help, "prodigal son" opps too strong

Unknown

i can't play any of the "prodigal son" games on story mode. Opp level is marked as "normal" but they are all around 200 level or more. I loose almost every game especially now that spiderman has been downgraded. My son plays the same game but all his opps are at reachable level... can something be done about this?

Unknown

my marvel user name is sb68

Unknown

Black Panther is not nearly as strong as he appears to be as long as you don't let him get the black tiles.

But if your levels are too tough you can just get all your characters killed periodically and it'll lower it. I think you've to kill guys whose strength are meaningful relative to your roster strenght, though it's been a long time since anyone tried suicidng level 1s over and over (I believe it didn't work the last time it was tried). For some reason, I'm noticing I tend to be winning games I try to lose on purpose, but I'm sure if I tried to play them seriously I'd have lost. That said, unless you're purposely leaving match 4 for the other side, a lot of 'bad moves' aren't nearly as bad as they appear.

Unknown

Welcome to MPQ: we serve you the opponents scaled to the sky. You say 200? It has good reserves since we raised the cap from 230 to 395.

... seriously, there is not much you can do except trying more and keep losing, that eventually lowers levels by a small amount that goes back up if you manage to win.

You can start afresh to have easy experience, MPQ is restructured to make the starting players win and the aged ones lose.

Unknown

and AI seems like cheat too much, 1 cascade 6 color fill to 30, lv25 hawkeye and 2 goon wipe my lv85 Ares/C storm/MN mag, just lucky or? unbelievable......

Nonce Equitaur 2

Another action you can take ... stop playing for awhile. The MMR (Match-maker ratings) will lower with time.

Unknown

In terms of PvE, quantity is generally more useful than quality, provided you've a quantity of heroes to work with in the first place. If you don't have Magneto I'd say 75% of the outcome of the fight depends on what's on the initial board. Get a bad board and nobody besides Magneto can save you (and sometimes not even him), and on the opposite end get a great board and even 3 scrubs can beats a level 300 team.

Unknown

Joeblack wrote:

and AI seems like cheat too much, 1 cascade 6 color fill to 30, lv25 hawkeye and 2 goon wipe my lv85 Ares/C storm/MN mag, just lucky or? unbelievable......

The AI appears to be getting more cascades than I do at a ratio of 4:1. I'm not talking about the 2-4 match cascades. I'm talking about the MEGA cascades where the AI gets 16 of one color and 6+ of just about every other color. It's really hard to overcome that when going up against a cStorm or Psylocke. And the cascades are hitting hard in PvP too.

I know there are some naysayers out there but one just has to look at Rags when the AI plays him. Almost every time the AI uses Godlike power he gets a cascade. 90% of the time I use it I get bupkiss.

Sure, it's possible it's just random and we've run into a string of bad luck, but most of the cascades fall from the top of the board where the AI could very well be cheating.

Unknown

UncleSam wrote:

Joeblack wrote:

and AI seems like cheat too much, 1 cascade 6 color fill to 30, lv25 hawkeye and 2 goon wipe my lv85 Ares/C storm/MN mag, just lucky or? unbelievable......

The AI appears to be getting more cascades than I do at a ratio of 4:1. I'm not talking about the 2-4 match cascades. I'm talking about the MEGA cascades where the AI gets 16 of one color and 6+ of just about every other color. It's really hard to overcome that when going up against a cStorm or Psylocke. And the cascades are hitting hard in PvP too.

I know there are some naysayers out there but one just has to look at Rags when the AI plays him. Almost every time the AI uses Godlike power he gets a cascade. 90% of the time I use it I get bupkiss.

Sure, it's possible it's just random and we've run into a string of bad luck, but most of the cascades fall from the top of the board where the AI could very well be cheating.

Are you implying that a programmed AI would do something like that? Are you implying that D3, would purposefully remove all of your healing capabilities and than pound the **** out of you, to "incite you" to buy more healthpacks... I mean "invest in longer game time" by utilizing the tools (healthpacks) at your disposal?

That would be, that would be... Well, truth be told, right in-line with where they are headed... Hmmm... interesting.

Unknown

Tonzil wrote:

UncleSam wrote:

Are you implying that a programmed AI would do something like that?

Yep! How many times do you see them get a match 4 and then a 5/6 in a row falls into place followed by a few other matches made near the top? Compare that to how many times you get that kind of drop. Is it random? Possibly. I'm trying to objective about this because this topic comes up every so often so I've been paying pretty close attention to it. There was a pretty good stretch there for a while where things seems balanced, but the last few days it's like they cranked up the dial for the AI.

Here you go...we'll give you more fair scaling...snicker...turn up the dial for AI matching...

Unknown

UncleSam wrote:

Tonzil wrote:

UncleSam wrote:

Are you implying that a programmed AI would do something like that?

Yep! How many times do you see them get a match 4 and then a 5/6 in a row falls into place followed by a few other matches made near the top? Compare that to how many times you get that kind of drop. Is it random? Possibly. I'm trying to objective about this because this topic comes up every so often so I've been paying pretty close attention to it. There was a pretty good stretch there for a while where things seems balanced, but the last few days it's like they cranked up the dial for the AI.

Here you go...we'll give you more fair scaling...snicker...turn up the dial for AI matching...

You're not trying to be objective at all, you're suffering from confirmation bias and sheer lunacy.

Unknown

jozier wrote:

You're not trying to be objective at all, you're suffering from confirmation bias and sheer lunacy.

I'm suffering from burnout which is likely impacting my play thus I'm getting hit harder. And there might be a touch of crazy too.

Unknown

The AI's moves is aggressively weighted toward the best potential cascades, which is why it passes up non row/column match 5s for match 4s, and of course it never misses any match 4 on the board if one exists, so they should be slightly more likely to get crazy cascades compares to a human at least in terms of just matching.

For example let's imagine you made a L match at the top. What's the best replacement tiles you can hope for? It'd obviously be 4 tiles of the same color that immediately matches crit tile you created. Now what if you match the top row? If you had the same luck (4 consecutive tiles of the same color) you'd also immediately clear the whole row, but you get multiple chances here. You can have 4 of the same color at 1234, 2345, and so on up to 5678. You even get a shot for 5 of the same color for an even better self-sustaining cascade. Now, there's value in creating the crit tile (like using it to make environmental match), and most of the time you won't have 4 of the same color anyway. But when you get lucky, there are a lot more ways to place your good luck tiles in a row/column match compared to a L/T/+ shape where you essentially have just one way (every replacement tile is the same color). The computer's 'good luck' is better than yours because they normally give up match 5s which gives them a slightly weaker position, but when good luck pays off, it really does pay off.

Unknown

I don't know why you guys complained about opponents have many lucky mega cascades.

Sure, they got it time to time, but I also got that mega cascade time to time too. And that time is always when the opponents are all already dead.

Slarow

Stefania68 wrote:

i can't play any of the "prodigal son" games on story mode. Opp level is marked as "normal" but they are all around 200 level or more. I loose almost every game especially now that spiderman has been downgraded. My son plays the same game but all his opps are at reachable level... can something be done about this?

Your PVE MMR (or equivalent rating) is very high because you have been using Spiderman to win on much higher levels than you would have if you didn't have Spidey. You are going to have to lose a bunch of fights for your MMR to go back down to its correct level.

Dragon_Nexus

UncleSam wrote:

Tonzil wrote:

UncleSam wrote:

Are you implying that a programmed AI would do something like that?

Yep! How many times do you see them get a match 4 and then a 5/6 in a row falls into place followed by a few other matches made near the top? Compare that to how many times you get that kind of drop. Is it random? Possibly. I'm trying to objective about this because this topic comes up every so often so I've been paying pretty close attention to it. There was a pretty good stretch there for a while where things seems balanced, but the last few days it's like they cranked up the dial for the AI.

Here you go...we'll give you more fair scaling...snicker...turn up the dial for AI matching...

The original puzzle quest suffered this issue as well, people thought the AI was way too lucky when it turned out the measurement of lucky AI cascades to lucky player cascades was pretty much 50/50.
They did some testing of it and discovered their testers would need twice as many lucky cascades in order to feel like they were breaking even with the AI.

Psychology is a wonderful thing.

Unknown

Dragon_Nexus wrote:

The original puzzle quest suffered this issue as well, people thought the AI was way too lucky when it turned out the measurement of lucky AI cascades to lucky player cascades was pretty much 50/50.
They did some testing of it and discovered their testers would need twice as many lucky cascades in order to feel like they were breaking even with the AI.

Psychology is a wonderful thing.

No, the AI definitely gets more, because they always gamble (take match 4 line instead of match 5 L/T/+) while the human very rarely do. The guy who always gambles for miracle cascade will obviously see more of them. The drawback is that a match 4 is generally an inferior move to a L/T/+ in normal circumstances, but when it pays off, you get one of those '6 of same color in one row???' killer cascades, which you don't even have a chance of getting when you do a L/T/+ match 5. I thought about the risk versus reward, and basically for the AI in PvE, gambling is always better (and same for you). This is because if you're much stronger than the enemy team, then both match 4 and L/T/+ match 5 are very strong moves and will easily keep your advantage. On the reverse, if your team is much weaker than the enemy team, the normal match 4 or the normal L/T/+ isn't going to turn the game around against say a level 395 team. You need a miracle to happen and miracles only happen to line/column matches. Now, if the teams are even in strength (like PvP events), then the expected advantage of a L/T/+ over a match 4 is significant. But in PvE, matches are generallly lopsided one way or another. Even a normally terrible move like GGXGG is often worth risking because you need the G to drop at where the X is, and if it didn't happen you're doomed anyway so you don't really care that this move has a high probability of letting the enemy get a match 5, because if you miss your miracle drop you're dead either way. The more lopsided the team strengths are, the better off you're to gamble (take match 4 over L/T/+ that doesn't appear to cascade into anything).

rixmith

I'd suggest trying to use lower level teams to beat the lower level fights, and hold your big guns and buffed heroes only for the later fights. I use Juggernaut a lot of low level fights, and let him Headbutt himself silly to insure I take appropriate damage and avoid abusive scaling (and it is fun to use a variety of characters). In my first run through against BP he topped out at level 86 (I have a solid 2* roster) so I took some serious damage that fight but wasn't really in terrible danger of losing.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

Dragon_Nexus wrote:

The original puzzle quest suffered this issue as well, people thought the AI was way too lucky when it turned out the measurement of lucky AI cascades to lucky player cascades was pretty much 50/50.
They did some testing of it and discovered their testers would need twice as many lucky cascades in order to feel like they were breaking even with the AI.

Psychology is a wonderful thing.

No, the AI definitely gets more, because they always gamble (take match 4 line instead of match 5 L/T/+) while the human very rarely do. The guy who always gambles for miracle cascade will obviously see more of them. The drawback is that a match 4 is generally an inferior move to a L/T/+ in normal circumstances, but when it pays off, you get one of those '6 of same color in one row???' killer cascades, which you don't even have a chance of getting when you do a L/T/+ match 5. I thought about the risk versus reward, and basically for the AI in PvE, gambling is always better (and same for you). This is because if you're much stronger than the enemy team, then both match 4 and L/T/+ match 5 are very strong moves and will easily keep your advantage. On the reverse, if your team is much weaker than the enemy team, the normal match 4 or the normal L/T/+ isn't going to turn the game around against say a level 395 team. You need a miracle to happen and miracles only happen to line/column matches. Now, if the teams are even in strength (like PvP events), then the expected advantage of a L/T/+ over a match 4 is significant. But in PvE, matches are generallly lopsided one way or another. Even a normally terrible move like GGXGG is often worth risking because you need the G to drop at where the X is, and if it didn't happen you're doomed anyway so you don't really care that this move has a high probability of letting the enemy get a match 5, because if you miss your miracle drop you're dead either way. The more lopsided the team strengths are, the better off you're to gamble (take match 4 over L/T/+ that doesn't appear to cascade into anything).

While I think you're right that the AI's strategy is definitely a factor in increased cascades, there is also huge confimation bias that you're ignoring if Dragon_Nexus has a source for his info. Especially in PVE matches when you're stronger than them, you don't notice your cascades because you were going to win anyways, but you'd notice enemy cascades for all the damage they cause.
Another point for the AI's strategy being beneficial to them is that the AI doesn't have to worry about it's health in subsequent matches. The more damage they cause the better, whereas a player doesn't get to fight a wounded enemy if they lose. I sincerely doubt anything shady is going on from D3's end as some players seem to suggest. Without annotating tons and tons of matches it'd be hard to prove one way or another anyways. Humans are inherently very bad when it comes to mental statistics.

Unknown

That is what happen when you only rely on spider man to win games. Try other combination for a change. Since i work out how to manage my PVE rating, i never since had a problem with scaling.

Unknown

Avoid OBW in general as well, actually taking some damage from fights helps keep your scaling down as well.