And you are going to need to learn to avoid losing by being strategic. Something you have never needed to do before in PVE.
I think everyone is missing the point with the PVE changes. Everyone is used to “play at optimal times, win basically every fight, and get a good placement”. The only “Strategy” was timing your playing and winning fast. Losing never happened.
The new scheme means that you are going to lose, and people need to adjust to that. Those who are talking about the game now requiring you to grind each node 11 times in a row are missing the point. You won’t be able to grind 11 times in a row, because the nodes will get so hard that you will run out of health packs before this happens.
The strategy now is to fight smart, take on teams that you can defeat, and if you can’t defeat them don’t try or end up losing your health packs.
The barrier you run up against now isn’t 8 hour timing or 1 point nodes, the barrier is teams you can’t defeat or ones who actually cost you your health packs. Consequently, those who fight smarter, or have better equipped rosters, are those who will make placement rewards. Previously, the game rewarded those who could grind optimally every 8 hours. Now it rewards actual in-game strategy (team choices), not meta-strategy.
The trade-off is that you are going to have to get used to losing more often, and learn to avoid it strategically.
“You are supposed to lose” worked so well with Galactus that they rolled it back immediately. I’d like to think they’re not so dense as to go back to that well, although I do agree that appears to be the plan.
We are again with the stupidity of “You have to lose”? I don’t want to play a game to lose! And for the same stupid rewards ?!?!?!? I love Dark Souls games, you die a lot, but it is a fair game, you lose because you made a mistake, not because the game ‘cheated’ you, with a node with a char and two goons feeding that char. This is not the same by any means.
Then if you read what you said, basically PvE is now a pay to win game, who has more health packs is going to place better, and whoever can pay more is going to have more health packs. Great. Fantastic. Like if this game needed more pay to win…
I never said “You have to lose” or “You are supposed to lose”, I only said you are going to, and you need to learn to avoid losing. You need to adjust and not take on fights you can’t win. That is a shift in strategy for MPQ, but it is a good one, as it replaces the “strategy” of “fight every 8 hours then grind down at the end”.
(1) the devs were up front about that design choice; and
(2) losing wasn’t punished so harshly in the game and therefore completely not fun; and
(3) grinding pve wasn’t among the best way to build up iso in this wildly iso-starved economy.
But none of those three statements are true. So the new changes are not fine.
The main things we are trying to accomplish with this change are … making missions more about completing challenging-but-fun missions rather than playing missions quickly, at set times during the day.
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Our goal with this change is to make Story events more about beating challenging missions rather than having to beat missions quickly at set intervals during the day.
Were they supposed to say “You’re supposed to not win”… how is that different than “You’re supposed to lose”? It implies that you didn’t even try. At least losing means you tried to win and didn’t make it. You’re supposed to not win implies you look at it and give up without even trying. Strategy implies that there is a way to win, albeit difficult. By implying you are supposed to “not win”… then there is no strategy to win it… ergo no strategy… and it fails as a strategy game.
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Notice the key words… beating. They want you to win, but be challenged. That’s not what you are describing sir.
No, Strategy implies the better you do, the further you go. If everyone could beat every mission (as was true of the previous setup), then there is no strategy other than the meta-strategy of 8 hour cycle and grinding.
There has to be a point at which people will lose for strategy to actually mean anything. The further along you get, the better your strategy was.
Well, I guess that depends on your definition of “challenge.” If 99% of the time you are going to win the bouts and the placements are determined by who can most reliably hit the 8-hour mark and grind down at just the right time, you could say that it is a “challenge” insofar as it’s a contest. It’s certainly not challenging in terms of difficulty.
Increasing your chance to lose is exactly what makes something more “challenging” in terms of difficulty. The winning position is changing from “who times everything exactly right” to “who can beat the most nodes.” I’m sure many of the top people will be able to beat all of them, and it will go back to the timing - which is a shame for them, really - but from a person who has to work 9-5 most days, this new method will be a breath of fresh air.
Health packs, imo, are a broken system and need their own rework.
“Strategy” in PvE is about selecting the most effective (not necessarily your strongest) combination of characters from your roster to beat the 3 enemies you are facing while using the least amount of health packs. From what those that have started to play this event have said, they can no longer do that and are forced to use their best 3 characters every single node. I’m still waiting for Slice 4 to open so I can’t speak out of personal experience, but if that is the case then this change REMOVES strategy from the game.
So the new strategy is to stop playing when it’s too hard and let others with the pockets to buy health packs at will just keep accumulating points and price you out of placement?
That’s the new ‘strategy?’
And if you don’t care about placement and have been playing PvE just because you have to get Iso from somewhere, what’s their strategy now? Oh well, so sad, say goodbye to roster development?
If the answer to the problem is “don’t play,” it’s a brown coil emoji design.
All great points in theory, but you’re forgetting one very important thing. Dollars can be exchanged for Health Packs. You really think people won’t pay up for the privilege of letting their characters be killed off by insane scaling so they can place high by eeking out that one extra win?
Just out of curiousity, since it’s a good while before I play EotS, has anyone who has posted so far started the event? Maybe I’m in La La Land, but if the nodes are going to start off at a set difficulty, what difficulty do they start at? Then the follow-up question is, how high did the difficulty jump after beating that node the second time and each time after that? I just feel there’s a lot of speculation and disaster scenarios being spread, but it doesn’t sound like anyone has actually played the event to see what it’s like.
WTF? Plenty of people have started. I’d say most have, if only because they were thinking, “It can’t possibly be as bad as what people are saying”, only to find out it is.
Yea, I have. The first survival node for me was lvl 199-240, the first “trivial” node was lvl 227, and the 2* and 4* essentials were at lvl 227 as well. Bafflingly, the Beast essential wave node was lvl 91…
227 + (20x6) means that after its done scaling, the nodes will be at lvl 350+ and stuck there for the rest of the sub event.
No thanks.
Edit: For reference, my roster contains 14 Championed 4s and all 40 3s at lvl 187-170. My Iceman, Deadpool and Cyke are all champed, which may help explain my absurd starting scaling.
Again, that assumes that you can defeat the max leveled node. Doesn’t matter how many health packs you throw at the game, if the node is too hard, it is too hard. You can’t buy your way out of it.
That’s the strategy that’s been in place, not the new one. Maybe if you were a PvE only player, you might be surprised by that - but that’s the definition of how PvP works, and I’ve skipped your name enough times to recognize you as a PvP player. There are always going to be players at a disadvantage - we usually call them Steam players, har har /sob - and people with less cash to spend will almost always have to be better to overcome those who are flush with cash when it comes to competitions where money can affect the outcome.
No one had a problem with people throwing cash at health packs before, because they could keep up by just steamrolling the game. Those people were already beating out players who couldn’t play better than they were because of cash. Now that this might affect some forum posters, those people are up in arms. The injustice has always been there, it just hasn’t affected you.
Also, no one is considering that more health packs may not even matter. It doesn’t matter how many health packs someone buys, if he or she doesn’t have sufficient luck or skill to beat the node.
Fair enough, but what about that would you call “good game design”? No one likes losing, why is it a good idea to make losing the point of the game? I like the Dark Souls reference. You lost A LOT in that game, but it is always, 100% your own fault. You made a mistake or stepped off a ledge or blocked when you should have dodged. You don’t lose because the game is lazy has the boss fed free special moves every two turns that negate your block or cannot be dodged. Also, really? You really think there’s a level that simply can’t be beat? C’mon now. Anyone with a max 5* is still going to walk all over most of these nodes, no matter what absurd level they scale to. Hell, for the most part, I walked all over them with a maxed Iceman, but I sure as kitty didn’t enjoy it. It’s boring using the same trick on literally EVERY node because the scaling makes it suicide to try anything else. All this change does is make the game about $$$, not roster strength or depth, not skill, but purely the amount of money you’re willing to drop to keep playing. If they change the rewards payout to include more and better prizes for t50, t100, and maybe even t200, then I will change my tune about this entirely. But if Top 10 remains the only way to get anything remotely worthwhile out of these events, then this is a pay to win change, plain and simple.
The difficulty is increased with this change, that’s the whole point and what people are complaining about. Your assumption is that you will be able to defeat the highest difficulty in the new setup. It will be harder to start, and get even harder each time you defeat a node.
