True Healing Discussion (Live 6/25)

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

Just as a note, so far we saw an increase in Health Pack purchases the day of and after the change went Live, likely due to people reacting to the change by "powering through it" instead of changing their gameplay patterns. Then sales dropped down slightly below "standard" for on Friday/Saturday. Now they have been stable for the past day and a half at the same general amount as before the healing change. As we expected, so far the change hasn't made any real bump or dip in Health Packs for the user base. Basically, we weren't expecting this change to make any huge impact financially in regards to Health Pack purchases. So far, it's been about a net zero. As stated before, it wasn't our intent and so far the change has had about the expected result in regards to changing player's play patterns away from Prologue Healing or reliance on similar strategies to extend play. We're still monitoring closely though, as we haven't even run a full PVE Event with the new changes in effect.

I get the cynical idea that the change was intended to simply line our pockets. It was never the reasoning on our end, and continues to be something that we did that hurts now for some players but we wholeheartedly believe is in the best interest of the game in the long run. I just wanted to throw out a bit of info on the actual financial aspects of the change to illustrate what has happened so far there, so that you all are better informed.

Hmm where do I start? Firstly as the changes went live in the MIDDLE of events meant that those who were taking it easy and banking on good chunk of play time to catch up suddenly find themselves behind the 8-ball with no real means of chasing without using/buying health packs. Hence the spike in initial health pack usage. Then the drop off came as users realised how much the new system works and refused to buy health packs out of principle. But then as always those users who can afford the extra amount of health packs needed to stay competitive will up their spending while the rest reduce hence the net result will be the same as pre true healing.

If you look at it from another angle, if the devs' true purpose was to generate more income through health packs this statistic indicates that initially the plan to generate additional revenue was successful. But as time went on there was no net increase in health pack purchases as the backlash sets in. But instead of admitting that the plan just hadn't worked let's turn this into great PR material by saying that all along we didn't intend for the overall purchase activity to change. Well played Sir!

Incidentally I feel sorry for those who spent money on this game. I thought about spending, until this change conveniently dropped on me before I decided to splurge.

Unknown

So, after being pretty upset at the "true healing" update, I would like to try to fix it, with small tweaks to how it's currently implemented. For whatever reason (Demiurge says it's not for profits but for encouraging more strategic play, not more play), we are here now. So aside from a total reversal of the change, here is how it currently works, and what I suggest.

1) True healing was supposedly done to stop prologue healing. It is effective in that way.

2) True healing acts as a shield when you use in in combat. All damage you take is taken to the temporary health first, before lowering your true health. This means that during combat, the game is essentially the same. Strategy of team healing and not dying still works.

3) When you leave combat, that's the main issue. Or rather when you start another combat and find your temporarily fully healed OBW actually at 5% of her max health. She'll get 1 or 2 shotted, and she has to make matches (until they change that silly mechanic of the first attacker also being the tank). Does this fall into the whole fixing prologue healing thing? Does it encourage more strategic play instead of increased time playing? No, it doesn't. No matter how strategic your play, you'll end up hurting next match. This side effect is not conducive to fun, or strategy, or anything except... potential profit from health pack usage. This isn't a reason the devs listed, so why is this the result?

Possible Solution to #3: I propose that when you end a match with temporary healing, that healing becomes permanent. But wait, that defeats the purpose of temp healing, right? Well no, the other part is that you can't go above the permanently healed health you started with. So that means if you start the game with full health, take a bunch of damage, heal back to 80%, you should be able to keep the 80% life. This still kills prologue healing because the whole point there was you'd take your 40% health guy into a prologue fight, heal them up to 100%, then leave with full health. This change looks at your permanent health at the start, which was 40%, and does not allow you to leave with anything higher than 40%. It satisfies #1 and 2, and 3 is no longer an issue.

I don't see any problems with this change (aside from new player confusion).

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

I get the cynical idea that the change was intended to simply line our pockets. It was never the reasoning on our end, and continues to be something that we did that hurts now for some players but we wholeheartedly believe is in the best interest of the game in the long run. I just wanted to throw out a bit of info on the actual financial aspects of the change to illustrate what has happened so far there, so that you all are better informed.

True Healing is not good as you think,in my opinion not only hurts the game core mechanics,but the veteran userbase, who spend much more money and time that the new users with limited rosters that you are supposed trying to help. This game is in a spiral downfall since Spiderman murder and D3 is making worse and worse decisions since that.

SnowcaTT

futongus wrote:

IceIX wrote:

Just as a note, so far we saw an increase in Health Pack purchases the day of and after the change went Live, likely due to people reacting to the change by "powering through it" instead of changing their gameplay patterns. Then sales dropped down slightly below "standard" for on Friday/Saturday. Now they have been stable for the past day and a half at the same general amount as before the healing change. As we expected, so far the change hasn't made any real bump or dip in Health Packs for the user base. Basically, we weren't expecting this change to make any huge impact financially in regards to Health Pack purchases. So far, it's been about a net zero. As stated before, it wasn't our intent and so far the change has had about the expected result in regards to changing player's play patterns away from Prologue Healing or reliance on similar strategies to extend play. We're still monitoring closely though, as we haven't even run a full PVE Event with the new changes in effect.

Hmm where do I start? Firstly as the changes went live in the MIDDLE of events meant that those who were taking it easy and banking on good chunk of play time to catch up suddenly find themselves behind the 8-ball with no real means of chasing without using/buying health packs. Hence the spike in initial health pack usage. Then the drop off came as users realised how much the new system works and refused to buy health packs out of principle. But then as always those users who can afford the extra amount of health packs needed to stay competitive will up their spending while the rest reduce hence the net result will be the same as pre true healing.

If you look at it from another angle, if the devs' true purpose was to generate more income through health packs this statistic indicates that initially the plan to generate additional revenue was successful. But as time went on there was no net increase in health pack purchases as the backlash sets in. But instead of admitting that the plan just hadn't worked let's turn this into great PR material by saying that all along we didn't intend for the overall purchase activity to change. Well played Sir!

Incidentally I feel sorry for those who spent money on this game. I thought about spending, until this change conveniently dropped on me before I decided to splurge.

I think their goal (stated somewhere?) is a high average number of dollars per user per day. After this change:

User base - way way lower.
Money from health packs - remains the same.
::Thus, the remaining users are paying more per day, and that is the only bottom line they are looking at.

To bad the future bottom line reads: many users left, many left bad ratings, and the response to the remaining folks has left them jaded at best. How to increase money is increase your user base, which will get you more of the whales in the long run. Making the whales who currently exist pay more while cutting your future user base down is short sighted, to say the least.

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

Just as a note, so far we saw an increase in Health Pack purchases the day of and after the change went Live, likely due to people reacting to the change by "powering through it" instead of changing their gameplay patterns. Then sales dropped down slightly below "standard" for on Friday/Saturday. Now they have been stable for the past day and a half at the same general amount as before the healing change. As we expected, so far the change hasn't made any real bump or dip in Health Packs for the user base. Basically, we weren't expecting this change to make any huge impact financially in regards to Health Pack purchases. So far, it's been about a net zero. As stated before, it wasn't our intent and so far the change has had about the expected result in regards to changing player's play patterns away from Prologue Healing or reliance on similar strategies to extend play. We're still monitoring closely though, as we haven't even run a full PVE Event with the new changes in effect.

I get the cynical idea that the change was intended to simply line our pockets. It was never the reasoning on our end, and continues to be something that we did that hurts now for some players but we wholeheartedly believe is in the best interest of the game in the long run. I just wanted to throw out a bit of info on the actual financial aspects of the change to illustrate what has happened so far there, so that you all are better informed.

I registered just to reply to this ****.

How cocky are you to think that your users are stupid and that you know what's good for your users? With over 58 pages of complaints after complaints, we are telling you this change sucks. Yet, you think you know better than all of us combined that this change is good for us? It "hurts some players"? You unapologetically trivializing the number of users you are hurting. You wholeheartedly believe this is in the "best interest of the game"? Best interest for who? We are seeing frustrated, upset players quitting the game. What did they do wrong? Name one thing that these people wronged you that they have to be punished and frustrated to the point of quitting.

According to you, financially, you are not better off. Us players are not better off. So what exactly is the benefit of this change? I can't think of one reason that justify this change if there is no positive outcome. With all these negativity yet you don't see it fit to reverse course. There is only one word to describe it. "Hubris". You guys think you are smarter than us, brighter than us, we don't know what's best for us. You guys are never wrong. There is no other words that can better fit you than the word "Hubris".

HailMary

d3sucks wrote:

Yet, you think you know better than all of us combined that this change is good for us? It "hurts some players"? You unapologetically trivializing the number of users you are hurting. You wholeheartedly believe this is in the "best interest of the game"? Best interest for who? We are seeing frustrated, upset players quitting the game. What did they do wrong? Name one thing that these people wronged you that they have to be punished and frustrated to the point of quitting.

It could very well be in the best interest of players in the longer run. We've already seen some players pipe up, amidst all the emotional negativity, that they actually like the change.

d3sucks wrote:

According to you, financially, you are not better off. Us players are not better off. So what exactly is the benefit of this change? I can't think of one reason that justify this change if there is no positive outcome. With all these negativity yet you don't see it fit to reverse course. There is only one word to describe it. "Hubris". You guys think you are smarter than us, brighter than us, we don't know what's best for us. You guys are never wrong. There is no other words that can better fit you than the word "Hubris".

Whether or not "us players" (i.e. players at large) are generally better off remains to be seen. One reason that readily comes to mind is the elimination of prologue healing. Another reason could be the over-reliance on OBW in... everything. The negativity of the vocal minority is a pretty worthless metric with which to gauge the general success of changes like this.

Feyda

I can't imagine how they think this change benefits players... So far the True Healing patch accomplishes the following

Negative Effects
1.) Practically forces players to use L.Daken / Patch as the only remaining true healers
2.) Limits playtime / number of battles any given team can do before running out of health
3.) Keeps 2* players from being able to compete on any real level with 3* teams that include Patch Daken or C.Mag
4.) Double Tapped Spiderman in the head (Insert Punisher animation here)
5.) Made She-Hulk even less appealing than she was at first glance

Positive Effects
1.)???

There are hundreds of replies in THIS thread alone of people deploring this change and offering tons of reasonable workarounds to the problems you claim to try to be addressing yet the one response we get is some nonsense reply about your sales rate of healthpacks after the patch? Of course your sales didn't skyrocket... only the super whales would be willing to pay for healthpacks in the amount that are needed now and they probably don't need them since they have the 3* teams that can actually work around the True Healing.

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

As we expected, so far the change hasn't made any real bump or dip in Health Packs for the user base.

Has it had an impact on your user base thougb? If there are less people playing but the same amount of health packs sold then technically sales have gone up.

IceIX wrote:

As stated before, it wasn't our intent and so far the change has had about the expected result in regards to changing player's play patterns away from Prologue Healing or reliance on similar strategies to extend play.

I think most people are annoyed because you guys decided to force our play style by restricting our ability to play. I would bet you a lot of money that if you simply encouraged us to play differently by giving us more options (by removing the need for health packs entirely - unless downed - for example) you would have seen a happier player base.

And you probably wouldn't have seen a large dip in Health pack sales either - I imagine they are mostly bought by new players who dont know about useful/useless characters like spidernerf.

Intentions are all well and good but for a lot of people something still doesn't add up.

Unknown

HailMary wrote:

d3sucks wrote:

Yet, you think you know better than all of us combined that this change is good for us? It "hurts some players"? You unapologetically trivializing the number of users you are hurting. You wholeheartedly believe this is in the "best interest of the game"? Best interest for who? We are seeing frustrated, upset players quitting the game. What did they do wrong? Name one thing that these people wronged you that they have to be punished and frustrated to the point of quitting.

It could very well be in the best interest of players in the longer run. We've already seen some players pipe up, amidst all the emotional negativity, that they actually like the change.

d3sucks wrote:

According to you, financially, you are not better off. Us players are not better off. So what exactly is the benefit of this change? I can't think of one reason that justify this change if there is no positive outcome. With all these negativity yet you don't see it fit to reverse course. There is only one word to describe it. "Hubris". You guys think you are smarter than us, brighter than us, we don't know what's best for us. You guys are never wrong. There is no other words that can better fit you than the word "Hubris".

Whether or not "us players" (i.e. players at large) are generally better off remains to be seen. One reason that readily comes to mind is the elimination of prologue healing. Another reason could be the over-reliance on OBW in... everything. The negativity of the vocal minority is a pretty worthless metric with which to gauge the general success of changes like this.

I agree that the vocal individuals who voice their opinions in forums are only a small subset of the total player base and do not necessarily reflect the views of the entire community. But wouldn't we solve that by getting demiurge to post in game announcements about players voting whether they like the change or not? Personally I don't know which way it will fall but will be fascinated to find out.

This would create the issue of the players themselves deciding which features should be added to the game and may not be feasible for the viability of the game to generate profits which it still needs to do but at least it'll keep the devs honest. Personally I would take much better to 'here's some changes that we think will help your gaming experience but let us know what you think' than 'Here's some changes that we arbitrarily decided will be good for you'

For the record I don't think the true healing is a game breaker and happy to go either way but I'll just don't like people telling me a spade is a jack hammer.

Unknown

HailMary wrote:

d3sucks wrote:

Yet, you think you know better than all of us combined that this change is good for us? It "hurts some players"? You unapologetically trivializing the number of users you are hurting. You wholeheartedly believe this is in the "best interest of the game"? Best interest for who? We are seeing frustrated, upset players quitting the game. What did they do wrong? Name one thing that these people wronged you that they have to be punished and frustrated to the point of quitting.

It could very well be in the best interest of players in the longer run. We've already seen some players pipe up, amidst all the emotional negativity, that they actually like the change.

d3sucks wrote:

According to you, financially, you are not better off. Us players are not better off. So what exactly is the benefit of this change? I can't think of one reason that justify this change if there is no positive outcome. With all these negativity yet you don't see it fit to reverse course. There is only one word to describe it. "Hubris". You guys think you are smarter than us, brighter than us, we don't know what's best for us. You guys are never wrong. There is no other words that can better fit you than the word "Hubris".

Whether or not "us players" (i.e. players at large) are generally better off remains to be seen. One reason that readily comes to mind is the elimination of prologue healing. Another reason could be the over-reliance on OBW in... everything. The negativity of the vocal minority is a pretty worthless metric with which to gauge the general success of changes like this.

You speak of all these things as facts, but I am not seeing the facts supporting what you said. Yes. We did see some player that likes the change, but if we simply count the number of players that voice their frustration compare to those that doesn't mind, it is a lopsided victory. The app used to be a 4 1/2 to 5 stars app. In the last version it dropped to 3 1/2 star (padded by the fact that this was mid release change that had some high rating going into the change). After today's release it's now 3 stars. All these fact supports that there is a nontrivial amount of players who are unhappy with the change. I don't see any fact supporting these are players are just vocal minority.

True, vocal minority is a pretty worthless metric to gauge the success of this change if we are judging it based on how much money d3 makes. Yes it can be a long term success for their pocket book, but they are insulting our intelligence by telling we are better off this way. As if we can't make up our own mind how we are better off. You said that whether this change is better off remains to be seen. How will it be seen? Do you work for d3? Are you gonna be able to judge it? What is the metric you would go by?

Who cares about prologue healing? Who cares about people using OBW in everything? Why do we care what technique or strategy other people goes by? If people don't like to use them, nobody is forcing them. But why does everybody have to stop? All I know is this, today there are more players that are dissatisfied and unhappy than before the change. This is a fact.

Unknown

gelatin wrote:

Possible Solution to #3: I propose that when you end a match with temporary healing, that healing becomes permanent. But wait, that defeats the purpose of temp healing, right? Well no, the other part is that you can't go above the permanently healed health you started with. So that means if you start the game with full health, take a bunch of damage, heal back to 80%, you should be able to keep the 80% life. This still kills prologue healing because the whole point there was you'd take your 40% health guy into a prologue fight, heal them up to 100%, then leave with full health. This change looks at your permanent health at the start, which was 40%, and does not allow you to leave with anything higher than 40%. It satisfies #1 and 2, and 3 is no longer an issue.

This. Exactly this. Originally I was assuming(maybe hoping is more accurate) that is how the mechanic would work. It would make total sense to kill prolog healing (which I never did anyway) while not completely nerfing all healers AND make the game possibly better and slightly more strategic.

Unknown

HailMary wrote:

Whether or not "us players" (i.e. players at large) are generally better off remains to be seen. One reason that readily comes to mind is the elimination of prologue healing. Another reason could be the over-reliance on OBW in... everything. The negativity of the vocal minority is a pretty worthless metric with which to gauge the general success of changes like this.

Entirely not true. The fact forum posters do not make up the majority of the population in no way means they are not a representative sample. There is are only a few ways to determine player opinion on something like this. You have forum posts (or tweets/FB posts), app ratings, money spent and people playing (and by extension leaving). Each of those is a valuable metric because, even though the last 2 are the ones D3 care most about, they also lag behind the first 2 as to when you get that feedback plus by the time ppl leave you've often lost the opportunity to intervene.

Comments about forumites being some kind of vocal minority reminds me of, say, Age of Conan. For a number of months you had people complaining on the forums BUT a few people who were somehow "in the know" told everyone that it was just the vocal minority and everything was ACTUALLY fine. Then the game went free to play (because everything was going so well). I could have substituted AoC for any number of games and described a similar pattern.

Unless you are willing to believe everyone on this forum is a total weirdo (and remember you are ONE OF THEM! ) then there is literally no reason not to believe the prevailing opinion on here is representative. The fact people come on here to voice their opinions is a valuable resource for D3 (or at least should be) because that silent majority you're talking about just quit and move on without saying a word....

Unknown

*Forum tried to prevent me posting this by demanding a new login (timeouted), thankfully I expected it an copypasted my message prior pressing the Submit button.

IceIX wrote:

Basically, we weren't expecting this change to make any huge impact financially in regards to Health Pack purchases.

I think this is true. However, "True Healing" has a cascade effect itself.

You play less, due to lack of healing. --> You earn significantly less Iso-8. --> Your character advancement slows down to a crawl. --> To stay competitive and level up your juicy 3*-4* characters, you need to buy Iso-8.

This might be their endgame, as you saw, next they plan to raise the level caps.

IceIX wrote:

As stated before, it wasn't our intent and so far the change has had about the expected result in regards to changing player's play patterns away from Prologue Healing or reliance on similar strategies to extend play. We're still monitoring closely though, as we haven't even run a full PVE Event with the new changes in effect.

Prologue Healing was already closed for new players, who didn't own OBW or Spidey. They did a sneak nerf on the Venom chapter and changed the Teamup Spiderman, so he won't have Yellow skill (now he has Blue and Purple instead of Yellow and Blue). Change notes didn't mention it.

Anyway, Prologue Healing was necessary for those who wanted to play more. I'm not saying it was fun, but doing 1-2 Prologue heal runs is definitely hundred times better than not playing at all.

IceIX wrote:

I get the cynical idea that the change was intended to simply line our pockets. It was never the reasoning on our end, and continues to be something that we did that hurts now for some players but we wholeheartedly believe is in the best interest of the game in the long run.

Again, watch the wording: "It was never the reasoning on our end." That's true again, their reasoning is something about making the game better. However, their True Goal is something entirely different. **cashmachine soundeffect**

I understand that you need revenue from the game. However you are doing it wrong. You are trying to force people to pay, instead of giving them endless fun and hook them to pay. You are driving away people.

Here is a list what you are doing wrong (IMHO):

- No way to buy specific covers/colors. If players could buy new characters directly, not just the chance of it, you would gain more revenue from it. (And I know you have a guaranteed cover in the overpriced megapacks). Also, players can't start a color on an existing character until they find a cover for it. For example I have a 3* IM and he has no Red skill, rendering him mostly useless.

- Your respec is unfair. When YOU change a character, you should give back everything to the player which went into that character, so he can decide what to do with it. At the moment, when you "balance" a character, all the effort that went into that character feels wasted for the player, because now he owns a regular character, who is not as fun to play anymore. For example I have a 3* Spidey, I have 13 covers for him, and I spent about 1000 HP to get those. Now I don't expect to get back the HP, but I'm so glad I didn't take the time and effort to level him up (he would stick out from my 2* roster), because now all that Iso would feel wasted, especially after the nerfhammer double hit he received.

- You are trying to dictate playing schedule. A lot of good arguments in this thread about this, I won't elaborate.

- You are limiting game time. The players don't get enough gameplay, they get frustrated of not being able to play. Some you will coerce to Pay-2-Play, but most will just get angry and they will vent their frustration everywhere, giving your game a bad name.

- You are not listening to your players. You have this giant company mentality, where you are absolutely sure you know better than the uneducated mob (your players). No, you are wrong again. You have to listen to your player base, because they are the ones paying you! Of course this is much harder in practice than it sounds (a lot of players have really bad, useless ideas/demands), but a lot of companies do it and do it well. You should at least try.

These are major factors in the gameplay and they have a very negative effect on the game's fun factor (which is basically the most important factor in any game). If you don't see that your changes lead here, that is really not good. I can think a few reasons why you make these changes:
- You have a financial CEO, who knows nothing about games and forces you to do it. If that is the case, he shouldn't lead a game company.
- You really think this is for the better. Fire your designers (or at least the one who makes the decisions).
- You need to generate more revenue quick or else...! Again, you are doing it wrong.

Anyway, form IceIX's answer it seems they are adamant about keeping this change. I guess they will get what they deserve.

yogi_

This change was never about health packs and the intention to increase their amount of selling. Anyone solely going on this tangent is not right. It's a distraction, though I imagine it will not lead to a long term reduction in sales of them.

The issue is that OBW was used too much in a way that D3 didn't really want - though it was left open to do. In this respect and from the D3 perspective, it's largely irrelevant what the average player thinks (they want the game to work in a certain "correct" way, the end). This "True Healing" would have been thought about for some time and may have had a number of other variations.

The real issue is a combination of the questionable execution of "True Healing" (even typing the words put me off it), the lack of follow up or prior communication (and the dismal of what, for a lot of people was quite a fundamental gameplay method) and the broader issue of there really not being a solid, diverse, useful enough 2* character roster (that D3 claims we should now use) to actually work alongside the vital role that OBW has played.

"True Healing" is kind of like giving a Band-Aid to what is quite a deep nasty cut. It sort of does the intended job in a way, but if you actually look a little more, the cut actually needs more serious attention.

Unknown

HailMary wrote:

d3sucks wrote:

Yet, you think you know better than all of us combined that this change is good for us? It "hurts some players"? You unapologetically trivializing the number of users you are hurting. You wholeheartedly believe this is in the "best interest of the game"? Best interest for who? We are seeing frustrated, upset players quitting the game. What did they do wrong? Name one thing that these people wronged you that they have to be punished and frustrated to the point of quitting.

It could very well be in the best interest of players in the longer run. We've already seen some players pipe up, amidst all the emotional negativity, that they actually like the change.

d3sucks wrote:

According to you, financially, you are not better off. Us players are not better off. So what exactly is the benefit of this change? I can't think of one reason that justify this change if there is no positive outcome. With all these negativity yet you don't see it fit to reverse course. There is only one word to describe it. "Hubris". You guys think you are smarter than us, brighter than us, we don't know what's best for us. You guys are never wrong. There is no other words that can better fit you than the word "Hubris".

Whether or not "us players" (i.e. players at large) are generally better off remains to be seen. One reason that readily comes to mind is the elimination of prologue healing. Another reason could be the over-reliance on OBW in... everything. The negativity of the vocal minority is a pretty worthless metric with which to gauge the general success of changes like this.

The over reliance on OBW was because Demuirge didn't release any other characters that could heal.

Most teams use at least one "tank," but since there's a variety of high health characters in the game, we don't think of them as being overly relied on. With only 2 available heroes that could fill the role of a healer though, of course they were leaned on too much. That's not the fault of players. Through our team set ups we told the devs loud and clear "We want a healer on our team." They responded by effectively removing healing.

If Demuirge is going to favour metrics over forum posts, that's fine, but they need to interpret the metrics properly and implement player-friendly changes.

HailMary

futongus wrote:

I agree that the vocal individuals who voice their opinions in forums are only a small subset of the total player base and do not necessarily reflect the views of the entire community. But wouldn't we solve that by getting demiurge to post in game announcements about players voting whether they like the change or not? Personally I don't know which way it will fall but will be fascinated to find out.

This would be very interesting, but even as a player who does have opinions about most changes, I don't really want D3 to make changes specifically based upon player voting. Right off the bat, there's reporting bias. More importantly, though, some lower-level players who, for instance, have no idea what prologue healing is or haven't connected the dots on how OBW healing wrecks PVE scaling simply will not have a meaningful vote. But, they will absolutely be affected by changes like "true healing."

futongus wrote:

This would create the issue of the players themselves deciding which features should be added to the game and may not be feasible for the viability of the game to generate profits which it still needs to do but at least it'll keep the devs honest. Personally I would take much better to 'here's some changes that we think will help your gaming experience but let us know what you think' than 'Here's some changes that we arbitrarily decided will be good for you'

For the record I don't think the true healing is a game breaker and happy to go either way but I'll just don't like people telling me a spade is a jack hammer.

For all the general crowing about how "true healing" is merely a greedy cash grab and the devs are just lying through their teeth at every turn, I've seen literally zero actual evidence that this claim is at all realistic. Sure, people (not you) can pat each other on the back for insults well-slung, but there's nothing concrete to support any such claims.

d3sucks wrote:

You speak of all these things as facts, but I am not seeing the facts supporting what you said. Yes. We did see some player that likes the change, but if we simply count the number of players that voice their frustration compare to those that doesn't mind, it is a lopsided victory. The app used to be a 4 1/2 to 5 stars app. In the last version it dropped to 3 1/2 star (padded by the fact that this was mid release change that had some high rating going into the change). After today's release it's now 3 stars. All these fact supports that there is a nontrivial amount of players who are unhappy with the change. I don't see any fact supporting these are players are just vocal minority.

Generally, when people say "could" and "remains to be seen," they're explicitly noting uncertainty in their statements, not proclaiming "facts." I'd say that people who take the time to actually change a past positive review to a one-star excoriation are most likely outliers.

d3sucks wrote:

True, vocal minority is a pretty worthless metric to gauge the success of this change if we are judging it based on how much money d3 makes. Yes it can be a long term success for their pocket book, but they are insulting our intelligence by telling we are better off this way. As if we can't make up our own mind how we are better off. You said that whether this change is better off remains to be seen. How will it be seen? Do you work for d3? Are you gonna be able to judge it? What is the metric you would go by?

Hahaha, that's a nice strawman. The vocal minority is a pretty worthless metric for gauging the success of anything at all, as long as that vocal minority isn't the sole target demographic. The League of Legends forums are constantly filled with rage. Should we conclude that LoL just totally sucks donkey bollocks? I don't think so.

I'm not as fixated on the black-and-white "IS IT ABOUT MONEY?!?!" issue as you are. How the change affects people will be seen by longer-term metrics. For example, shifts in general sentiments and player behavior in the next few PVPs (e.g. how shortened 2* pushes actually affect competition), or changes in PVE scaling brought on by a new inability to exit with more health than you entered with. Players in general could actually be better off in the mid-term and long-term. For now, it makes my PVE pushes more annoying, but I'm willing to see how the change actually plays out.

d3sucks wrote:

Who cares about prologue healing? Who cares about people using OBW in everything? Why do we care what technique or strategy other people goes by? If people don't like to use them, nobody is forcing them. But why does everybody have to stop? All I know is this, today there are more players that are dissatisfied and unhappy than before the change. This is a fact.

I was a pretty active prologue healing user in PVE for quite a while, right up until the "true healing" change went live. I was a pretty active prologue healer for PVP, too, back when I was using characters that didn't have approximately 6 billion health. Your nonchalant "nobody is forcing them [to use prologue/OBW healing]" statement is simply absurd. The same anti-'true healing" forum rage you cite as support for your arguments is evidence of how many people have found themselves dependent on traditional healing.

Moreover, your argument actually goes further, beyond "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", and firmly into "balance is never broken, don't fix anything" territory. You could say the same thing about completely OP characters: who cares if pre-nerf Spidey stun completely breaks the game, especially in PVE? Who cares if pre-nerf Rags was basically just a "Press Here to Win" button in the guise of a character? Who cares if current CMags (CMags is a mainstay in my PVP lineup, by the way) is also brokenly OP? Spidey & Rags were probably over-nerfed, but the fact that there was a solid case for nerfing them is, well, a fact.

What some players say about the change today doesn't really matter. What matters is how the change will actually affect longer-term player satisfaction and player behavior.

bonfire01 wrote:

Entirely not true. The fact forum posters do not make up the majority of the population in no way means they are not a representative sample. There is are only a few ways to determine player opinion on something like this. You have forum posts (or tweets/FB posts), app ratings, money spent and people playing (and by extension leaving). Each of those is a valuable metric because, even though the last 2 are the ones D3 care most about, they also lag behind the first 2 as to when you get that feedback plus by the time ppl leave you've often lost the opportunity to intervene... [and the rest]

If we really take the vocal forum population as a representative sample, then you've just neatly destroyed the "it's just a cash grab" argument: forumites are, if anything, pointedly refusing to buy more health packs. So, either vocal forumites are a representative sample (in which case the "true healing" opposition means something even though the "cash grab" claim means nothing), or they aren't (in which case any forumite rage presuming to speak on behalf of "the players [at large]" is empty bulls---). Those are your choices.

RockMonster wrote:

The over reliance on OBW was because Demuirge didn't release any other characters that could heal.

Most teams use at least one "tank," but since there's a variety of high health characters in the game, we don't think of them as being overly relied on. With only 2 available heroes that could fill the role of a healer though, of course they were leaned on too much. That's not the fault of players. Through our team set ups we told the devs loud and clear "We want a healer on our team." They responded by effectively removing healing.

If Demuirge is going to favour metrics over forum posts, that's fine, but they need to interpret the metrics properly and implement player-friendly changes.

Agreed. The game could use more support characters in general at the 2* level, and more healers at the 3* level.

Unknown

HailMary wrote:

Generally, when people say "could" and "remains to be seen," they're explicitly noting uncertainty in their statements, not proclaiming "facts." I'd say that people who take the time to actually change a past positive review to a one-star excoriation are most likely outliers.

I'm used to express my opinion, even if it is a lone voice.
Before the change I considered this game a 5 stars one. Now it's different. I want to give a message to the other Appstore users to choose a different game, at least as long as they improve the healing system.
This is why I urge people who do not like this last "improvement" to change their review of the game

kind regards

Unknown

unqltango wrote:

Anyway, form IceIX's answer it seems they are adamant about keeping this change. I guess they will get what they deserve.

Of course they are. The **** who ordered this change has that single option for survival. It is possible to build up all kind of **** to explain away effects or deny it or lie about them. Reverting would be clear admittance of failure with no exit, that one would have to take the blame for the shake, players left, reviews and everything.

Unknown

HailMary wrote:

For all the general crowing about how "true healing" is merely a greedy cash grab and the devs are just lying through their teeth at every turn, I've seen literally zero actual evidence that this claim is at all realistic.

Err, so you are the one person on these forums who believe it was meant to increase roster diversity just as stated? And that it is a relevant action for that goal?

kensterr

If they expect more reasonable personal and community scaling with this True Healing update then I say mission accomplished. So far I managed to run through all the nodes without using all health packs in the current PVE. It would remain to be seen if things will get crazy for the last 1-2 days of the PVE.