End Game PvP worst state ever?

Gameplay Chat (PlayStation 4/Xbox One)
41

Right, hence my “elephant stepping on its own genitals” analogy earlier. I think you’re the third person to point out “But wait! Losses do count!” because I talk about that later than the first paragraph.

We have one mechanic that rewards you for losing, and another mechanic that punishes you for losing. Simultaneously.

The complaint in this thread is “Gee I sure hate defense teams that are cheesy and take a lot of luck to beat.” I think that’s a direct result of “losses in defense matter”. Personally I’d like to see defensive win rate removed from PvP ranking. That would encourage more people to shoot for Revenge bonuses by fielding teams that can lose.

The obvious fallout will be “oh no now people have 100% win rates” but I think taking that argument too far requires pretending PvP isn’t mostly a competition of “who can play the most games in one week”. I could have a 100% win rate and I guarantee I wouldn’t be ranked much higher than 25k.

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42

I agree! PVP defense teams are repetitive because humans are basically herd animals. Most of us aren’t sure what to do, so we look to our neighbors and copy them. This is true in almost every human endeavor, why shouldn’t it be true in GoW?

If you want to ‘help’ the situation, develop YOUR OWN team and put it out there. It’s more or less impossible to be totally ‘original’ with only 400-some troops, but you can still be unusual.

Just tooting my own horn now :postal_horn: – my PVP defense team wins 40-45% each week and I’ve yet to encounter another defense team w the same 4 troops, much less the same configuration. And no, I won’t list the team here, I like being off the beaten path. :sunglasses:

43

I think it makes a difference if you get a few hundred glory/week from doing it.

Right now “getting higher in the rankings” gives higher rewards than having helpful defense teams. So when people care about their defense teams, they tend to optimize for “winning”. (Side note: some people don’t give a flip and like to do the best they can to help with the week’s event. Others won’t be motivated to lose via anything. Humans aren’t rational beings.)

Evidence I’m right: you get more rewards for changing your team in GW to match the day’s color. People do it, even when their team for that day may not be as strong as their “best” team.

I think a solution to a cheesy PvP meta would be to leverage Revenge rewards as incentive to use easier defense teams. I think it has a downside we might not like: “only easy PvP matches” is only fun in limited silly events like the Moas thing!

So there’s no easy solution. Personally I don’t pay attention to my defense team much. It’s generally the same as my offense team, and it has a win rate of about 10%. Oh well. I don’t have the resources to build/trait up a good defense team yet. But I did get Gorgotha today, so go me.

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44

you only lost about 4-7 points per def loses and can gain about 52 per offense win. if you are already high on the leaderboard, those 4-7 points per loses didn’t scratch much your score.

45

Firebomb defense team 24/7. You get points for winning, I get revenge points, the end.

PVP is only as good as the rewards, and you get more of them for letting the AI lose for you and manually beating a team of firebombs than you do for winning every battle manually.

46

Maybe not if it’s just a few matches. But they add up, especially when you’re neck in neck for the top spots. There are times when it can be the difference of losing a top ten spot.

47

Are you sure your defense needs to be defeated to get a revenge battle? I thought it only needed to be attacked.

48

Yes you need to lose to get rematch :slight_smile:

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49

Honestly I think it’s just Psion that gets me every time, I’m ok with famine teams as long as they don’t have psion first slot. They should add an option to ban certain troops for a deduction of gold and PvP points (10-20% per troop?). It should at least force players to vary their meta teams if someone can choose to block one of psion, mab, famine, kraken, Lady A or plague. Not giving those who decide to grief others their fair share of revenge battles.

It’s the devs job to balance the game and keep it fun, not the players. Defense opponents are part of this category.

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50

The problem if you ban psion is you will still be matched against the same 4-5 guys cause only 4-5 guys doesn’t use psion :stuck_out_tongue:

51

Psion loses his edge immensely if you entangle him. Works for me.

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52

Reduce his attack to 0 also work :slight_smile:

53

@Rickygervais reducing his attack to zero removes his remove mana trait same as entangle? Did not know that :thinking:

54

Yup it work unless of course he hit 4 lucky skulls in a row :slight_smile:

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55

Well I figured I’d give Ranked PvP another go this week. After 350 matches it’s pretty much non stop Famine meta teams despite it being a “monster” event weak. They really need to give people some other option to make decent gold in this game other than the mindless agony that is level 1000+ pvp :frowning:

56

There is little difference between the two when you’re trying to grind your way into the upper half of the top 100 leaderboard. It was a mix of severe burnout on the one team fast enough to compete with players that were on sixteen hours per day for top spots, and severe burnout on just playing in general.

And when there comes a point where one team is performing that much better than the next competitor in terms of speed and reliability, you… kind of don’t want to play any other teams because they all feel dull, clunky, and slow.

I can’t play reliably enough to meet any sort of requirements. Even attendance ones. I’m too busy bouncing my time between Mechwarrior Online and Fate/Grand Order right now.

I’m sure your guild is full of great people. This entire community is. I just don’t really have the will to play at the moment. Coming back to these forums is a rush of nostalgia, almost. I miss the fun I had with this game, and this community is still excellent. I just wish I could enjoy it like I used to. And trust me, I’ve tried.

WAIT THEY FINALLY NERFED JUSTICE? Was it in any meaningful way? What happened? I’ve been waiting for this news since about six months before I stopped playing.

Edit: Now, I remember how I earned my title…

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57

Honestly I can’t say I have much skin in this game at the top end because it already has something that makes it my “worst state ever”: investing more time means you rank higher.

On most days, I play for maybe an hour or less. So I’m completely disqualified from most of the upper ranks of PvP. Even if I had a 100% win rate, I wouldn’t make it much higher than 20k in the rankings.

I like a different ranking system, but I don’t think it will work for GoW and wanted to capture that. It works best in real head-to-head PvP, and the score eventually represents the skill level of the player. It’s set up such that:

  • Losses to “weak” opponents dramatically lower your score, but wins don’t have much impact.
  • Wins against “weak” opponents don’t impact your score by much if any, but losses to “weak” opponents have a large impact.

This setup makes challenging higher-ranked opponents the only way to rank up. At some point, PvP vs. weaker opponents won’t change your score positively at all. It reflects the notion that we aren’t surprised if #100 loses a game to #1, but if #1 loses the game to #30,000 we start to believe maybe #2 deserves the throne instead.

But GoW isn’t head-to-head PvP. We play vs. the AI, and it behaves the same when playing #30,000’s team as it does when playing as #1’s team. So the skill-based ranking won’t really work, and would only further encourage cheesy defense teams. Then everyone’s rank would end up roughly the same over time, and the only remaining indicator of skill might be win/loss ratio, which is horrible in a luck-based environment. (This is a big part of why the “winners” of a Magic: the Gathering tournament are the top 8 players: it’s a tacit acknowledgement that often the upper ranks are decided by luck.)

I don’t think it’s bad that someone who plays more hours daily is more likely to be ranked higher. That’s a game design I’m sort of used to and I deal with it. But I do think having the defense team win/loss ratio be part of ranked play makes PvP less fun for everybody.

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58

I don’t know what the answer is either but it sounds like they don’t much care to find out or even try new things if this discussion has been going on for 2+ years. Makes me sad their is so much lost potential here they just need to experiment a little and find the right balance because right now the fun level is zero in Ranked PvP at the end game player level (IMO of course but I have yet to hear anyone say they love it, just a few people say they zone out and don’t “mind it” which is a pretty bad “praise” in my mind)
Cheers

59

They… have been trying. Like, really. They’ve been trying their damnedest, introduced not only new cards but new systems to incentivise people to not just do the same thing over and over again.

They’re trying, and they have been! This dev team is one of the best that I’ve come across in terms of player support, and they take a lot of things people say into account. They’re very open to feedback and have never been anything but friendly.

The problem is that it isn’t that easy. If it were as simple as just doing anything and fixing it, this wouldn’t be an issue. But we’ve been at this for years, and honestly the heart of the problem isn’t even something that can really be tackled.

The problem is that, due to the competitive nature of gaming, there will always be people that will search out and find and optimize whatever they can get their hands on. And gamers as a whole generally prioritize optimization over fun or variation.

Players in general live to optimize and do things the best way possible to ensure the best perceived outcome. That level one hammer might make a funny noise, but once you can equip that level ten sword in [Generic Game Title], you bet your ass you’re gonna equip it. And even if you aren’t going to, most people are.

There will always, unless in a state of perfect and absolute balance, be a handful of things that do better than anything else, and people will always use them. The only two options are for your Grim Patron to be one of the strongest cards in the game four years from now, or to put out something even stronger, giving way to power creep that will dissatisfy people anyway.

And in the former example, the game would get stale and you’d still just have that one meta for all four years anyway. So, it’s between “X 3 teams for years and years” or “A new flavor of top three every month”

Either way, you’re only facing 1-3 teams over and over again at any given time. GoW takes the latter approach though and does have a shifting meta though. And I appreciate that.

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60

@Kurokazna

If they’ve had this problem for 2+ years and people have been suggesting removing the incentive to have a win at any cost PvP defence team and / or remove the win / loss % that includes defence in ALL that time they are not trying very hard IMO. These are two easy suggestions that have nothing to do with “balance” that could alleviate some if not a lot of the issues with Ranked PvP meta defence teams if people stopped caring about whether or not they win these fights.

They could also just have the Defence team be picked randomly from all the players teams in their “teams” TAB that would be 100% better than it is now (sure the odd person would set every team to a grief meta defence but it would be a very small % and there is nothing you can do with folks like that they just are that way no matter what you do they’ll find a way). I’ve been playing daily for over 7 months now and I’ve seen no meaningful changes to PvP other than some of the Meta Teams changing but the end game experience is still the same (which is bad). My experience of course but I’m sure I’m not alone here from what I’m reading on discord, FB and here
Cheers
Calvin