Question about Scaling

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

This game needs a dedicated FAQ (in game) that answers any question that may be asked about it, and it links to this forum as well. Maybe update the stickied topics in the Tips forum, also. Some information in there is one year old and doesn’t cover some of the issues that arise now.

Anyway, my question is about scaling. I’m not 100% sure about this, so correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve heard that scaling has to do with the highest level of your strongest character, combined with how you do on each node (talking PvE here). I want to know, if I happen to get a new cover for the featured character that pushes him over the highest level of the other best character on the roster, will his new level (even though it is boosted) now affect the scaling?

Example: I figured that I would keep my strongest characters, Sentry and Xforce, at 143 to stop scaling from going crazy (well, too crazy). The featured character, Deadpool, was boosted 90 levels to 143, bringing him in line with the other characters. I got a new cover for him off this PvE, and it will boost his level if I upgrade with iso8. So will it change the scaling difficulty if I upgrade him in the middle of an event? If not the current sub, will it make the next one more difficult?

2

You just missed the February Q and A. I am sure the forumites will give you some comments, but you might want to post a question in the March Q and A.

3

Check out these responses from IceIX, but keep in mind, they come from a thread, which is almost a year old.

https://forums.505go.com/discussion/5451

4

Thanks a lot for that. It should be added to an FAQ or something. And how exactly does scaling work? I’ve got an idea, but I’m not sure.

5

nice link, but i do not think it explains scaling it just list 2 things that don’t affect scaling. i think the scaling should be based on your current team fighting and that is it. the stronger team the team you bring, the more points and higher level ( slightly but noticeable) If you get a bad combo/ main team used in a fight against your strongest team. you can use you B team to clear for less points making those roster slots more useful when you out of healthpack.png
less optimal > then unable to complete. it would also be nice to use some 2*s again.

6

Three aspects of enemy levels:

Starting value - Based primarily, but not entirely, on your highest leveled character.

Personal scaling - Increases with each clear, may be related to how much damage you take, can be reduced a little with tanking.

Community scaling - Some combination of everyone’s personal scaling

If you increase your highest leveled character midevent, it will not impact the current subs, but it may (or may not) impact future subs.
Boosted levels should not play into your starting value, only your highest non-boosted character level.

7

I’m convinced now that this is accurate. People get hung up on something IceIX said about scaling nearly a year ago, and forget that starting levels represent an entirely different part of the equation.

8

I was chatting with my friends about the nodes and the levels during Sudan sub-event in ISO Brotherhood event few days ago and accidentally got these numbers as shown below.
I know it doesn’t have enough information to actually find any relevant correlation, but at least I got the idea that the scaling doesn’t just use your highest level character(s) alone.
My info might not be a complete set of data because I didn’t intentionally collect them, I’ll do better next time if I can get them in the same shard again.

So here are the numbers I mentioned earlier:

Mr.A
First page of roster : lv200, 166, 132, 130, 130, 118
Sum = 876

Mr.H
First page of roster : lv198, 198, 166, 126, 115, 114
Sum = 917

Mr.L
First page of roster : lv180, 180, 180, 154, 152, 117
Sum = 963

Mr.T
First page of roster : lv220, 220, 166, 165, 120, 99
Sum = 990

Mr.Z
First page of roster : lv270, 270, 166, 166, 140, 130
Sum = 1142

Sudan II
Mr.A: lv154
Mr.L: lv154
Mr.T: lv190

Sudan III
Mr.A: lv158
Mr.H ;lv189
Mr.L: lv172
Mr.T: lv195 (210, then 243 later)
Mr.Z: lv227

Sudan IV
Mr.A: lv178
Mr.L: lv191
Mr.T: lv201
Mr.Z: lv248

Note: everyone was in shard 1, except Mr.Z who was in shard 2.
I also noticed the instant +15 level increased when I hit these nodes 4 times in a row
(one node needs a total of 6 clears to drain it down to 1 point)

9

Personal scaling seems to go up every 5 wins or so. It doesn’t matter how clean or ugly those wins are though once in a long while a particularly nasty win can somehow lower the scaling, but I’ve never been able to reproduce this. By the way, it’s not as hard as it sounds to have a nasty close win because all you have to do is wait until there’s one guy left for an easy win and then start doing very dumb things on purpose and I’m pretty sure I’ve tried it before on purpose and it doesn’t work reliably.

At any rate, if you win enough times the levels will go up. It may have been dialed back some from the old days where it doesn’t even care what missions you are beating so that beating a trivial mission worth 1 point 10 times will totally kill your scaling, but you can be pretty sure that if the missions are still giving good points it’s going to go up. Usually your personal scaling isn’t going to matter because the game clearly takes the higher of community/personal scaling, so even if you sit around doing nothing you’ll still find all the nodes went up by 50 levels after 10 hours so you might as well get some clears while the level is low, unless you plan to be on the top of the leaderboard. In that case your personal scaling will be ahead of community scaling but you shouldn’t expect anything less. Back when it was possible to manipulate your personal scaling easily and the game still showed your personal scaling, you can actually get it to way down to something like half of what the community scaling is by engineering a fake ‘close call’ but even that wasn’t super effective because the game will just override your personal scaling with community scaling anyway, though you’re still far better off than anyone whose personal scaling is higher than the community scaling.

10

https://forums.505go.com/discussion/5451

This is interesting in that Jozier asks if a) collecting a lot of AP, b) taking less damage, and c) dealing more damage contribute to scaling.

IceIX doesn’t specify which is correct, but if you think about it, counting AP left over after match would make sense as an anti-sandbagging tool.

Also, people get hung up on the Holy Triumvirate of Personal Scaling, Community Scaling, and Starting Level. But there’s no reason why Personal Scaling can’t be a persistant value, and the carryover being the only influence on Starting Levels for the next Event. The only way to test would be to have 2 people start brand new games, have one max out a 2* roster (between prologue and paying) while the other doesn’t do a thing, and have both join the exact same PVE at the exact same time, and compare results.