PvP Question

Leugenesmiff

Hey all, quick question I couldn't find the answer to. I recently got my first character over level 100 and since then it seems that in PvP I'm getting matched up against much harder opponents. Am I just imagining things or does the opponent difficulty scale by your roster? I hope I'm imagining this as it's taken me months to get one decent character this high and it'll be even longer before I can field a fully competitive 3* roster.

Unknown

It has to do with your MMR ranking ( wins to loss ratio ), but yes for a few people i know once they got there first lvl 141 hero things got much tougher for them to. so it seems i does have to do with that lvl 100 rank, but i dont know anything thats just my thought on your question

Cragger

It has much more to do with your win/loss ratio, but there is a "slight nudging" that occurs with brackets and opponent matching. See it more as a sign that you are doing well, and that the game should continue to be a challenge.

Unknown

It's coincidental.... basically what's happening is....

1) People who are doing well in the 2* MMR bracket, getting lots of wins and placing highly tend to start moving to heroes over lvl 100 as they're getting a decent number of covers and the ISO to level them.
2) All that winning without taking many losses (often due to shielding) increases their MMR.
3) At some point their MMR will tick up into a bracket with more in the way of 3* heroes, possibly including lvl 141s (Player A levels 6 2* heroes to 85 then starts on their 3*s and gets one to 100. Player B levels 4 2* heroes to 85 then goes hardcore into one 3* hero largely ignoring all other heroes. They'll reach that point at similar times.)
4) At the point their MMR puts them against higher level heroes their best hero will have a level... they will wonder if that level (100+, maybe recently 141, whatever) is the reason everything got harder.

.....5) other people manage their MMR better by taking losses and have an artficially low MMR while the overachieving 2* player moving into 3* has an artificially high MMR.

Ironically this is all made a lot worse by spending money on the game for shields when in the 2* range. Can't take losses that count while shielded so nothing puts the breaks on your MMR. Be punished paying customer!!!

Side note.... the only nudging that's been announced is to do with the event brackets you're placed in which has nothing to do with the opponents you are offered. Nothing i've seen makes me think there's anything else at play.

Unknown

There's a very large population in the overlap between what's considered a good 2* transitioning to 3* to a bad (or tanked) 3* player. And since the AI plays for everyone on defense, even if there are some really bad 3* players out there who totally sucks at attacking, their defense team is still just as strong as any other player using the same characters. At the higher end of 2* and above everything sort of breaks down into this one generic 'very hard' difficulty for everyone in there.

Unknown

I'm sorry the MMR explaination is FALSE. I have two characters above 100. Neither is maxed. Neither is even that great, so they honestly don't help that much. I faced walls of 141s all of season 2. I placed in the top 50 one time all season. I lost a lot of matches, not by choice. I did intentionally tank every lightning round I could. The competition never got easier. I had a much easier time when I was playing with 2* characters. It makes no sense at all, but play with your level 85s as long as you can. If you level up some suboptimal 3* champs you will be punished and all enjoyment in pvp will quickly fade.

Unknown

Pylos wrote:

I'm sorry the MMR explaination is FALSE. I have two characters above 100. Neither is maxed. Neither is even that great, so they honestly don't help that much. I faced walls of 141s all of season 2. I placed in the top 50 one time all season. I lost a lot of matches, not by choice. I did intentionally tank every lightning round I could. The competition never got easier. I had a much easier time when I was playing with 2* characters. It makes no sense at all, but play with your level 85s as long as you can. If you level up some suboptimal 3* champs you will be punished and all enjoyment in pvp will quickly fade.

It is entirely possible someone who is bad at this game doesn't win as well using 3* characters as a good player can using say, OBW + Thor.

But of course that doesn't help when on defense, everyone is equally strong since it's always controlled by the AI. I got sniped by a lot of random 3* players with maxed roster sitting at 200 or so rating. Are those guys just lazy or do they just suck for having such a low rating? But either way the game can't really tell and it seems reasonable to say a 2* guy who can get to say 700s is overall as good as a 3* that sucks at the game and is sitting at 300 points. What do you propose the game is supposed to do if someone has a maxed 3* roster that genuinely sucks at this game? Is that guy doomed to forever sucking because by roster strength he definitely should be matched against the strongest players in the game even though he totally lacks the skill/time/whatever to be competitive? Note that this doesn't mean that guy has to do well overall, but at some point 'the guy that really sucks' has to be matched up with weaker players unless you want to tell people that they shouldn't ever bother leveling up their characters if they can't be one of the top 3* players. Of course, you also get this via tanking, and I think it's unavoidable.

Leugenesmiff

Is there a way to see what your MMR is? And if I'm understanding this correctly, would losing on purpose in an event I've no interest in make the difficulty go down? Also, is the MMR just a tally of your PvP or are PVE matches included?

Thanks everyone for all the info.

mohio

there are separate ratings for pvp and pve, so you don't have to worry about your pvp rating while doing pve, just your scaling getting out of hand.

"Tanking" used to mean going into shield simulator every day or two and retreating most of your roster when you weren't otherwise playing. Nowadays they've nerfed retreating so it's WAY less effective (if effective at all, I'm not even sure), so people go into shield simulator or even at the start of a featured character PvP and purposefully lose over and over a bunch of times. It helps to have low leveled 1 and 2* since they revive from dead sooner than 3*.

Unknown

I'm assuming tanking just marks you as a 3* player that sucks, but the game has so many 3* players that you're still matched up against other 3*s who the game considers as bad players with 3* roster, and since most people only faked their suckiness, you're not actually gaining anything by playing against other 3* players who also faked their suckiness.

mohio

Oh I agree Phantron. I did the retreat tanking thing back when it worked cause I had like 128 LT/OBW as my only viable team and wasn't confident going up against 141s everywhere. And I could keep myself fighting 85s up until ~750 or so, and then wade into the 141 waters for the last little bit of the push before shielding. It helped a lot, but I have stopped tanking in anything but LRs (since it's effectively free to do so) since it's just a waste of time and unlikely to really change things appreciably for me.

Leugenesmiff

Well I hadn't started either Season 3 or the Hood PvP yet so following the above advice tanked for maybe thirty fights in Season 3. In the Hood PvP I'm mostly getting matched up against teams of 1*s now as opposed to the 100+ level 3*s I was facing at the end of season 3.
So thanks everyone for the info. There's a couple guys in my alliance that were really starting to struggle in PvP and this should help quite a lot.