Thoughts on scaling

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

Why would a player versus ENVIRONMENT event use the performance of other players to affect my difficulty at all? Sure, it’s alledgedly not a big influence, but still. When I can select a fight, back off for whatever reason before starting it, then go back a few minutes later to and see the opposing levels have gone up due to nothing I’ve done, that’s not remotely cool, imho. Just thinly disguised pvp. Which I dislike.

When I get stomped using my highest boosted characters that make a decent team before I can even bring one opponent down and it wasn’t due to a lucky cascade, something is broken. When the difficulty stays the same until I’ve done that three times, then jumps back up past where it was after I beat it once at the reduced level, it’s not just broken, it’s shattered.

Past performance should only have an affect in relation to that specific event. Not everyone has the right roster for every event.

Scaling that looks at previous performance should not just look at how many times someone has beat a node, but how many attempts were needed to do so.

The number of covers needs to be considered in addition to character levels. I have 2 covers for OML, 1 for SS, 1 for Spiderman black. For giggles, I used them for the negligible nodes recently and actually had spidey downed and ss at half hit points in one… thugs scaling is SO broken it’s not even funny.

So, I was dealing with scaling issues ok, then along comes champions and the nerf to my primarily 3 star roster. Immediately dropped from a consistent t100 player to struggling to get into the t200. Finally managed to get back into the t50 for the first time in months during the hulk event, and now I’m getting stomped in the event I’m usually best at, meet rocket and groot. Not even managing to stay in the t200.

I’m not a f2p. My wife and I have both spent at least $100 each on this game in the last year. I’ve got all but a couple of the 2 stars, all but one of the 3 stars (most fully covered, about half made champion), most of the 4 stars (none fully covered, highest levelled is xfw at 188), and three 5 stars with a total of four covers between them. I rarely miss a day, but I’m seriously considering it, since I’m tired of apparently getting punished for improving my roster.

2

Sounds like you’re a victim of 5* scaling more than anything else. You’re certainly not alone in your quandary since the most effective solution is to sell your 5* and that’s one hell of a sacrifice. The other route - assuming you keep all 3 5* heroes - is to just level your best group of 4* as much as possible because it won’t affect your scaling (well, unless they’re boosted, and the difference in power should outstrip the difference in scaling) and you definitely need them to clear those nodes. That takes a ton of ISO so it’s unfortunately a much more longer-term solution.

From A PvE Guide for Beginners (I have bolded the most relevant text):

Scaling refers to how difficult a node is compared to your roster. There are two sorts of scaling, personal and community. Community scaling was turned off some time ago. Personal scaling appears to be calculated based on your individual roster level at the start of an event. More specifically, the initial starting level of your nodes are based on the top 3 highest leveled characters in your roster, including boosts for that event. Trivial/Easy nodes are capped. Nodes within an event will scale up depending on your success in beating those nodes. The more you beat a set of nodes within a sub, the higher the levels will become (particularly if you beat them with ease, sustaining little to no damage).

3

Selling my 5*'s was the best thing I ever did! I only have one fully covered 4*, so I dont use any of them yet. All my battles are fought with 3*'s and the 5*'s on my roster were pushing my scaling up to ridiculous levels. The minute I sold them, teh scaling dropped by a good 50 levels for the next event. The game is a lot more fun now so I dont regret selling them for even a second.

4

Unfortunately, this game is very much pay to win. $100 is a drop in the bucket; super whales spend several hundred dollars per week. icon_e_surprised.gif
Unless you’re willing to blow enough money to buy a new car, pay for a year of college tuition, or a house’s down payment, you will not be competitive in pvp.

As far as pve is concerned, the wisest thing to do is to drop your 5s, and reduce your scaling. A player with a deep roster can be competitive (i.e. t100) in virtually every pve event, and you won’t need to spend money doing so either. icon_lol.gif

5

Okay, I want to address the issue of t100 vs t200 vs t50. If you can hit at least two essentials in a pve event, and do a reasonable amount of grinding you can hit t200 at a minimum. If you can hit all three essentials, your placement floor is t100 with a chance at t50. The issue is one of luck—were you lucky enough to avoid landing in a competitive bracket?

So if you are putting in a similar amount of time grinding each pve, and hitting the same number of nodes, you could still jump up and down in your placement. Your placement does not reflect anything you did wrong per se, but rather your luck in landing or avoiding a competitive bracket.

6

Depends. If your scaling has made your fights that hard that you use up all your health packs, you may not be able to do a full clear each time you need to which of course will push your placing down. It wont matter what type of bracket you are in then.

7

He said he’s got half of the 3* characters championed. Selling his 5* characters isn’t going to change anything as boosted champion 3*'s are already picking up 94 levels for the essential 3* to make them 260 and a regular boosted 166 has got to be close to 250 as well.

Please read more carefully before suggesting that someone sell the hardest to get covers in the game, especially when it won’t change their scaling.

My thoughts on scaling is that I hope they fix it in this upcoming matchmaking test. 1 cover 5* characters are mostly a joke except for OML yellow when it comes to PvE (probably PvP too). My thoughts on top 50 are that there are too many competitive people playing this game (at least in my slice) and unless you grind all 3 essentials every 8 hours plus extra you aren’t even going to get into top 100.

8

Appreciate the feedback and the quote. I’ll have to do a little experimenting again to double check a couple of things, but I’m fairly sure I noticed levels rising without me doing any fights after community scaling was supposed to be turned off. One of the times I noticed, I know I’d backed out just to level a couple characters, so I’m not sure roster level scaling sets until you’ve actually fight a battle in a sub. One of the things I’ve noticed in most of the guides is that they are mostly based on player conjecture and not anything officially confirmed. Now most of them are pretty close to being dead on (the player base generally figures everything out eventually), but we don’t have all the facts.

I’ve really debated dropping the five stars. Guess I’m a bit on the stubborn side.

Here’s hoping the quality of life changes keep coming and address this issue along with a few others. I’ve really liked some of the recent changes, but others have really left me wondering if someone spiked the drinks in a dev meeting or two.

9

Your personal performance still affects scaling, but that’s a really odd timing for a personal scaling adjustment. D3 has also been silent on exactly what actually affects personal scaling in PvE, or exactly when levels change as a result of that. Could it be that the client doesn’t actually check for level changes from performance scaling until a sub is reloaded from either a battle or entering another menu?

Only one Championed character is picking up the levels for the Essential 3*, and the game averages the 3 highest-leveled characters. The boosted Essential is going to be over 255, but that level is being averaged with two effectively useless characters at level 255. Boosted 3* from Level 166 are Level 240, and he either has 3 boosted 3* (giving him a full team that heals quickly and gives 10 less levels of scaling assuming his Championed boosted characters are at 166) or he has less than 3 boosted 3* (which gives him 52 less levels of scaling).

There is also anecdotal evidence that scaling is affected by your top X characters based on your performance, where X >= 3, or that the scaling for maxed-out 4* characters (and by extension base-level 5* characters according to this post) is higher than the scaling from a boosted 3* at the same level. If either of those are true, then the 5* heroes will still ruin his scaling. There’s discussion of both of these in that thread, and I’ll just quote the 5* scaling post below since it’s on Page 2.

10

I will note that I’ve stopped backing out of the first sub to level characters since I noticed levels changing when I do that. Started levelling from the character selection screen when I wanted to level someone. Of course, sometimes when I do that, the game kicks me out of the sub and increases the difficulty anyway. I’m pretty sure at this point that scaling isn’t set until you fight that first sub battle.

Please excuse the somewhat hit and miss of my comments right now. Fighting a nasty cold at the moment. Means I’m poetically going to do terrible at the current event anyway. Hard to concentrate and I’m pretty cranky and likely to just put the phone down and take a nap when I get irritated.

11

Not a bother. Your follow-up posts are a lot more civil than I’d expect to see after running into that OP icon_e_smile.gif

12

OP was intended to start a discussion. Yes, I was a bit irritated at the time, but I was also reminding myself that I was while writing it so it didn’t get out of hand.
I don’t expect everyone to agree with me, so follow on discussion doesn’t generally get out of hand. I’ve learned the hard way not to respond right away if someone actually makes me angry.

13

If community scaling was still on goon only nodes would jump to considerably for everyone between levels and you wouldn’t suspect you’d know from my experience of living with community scaling for its time as a feature.

No one knows if retreating affects scaling for sure but there are lots of theories - given every other element of the game shows signs of server lag I’d suggest with no evidence its server lag on personal scaling for hitting earlier nodes - I know in top PVE alliances people focus on how quickly they can clear all nodes - part of that is for max time for refresh but some believe you can minimise scaling impact during a clear if you can get there before server releases and updates - given most efficient pve play is on an 8 hour cycle from a fixed start point server is taking a lot of input all in a short window from everyone clearing.

They accidentally left community scaling on a few months ago in an event and there where pages of complaints and they acknowledge it as a mistake and turned it off again mid event - don’t think it’d be back on and you’d be only one to notice.

Another tip/rumour/old wives tale that can help is deliberately losing to tougher nodes between clears - not retreat go and do some damage but lose - affects win/lose percentages and damage suffered which seems to factor into scaling somewhere

14

I can confirm that worked far better than just retreating back when MMR-based scaling was a thing in both PvE and PvP. I used to join a PvP and kill off my entire roster multiple times over the course of a couple of days, then make a run to over 800 points without ever running into a team of maxed 2*.

15

Well, losing will drop your scaling eventually… until you beat it once again, then it goes back to where it was or higher. I’ve tested this repeatedly lately and at least for me, I have to lose three times to get a break. That’s either nine characters unavailable until they heal or nine health packs. There have been a couple of times it’s taken more than three losses to drop scaling, but I’m not sure what I was doing different at the time. Could be it was one of those days where I had a really bad run of luck (boards lacking colours I needed, massive ai cascades, etc) and I was throwing whoever was left alive in my roster at the nodes in frustration.
Could be it was when I had lots of com link disrupted issues and the game just wasn’t updating opponent levels properly. Not sure if the game calculates scaling in the app itself or on the servers. If it’s a server side thing than I can actually understand scaling issues when I have a bad signal.

I only casually play PvP, not a huge fan. Would probably play more if it was a situation of playing live against other players, but I can understand the issues with that, too. I’m usually getting somewhere between 200-400 points per event, and feel happy if I get the heroic 10 pack from the season rewards. The way I’m matched with others annoys the crud out of me, and that pre dates any of the 5 stars in my roster. I’d gladly play matches there against all the people the game skips me past after the seed teams (what’s up with those, I generally start close or right on the beginning for whatever time slot I pick, and the number of seed teams varies hugely anywhere from 3 to 15 (once).) Rather than jumping to 90% of the teams being ones I have no chance of beating or will only beat if i don’t make any mistakes and have a good board. I’d love to see some kind of competition tree or such. Modified double elimination… where you can only face any particular player twice in an event. Makes more sense to me than the system they use now. Make it a win loss count for placement. (I’d love to see what happens to the meta game then… honestly interested, not being snarky. Just because I don’t participate in it, doesn’t mean I have anything against those who do. Aside from me being mildly annoyed about it existing.. but then, lots of things about me and that’s way way down the list)

16

I play PvE to get optimal points (3 full clears per subevent) and some grinding mainly just for the iso if I didn’t get the good iso rewards on my first 3 clears (200,250,500 iso rewards and CP) I always grind the easy nodes to get the iso as IF allows you to waste those low level enemies pretty fast. My goal now is the 25 CP progression, not placement unfortunately because even with optimal clears and some grinding I normally end up between rank 60 and 120 depending on the competitiveness of the slice. The problem is that just as in PvP, the top placements will all go to 4* and 5* due to the significantly greater advantage that they provide. I remember when you used to see 2* players ranked high in PvE when 3* was the meta. Now everyone in the top 10 (of my slices) has good 5* covered characters which I imagine make PvE a breeze both for speed of matches and grinding. If this is the case, is the solution to make more slices so it further spreads players out? My preference would be to simply get rid of placement rewards for PvE and make it a progression system only with more rewards spread out over a longer progression.

17

Hey guys sorry to interrupt this conversation, but I promise there is some relevance.

I have 2 covers for both Silver Surfer and OML, and it has made playing PVP, and occasionally PVE, almost unbearable.

My highest level characters are my championed 2* roster (6 champions between lvl 100-110). I am asking if it really would be a good idea to sell my 5s. I can see that it would possibly be more fun for men, and would help me in getting 3 and 4* covers.

Please help.

18

There is supposed to be a matchmaking change coming up (see the other thread about it being delayed from last month). If you sell them it will fix your scaling now but the matchmaking change might fix it when it takes place. I would recommend not selling your 5* characters.

I have three 5* characters on my roster and I am mostly running championed 2*'s. The game is in hard mode all the time but I’m still getting by. I’m just crossing my fingers and hanging in until I see what happens.

19

everybody is talking about a patch which fixes scaling.
everybody, except the devs.

until that patch is out (which i think will be after the first 6*), this is a 4* game for me and i happily sell any 5* i wouldnt use anyway

20

https://forums.505go.com/discussion/comment/494863