UC leaderboard problems

Firstly, I want to say a big congratulations to @SHIKAOTOKO for his first ever 1st in UC! He’s got 2nd twice before and was unlucky to get 4th last time despite getting a tie with 2nd and 3rd. This time he got lucky and was given 1st despite getting a tie with 2nd… which leads me on to why I’m creating this thread.

The Ultimate Challenge leaderboard is having big problems differentiating between the top 10 positions! In recent times it is more common to have a tie and we’ve now had it giving places purely based on RNG:
May 2022 - 2 players tied for 1st, 2 players tied for 10th
Feb 2022 - 3 players tied for 2nd, 2 players tied for 10th
Nov 2021 - No ties!
July 2021 - 2 players tied for 3rd, 2 players tied for 10th
May 2021 - No ties! (literally stepping down 1 loss for 2nd → 3rd → 4th and 10th → 11th)
Mar 2021 - 2 players tied for 2nd, 3 players tied for 10th (only one got it)

I hope that makes the point very clear… almost every time we’re getting ties. Given how these people are using all their tickets for 5 days straight, often making sacrifices in their personal lives, it’s incredibly frustrating for them when they get fewer rewards than someone else who won the same number of battles.

@Dev_VKC I’ve brought this up with you many times but I hope you will consider changing it. To be clear, there are two problems:

  1. It makes players unhappy when they miss out on rewards they feel they deserve.

  2. The competition has problems if it cannot differentiate enough that it always creates ties. UC has historically been the PvE place for competition.

Solution 1

Simply change it so when people tie they all get the highest reward for that score. This fixes problem 1, but doesn't do anything about problem 2 and may get exploited by people purposefully getting a tie for 1st.

Solution 2

Make levels 2001+ be “hell mode” where the battles are much tougher. For example, the enemy teams could become 24 monster teams, with the first half of the person’s team duplicated and added to the back.
This solution solves both problems and won’t be exploitable. It’s what I really hope, @Dev_VKC, you will do. I suggested it long ago but didn’t have a good idea at the time for how to make the battles tougher. If anyone else can come up with good ideas then please share them!

Bonus problem + solution

The end of the event is horrible timing for all European and African players. This is already being discussed in terms of PvP, but I had to get up at 3:20am to do my final tickets! The fix for UC is easier than PvP… simply extend the length of the event by, say, 8 hours and make us not gain any more tickets for those last 8 hours. It might be awkward to code, but would be a very nice solution for the players!

My sad ramble
As it stands right now, I’m going to stop competing in UC. Instead I will settle for top 50 with the last gatekeeper (lvl 2000). It’s difficult to do 5 days of grinding and with the current setup I cannot reliably differentiate myself from other competitors. I don’t want to always get 1st, I just want us to be challenged properly rather than it being a case of RNG + whether you can focus on the grind properly (e.g. I usually lose 1-2 battles each UC from falling asleep while playing or being distracted by an outside influence because I’m needing to use tickets at awkward times - same for many people I’m sure). This UC we had two people with 1 loss and me with 2. That’s nowhere near enough to differentiate! So if I do grind UC my position isn’t really based on how good my team is and how well I play, it comes down more to whether I get those 1-2 losses from outside influence… which is frustrating. After 5 days of grinding the last thing you want is to be frustrated with the outcome!

Side note: this UC I’m almost glad I got one loss from distraction because otherwise it would’ve been a 3-way tie for 1st. I hate that RNG more than I hate getting an unnecessary loss!

If UC can have this “hell mode” added, I will definitely compete once more. Otherwise, after three years of being in the top 10 I guess I’ve burned out haha.

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The issue with your 2nd solution is that players will still tie if they perform the same. Your solution would make it less likely for this to happen, but this is still possible, and would probably happen regardless outside of the top 10. While I support this idea overall (though I personally think that adding you last 8 instead of first would be more interesting), it doesn’t really solve the fundamental problem

While this can kinda be solved by your first solution, leaderboards are still important to players, so I think that there should be a system to actually give higher leaderboard positions to better performing players, even if they had the same win/loss ratio.

I’ve tried to think of ideas for this, but most either hurt a specific strategy (e.g. Giving a bonus for losing less monsters hurts summon teams, giving a bonus for completing with less total in-game time hurts sleep teams, etc.) or just feel like they wouldn’t really fairly measure player skill (e.g. irl time targets slow thinkers, total damage dealt is super easy to exploit, lowest team cost hurts those who ultra-evolve, etc)

Honestly, I’m not sure if there is a perfect solution, but I just thought I should point it out

Yes ties would still be possible, but when they happen they’ll be less likely to happen when there’s more differentiation (not like the 1-2 losses we have for top 3 right now) and they’ll be happening more to do with people actually losing battles rather than the random extra losses they get from playing at awkward times. There’s always going to be some problem of ties in events like this, the best you can do is minimise them.

It’s worth noting that the Devs can adjust how difficult they make levels 2001+, perhaps even making it +10, +12 or +14 monsters onto the enemy team if they need to make it that hard to make people lose battles. So it’s a somewhat future proof system for always keeping that differentiation between positions at the top of the leaderboard.

I will say that ties seem unlikely in that event

Just an idea, but I was thinking that, instead of copying your last 8(which seems exploitable), it could just save the last 8s of everyone who made it to 2001+, and randomly add one to the back of a team, thus making it varied, but not totally random

I must say, it does seem a bit odd to see the top 3 players getting ~99% winrates. Increasing the difficulty of the later battles is likely all that needs to be done to solve this issue.

It’s not the 8 monsters of your team, it’s the first 8 of the enemy team being added to the back of their own team. So it’s not exploitable.

I don’t know what you’re saying about ties being unlikely… did you see the start of my post where I showed just how much they’re happening?!?

Solution 1: I think let gate keepers battle cost tickets like it used to .
This might create a significant impact since gate keepers are generally pretty hard and can be a surprise .
Solution 2 : Apply limitations to UC to make it a little bit more harder and require a bit more experiments and stuffs during the ranks which might create some losses for a top player .

I was saying if your change was made

That just doesn’t seem fun. You just face the same 8 twice. No surprises, no nothing. I prefer the idea of adding player teams, since those are more varied and powerful

This would be terrible for people with poor connection, or if there are server problems. It’s definitely not something that can happen.

Do you have any specific ideas?

To be fair, most of UC is facing incredibly similar teams over and over again lol

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you could always make the end of UC a sort of tiebreaker type thing where players with identical scores when the tournament ends have to play back to back matches (with the option of resting
in between) for idk like another 24 hours to with unlimited tickets and they won’t progress thier score however it registers how many additional wins players get until they lose and distributes positions accordingly. a deathmatch of sorts. while this still has the potential for ties it makes them less likely and the 24 hour cushion allows plenty of time for players to rest.

Giving people who have won the same number of battles the same prize is of course the more obvious solution.

as far as timings are concerned I agree it has been a strain. i didn’t sleep for 40 hours plus to make sure i didn’t miss any tokens on the first day which started at 4am GMT. the end was also at 4am. on the final day i overslept because of fatigue and woke up panicked because my token count was almost full. i went on to lose 3/5 of the next games i played and i suspect being half asleep had something to do with it. (though admittedly i could have just played a couple of battles then allowed myself to wake up properly.)

when i finished at approximately 3:30am on the last day to see that my efforts were disregarded by RNG as i finished 11th despite having the same number of wins as the player in 10th it had a very bad effect on my mental health and wellbeing. i essentially had a mini meltdown for a few hours. at one point I almost uninstalled the game. this sort of thing shouldn’t happen.

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You tie breaker idea would be atrocious for the top 10, especially the top 3. In this most recent UC the two people who tied for 1st got 1 loss in 5 days… imagine how many battles they’d need to do until somebody lost! It would become a grind fest for those 24 hours of who could get the most wins in that time XD

However, having a tie breaker built in is another potential solution. My only worry is it will be something that requires even more time spent by players who have already done 5 days of grinding.

E.g. It could be a single battle that’s 500 enemies (random mythics/legendaries) and we’re given 5000s of battle timer. Once the battle timer reaches 5000s the battle ends (or if you lose all your monsters before) and the game counts how many enemies of the 500 are left in the team. We get given score based on that number and it’s what determines the tie.

Thanks for sharing your own experience of getting tied 10th and not getting the top 10 rewards. I can completely understand where you’re coming from. I hope the Devs will consider changing things.

500 seems weirdly specific, but this seems like a fun idea. I generally like the idea of copying in the teams of other UC players. Maybe just generate strings of other player’s teams, and give points for each team beaten(so as not to deal with summoning issues). Regardless of this, the idea of having players try to kill as many as possible seems fun. However, I don’t like the time limit. This would heavily favor certain teams over others. I prefer the idea of just giving you unlimited time, and ending it when your team dies

this seems unnecessary and will favor those who use dr spam over other strategies like death sentence which requires time.

agreed. though i accept that it can’t be open ended timescale wise.

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a fun idea might be if the tiebreaker worked its way through the Monsterdex in order lol. the sheer audacity of getting flattened by a 0 star superbuffed monster is kinda hilarious.

in fairness nobody has faced monsters buffed beyond the max so we don’t know if they would lose or not. imagine how much damage something like a mushashoid poison gas tick could potentially do. (already my pet peeve btw)

It’s 1/10th of the time given, so basically more than would be possible to defeat in 5000s of game time. An average of 40TU per kill for each of your monsters is not possible.

Partly the point… people can build a different team for the tie breaker battle and it’s whoever can build the best one for it + play it well will win it. DR spam won’t actually work too well because you’re limited by how many you can kill. If there was no time limit you’d want to go for a sleep lock or similar lock where you could kill infinite monsters (again causing a tie). Having a large time limit would give the opportunity for a you to build a bit of both stuff that can get kills quickly and stuff that can make the most of the time to get lots of kills for the number of monsters in your team.

Most of the teams which get top 3 are using a lot of mirror revenge or using stuff that simply doesn’t care about the damage dealt by enemies. Honestly, I win half my battles by having a line-up of 3x buffed monsters with a Hanzo I’m repeatedly cloning then bringing in the next enemy (I leave them with 4 rocks) for it to kill the Hanzo and die. This has no trouble scaling to whatever buff the enemies have.

i mean…vinegazers would do this regardless of time limits. and then there’s purpie…

kinda what i meant by dr spam.

I’m confused, where are you going with that? My point was no time limit would allow people to do infinite loops, then you suggest Vinegazer as one of those… meaning you agree that there needs to be a time limit? Purpie is pathetic in high level UC so not sure why you’re mentioning it.

Hanzo looping and DR spam are definitely different things. Also, that completely contradicts the point you were making about DR spam… you said having a restricted timer on the battle favours it, but looping Hanzo takes ages because you’re killing one enemy at a time and need to do the clone + protect + wait for the enemy to kill the Hanzo. Sleep lock + Geartyrant is way faster than that!

I have absolutely no intention to get into debates with you over this stuff, just getting super confused by what you’re writing now. I really appreciate the idea of a tie breaker battle, it’s a good one.

So then it’s collection. If you don’t have the monsters to make a fast killing team, you lose