What you were expecting to happen, and what actually happened:
I was expecting that the VPs would increase proportionately with the team strength (blue number) and thereby the tier 3 fight would have the most VPs. What is actually happening (as far as I can tell from some visualization testing) is that the VPs are based on the enemy hero level relative to my own (1,551) wherein the same hero level would be 50 base VP. As a result we see really weird findings like this screenshot where the VPs are completely opposite of the trophy tiers. Or another instance where a team of all fireballs was 90 VP and the difficult teams were less than 50 VP. I am all for fairness for new and veteran players (ex. Veterans can win battles faster so the base should be lower for them). But this current methodology / calculation is super punishing to veteran players. So I think this bug might fall in the category Kafka mentioned where it can impact company financials. I think the VPs should be based on enemy team strength, even if it’s calculated as a differential from your own. Hero level makes no sense at all.
How often does this happen? When did it begin happening?
Most PvP battle selection screens for higher level players (hero level > 1,550)
Steps to make it happen again
Play PvP with high hero level. Note the correlation between VPs compared to hero level differential and compared to enemy team strength.
Not sure, if this is a serious bug report or an attempt to give the issue more exposure. Basicly this has been the main talking point since the update release (and even more so now that the long loading times have been resolved). I would assume, at least the board moderation is aware of it by now (don’t know, if it was forwarded to development).
Base VP are exclusively dependent on level difference and range from a minimum of 25 to 90. This concept has been carried over from the old Pvp, though the numbers were a bit different there. It is due for a workover. But, well, I don’t want to say working as “intended”, but not broken in a technical sense either.
That’s very informative, thank you. I didn’t know it was reported before. I didn’t have a lot of time to search other posts before I was heading out and wanted to get it in.
I’m 90% sure the old PvP system was based on the team level not the hero level though. The team level scaled with the tier and was worth more of everything from what I remember.
Hopefully they fix it soon cause it’s really frustrating right now lol
It’s intended to be based on Hero level in the new PVP system, however, the Point scaling for high level players is too aggressive, possibly due to a bug and the team are looking into why.
Hero Level is a barometer for the player’s overall playtime, sure enough, but it is otherwise detached from basically everything which actually controls the strength of their team:
Acquiring new troops does not increase Hero Level
Leveling up / ascending / traiting Troops does not increase Hero Level
Investing Gold in Kingdoms (i.e. Kingdom stat bonus) does not increase Hero Level
I agree 100% with what you said Stratelier, my made sense was that it was intended. Personally I don’t think it should be based on Hero level for the very reasons you mentioned and a few others, but I guess it’s ultimately up to the devs and their vision. Maybe they know something we don’t, like future plans for hero level implications?
Previously, PvP point scoring was based off a team score of the defending team versus total “bonus score” added from the invading player (offset as if they were running a team of mythics). As I pointed out in the other thread, this metric correlates far more closely with how effective they will be in any given PvP interaction than account level, which is only a metric of total battles played, and far more loosely correlates with basically anything you’d try to measure for the relative competitive strength of the account. Players don’t usually avoid developing things that can raise their team score while collecting and leveling pets and troops, maxing weapons, having a bunch of mythics, raising elite levels or any of the other things that would make an account “strong”. I am probably one of the biggest outliers in this regard in that I’ve made not much special effort to increase my kingdom power or delve progress, but I’m also less than level 1500 (and only about 16.5k strongest team score) after playing since just a couple months after release, so by either metric I’m getting a point advantage I probably don’t need in a lot of scenarios (while still getting disadvantaged when the matchmaking algorithm just spits out lower level higher-score opponents that are irrelevant in terms of difficulty versus high level higher-score opponents).
Using a score differential has always had its own set of problems its problems, but I should point out:
Score differential is still the ORDER in which potential fights are ranked in the menu, leading to higher VP fights being placed in lower trophy slots
Score differential is still responsible for the gold payout formula
Score differential is far more representative that account level will be at representing player power, including having hero level as one of the things that effects your team scores with extreme diminishing returns.
You are actively disencentivizing usage of the xp booster system, which in and of itself was already a very weakly incentivized thing for higher leveled players
Whatever problem making a new metric to be based purely off account level differential instead of team score differential was intended to fix, it didn’t work. Creating an entirely new curve based off hero level, rather than it being a linear drop off, is possible to reign in the numbers for victory point payouts to be more reasonable/consistent across the board, but it always tracks back to why the very number created to do this isn’t still the way to go. If it is that the number is not representative of the increasingly stackable “invisible” bonuses such as pets and somehow the team feels that this is the most important thing to handicap people on, and the number can’t be updated to reflect such things, well, blindly measuring number of total battles won still does it worse than team/account score.
It would be pretty polarizing if hero level suddenly gave a power jump big enough to be significant enough that a level 2500 account is considered that much stronger than a level 1500 in a way that could be reflected in a way where it means the 2500 is about to flip battles 2-3 times as fast. Even flattening everything out so that this difference amounts to never more than 30% as I proposed in the other thread would, if this were actually directly reflected in power from just having your hero level be that high and nothing else, would be massive, and not in a good way. If it were stats, troops with 300 durability would potentially have 400, slowing things further down for already slow regions. If it was something more ephemeral, like, say, giving medal slots every 500 levels past level 1000 or something, this advantage would spill over into other areas and lead to content being balanced around it. Conferring actual bonuses for just hero level past level 1000 is almost certainly a lose/lose scenario, so I sure hope not.
At a certain point in the game’s history, it was beneficial to hold off boosting stat points to gain scoring and gold payout advantages in PvP, as enemies would more often be considered “stronger” than you and give you full bonuses. This is no longer the case, and hasn’t been for years, not only because the sheer volume of other content where you are disadvantaged for having lower stats (which was much less of an issue when PvP and OG pre-revamp explore and some weekly things were the only things going on). If this is the behavior trying to be curbed, well… you can still “slow level” by participating in fewer battles that don’t lead to any significant rewards. You can’t entirely prevent levels like you can with kingdom power progress, but it doesn’t take much to feel like you are being punished for doing battles that give lower rewards and the same xp, and it sure makes bothering to use xp boosters and/or popping on to do explores for 30 minutes feel a lot worse.
And then I’d also like to point to this screenshot.
The team scores (= theoretical difficulty) are almost identical, but the middle in difficulty is worth 90 points while the insignificantly more difficult one gives only 85 and the somewhat lower one that u still in the same ballpark only 43.
Could you please explain how this makes sense in any way, shape, or form?
"We hear and respect your criticism. Instead of the hero level difference, Victory Points will from now on be based on the difference in account age. Each day, your enemy’s account is older than yours, will earn one bonus point.
Thank you for helping us improving the game. Your Infinity +2 team"
Remember, there is always a way to make things worse.
Though it may not be a perfect system, I still believe VP awards should be tied to team score instead. Hero level is a terrible way to determine how much VP is awarded, as a player just starting out could theoretically hit level 1000 in as little as a week if they get the needed power leveling troops early enough and spend a lot of time speeding through E1 battles. If they were to keep at it, they could hit 1500 in a few months, though it would take a lot longer to build up their team score high enough to be on par with most level 1500 players. In that case, the level 1500 power leveler would likely be much easier to beat than a level 1200 who has a much older account, yet the level 1500 power leveler would give more VP than the level 1200.
If you want to encourage players to buy Deathknight armor and not waste their XP boosters, then PLEASE abandon tying VP awards to hero level.
In all honesty, the VP to level metric could stay, if it got capped at a certain point, so that it wouldn’t be punishing players who took the time to get to high hero levels.
Team score has a similar problem to the hero level, though. At a certain point team score flattens out between players and practically stops increasing. A player at lvl 1700 won’t have half the team score of a player lvl 2200, not to mention 2500 or 3000. So the problem would be identical, just based on a different number. I can’t imagine a player level 2500 having much higher team score than a player at level 1500 or 1700, IF both took the time and effort to actually progress in the game - maxing out the power levels (500 pure delves, weapons, troops, pets… and what not) as far as their books of deeds and imperial deeds collection allows. The team scores I see from people at 2000+ hero levels aren’t that much higher than mine, at 1700+.
exactly this, the team score from player level is capped somehow, the score from bonus stats is more than 50% of it.
so, like i said, team score would be the better system for pvp or if devs can do it, player’s PL would be also possible, maybe too complicated.
here’s an old tool with team score calculation, but we never found the formula for player level (for example player level 600 would give the same score) and that was also before medals and all
I understand it’s frustrating and not super fair or even really logical but we all make mistakes and the devs are working on a fix.
The purpose of this post was cause I didn’t know it was intended to be based on hero level so it seemed like there were some discrepancies in how the new system was operating. I’m not even Kafka or the other GoW staff and this thread is seeming like an overwhelming cry fest. There are a lot of great examples of discrepancies. The issue is reported and the deva are working on it. Chill out and give Kafka some room to breathe. Every minute Kafka has to spend going over the same redundant complaints being repurposed here, is time taken away from flagging other issues as well.
Also, foregoing XP boost and armor benefits is dramatic. You shouldn’t stop improving your character and you still can get more stats from it, along with other benefits. PvP is still functional and fun over 1,500. It’s annoying but not as bad as people are making it out to be. I agree hero level could be misrepresentative but more often than not it is correlated with a players team score enough to be a proxy. Yes, it sucks that you have to put in more time into PvP to get the same score… but also much higher level people are often spread a lot thinner than non-endgame people, so they have more time to be putting into PvP. AND once you get the silver marks pets there isn’t much incentive for silver marks and can just farm central spire.
I know it’s frustrating but try to remember there are people on the other side of your complaints that have to go through negativity after negativity and there is a small group of overwhelmed people trying to make everyone happy, which is impossible. Also, from a business perspective there are diminishing returns on purchases from much higher level players so it is also important to keep a strong carrot for the lower level players. It’s all a balancing act and there is a lot more to think about than the issue in isolation and there are always going to be upset people. Just like treat them how you’d like to be treated if you were in their shoes.
It took a month of complaining, attempts at explaining, screenshots, before this issue was FINALLY understood by the CX enough to be picked up and reported to the devs…
It’s not possible to make everyone happy, true. But making long-time and experienced players unhappy, in a game that relies on the community doing a lot of the hard work of guiding new players and helping them find their footing in the game (as the game itself is really bad in this area), is something that backfires easily. Remember that behind every single post on the forum there’s a full guild of 30 people (and sometimes families of multiples of that) of people being just as frustrated and annoyed with certain design decisions, for the lack of a better word.
If you spend enough time in this forum, you’ll get bitter and disillusioned enough to not even trust this part. All we have is a statement from Kafka, and those have proven to be quite unreliable, with a solid share just being “pacifiers” to put a problem on hold until it is hopefully forgotten and replaced by a new problem in user attention.
Communication is maybe the main issue, this game has, and intentionally so, with the only ways to reach development being (maybe) through the third party of moderators, if everyone is feeling especially mercyful, or by a drastic change in game metrics.
They do not know, what we think or want, nor do they care. If you are willing to go completely bleak, take a look at the times, when upcoming issues were spotted in ingame code spoilers, pointed out days or weeks in advance, and still hit us at full force.
I’d honestly wish, your mindset was more justified with this game.
P.S.: It is extremely rare, that anything introduced is geared towards new players, and this level-dependent scoring is, if at all, only by accident. Most of the focus is devoted to keeping the long term big payers running and giving them a never-ending stream of new incentives, with new players only popping up in the calculations, when it’s the type, that joins, spends a fortune for three weeks, then quits again.
