If the “new” PvE system looks anything like these tests, it’s not going to change anything. At most, every iteration of the new PvE system does nothing more than shift rewards around slightly. Back-and-forth about who really benefits from it is ignoring the real issue.
Because the problem isn’t with anything they’ve changed so far. The problem is right here:
Those are the awards available to everyone who plays PvE. The exact same rewards. Whether you’re on Day 5 and have your Iron Man/Juggernaut/MBW team, or whether you’re and you have all of the covers in the game. In fact, if you’re just starting out, you have a much better chance of earning those rewards than someone who’s been playing for a few hundred days and could really use those 4* covers.
The issue isn’t how to decide who the best two players are in an arbitrarily-assigned bracket using a system that punishes long-term players. Changing that is rearranging deck chairs on the titanic, and it’s mind-boggling to me that limited developer time is being wasted doing that. The Civil War event was fantastic, but the Gauntlet re-run and the next tone-deaf PvE rework have taken all that shine away in a really short period of time.
Another poster put it as succinctly as I’ve ever seen it put when he said that:
(Hop over there real quick and upvote that post, because it deserves to be green.)
Clash of the Titans is a fun diversion, but it’s not 4* content. I use my 3* characters far more than I use my 4* characters. Elektra was the first 4* PvP re-run, and there’s no indication that something like that will ever happen again.
You’ve got the perfect format for real PvE: The Gauntlet. But it languishes because developers pretend that rewards that were valuable to everyone a year and a half ago are still as valuable as they used to be. Real PvE, without personal scaling and with gated difficulty, is something that the game needed a year ago, and needs even more today. It’ll allow people to get rewards geared towards their specific needs, at every level of the game.
So here’s the real question for the developers. What’s coming down the pipe for us? Why should we continue to spend time and money on this game, if all you’re doing on your end is making tiny tweaks to PvE-but-really-PvP structure to stretch out the same old content over five tiers of players, and punishing success with increased difficulty for the same out-of-date rewards?
The developers have had multiple goes at the the PvE rework, and they haven’t even addressed the players concerns about the real issues, let alone made any effort to change it. Don’t ask us to choose between the old PvE and the “new” PvE, because the right answer increasingly looks like no PvE at all. Almost all of us realize that the best option is the one that the developers aren’t giving us, and we deserve to know why that is.
