kensterr wrote: yup, surprised that Namco would do such a thing. anyhoos I'm already shopping for RPG games on Steam, even though I'm not hit that badly with the true healing nerf apart from a very bad AI cascade in the PVE Hard node. This game has been fun for the past 7 months or so but my fingers are itching for some Diabloesque or Baldur's Gate type of game on the PC.
NotYou13 wrote: Unintended side effect of the true healing change: Patch/CMag teams have become ubiquitous. While very popular prior to the change, the ability to kill quickly while not taking a lot of unhealed damage makes this team the winning combination for anyone who wants to play on their own terms instead of waiting 3 hours to play. This is clearly what's known as Team Diversity.
Ben Grimm wrote: NotYou13 wrote: Unintended side effect of the true healing change: Patch/CMag teams have become ubiquitous. While very popular prior to the change, the ability to kill quickly while not taking a lot of unhealed damage makes this team the winning combination for anyone who wants to play on their own terms instead of waiting 3 hours to play. This is clearly what's known as Team Diversity. This was pretty much inevitable, and a bunch of us mentioned that something like this was likely to happen.
Kiirnodel wrote: NotYou13 wrote: Unintended side effect of the true healing change: Patch/CMag teams have become ubiquitous. While very popular prior to the change, the ability to kill quickly while not taking a lot of unhealed damage makes this team the winning combination for anyone who wants to play on their own terms instead of waiting 3 hours to play. This is clearly what's known as Team Diversity. And after taking some damage your Patch or Daken can go and make some Prologue Healing... oops... sry guys :b
Demiurge_Will wrote: Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote: 1. Can the AP costs of the most overpriced powers be lowered? 2. Can the worst fifth covers in the game get a modification? This doesn't directly answer your question, but I wanted to say how much we've appreciated these polls and the analysis in the threads. Super useful feedback as we decide how to prioritize future balancing work. Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote: 3. Can anything new be added to the sparse historical listing of all buffs? The game has had no major balancing buffs since 2013. 4. Will the long series of nerfs end any time soon? So I'm going to say something very controversial, but true, so I'm putting on my flame-retardant pants for a diversion into game-design-philosophy-land: Dividing changes into buffs and nerfs doesn't really make sense when you're evaluating whether and how much a game has improved or not. For one thing, the terms aren't necessarily clear or useful. A buff for one character/ability/mechanic/strategy is a nerf for everything else in the game, and vice versa. Any change can be interpreted as a buff or a nerf. Team healing not lasting between missions? Clearly a nerf, right? To Black Widow (Original), Spider-Man (Classic), and those poor long-suffering hot-dog vendors, you bet. But it's also a buff to health packs, Protect tile generation abilities, strategic play (vs. volume play), stun, users that play in typical mobile patterns (vs. those that play all at once), characters with self-heal, and so on. And it's a nerf to a bunch of other tangentially related things as well. Players, particularly expert players that are well-represented on the forums, gravitate toward optimal strategies, even if they make the game less fun for others (usually even if they make the game less fun for them). If you make a balance change and do it exactly perfectly (which I certainly don't claim to do all the time - assuming the idea of "balancing perfectly" even makes sense), there are two possibilities: 1) You take something overpowered and make it perfectly balanced. This is most likely going to change the way the expert players are playing, and make the way they were playing before less effective. And there's some adjustment involved in that, and expert players notice big time. 2) You take something underpowered and make it perfectly balanced. Expert players are not likely to care or notice, or they'll think of the change as minor, since the optimal, overpowered strategies haven't changed. So even if we were doing everything perfectly (which we're not, of course - we're human), an expert group of players is always going to feel like changes are biased towards nerfs, even if there were the same number of both. But even then, there shouldn't be the same number of both: if you take another look at those two possibilities and weigh them against each other, you'll usually find that fixing something overpowered is more urgent, since it's having a bigger impact on the experience. Most often, a very underpowered thing makes the game smaller, with fewer possibilities than it might otherwise have, while a very overpowered thing makes the game broken. I'm not saying this to defend the design decisions we've made, but to criticize listing a game's nerfs as telling us anything about the quality of a game or how it's changing. I'm always interested in y'all's "things I love about MPQ" and "things I hate about MPQ" lists, and I care very much about putting lots more eggs in the first basket, but I try not to pay too much attention to balancing out what particular players think of as a nerf vs. what particular players think of as a buff. Also, while I am interested in both, I think it makes sense to give more weight to the experience afterthe change than the experience ofthe change: temporary pain can be vital to the long-term health of the game. (The lists you've linked to are also missing some things that I think most forumites would classify as substantial buffs (like the PvP rewards rework) and the nerf list includes some things that are pretty questionable as nerfs (writing patch notes in fiction? we might do that again when it makes sense and can be clear, but we got a lot of complaints that the fictional language made them unnecessarily hard to understand, and I don't think you'd usually call something like that a nerf) but for the reasons above, I'm not going to spend time hashing the details of those lists.) Now returning from game-design-philosophy-land; hope the diversion has been interesting.
Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote: 1. Can the AP costs of the most overpriced powers be lowered? 2. Can the worst fifth covers in the game get a modification?
Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote: 3. Can anything new be added to the sparse historical listing of all buffs? The game has had no major balancing buffs since 2013. 4. Will the long series of nerfs end any time soon?
Demiurge_Will wrote: orionpeace wrote: Because of the "articles" posted by your President/CEO and comments by IceIX, we read that as, "we are actively watching the metrics to determine if this is having a negative impact on revenue generation, talking about said revenue, and unless we see that drop don't expect a change". Changes in revenue trail a change to the rules of the game by so much time and in such subtle ways that, even if we were cold, calculating, soulless, revenue-optimizing evil robots, we'd still be gathering information through all the ways we do: these forums, Twitter/Facebook/Reddit/blogs, emails to us, CS tickets, calling up players or bringing them into the studio and interviewing them, playing the game ourselves, talking to our friends/family/colleagues that play, looking over peoples' shoulders when we see them playing on public transit and starting conversations with them, and using analytics to study at how play patterns are changing (how all of player behavior is changing, not just spending). All of those sources have their shortcomings and biases, and only in the context of all the other information does the last piece, the "metrics", make any sense and lead to actionable intelligence. P.S. I swear I am not an evil robot. P.P.S. That's exactly what an evil robot would say.
orionpeace wrote: Because of the "articles" posted by your President/CEO and comments by IceIX, we read that as, "we are actively watching the metrics to determine if this is having a negative impact on revenue generation, talking about said revenue, and unless we see that drop don't expect a change".
Big Toxi wrote: I don't know if this has been mentioned, but personally: If they would simply up the maximum number of health packs that can regenerate to 10 (double current amount) I would be happy. This would at least allow for a good play session before being faced with a decision to buy health packs. Keep the rate of regeneration the same. That's all!
kidicarus wrote: I hate to be that elitist jerk but d_will is pretty much on the money. Everyone in my alliance has adjusted to the change and we're not one of the big franchise teams. As far as I can see, you only need 600 to get into the top 10 so that's an improvement for most casual players - and considering you only need to get top 100 to get a 3* cover it means that if you try you should be able to make progress. If you're playing smart you shouldn't be playing 2 rounds and then calling it quits because you ran out of healing packs.
Teno1 wrote: To mr Ice.I like the new system because now there is variation and not the same (happy meal) team over and over again
While Bartle acknowledged that free-to-play was a "great revenue model" right now, various inherent qualities would undermine its popularity. "It will start to tail off because the people who play the games will recognise when they're about to be nickled and dimed, and stop playing them,