Finally, destruction of bad metagame!

Phillipes

_RiO_ wrote:

Dauthi wrote:

Forcing players to play constantly due to prologue healing also increases burnout for many. It makes much more sense to increase health regeneration and allow people to spread their gameplay through out the day while still being able to compete, in fact it makes even mores sense with the recent refresh rates to PVE. Since it affects all players it means that casual players will have a slightly better chance at competing and all players will have to play less to keep up with those who used to play all due thanks to a terrible metagame.

It also means players of Steam / PC edition of the game are now royally screwed out of any chance to effectively compete and place for 3* rewards.

PC players are only able to play in two bursts per day; a short period in the (very) early morning before leaving for work, and one big long chunk in the evening. They get no benefit out of the sped up health regeneration and they get no benefit out of the regeneration of the basic 5 health packs. Meanwhile, players of the mobile editions of the game get to spread out their matches over the day and use the regeneration mechanic to its full benefit.

What are these players supposed to do? Cave in and buy health packs just to place themselves at a competitive level with mobile players that pay nothing?
No; I think those players are going to have a mass exodus away from the game and to greener pastures.

ABSOLUTELY TRUE !!!!! I´m steam player, I´m playing game EXACTLY like you just wrote it!
I´m not competitive now, how could I when I can play only few games a day ??
Ofc I´m considering not playing this game anymore. I would give +1000 reputation for that clarification.

Dauthi

Phillipes wrote:

Are we playing same game?? What you wrote is wrong from beginnig to end. Casual players dont have any chance now to score properly. 2*/3* transition is gone now !

If you were healing to play longer you are not a casual player in the slightest.

And you think that all play this game from cell phone? I´m not ! I play it via Steam, so I can´t play when I´m in work !

Do you think all players on phones are mangers/executives that can sit at their desk and play phone games instead of working? That would be great, but most people go to work, unfortunately, to work.

Phillipes

bonfire01 wrote:

Your understanding of the issue is somewhat shallow.

If you think this is a zero sum kind of change for 2* players then explain this one to me....

Player A has a 2* roster and can only play after work and before bed. He puts aside 3 hours (he likes the game) and plays in that time.
Player B has a 2* roster and pops onto the game regularly throughout the day. He goes on 3 times a day for 1 hour.

Pre healing nerf both have a chance to do well. Player B can get more use out of health packs because they are regenerated for each time he plays and his heroes have mostly patched themselves up if they were damaged but player A can just use OBW in fights and keep in fighting shape saving health packs for bad enemy cascades.

Post healing nerf player B will struggle to play for a full hour on his 5 free health packs + 1 regenerating but he can still get work done thanks to his packs regenerating between play sessions. Player A on the other hand is screwed. He can play for 45mins-1hour (less if unlucky) on his 5 health packs + 1 regenerating in that time then what? do nothing for a couple of hours while he waits on enough health packs to play again and get a few more matches out?

This change does NOTHING but hurt 2* players ability to actually play the game, especially if they want to do it on their own schedule (how dare they!!!!). It benefits well established 3* players whilst simultaneously harming anyone in their MMR bracket who's not got enough 3* heroes to swap them out OR one of the super effective (overpowered?) combos and has been relying on OBW to bridge the gap. They will now struggle even more to progress their 3*s unless they are willing to pay, or their alliance is picking them up covers (OR they are able to play every few hours for 30 minutes cause that's a common thing).

It's a **** change.

Yes I´m in the same situation you just described.. I can play few games a day when I´m back from work. I´m screwed. +1 man

Unknown

Dauthi wrote:

True, but there is a much better bandaid in the form of tanking. It's easier and it doesn't disrupt PVE.

Exactly what about having to intentionally lose a series of battles so as to be battling appropriately leveled opponents do you find better, easier, and less disruptive to PvE than collecting the AP to heal in-match?

Unknown

Dauthi wrote:

Phillipes wrote:

Are we playing same game?? What you wrote is wrong from beginnig to end. Casual players dont have any chance now to score properly. 2*/3* transition is gone now !

If you were healing to play longer you are not a casual player in the slightest.

I disagree 1000%. I used prologue healing (and Spidey) for the months that I was a pretty hardcore player.

Why make such a blanket statement like that when you do not know each persons play style or hours played?

Dauthi

MikeHock wrote:

Dauthi wrote:

Phillipes wrote:

Are we playing same game?? What you wrote is wrong from beginnig to end. Casual players dont have any chance now to score properly. 2*/3* transition is gone now !

If you were healing to play longer you are not a casual player in the slightest.

I disagree 1000%. I used prologue healing (and Spidey) for the months that I was a pretty hardcore player.

Why make such a blanket statement like that when you do not know each persons play style or hours played?

Because a casual player is extremely unlikely to sit down and play for extended times due to the nature of their definition. The definition of casual: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=c ... 8#q=casual

relaxed and unconcerned.

AgCenturion397 wrote:

Dauthi wrote:

True, but there is a much better bandaid in the form of tanking. It's easier and it doesn't disrupt PVE.

Exactly what about having to intentionally lose a series of battles so as to be battling appropriately leveled opponents do you find better, easier, and less disruptive to PvE than collecting the AP to heal in-match?

It takes less time than consistently healing your characters. You only need to tank once per event and that takes around 15 minutes max. Since tanking lowers the levels of characters you have to fight by a lot, if you were to choose healing or tanking, tanking would be by far the best choice when considering efficiency and difficulty. Healing disrupts PVE by allowing players to continuously play and push the point totals farther up.

_RiO_

Dauthi wrote:

Because a casual player is extremely unlikely to sit down and play for extended times due to the nature of their definition. The definition of casual: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=c ... 8#q=casual

relaxed and unconcerned.

Please excuse me while I go and casually watch this 2hr movie.
Please excuse me while I go and have a casual 2hr bike ride across the country side.

The point here is that like many other activities you perform casually, you can also casually play this game for a few hours on end as a time sink, or without thinking critically about each and every move you make. That still makes you a casual player.

Unknown

What would you consider casual in a 2.5 day event? How many hours or how much time?

Spoit

MikeHock wrote:

What would you consider casual in a 2.5 day event? How many hours or how much time?

You probably wouldn't hit top 10, but you could probably do okayish just doing extra clears whenever you have time to minimize the amount of time you sit at full stacks

Unknown

Dauthi wrote:

AgCenturion397 wrote:

Dauthi wrote:

True, but there is a much better bandaid in the form of tanking. It's easier and it doesn't disrupt PVE.

Exactly what about having to intentionally lose a series of battles so as to be battling appropriately leveled opponents do you find better, easier, and less disruptive to PvE than collecting the AP to heal in-match?

It takes less time than consistently healing your characters. You only need to tank once per event and that takes around 15 minutes max. Since tanking lowers the levels of characters you have to fight by a lot, if you were to choose healing or tanking, tanking would be by far the best choice when considering efficiency and difficulty. Healing disrupts PVE by allowing players to continuously play and push the point totals farther up.

It does not take less time to consistently heal in-match than it does to consistently tank to the point that you mitigate the negative effects of true healing on PvE play time. If you're talking about prologue healing, which admittedly I rarely ever used, perhaps the time commitment required for both is more even (but i highly doubt prologue healing was more time consuming). However, collecting 9 blue AP and casting ADG is simply never going to take as long as suiciding multiple teams against multiple opponents/nodes then having to wait hours for health regeneration in order to play again and take advantage of the reduced scaling. Your 15 minute once per event estimate, which in my personal experience is far from accurate, is also irrelevant because even if it were accurate in-match healing is done concurrently with PvE play. Net additional gameplay is negligible. Tanking, however, results in exponentially more wasted gameplay time because it always has to be done separately from any matches you want to play for actual progression in the event.

Again, in my personal experience, the effects of tanking are also not as drastic or persistent as you represent here. Often involving sacrificing large numbers of characters repeatedly over the course of events to see a marginal 5%-10% reduction in enemy power levels that is then reversed almost immediately upon defeating said enemies again. So not only is it more time consuming that healing in-match, but a worse and less efficient tool to deal with the poor scaling and MMR algorithms if you would still like to actually place in PvE in the foreseeable future. A team still ends up being beaten to a pulp, but may be able to eke out one victory in between the five to ten (intentional and unintentional) trouncings instead of being able to play through nodes once, take damage, but mitigate it and continue to the next node on their clear.

High point totals is not disruption, it's gameplay. Being forced to buy health packs in order to successfully complete a PvE push, suicide your roster repeatedly in order to have marginally more manageable enemy teams to fight (and still needing to buy health packs to revive your dead roster so you can then fight those teams once, rinse, and repeat), or just not place for a few events until your MMR/scaling is 'sorted out naturally' by the system is. Players are coerced into playing on the schedule set forth by the developers rather than their own and nothing is more disruptive to the player base, and by extension every aspect of the game, than that.

Dauthi

_RiO_ wrote:

Dauthi wrote:

Because a casual player is extremely unlikely to sit down and play for extended times due to the nature of their definition. The definition of casual: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=c ... 8#q=casual

relaxed and unconcerned.

Please excuse me while I go and casually watch this 2hr movie.
Please excuse me while I go and have a casual 2hr bike ride across the country side.

The point here is that like many other activities you perform casually, you can also casually play this game for a few hours on end as a time sink, or without thinking critically about each and every move you make. That still makes you a casual player.

"The term casual gamer can be used to distinguish between play styles of level-based character advance in nonlinear games with respect to the amount of dedicated hours of play."

Found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamer

AgCenturion397 wrote:

It does not take less time to consistently heal in-match than it does to consistently tank to the point that you mitigate the negative effects of true healing on PvE play time. If you're talking about prologue healing, which admittedly I rarely ever used, perhaps the time commitment required for both is more even (but i highly doubt prologue healing was more time consuming). However, collecting 9 blue AP and casting ADG is simply never going to take as long as suiciding multiple teams against multiple opponents/nodes then having to wait hours for health regeneration in order to play again and take advantage of the reduced scaling. Your 15 minute once per event estimate, which in my personal experience is far from accurate, is also irrelevant because even if it were accurate in-match healing is done concurrently with PvE play. Net additional gameplay is negligible. Tanking, however, results in exponentially more wasted gameplay time because it always has to be done separately from any matches you want to play for actual progression in the event.

15 minutes is pretty accurate in my experience. How long does it take to join a match then hit retreat to kill off a team? Tanking can reduce your opponents to levels as low as 10, and fighting these enemies means receiving virtually no damage. You can do this until about 600 points in my experience as well, while opponents slowly increasing to around level 60ish max. How long do you estimate a prologue healing match takes? How many times would you have to do it to hit around 600?

Tanking also has virtually no effect on PVE, while healing does, though that is a seperate point. In my opinion healing was hindering PVE (for casual players) more than anything else. Players with a lot of time and a healer were able to create massive gaps between themselves and other players.

Again, in my personal experience, the effects of tanking are also not as drastic or persistent as you represent here. Often involving sacrificing large numbers of characters repeatedly over the course of events to see a marginal 5%-10% reduction in enemy power levels that is then reversed almost immediately upon defeating said enemies again. So not only is it more time consuming that healing in-match, but a worse and less efficient tool to deal with the poor scaling and MMR algorithms if you would still like to actually place in PvE in the foreseeable future. A team still ends up being beaten to a pulp, but may be able to eke out one victory in between the five to ten (intentional and unintentional) trouncings instead of being able to play through nodes once, take damage, but mitigate it and continue to the next node on their clear.

High point totals is not disruption, it's gameplay. Being forced to buy health packs in order to successfully complete a PvE push, suicide your roster repeatedly in order to have marginally more manageable enemy teams to fight (and still needing to buy health packs to revive your dead roster so you can then fight those teams once, rinse, and repeat), or just not place for a few events until your MMR/scaling is 'sorted out naturally' by the system is. Players are coerced into playing on the schedule set forth by the developers rather than their own and nothing is more disruptive to the player base, and by extension every aspect of the game, than that.

In my experience tanking is this drastic. I am not sure what others are doing that I am not, or what I am doing that they aren't.

I won't argue that tanking isn't a stupid system, my argument is that healing was worse.

The system is set to make it harder for hardcore players and easier for casual by taking away the ability to sink in large chunks of time. Small chunks throughout the day caters to someone who has things to do throughout their day. I believe that most phone games try to give advantages to casual players, and this is no different. They have given this game a competitive edge, which seems at odds with the model, but who says casual gaming can't compete? I would be willing to bet that most of their players are casual, and that is why they have adopted this model.

This doesn't mean that hardcore players won't still have an advantage, they always will. This has just given them a handicap over casual players.

Unknown

They've clearly decided that stunlocking and efficient healing is not something they want to try and balance around. Instead of teams being able to play almost indefinitely (with or without an occasional dip into an easy PVE node to heal without serious risk) they're putting everyone on the same footing with regard to health packs.

I just wish they'd turn the ISO tap back on a bit more (bonuses for first completion would be nice! There's still nodes in PVE events not worth doing now that those are gone) so people could level more characters more easily, which to some extent mitigates the problem.

killerkoala

Zhirrzh wrote:

They've clearly decided that stunlocking and efficient healing is not something they want to try and balance around. Instead of teams being able to play almost indefinitely (with or without an occasional dip into an easy PVE node to heal without serious risk) they're putting everyone on the same footing with regard to health packs.

I just wish they'd turn the ISO tap back on a bit more (bonuses for first completion would be nice! There's still nodes in PVE events not worth doing now that those are gone) so people could level more characters more easily, which to some extent mitigates the problem.

you must buy iso for money, no more freebie iso. that is why you must plunk down money to pay to play.

Unknown

Even if I accept that prologue healing had to go (and I mostly do) and I accept that in-match healing was creating imbalance (which I do not, but we'll move passed that for now), "True Healing" is probably the worst possible fix.

IceIX said prologue healing wasn't fun, and he's sort of right. But what WAS fun was finding a good Slacker radio station and spending an afternoon playing MPQ. Maybe some players preferred the game in short spurts, and maybe some others have rearranged their play time to compensate for these changes, but there's no good reason to dictate to players how they apportion their game time. It's intrusive, disruptive and counterintuitive to general game design.

If the devs had spared an extra hour's thought on how to go ahead with true healing in a way that doesn't dictate playing schedules, they could've come up with something. A poster on these forums mentioned a daily limit on health packs, as opposed to the constant refresh. That would be a simple and effective way for Demuirge to accomplish their aims and balance the needs of different types of players.

If the idea was to create roster diversity, that starts with a real effort to balance the roster. Not a 4 month old list that they'll get around to one day, or an off-hand remark a year ago about giving characters with 2 powers a 3rd one. An actual effort. With a little bit of player feedback, half a day's worth of programming and a few hours of testing, most of the underpowered 3* characters could be brought up to par with small tweaks.

But it looks like the OP has devolved to digging up Wikipedia definitions to try to back up a shaky, semantic and misguided argument, so I guess this thread is officially at rock bottom.

Dauthi

RockMonster wrote:

It's intrusive, disruptive and counterintuitive to general game design.

But what if the game is designed to be geared towards casual players? Let's face it, most phone games are not meant to be hardcore, it isn't exactly the gaming field that revolves around this style of gameplay. They bank off of the fact that they are mobile gaming, and people can play here and there throughout their day. I would grant that Steam players are a hardcore bunch, and they are unfortunate to have to be placed with the phone players.

If the devs had spared an extra hour's thought on how to go ahead with true healing in a way that doesn't dictate playing schedules, they could've come up with something. A poster on these forums mentioned a daily limit on health packs, as opposed to the constant refresh. That would be a simple and effective way for Demuirge to accomplish their aims and balance the needs of different types of players.

Where is this post? I agree limiting daily health packs would further help casual players, but not nearly as much as removing healing.

If the idea was to create roster diversity, that starts with a real effort to balance the roster. Not a 4 month old list that they'll get around to one day, or an off-hand remark a year ago about giving characters with 2 powers a 3rd one. An actual effort. With a little bit of player feedback, half a day's worth of programming and a few hours of testing, most of the underpowered 3* characters could be brought up to par with small tweaks.

But it looks like the OP has devolved to digging up Wikipedia definitions to try to back up a shaky, semantic and misguided argument, so I guess this thread is officially at rock bottom.

I agree characters should be rebalanced, and the more I look at the after effects of this patch the more I see it aimed towards helping the casual gamer rather than promoting roster diversity. Promoting roster diversity seems to be more of a side effect.

What was misguided was the illusion of what a casual gamer is. I don't believe this is devolving, but proving my point. I corrected it through a generally accepted definition from Wikipedia. It's too bad you feel that my insight is misguided, but that isn't uncommon, this opinion is shunned among the forums.

Unknown

These changes do not make the game geared more towards casual players. Just the opposite.

When I'm going at this game hardcore I log in multiple times a day to maximize shields in PvP and point refreshes in PvE. When I'm not feeling so competitive I absently smash tiles for an hour during the Daily Show. True Healing benefits my hardcore playstyle, since shield lengths and point refreshes match up pretty well to health pack refreshes, but it kills my casual side, since I can't play a straight hour with no in-match healing to keep my characters up. The game has shifted more towards hardcore. To the players with large rosters that can roll through characters, the ones with the time and drive to schedule playtimes around maximum efficiency.

To my second point, the idea of a daily limit on health packs was a player suggestion, not a developer idea. The developers didn't seem to give player-impact a second thought beyond the sped up healing rates, which only plays in to the hardcore player I described above.

Finally, you're arguing that hardcore and casual players are defined solely by their /played, because Wikipedia told you that. It's an incredibly limiting and inaccurate description.

Check it out. Players A and B both log in at 7:45.

Player A uses Sentry, because he's a little OP right now, then stacks some boosts and rushes through the PvE sub, forward to back to maximize rubberband points. After that, Player A joins the Lightning Round and spends 4 shield to soak retaliations in an attempt at a top 5 placement, and finishes at 9:30.

Player B uses Psylock because Psylock is his favourite. He does a bit of PvE sub unboosted with one eye on the TV. At around 8 he notices a Lightning Round opened up so he joins and beats up the seed teams. Secure in his top 100,000 placement, he grinds his way towards 300 points for the recruit token in the Doom PvP and calls it a night sometime around 9:30.

Because both players have the same amount of time played by the end of the night, you would describe both their playstyles as hardcore? Hardcore and casual are mindsets, not denominations of time. You could definitely play hardcore for an hour or casually for 6, because it's all about how you play.

_RiO_

^ This guy gets it.

Unknown

If i am being generous I would agree that this move is in fact a destruction of bad metagame. However that leaves us with some rubble to sift through. They have changed the game significantly, this is great for some and terrible for others and the deciding factor of whether or not this was a good change over all is what d3 does next.

Tearing out functionality d3 doesn't want is fine in the same way taking out a diseased liver is a good thing. Only if you then put a healthy functioning liver back in. I can even accept that it will take some time for them to see how the changes play out for a short time but the changes to a regeneration are a bandaid, and the patient is still waiting on a new organ.

Unknown

Every time when Im starting new pvp now Im thinking bout this dumb thread. Earlier didnt care what teams Ive as enemies, now Im wasting my time for tanking. So healing during fights was bad metagame (wasnt healing in prologue) but losing with purpose is good metagame...

Edit: Forgot to say how much fun Ive when Im wasting my time during tanking