Feedback Thread - The Hunt for the Falcon - April 18 - 27

NorthernPolarity wrote:

gamar wrote:

Phantron wrote:

Toxicadam wrote:

Yea, this is the first event where rubberbanding felt like it worked perfectly. You couldn't cheese the system to get easy 1st place finishes in certain subs, but you could still miss a few refreshes and place in the top 10 of a particular sub.

If you missed one or two sub-missions you weren't going to get top 20, but you still could get top 100 overall. Which seems fair. In the past, you could miss half the event and still come back and storm to a top 10 finish (while reaping easy first places in most events) if you had joined early and had a global leader that was 50k points ahead of you.

So it rewarded persistance of play, but didn't require you to play constantly. Quite a feat considering some of the imbalanced PvE events of the past.

The rubberband is definitely done quite well this time. It's pretty much impossible to snipe #1 unless you're in an extremely weak bracket. Persistance will definitely win though you can certainly get a respectable amount of points for the usual 'wait for last 2 hour' strategy, but don't count on competing for top 10 like that.

I never figured out how to game the subs... In most of the subs I took somewhere between 20th and 50th because once you get within ~500 of 1st all of the nodes have double digit points, and for giggles I decided to try to take one of the Alaskas by taking an early lead out of the gate, but a couple of guys passed me in the next 12 hours and I couldn't catch back up to them. It ended up not being a big deal because even with that, I still got top 20 in the main (despite missing almost an entire sub due to the server crash), but I'm kind of curious as to what the "correct" strategy was to win a sub (or finish at 15000 points higher than me like davecazz who lead my bracket)

Winning a sub is the same strategy as its always been: grind as much as possible right before the end of the sub and each 12 hour interval, so you would time your runs such that you finished 13 hours before the event (to give you some breathing room for your next clear) and just before the event ends. The only problem is that your PvE MMR could mess up your runs by giving you ridiculous levels to prevent you from grinding as much as possible, so you need to either have a roster strong enough to brute force your way through that and grind your heart out, or trick the system into thinking that you suck so that you can fight more reasonable opponents. Dave did a combination of managing his PvE MMR and hardcore grinding in order to get his huge lead I believe, so it's the same as its always been for most events in this game.

yea, I followed all the info that is here on PvE strategy already. mainly from eddiemon's guide. I never ground any node to 1 and only took a few sub passes down to 100. I did two passed per sub, an initial clear plus a final right before the end. Theonly exception is that I only did a final clear on the 24 hour savage subs.

Because of scaling people just didn't try as hard, either because they were unable to or afraid of how grinding would affect their PvE MMR. I got screwed over in the Heroic with really high levels so I focused on that event to get my MMR down as much as possible and I was just really strict in managing my MMR in this event. despite all my grinding my MMR hardly increased.

the only danger I ran into was community scaling in the savage lands for all the Bullseye nodes. it was really tough to take damage in those nodes without getting completely killed. Thats the trap for this new scaling, even if your MMR is down, you run into a really hard node because of community scaling where it's impossible to take damage without losing. If you do manage to push through the node then your MMR will spike and it will be a never ending cycle until you start seeing lvl 400s.

Another reason why my lead was so big was about half way through I tried to grind for the HT cover. I thought I could lift the rubber banding for everyone by taking a huge lead early in my subs and try to get 20k points per day. The amount was negligible and it was pretty obvious that HT was unreachable. but that pushing put me 10k above everyone in my main and I just maintained it by getting 1st in the rest of my brackets.

Basically:

1) scaling is a terrible system. Actually, it's ideally a good system with some heavy flaws, that makes very very bad.
Easy fix: make scaling degrade by x for each hour you don't play. Pros: incourages to play smart and pace yourself, can be back in the game later should scaling become overzelous and make the current session frustrating, makes you say "I'll be back" with a grave voice and make it count. Cons: makes it easier to "game the rules"

2) too long and repetitive event. Obviously, they should be shorter and much varied. Problem: dark avengers are only so many, so variance is an issue. Solution: introduce more baddies or at least more HAMMER goon types. There are only so many times anyone can stomach Daken, Bullseye and the healing officer in a day.

3) timers for EU players. Seriously, sleep time and work time for the whole event, combined with rubberbanding effect makes it a mess. 80% of the pvp events follow the same suit. No respect at all. Solution: make these subs duration 9-10-11 hour multiples based instead of 12, to get more rotation for the finishing times.