Why Healing is Gone: It's Boring

Nemek

It's been a long time since I've written a new thread to play Devil's Advocate, but now seems like an appropriate time. Early warning - it's a long one.

There's been a lot of talk lately about the soon-to-be-reality of True Healing and the motivations that put the change into motion - this thread is to talk about what I believe those motivations to be and how it lines up with many of the controversial decisions put into action in the past (and why it's not increased health pack usage.)

Edit for clarity:
The purpose of the thread isn't to say that the removal of healing will be a boon to players or that everybody will be able to reach greater heights when healing is removed or that this makes the 2*->3* transition any easier or harder. The intent is to show why the mechanic shouldn't exist in it's previous state and why it's in-line with the overall goal of removing tedium from the game and not a move to drive health pack sales. If the health pack poll is any indication (and it's really not, but let's just believe), the change will have zero effect on health pack purchases. The devs have a decent idea of how they want players to progress from the Prologue to 3*-land, and that was in effect before the healing change. If progression is severely altered due to the healing change, I would fully expect other changes to occur to re-align progression...and it won't be propped up by tedious mechanics.

TLDR: Prologue healing is a chore. It's tedious and un-fun (the results, however, can lead to plenty fun). But, since it's available, players feel forced to partake in it to remain competitive among their peers. Game mechanics that reward tedium and boring gameplay should not exist. Similarly, game mechanics that "force" users to use certain characters should also not exist. The system needed to change.

Player Motivation - Gaining an Advantage

This game is highly competitive, particularly in the top 5% of players. For those top percentage of players, winning is often the primary objective, so they are always looking for little edges to gain an advantage in relation to their competitors. It's something that's inevitable, and players will take advantage of every edge they can get, even if the method of doing so is completely un-fun, since the overall objective of winning is the goal. Players wanting to win would feel compelled to adopt any strategy that would give them an edge, since not adopting those strategies would put them at a disadvantage.

A Boring Advantage Is Not Good Design
We've seen a number of strategies surface over the lifetime of MPQ that gave players advantages, and most all of them are completely boring. Most of the time, the strategies revolve completely on doing some sort of mundane task that would hardly be considered playing the game.

Specifically, these are the ones I'll be talking about:

• Skipping. Players would skip opponents endlessly until they got a favorable match-up/points combination. This would often outweigh actually playing matches. (In the pre-nerf Rags/AP Boosts era, 30 second matches were the norm for all top players...likely putting Sentry+Daken to shame.)
• Tanking. Players would retreat-tank entire rosters full of characters in order to "hide" from other top players in PvP or to reduce scaling in PvE.

Both of these methods were considered fairly boring - there's no enjoyment in it. Nobody sits around thinking that they love watching Yelena bite the dust constantly or that tirelessly watching for high point totals on repeated skips while just barely glancing at the opponent's team is a good idea for a fun-filled Friday night. If a friend came over and I wanted to show him this awesome game I was playing and I spent 2 minutes skipping opponents or killing off BagMan for the umpteenth time, it would be the worst advertisement ever.

Eliminate Boring Content

So, those two methods of gaining an advantage needed to go.

• Skipping. Victory bonuses were added to the game. Interestingly, both positive and negative feedback were introduced to the mechanic. I'm uncertain on just how effective the change was, though I suspect skipping on a whole has been reduced across the board, even if a large percentage of the reduced skipping behavior is isolated to lightning rounds.
• Tanking. Many changes have been made to tanking in the past - lightning rounds had a much less effect on overall MMR, retreating tank teams were no longer being displayed on defense (which is now reverted, though possibly due to alliance retreat tactics?), and finally retreats not counting as losses altogether. Unfortunately, many of these changes just led to even more tanking...while also creating this "Don't talk about Tank Club" mentality that many top alliances adopted that was oh so entertaining to watch.

While the methods used to curb skipping and tanking possibly have questionable effectiveness, the motivation for those changes were clear - gaining an advantage through mind-numbing tactics is not the goal of the game. The devs don't want players to feel compelled to use very boring strategies in order to achieve their goals of winning tournaments.

Healing
Healing falls right into the same bucket as Skipping/Tanking in terms of being an un-fun way of gaining an advantage. A player could spend a third to half of their time in some random Prologue node with opponents far lower in level than them just to add a couple thousand health back on their characters. Few people went to Prologue Heal and thought about how fun Prologue healing was and that they were super excited to show those lvl 30 goons who's boss. (I'm sure some people went in with the idea of "It's like a new mini-game! See how many blues I can get without having a countdown tile hit!"...I don't know.)

But, players feel compelled to do so, because it gives them an advantage over those that don't prologue heal and enables them to keep up with players who do prologue heal. (Technically, most top players stopped prologue healing a long time ago, but it's still very much true for most players in the 2* range.)

In-game healing follows a pretty similar line of thought. 2* players feel compelled to use OBW - they don't have much other choice. They either use OBW or fall behind everybody who does. So naturally, all of your teams consist of OBW and all of your opponents do, too. This is boring (and pretty well chronicled in a number of threads all over the forum.)

This is the motivation for "True Healing." Prologue healing is boring. Using the same character and facing the same character all the time is boring. The changes introduced in "True Healing" are designed to make it less boring...so that you no longer feel compelled to do some of most tedious **** just to stay in-line with your opponents.

Gaining An Advantage The Fun Way
Instead of the boring ways to gain an advantage, the devs want to focus more on fun ways.

• Deep rosters/roosters. If the whole point of this game is to get covers and invest ISO into them, then you darn sure hope that having a large collection is an advantage for you (sorry Flo98). You see this in effect most prominently in having featured/boosted characters in PvP/PvE tournies and very much so in Heroics. Gaining covers and putting a collection together is fun (I hope it is, at least, it's probably the main point of playing the game.) Thinking of how characters synergize together and putting together optimal builds for your individual playing style is fun.
• The meta-game. Probably more controversial, but a lot of players have a ton of fun piecing together the meta-game and designing optimal strategies - whether it be in PvP or PvE.

The devs are always trying to push players into gaining advantages through non-tedious/boring methods, particularly the two above.

Health Packs
I think a lot of people overestimate the impact of health packs on the game, currently. Health packs are such a bad investment in terms of cost-effectiveness, it's likely never used by 99.99% of the playerbase in any sort of consistent fashion. I don't think I've heard of anybody that has bought a health pack outside of extreme desperate measures ("Oops, I accidentally wiped my entire team twice 45 minutes before this PvE ends".) Any HP spent on consistent sustained health pack usage should probably be used to buy covers outright. I don't see this changing.

Conclusion
The change in how healing works falls very well in line with previous changes to discourage tedious gameplay to gain an advantage. The devs are (and should) be encouraging tactics that are overall more fun. Any tactic that feels like a chore...like excessive skipping, tanking, prologue healing, or compulsion to choose only very specific characters should definitely be eliminated from the game. There are most certainly a lot of things that can be improved with the game from a fundamentals perspective (and, most certainly, from a communications perspective), and we'll just have to see how those things play out while giving our suggestions and feedback as we go along.

The Future Obstacles
Having said all of that, I think that there are a lot of things the game can improve on and there are a lot of obstacles from a fairly macro perspective that need to be figured out regarding player motivation.

• Everybody wants to feel like a superhero/winner. In a game about fielding your favorite Marvel super-powered heroes...there are a lot of losers and very few winners. In order to get all of the 3* covers, you need to be top 1% individually and top 0.005% alliance-wise (I used 20,000 as the number of total alliances)? Rough. Many on the forum can top-10 a PvP in their sleep, but that is far far far the exception. How can we make everybody feel like they are kicking **** all of the time? In a game with so many "losers", that's really difficult. The top is actually getting rather crowded with large teams of 141s all over the place. At some point, 2* players won't be able to displace a player with a load of maxed 3*s, since there will be no more room at the top. How do we make it so players have a clear path to achieving their goals and not discourage them by putting them up against high-leveled teams or have them get "picked on" by those teams at the same time?
• Disconnect between PvP success and roster size. We've all seen that you really only need two characters to completely dominate a PvP tournament. You can go in with Patch/Mags/loaner or Daken/Sentry/loaner and wipe up. This is obviously contrary to what the devs have in mind for what constitutes having "fun" advantages of large and diverse rosters. Eventually, people will feel compelled to go with a very specific top two characters....how can that be prevented? How do we reward players for their previous effort?
• Rewarding players who take on higher challenges. Both in terms of high-MMR PvP and high-scaling PvE, there is little reason to actively seek out harder competition in the game. How do we encourage players to face tough challenges head on? Instead of trying to manipulate the system into giving them easy missions?
• Self-Healing. This one is a lot more micro...but I'm a little bit worried about Daken/Wolvie holding onto the old healing effect. For as much as I've said that players felt compelled to use OBW/Spidey...I worry that the same compulsion will carry on over to Daken/Wolvie.

Maestro145

I don't heal in prologue since season 1. Just work on your roster and when you have 8-10 141s, you do not need to heal at all!

Unknown

I see what you're saying, and here's my (and probably everyone else's) response.

1) This change would be OK if you can come out of a battle with the max that you went in with (meaning you go in full health and you fully heal by the end, you come out fully healed). This prevents prologue healing but still makes healing worthwhile. Did they do that? Can't really tell because the explanation doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but it doesn't seem like it works this way.

2) Roster diversity is great. We all want to see different characters. The problems isn't that OBW's heals are too strong. The problem is that there are no other viable 2* characters that work well with the good 2* characters, which by the way, happen to all be G/R/Y. Characters that can work with them are OBW, MNMags, MHawkeye, Moonstone, Daken and Bullseye. Now of that list, only OBW is any good. MNMags and MHawkeye have potential, but their reliance on random CD tiles that take way too long ruin them. Moonstone's skills are pretty much horrible. Daken and Bullseye can't even get to 85. So when a 2* player has to run a team, they'll pick one of the G/R/Y 2*'s that are viable (Ares, Thor, even Wolvie) and then a character that uses off-colors - oh wait, only OBW is any good. So they pick OBW.

3) 3* characters are useless until they get ~10 covers. How do you get those covers? Win PvP. How do you win PvP without 3* characters? Run a viable 2* team. What's a viable team? Refer to point 2. Now once OBW dies, what then? Switch it up and use Bullseye? That's how you don't win PvP and get 3* covers. Here's the answer: make 3 different OBW characters. That's going to be the meta now. Throw out MNMags, CStorm, Wolvie, maybe even Thor. Make 3 Ares. Make 3 OBW. Now you can win PvP again with a 2* team and get those 3* covers. That's what this change is going to do to the game. Not promote roster diversity.

HairyDave

It's a good read but in my opinion the main reason OBW is such a mainstay of 2* teams (and let's be honest a lot of 3* teams too) isn't her healing - it's her downright overpowered Aggressive Recon. Any healing done through Anti-Grav is a bonus.

Not once have I ever lost a game to her that didn't involve a sudden cascade of purple. Blue cascades? Not a big deal, I just have to do more damage. Purple can be - and often is - a game ender.

Or maybe it's just how I play

Maestro145 wrote:

I don't heal in prologue since season 1. Just work on your roster and when you have 8-10 141s, you do not need to heal at all!

And that's great but I've been playing since December and I still don't have one thanks to the shotgun nature of rewards (and some poor performances on my part but it's a feedback loop) - and I'm a long way ahead of a lot of people.

I know it's meant as sarcasm but that's clearly the only way to actually progress well at all now.

Art Flash

I tend to agree with this honestly, if not reluctantly. I really would like there to just be more characters that heal personally. But there is something to be said about forcing a player to be less reliant on feeling a mandatory need for a healer.
The good thing is, OBW/Spiderman/maybe She-Hulk staples will fall drastically. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'll be very glad to finally be able to use blue for something besides OBW's heal, that and not have to fight near identical teams over and over.
From the developer's perspective, it probably does make more sense to gut our attachment to healers and force us to diversify our team than make a plethora of healing based characters to switch out what became a mandatory healer slot on a team roster. Especially since the number of possible Dark Reign characters is starting to dwindle as more are added to the current cast.
While it hurts to think that I'm going to be battling the amount of health packs I have on me constantly, it does also do something I have not had much need to do aside from Heroic events, and that's level out my roster across the board. Now I have more incentive to do this over leveling merely the current focused character. Now I need to think in terms of backup and fallback teams as well.

I might just be being optimistic here, but maybe this will be a good thing in the long run, even if it feels like I just got punched in the stomach in some respects, or maybe a better analogy is that I'm already anticipating the detox from having such steady healing for so long, heh.

FierceKiwi

HairyDave wrote:

It's a good read but in my opinion the main reason OBW is such a mainstay of 2* teams (and let's be honest a lot of 3* teams too) isn't her healing - it's her downright overpowered Aggressive Recon. Any healing done through Anti-Grav is a bonus.

Not once have I ever lost a game to her that didn't involve a sudden cascade of purple. Blue cascades? Not a big deal, I just have to do more damage. Purple can be - and often is - a game ender.

Or maybe it's just how I play

Pretty much purple on defense is often a game ender. But on offense I think alot of players (especially 3* players running her + Punisher) run her to heal (I know I did/do).

FierceKiwi

Art Flash wrote:

I might just be being optimistic here, but maybe this will be a good thing in the long run, even if it feels like I just got punched in the stomach in some respects, or maybe a better analogy is that I'm already anticipating the detox from having such steady healing for so long, heh.

You're being incredibly optimistic if you think this is going to remove any OBW from the game other than the OBW + max Punisher teams...she's still pretty much the only viable partner for Thor/Wolvie/Ares in 2* land...best case scenario you see a few more people try to run MNMags and CStorm teams.

over_clocked

Maestro145 wrote:

I don't heal in prologue since season 1. Just work on your roster and when you have 8-10 141s, you do not need to heal at all!

Wise guy, how should current 2* players build their rosters now?

Not sure if serious, even.
Edit: hope others are right and that's sarcasm.

Original post is well-written as usual, but you don't make the game more fun by trying to remove an unfun symptom.

Maestro145

locked wrote:

Maestro145 wrote:

I don't heal in prologue since season 1. Just work on your roster and when you have 8-10 141s, you do not need to heal at all!

Wise guy, how should current 2* players build their rosters now?

Not sure if serious, even.
Edit: hope others are right and that's sarcasm.

Original post is well-written as usual, but you don't make the game more fun by trying to remove an unfun symptom.

I often see, 2* rosters getting top 5 top10 in my bracket. So... it is not too hard, i guess.

Once I was also 2* player and somehow got my first 141, then second... It is not easy, but possible.

over_clocked

Could it be, on the off-chance, that oBW helped obtain all those covers as she extended playtime?
For me, she did.

Maestro145

locked wrote:

Could it be, by an off-chance, that oBW helped obtain all those covers as she extended playtime?
For me, she did.

my obw is 14 level now, that time i didn't have her or maybe she was 6 level
So, the answer is ... no

Art Flash

FierceKiwi wrote:

Art Flash wrote:

I might just be being optimistic here, but maybe this will be a good thing in the long run, even if it feels like I just got punched in the stomach in some respects, or maybe a better analogy is that I'm already anticipating the detox from having such steady healing for so long, heh.

You're being incredibly optimistic if you think this is going to remove any OBW from the game other than the OBW + max Punisher teams...she's still pretty much the only viable partner for Thor/Wolvie/Ares in 2* land...best case scenario you see a few more people try to run MNMags and CStorm teams.

Yeah, likely so. But who knows, maybe some upcoming characters will mesh well with Punisher later on. In either case, as I see it, the developers likely debated whether or not to do this, and because they actually did, I have to hope it's a change for the better ultimately. If it's not, well, at least I've grown to appreciate how effective someone in a fishnet costume can be, hah.

HairyDave

Art Flash wrote:

at least I've grown to appreciate how effective someone in a fishnet costume can be, hah.

Fishnets are ALWAYS effective at distraction

Unknown

Maestro145 wrote:

I don't heal in prologue since season 1. Just work on your roster and when you have 8-10 141s, you do not need to heal at all!

I barely heal in prologue now, and I have 9 141s, yet this change still gets me pissed. It feels like they are trying to ROB $$$ from players, which is disgusting.
Instead of "roster diversity", why not try "mode diversity" to attract more players?

Maestro145

HairyDave wrote:

Maestro145 wrote:

I don't heal in prologue since season 1. Just work on your roster and when you have 8-10 141s, you do not need to heal at all!

And that's great but I've been playing since December and I still don't have one thanks to the shotgun nature of rewards (and some poor performances on my part but it's a feedback loop) - and I'm a long way ahead of a lot of people.

I know it's meant as sarcasm but that's clearly the only way to actually progress well at all now.

You have to invest either time or money to be top player. Also you have to understand, how the game works. It takes time to learn. I started winning just after i joined 5dv.

Maestro145

Grazzt wrote:

Maestro145 wrote:

I don't heal in prologue since season 1. Just work on your roster and when you have 8-10 141s, you do not need to heal at all!

I barely heal in prologue now, and I have 9 141s, yet this change still gets me pissed. It feels like they are trying to ROB $$$ from players, which is disgusting.
Instead of "roster diversity", why not try "mode diversity" to attract more players?

The decision is made by DEVs, so you can be pissed, or not. This changes nothing I learned this from this and other games

I am not pissed, i just try to adopt my strategy to new conditions and maybe update covers (this is true for any kind of change)

Unknown

Maestro145 wrote:

locked wrote:

Could it be, by an off-chance, that oBW helped obtain all those covers as she extended playtime?
For me, she did.

my obw is 14 level now, that time i didn't have her or maybe she was 6 level
So, the answer is ... no

God for you. Care to enlighten us how you got your 3* roster? Because here's what happens if I play without OBW healing: I win a few matches and then lose because my team got beaten up. Then I heal with health packs and start over. I get maybe 8 games on a really good streak like this - that's completely ignoring PvE, where I usually end up spending most of my health packs. That sure seems like a good way to compete in the bracket. Indeed, in my alliance I noticed it again and again - a low scorer gets OBW and suddenly their score damn near doubles per PVP. The game is also not the same as it was back when you got a set of 3*s worth using.

Healing is boring. You know what else is boring? Having two viable PvP shells in the 2* range - MNMags+Storm, which gets eaten alive because it's a free win, and OBW+RGY. I sold off my optimally-covered Moonstone the other day because I noticed that I never found any reason to actually use her. Most 2*s are absolutely worthless, then there's a handful which work well as part of a combo, then there's OBW and the RGY tanks. And with that, we're supposed to believe that the idea here is to foster deeper rosters? Deeper roster apparently means "3 copies each of Thor and OBW".

over_clocked

Maestro, who did you use then, cStorm/MMN? Thor/Ares? And who covered blue, purple and black? Who did you run to counter enemy oBW?
Just curious. I had a friend playing who was doing fine without oBW early on and only added her to his roster after having several other 2*s. He reported enjoying the game much more with OBW though. He stopped playing for other reasons (like sharding) after Season 1.

HairyDave

Maestro145 wrote:

I started winning just after i joined 5dv.

And that's clearly a practical solution for everybody. Join a top 10 alliance and you can win too!

Bowgentle

Good points, Nemek.

The problem is: Devs have known about the problems you state in your "future obstacles" for months, and haven't done anything that shows that they have any idea how to incentivise risk taking, just taking what your MMR serves you, etc.

They just continue to take away the workarounds that allow us to make their flawed systems bearable, instead of working on the core problems.

Can I take on 141s? Sure. Do I have any motivation to do it in every PVP right from the start? Not as long as I get the same rewards as everyone else. So I tank to get to 700 unmolested and then start PVP for real.

I don't even care about healing, I'd just like to see some steps in the direction of facing the underlying problems of why people tank their PVP MMR and do the most bizarre things to keep their PVE scaling in check.

Why not run a PVE with fixed levels again for a change? Something throwaway like IM40 rewards would have been perfect.
Why not make a tourney with different reward tiers, like it has been suggested for months?
Why not bring any real new content instead of throwing out new chars every two weeks? (I get it, new chars is like printing money).
And with new content I mean new game modes, and whatever you can think of - NOT new story missions against the same old Dark Avengers (now with extra UDaken for extra annoyance).

I get it - new stuff except extra chars costs development money. And from the servers dying consistently when rewards are going out, I guess money is tight. Still, that should be how you motivate your players, not by punishing them for gaming the system _which they only do because you don't give them a reason not to_.

Unknown

Read mostly just the conclusion onward as the first part could be surmised by the title. As for the future issues, some possible ideas:

1.2 birds with one stone...make a seperate tournement. They did a hard/normal bracket in pve, so why not in pvp? 2 ways this can be done. 1. You can enter both but only your higher score counts towards seasons and you only receive the reward from your higher placing tournament. The normal doesn't allow enemies over lvl 100, while the had is maximum lvls. The lower tournament gives good rewards, but doesn't have as much ISO/hp/(any)4**** compared with the higher mode. Option 2, same except.instead of playing.both you only.get to pick.one.and.are locked.into.that grouping for that tournament. This also means higher players can use those 2** and low 3*** they normal can't vs everyone else's 3***. The lack of 4**** isn't an issue for a new player (even once 4**** are finally good) as they have rate constraints while it giveaway midrange players some options for both. Top players will likely go to the higher up bracket. Nicely seperately flings without penalizing early or late players and let's the middle of the road ppl have the option to choose where they think they fit best. The 2nd bird is that you are being rewarded for fighting higher opponents as most of the ppl in the hard bracket will have higher characters and you will be getting a better award list for fighting those harder enemies...better progress rewards too.


2.diversity is a much bigger issue as ppl cannot afford to have a diverse roster. A seperately bracket would do something, as it giveaway you am option to play with your lower guys, but doesn't truly change the problem. Someone mention of daily activity made me think maybe a good answer would be for each pvp to have a second set of progress rewards. This set is based, not on your score, but on your ability to complete creatin activities. 500 ISO for winning once with a 1* on your team. 1000 for winning matches in the pvp with 10 different characters. 25 hp for completing a match with full health (finally newly double needed spidey might have a purpose!)...things like that. Things that either make you work hard or use/avoid different characters in order to win extra rewards. Devs can even make.some money here and HERE place something like "win a .match using a team of "newest character" "required" and spiderman. Now all.of a sudden someone might think if its worth spending hp to draw a token in order to earn 50 hp from completing the task. If they fail, they don't blame the devs..they did nothing here but give out more goodies. Sure, ppl.can complain about anything, but founded complaints and bitchen' are not the same.

3.self healing is more of a "when we get to it" matter. I don't know if they are really op and overuse if d3 brings .some other changes along too (see .#4)

4. Team heals being removed is good imo. Ppl say other option like removing prologue would work...but I don't think that hits the real.issue, which is extended play from character not balanced around extended play. If I can use player X to drop everyone on both teams to 1 hp, there is balance there to some extent. That character is balanced around an even Exchange of insane damage to insane self damage. If they suddenly can get back to full hp with a healer, that character balance is broken. Team heals in a game like.this, where you have hp as a buyabke commodity, never worked imo. It was fine, but it wasn't the best way to go about it imo.

None of the self healers so far have canonical healing either, so the loss is good in that regard too. As I've stated recently, they should change all team heals (all temp heals ARE team.heals....) into a new grouping of "armor" moves where a set hp amount is added, able to go above max hp, insanely upon use. It's similar to the taken style healing ice is talking about except you can use it effectively regardless of hp % atm...making it far mire viable. Effectively, it makes team heals into team def tiles that cannot be removed and are more effextive vs single hits compared with def tiles being good vs more smaller hits. It's what strike vs attack tiles should be.

To do with this, lower the recharge times by about 25-40% and or increase the max number of "rechargeable" health packs. on that note, d3 can make increasing you max rechargeable health packs something you can buy. nobody really buys health packs because there isn't value in it usually beyond emergency situations. Buying a RECHARGEABLE health pack upgrade, ppl would buy, I guarantee it. Maybe not at firstbut over time they wild see the merit and likely dump some of thier extra hp there. Maybe make the first 3-5 upgrades really cheap, basically upgrading most everyoneand then increase lists similar to offer slots (except steeper jumps) so maybe #6 costs 500 ISO. Slot 7 costs 1000 ISO. Slot 8 costs 25 hp. Slot costs 50 hp. Slot 10 costs 75 hp and from there it .costs 100 hp per an upgrade for the next 2 upgrades and increase by 50 hp every 2? Cuz, now all of a sudden ppl are buying health packs (in a way) and they STILL will buy those emergency health packs when they need to. Plus, if ppl.and there tendencies while playing rpg are any indication, ppl lobe buying equipment slots and upgrades just because. So expect whale to be maxing these slots out too. Its a win win that mitigated some of ppl issue with the team healing removal (especially combined with mt armor change).