They probably don’t feel like giving away another 3* after the freebie Sentry cover from Simulator Basic. Honestly if the reward was set right it’d be out of reach for the vast majority of the people who needs it, and since Captain America is the prize this time, don’t expect much help on rubberband from the crazies. Not counting anomaly like TaT "we set the top progression at 1/10 the final top score’, the average person can only get the top progression cover if either the progression is coveted or the overall reward is coveted by the top, because those are the guys who drive the rubberband forward.
I don’t know why they nerfed the subs down to 50 HP though. I always thought it’s there to offset the fact that the main sub HP rewards are stupidly low for such long events, but apparently not.
I imagine someone looking over the numbers from past events and spitting their coffee all over the boardroom table. “Holy shit! How much HP did we give out in the Iso-8 event? Fuck that! Turn it off! Turn it all off!”
That’s what happens when players get boisterous and start bragging about having too much ISO/HP.
Seriously though, data is probably showing that easy wins by new players are assisting in becoming a bit more self-sufficient that the devs would like. Another possible angle here is from the vets playing PvEs “just for the HP from the subs” (pretty much everyone is guilty about that). Just like how 3*** covers were changed to not be worth HP to mitigate veteran players from farming them every PvP for the HP, this change is probably along the same lines to discourage veterans to play PvEs “just for the HP”.
The PvE subs have the ‘rich gets richer’ problem but they could’ve spread out the HP more instead of just nerf everything by half. Instead of 1-10 for 100 HP, it could be 1-20 for 50 HP.
That’s now how their funbalancing works though! (And besides, which the 1* people may not have the endurance to actually maintain the top 10 placement in the main bracket, I always do see a reasonable number of them placing in the smaller subs)