data I collected on rubberbanding

Finished 2nd/2nd this round. After looking at my sub brackets and overall brackets and the guys I'm competing, here's what I concluded. Starting late is advantageous if your PvE scaling is low. The rubberbanding is fairly irrelevent. If there is no PvE scaling and everyone fights level 230X3 enemies, you can basically assume each battle takes about 10 minutes (they take a while no matter who you got). Although no one knows the formula of the rubberbanding for sure, there exists a way to convert a lead into an equivalent base points. That is, maybe for this event 5000 points is the same as having 1000 base mission points lead, and you can convert that to a minimum number of missions, and if it takes at least 10 missions to do that then you know nobody can catch you from 5000 behind with less than 100 minutes left. In these scenarios you basically want to do as many and as often as you can, which is how the pre scaling PvE content worked.

However, because of PvE scaling, the time it takes to defeat an encounter is not always the time it takes to defeat 230X3, especially at the beginning of the event. Therefore if for whatever reason you have a favorable PvE scaling, you want to play as few missions as possible not because of rubberbanding but that you don't want to increase the your scaling. Therefore, a guy who normally has built up say 1000 base mission points of lead cannot hold you off at the end because you're not fighting 230X3s so getting 1000 base mission points takes considerably less than expected. Of course, in such a case you've a rather significant advantage compared to the guy you're attempting to catch, so you probably will win anyway, but you want to play as few games as possible to minimize the increased scaling factor.

Note that on an event like heroic Juggernaut where the scaling seems to be constant, there's no particular advantage for starting late since you're fighting relatively constant level enemies. It only matters on events you know will definitely eventually scale to 230X3s, which is usually the 10 day events.

Now, what if you're someone whose scaling is unfavorable? You pretty much have to just grind as much as you can to drive up the community portion of the difficulty. There's no way you can possibly fend off someone with say a level 15 Psylocke boosted to level 105 fighting level 20-30 enemies while your guys are fighting 230X3 even if you have every character in the game maxed, so you want to build as big a wall for your pursuers so that they don't get a free ride the next event with their favorable PvE scaling. The more your pursuers have to win, the more their own scaling will go up as well, and since your scaling can't possibly go up anymore if you're facing 230X3s, this will help you in the long run.

klingsor wrote:

morgh wrote:

Actually - no. Take a node of 1000 base points - every time you deplete it, it goes down by 200 (so you can get 1000+800+600+400+200).
Now let's consider you were tired and only depleted 3 'stacks' -
you got 1000 at 24:00
800 at 00.05
600 at 00.10
so it is now worth 400

You come back after 11 hours 55 minutes (11.55) - and it's still worth only 400... now it goes back to 600 at 12:00 (noon), 800 at 12:05 and 1000 at 12:10

Of course above explanation does NOT include rubberbanding which would make the point totals much higher

What the implication of this is that I needed to stop playing 13 hours before my final clear and not 12 to allow full regen then, no?

Ok, now is it better to clear higher value first, and bring those down, (depth first) or go for highest value of any node, jumping around (breatdh first) or reverse depth first (low to high?)

Breadth first is less work but you have to wait longer. That is, suppose you do A B C A B C A B C, then A will not refresh fully until the refresh period + time spent playing A 3 times, B and C X 2, which can be considerable in it itself. If you did A A A B B B C C C, then A would've refreshed in refresh period + the time it takes to do A 3 times. However doing depth first means you've to know exactly how deep to go on each mission. That is, if you do A A A B B B C C C and found that you still don't have quite enough, unless one more C is enough to stop, you'd have to go back to A or B and that ends up similar to breadth first.