An entirely new way to PVP

[system]

First, get rid of shields all together. You want me to pay money to not play that game? Forget it. Sorry, D3, you are taking a cash hit here, but you will make it up for it and then some, see below. It sounds like you want to fix the shielding problems anyway.

Second, get rid of losing points for defensive losses (edit: and obviously remove getting points for defensive wins). It’s ‘player-versus-player’. I’m not playing, but I’m getting destroyed in points? It makes no sense. Without losing points on defense, teams won’t be forced to leave a defensive squad out and not play the game. They will use all the characters in their roster to get points and then start buying health packs. Risk takers will bring out 2* characters to beat a 3* team just to keep going. Yes, there is still a penalty for losing a battle. That’s what makes it exciting!

Third, the higher rank you are in PVP, the higher level your enemies will be. You are ranked 1st out of 500? Well congrats, every player you go up against will handicapped up to level 200+*. People will die more and spend money on health packs to play the game. People will start spending money on powerups to be able to take out seemingly impossible teams. Players will benefit from having large rosters to counter all the different enemies they might face. The best rosters and strategies will take players to victory. Pulling any random team in your event at powerful levels will stop the endless X-Force+Hood+whoever matchups and make every battle unique. Players will see an enemy before them and choose the best characters they have to counter them, not just run the same team out every few hours when a shield is up. Basically, players are rewarded for finding ways to win, not finding ways to hide and not play the game.

Finally, progression rewards are given for hitting scores calculated by total wins minus losses, not points. +100 wins gets you that sexy X-Force cover that you will love, but not need to use in every single battle. It won’t be a grind-fest because if you get wins, you get a high rank, then you to get harder battles. Basically, it all comes down to the best rosters, strategies, effort, and resources spent getting players the best rewards.

This is all off the top of my head. I’m sure we can find a way to tweak this to make a much more fun game. I would love to hear everyone else’s ideas. I know these are huge changes, but I think D3 can pull it off.

1, 2*, 3*, 4* teams do not scale equally well. Perhaps every enemy characters get scaled to max level + (25x the number of *'s the character has). The numbers will need to be tested, but looking at PVE data should give a rough idea. Maybe the number of points awarded for a win is based on the number of levels the opponent has in the fight?

[system]

first idea, good.

second idea, even better.

third idea. awful.

if they got rid of shields and the loss of points altogether, the winner of pvp would be whoever put in the most effort (as it should be) and whoever bought the most health packs (it is p2win after all). the downside is that, those with patch/laken/grocket/xforce would be at a more significant advantage than they are now and the whales who buy the most health packs would win.

as much as the whales would like ideas 1 and 2 to happen, the best realistic way to do it is to keep shields but with a 3 hour penalty before using another (instead of the proposed 8) and re-tool the point loss algorithm to make it so you don’t lose nearly as many points from getting hit when unshielded. they could put in a stop-gap measure like in the stock market where if you fall too fast too quickly a safety measure will take place, maybe more than 100 points lost in an hour could create an automatic 8 hour shield which would benefit those who can’t shield before having to leave the game so they can at least come back later and not be smashed in the ground.

[NorthernPolarity]

@rooter

First, get rid of shields all together. You want me to pay money to not play that game? Forget it. Sorry, D3, you are taking a cash hit here, but you will make it up for it and then some, see below. It sounds like you want to fix the shielding problems anyway.

Uh… do you remember what PvPs were like before shields existed? There was no sense of progression: everyone was on exactly the same playing field, which lead to everyone devouring each other at 600 points. It became a matter of “who could play 30 mins before the end” and “who got lucky and didn’t get eaten by the zombie horde”. It was a terrible system, and while shields isn’t perfect, it was definitely better than that.

@rooter

Second, get rid of losing points for defensive losses. It’s ‘player-versus-player’. I’m not playing, but I’m getting destroyed in points? It makes no sense. Without losing points on defense, teams won’t be forced to leave a defensive squad out and not play the game. They will use all the characters in their roster to get points and then start buying health packs. Risk takers will bring out 2* characters to beat a 3* team just to keep going. Yes, there is still a penalty for losing a battle. That’s what makes it exciting!

And so begins the start of PvP being actually just strictly a longer grind than even the femthor PvE. There is no ceiling on points, it just becomes a matter of who will grind the most.

@rooter

Third, the higher rank you are in PVP, the higher level your enemies will be. You are ranked 1st out of 500? Well congrats, every player you go up against will handicapped up to level 200+*. People will die more and spend money on health packs to play the game. People will start spending money on powerups to be able to take out seemingly impossible teams. Players will benefit from having large rosters to counter all the different enemies they might face. The best rosters and strategies will take players to victory. Pulling any random team in your event at powerful levels will stop the endless X-Force+Hood+whoever matchups and make every battle unique. Players will see an enemy before them and choose the best characters they have to counter them, not just run the same team out every few hours when a shield is up. Basically, players are rewarded for finding ways to win, not finding ways to hide and not play the game.

So you now want to introduce PvE scaling into PvP? Players will now be punished for placing highly in PvP? How would increasing the levels on the enemies increase roster diversity? If anything, it restricts it because once you scale to level 300+, there are only a few, degenerate teams in the game that can reliably kill them, and everyone just flocks to them.

@rooter

Finally, progression rewards are given for hitting scores calculated by total wins minus losses, not points. +100 wins gets you that sexy X-Force cover that you will love, but not need to use in every single battle. It won’t be a grind-fest because if you get wins, you get a high rank, then you to get harder battles. Basically, it all comes down to the best rosters, strategies, effort, and resources spent getting players the best rewards.

The first reasonable suggestion, but I feel like this is already done with season progression awards in a sense.

@rooter

This is all off the top of my head. I’m sure we can find a way to tweak this to make a much more fun game. I would love to hear everyone else’s ideas. I know these are huge changes, but I think D3 can pull it off.

1, 2*, 3*, 4* teams do not scale equally well. Perhaps every enemy characters get scaled to max level + (25x the number of *'s the character has). The numbers will need to be tested, but looking at PVE data should give a rough idea. Maybe the number of points awarded for a win is based on the number of levels the opponent has in the fight?

Honestly, I think most of these ideas aren’t well thought out, or invoke too much change into the system. The key thing I don’t think a lot of people understand is that Demiurge isn’t going to enact massive, sweeping changes and overhaul their entire system all at once, because it just doesn’t make sense. Yes, the system has flaws, but do you really want to completely change it just so that new flaws and unforeseen implications can arise and be even worse than the original system? Demiurge will never take such a big risk: what they would do is consider carefully thought out feedback that suggests incremental changes that make sense, and we can’t really do that for the new system without at least giving it a shot first.

[system]

@atlasspeaks

third idea. awful.

if they got rid of shields and the loss of points altogether, the winner of pvp would be whoever put in the most effort (as it should be) and whoever bought the most health packs (it is p2win after all). the downside is that, those with patch/laken/grocket/xforce would be at a more significant advantage than they are now and the whales who buy the most health packs would win.

That’s not true though. If you don’t have the ability to beat the teams at the highest level, more effort will only result in more losses. There are other ways around your issues. Put a cool down on the purchasing of health packs or an increasing health pack cool down on a character each time you revive them. Maybe instead of increasing the difficulty by rank, enemies could increase a level for players win minus loss score \ 2 to 5. At some point, every player is going to hit a wall. It will be different for everyone, but where you hit that wall determines where you rank in the event.

Let’s find ideas to make changes work, not excuses for why they won’t. Thanks for the awesome feedback!

[NorthernPolarity]

@atlasspeaks

first idea, good.

second idea, even better.

third idea. awful.

if they got rid of shields and the loss of points altogether, the winner of pvp would be whoever put in the most effort (as it should be) and whoever bought the most health packs (it is p2win after all). the downside is that, those with patch/laken/grocket/xforce would be at a more significant advantage than they are now and the whales who buy the most health packs would win.

as much as the whales would like ideas 1 and 2 to happen, the best realistic way to do it is to keep shields but with a 3 hour penalty before using another (instead of the proposed 8) and re-tool the point loss algorithm to make it so you don’t lose nearly as many points from getting hit when unshielded. they could put in a stop-gap measure like in the stock market where if you fall too fast too quickly a safety measure will take place, maybe more than 100 points lost in an hour could create an automatic 8 hour shield which would benefit those who can’t shield before having to leave the game so they can at least come back later and not be smashed in the ground.

No, this is not what happened at all. There was a time back in the early days of MPQ when shields didn’t exist. During this time, if you pushed to say 800, you would be spotted by everyone else, and attacked back down to 600-700. Getting to 1100 was literally impossible unless you were extremely, extremely lucky because there WAS no one at 1100. Once you hit 900, you had to do 20 point matches, and by the time you could do 10 of those, someone found you and attacked you back down. You think health packs would give you an advantage? You get nothing when for every 1 match you win, 5 people attack you for -100. I don’t get why you guys think that changing PvPs to the LadyThor PvE where you’re forced to grind every 2.5 hours to stay first is a good idea at all.

[system]

@NorthernPolarity

@atlasspeaks

first idea, good.

second idea, even better.

third idea. awful.

if they got rid of shields and the loss of points altogether, the winner of pvp would be whoever put in the most effort (as it should be) and whoever bought the most health packs (it is p2win after all). the downside is that, those with patch/laken/grocket/xforce would be at a more significant advantage than they are now and the whales who buy the most health packs would win.

as much as the whales would like ideas 1 and 2 to happen, the best realistic way to do it is to keep shields but with a 3 hour penalty before using another (instead of the proposed 8) and re-tool the point loss algorithm to make it so you don’t lose nearly as many points from getting hit when unshielded. they could put in a stop-gap measure like in the stock market where if you fall too fast too quickly a safety measure will take place, maybe more than 100 points lost in an hour could create an automatic 8 hour shield which would benefit those who can’t shield before having to leave the game so they can at least come back later and not be smashed in the ground.

No, this is not what happened at all. There was a time back in the early days of MPQ when shields didn’t exist. During this time, if you pushed to say 800, you would be spotted by everyone else, and attacked back down to 600-700. Getting to 1100 was literally impossible unless you were extremely, extremely lucky because there WAS no one at 1100. Once you hit 900, you had to do 20 point matches, and by the time you could do 10 of those, someone found you and attacked you back down. You think health packs would give you an advantage? You get nothing when for every 1 match you win, 5 people attack you for -100. I don’t get why you guys think that changing PvPs to the LadyThor PvE where you’re forced to grind every 2.5 hours to stay first is a good idea at all.

i was there for pvp before shields. and yes, even during the bloodbath days, the winner was still the person who persisted the most and used the most health packs although luck and timing were pretty influential as well. i didn’t mention anything about points because i already know how difficult it was to reach 1100.

and who said anything about grinding every 2.5 hours? with my solution you’d still lose points when unshielded and hit but not nearly as much as now. plus no matter what, the person who does choose to spend more time and effort should win, because well, they put in the most effort. there’s very little difference from my scenario to now where the people who take the time to grind up to 1300 or so then make the effort to do the tedious shield hopping song and dance win.

[NorthernPolarity]

@atlasspeaks

@NorthernPolarity

@atlasspeaks

first idea, good.

second idea, even better.

third idea. awful.

if they got rid of shields and the loss of points altogether, the winner of pvp would be whoever put in the most effort (as it should be) and whoever bought the most health packs (it is p2win after all). the downside is that, those with patch/laken/grocket/xforce would be at a more significant advantage than they are now and the whales who buy the most health packs would win.

as much as the whales would like ideas 1 and 2 to happen, the best realistic way to do it is to keep shields but with a 3 hour penalty before using another (instead of the proposed 8) and re-tool the point loss algorithm to make it so you don’t lose nearly as many points from getting hit when unshielded. they could put in a stop-gap measure like in the stock market where if you fall too fast too quickly a safety measure will take place, maybe more than 100 points lost in an hour could create an automatic 8 hour shield which would benefit those who can’t shield before having to leave the game so they can at least come back later and not be smashed in the ground.

No, this is not what happened at all. There was a time back in the early days of MPQ when shields didn’t exist. During this time, if you pushed to say 800, you would be spotted by everyone else, and attacked back down to 600-700. Getting to 1100 was literally impossible unless you were extremely, extremely lucky because there WAS no one at 1100. Once you hit 900, you had to do 20 point matches, and by the time you could do 10 of those, someone found you and attacked you back down. You think health packs would give you an advantage? You get nothing when for every 1 match you win, 5 people attack you for -100. I don’t get why you guys think that changing PvPs to the LadyThor PvE where you’re forced to grind every 2.5 hours to stay first is a good idea at all.

i was there for pvp before shields. and yes, even during the bloodbath days, the winner was still the person who persisted the most and used the most health packs although luck and timing were pretty influential as well. i didn’t mention anything about points because i already know how difficult it was to reach 1100.

I don’t think you remember what happened in the bloodbath days clearly. Back then, no one used health packs because ragnarok and +all ap iso boosts still existed. The winner wasn’t the person who “persisted” the most: any time you pushed to 800+ before the last hour, people crushed you back down to 700 points. The only strategy back then was to play till 500, wait till the last hour of the event, and then grind to 800+ and pray that you didn’t get it. The guy who pushed all three days past 800 got crushed every time, the guy who pushed to 500, waited, and pushed highly won the event. It was really bad.

@atlasspeaks

and who said anything about grinding every 2.5 hours? with my solution you’d still lose points when unshielded and hit but not nearly as much as now. plus no matter what, the person who does choose to spend more time and effort should win, because well, they put in the most effort. there’s very little difference from my scenario to now where the people who take the time to grind up to 1300 or so then make the effort to do the tedious shield hopping song and dance win

The optimal strategy for your solution would be to push as much as you can, hit the stop gap, wait until the shield expires, and then push again until you hit the stop gap, so on and so forth. This sounds exactly like hitting an 8 hour refresh in PvE, and I think it’s reasonable to not require your players to put in this amount of effort to place well in an event. Right now, you can put maybe 2-3 hours into a PvP and come out with top 10, which is reasonable. I don’t think your solution would have the same effect.

[system]

The idea of bloodbath is nice! personally i love it NOW. why? becuase i only have 2
team and always lack of HP to shield. I dont care bloodbath as i always get hit and back from top 100 to top 200 ( i face bloodbath EVERY PVP ) . I dont care. Never reach top 50 before. Who cares the blloodbath? Let those want to challenge top 10 to prove they “own” top 10 but team but not shield to top 10.

[system]

@NorthernPolarity

Honestly, I think most of these ideas aren’t well thought out, or invoke too much change into the system. The key thing I don’t think a lot of people understand is that Demiurge isn’t going to enact massive, sweeping changes and overhaul their entire system all at once, because it just doesn’t make sense. Yes, the system has flaws, but do you really want to completely change it just so that new flaws and unforeseen implications can arise and be even worse than the original system? Demiurge will never take such a big risk: what they would do is consider carefully thought out feedback that suggests incremental changes that make sense, and we can’t really do that for the new system without at least giving it a shot first.

If the ideas aren’t well thought out, say why. You took time to write a post and decided to not be constructive in nay way. How do you know how much change is too much change for the system? If something is difficult it should never be discussed? That’s crazy. I think the game needs a complete overhaul. And yes, personally I want to change it because I hated it so much that I quit playing over a month ago. I came here looking for a reason to come back. Most people seem to love playing the matches themselves and hate playing the side game that is PVP.

[system]

@benben77

The idea of bloodbath is nice! personally i love it NOW. why? becuase i only have 2
team and always lack of HP to shield. I dont care bloodbath as i always get hit and back from top 100 to top 200 ( i face bloodbath EVERY PVP ) . I dont care. Never reach top 50 before. Who cares the blloodbath? Let those want to challenge top 10 to prove they “own” top 10 but team but not shield to top 10.

The people who care about the bloodbath are the people who play more than the regular person and who want to be rewarded for their efforts, as opposed to end up T200 because they couldn’t play the last 2 hours. While this has been sort of mitigated by time zones, there’s a lot of times when a person just can’t play the last 2 hours.

[system]

@rooter

@NorthernPolarity

Honestly, I think most of these ideas aren’t well thought out, or invoke too much change into the system. The key thing I don’t think a lot of people understand is that Demiurge isn’t going to enact massive, sweeping changes and overhaul their entire system all at once, because it just doesn’t make sense. Yes, the system has flaws, but do you really want to completely change it just so that new flaws and unforeseen implications can arise and be even worse than the original system? Demiurge will never take such a big risk: what they would do is consider carefully thought out feedback that suggests incremental changes that make sense, and we can’t really do that for the new system without at least giving it a shot first.

If the ideas aren’t well thought out, say why. You took time to write a post and decided to not be constructive in nay way. How do you know how much change is too much change for the system? If something is difficult it should never be discussed? That’s crazy. I think the game needs a complete overhaul. And yes, personally I want to change it because I hated it so much that I quit playing over a month ago. I came here looking for a reason to come back. Most people seem to love playing the matches themselves and hate playing the side game that is PVP.

I’ll help you out there.

Point one is completely moot because of point 2. If you can’t take defensive losses why bother with shields at all.

Point two is naive for 2 reasons.

1: Point scores become theoretically near limitless. If i’m never taking defensive losses then I can literally grow my score from minute one til the end so how the hell can you place progression rewards.

2: I wouldn’t need health packs to keep on playing just about constantly if I don’t have to care about my defensive team.I could either use XForce/Daken and literally only need a health pack when my featured hero is downed or if that was more often than the health pack refresh then just use XForce, Daken and a loaned featured hero. Alternatively I have enough fully covered 3*s at 130+ (all you need to beat 166s) to just rotate through them. This point feeds back into the theoretically limitless scores. It would simply become a question of how willing I am to grind grind grind.

Point three is IMO terrible. Why are we adding PvE scaling to PvP? Also you are simply aiming to compress scores. You make it tougher for the leader meaning everyone who’s having an easy ride can catch up. I see no tangible benefit at all.

Final point again makes no sense. Winning is easy in this game. Even going with the scaling it’s easy. The ai is stoopid so you get to win. Even more so if I can use any cheesy combo I like because I couldn’t care less if i’m hit.

[system]

For a while I’ve been thinking that they should get rid of point losses not on defensive losses, but on OFFENSIVE losses. The cost for losing on offense is so outrageous compared to the benefit of winning that it’s worth it to spend however much iso it takes to skip to find a sure win (or someone worth 40 points). And no-risk battles are boring.

You’d still have the lost time and lost health, which is more than enough of a cost for losing.

[system]

@gamar

For a while I’ve been thinking that they should get rid of point losses not on defensive losses, but on OFFENSIVE losses. The cost for losing on offense is so outrageous compared to the benefit of winning that it’s worth it to spend however much iso it takes to skip to find a sure win (or someone worth 40 points). And no-risk battles are boring.

You’d still have the lost time and lost health, which is more than enough of a cost for losing.

The problem with that is you’d then have to get rid of defensive point gains. Otherwise you’d find your clanmates and just lose to them over and over.

[system]

@NorthernPolarity

@rooter

First, get rid of shields all together. You want me to pay money to not play that game? Forget it. Sorry, D3, you are taking a cash hit here, but you will make it up for it and then some, see below. It sounds like you want to fix the shielding problems anyway.

Uh… do you remember what PvPs were like before shields existed? There was no sense of progression: everyone was on exactly the same playing field, which lead to everyone devouring each other at 600 points. It became a matter of “who could play 30 mins before the end” and “who got lucky and didn’t get eaten by the zombie horde”. It was a terrible system, and while shields isn’t perfect, it was definitely better than that.

I remember it all too well and although shielding seems like it is definitely here to stay, rooter has a good point: I’m paying not to play? I remember when they introduced shields and I expressed the same thought at that time. PvP is way better now otherwise I wouldn’t be playing this game, but in essence, you’re using in game currency not to play!

[system]

@MikeHock

@NorthernPolarity

@rooter

First, get rid of shields all together. You want me to pay money to not play that game? Forget it. Sorry, D3, you are taking a cash hit here, but you will make it up for it and then some, see below. It sounds like you want to fix the shielding problems anyway.

Uh… do you remember what PvPs were like before shields existed? There was no sense of progression: everyone was on exactly the same playing field, which lead to everyone devouring each other at 600 points. It became a matter of “who could play 30 mins before the end” and “who got lucky and didn’t get eaten by the zombie horde”. It was a terrible system, and while shields isn’t perfect, it was definitely better than that.

I remember it all too well and although shielding seems like it is definitely here to stay, rooter has a good point: I’m paying not to play? I remember when they introduced shields and I expressed the same thought at that time. PvP is way better now otherwise I wouldn’t be playing this game, but in essence, you’re using in game currency not to play!

I like to inagine the MPQ offices are actually run by the Maggia. You’re not paying to not play…you’re playing for protection.

[system]

@bonfire01

Point one is completely moot because of point 2. If you can’t take defensive losses why bother with shields at all.

Point two is naive for 2 reasons.

2: I wouldn’t need health packs to keep on playing just about constantly if I don’t have to care about my defensive team.I could either use XForce/Daken and literally only need a health pack when my featured hero is downed or if that was more often than the health pack refresh then just use XForce, Daken and a loaned featured hero. Alternatively I have enough fully covered 3*s at 130+ (all you need to beat 166s) to just rotate through them. This point feeds back into the theoretically limitless scores. It would simply become a question of how willing I am to grind grind grind.

Final point again makes no sense. Winning is easy in this game. Even going with the scaling it’s easy. The ai is stoopid so you get to win. Even more so if I can use any cheesy combo I like because I couldn’t care less if i’m hit.

2. It doesn’t matter what the scores are. Progression rewards come from win-loss count, not the point that you hit. Also, there is already limitless scoring in the game. Someone just hit over 3,000 points in a PVP.

Your final point makes no sense. Winning isn’t easy when the opponents can’t be scaled up endlessly. Winning is easy when you mindless kill the same team over and over without any variation in opponents or their difficulty level. At some point the opponents will be leveled up to be literally impossible to beat with any roster.

[system]

@daibar

@gamar

For a while I’ve been thinking that they should get rid of point losses not on defensive losses, but on OFFENSIVE losses. The cost for losing on offense is so outrageous compared to the benefit of winning that it’s worth it to spend however much iso it takes to skip to find a sure win (or someone worth 40 points). And no-risk battles are boring.

You’d still have the lost time and lost health, which is more than enough of a cost for losing.

The problem with that is you’d then have to get rid of defensive point gains. Otherwise you’d find your clanmates and just lose to them over and over.

Yes, obviously. If you can’t get points from a defensive loss, you definitely wouldn’t get them from a defensive win.

[Phaserhawk]

No shield PvP was bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. Are shield’s perfect? No. Now I’m all for change, and I generally pushed my scores to 1300 and stop since to me it wasn’t worth the HP to go past. Now in terms of $ D3 is taking a risk but saying you get 3 shield hops every 8 hrs and it’s going to cost you 525 Hp instead of 225 in that same 8 hr period and I have a feeling that 8hr CD timer will not go away. This is desgined to milk more money out of the Whales in the name of fairness. All this will do is hurt most players attempting to get progression rewards as there will be less points to push so will see how it plays out.

[FaerieMyst]

PVP doesn’t have to be a zero sum game. If could be structured so that winners get points. Losing costs you nothing. Yes, the progression awards would have to be adjusted.

Alternatively, yes, you can lose but only against one opponent at a time. When I’m playing a match, I shouldn’t win only to find that I was beaten by eight teams while I was fighting. I like a good party but that is not one.

[system]

I do agree that something needs to be done to PVP because I too do not like having all my progress wiped by attacks against me.

They could:

Only have point loss count towards placement, but not progression awards

Remove point loss completely

Or give a free 3hr shield to anyone that gets attacked an loses. Starts from the time of the loss and works just like a regular shield.