Status of tanking?

Unknown

Can someone summarize the current status of tanking? I'm seeing some posts saying it isn't working anymore. If not, how do I keep my MMR down to fight reasonable opponents in PvP?

I used to just destroy my roster by repeated retreating. But that doesn't seem as effective anymore...

mohio

I'll let others who actually do it confirm if it works for them, but the consensus I've seen is that you have to actually completely wipe, but it does work (some of my alliance mates do it and say it helps, just not as much as it used to). I don't bother doing it because for one, I haven't really had trouble finding opponents I can beat, and two, it doesn't really seem worth my time.

Unknown

First rule of tank club: YOU DON'T TALK ABOUT TANK CLUB

Cuz the devs will read it and then take it away from us

HairyDave

mohio wrote:

I'll let others who actually do it confirm if it works for them, but the consensus I've seen is that you have to actually completely wipe, but it does work (some of my alliance mates do it and say it helps, just not as much as it used to). I don't bother doing it because for one, I haven't really had trouble finding opponents I can beat, and two, it doesn't really seem worth my time.

I heard something similar and gave it a shot in Unholy Outlaw to start off (nearly won with my Hood/MStorm/IM35 team too - left a L90+ Patch on about 50% health ) and deliberately lost six games with rubbish roster fillers. I can't say it made an enormous difference, but I was only seeing L85 teams up to about 300 points - whether that was a result of my tanking or just the natural result of my late start is another question.

Unknown

Tanking is still moderately effective. The problem is that your MMR now rises back to where it was at considerably faster than it used to. This means that you basically need to tank the start of every PvP.

Unknown

I had a string of 20 or so matches where no enemy besides the featured character was above level 85 during Lord of Thunder, including some matches against a IM35 and Modern Black Widow and I never tanked, so I'm more inclined to think any observation of tanking working is just the game decided to give you a break for whatever reason.

mohio

Phantron wrote:

I had a string of 20 or so matches where no enemy besides the featured character was above level 85 during Lord of Thunder, including some matches against a IM35 and Modern Black Widow and I never tanked, so I'm more inclined to think any observation of tanking working is just the game decided to give you a break for whatever reason.

It's funny you say that cause I've been noticing the same thing lately although no 1*s, more like low featured and 85s or 100-115 3* with an 85.

On a somewhat unrelated note I was matched against a guy who must really be taking this lvl 100 3* thing to heart. Not one character over 86 despite something like 4 or 5 max covered 3*. He just brought them all to 85 and stopped it seems. Forget the name exactly but it's lebron something in lebron something alliance. I guess this could give him a leg up in pve maybe.

Edit: not really an edit but too lazy to delete on my iPad, the guy is lebronthedog and alliance is lebronthegreat, just in case you wanted to check him out. 5 max covered 3* and another one or two at 12 covers. Not sure why 3 are at 86 when the rest are 85.

Sandilord

Don't read, need first post to PM.

Unknown

bonerang wrote:

Tanking is still moderately effective. The problem is that your MMR now rises back to where it was at considerably faster than it used to. This means that you basically need to tank the start of every PvP.

So dev's measures to reduce tanking by making it less effective makes people tank even more for similar results??

Unknown

FoxyMulder wrote:

First rule of tank club: YOU DON'T TALK ABOUT TANK CLUB

Cuz the devs will read it and then take it away from us

THIS 100 000 000 times. every tanking strategy that gets discussed on the board eventually gets nered. keep this talk in private chats and pms...not on the boards.

marc

Unknown

Tanking doesn't work, the devs removed it in R55 when they modified PVE scaling as well.

Unknown

See I was going to say that yes, it does seem to be working. Last few events I had been seeing teams of full 141s and I have nothing but some 85s and a pun at 115. No matter how much I skipped, I kept seeing those 141 teams. I decided to sit out 1 event and I am tanking hard this event and now the teams coming up are of 2*s, some not even max leveled. Ims till tanking to see how far I can take it.

This is based off of starting a battle and then having a full wipe using low level covers, no retreating. I did it maybe 20 times so far. Havent see any characters over 100 since. Granted, I havent stopped tanking so who knows how fast it rises back up.

franckynight

Tanking has been nerfed.. Period.. Rest is urban legend..

Unknown

Tanking works, but you have to full suicide a bunch of teams, it doesn't transfer from lightning rounds, and you need to do it every single pvp. There are tricks to make this not take forever (it usually takes me a half-hour at the beginning of every pvp), but people aren't sharing them on the forums because the devs will see them.

mohio

djsquillz wrote:

FoxyMulder wrote:

First rule of tank club: YOU DON'T TALK ABOUT TANK CLUB

Cuz the devs will read it and then take it away from us

THIS 100 000 000 times. every tanking strategy that gets discussed on the board eventually gets nered. keep this talk in private chats and pms...not on the boards.

marc

The problem with this is that they have basically ALREADY done everything they actually can do to remove tanking by severely nerfing the retreat option. They can't really do anything about the current state of tanking without completely changing MMR to only take into account roster strength or something like that (not a suggestion to devs!!!!). There is no way for the game to distinguish between a "legitimate" loss where you were trying to win with an actual good lineup, versus a "tanked" loss, where you just put in chumps and made matches to set up the opp to get their most powerful abilities off to kill you. They would have to implement much higher logic (i.e. looking at your roster to see what characters you picked and using that to determine how much to adjust your MMR after a win/loss) than they do currently and frankly they seem more concerned about other things to worry about this.

also a marc

Unknown

You'd think if tanking really worked that well, you'd soon be playing other players who also tanked because they'd fit your profile the best (presumaby a 3* player that somehow totally sucks at the game), but that defeats the purpose of tanking since those players are plenty strong too.

Cragger

Phantron wrote:

You'd think if tanking really worked that well, you'd soon be playing other players who also tanked because they'd fit your profile the best (presumaby a 3* player that somehow totally sucks at the game), but that defeats the purpose of tanking since those players are plenty strong too.

That used to happen, but you'd also expect it to happen infrequently, as there should be more new players than established and successful players. Before any limits were put on tanking, I knew that I had passed 0 and gone negative when the big names suddenly started showing up. With changes to tanking and blocks on excessive losses, it makes the match pool much larger and much harder to find artificial MMR bubbles. It used to looks like this, and this was BAD.

* I'm going to grind this game out no matter how hard it gets!
** Man, this game is getting hard, is there a way to combat that?
**** I leveled up my best guys and this game is super exciting! Wait, you can match 5 on a corner?
******* I finally finished the prologue but I'm afraid to try out these other game modes, ooh look, Flappy Bird.
*********** Cool, I get to play as Iron Man and Hawkeye from the movies, this is neat. Wow that Juggernaut is hard!
****** My friends started playing this game and I'll give it a try, maybe.
*** I logged in once, I only have two heroes somehow.
* I am clinically insane and independently wealthy.

It was actually interesting winding your way down through the strata like a MMRchaeologist.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

You'd think if tanking really worked that well, you'd soon be playing other players who also tanked because they'd fit your profile the best (presumaby a 3* player that somehow totally sucks at the game), but that defeats the purpose of tanking since those players are plenty strong too.

That is the usual fallacy. When tanking was in its prime and easy to do still like 98% of people never had a clue about it.

If it worked, yeah, you'd have that 1% chance to meed other tankers in the mix but mostly faced the "natural" population.

Unknown

I'm not even why the MMR is based on win/loss ratio, since that system can easily be gamed. Like people have been. It needs to be on something that's harder to game, or gaming it comes with a cost.

I think it should be based on your pvp placement in the last dozen (4 weeks) of pvp tourneys. Something like first place gets 50 MMR "points", 2-3 is 40, rest of top 10 is 30, top 50 is 20, top 100 is 10, top 100 is 5 and zero past that. Sum them together and that's your pvp MMR.

Tanking in this case would be difficult - you'd need to suck wind on an entire pvp tourney, and that's not something top player would want to do much of. But if you used to be able to get into top 5-10, and now making top 50 routinely, you'll slide down. You should now be seeing lower-end 3* characters and likely some of the better 2* teams in the top 50.

Sure, you can take a month break and be a powerhouse in the first pvp you come back to. But I'm sure that would reinvigorate your interest in the game and pulling a first first place finishes would get you fighting with more appropriate people in a week or so.

vudu3

Ben Grimm wrote:

Tanking works, but you have to full suicide a bunch of teams, it doesn't transfer from lightning rounds, and you need to do it every single pvp.

I did not know this. Do Lightning Round wins also not carry over? One of the reasons I never participate in Lightning Rounds is because I don't want it to increase my MMR for regular PVP events.

Unknown

I dont think lightning rounds have any effect on MMR as I was fighting baby teams all day today without skipping a beat.