How does difficulty work in timed events?

Question

I've only participated in a couple of timed events, but I've noticed that the difficulty of the missions varies wildly over time with a seemingly random pattern. For example in the current one, Heroic Mode - Oscorp, all the missions were labeled as Trivial, with a maximum opponent level in the harder missions of ~50. After a couple of hours about half of the missions had turned Lethal, with the opponents level going as up as 160.

In a previous event I experienced the opposite: missions previously labeled as Lethal suddenly becoming Easy or Normal. Again this lasted for a couple of hours after returning to the previous settings.

What is affecting the missions difficulty? Is there a way I can influence the changes?

Answer 1

Generally speaking, winning in the event makes the missions harder, and losing in the event makes the missions easier.

Here's a part of the announcement for an event in February, 2014:

PVE Scaling is in effect for the sub-events. This means that as Agents consistently complete missions and defeat opponents, enemies will raise in difficulty.

The exact win/loss ratio for a bump up or down in the difficulty is unclear. On the MPQ forums, some folks report that they can get the difficulty level down 1 set of levels by losing 5 times in a row. Their strategy was to put in a team of low level 1-star heroes and have them either lose or retreat repeatedly.

When playing the previous event, I tried this repeatedly and only saw one decrease in difficulty even after losing 20 times in a row. It was a relatively small decrease as well (roughly level 90 to level 80). It may have been that I had too many wins and would need a substantially higher count of losses to reverse it, though.

This strategy is also relatively difficult to implement some events (such as the 'Heroic' Oscorp event) compared to other events. In these situations, the hero roster is very locked down, and/or there don't appear to be any "boosted" heroes which would make the difficulty matter a bit less.

I've seen also that occasionally time plays a factor - if I leave the game alone for a while or don't participate in the event, when I come back sometimes the difficulty has gotten significantly easier. I don't know if this is intentional or a bug, but it has occasionally gotten me over the hump on a tricky level. Once I won a single victory, though, the difficulty jumped right back up, unfortunately.