If it is true that there are two veteran brackets in PVE, thus taking away our ability to control our entry point into a bracket, then I suggest you raise rubberbanding back up so people who are unlucky to join a bracket later actually have a chance to catch up.
Otherwise if I join a bracket at position 800 when the leaders have already been grinding for half a day or more, I have no chance to catch up. I don’t see how it is beneficial to you to have 1/3 to 1/2 of your players in a bracket just give up and stop playing because they don’t believe they can catch up.
Erhm…Why should you be able to catch up when they’ve put in 36 hours more work than you? Not to come across as rude, but if I start an event 36 hours before someone and put in 36 hours worth of clears more than they did, I should beat them and deserve to beat them. Hands down.
Rubberbanding hasn’t really gave anyone the ability to pass anyone, unless said person stopped playing (or they weren’t playing optimally, I guess). Rubberbanding is a percentile-based bonus based on the difference of points from you and your leaderboard leader. It was originally meant to give players that could not always optimally play (due to jobs, children, significant others, family, etc - just life in general) and allow them to still attain progression rewards and maybe keep their head above water.
Just as much as I agree with you that the people that put the time in should be given the advantage, I don’t think people with other responsibilities should be handicapped. As long as it’s not severe (and it has been in the past), I don’t see why it’s such a big deal - like I said before rubberbanding should never put you in a position to pass someone that’s realistically put their time into the event. It should only allow you to pass people playing less casually than you (or are not playing optimally), and it’s not something that just you gets, those people you pass have the same (not literally, because your scores are different, but in essence) bonuses you do.
so your saying its fair for this to happen. A pve is 6 days long, a person plays hard for 4 days and then gets sick with the flu and can not play for the 5th day, While someone can join on day 5 and plays the last 2 days and beat the person who put in 2x more work
I say there should not be any rubberbanding. How it is right now you can play hardcore for the first 80% of the PVE if something comes up and you cant play Normal in the final day most everyone is going to pass you
Then I would suggest smaller brackets (thin out the rewards per bracket to compensate) so that the gap between top and bottom isn’t as big.
Good for you for defending the grinder who gets sick the last day. Glad to know you have no sympathy for anyone who gets sick at the beginning of the event and joins a bracket late through no fault of his/her own.
I’m saying that is near impossible, because rubberbanding is percentile-based, so the closer you get to the top, the less of a bonus you get, until you get no bonus at all. Rubberbanding hasn’t been that amazing to allow you to go from not playing at all to top anything significant since it was first introduced. As I said, if you’re passing people, they’ve either stopped playing or they’re playing sub-optimally - in either case, you’d pass them anyways if you’re playing optimally.
To prove my point. There is still currently rubberbanding, it’s just been scaled down significantly over the last three seasons or so. They have also gotten into the habit of severely capping the rubberbanding effect in the last stretches of an event, which further prevents people from passing anyone that’s put in a lot of work, without putting in the work yourself.
In both cases you’ll beat everyone who played sub-optimally and lose to the people who played optimally, whether it was the first or the last day you missed.
Well with the rubberbanding as low as it is, you won’t actually beat everyone who played sub-optimally. And the people who (imo) got lucky and got into a fresher bracket will then have enjoyed lower lvl enemies compared to the people who joined later and have to contend with the higher lvl enemies due to community scaling and do more matches.
Which is why my original suggestion was to raise it. I certainly don’t expect rubberbanding to let you overtake the leader in 1-3 refreshes (like it used to).
That said, having thought about it, we are going to do 8 hour refreshes starting next pve, so this might not be a problem as the leaders can’t be a lot of refreshes ahead of the bottom anymore.
Still think smaller brackets is a good idea though. Generally less demotivating when you’re only 300 away from the top rather than 700. Also more motivating to know that the leader has had less time to build a lead compared to a leader in a larger bracket.
Rubberbanding was originally implemented as a way to try to address the whole “different time zone” thing, and now that they’ve finally implemented time slices, they really should at least experiment with turning it back up a bit. Though with 8 hour refreshes, it probably doesn’t matter any more