Why death brackets are killing this game.

Unknown

MarvelMan wrote:

I used to place top 10 quite regularly, winning about a dozen...but now its just brutal. The only 2* I have seen since mid Season 1 has been OBW....and that is with only two 141s on my roster, with 4 chars over 100 total. Its such a slog to get anywhere its beyond painful. I get that they want us to be fighting amongst ourselves when we have 1+ 141 and a bunch of days under our belts, but it seems WAY off to have new people winning brackets at 500-600 when 1,100 can be required for top 10 in a veteran bracket. There has to be some middle ground that doesnt punish people for having played.

This is exactly the same for me, I have a few characters at 100 (no 141) and from the start see teams 212/141/141 (not all, but most of them)

When a game stops being fun I just stop playing. Its very close to not being fun anymore.

Unknown

Started Cage Match today...

\o/ All 141 and above teams once I got over 150pts \o/

FFS. Now I get what that 2000 iso was for, I'll burn through that skipping matches in no time.

Unknown

I haven't started Cage Match yet and my first three nodes.

212 patch x 141 hulk x 141 shieldbro
212 patch x 141 cmags x 141 hood
212 patch x 141 cmags x 102 hulk

The team I'll likely use:
212 patch x 130 cmags x 130 psylock

So it's not that I can't beat the above three teams. It's just a chore to have to fight through all that up to 900 pts. No thanks...

Unknown

So I've just opened up the champagne and set off some fireworks for reaching 500 points, while tears roll down my ruddy cheeks.

Only 1 of the top 10 on my leaderboard have a fully levelled 3* on their roster, while I'm consistently running up against lv200 Patches accompanied by 141's.

Unknown

jozier wrote:

Brackets are 10x easier than they were in season 1.

I got into a completely lamer bracket once, the rest are about same as at end of S1.

And insane shielding is still in effect down to ~30 places for ~ whole last day that hoses progress bigtime.

Unknown

I've finished first in all my s2 pvp brackets with lower scores than my lowest s1 brackets. I've only ever had to shield more than once in the Sentry PVP because it was competitive getting to 1100.

The brackets are far easier this time around. Find me a routine bracket score of 1300-1400 to take first place and I'll concede I am wrong. That was the average top score for a lot of brackets in S1.

Unknown

MMR has changed for people since season 1. It was quite common to see lower tier MMR opponents until you reached 900 (and little fear of retaliation in your ascent). Now people are seeing 141's (or MMR appropriate) right out of the gate.

This has helped tamp down scores also.

The only time you get relief is when you hit an MMR bubble then the MMR relaxes and you get easier targets.

Unknown

jozier wrote:

I've finished first in all my s2 pvp brackets with lower scores than my lowest s1 brackets. I've only ever had to shield more than once in the Sentry PVP because it was competitive getting to 1100.

The brackets are far easier this time around. Find me a routine bracket score of 1300-1400 to take first place and I'll concede I am wrong. That was the average top score for a lot of brackets in S1.

Quite clearly it's different for each person. As a member of Shield I'm going to assume you've got an excellent roster and so if bracketed with similarly competitive people in S1 you were seeing massive scores to take 1st place. In S2 things have got easier for you in terms of who you're being grouped with in leaderboards - that may well be true for others, but a LOT of us are finding that even though winning scores are lower it's taking a huge effort to get a decent score because we're being given much stronger (or consistently very strong) opponents almost from the start of the event.

In a nutshell, in S1 I probably needed 900-1000 points to be guaranteed top 10 place. I'd get the first 700-800 of those points fighting 'average' (usual Thor/OBW/Featured) opponents before hitting tougher opponents and more frequent attackers trying to get my final 200 points.

In S2 I probably need 850 points to be guaranteed top 10 but I'm getting 141 LThors / Punishers / C Mags etc from my first 100 points, and I'm getting attacked regularly from 300 points and up. Sure, 850 is a lower total but getting there is a MASSIVE amount harder for me.

Spoit

The walls of 141s have been there since about a couple weeks before kyip, but they also came with changes to the MMR, allowing you to regularly get 30+ points per fight up to the 900s or so, making it more effective than fighting zombie hordes of 85s

M1Lance

I thought the crazy high amount of points i was seeing in PvP over the past month was due to more action from the community as a whole but I now see that I too am a victim of the "death bracket". For one of the events a couple of weeks ago I finished with just under 800 points and it wasnt even good enough for top 50.

Unknown

My bracket is complete trash. My first fights were against all lvl 100s and higher. Almost everyone had a 150+ patch. If you think I'll buy health packs you're insane because I don't need a fresh char to watch get slaughtered. I'm not buying iso or hp to lvl my patch because it still wouldn't matter. Next tourney I would have to buy that featured char and a motherload of iso. Would be stupid to play into a cycle like that. I'll just casual play til stuff returns to normal. This game is becoming a **** waste of time imo. New players who don't spend a dime are collecting easy wins (I know because my alliance and co-workers tell me daily how easy it is to place top 5) all the while guys like me who have bought many a cover are forced to stare down the barrel of undefeatable odds. I would tell younger players not to buy anything period and work with what you got but lol they don't need to. They're guaranteed to win the covers they need.

Unknown

I've been playing close to 150 days. Getting to the point of aggravation rather than fun. I keep hoping it turns around as I also bought covers and hate to think I wasted money. At this point, if I were to quit I will definitely go as far as I can to bad mouth the changes that have been made on this game. I just unshielded in cage match, was able to complete 3 quick matches planning to shield again, and got hit 4 times for a total of -120. The entire time shielded over the last 2 days (16 hours) I wasn't hit a single time. I also wasted 3 health packs due to lucky cascades on first moves by the opposing teams. Tiny Kitty that. 3 health packs, 3 positive fights and 4 losses happened in a total of 7 minutes. Now my 3 hour shield won't last until the end, I am at 700 pts and will fall out of top 50. And lets not even talk about the Sim event. I have played 30 hours this week to wind up successfully winning nothing. Yes I understand MMR, Yes I read the forums daily, Yes I try to do everything I can to make sure that I wind up in a good situation. I have never placed 1st, am generally happy with 700-800 pts pvp, and have 2 141s 2 others above 100 and 3 more above 90.

MarvelMan

Spoit wrote:

The walls of 141s have been there since about a couple weeks before kyip, but they also came with changes to the MMR, allowing you to regularly get 30+ points per fight up to the 900s or so, making it more effective than fighting zombie hordes of 85s

Something has changed during this tourney. I havent seen a single fight worth more than 42, and that was the only one over 37. Most of mine, even from the start, were in the high 20s to low 30s. Cant quite put a finger on it though. Its possible its the lower point totals, the prevalence of Patch, or my MMR bubble, but whatever it is the climb was brutal. Fighting 212/141/141 from the opening fight for 27-28 pts each all the way to 900 just sucked.