Proposal for "Play when you want" PVE

HoundofShadow

One of the biggest challenges in competitive pves is catching cheaters. Based on the really top competitive players' sharings and experiences, cheating is still happening and also based on the latest Q&A, it seems they are still not fully confident in the new dev team's ability to deal with cheaters quickly.

By shifting from a schedule based competition to an "anytime" speed competition, are we also opening up the opportunities for more cheaters to cheat? For example, there might be cheaters who wanted to cheat but they can't due to bad scheduling of time slices.

Looking at past sharings of really top players, it seems to take weeks or months before the dev sandboxes cheating accounts.

The question is, is it worth the risk to give more honest players the opportunities to compete, and at the same time, also give more potential cheaters the opportunity to cheat?

Or should we be asking, how robust is the current system in dealing with cheaters? If the dev can't deal with them quickly enough, will even more players leave the game despite giving more players the chance to compete for T10 or better placements?

Punzaman

@HoundofShadow said:
The question is, is it worth the risk to give more honest players the opportunities to compete, and at the same time, also give more potential cheaters the opportunity to cheat?

Good point. For sure, there will be more cheaters if there is more engagement and there are more players playing. At the same time, there will be players (possibly among the new or re-engaged) that will get turned off by perceived cheating. These are unavoidable consequences of growth which is hopefully a result of this proposal. I don't see why there will be disproportionally more cheaters (as a % of total players) because of making PVE more accessible.

I'd also hope the devs are doing their best and prioritizing getting better at catching cheaters!

HoundofShadow

Currently, to get top placements, you need to have fast rosters and importantly, schedule a block of 35-50 minutes aside for both clears and grinds. This means the available "cheating period" is the first 20-25 minutes clears and last 20-25 minutes of grinds. Let's name each 40 minutes clear and grind time as one block.

By allowing "anytime" speed play within 24 hours, cheaters will have (24*60)/40 = 36 blocks of opportunites to cheat.

Looking at scl 10 score, I would say about 5-10% can schedule their life around each slice. Cheaters who couldn't do that will be able to do that with this change.

DAZ0273

Why do we assume that more people will cheat? Cheating is not a normal or standard player conduct. That seems to suggest that we already have dishonest players who would cheat if they could? If they were already looking to cheat then surely they would have found a way by now already?

Bowgentle

I don't know why someone brought cheating into this all of a sudden. It's not really a widespread thing in PVE.
Unless they meant time travellers.

HoundofShadow

Cheating is still happening in pves top placements. It's not a widespread thing because not everyone could schedule their lives around it. What I'm saying is that by making pves an "anytime you can play to compete for top placements within 24 hours" format, the windows of opportunity for cheating increases.

DAZ0273

Just because a window of opportunity increases doesn't mean the level of cheating must also exponentially increase like there is some sort of cosmic rule.

Sekilicious

Appeal to cheating is definitely fear mongering. From my reading of this thread a few of the people that can meet the schedule requirements for the game are trying to maintain the status quo but trying to make their position appear more logical. It is probably more accurate to say that this won’t be universally accepted if implemented.

Removing the schedule would change strategies not eliminate them. Chances are you would be able to keep the spreadsheets. Cheating happens through speed hacks according to anecdotal evidence. It doesn’t appear to be as prevalent as it once was. This proposal won’t change that. Changing the interface to get rid of artificial delays and adding ways to increase scores that don’t rely on speed would.

HoundofShadow

I'm not fearmongering here, but I'm just pointing out a potential problem that could be enlarged. As a matter of fact, I believe that I would be able to hit T5 in scl 10 with this change because my grinding is not top notch, compared to those who have spreadsheet laid out in front of them.

Since majority of the replies don't think that cheating will be a big problem, then the second topic would be fairness. How do we ensure fairness? One of the suggestions is that penalty will be introduced to discourage retreating tactics that give players favourable boards and ap supports activation.

All things being equal, players with 550 meta with meta supports who couldn't schedule their lives around pves will be snatching up top placements unless they are Slowpokes. This means baby champed 5* players' chances of hitting T10 in scl 10 will be virtually zero, unless they are willing to use boosts that costs HP or iso-8. At best, they could aspire for T25. End of the day, is getting T25 for baby champed rosters that aspiring? For 550 players with a life, it's a big change, provided they have meta supports.

Also, how many decimal places should stopwatch use? Should it be rounded up or rounded down?

Sekilicious

Is it fair that someone with an optimized 550 Okoye and 520 iHulk misses out on rewards to a player with a roster with a solo baby champed Shang-Chi+Chavez+boosts because real life gets in the way of scheduled grinds? I'm sure the person with the 550 Okoye doesn't think so. But I will defer to the standard answer that is provided every time someone with a 370 4* they have maintained a roster spot for is suddenly made a feeder and they get 6 free 5* covers for their effort. Or why heroics were considered a good thing by some players. Sometimes having a older and broader roster is rewarded.

I really don't think anyone has to worry too much. My gut tells me if this change was likely at all it would have been implemented a long time ago.

HoundofShadow

550 Okoye/iHulk doesn't guarantee T10 if the players are lacking in certain departments like skills, luck or supports. I'm sure you've heard of the story of David vs Goliath or something similar where size/power don't mean everything. Ultimately, T10 placements depend a lot on the speed of your metas clearing teams, your familiarity and accumulated experiences with those enemies for each pve, the metaness of your support and boosts used.

The original premise of the change is to allow players to have a chance to compete for top placements. T25 in scl 10 is not top placements, and personally, I find that now T10 is not top placement because you don't get LT. As for being able to play anytime, players could already do that if they can get past their psychology barriers of not ignoring placement rewards, rather than requesting dev to remove placement rewards.

550 players aside, I don't think this change benefits majority of 5* players playing in scl 10 because majority of 5* players don't have 550 meta.

Currently, we are under new dev team. Everything becomes a possibility. I never thought they would give double feeders for 5*, but they did. Also, they are exploring autoplay in pves, if I didn't interpret the dev message in reddit wrongly.

DAZ0273

How do you stockpile luck? That sounds like the best boost ever!

HoundofShadow

By retreating and hope lady luck gives you good board and activate +6 yellow/purple/red/black/green aps at the start of the game the next round.

DAZ0273

Yeah but how do you stockpile the luck so you aren't a player lacking in it when it comes to the board? If I have the skillz and the supports then I wanna stock up on the luck too so that RNG aint my fickle mistress and Shang Chi has multiple red and purple match 4/5!

Bowgentle

Yo, mad skillz, matching 3s, 4s or even 5s!
Respect!

HoundofShadow

Maybe luck is the wrong word. Replacing it with mercy of RNG might be better. For example, if you've bad RNG, your iHulk will be creating green tile that turns into a green match-3 which reduces the number of green tiles to fewer than 7 or 8. This in turn doesn't process his AoE. Depending on RNG, green tiles might drop or it won't drop on your next turn, and your iHulk is sitting duck. Similar thing can happen to SC where your counter resets to zero due to lack of red or purple tiles to match. This happens, but not frequently. However, this could turn the tide of placements if such change is implemented.

Again, the main benefit of this proposed change is to give players with a life the chance to fight for placements. However, are we giving them false hopes of getting top placements? Logically, the one who benefits the most are players with 550 rosters and those with R5 meta supports who couldn't schedule their lives around pves. I don't think baby champed 5* players will benefit from this. As a matter of fact, T25 baby champed rosters would be probably be booted out to T50 or T100.

Bowgentle

The same players would be at the top of the leaderboards of course.
They didn't build their rosters by luck, they did it by playing PVE for years, and adopting to all changes.
People who think that they'd suddenly be able to compete with their small rosters are deluding themselves.

killahKlown

@Bowgentle said:
The same players would be at the top of the leaderboards of course.
They didn't build their rosters by luck, they did it by playing PVE for years, and adopting to all changes.

And cheating

Bowgentle

@killahKlown said:

@Bowgentle said:
The same players would be at the top of the leaderboards of course.
They didn't build their rosters by luck, they did it by playing PVE for years, and adopting to all changes.

And cheating

Well... Yes.
As we've learned during anniversary.

Punzaman

Could we please table the discussion about cheating for now? Cheaters are always going to cheat in any system because there's a method (speed-hacking) and incentive (rewards). Yes, if you try to bring in more people, some of those will be riff-raff. If there's anything existing players should "fear", it's not cheaters; it's those "new" 550 players that might crowd out the top of the boards. But all players should be spread out over multiple brackets since there's no reason to join any particular bracket. A given player will have roughly the same probability of being affected by a cheater.

It's more interesting to discuss how a change like this proposal would affect the status quo.

@HoundofShadow said:
Again, the main benefit of this proposed change is to give players with a life the chance to fight for placements. However, are we giving them false hopes of getting top placements? Logically, the one who benefits the most are players with 550 rosters and those with R5 meta supports who couldn't schedule their lives around pves. I don't think baby champed 5* players will benefit from this. As a matter of fact, T25 baby champed rosters would be probably be booted out to T50 or T100.

It is not only a benefit for 550 players "with a life" but also baby champ players with a life. There will definitely be more competition from additional 550 players and baby champ players who are now able to play optimal. Right now, a baby champ player has a better chance for good placement by joining a late bracket flip. With this proposal, it won't be as easy to "hide" from the bigger, faster players. You could still try to join at the very last hour of the 1st sub as there will be fewer players there. But I think that overall, "current" baby champ players won't be able to compete as much. I'm one such player but I'm willing to trade some placement rewards for control of my time back.

I've talked to some 550 players who play top-level PVE and there are those that are supportive of this proposal, even if there will be more competition at the top from those "dormant" 550 players who currently can't play optimal. These are players who consistently will be T5/T10 individually and are also in T10 alliances. But they still overall like the proposal (with feedback of course) primarily because the PVE grind is tiring.

Yeah I know, no one is compelled to be competitive if they don't want to or can't do it. But many players who continue to play the game after a long time, keep playing in order to compete. The current PVE structure prevents many players from being their full, competitive selves without compromising on their personal lives.