Are competition brackets ever going to balance?

Cheetah1982

It’s getting increasingly frustrating to enter CL 7 PVE and seeing champed 5-star rosters sitting in top positions. Especially max champed 5 star rosters.
Is there any hope of the devs giving younger rosters a chance to compete against each other for valuable prizes? 

Daredevil217

Why not go to a lower CL? I know for me (low champed 5* roster) I will dip down to CL8 when I can compete in CL9 just because I don’t want to play as long and would like quicker clear times. I think I’ve earned that right by building up my roster. I think allowing players to go where they want is something they do right, honestly.

The problem is that the rewards in 7-9 are all so similar that there is little incentive to play up or down. If anything that is where they could improve massively. 

Cheetah1982

The rewards in CL 6 are significantly worse and the boards are still dominated by champed 5-star rosters, making it even less likely to win a prize worth playing for. 

jamesh

Given that the top prizes in CL7 are comparable with the CL9 prizes two steps down (i.e. top 5 in CL7 is roughly equivalent to top 20 in CL9), there are always going to be people who will drop down in the hope that the easier battles will let them place better and get the same or better prizes.

The prizes at the higher clearance levels would need to be expanded even further in order for it to not be worth while dropping down.  For example, a 4* cover for top 100 or top 200 in CL9.

bluewolf

I presume you want some kind of lockout for rosters of a certain tier to create brackets of smaller and bigger rosters.

The issues are:

1.  The game is set up with an ability to pick your SCL to allow you, the player, to choose which level of effort and rewards appeals to you for the event.  This was a huge boon to players vs the old days where it was just scaled off your characters, making softcapping a very solid strategy in order to avoid massively overscaled enemies.  Now you can decide if you want to fight the hardest enemies and get (somewhat) better rewards or just pick easier enemies and accept lower rewards in exchange for less time spent playing.  Many players find this invaluable and enjoy reduced time requirements while getting reasonably good rewards.   Therefore it is pretty unlikely people will voluntarily move to higher SCLs.

2.  The game's way to divide up players is imperfect at best; it could possibly use MMR; but the Shield Rank is what they use.  The fact is that your Shield Rank may not reflect your ability to clear nodes, especially in different events where difficulty can vary based on the enemies you face.  You can build up your SR by rostering people and adding covers, but dilution means you can build XP while ending up with a lot of low-cover characters.  So any filter they use to try to segregate rosters with the current tools available seems like it wouldn't have the desired results for lots of players.

This isn't to say they couldn't devise a system that worked to meet the goals you want, but the devs probably like that you feel like you need to catch up/become competitive, at least in the general sense.  Therefore, they may not feel like it's worth their time currently to work on that type of system.  

It's true that facing champed 5's feels really unfair and maybe they will do something about that eventually, but the game has been around a really long time and they are trying to balance a lot of different players' needs.  Heck, even someone with champed 5's might not be very competitive in a higher SCL (depends on the 5 and all that).  

The most relevant short term hope for players in your position is that the devs are supposed to be working on updating the rewards for events, which might possibly make the gradient bigger between SCLs and draw some of those champed 5's higher.  Of course, then you might end up feeling you are being left behind at a more rapid pace.  Also, I doubt they will ratchet up the higher SCL rewards to the point that people who highly value faster clears will feel it is worthwhile to move up and spend more time playing.

RickOShay

Cheetah1982 said:

It’s getting increasingly frustrating to enter CL 7 PVE and seeing champed 5-star rosters sitting in top positions. Especially max champed 5 star rosters.
Is there any hope of the devs giving younger rosters a chance to compete against each other for valuable prizes? 

We can hope that CL10 opens sometime ~soon~, and that it has an appropriate rewards differential from the other CL's.
It will probably be just a bit better than CL9, and will maaaaaybe pull some players up that 'should' be playing higher. 

While I appreciate the ability to drop CL's if I want a faster/easier clearing time for a bit less rewards, I feel many players sandbag too heavily. 

I've dropped from CL9 to CL8 quite often now. My fully-5*-champed roster 'should' be playing in CL9, and I do feel some guilt when earning placement above those who are working hard for placement.

Dropping to CL7 from 9 though is really a pretty lame move to dominate top placement. Unless it's seldom drop, or during a vacation week or something, playing in CL7 regularly when your roster is clearly geared toward CL9 just stinks. 

It' could be compared to running track in school. Sure a senior may need to get a workout in with a lower class once in a while, but routinely competing with them if allowed to? Come on. 

shardwick

The game could definitely use some gating. This is actually why I stopped playing on my backup account which has like champed 2s and a champed 3* Strange. I thought I could play on like cl2 or cl3 and do well against players with similar rosters and build up resources from top placement. Wrong. First few events that I played was mostly 4* or higher level 3* players in the top 10 and even with having the essential 4* for one event, and doing optimal clears, I still finished like 22nd in cl2. That's ridiculous. Compare that to when I was a new player back in 2017 on my main account someone just having the essential 4* pretty much guaranteed them top 5 even without doing optimal clears.

So, the big question is how would you gate off players? You could completely lock out players but I don't think that would be fair to those that don't play optimally anyway.  I would probably have a max level for characters. Maybe something like level 300 for all characters for cl7 so the 5* player that has max champed 4s and a ton of champed 5s will be able to still use their 5s but 4* and 5* characters will max out at 300. For cl8 and cl9 there would be no restriction. For lower clearance levels you could have more restrictions like locking out 5* characters completely.

skittledaddy

OP,
I just got T5 in CL7 for Prodigal Son. I'm almost always T10 in my slice. I have no 5* champs, in fact I don't even have one fully-covered. Heck, even my highest 4*s are only between 290-295. Additionally, I exclusively use 4*s in my PvE play (except for the 5E node, of course).

It can be done with the right approach/roster; and, no, I'm not talking about sniping late bracket flips. While that is an option, I don't use it because I need full progression rewards even more than I need placement rewards.

ROY84

I agree, however the rank system in the game doesn't properly assess the players roster. I'm not one for making excuses for the devs but on this one they kind of put their backs to the wall. I don't see a fair way to regulate people to tier groups.

I do pretty well in the rankings but I should be doing better. It's just impossible when you get someone who has maxed every 5* beating the round in half a second. 

The only thing that comes to mind is maybe just increase the amount of event times per day. That should spread people out a little more, maybe you'll have better luck on a different time frame.

BoyWonder1914

Don't think I can really contribute anything new here that hasn't been said, I've been on both sides of the fence. Before I had 5s, and was playing optimally, it was incredibly frustrating to lose out on T10 because 5-star rosters could finish their grinds/clears around the 30 minute mark, sometimes less. I still made T10 occasionally (sometimes T5 even), but I knew that it wasn't something I was going to be able to count on until I got myself at least a champed Th5nos. 

Fast-forward to me having a stable of 15+ champed 5s, I'm somehow enjoying the game a lot less, and feel much less motivated to play for placement. I don't even remember the last time I played an event optimally - my XBox got dusted off after months of neglect and is refusing to ever let go again. Less MPQ time = More XBox time, and that has since become my motivation; to play only as much as my alliance reqs need. I play CL7 & CL8 when I could be playing CL9 not because of access to rewards, because it requires the least time before I can put my phone down again. I know guys like me aren't the problem though, it's the folks who still go hard for placement in that situation. When CL9 first rolled out you could actually reliably make t50 in a lot of cases not doing the 5E node as long as you still grinded the other nodes somewhat optimally. A lot of players have moved into 5-land since, and 5s have gotten a lot better since, so that's no longer the case. 

Haithere

The crux of the situation is that rewarding players for completing events as fast as possible is stupid. It's a bad decision that discourages trying new teams, and going into a level you aren't sure you're comfortable in. But the devs are never going to do something that helps the players only without increasing their profits. 

bluewolf

Haithere said:

The crux of the situation is that rewarding players for completing events as fast as possible is stupid. It's a bad decision that discourages trying new teams, and going into a level you aren't sure you're comfortable in. But the devs are never going to do something that helps the players only without increasing their profits. 

Mostly true, or at least they focus on things that provide ways to potentially increase revenue or keep spending pressure on.  It's the catch-22 of the entire FTP business model, the devs are simultaneously required by such a model to continually try to sell you things etc while in theory providing an enjoyable experience, and finding that balance is difficult at best.

This past year they did change the Team up/Join Forces nodes to only require the featured 4*.  This had no direct revenue-generating function but did address a longstanding player complaint.  Most things of course seem to require a give and take in terms of player benefit.

This situation is a bit harder to figure out how to approach it, as you are talking about either creating restrictive brackets/SCLs and reducing player choice in PVE approach or somehow changing the definition of competition which will inevitably see some shifting of winners and losers.  So it would seem to be unavoidable that some people would be upset by whatever change were implemented while other players would be happy/enjoy the results.

UNC_Samurai

People will continue to play down as long as there is such little difference in rewards between tiers.

shardwick

UNC_Samurai said:

People will continue to play down as long as there is such little difference in rewards between tiers.

It's not even about rewards for a lot of players though. Many just like being able to slaughter enemies in pve even if the rewards that they can get are total garbage for where they are in the game. So you could completely overhaul the progression and placement reward structure, throw a bunch of master support tokens and legendaries into rewards and introduce cl10 and all that to encourage people to move up but many would still slum it in lower tiers. That's why I support having restrictions for like cl1 to cl7. You could slum it in cl7 if you're a 550 player with multiple max champed 4* dupe characters but maybe you would need to choose between being locked out of placement rewards or having a max level on all of your characters. If you care about placement rewards then you'd probably think twice about going down to lower clearance levels.

KGB

shardwick said:

 That's why I support having restrictions for like cl1 to cl7. You could slum it in cl7 if you're a 550 player with multiple max champed 4* dupe characters but maybe you would need to choose between being locked out of placement rewards or having a max level on all of your characters. If you care about placement rewards then you'd probably think twice about going down to lower clearance levels.

I asked for this a LONG time ago when SCL first went live. I suggested something simple like CL1-4 was restricted to using 1&2* characters only (other than the 3/4* required characters), CL5-6 would be restricted to 1-3* characters only (other than the 4* required), CL7 would be restricted to 1-4* characters (other than the 4* required) and CL8+ would be open to any character.

Of course this was shouted down by vets who wanted to slum down to quickly do their clears in lower CL's even if they didn't want placement. It seems many players are simply on auto-pilot in PvE in order to remain on T100 alliances for the extra rewards that brings so they slum down to CL7 to simply meet their requirements on points.

You could get rid of a lot of players in CL7 if you reduced the max points by say 10 or 20% forcing competitive T100 PvE players into CL8/CL9 in order to get max points.

KGB

bluewolf

KGB said:

shardwick said:

 That's why I support having restrictions for like cl1 to cl7. You could slum it in cl7 if you're a 550 player with multiple max champed 4* dupe characters but maybe you would need to choose between being locked out of placement rewards or having a max level on all of your characters. If you care about placement rewards then you'd probably think twice about going down to lower clearance levels.

*snip*

You could get rid of a lot of players in CL7 if you reduced the max points by say 10 or 20% forcing competitive T100 PvE players into CL8/CL9 in order to get max points.

KGB

FTFY

Vins2

KGB said:

shardwick said:

 That's why I support having restrictions for like cl1 to cl7. You could slum it in cl7 if you're a 550 player with multiple max champed 4* dupe characters but maybe you would need to choose between being locked out of placement rewards or having a max level on all of your characters. If you care about placement rewards then you'd probably think twice about going down to lower clearance levels.

I asked for this a LONG time ago when SCL first went live. I suggested something simple like CL1-4 was restricted to using 1&2* characters only (other than the 3/4* required characters), CL5-6 would be restricted to 1-3* characters only (other than the 4* required), CL7 would be restricted to 1-4* characters (other than the 4* required) and CL8+ would be open to any character.

Of course this was shouted down by vets who wanted to slum down to quickly do their clears in lower CL's even if they didn't want placement. It seems many players are simply on auto-pilot in PvE in order to remain on T100 alliances for the extra rewards that brings so they slum down to CL7 to simply meet their requirements on points.

You could get rid of a lot of players in CL7 if you reduced the max points by say 10 or 20% forcing competitive T100 PvE players into CL8/CL9 in order to get max points.

KGB

When SCLs first came in, I don't think there was an SCL 9, so it would be unfair to quarantine all 5* rosters, from baby to 550s in SCL8.  To me, having SCL1-3 dedicated to unchamped 2* rosters seems more illogical, when the time spent at that level of play is so small. 

And they did adjust the points in SCL7 to give significantly less total points than 8 and 9.   I don't know what's enough to make top 100 alliance in PVE anymore, but in release pve events, there was a minimum expectation of 1.4x progression (not sure of the number but it was a multiplier of max progression) and playing optimally in scl7 didn't give enough.

If it's like pvp, the amount of players has dropped and the minimum average required points to still fill up a top 100 alliance has dropped.   For instance, I think the #50 alliance in pvp scored around 190k, so every person needed an average of 9500 for the season.  190k at one point in the game was the threshold for an alliance to make top 100.  People have just stopped playing. 

HoundofShadow

You could get top 1 in SCL 6 and top 10 in SCL 7, even when there are players with multi-champed 5* playing there. There are those who deliberately overclear and there are those who takes their own time to clear. As for getting top 1 in SCL 7, it's impossible unless you bracket-snipe. 

ThaRoadWarrior

I have always advocated hating characters by level rather than by star tier. That change targets the roster rather than the player.

ThaRoadWarrior

I guess; whatever works lol

ZootSax

ThaRoadWarrior said:

I have always advocated hating characters by level rather than by star tier. That change targets the roster rather than the player.

But then that encourages soft-capping, which has a long history of being abused/hated from the roster-based scaling days.  

Granted, I'm not saying you're wrong or that it's a bad idea.  Unfortunately, the players will always find the most profitable way to game whatever system is implemented, as it's absolutely in their best interest to do so.  Sometimes it's to your personal benefit, but in others its not. 

Personally, I think the best solution would be to better differentiate the rewards between CL's 7,8 & 9, but that would mean opening the tap on higher-end prizes, which the development team is rightly reluctant to do without a lot of consideration based on their own self-interest.

There are absolutely flaws with the current system, but I think the current CL system is the most balanced PVE system we've had in this game.