PVE or PVP in disguise?

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

Before I start this thread, I’ll just say that most people may find this obvious, pointless or a re-hash of other comments packaged slightly differently…

I’ve been playing this game for a little over a year now, and I have never particularly been a fan of PVE.

I haven’t been able to really pin down what I didn’t like about it, and never really cared to pin it down until just recently.

It isn’t because of the nodes or the storylines or even the repetitiveness.

Upon considering it, I’d say the reason I hate it is the PVP component.

“PVP component in PVE? What’s he talking about? There’s no PVP component in PVE.”

No, there definitely is. In the form of placement rewards.
Let me draw a comparison between PVE and PVP:

In order to be a valuable asset to a top 100 PVP alliance, how many progression rewards do you need to reach? Maybe 10 of the 15? That’s a score of 725.

In order to be a valuable asset to a top 100 PVE alliance, how many progression rewards do you need to reach? All of them? Multiplied by 3 or 4?

When can you stop playing PVP? When you get to a certain number. Whether your number is 700, 800 or 1000. Once you reach it, you’re done. And you can shield and stop thinking about it. You’ll place approximately where you always place. Whether that is top 25, top 5 or top 100. You generally know what you’ll get in PVP, based on your score.

When can you stop playing PVE? When it’s over.

You need to play to the last minute. If you don’t enjoy falling to the next placement reward tier.

I mean, it’s ridiculous. In order to get top 50 or even top 150 in a PVE, for your own personal progression, you’ll need to grind for a long while after you reach the final progression reward. So the only incentive is the placement reward.

Last PVE, when Iron Fist was the reward, I had already gotten the final progression reward maybe 2 days into playing, so I was playing solely to get top 50. I wanted those 2 covers, rather than just 1.

I continued playing for the next 2 full days to stay into the top 50. I went to bed with 4 hours left to play ranked #10. I grinded every node to under 50 points. I could literally not get any other points at that time. I figured, hey I won’t keep top 10, but I should be safe for the top 50.

I woke up to rank #52.

That is the PVP component of PVE that makes it intolerable. There is no limiter, there is no skill component or roster component that dictates a stopping point and you cannot stop until the thing is over if you want to place well.

What D3 should do is to completely remove the PVP component of PVE. Make it 100% progression rewards. That way I can control what I win and when I win it. That is what PVE is. You versus the computer. No player interference at all.

What our PVE is now has nothing to do with PVE. It is PVP in an ugly, ugly disguise.

2

falling from 10 to 52 is pretty serious in 4 hours. i think your issue is pretty much why people prefer gauntlet. get where you can when you can and when youre done thats it.

i find placement in pves is mostly about monitoring your relative position and playing according to the dictates of your bracket. i tend to grind harder earlier and coast later once everyone has sort of staked out there position. it normally seems that by day 5 of a long event (6+ days) everyone is burning out equally. with the essential there usually isnt much difficulty maintaining top 50. the only events i dont try for top 50 are 4* releases. these bring out the big dogs and im satisfied with the 3* at top 150.

i will put in a +1 for your suggestion. id much rather see straight progressions. the progression awards they currently set are very low. im not sure if youd finish top 400 if you hit top progression and quit.

3

I had actually posted this as a Q&A topic for February, was even upvoted a good amount to turn green and whiffed on a response by the Devs, lol. I later found out that they had done this a long time ago but I couldn’t find much on the forums about folks reactions to it. There was another thread talking about Subs rewarding Covers and I don’t personally think that would work since the reward should be for the whole event’s efforts.

I agree, it is very player versus player in PVE when going for the top spots. Too many unknowns and no way to make it completely balanced to go after the same rewards. One major potential CON to this is that more folks would be getting covers than they do now probably, which would cut too much into the Token Sales.

4

If they made PvE progression based people would just be posting about how they can’t reach the rewards.

5

Lol, how is that any different than now? At least this way, they know why they didn’t get it, they were too busy or too lazy to put the effort in.

6

They’d have to flip the rubber banding on and I wouldn’t even care since that wouldn’t necessarily impact me for those folks that join really late into an event (whether unintentionally or intentionally).

7

It’s not, so it wouldn’t solve anything. Historically, whenever D3 has set the goals to be remotely challenging for the top PvE players what usually happens is less than 1% of the people can even hit the first 3*. They tried to refine the rewards but you always have the guys who are nowhere close to it getting it so now we settled on this ‘here’s your free 3* cover for showing up for this PvE event, now stop crying’ model. It doesn’t bother me if they made it more progression based but history indicates that people never blame themselves for their failure to achieve progression based rewards. At least in a competitive system you can blame others for your problem.

8

It sucks when you go to sleep only to finish out of where you wanted to rank, it happens to all of us. I disagree that it doesn’t happen in PVP. Ask any number of people who’ve shielded early and found themselves out of top 100 by the end of it.

I fail to see how taking away competitive rewards would make PVE better. Now mind you, I’m not a grinder. I usually just place 300th or so, far out of range of any covers. When I do place top 10, I feel like I really earned it.

If you take away competitive rewards then once you hit progression, there’s little compelling reason to play after you hit the progression rewards. People would then complain that node rewards are too low, or that there’s no reason to play. I understand the sentiment behind the thread and I think it doesn’t take into account the entire player-base, particularly the hardcore. Players with a lower roster who can’t win in PVP want to win too; do you really want to take that away from them? PVE is where winners go to win before they can win in PVP.

Taking away PVE competition rewards would eviscerate the future top players of MPQ.

9

In dead pool v mpq I really enjoyed watching these two players battle for the last star lord cover. Player 1 (hector) was leading from the start, but Freddy was grinding hard. at t-8 hrs(overall pve) hector had a few hundred point lead over third place (Freddy), but… It was midnight in my time zone and i knew it was gonna come down to who was gonna wake up early to do the full grind down.

I wake up early to lockup my star lord cover and sure enough hector still had his vise grip on second. But low and behold Freddy sniped at the last second to jump into second with a lead of about 100 pts!

So for sure pve is really pvp Disguise! In fact I like these short pve better because it clusters the scores and makes it more unpredictable.

In iron fist, 1st place had a 12k lead over me and I had an 8k lead over third. Short of one of us blowing our schedule, it was pretty much a lock for top two and I prolly could have skipped the last sub and still made top ten! As it was, I just coasted my way through thunderbolt mountain and ignored the hard subs on my last full grind

While it was a nice victory it felt very anticlimactic compared to dead pool v mpq. Part of the fun of the final grind is that you know that everyone else is also dealing with the scaling issues/hard nodes. In comparison, pvp is a little boring in the sense that you have no idea how hard the other players are struggling. They could be boosting off alliance mates/skipping like crazy to avoid 18pt max Thor hood matches etc..

10

I hate to only complain on forums, but I’d have to agree, and now will segway into a little summary of complaints I have (all of which I’m sure we’ve seen before)

Progression rewards stop too early. There should at least be nominal rewards after final progression cover. 250 iso, 50 HP, heroic tokens…something. 1 more event toke? I open 20 of the dam things per pve and 1 out of every 3 pve’s get a gold, what’s 1 more token?

Grind, grind, grind, and then grind. I really wanted to stay in top 50 and get the extra IF cover, but the event went over the weekend, and I chose real life instead. With new charecter releases that happen over the weekend, I find it’s not worth my time to spend the extra hours grinding for 1 cover. I don’t have the stamina or schedule to grind for all 3 covers.

I find PvE that aren’t charecter releases fun. I usually don’t care about placement, and play for kicks, and when a node is annoying me or a sub is too hard, I just leave it and chill and I’ve had more fun with MPQ as a result.

I dread new releases, and have decided that going forward if I’m not into the new release I won’t be playing for anything more than iso and tokens. With a new release every 2 weeks that takes a 1 week grind I’ve decided to move on in life. I won’t have teh iso to level them all anyway, and there will be plenty of oppertunity to get more covers for the new release for much less effort down the road. It just so happens that I thought Cyclops pretty cool, and IF is obviously a big deal…but the next dud or mid-tier 3* I’m not even playing.

I agree with the redundancy of some battles too. I’m sure we’re all sick of seeing the dark avengers crew. I dont’ like the idea of taking the competitiveness out of PvE though. i would feel like I was getting something for nothing. Progression rewards are for everyone, additional covers are earned.

11

People seem to like Gauntlet.

12

Daibar, I was with you until the end. There are multiple ways to play this game that don’t involve competing at a high level in pvp. PVP is a brute force mode where the best rosters and willingness to spend HP will win out. I have a strong preference to not spend HP (f2p), so I don’t dabble at the top except in rare circumstances for covers of interest. I prefer the PVE side, myself, with the gauntlet being my favorite because it’s me against myself and my roster depth.

Though, I do like systematically crushing the life out of people in PVE when I’m going for the top prize once in awhile, noobs and vets alike. If I want my 4hor blue, I’m getting my 4hor blue and will put in the time to get there. The sooner my bracket accepts that, the sooner the rest of you can coast to top 10. Best feeling is that last day when number 2 finally throws his/her hands up and waives the white flag by not playing the final grind. icon_twisted.gif

13

Lol, I play pretty much the same, for anyone that’s battled Scoregasms for top spot in a bracket, most of the time, I am going for top spot and only let up when I’ve got a mathematical lead to lock up 1st because I love taking the last sub easy since that tends to be the most difficult (though, DP vs MPQ wasn’t so bad and Thunderbolt Mountain was loads easier this time around).

Don’t get me wrong, whatever the reward system is, I’m gonna go in guns blazing. There’s still Alliance Rewards for folks to continue to score and I do think more folks will be playing more if they know they can get covers. Mentally, I think a lot of folks give up on even trying for top rewards because they don’t want to deal with it before an event even starts.

I think placement wise, top 2 should still reward 4* and top 10 event 10 pack, top 25 get 5 event tokens, top 150 get 1 Heroic Token.

I haven’t played long enough to gauge how the community would react though, but more cover opportunities is good for the community, but probably bad for the Developers wallet, so yeah, not sure what to do honestly.

14

I thought it has long been understood that gauntlet and Dpdq are the only real pves. All the rest are pvp with a story mode with it, except for simulator. It’s pvp, just without shield hopping.

The only other difference is pve is set up for best players and rosters to win. Pve is set up more of an equal footing where players all play proportionally the same level of competition.

While pvp will be all advanced rosters in the t10, pve will have a mix of veteran and transition rosters.

Which again, this is why it doesn’t make sense to not level your characters.

15

I’m sorry, but I respectfully think many of you are just flat out misusing terminology here.

PvP has a very specific definition that’s not really subject to any grey areas. It’s player vs. player matchmaking. PvP is, and ONLY is, one real-life person’s character (or, in MPQ’s case, team) directly engaging (in the game’s specific mechanic) another real-life person’s character/team. PvE is any situation in which the real-life person’s character or team engages a computer controlled character/team/mob/whatever.

The fact that there are competitive aspects built into a PvE system that reward players in a differential manner does not make it a PvP game. There are some limited competitive aspects in World of Warcraft PvE – namely, realm firsts – that are as excluding and competitive as getting #1 in a PvP node in MPQ. But that’s not PvP, which is a completely separate thing. The fact that there are a ton more of those competitive aspects in MPQ’s PvE does not magically convert it into PvP. Because ultimately, it’s as simple as this: If I were the only person playing MPQ, I could play every single PvE node the developers threw at me, because I don’t need a single other person to be playing. It’s PvE. But in the absence of bots (which are present for game mechanic purposes in MPQ PvP), I’d never be able to play a single PvP node, because there would be nobody to play against.

Having said that… onimus the OP makes a perfectly valid observation that the competitive aspects of PvE can make it feel like an alternative form of PvP. That’s reasonable to think, and I’m not saying that it’s incorrect. However… that does NOT mean that there’s no “true” PvE in MPQ, or that PvE is actually PvP. Unless I can actually take points away from you in PvE, it’s not PvP, even if it really feels like it.

tl;dr: The fact that you did better than me on the “test your punch strength” machine doesn’t mean we had a fistfight.

16

First thing to understand is the devs are not going to suddenly give out more stuff. They’ve got a number of 3* and 4* covers they want to hand out in PvE events and the player leaderboard basically guarantees it’s always give out.

If you change it to progression then you rely on them setting realistic numbers and I have no idea how the hell they do that. How are you setting a progression level that guarantees an average of 2 players per bracket get a 4* cover? I can tell you now that there isn’t a node they can set that I can’t kill and that’s the case for a lot of rosters.

So they can’t do it on difficulty of nodes (ALSO people HATE overscaled PvE nodes in far greater numbers than hate the competitive aspect of PvE IMO. People hate not being able to do something at all a LOT) which leaves sheer volume of points. How do you set a score to limit it to 2 ppl per bracket? Make ppl optimally grind then grind every node down to 1 at the end? How much leeway can you allow before you reach a point where LOADS of ppl get a 4*? At the moment ppl will take their foot off the pedal somewhat once they see there are at least 2 ppl sufficiently insane at grinding to stop them getting a 4* with the effort they will put forth BUT, make that 4* guaranteed with a certain level of grinding and then what?

I don’t trust the devs to set appropriate progression targets, due in a large part to how incredibly difficult it would be to do so. They aren’t going to hand out covers in greater numbers in pvE because that doesn’t benefit them (or in fact the game due to cheapening the value of content that ppl are currently aiming for) at all.So that leaves one final option to allow pure progression… gimp the rewards. No more 4s in PvE, no multiple 3 cover awards in PvE… we’re left with the only workable model for pure progression rewards which is drip feeding of covers… so that’s gauntlet or DDQ which are already in the game.

It’s not workable to just switch the current PvE to pure progression with the same rewards.

17

I’ll never go back to PVE. I couldnt even stomach it for more than a day when IF Purple was the reward. To each their own, but meh. Players are definitely earning their covers there!

18

They already sort of do that with the 1 3* cover for PvE that’s usually set at something like less than 1/10 of the point of the overall leader so that everyone can hit it. Otherwise this problem is not just hard, it’s basically unsolveable. Let’s say I came back from a time machine and told you that the cutoff for top 1% score in the Simulator event we’re about to have is 150932 points. So we convert it to a pure progression model and we set the third and last 3* cover at 150932 points and we say everything looks good since we know from our time machine this is exactly the score where 1% of the people will reach, which is historically the equivalent of 3 3*s. Great idea? Good luck trying to convince any halfway normal guy who missed the first cycle that they now have practically no chance of hitting that score, let alone missing anything more than that. Sure right now the system leads to all kinds of bogus timing games, but if we’ve a pure progression model with a tight boundary, that’s basically telling anyone who missed a cycle don’t even bother showing up because it’s going to be that tight in order to hit whatever % they were going for and I don’t see how that can possibly make people feel better.

19

Maybe I’m just doing it in a way that I’m ok with but I’ve capped out at 135, myself, without many drawbacks in PVP or PVE. I can own PVE like anyone else that puts in the time and I can snag top 25 in PVP if and when I want to. I don’t want to spend hp for top 5, so I don’t see reasons to go above level 135, regardless of what the devs have said.

The biggest draws for this strategy have been - 1) always having ISO when I need it to level people, those last 30 levels cost almost as much as the first 100 for just one character, compound that for an entire roster and that sounds painful and 2) I don’t slog through 395’s ever. I don’t know the scaling algorithm and yes, I’m supposed to take proportional damage relative to my characters but you don’t get that much more damage for leveling XF from the 150 (where mine is) and 270. I dont consistently see anything above 300 in any event, yet pumping character levels could eventually get me to 395 somewhere and I’d have to take longer to slog through those fights. What exactly is the benefit of leveling then if I’m meeting my PVP goals?

My Surgical does 432/tile vs 522 max, so I’m losing 900 damage per 10 tile strike. BP black does 3100 damage vs 3700, CoTS 3800 vs 4500. Nothing in there sounds like I can eat through an extra 5-6k worth of goon life any faster just because I leveled my characters. My gut is telling me that my damage output scales slower than the health of opponents in PVE at a certain point. I’m ok with taking a little more damage as a % of my lower total health in PVE to keep my scaling down (they have said that is a factor) and getting 85% of the damage output, seems like it is a winning strategy for PVE.

Just some food for thought about us non-PVP Luddites. icon_e_wink.gif

20

The mix of characters at the top of PvE event varies because the scaling varies per event. There’s no way Meet Rocket & Groot is on the same level of scaling as Simulator Hard. The higher the overall scaling factor per event the more advantageous it is to have a highly developed roster if only because enemies cannot possibly get past level 395. Doing well is a relative thing. In Meet R&G I don’t recall seeing a node above level 250. That doesn’t mean it was easy to do well because if you scale that back for a weaker roster they might be seeing low 100s which is relatively easier as at that level you might have a straight up stat advantage for a transitioning roster, while no roster has a raw stat advantage over an enemy at level 250 (the 4*'s level 270 certainly don’t scale as well in raw stats compared to an enemy 1/2/3* at 250). Sure the guy with everyone has a lot of cheap options, but it’s awfully hard to beat someone who has a straight up raw stat advantage over his opponent. For example, a long time ago there was a lazy Thor + 2 Grenadier node. On the high end of scaling, there’s no way you’re racing that node so you have to use Spiderman for an infinite stun (and you got to have it down by turn 3 or so because the first CotS will likely wipe out your team). On the lower end of the scaling, they can actually take the CotS and possibly outrace Thor, and just even having that as an option is often better than any cheap combo you can do.