To the devs...

Typhon13 wrote:

Eclypse, your post is mad long so I'm not gonna quote it. First off, the fact that they have time to think it out is even worse, since they obviously don't care that we hate the current scaling because they did it anyway. For the comments on beginners, which I figure is anyone who runs all one stars, yes, they should expect to get low rewards right off the bat because they haven't gotten good enough teams to earn good stuff. That being said, it isn't that hard to get maxed covers for two stars, so it won't take them long to move up the ranks. And the devs shouldn't cater to the new guys at the great expense if everyone else. I understand attracting more customers, but giving them unfair advantages is insane. For your other comments, I realize things don't happen instantly, but they need to happen faster. For example, it been nearly a month since thorverine was nerfed, but we haven't gotten a respec, and they should've expected we'd want one. They get spat on when they mess up? They mess up consistently, we have the right to complain at this point. For your comments on scaling, we don't necesarily want it made easier, we want it to be made fair. I thought of scaling based on team strength, but with a max level the enemy can hit based on your team (or when you lose it decreases the difficulty slightly, maybe not as much as it would increase when you win), and the points are based on the difficulty of the enemy. And the community's wins have no effect on each individual player.

No need to quote as long as I know what you're referring to.

Slight clarification. What I'm saying actually was that the devs are unlikely to have enough time to go through every possible details particularly for the scaling algorithms before an event goes live due to the events being so close to each other. They are trying their best to fix things as fast as they can, so do cut them some slack. They can only test so much internally and only when things go "live" will they know whether it's a hit or miss. And once it goes "live", it's at least a week before they can try again due to the length of the events. With the issues regarding mid-event nerfs, I doubt players would want them to keep toying with the algorithm while the event is going on (unless it will satisfy everyone, of course).

There will never be perfect devs because they are human and due to the different ideology everyone has, what one thinks is a step in the right direction from the devs, another may see it as a mess up.

Regarding the scaling, you were asking whether the game really needs scaling and for it to be removed due to complaints, so I gave you what I thought would be possible reasons they added scaling and was never saying that you wanted it to be easier and not be a challenge. I agree totally that the scaling isn't particularly well done at the moment but what's done is done. They are unlikely to be able to try to tweak things again until the next pve event (without causing an even bigger uproar of emotions), so we unfortunately will just have to understand and live with it for this one. Make your thoughts known, sure, but berating them is rather pointless and won't help fix the problem.

As for your idea, I can think of 2 problems with basing it on team strength. The first is still the same "where do we draw the line?" question. The second is potential exploitation as players can and will tinker with their rosters to get easier battles. Player exploitation is also what I believe to be the reason the devs are using community scaling. It's much easier for a player to game the system (e.g. lowering battles through retreating or losing on purpose with a tank team) in individual scaling than in community scaling.

As for respec, based on what IceIX said, it should hit on Monday. Based on previous replies from the devs, it is my personal belief that it was never meant to be a priority and was fast tracked to this upcoming patch due to all the unhappiness over the funbalancing, which would make it pretty speedily done IMO.

Eddiemon wrote:

gamar wrote:

That's not a summary of community scaling at all. Try "Even IF they nerfed Spider-Man, high level players will always have some kind of chain combo/stun/protect tile strategy that will make them nigh-invulnerable as long as they can live long enough to reach AP threshold to pull it off, meanwhile people who don't have a prayer against lvl 230 teams aren't going to attempt the missions so most people playing them will beat them. So, levels will rapidly scale during the first few hours of the event and then stay scaled forever. Unless you have a high level team you'd better able to play during that narrow window of the first few hours of each subevent or you're locked out of most of the event."

Which is asinine.

And yet the Devil Dinosaur mission was dropping in level despite all the magical super powers that high level players supposedly have to win a statistically significant number of matches.

Easy mode levels were scaling higher than hard mode towards the end because more people were beating them. Not because of rosters or some guy having more 141s but because of sheer weight of numbers and community scaling.

But you're still stuck in the fantasy that high level rosters is why you couldn't succeed. The best characters last event were Daken and C Storm. 2 stars that any 'mid tier' player would have seen plenty of covers of. There was no secret up down up down a a b b start combo that these evil high level players have that they are hiding from you.

If you even read my post, you'd see that it isn't a "secret magical super power" strategy, it's the fact that your characters have to survive long enough to do ANY strategy to have a chance at a mission - that's the only threshold of the game. If the 1-star characters had enough HP to survive a couple of powers from lvl 230 characters, you could take nearly every team down with just an M Storm and M Black Widow - that's no secret.

And again, the problem isn't the difficulty itself... it's that if I play during the first couple hours of an event, I can plow through both easy and hard mode and beat the jackpot mission without too much problem. If I happen to not be able to play at that time, I can't get past the 3rd mission because EVEN WITH Max level Daken and C Storm I can't even survive magneto long enough to activate my powers, and I get to grind Mooks in the Desert forever. More than anything that just makes me not want to play the event, and that's terrible design.

And I found all the Devil Dino missions easy... go figure

Maggotbreath wrote:

Phantron wrote:

So the fact that the other stuff never budged from 230X3 means people in general didn't have problem with the encounter.

Or those who knew they were going to have a problem with that encounter didn't try it, so didn't lose so the level did not drop. The people playing it were the ones who knew they could beat it thus artificially inflating it.

I explained my point poorly I think. Compare it to our inflated MMRs in PvP where we can skip infinitely w/out any cost to ourselves. If we see a team we know we are going to have trouble with, we skip it until we find a team we can beat (not everyone does this, but enough people do for them to initiate the eventual skip tax). Doing this raises our MMR to the point where we feel we have to tank an event.

Some missions that are already difficult become inflated because the only people trying them are the ones who know they have a good chance of beating them is the point I was trying to make.

If there was one mission that you shouldn't be trying, that'd be Bagman + Devil Dino. It's not hard to see how this mission is definitely way harder than the rest. Why would people purposely try a mission that is clearly a cut above all others and then die to lower its level, and yet somehow not doing that for the other missions that are significantly easier?