characters are better, will allow you to beat bigger challenges in the game, and that selecting appropriate SCLs will allow you to tailor the level of difficulty to your preferences, with the knowledge that you will get better rewards. The never-mentioned and utterly opaque MMR system in combination with the absurd scaling of 5stars causes players to penalize themselves for simply doing what the game is implicitly encouraging them to do (build their roster and recruit ever-higher-tier characters) for all 4 other tiers in the game.

I know it's popular to complain that everybody ahead of you is a no-life loser, and everybody behind you is a scrubtastic noob, but at least in this case, the game's mechanics are (to my mind) clearly to blame for the end result, which is that players must know beforehand that they have to avoid recruiting/training 5star characters if they don't want to find themselves shunted up to a tier of pvp play at which they cannot be successful. That's a bad situation all around, and the portion of players who are simply playing a match-3 phone game are not to blame for finding themselves funneled into that poor outcome.

Rod5

...and gating 5* levelling would do exactly that.

You’re welcome.

Jwallyr

Unnecessary snark aside, yes, gating 5* leveling would band-aid that specific problem while ignoring the underling disconnect in scaling that causes the problem in the first place. I would much prefer for 5stars to scale in keeping with the previous 4 tiers and gradually, gracefully become useful in PvP without arbitrary special-case mechanics to mitigate the MMR issue.

But sure, address the symptom and not the cause. Shrug.

broll

Jwallyr said:

Unnecessary snark aside, yes, gating 5* leveling would band-aid that specific problem while ignoring the underling disconnect in scaling that causes the problem in the first place. I would much prefer for 5stars to scale in keeping with the previous 4 tiers and gradually, gracefully become useful in PvP without arbitrary special-case mechanics to mitigate the MMR issue.

But sure, address the symptom and not the cause. Shrug.

OK, sure, many have said that.  But it's far too late for that now..  You're suggesting they re-architect the entire 5* tier of 27 characters to fit this well over 2 years after they came out.  That would have been a sensible soution 1-6 months after 5*s came out, it's too deep now.  You change them now you're gonna have people upset by the change, lots of things broken that didn't scale well, etc. etc.  

What he's suggesting isn't a band-aid it's a brilliant solution.  It's brilliant because: 
1.  It doesn't seem like a big change (I don't know the code but it's certainly simpler than redoing the whole 5* tier)
2.  It won't have any effect on the people in the tier using the characters regularly.
3.  It sounds like it would be very effective.

In what way is it a band-aid?  When people call fixes a band-aid they usually mean they temporary or inefficient.  His suggestion doesn't sound like either to me.  You suggestion is like dangerous experimental surgery for a deformity that the patient will inevitably grow out of.

Rod5

If the devs had the option to go back and do it again they might, but it’s just not realistic to impose that sort of rebalance now.

So we are where we are, and short of directing new players to the forums when they join (although that is not a bad idea either tbh), it would be tough to do it in-game any other way.

bbigler

Limiting 5* leveling based on Rank or SCL still won't work because players can reach the top SCL very quickly.  For example, I recently hit Rank 65 (qualifying for SCL 9) with a roster composed of 3*Champs alone, most being between levels 170 and 180.  My best covered 4*s have 6 covers each, so they're not ready either.  If I leveled a single 5* to let's say 315, my PVP MMR would be painful. 

Jwallyr

Re: Broll's 3 points:

1) I 100% concede that it would be a substantial effort to retune the entire 5star tier, and as a result I don't expect it to happen. That doesn't mean that it's not the best fix for the problem being presented.

2) I think that the impact to high-end 5star players might not be as big as you think, because if the entire 5star tier were to be thoughtfully retuned, the relative strength of 5star characters could remain pretty consistent to their current ranking.

Additionally, if the 5star tier were scaled down to be more in line with the previous 4 tiers, high-level/boosted 4stars could be competitive against low-level 5star characters, which would allow a much broader character set to remain relevant at high levels of play. I have repeatedly read that once you get a few high level 5stars, you are essentially stuck playing the same 3 to 4 characters, because your other characters are simply too weak to matter. Increasing the usable character space could be a big improvement to diversity at high levels of play.

3) I think we have every reason to believe that gating 5star levels on SCL would be clumsy and arbitrary, and therefore ineffective. Like the enforced minimum SCLs in PvP as a fix for "slumming" (instead of simply having better enough rewards at higher SCLs to draw players upward), the gating might either be tuned too high such that players get confused about why they can't improve their shiny new 5star, or it might be tuned so low that nobody notices the gating. The SCL lockouts for Story mode, for instance, are COMPLETELY divorced from your roster's strength, so effectively the lockouts have no impact on my play. I am early in the 4star transition, but I can join SCL9 despite having no chance of being competitive at that level of play.



So, just to summarize... I don't expect the 5star tier to be rebalanced to fall in line with the 1 through 4 tiers of scaling, but I still think it's the most complete, effective, and therefore correct solution to the variety of problems that plague the 5star tier.

Rod5

bbigler said:

Limiting 5* leveling based on Rank or SCL still won't work because players can reach the top SCL very quickly.  For example, I recently hit Rank 65 (qualifying for SCL 9) with a roster composed of 3*Champs alone, most being between levels 170 and 180.  My best covered 4*s have 6 covers each, so they're not ready either.  If I leveled a single 5* to let's say 315, my PVP MMR would be painful. 

Why not based on Shield Rank?

It definitely goes higher than 65...

broll

Rod5 said:

If the devs had the option to go back and do it again they might, but it’s just not realistic to impose that sort of rebalance now.

So we are where we are, and short of directing new players to the forums when they join (although that is not a bad idea either tbh), it would be tough to do it in-game any other way.

Or they could just put a demo in and explain the stuff, like when Supports came out. That’s literally the only thing I like about supports. 

Jwallyr said:

 
2) I think that the impact to high-end 5star players might not be as big as you think, because if the entire 5star tier were to be thoughtfully retuned, the relative strength of 5star characters could remain pretty consistent to their current ranking.

You don’t understand my concern. Each 5* has 3 moves, an HP pool, and level scaling.  That’s 135 different points of variability. Unless the testing was extremely detailed it’s almost certain some of these would scale poorly to one way or the other. On top of that it would almost certainly completely change the entire balance. If they were to do this it would probably take 3-6 PvP seasons of rebalances before all the kinks were out. If you think they’ll just easily scale go ask a longtime vet how well 1* Juggernaut scaled to 550 pre SCLs. 

Dormammu

Would it work to lock out 5-stars from certain SCLs? For example, if PvP SCLs 1-6 didn't allow 5-stars, MMR wouldn't factor them in. At the very least this would allow players who ignorantly leveled their under-covered 5-stars to choose an appropriate SCL until they reached 4-star land and balanced out their MMR.

Jwallyr

Meh. I'm gated to SCL7, and I'm still tossed up against near-max-required 3star + dual boosted/champed 4stars with my typically champed (non-boosted) 4star + reasonably-developed 3star + non-boosted 3star.  Until they fix MMR to be smart enough to factor the actual teams being used (or even just the effective roster levels after accounting for boosts), the pvp experience is going to continue to stink.

Rod5

MMR is also dependent on who is unshielded in your slice and near your points level. SCL makes no difference to your MMR whatsoever.

Jwallyr

I'm aware, and that's a problem IMO. SCLs in story let you pick your challenge with a specific list of rewards possible. SCLs in versus... give you zero control over the level of challenge, and primarily limit your rewards based on the SCL you pick. Having MMR limited by your chosen SCL would be a massive improvement for players getting to tailor their own experience, vs.  being shunted up to fight opponents with huge level advantages because of irrelevant things elsewhere in your roster.

bbigler

The source of this problem is not explaining to new players that leveling up their new 5* will give them tougher opponents in PVP.  Just explain that in-game and let them decide. 

On a side note, I wish D3 would explain how the MMR works.  They don't have to give away proprietary information, just some more details other than "it picks rosters with similarly leveled characters".