"No Whammies!" - Amplifying the Influence of Bad Luck in MPQ

[Stax_the_Foyer]

There are only two Whammies in the above picture, but other than the sweet Don Johnson blazer, that’s all you care about. Everyone remembers their Whammies, even when they’re the exception, rather than the rule.

AI cascades that lead to a loss? Whammied.
Hit 3 times during a shield hop? Whammied.
Got all 2* tokens from a season 10-pack? Whammied.
Character got rebalanced just after you finally cover maxed them? Whammied.

When something bad enough happens, it can make you feel like you’re losing, even when you’re actually breaking even or coming out ahead. We dwell on the Whammies. It’s irrational, but it’s human nature.

The recent changes to the game have increased the likelihood that we’re going to get Whammied. Luck has always played a role in MPQ, but the effect has been amplified by the recent changes. AI cascades were always a primary reason for losing, but with longer matches due to the health increases, you’re more likely to see one in a given match, and more likely to lose matches overall. You’ve always run the risk of being hit while shield hopping, but the longer matches and the changes to MMR mean that you’re more likely to be hit during the hop, and for larger point losses because you’re visible to people farther down.

Bad luck was always there, but the effect has been amplified. Instead of losing one character, you lose an entire match. Instead of losing 30 points on a hop, you lose 45, or you’re hit twice for a 60 point loss. With shield cooldowns in place, a bad hop can mean you won’t hit the progression goal you’re shooting for, and you may have wasted a couple shields in doing so. That’s what’s behind a lot of the complaints that you’ve been seeing in the forums lately, because crapping out is no fun, especially when it’s all out of your control.

You can see a little bit of that in tanis3303’s post in the PvP changes thread, which is about to go green despite being stranded in the middle of an 11-page testament to the effects of downvote removal.

@tanis3303

But picking the wrong, non-Crews time slice, having a bad hop (wipes, snipes etc) or just not having the kind of time to schedule perfect hops will all prevent you from getting there, because the system, quite frankly, sucks. So yea, I’ll take any advantage I can get in order to actually feel like I’m getting something for my time/effort in this game.

The new PvP scoring changes are another luck amplifier, probably the clearest one we’ve seen yet. The trickle-down effect of boosted scores will be gone, but there’s a chance that they could still be a net positive. What we do know for sure, though, is that it’s going to make those Whammies hit that much harder. And I’m pretty sure that’s what we’re going to remember.

[system]

A long time ago WoW had an article where they said they originally made say a quest drop 20% to drop and had the standard explanation on probabilities when people post they didn’t get the quest drop after killing a large number of stuff, but eventually they just made it such that it’s 20% and you’ll get at least one drop after 10 kills so people stop complaining and that was easier to do than explaining probability to most people.

I think the game could use something like that when it comes to AI’s ability to make great cascades when they’re already running a team that you cannot possibly match in quality. A level 395 Juggernaut doesn’t need any more advantages on his side. Although the competitive nature of the placements would negate any such boosts to player, it’d be good for a quality of life improvement to know that crazy cascade is not something you’ve to worry about when you’re fighting one of those crazy combination of hero + feeder nodes. Not sure if this is anything high on the priority list to do, but it wouldn’t actually be very hard to do. You’d just flag all cascades to magically stop after a certain point when the enemy is deemed as too strong, since it is always possible to generate new tiles in a way such that no cascade is possible. Swarm would feel a lot less cheesy if it’s hardcoded to never create a cascade. Note that it can still create a match 4/5 on the board that the AI immediately take, and I can live with that.

[Eddiemon]

All they need to do is rejig the tile generation algorithm so it won’t drop 3 tiles of the same colour in succession.

It won’t end cascades, because it only controls the new tiles generated, so they can still make matches with the board. But it prevents the stupidity of a match 5 dropping into a column a match 4 destroyed. And you can also judge how susceptible the board is to generating cascades, whereas the RNG is just that, random.

I know this stuff happens just as much in my favour as against, but I think it ruins the game either way. It either make my match trivial or an ugly wipe, and neither is satisfying.

[Raffoon]

@Phantron

A long time ago WoW had an article where they said they originally made say a quest drop 20% to drop and had the standard explanation on probabilities when people post they didn’t get the quest drop after killing a large number of stuff, but eventually they just made it such that it’s 20% and you’ll get at least one drop after 10 kills so people stop complaining and that was easier to do than explaining probability to most people.

I think the game could use something like that when it comes to AI’s ability to make great cascades when they’re already running a team that you cannot possibly match in quality. A level 395 Juggernaut doesn’t need any more advantages on his side. Although the competitive nature of the placements would negate any such boosts to player, it’d be good for a quality of life improvement to know that crazy cascade is not something you’ve to worry about when you’re fighting one of those crazy combination of hero + feeder nodes. Not sure if this is anything high on the priority list to do, but it wouldn’t actually be very hard to do. You’d just flag all cascades to magically stop after a certain point when the enemy is deemed as too strong, since it is always possible to generate new tiles in a way such that no cascade is possible. Swarm would feel a lot less cheesy if it’s hardcoded to never create a cascade. Note that it can still create a match 4/5 on the board that the AI immediately take, and I can live with that.

Not to sidetrack too far, as it is a bit related to the topic, being about human perception of events:

My favorite WoW tuning story, that I thought you were retelling at first, is about the rested XP bonus. When the game was in early stages, they had an XP penalty if you played the game for too long. People HATED it. Why penalize people that wanted to play for a longer period of time at once.

But here’s the stroke of genius: By simply changing the anchoring perception point, they created one of the most well loved features in an MMORPG to date. Rested XP. That’s right, when you first start playing the game in a session, you earn XP at an increased rate! And then after you play for a while you earn less XP when the bonus falls off… Exact same system, different spin!

Anyway, to bring it back on topic… Try to amplify the good hits, I suppose? Think of all those times that you scored a killer cascade.

[tanis3303]

Very well said Stax. I had to get the tinykitty away from the other thread, that really got out of hand quickly. Seriously, I think Brick stabbed a guy in the heart

It’s this risk vs reward dilemma we all face that really gets to a lot of people, and the risk keeps on increasing while the rewards stay the same. More health → longer battles → more chances for whammies (great analogy btw!), basically increasing the overall difficulty of the entire experience, but no increase to the reward structure is anywhere in sight.

If you wipe on an attack in PvP, especially late in your climb, the consequences are pretty overwhelming…and there have been a multitude of recent changes which make this happen much more frequently. You lose event points (even more now). Your characters are down, so 3 of your 5 health packs are gone if you want to continue. Sure, using a different team is an option, but you want your A team out there just in case of that 10% chance of picking up a defensive win. As soon as you switch out the Goku/Vegeta of the week for Wingus/Dingus, you just painted a giant kick me sign on your back. The mere sight of something other than the weeks “best pair” will get you attacked mercilessly, which now hurts even more thanks to the points change. There’s a good chance you’ll be sniped during all this, losing even more event points. All of these things together means that every second you don’t have a shield up past ~700-800 points is another chance to ruin the entire event for you, and as you said, it’s all out of your control. Whammied! That’s not very fun.

I wasn’t trying to defend boosting. It was a clever way to get around the risk factor involved with reaching progression goals, but at the end of the day, it did need to be stopped. How they’ve gone about it however, by increasing the risk factor even further, makes me think they don’t understand the underlying problem, and what drove players to do it in the first place. I can’t speak for everyone here, but the only reason I did it a few times was because I got fed up with wasting time and resources going for 1k only to miss it for one reason or another, more often than not because I would get to ~900 points and be faced with an endless sea of 3 and 4 point battles because I didn’t pick the high scoring slice. Whammied! Also no fun.

Will updated his original post - the max point gain for a PvP fight is now 75. Why he didn’t lead with this is beyond me, as that would have eliminated a good chunk of the rage and hate that spewed forth from the announcement. Being able to close gaps that size in a one-hop makes a HUGE difference. It’s still going to rely heavily on choosing the high scoring slice however, but that’s a whole different issue…

[Stax_the_Foyer]

@tanis3303

I wasn’t trying to defend boosting. It was a clever way to get around the risk factor involved with reaching progression goals, but at the end of the day, it did need to be stopped. How they’ve gone about it however, by increasing the risk factor even further, makes me think they don’t understand the underlying problem, and what drove players to do it in the first place. I can’t speak for everyone here, but the only reason I did it a few times was because I got fed up with wasting time and resources going for 1k only to miss it for one reason or another, more often than not because I would get to ~900 points and be faced with an endless sea of 3 and 4 point battles because I didn’t pick the high scoring slice. Whammied! Also no fun.

Yeah, I have no complaints about the boost removal, either, I’m just worried about the collateral effects of the specific fix they went with. Like you, I’d mainly done it because of PTSD from previous climb attempts that stalled out in the 900s.

I will say, though, that the impromptu groups that sprung up around boost climbing were some of the friendliest, most positive experiences that I’ve had in MPQ. Everyone was helping everyone, and was happy for each other when they got their 1K awards. I think a big part of that was that if something went wrong, we could recover as a group. That’s not something that you can easily do without help from others (or do at all, anymore). If you get whammied, trying to fix it yourself usually just digs you a deeper hole.

[Pylgrim]

Great post, that was a really good way of framing the way changes may affect playing at the top levels. However, I want to bring up something I did in the other thread and that got simply ignored by those opposing the changes: The greatly increased scores from winning even out the risk you talk about. For example, sitting at 940-960 points in the present means that you need at best two offensive victories to reach 1k (since finding targets over 40 points at that stage is unlikely). That’s either two shields or an insanely against-the-odds gamble of being able to rush two battles before being hit. Under the new conditions, it’s presumably possible to breach that gap in a single fight, greatly diminishing that risk. Additionally, even if you get hit once during that hop (for an increased score loss) the much greater increased score gain from your victory means that you’ll come slightly ahead than what you’d have come from the same scenario under the current circumstances. E.g.: Let’s think of a 30 point victory followed by a defensive defeat where the attacker also got 30 points (an 80% = 24 points loss for you), for a measly +6 total points. Just following the maths hinted by the little information we have, that would be a 45 point victory, followed by a 45 point defensive defeat (a loss of 36 points) under the new system, for +9 total points.

Nevertheless, both your argument and mine are basically theories in paper since we are dealing with lots of incomplete, non-empirical information. That’s why, as always, my position is “wait and see”.

[Stax_the_Foyer]

@Pylgrim

Great post, that was a really good way of framing the way changes may affect playing at the top levels. However, I want to bring up something I did in the other thread and that got simply ignored by those opposing the changes: The greatly increased scores from winning even out the risk you talk about. For example, sitting at 940-960 points in the present means that you need at best two offensive victories to reach 1k (since finding targets over 40 points at that stage is unlikely). That’s either two shields or an insanely against-the-odds gamble of being able to rush two battles before being hit. Under the new conditions, it’s presumably possible to breach that gap in a single fight, greatly diminishing that risk. Additionally, even if you get hit once during that hop (for an increased score loss) the much greater increased score gain from your victory means that you’ll come slightly ahead than what you’d have come from the same scenario under the current circumstances. E.g.: Let’s think of a 30 point victory followed by a defensive defeat where the attacker also got 30 points (an 80% = 24 points loss for you), for a measly +6 total points. Just following the maths hinted by the little information we have, that would be a 45 point victory, followed by a 45 point defensive defeat (a loss of 36 points) under the new system, for +9 total points.

Nevertheless, both your argument and mine are basically theories in paper since we are dealing with lots of incomplete, non-empirical information. That’s why, as always, my position is “wait and see”.

You’re correct that this is all hypothetical, but respectfully, a couple additional points to keep in mind. First, you can only win one match at a time, but there’s no limit on the number of people that can attack you.

Also, when you’re hit during a hop, it’s more likely to come from someone at a much lower score than you than from someone at or near your level. At higher scores, once people are hopping, they tend to queue their targets up well before the actual hop, and you can usually do better than someone with a score equal to yours. If you get hit during a short hop, it’s probably from someone actively cycling through targets who wass able to queue you right after you unshielded, and those people are usually in the middle of a climb from lower scores. I’ve personally had several net-negative single hops since the MMR and health changes went live, and I know that my experience isn’t uncommon. Those are very frustrating, and will be made worse under the revised format.

Finally, whether you gain 6 points or 9 points, if you spent 75 or 150 HP on a shield hop and incurred an 8 hour cooldown on that shield, it’s going to feel like an unsuccessful shield hop. Once you start hopping, there’s a hard limit on the number of shield hops you can do before the event ends. Effectively losing one of those can mess with your plans and keep you from progression awards.

I totally understand the desire to wait and see, since there are multiple factors at play with this change. But the naysayers have had a pretty good track record lately when it comes to the impact of changes on high-level play.

[Pylgrim]

@Stax the Foyer

@Pylgrim

Great post, that was a really good way of framing the way changes may affect playing at the top levels. However, I want to bring up something I did in the other thread and that got simply ignored by those opposing the changes: The greatly increased scores from winning even out the risk you talk about. For example, sitting at 940-960 points in the present means that you need at best two offensive victories to reach 1k (since finding targets over 40 points at that stage is unlikely). That’s either two shields or an insanely against-the-odds gamble of being able to rush two battles before being hit. Under the new conditions, it’s presumably possible to breach that gap in a single fight, greatly diminishing that risk. Additionally, even if you get hit once during that hop (for an increased score loss) the much greater increased score gain from your victory means that you’ll come slightly ahead than what you’d have come from the same scenario under the current circumstances. E.g.: Let’s think of a 30 point victory followed by a defensive defeat where the attacker also got 30 points (an 80% = 24 points loss for you), for a measly +6 total points. Just following the maths hinted by the little information we have, that would be a 45 point victory, followed by a 45 point defensive defeat (a loss of 36 points) under the new system, for +9 total points.

Nevertheless, both your argument and mine are basically theories in paper since we are dealing with lots of incomplete, non-empirical information. That’s why, as always, my position is “wait and see”.

You’re correct that this is all hypothetical, but respectfully, a couple additional points to keep in mind. First, you can only win one match at a time, but there’s no limit on the number of people that can attack you.

Also, when you’re hit during a hop, it’s more likely to come from someone at a much lower score than you than from someone at or near your level. At higher scores, once people are hopping, they tend to queue their targets up well before the actual hop, and you can usually do better than someone with a score equal to yours. If you get hit during a short hop, it’s probably from someone actively cycling through targets who wass able to queue you right after you unshielded, and those people are usually in the middle of a climb from lower scores. I’ve personally had several net-negative single hops since the MMR and health changes went live, and I know that my experience isn’t uncommon. Those are very frustrating, and will be made worse under the revised format.

Finally, whether you gain 6 points or 9 points, if you spent 75 or 150 HP on a shield hop and incurred an 8 hour cooldown on that shield, it’s going to feel like an unsuccessful shield hop. Once you start hopping, there’s a hard limit on the number of shield hops you can do before the event ends. Effectively losing one of those can mess with your plans and keep you from progression awards.

I totally understand the desire to wait and see, since there are multiple factors at play with this change. But the naysayers have had a pretty good track record lately when it comes to the impact of changes on high-level play.

This is all true. You can indeed be hit by several people at once while you are unshielded. And yet, while playing at those levels one plays with the fastest possible team and more often than not, it is possible to hop without getting sniped (otherwise getting 1k would be literally impossible and I know it is not, since I have done it myself and I’m just in the earliest stages of the 3*-4* transition and I don’t even do alliance-coordinate hops). But yeah, sometimes you’ll get unlucky and be massacred in the same time it took you to finish one battle and indeed, under the new system that means that you’ll be screwed even further. However, let us do the maths exercise again. Let’s say that with 950 points, you win a 33 point battle and come out to find out that you were hit by 3 people, losing, say, 32 + 37 + 25 points, leaving you at -61 points from your starting point, 889. You will now need 4 more victories like the one you just had to reach 1k. Those same numbers under the new system will look something like +50-48-56-38=-92, so 858… only 3 victories away from 1k!

Additionally, if you didn’t get screwed and managed to score your points before you get defensive losses, under the new system, you’ll have gotten 1k already, as opposed to 983!

[Xenoberyll]

@Pylgrim

Let’s say that with 950 points, you win a 33 point battle and come out to find out that you were hit by 3 people, losing, say, 32 + 37 + 25 points, leaving you at -61 points from your starting point, 889. You will now need 4 more victories like the one you just had to reach 1k. Those same numbers under the new system will look something like +50-48-56-38=-92, so 858… only 3 victories away from 1k!

usually, once the hits start rolling in they wont stop at 3. so if you continue climbing they will continue to hit you.
maybe you can hop again later but often to a similar result. I think the number of points lost from defensive losses should be lower, not higher. I have little to no influence on winning on defense, so it feels unfair that this part is often weighted stronger than what i can do on my side of influence (offense).

[Stax_the_Foyer]

@Pylgrim

This is all true. You can indeed be hit by several people at once while you are unshielded. And yet, while playing at those levels one plays with the fastest possible team and more often than not, it is possible to hop without getting sniped (otherwise getting 1k would be literally impossible and I know it is not, since I have done it myself and I’m just in the earliest stages of the 3*-4* transition and I don’t even do alliance-coordinate hops). But yeah, sometimes you’ll get unlucky and be massacred in the same time it took you to finish one battle and indeed, under the new system that means that you’ll be screwed even further.

I’m setting aside the math, since it’s not the point of this thread and I trust that everyone discussing this understands that if you get more points for a win you’ll be able to hop higher if you’re not hit. The upside of this change is obvious on its face.

Nobody is arguing that 1K will be impossible after this. As a general rule, it could very well be easier. But when you get hit, it’s going to hurt more, and extrapolating from personal and shared experience over the last few weeks, one or two instances of bad luck can shut you out from progression in that event, because there’s a finite number of opportunities once you start shield hopping.

It’s that feeling of washing out that’s become more prevalent lately, and is discouraging players. I’ve been getting the 4* covers in PvP for quite a while now, so I don’t expect things to be a cakewalk. But between dry shards and bad wipes, it’s been more unreliable than ever lately. It’s that volatility that’s really discouraging. It’s not that I don’t understand the reasons for the changes, it’s that there are many different ways they could be addressing the issues that come up, but they’ve chosen ones that have luck-amplifying side effects, and that’s what I wanted to highlight.

The Whammies are boosted this week. The Whammies are boosted every week.

[CrookedKnight]

Under the formula MPQ uses, any increase in the points at stake in a fight means that if you win one fight and lose another, then you’re going to come out ahead of where you’d have been under the old system since points gained rise faster than points lost. If you get hit multiple times during a single fight, that hop is a bust under the old system or the new. So I don’t really see this as amplifying the effects of bad luck because luck bad enough to be made worse by the points increase would ruin my day regardless.

[Wonko33]

I never had issues with cascades, they just happen ( they do make me take a break from playing sometimes) . I am afraid of the mess they would make creating some sort of cascade limiting algorithm though, the space time continuum would probably collapse on itself.

I don’t freak out too much about a streak of bad luck for tokens either but I do wish that compensations for a D3 error would not be random tokens, just give us a choice of 2-3 characters to pick from or something because getting screwed by some server malfunction and getting a Moonstone is just putting salt on a wound.

[Pylgrim]

@Stax the Foyer

@Pylgrim

This is all true. You can indeed be hit by several people at once while you are unshielded. And yet, while playing at those levels one plays with the fastest possible team and more often than not, it is possible to hop without getting sniped (otherwise getting 1k would be literally impossible and I know it is not, since I have done it myself and I’m just in the earliest stages of the 3*-4* transition and I don’t even do alliance-coordinate hops). But yeah, sometimes you’ll get unlucky and be massacred in the same time it took you to finish one battle and indeed, under the new system that means that you’ll be screwed even further.

I’m setting aside the math, since it’s not the point of this thread and I trust that everyone discussing this understands that if you get more points for a win you’ll be able to hop higher if you’re not hit. The upside of this change is obvious on its face.

Nobody is arguing that 1K will be impossible after this. As a general rule, it could very well be easier. But when you get hit, it’s going to hurt more, and extrapolating from personal and shared experience over the last few weeks, one or two instances of bad luck can shut you out from progression in that event, because there’s a finite number of opportunities once you start shield hopping.

It’s that feeling of washing out that’s become more prevalent lately, and is discouraging players. I’ve been getting the 4* covers in PvP for quite a while now, so I don’t expect things to be a cakewalk. But between dry shards and bad wipes, it’s been more unreliable than ever lately. It’s that volatility that’s really discouraging. It’s not that I don’t understand the reasons for the changes, it’s that there are many different ways they could be addressing the issues that come up, but they’ve chosen ones that have luck-amplifying side effects, and that’s what I wanted to highlight.

The Whammies are boosted this week. The Whammies are boosted every week.

Alright, let’s say that whammies are gonna hurt more, piling up that discouraging feeling. However, if you agree that 1k may now very well be easier, doesn’t that mean too that the rewarding feeling of satisfaction and achievement will happen more often as well? It’s not like the frequency of “whammies” will increase; (if any, as pointed by another poster, they may decrease as faster climbs means that your opponents will remain a shorter time on the score zone where victories will steal close to max points from you.) The difference is that instead of being hit for, say -150 on a bad break, you will be hit by -230 or so. Yes, looks (and feels) pretty bad, but in reality, the recovery from that will be quicker and easier that it is now to recover from -150.

[Stax_the_Foyer]

@Pylgrim

Alright, let’s say that whammies are gonna hurt more, piling up that discouraging feeling. However, if you agree that 1k may now very well be easier, doesn’t that mean too that the rewarding feeling of satisfaction and achievement will happen more often as well? It’s not like the frequency of “whammies” will increase; (if any, as pointed by another poster, they may decrease as faster climbs means that your opponents will remain a shorter time on the score zone where victories will steal close to max points from you.) The difference is that instead of being hit for, say -150 on a bad break, you will be hit by -230 or so. Yes, looks (and feels) pretty bad, but in reality, the recovery from that will be quicker and easier that it is now to recover from -150.

I think you think I don’t understand the point you keep making. I assure you, I do. I can do math.

The point of the thread, though, is that people behave irrationally when it comes to losses. Losses feel worse than wins feel good. I do disagree that sniping is likely to decrease (for the reasons that I gave in response to that poster in the other thread), but I haven’t brought that up here because I don’t think we need a second thread discussing it when it’s been discussed in much more detail there.

I’m just pointing out that this is yet another change that amplifies the effect of bad luck, a frustrating aspect of this recent change that’s shared with a bunch of other design decisions made recently.

[Pylgrim]

@Stax the Foyer

@Pylgrim

Alright, let’s say that whammies are gonna hurt more, piling up that discouraging feeling. However, if you agree that 1k may now very well be easier, doesn’t that mean too that the rewarding feeling of satisfaction and achievement will happen more often as well? It’s not like the frequency of “whammies” will increase; (if any, as pointed by another poster, they may decrease as faster climbs means that your opponents will remain a shorter time on the score zone where victories will steal close to max points from you.) The difference is that instead of being hit for, say -150 on a bad break, you will be hit by -230 or so. Yes, looks (and feels) pretty bad, but in reality, the recovery from that will be quicker and easier that it is now to recover from -150.

I think you think I don’t understand the point you keep making. I assure you, I do. I can do math.

The point of the thread, though, is that people behave irrationally when it comes to losses. Losses feel worse than wins feel good. I do disagree that sniping is likely to decrease (for the reasons that I gave in response to that poster in the other thread), but I haven’t brought that up here because I don’t think we need a second thread discussing it when it’s been discussed in much more detail there.

I’m just pointing out that this is yet another change that amplifies the effect of bad luck, a frustrating design choice that’s shared with a bunch of other design decisions made recently.

Ah ok, then I can agree. Getting whammied sucks and getting whammied for 300 points instead of 200 will suck even further. Still, I gladly will suck that up when it happens from time to time in exchange of an easier and quicker climb every time and an easier and quicker recovery after the whammy.

I guess that your whole point is that the whammy shouldn’t exist to begin with, and I can also agree with that. An implementation to cap the number of times you can be made target of in a determined amount of time would greatly help and hopefully it will be made some time in the feature. But right now, we got this change which while makes whammies a bit suckier also improves the overall system and speeds the recovery. No point in dismissing this improvement because it is not the improvement we wish it were.

[simonsez]

@Stax the Foyer

The point of the thread, though, is that people behave irrationally when it comes to losses. Losses feel worse than wins feel good.

And along those same lines, it is an accepted principle in behavioral economics that people attach more value to things they already have. So when you lose 200 points to snipers, it is a far more psychologically negative impact than the positive impact of acquiring those 200 points in the first place. Even though your net change might be 0, the overall experience is very unpleasant, not neutral.