and believe me it really, really doesn’t - it’s the single biggest annoyance I have with MPQ - wouldn’t a reasonable tweak be to make sure that it doesn’t engage until after a user has played a node at least once?
I really shouldn’t log in for the first time to discover that a node has scaled up 100 levels between the time I went to bed and the time I woke up without having actually played it.
I completely agree - I’d like my shot at it when it is at its starting level, then let it go bonkers if everyone is smashing it.
Is there a purpose for community scaling? I’m trying to understand it.
The sick, twisted bit is that community scaling affects The Gauntlet, a non-competitive PvE event.
Makes no sense…
I haven’t ever experienced community scaling in the gauntlet. At least, i don’t think it’s that.
From my experience, playing nodes bumps up scaling as you go through the event for some reason. Maybe they keep personal scaling on for the event based on performance?
So while I can let nodes sit for a day without it scaling at all (ie community scaling), as soon as I hit a node, previous nodes and essential nodes I haven’t played yet get a bump.
Last gauntlet which I took slow without any intention of completing (just going for node rewards) definitely had nodes scale up without me completing anything. Which was fine since I wasn’t planning to complete it, but I personally saw nodes go up in difficulty without beating nodes. Only thing that would do that is community scaling I would think?
Community scaling was most likely meant to be a balance against rubberbanding. Back in the day, rubberbanding was powerful enough to let late bracket-joiners be competitive with early bracket-joiners, so community scaling provided a sense of “fairness” to those that started early.
Now that rubberbanding is practically non-existent, there really is no point to community scaling.
Fair enough, I didn’t play that one that much, I think. Maybe I didn’t notice because of that. Hope it wasn’t a trend.
That one had blade at the end, right?
The last one I played to completion was death bracket for the ten pack and I didn’t remember anything feeling like community scaling.
Community scaling is also a way to attempt to balance the difficulty of nodes. Sometimes your enemies have no synergy, so everyone steamrolls them. Their levels go up accordingly. If everyone is losing to a node, in theory the community scaling should drop their levels until a certain percentage of attempts are successful. There seem to be different percentage success rates aimed for each node. (Maybe 95% for start nodes, 25% for end nodes?)
It’s why Yelena/Venom/Grenadier nodes scale up so high, but Yelena/Venom/Lieutenant nodes don’t scale up as high because you’re losing to them more. However, the overall skill level of players has gone up, so scaling gets ridiculous in popular events like 4* releases.
It’s also why essential nodes tend to be underscaled. More people attempt them with underlevelled essential characters and thus lose to them more. Other people don’t have the characters, so can’t attempt them. All-in-all, less successful attempts. This has also led to the 4* essential nodes scaling less than the 3* essential nodes scaling less than the 2* essential nodes.