PvP Week 11 - Statistics and Discussion

[CanyptianFit]

Rank: 17
Attacks:203
Defense:196
No Gimp

Was a punching bag for a couple weeks, then went invisible after update. Glad the update went in. Sucks how many bugs are evident, especially immunity dogs ones.

VE rocks and is the new mummy, especially after mummy Nerf. VE changes the landscape. Nice to see new talismans. Congrats Enti! Back to watching hockey.

[mk ultra]

last week

attacks: 234/274 - 85%
defense: 28/243 - 12%

finished 73 with 2379 points.

funny thing with with strike talismans set. it happened twice today, when attacking another toons equipped with strike set the skill keep triggering until one of the toons dies.

[Kris-0707]

My stats for week 11, ratio 1

Still using the same team with my favourite Viking Eddie, no ironite used for SoW, I lost only 3 battles: 2 with overpowered Visions Eddie, 1 battle was a strange bug - I lost the game getting 1 hit from my opponent at the beginning of the battle and all my toons died, don't remember who it was, forgot to take a screenshot.

[Tritium]

Another week, another bug infestation to combat (can someone call Terminix already?).

Started off the week receiving so many attacks that I nearly all but gave up on PVP. Then, after the update, I became invisible (seems like this was a trend for many of us this week).

Attacks: 139 (Most of my losses were due to game freezes or being raped by teams that my HH would otherwise protect me from >.<)
Defends: 200 (I like even numbers like this )

Had my best defensive ratio yet with 34%, but I attribute most of it to being around the mid-ranks where not many players are veterans of the game just yet. The same defense isn't holding at half that percentage now after reset.

Most, if not all, of my attacks after the update (I believe I had 189 attacks right at the time of the update) were revenges.

Finished 43rd with 2641 pts.

Can agree with everyone who says that VE is the new Mummy. That fucker is all you see at the top now haha. He doesn't like Nomad too much, but one has to be very careful in pitting the two against each other if you end up going 2nd. Nomad has crap survivability when VE strips him of everything.

[BG840]

ATK-203
DEF-161

Seemed to be mostly evened out give or take a little. Almost finished in my normal tier, so no gripes this week 🤘

[Ian]

Attacked: 187
Defended: 236

I should add that before the update, I was already at 200+ defences, so I did benefit from minimal attacks and just a few revenges post-update. Sadly my artillery dog was then useless so I didn't attack as much as I could have to take advantage. Wanted to try loads of different strategies with my teams but don't have the luxury of loads of spare shards. Figured out something workable and used a refill to make a climb up the ranks but ran out of time before the reset.

I did see quite a few top players on my list. After being annihilated by Bradata despite going first, I figured to save my points I would avoid trying to hit Jofer, Nicko etc and held onto my top-100 position.

[Chaosego888]

Congratulations to Enti on the Eternal, glad you didn't get robbed by the mid-week update

Attacks 384
Defenses 292

On tuesday morning Attacks were around 200 to 50 defenses. I like the system better when you can work your way forward and maintain your position through the week a lot better. I got pissed by the timing of the update and didn't play too much until Saturday. It wasn't as bad as it initially seemed though. I thought I was getting attacked a lot more because the number on the arena tab just kept getting higher, don't know what was going on there. Attack lists are different now but there are always at least a name or two from the previous list. I also noticed the top five all showed up on my list at the same time the last hour and a half before reset. I just refreshed because at that point I was just trying to maintain a top 50. I am usually somewhere around the top 10 so I know how annoying it is being attacked by someone that is not contending for anything. Some are low enough to revenge holds as well which should be made impossible if not just get rid of revenges completely. A lot of this is caused by this ignorant point system which something needs to be done about as soon as possible just not in the middle of the week. How hard is it to just run the updates after refresh?

[Sparton_LOTB]

The greatest predictor of success in this game is how hard you're willing to work. Jofer has a determination like no other. No matter how things were set up, he'd be number one - I loved his analogy about giving his account to another player - wouldn't make a difference. They wouldn't duplicate what he's done.

But the SECOND biggest predictor is defensive losses. When you're at the top it's 20 points a loss. And even 12 points is a big deal if you're getting attacked 450 times and your competitor is attacked 300 times while making the same number of offensive attacks.

(Emphasis mine.)

In general, the main thing we've continued to try and refine is having attack:defense ratios more equal, because if that ratio is close to 1 for all players, it means your participation in raw number of attacks is rewarded (because most people will have a higher attack win rate than defensive loss rate) while your win rate (attack and defense) is what makes the difference for climbing against your peers. While the end of week rush will definitely skew things, it seems like that maaaay be holding better this week? Definitely time will tell... reports so far seem a bit closer to what I'd expect, at least.

That said...

So my suggestion was to make point losses for breaks in defense minimal - ex 0-5 points - and continue to reward holds. Players will STILL have to buy Ironite to compete - but from a psychological perspective you will go forward much more proportionate to your effort, defense will STILL matter, and if the match lists are still broken it wouldn't matter nearly as much.

Me and Kaz have been discussion how we could change handling defensive results to still encourage having both a high attack and defense win rate, while also not letting someone just out-participate everyone else and hit the top with a much weaker attack and/or defense win rate. Rewarding based on defensive holds may be a bit technically trickier to make work properly, but we're looking into adjusting how many points are lost on a loss (tunable separately for attack losses and defense losses) in an upcoming update.

---

Anyways, I won't have time to stay on top of and respond to a lot of things in this thread as well, but I figured I'd chime in on this:

1) Don't make sweeping matchmaking changes mid week, I agree that things needed to be fixed but players make choices to invest resources into the week based on the current state, be it good or bad. Doing changes to the formula can create a very negative experience. Again things needed to be fixed, but can't they preload the patch to take effect as close to the reset as possible? Pre warn players an update will be coming?

Were it technically feasible, we would, but the sort of change here was a fundamental logic bug that needed to be fixed, and for operational reasons it's not feasible to deploy things like that on a weekend when we don't have people in the office. Changing matchmaking logic is not the same as scheduling items for the store, sadly.

[The Educated fool]

we're looking into adjusting how many points are lost on a loss (tunable separately for attack losses and defense losses) in an upcoming update.

This sounds very promising indeed!

[slauki]

(Emphasis mine.)

Me and Kaz have been discussion how we could change handling defensive results to still encourage having both a high attack and defense win rate, while also not letting someone just out-participate everyone else and hit the top with a much weaker attack and/or defense win rate. Rewarding based on defensive holds may be a bit technically trickier to make work properly, but we're looking into adjusting how many points are lost on a loss (tunable separately for attack losses and defense losses) in an upcoming update.

glad to hear, that you are considering changes, because they are really needed. this system demotivates players and the only thing we gain is frustration, when all of you effort vanished over night. i feel dumb writing that again, but since this seems to be the toppic of the week, i figured, chances are better that something might change. aside the whole bugs, this is the biggest problem in PVP imo and many people would enjoy the arena way more without this constant and massive punishment. so the psychology behing PVP is bugged We need less sticks and more carrots (rewards) for the midrank and lower guys.

still positive that time will bring more good changes, but this is basicly another extended beta phase i feel. at least matchmaking seems to work as intended now, but too early to celebrate and draw conclusions, but thigs looks promising so far.

Rank: 10
Attacks:332
Defenses 281
Ratio: 85%

I was invisible the first half of the week and everyone took a stab at me after the update, which makes sense. Curious to see the results next week, since this could be changing the dynamics a bit.