Pve scoring - Prodigal Sun vs Thick as Thieves

Phaserhawk

Ugh. There is no easy answer to this thing they call PvE. I do think the answer does lie in more individual scoring to acheive a progression than rubberbanding or nodes etc. It's too bad they couldnt' design the game to go. hmmmmm you have a roster of such and such therefore you are moved into Bracket C, where the progression is harder than Brackets A and B due to you having a fuller roster with higher level guys. Another player it says, hmmmm you have everyone maxed, you are in bracket Z, having the hardest time to progress. The question is how do you determine hardness? Is it by character lvls or amount of points. One way makes it more difficult to play, the other makes you take longer to play.

If the game is going to continue as is though, the only way to fix it is to not go after points, but enemy levels, this in theory would have to refresh quicker, like after every battle. If you start off against lvl 35 goons and smoke em based on whatever calculation d3 does, the next time you face them they are lvl 50, but point totals don't go down. The only way to make them go down is to lose. Sure we could get tanking, but I would rather have a game based on that. In addition you could add more feature characters or lock out characters for certain battles. So while I have Patch/Mags, if they are locked out I have to actually compete. I don't know, there are a lot of options and you shouldn't screw over the guys that grind, but at the same time, missing a node shouldn't cost you the whole thing because you were busy.

In short I say get rid of the sub nodes, and just have more progression rewards. Or go back to the original Hulk event and everything they did then. The was the best run PvE ever. Not the piece of **** re-run where the messed up everything that made the first Hulk event great. That or the Ares event and the first simulator those were by far the best run events.

Spoit

Phantron wrote:

It seems to me the common complaints about the PvE is that people who try to play games with rubberband wonder why they lose to a grinder that also knows the same thing as you. The PvE system has been overwhelmingly favoring the grinder as long as the grinder doesn't run out of steam, which is actually quite possible due to scaling. People are basically saying how come they can't catch up to someone who grinded all the time if they didn't hit a scaling wall at the end? Well, why should you be able to?

For the typical 1000 players main bracket event, the prize for finishing #1 is effectively the same as #20. The difference is that the grinder starts out in the top 5 and can afford to drop 10 places and not have a nervous breakdown, whereas if you started out at #19 and fall two places in the last hour that'd really suck. Now, there are also times where you start out at #19 and just stay there, and here you probably came out ahead because you obviously spent a lot less effort, but that advantage comes at the risk of having to make sure you didn't fall 2 more places at the end.

Although I question the scheduling requirement trends in the recent event, the overall pattern has not changed. If you won't or can't play more then the best you can do is try to hex those who can and hope they run into the 395s really soon. I sure don't see anyone saying how it's unfair they pass someone up who jumped out early but hit a scaling wall later, and there are a lot of those guys (usually the 2* roster you see at the top at the beginning).

You keep taking the 'rules' for getting a top 1-2 place, and extrapolating it down to the top 20, where there is nowhere near the degree of separation you keep touting, when it really doesn't work that way. Of course the person who grinds optimally will (and should) win.

Unknown

Phaserhawk wrote:

In short I say get rid of the sub nodes, and just have more progression rewards. Or go back to the original Hulk event and everything they did then. The was the best run PvE ever. Not the piece of **** re-run where the messed up everything that made the first Hulk event great. That or the Ares event and the first simulator those were by far the best run events.

This times 1,000.

I remember the "original Hulk" event! Was the best ever. In fact, it was so good, that D3 felt obliged to run it a second time due to community feedback and "want" of that event!!

atomzed

I hear so much about the Hulk event. I wasn't playing MPQ at that time.... could some one explain to me why the Hulk event is good? (Besides the fact that they were giving a lot of covers )

Unknown

atomzed wrote:

I hear so much about the Hulk event. I wasn't playing MPQ at that time.... could some one explain to me why the Hulk event is good? (Besides the fact that they were giving a lot of covers )

It wasn't, other than that it was raining covers, and that the powered up hero was pre nerfed Wolverine who can solo everything by himself except the level 230 Ragnarok. It was an event where what you did on the final two sub events basically determined your overall placement. If you had The Punisher you basically only have to play the 1 node he's in and get all the points you ever need.

Spoit

It was a bit of a grind, yes, but a hell of a lot less than the ones recently.

And it was the only PvE event where they actually were able to nail the progression tiers, with a few people reaching the final cover, but not blowing way past it.

atomzed

Phantron wrote:

atomzed wrote:

I hear so much about the Hulk event. I wasn't playing MPQ at that time.... could some one explain to me why the Hulk event is good? (Besides the fact that they were giving a lot of covers )

It wasn't, other than that it was raining covers, and that the powered up hero was pre nerfed Wolverine who can solo everything by himself except the level 230 Ragnarok. It was an event where what you did on the final two sub events basically determined your overall placement. If you had The Punisher you basically only have to play the 1 node he's in and get all the points you ever need.

So basically people like the event because it was easier and people have a fun time?

Hmm... It's so tough to balance the expectations. On 1 hand people want to have fun while playing (I.e. playing whenever they feel like it, playing with fave rosters, min scaling). On the other hand, D3 shouldn't cheapen the covers by giving it out like candies... esp when the covers are the only concrete rewards. (Iso is good but it's grindable. Rankings are just mainly for bragging rights).

HairyDave

There's got to be a happy medium between the two. By all means, grinders should be rewarded for having nothing better to do but you shouldn't be punished for not playing absolutely optimally.

Prodigal Sun I missed one (maybe two?) refreshes due to real life and server issues and I was boned from that point onwards. TaT I was grinding early just in case (see aforementioned server issues) and only just held onto a Storm cover - despite being top 20 in the first three subs - because I happened to have some free time two hours out from the end.

So rubberbanding is good but not to extent that it effectively erases three days of effort.

Unknown

I honestly don't see much point in rubberbanding. Say event got 10 refreshes worth of playing. Guy A clears all 10 of them. Guy B got rl issues and can clear only 9. Assuming, apart from this one refresh, they play identically, why should player B be able to outpace A? For me, he should now compete with other people who missed one event.

TaT rb was beyond stupid. If you were playing on first DAYS of event, you were a fool, which people who know how to game system just exploited and leeched points of it later.
Iirc subs had it's own rubber, and since reward for placement in subs were lol-worthy, you should be not touching last sub till you're near end of event, grind main to 0, then soak up rubbered-up points from sub to launch your main score (if it was diffrent, please let me know, because that's how my limited testing showed me it worked like that).

Node strength doesn't make much sense either. One guy can play once per <2,5h, other play 5 times at once. Both guys clear same nodes in same 12h, same 5 times. Yet one ends with 300% points and other with 500%. Both had same commitment, it's just diffrent playstyle, so why it's so different? It made sense on 12h refresh since it made that the more you grind, the less 'lead' you get. But with dynamic refresh, it creates sick meta of having to be constantly on clock.

Imo nodes should have fixed values. If a node have 5000 points, you get 1k for each clear to 0 and takes 12h to gradually refresh. This makes any playstyle viable as long as you can clear it 5 times per 12h. And if, for max points, clearing each node 10 times per day is too much, there is nothing stopping having less stacks, 3000 points nodes, 1k per clear, still require 12h to fully recharge.

When event launch, all nodes should start at 50% strength, meaning you have roughly 6 hours to start playing before points start to 'overflow' and be lost from theoretical maximum. 6h from end of event, nodes stop regenerating. This would give both US and EU players roughly same chances, assuming no rubberbanding (or at least one that isn't as aggressive, it should help players that are maybe in bottom 50-75%, it shouldn't really give anything to people that are already in rank 50 or so out of 2000).



But yeah, it's all bit offtopic really... on this thread, I'd say Prodigal Sun was way better. Not as crazy rubber, one guaranteed cover (which means you can compete in next event instead of making **** situation when you can't get into high ranks to win 3* you need for next event, at least before you got lucky and pull actually required char from token and break chain) and ToT really felt like it lasted twice long as it should, even sub events were reused.

Unknown

Best 4th post ever tbh. Nailed it.

Polares

I think that PS was far better and far more fair than TaT.

With PS your final score depended of your 'hard work' in ALL sub-events, in TaT it depended allmost to just rubberbanding, and the last two hours of play, which will always be very very unfair to some territories ( like EU ). Of course in PS if you missed one sub-event it was trickier to get the maximum rewards, but this is fair, it was the same for everybody, if you play more than someone you should have more rewards. And you could at least try to compensate playing more in the other sub-events (you had less scaling, because you didn't play in one of the sub-events, so it had its advantages).

And probably this

LoreNYC wrote:

Summary:

Fixed points.
Limited number of node repeating/recycling.
Fixed enemy level tiers.
Time Independent.
No Scaling.
No Rubberband.
Rewards all progression.
Fun PVE

would be really great. I think devs should give it a try

Unknown

Polares wrote:

And probably this

LoreNYC wrote:

Summary:

Fixed points.
Limited number of node repeating/recycling.
Fixed enemy level tiers.
Time Independent.
No Scaling.
No Rubberband.
Rewards all progression.
Fun PVE

would be really great. I think devs should give it a try

As long as node refreshes were no sooner than 8hrs (y'know - to let people sleep) then I'd be all for that.

Prodigal Sun has actual threads praising it... and then TaT happens. I can only hope that it's only that TaT is a recycled event and future 'new' events will have a more progressive structure.

Unknown

Spoit wrote:

It was a bit of a grind, yes, but a hell of a lot less than the ones recently.

And it was the only PvE event where they actually were able to nail the progression tiers, with a few people reaching the final cover, but not blowing way past it.

Levels were fixed and instead of scaling they were going up on the node chain... and proportional with points too. Buffed pre-nerf wolvie helped a lot too, you could do some easy wins on starting nodes and good challenge on the later ones. I only defeated the 240 fights a few times but it was enough for the top finish. With rubberband based on main the last subs were not winnable unless you was nowhere in combined, but it wasn't a problem. The nodes dropped a ton of ISO, IIRC enough for a full ** that helped a lot with my mid-** roster. The story made sense too, and the last main nodes were repeatable only 2x so just serving a victory lap and story conclusion unlike providing 1/3 of all event point like in the rerun.

Unknown

LoreNYC wrote:

Clintman wrote:

They need to remove this utterly **** system for PVE. It is just so darned stupid. We are essentially arguing the merits of the changes to PVE scoring to be more or less dumb than they were before, but at no point does it make sense.

It does everything badly, it really does not cater to new players and certainly not veterans. It is not balanced, scaling follows an incomprehensible algorithm that we can only guess at, feeling confident that the only thing we can count on is that it will change next PVE to be more or less dumb than it was to start.

It is unduly punishing to other members of our world wide community. It causes stress and frustration. They need to have an outlet for people to play casually without having to babysit their rating. PVP is good for that, lets abandon it with PVE.

I fully agree the current system of scoring for PVE is dumb

The only rewards should be progression - they should include the new character covers here and remove the need to play at a certain time because of rubberbanding etc bec. of this. This way they could removing scaling as well. Its a silly system at its very base level right now because they're giving arbitrary points randomly depending on what time you beat a node and who you beat it before or after.

Summary:

Fixed points.
Limited number of node repeating/recycling.
Fixed enemy level tiers.
Time Independent.
No Scaling.
No Rubberband.
Rewards all progression.
Fun PVE

Love everything u suggested. i do not like the new pves its like game designed for no life(no offense). the grind is ridiculous. my alliance stoping focus anything on pve since we all got work, family and such. idont understand what is the logic to made this decision. drive away the buying power?? leave someone can obw their way to number one?

simonsez

Phantron wrote:

I don't think the RB was any different in TaT compared to Prodigal Sun (not counting the RB-less sub at the end). They're all well within the 'a full clear probably gets you first if you kept pace' RB that's been used for quite a while now.
Grinders hasn't lost to the 'wait for the last minute' guys for a very long time now so I don't see how the change in partial refresh helps.

I hate to disagree with you, since you know more about this game than I ever will, but my experience in TaT was completely different than previous events. I had a lead in my bracket from 2-3k during the final few days of the event, same as always. On the final day, I hit the node max in both main and sub four times, and did a full clear of all nodes during the final hours, pretty much the same as always. But I got passed by two people I didn't even recognize, and finished 3rd. So from my perspective, the rubberbanding was massive, and it did serve to defeat someone playing often and efficiently.

famousfoxking

Well, it'll never happen, but I don't think PVE should be competitive at all. All rewards should be either from the nodes or from progression rewards. If we're not competing against each other, the individual nodes don't have to refresh: once I've ground down a node, I don't have to grind it again. No rubber-banding necessary, because my score isn't being compared with anyone else's. It may make sense to even set the nodes to a static difficulty, with things getting progressively more difficult as the event wore on. Make the sub available for a certain amount of time, and if I leave points on the table by the time it closes, then whoops.

So, if during a PVE event you run through every sub 3 times, make the featured character 3* (hulk for TaT) cover available at whatever the point value is for the entirety of the first round. Make the first newly introduced 3* (Storm) cover available at whatever the point value is for the entirety of the first and second rounds. Make the second one available at whatever the point value is for the entirety of the event. Or adjust everything down just a notch and put the 4* cover in place at the end.

Then, if an event is worth 1 million points across all nodes of all subs, you just put your highest level reward as a 1 million point progression reward and steadily increase the difficulty. You probably end up giving out more of the "featured Character" 3* cover, but I'm sure it could be tuned to hand out a comparable number of rewards. And giving people an inexpensive taste (like the first or second cover out of 13) encourages people to buy more. At least that's what the handful of 141 Sentries I'm currently seeing in Cage Match leads me to believe.

It's a thought at least.

Unknown

simonsez wrote:

Phantron wrote:

I don't think the RB was any different in TaT compared to Prodigal Sun (not counting the RB-less sub at the end). They're all well within the 'a full clear probably gets you first if you kept pace' RB that's been used for quite a while now.
Grinders hasn't lost to the 'wait for the last minute' guys for a very long time now so I don't see how the change in partial refresh helps.

I hate to disagree with you, since you know more about this game than I ever will, but my experience in TaT was completely different than previous events. I had a lead in my bracket from 2-3k during the final few days of the event, same as always. On the final day, I hit the node max in both main and sub four times, and did a full clear of all nodes during the final hours, pretty much the same as always. But I got passed by two people I didn't even recognize, and finished 3rd. So from my perspective, the rubberbanding was massive, and it did serve to defeat someone playing often and efficiently.

TaT had a particularly nasty gimmick that you have no hope of overcoming if you didn't know about it. But if a grinder and a nongrinder both knew about it, the grinder will still win comfortably.

Grinding has always been dominant strategy provided:

1. You can actually grind.
2. You know at least as much as whoever isn't grinding in terms of event mechanics/gimmicks.
3. You don't face any unusual last minute time constrains (missing the last refresh has always been crippling).

Unknown

lickfurjr wrote:

...
Love everything u suggested. i do not like the new pves its like game designed for no life(no offense). the grind is ridiculous. my alliance stoping focus anything on pve since we all got work, family and such. idont understand what is the logic to made this decision. drive away the buying power?? leave someone can obw their way to number one?

It would be interesting to see the demographics of the players in this game. From a purely business standpoint, the devs should be targeting the group with the most disposable income, not the most free time. One would think the people with the most buying power would be the ones with the least free time. They need to come up with a way to monetize casual play and/or make the game more fun for those who can't spend multiple hours per day playing.

Unknown

silent flyer wrote:

It would be interesting to see the demographics of the players in this game. From a purely business standpoint, the devs should be targeting the group with the most disposable income, not the most free time. One would think the people with the most buying power would be the ones with the least free time. They need to come up with a way to monetize casual play and/or make the game more fun for those who can't spend multiple hours per day playing.

As the prices are completely unreasonable I don't think those who grind in RL apply as potential spenders at all. Including ones with good income.

The main targets for continual spending are probably their spoiled children.

simonsez

Phantron wrote:

TaT had a particularly nasty gimmick that you have no hope of overcoming if you didn't know about it.

Dang, what a tease...