On SCL10 Points Recharges

IceIX

A few events back, we made some changes to SCL10 to help bring down the overall time pressure that players were experiencing at that level compared to lower SCLs. Recently, we made part of another change intended to help with this. This change overall is intended to reduce the amount of required replays for missions by *increasing* the point decay rate. This means that for most missions, points would decay in 2 plays instead of 3, meaning that they recharge over 36 hours instead of 24. This wouldn't normally have been directly visible on a standard 1 day sub since this decay rate is over 24 hours, but the recently run "Deadpool vs. MPQ" uses 2 day subs.  A big comment was that this is confusing, since players are used to seeing a 24 hour timer until the points are a full value again.

Agreed. This is confusing.

So, we’re planning another change. We’re working to push it Live as quickly as possible, but unfortunately, this change touches a surprising number of places in the game. What this means is that SCL10 players will continue to see the current behavior until we can get a client side fix in, which will take until around mid-to late September to make sure we hit all the areas the change affects. Our current plan is to have the finalized update in place for the September 20th event, currently planned to be Fight For Wakanda. The points will still decrease by 50% in most missions, but after one instance of points decrease the points will return to full in 24 hours. This change also means that a refresh to full points from 0 points for those missions will take 48 hours. This meets our original goal of reducing requirements for overplays by players and making SCL10 less time intensive overall.

So, in effect:

Old behavior (and current in SCL1-9)

3 overplays on each node till full points decay, 72 hour recharge for all points

Current behavior (SCL10 only)

2 overplays on each node till full points decay, 72 hour recharge for all points 

Planned behavior (SCL10 only)

2 overplays on each node till full points decay, 48 hour recharge for all points

bowla33

While it's a week late, I do appreciate the explanation. 

Michael1957

I like it ! It’s like we get a whole day off on a 2 day node

broll

I was really enjoying 3 clears at start, 1 at the end and done.  Will that still be enough for max progression?

How was this “ part of another change intended to help with“ a change “ to help bring down the overall time pressure that players were experiencing at that level compared to lower SCLs.“. How does increasing the point decay delay take pressure off?  This is putting more pressure back on. Is 4 clears enough for max progression with this change?  If the real goal is to lower the point discrepancy created by the SCL10 change, wouldn’t a simpler solution that still meets with the reduce pressure goal just be to hard cap the point gain by having nodes go to a hard 0 at the desired cutoff?

It’s always sad to see great features instantly nerfed and solutions being far too convoluted, but such is MPQ...

DyingLegend

I still don't get it but I don't play for placement, just progression... So yeah

Aweberman

broll said:

I was really enjoying 3 clears at start, 1 at the end and done.  Will that still be enough for max progression?

Is 4 clears enough for max progression with this change?

3 clears was already enough to reach progression. This doesn’t affect that at all.

(In fact, with the increased points, you can still basically skip the first sub entirely, do 3 clears, and still get max progression.)

wymtime

Thanks for the communication and making CL10 less time consuming.  Overall this makes a great QOL adjustment.

Daredevil217

wymtime said:

Thanks for the communication and making CL10 less time consuming.  Overall this makes a great QOL adjustment.

This.  All of this. But especially the communication part. B/w this and “What’s New...” you’ve been knocking it out of the park lately. Huge thanks!

bluewolf

To think about the math for a moment....

Typical (SCL 1-9) node behavior is after the full point clears, your next hit would be worth 33% less and a timer begins that runs for 24 hours restoring it to full points.  If you had a node worth 100 points you'd gain 33 points over 24 hours or 1.375 points per hour.

If you have a 100 point node that drops 50% of the value you need to regain 50 points (restore 50% of its value).  Over 24 hours that's about 1.3888888 points per hour.

I'm fudging this a bit but its probable that the true refresh rate is the same here in both instances, since they are very close.  (Very Good Players probably know the true rate as they time their clears very precisely.)

Now, if you grind down to 0, the node that gains 33% every 24 hours would need 72 hours or 3 days to regain full points.

If you grind a node to 0 that gains 50% every 36 hours, it would need 72 hours as well to be back to full points.

(Note that the same outcome - full points - is achieved in both circumstances after 72 hours.)

So if the goal is regaining 50% of the total points over 24 hours you need a rate of recharge of about 2.0833333 points per hour.  A much higher rate, relatively speaking, than the apparent node point recharge rate in SCLs 1-9.

If you grind a node to 0, and it regains 50% of its value every 24 hours, it will be at full points after 48 hours.

So it seems likely that for whatever reason, getting nodes in SCL10 to have a different (faster) recharge rate is causing the issues/problems mentioned.

bluewolf

broll said:

I was really enjoying 3 clears at start, 1 at the end and done.  Will that still be enough for max progression?

How was this “ part of another change intended to help with“ a change “ to help bring down the overall time pressure that players were experiencing at that level compared to lower SCLs.“. How does increasing the point decay delay take pressure off?  This is putting more pressure back on. Is 4 clears enough for max progression with this change?  If the real goal is to lower the point discrepancy created by the SCL10 change, wouldn’t a simpler solution that still meets with the reduce pressure goal just be to hard cap the point gain by having nodes go to a hard 0 at the desired cutoff?

It’s always sad to see great features instantly nerfed and solutions being far too convoluted, but such is MPQ...

I see no reason for the current 3+1 to not be full progression.  It seems to me the change is only changing (eventually) the timer and recharge rate.

Hard 0 would be nice as far as not caring about when you play but eliminate the current way to distinguish players competitively (clear to timers as soon as possible, wait as long as possible to clear to 0).

Currently we have 3/2 on nodes in DPvMPQ and that will continue, just the timer length and point recharge rate will be changing, based on what I'm reading.

Steve111

I have to say that this is very disappointing. Firstly because of the way it was done, on a Sunday with no communication until 3 days after the event started. Secondly because 36 hour clears will be out of sync with the advertised finish time of the event. People pick a finish time because that is when they are free in their busy lives. Having to add 12 hours to that finish time causes a lot of inconvenience as it is either during the working day or in the small hours of night. Thirdly because if this was designed to be a QOL change, it has had the opposite effect. Fourthly because it puts a lot of people out of contention for competitive play.

Those running this game ought to try to encourage players to play, but where is the feedback / discussion for these massive changes? Where is the relationship between the players and makers of the game? It says a lot about imposing this as a fait accompli and basically we have to suck it up because you have not thought through how it affects the player base. The intention was good but the delivery, execution and management was and is totally awful. 

BlackBoltRocks

Agree with @Steve111.

And sorry @Daredevil217, love you loads, but I'll have to disagree with you here. The devs aren't knocking anything out of the park. Timely communication is the very least I and many other forumites expect, and the devs have failed terribly in this area for a while now. It says a lot about how the devs have lowered our expectations so drastically that late communication and bits and pieces of information are now being lauded.

fight4thedream

While I appreciate the effort being made to make CL10 more palatable and less time intensive, I strongly urge the dev team consider moving away from a timer based points system or at least develop a new PvE scoring format that uses different criteria tied to win conditions (ex: team health, amount of turns taken to complete a match, amount of special tiles on board, etc) rather than tying point values to a set timer.

A timer based scoring system has significant drawbacks in terms of overall game design, namely:

1. It creates an unfair advantage for those who can play at the optimal time.

2. In terms of the meta, it creates an imbalance in value on ability types. Offensive powers and powers that offer offensive boosts are valued much higher than defensive abilities because the primary objective is to down the enemy team as quickly as possible.

3. It favors one play style, mainly speed play, over other forms of play.

I think a good illustrative example is the problem a lot of players have with "Mindless Ones" battles. The main reason a lot of players find these battles frustrating is because the special tile generation and attack tiles generated increase the amount of time to finish the battle which goes against the goal of trying to clear nodes as quickly as possible.

Remove the timer, then these matches lose their primary point of frustration. (Although I am sure many would still appreciate speeding up the tile generation and attack tile animations).

Ideally speaking, each PvE event should focus on highlighting the value of different ability types. For example, Web Wonder is a Spider-man event so stunning and web tiles should be featured and offer bonus points.

So let's take the trivial node battle: "Spy Eating Contest"

Normal clear (downing the enemy team to end the match) will net a player 300 points.
A stun clear (stunning the whole enemy team to end the match) will net a player 600 points.

And add a 10 point bonus for every web tile on the board at the end of the battle. 

Under such a system, I recommend limiting a player to 3-4 attempts per node.  You can either tally a score cumulatively over the 4 attempts or take the best score among those 4 attempts.  I suppose if we are going to let players clear as usual, the cumulative way is the best way to go.

What's best about this system is that a player is free to play optimally at their own leisure. No longer does a player need to fear a phone call interfering with their grind or any other potential interruptions. No longer does time restrict a player's ability to compete. No longer will new characters be judged by the limited criteria of a narrow meta.

Anyway, the point is that PvE events should be designed to encourage players to use different abilities and play styles. Doing so opens up the meta and the criteria for analyzing the value of a character will no longer be limited to what they offer in terms of speed and damage output but how they might be able to aid a character for a particular kind of event.

I realize it's a pretty tall order and don't expect anything to happen overnight but I think it's something worth considering. Additionally, I wouldn't recommend doing away with the current system totally but rather make it one type of event that is run occasionally instead of all the time. I would call the current PvE format a "Time Attack" event or such.

So ideally PvE would feature event types like:

"Time Attack": current PvE format that favors speed play
"Web'em Up": a stun event that rewards bonus points for web tiles
"Knock'em Out": an event that rewards sending the whole enemy team airborne
"Shield & Sword": an event that rewards bonus points for strike and protect tiles
"Strike a pose": bonus points rewarded for pulling off certain abilities that have fantastic poses (Ex: Dance Floor Queen, Veteran Instincts, It's Patsy, etc)

And so on.

But I digress.

As always, thank you for your hard work. Hope all is well!

Glockoma

@fight4thedream That’s thinking outside the box! Fun idea. I would love to utilize more of my roster.

krakenoon

I still say the best fix for the game is making our play time more flexible. Get rid of slices/optimal play & allow us to play around our schedules IRL. I know it would take a ton of adjustment to the code and probably something they would rather wait until MPQ2 to implement (if at all), but I’m almost 100% convinced they would see a huge jump in player retention & engagement.

bluewolf

It would take a lot of work to throw out the current competitive system and add in a new one.  Whatever that looked like.....speed clearing to 0 points all at once?  Timers start when you enter a sub?  Whatever it was it would be a lot of work and disrupt (possibly) current top players with no promise of actual gain in engagement.

You can already play whenever you want if you want progression, and engagement just to progression is already pretty minimal, such that anyone hitting progression is at minimum at a T100 alliance level (top 2000 players out of 250K or so).  There are probably players who hit progression that float in casual etc alliances but the point is it's a pretty high bar for many players to grind away to that score.

Obviously there are people out there who give up at progression, or all node rewards, or whatever because they aren't able to schedule appropriately.  Some of them (already highly engaged, relatively speaking) might be more competitive under a new system.  But odds are you aren't picking up many new players by rejiggering the placement system at this point in the game's life.  Progression alone in 10 is both a lot of playing for many people, and gives pretty good rewards, and gives you a T200+ placement (probably T100 most of the time).

ThaRoadWarrior

Tying the economy to rewards that are themselves tied to the real world calendar are what drives daily/regular play in this game. Added pressure of roster gating with the relentless pace of new releases means that missing resources means missing characters which means missing access to nodes which means missing more rewards. Disrupting that by letting people play when they want, as long as they want, with as much of a gap in between like you would a game you bought up front would require a change to the business model so fundamental, I think it would be more likely to appear in a hypothetical MPQ2. 

Colognoisseur

To everyone advocating complete overhauls of PvE, are you not paying attention?

All of this is happening because the seemingly simple change of grind in cl10 from 3 hits to two hits caused so much programming headache it’s going to take 3 weeks to fix. 

Yeah every suggestion above is completely doable, no problem. 

Reecoh

Colognoisseur said:

All of this is happening because the seemingly simple change of grind in cl10 from 3 hits to two hits caused so much programming headache it’s going to take 3 weeks to fix. 

 Sometimes it's easier to start from scratch than to patch an existing system. 

abmoraz

broll said:

I was really enjoying 3 clears at start, 1 at the end and done.  Will that still be enough for max progression?

How was this “ part of another change intended to help with“ a change “ to help bring down the overall time pressure that players were experiencing at that level compared to lower SCLs.“. How does increasing the point decay delay take pressure off?  This is putting more pressure back on. Is 4 clears enough for max progression with this change?  If the real goal is to lower the point discrepancy created by the SCL10 change, wouldn’t a simpler solution that still meets with the reduce pressure goal just be to hard cap the point gain by having nodes go to a hard 0 at the desired cutoff?

It’s always sad to see great features instantly nerfed and solutions being far too convoluted, but such is MPQ...

In practice this is what happened in order to get max points:

1. Old way: 4 passes (3 for waves), then 3 passes just before reset

2. Newish way a few weeks ago: 3 passes (2 for waves), still 3 just before reset (but the difficulty went up so it ended up taking longer)

3. New-NEW way: 3 passes (2 for waves), 2 passes just before reset.  Difficulty seems even higher, but the removal of 1 wave offsets the time spent).

Functionally.  This is nice for me.  I like this change.  It helps immensely because there still is no good slice for us in the Eastern Time Zone.  This change cut my play down to 90 minutes (from roughly 3hrs in the 4+3 era) each night (including Daily Deadpool and any other one-off story modes).

/I don't really play PvP, so those fit in when I'm bored on the toilet or eating lunch.

Waddles_Pines

abmoraz said:

3. New-NEW way: 3 passes (2 for waves), 2 passes just before reset.  Difficulty seems even higher, but the removal of 1 wave offsets the time spent).

Is the difficulty ramped up?  I thought the max difficulty was the same.