Fixing PVP, the honest way

Unknown · April 2014

Alright, since I just registered an account after playing since last November to complain about scaling in Heroic Venom I might as well post the thoughts I had on PVP in MPQ for about the last 3 months.

First of all: It's broken. Everyone with reasonable knowledge about game theory should be aware of that. The main reason for this is the fact that the developers treat it as though matches took place between 2 actual players. After a certain threshold of points is achieved in a PVP tournament match results are calculated like an ELO rating with the amount of points lost/gained determined by the difference in score before the match. This is an established system for
1-on-1 skillbased games like Chess. But PVP in this is neither of those. You only actually play the matches in which you are attacking, on defense an AI takes over your characters and often bumbles around with their skills (also you might have tailored your team to a specific environment *cough* Storm *cough* they might not fight on during defense). And when you get up very high you can be attacked by multiple people at the same time.

What PVP actually resembles more is user-generated content. The devs provide you with a framework to fill out with your characters and other players go up against those. So why not be honest about this and embrace it fully?

Change scoring to a system based on team composition: Every character is assigned a numerical value based on how popular he was lately in PVP (let's continue to use the name). Featured characters in Events can have this modified to encourage their use. Add up (or average) this value for all members of the team and modify by average level and you have their 'Rating'. Now if I fight someone else's team base the points earned (and note only earned, I propose changing to an additive system) on the ratio of my Rating to theirs. Ideally it would award the most points for a lower level team of underused characters beating a team of high-level cookie-cutter powerhouses. Maybe throw in a little points bonus for having your team be attacked so you can accumulate score without actually playing. Rebrand as 'Combat Training' and even have a good thematic explanation.

I'm aware this would be a huge overhaul but it's a cleaner design, so I'd like it better. And to be completely honest about my proposal let's sum up the pros & cons I can think of.

Pros:
- Encourages diversity in teams
- Attacker has more control over points won per match by choosing his own team
- Naturally encourages use of freshly introduced characters since they are automatically under-used (shhh, don't tell anyone they could start out neutral just as well

)
- Matchmaking should be done completely random, so no need for hidden but manipulatable systems like MMR (no more tanking)

Cons:
- Requires tracking of all teams used in all matches (I realize this might be impossible at this time)
- Encourages grinding due to being additive
- Healers like OBW get even more valuable due to encouraged grinding (could be countered by healing every attacker to full at the end of a match, but that's a completely different discussion and re-balance)
- Probably unsuitable for the format of Lightning Rounds
- No more Shields necessary, so less avenues for income

For your consideration,
Doombot77

CNash · April 2014

I like this idea, and it'd be great... if the developers didn't have to consider monetisation and revenue streams. Several of your points would damage or destroy two of the game's key established revenue streams - shields and health packs.

F2P game development is kind of a double-edged sword: your game makes money through its lifetime, but you don't get anything up front. And you have to compromise between designing a game that's geared towards maximum user enjoyment, and having to implement features that make playing the game less practical for people who don't spend enough money.

Unknown · April 2014

I believe the unintended emphasis placed on grinding would be the ultimate downfall here because it would force a redesign on how healing is implemented in the game (as you pointed out). Allow me to point out how bad this could get, a scenario that both supports another one of your con points, and somewhat goes against one of your pros.

With grinding being the go to strategy, obviously you want keep your team as healthy as possible to increase your mileage, so to speak. With such emphasis placed on healing, the ultimate team that ends up as FotM is Daken, a Wolverine (most likely Patch for constant regen), and OBW or Spiderman (in his current form). So that pretty much eliminates character diversity and focuses solely on healers for best chance possible. Incidently, you already see OBW/Spidey everywhere as it is, because the emphasis on healing is still prevalent, just has a lesser impact than the system you are stating.

However, let's say for the sake of the point here that somehow or another you do not have access to a healer, or there was no passive/activatable heal in battle. With the way that character ter health regen works, you give the benefit to holders of 1* teams at best, and extremely low leveled characters (base level for all rarities)at worst, because of regen times. Sure, your level 135 Hulk can take some serious damage before having to wait, but oh my goodness! What a wait to use him again it will be as compared to say M. Storm, who can lose her entire life bar over the same amount of battles, but will regen at only a miniscule fraction in comparison to hulk.

Ultimately, the fault isn't inherent to the PVP system itself, but the hidden mechanic behind it, the MMR. No point loss works for PVE, because you aren't 100% working against other players, per se, as compared to PVP, where each individual faces off against a (mostly) different team than another player while simultaneously trying to bring them down point wise.

_RiO_ · April 2014

CNash wrote:

I like this idea, and it'd be great... if the developers didn't have to consider monetisation and revenue streams. Several of your points would damage or destroy two of the game's key established revenue streams - shields and health packs.

It would also open up other avenues of revenue; put in paid-for options to (un)lock certain terrains used during an event. Like shields, you could 'seal off' certain terrains from being used for encounters or you could buy an option to increase the weight of showing up on a particular favored terrain, both for either a set number of matches or a certain slice of time. That's no more pay-to-win than the current shielding options (and could even be combined with them), so I don't see the harm in it.

If anything, increased control over defensive teams would even out the win/loss ratio within MMR bubbles and actually stabilize MMR instead of sending it skyrocketing. Though increased losses resulting form the strategic gains for your opponents would have to be factored into the available health packs to retain a viable game environment. Perhaps lowering the health pack regen/cooldown time, or the character healing cooldown time in general. (I'm actually fine with retaining the knockout (revive) cooldown as is. If you get stuck with that, you should've cut your losses and used the option to retreat instead...)

Unknown · April 2014

There's nothing wrong with an ELO system just because the computer controls your team on defense. You can assume computer has some kind of constant ELO strength + strength of your roster, and it still creates a consistently difficult opponent, especially given how most of the teams at the high end look practically the same anyway.

The problem with PvP is that MMR does not correlate with PvP rating after a certain point. In pretty much every game that uses a matchmaking system, the best players and thus the best prizes to compete for are for the guys with the highest MMR. This is not true in MPQ. In MPQ PvP success is more based on your winning %, and it'd be advantageous for you to purposely lose to drop out of the equivalent 'Grandmaster' league where you can only beat people 50% of the time (because they immediately beat you after you beat them) and go one tier below and get a 90% winning ratio against lesser opponents. Of course, in any other game, having a 90% winning in the league one tier below the top means nothing compared to winning 50% in the top tier, but in MPQ winning 90% in 1 tier below leads to considerably better PvP rating than winning 50% in the top tier.

In fact this is a lot like how the original Starcraft where people would just do 7 on 1 comp stomp to build up their record, except unlike Starcraft there isn't even a ladder option. Your performance is indeed just based on your winning ratio with no concern to the quality of the opponents.

Fixing PVP, the honest way

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