I know you are still working on it… this is constructive criticism.
The current model really seems like everything is predetermined. I can go into detail on this, but I think the majority of people playing PVP are seeing similar situations. I pick the hardest fight available for several days straight and get no score improvement. Often times I fight the same opponent 11 times in a row for the day. There really is no reason to keep at it.
Giving higher scoring opponents to some of the participants makes the “competition” unfair. You can argue it any way you want, but if we are all competing in the same bracket, we should also have the same opponents available to fight.
If the concern is that we will all tie for first there are ways around that. Here are some ideas:
Create smaller brackets within the tournament tiers. (eventually you will have to do this anyway right?)
Add more criteria to scoring. (battle record, defense record, damage differential, turns taken, etc.) Many things can be done to prevent ties that are performance based and would create cool new builds and counter builds.
Let us submit a “defender” build at the beginning of the week that is independent of our offensive build.
I do like the direction it is heading, and there still is a long way to go. Hopefully you continue to listen to the community and make pvp one of the defining characteristics of the game at all levels.
The biggest drawback of the new PvP, among others, is that ‘you’ have not given us players, a proper explanation of the new matching and scoring system. Scoring seems to be constant at Bonus score x 1.3.
It’s the matching that is not at all clear. The hotfix says “overall power level and not gear score alone.” But what is this overall power level ? We players want clear and precise answers. Then only can we try to get better. Also how is that, as also noted in the above post, some players get ‘more’ of the very high BS players and some others, while still getting, much less. There need to be a balance and reason for this.
In short, give us a detailed explanation and please tell us what your future plans are on PvP, so that we are not forced to undo changes. You know any upgrade is not easy at all.
Finally, I must add that, in spite of all these low points, I do enjoy the new PvP much more than the old, mainly skull damage based one.
For those that can place near the top of the leaderboard, there is exactly one opponent who matters at all, and that’s the player with the highest “perceived strength” in the game.
A player who flawlessly wins against that opponent 10 times and loses all other battles that week is guaranteed first place in the tourney. In contrast, a player who wins against that opponent 9 times flawlessly and the player with the second highest “perceived strength” 50+ times flawlessly is guaranteed to not have any chance at first place because of how the scoring system works.
Personal opinion here, but I believe that power level is more or less a proxy for a player’s life/armor/resistance totals. To a point, I think the devs’ intentions here were that higher rarity gear = higher life/armor/resistance, and therefore a proxy for higher rarity gear = higher perceived strength. The confounding factor in that argument is that Citadel stat bonuses can grossly inflate those stats further and in that situation yield significant stat advantages for players who have grinded out citadel levels to such an extreme degree that the game considers them powerful enough over the rest of the late/end-game playerbase that they are difficult (if not nigh-impossible) to roll as opponents at all.
It is an incredibly frustrating situation all around, currently.
Not if we get the same easy opponents over and over.
Or some ‘brackets’ - 5 or 10 players of similar strength/points - could play rounds: everyone plays with everyone else on the last day.
And the ‘last 20 battles’ should show ‘best 10 battles’ or something like that.