Healing Compromise [With D3 Q&A]

Demiurge_Will

Cryptobrancus wrote:

...those with healers could play indefinitely and those without were severely disadvantaged by this, and these changed were made to make the game more fair across all players for the long term health of the game.

That's closer to the mark - play changed too significantly when people got their hands on Black Widow (Original) & Spider-Man (Classic). When unlimited healing is available, the playing field shifts away from strategy and towards sheer number of matches finished. Before the change, we heard a lot of folks say that they felt forced to play too many hours in a day to be competitive. The changes to Anti-Gravity Device and Web Bandages help to address that (alongside some other changes, like the recent rework of placement & progression rewards structures).

The fact that using prologue missions to heal was busywork that most players find un-fun and the change eliminated it was a side benefit. But the problem was team healing everywhere, not just in the prologue. Turning team healing off in the prologue wouldn't have worked (as well as being quirky and difficult to explain clearly). You'd still be able to track down an easier PvE fight (or an easier PvP fight, depending on what you're up to, event-wise) and heal up there, and you'd still have odd incentives to make a fight that's already been decided drag out for longer so you can heal back up to full while you keep the last enemy stunned.

The OP's mechanic would be an interesting way to extend play time, but that's moving the game in an opposite direction to lots of player feedback. (Bear in mind when evaluating that statement that folks who post on these forums are much more likely to be interested in playing for long periods of time in one sitting than most players (including a lot of serious, dedicated players) are.)

I think we booched the explanation of this change, and I'm sorry we didn't do a better job of explaining our motivations and the benefits of it.

Nonce Equitaur 2

Hmmm ... do I use my moderator powers to change booched to botched?

LordWill

Demiurge_Will wrote:

Before the change, we heard a lot of folks say that they felt forced to play too many hours in a day to be competitive. The changes to Anti-Gravity Device and Web Bandages help to address that (alongside some other changes, like the recent rework of placement & progression rewards structures).

The OP's mechanic would be an interesting way to extend play time, but that's moving the game in an opposite direction to lots of player feedback. (Bear in mind when evaluating that statement that folks who post on these forums are much more likely to be interested in playing for long periods of time in one sitting than most players (including a lot of serious, dedicated players) are.)

So how do you want us to play your game Will? What would you like to see the player patterns be?

You don't want people to play long hours but the entire structure of the game is if you don't put in the time, effort, resources, you probably aren't going to do very well in any events....Events back to back, multiple running events etc.

You create a highly competitive system that takes hours and hours of dedicated playing and resources and then say you removed healing so that players don't have to play as much makes absolutely no sense.

Seriously, since you are the Lead Designer, you must have some sort of vision where all these "Changes" come from. Would you care to share it?

I'm also curious where all this feedback came from? You don't do in-game polls like I suggested, the pulse of the forums didn't really seem to indicate this outrage of playing too much. Where did you get your data from?

Unknown

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

Hmmm ... do I use my moderator powers to change booched to botched?

Let the irony stand!

_RiO_

Demiurge_Will wrote:

I think we booched the explanation of this change, and I'm sorry we didn't do a better job of explaining our motivations and the benefits of it.

What benefits would those be? Because as a PC/Steam player, I see absolutely none. PC players don't exactly have the luxury of picking up a mobile phone and playing every 2 to 3 hours when health packs have regenerated and/or characters have healed themselves. Yet we find ourselves lumped in with the players of the game's 'main' mobile edition and without being able to sustain a longer playing session (in the evening hours, at home after work) we are made to compete for prizes under a permanent handicap...

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

Hmmm ... do I use my moderator powers to change booched to botched?

Should be changed to 'boozed', because someone obviously had a little bit too much alcohol when they came up with the broken-as-kitty 'true healing' mechanic.

Demiurge_Will

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

Hmmm ... do I use my moderator powers to change booched to botched?

Nah, I just played too much Puzzle Pirates back in the day and never remember that it's not a real word.

wymtime

Demiurge_Will wrote:

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

Hmmm ... do I use my moderator powers to change booched to botched?

Nah, I just played too much Puzzle Pirates back in the day and never remember that it's not a real word.

So Will are there going to be anymore changes to the true healing or additions to allow players to play longer?
a. more health packs
b. increase regeneration on health packs
c. another increase on everyone's regeneration time.
d. more character tweeks to increase shields

I appreciate you posting on the forum

Thanks

Nonce Equitaur 2

Some other questions that can be answered.

1. Can the AP costs of the most overpriced powers be lowered?
2. Can the worst fifth covers in the game get a modification?
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?
5. What will happen for season 4?

Demiurge_Will

wymtime wrote:

So Will are there going to be anymore changes to the true healing or additions to allow players to play longer?
a. more health packs
b. increase regeneration on health packs
c. another increase on everyone's regeneration time.
d. more character tweeks to increase shields

No changes are currently in the pipeline (i.e., being implemented or tested right exactly now - as always, we're actively watching the impact of the changes and talking about them, and that could change at any time) in that department.

The next thing we'll probably evaluate is whether the health granted by team healing needs a boost: healing is currently more expensive, AP-wise, than damage, by about 20%. You typically do want a cost bias toward damage in a combat system, or you can end up with stalemates (or just bad pacing), but the amount of the bias might need to change now. The design team here has some intuitions about that, but we need to take a closer look before making a change.

Nonce Equitaur 2

A few more

6. Will the characters that most need a buff get any help?
7. Since many players carefully controlled levels for tile ownership, can a level drop mechanism be implemented to help players who had their strategies wrecked by the level shift?
8. Will Loki get a buff?
9. Will Daredevil get a buff?
10. Spiderman got a quadruple nerf. Can he be given something like the following?

Web Interference - Blue 5AP
Spider-Man picks a strategic spot for a web countdown tile. Opponent powers using the chosen color are unusable for 2 rounds. When the countdown is over, just the webbing remains.
Level Upgrades

Level 2: Powers are unusable for three rounds. Level 3: Countdown tiles powered by the chosen color are halted. Level 4: Protect, Strike, and Attack tiles of the chosen color stop functioning. Level 5: Interference lasts for 4 rounds.

orionpeace

Demiurge_Will wrote:

we're actively watching the impact of the changes and talking about them, and that could change at any time

First, thank you for coming here and making comments on topics that are causing such concern and letting us know that someone is listening, at least to some degree.

Regarding the statement I quoted above:

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".

That view may or may not be fair, but we have heard directly that decisions not to do events we find fun are based solely on the lack of sales for the associated Hero Packs. Additionally, we know that there is no in game poll. No devs are here actively asking questions to gain specific feedback.

So, we are left to conclude that the only "watching" that is being done, is on the bottom line.

I, for one, would dearly like evidence to the contrary.

Unknown

Healing changes and health pack regeneration rates are biased towards players who play throughout the day, as opposed to those who will play in blocks. Since this was not addressed when True Healing rolled out and there's nothing to address it in the pipeline, I have to assume that it's by design, and you would prefer that we play in several short sessions, not one long one.

So I have to ask - Why? What's the design reason for pushing players to spread out their playtime? How does it enhance the individual and overall player experience? Why is one method of play preferred by the design team to another?

Nonce Equitaur 2

One more question, I'd like to compare two companies:

1. Demiurge/MPQ Oct 2013 - Feb 2014
2. Demiurge/MPQ Mar 2014 - July 2014

The first company put out new content and character buffs almost weekly and was widely seem as awesome. The second company has given up on both buffs and content, with virtually all events being rehashes of old material. The second company has left itself wide open to mockery, such as in the silence thread. The most popular players on the forum, UnwiseOne and Clintman are just two of many players that have announced retirement.

Company #1 did a much better job of listening, and was a lot more fun. How can we get that company back?

And where is IceIX? (EDIT: Perhaps preparing for Comic Con) If he's not here within a few hours, I'll likely be more respected than he is.

wymtime

RockMonster wrote:

Healing changes and health pack regeneration rates are biased towards players who play throughout the day, as opposed to those who will play in blocks. Since this was not addressed when True Healing rolled out and there's nothing to address it in the pipeline, I have to assume that it's by design, and you would prefer that we play in several short sessions, not one long one.

So I have to ask - Why? What's the design reason for pushing players to spread out their playtime? How does it enhance the individual and overall player experience? Why is one method of play preferred by the design team to another?

I feel bad for all stream players that have been hammered by the true healing changes. I think Will answered what the Dev's were looking for in a previous post.

- play changed too significantly when people got their hands on Black Widow (Original) & Spider-Man (Classic). When unlimited healing is available, the playing field shifts away from strategy and towards sheer number of matches finished. Before the change, we heard a lot of folks say that they felt forced to play too many hours in a day to be competitive. The changes to Anti-Gravity Device and Web Bandages help to address that (alongside some other changes, like the recent rework of placement & progression rewards structures).

I definatly think it would be interesting to see if steam players have had a significant drop in placements in events with the true healing change. I am a mobile player but I am all for an equal playing field. The question is how can Rockmonster and myself play as long as we want without having to spend a ton of $$ on health packs.

Demiurge_Will

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.

Unknown

Will,

Has there been any thought to getting rid of temporary healing powers for characters and changing said powers into offensive or defensive ones (defensive makes more sense IMO)? I know it may help short term for the match you are in at the time, but not worth the long term AP usage. This might help some people "get over" the True Healing issues and move on. i.e. It would really help Spider-Man to be more useful once more, if his yellow power was something other than healing, as it's effects don't last more than the current match anyway. Those characters that benefit from True Healing (Wolvie, Daken, etc) would still remain the same.

On a side note, changing his yellow toa passive Spider Sense would be a good use of the lore around him. It could work something like a Hawkeye-Avoid / Falcon-Insipration combination, moving Spidey to the back and increasing a random strike/shield tile and/or taking time off of a random countdown timer, or some combination of all three.

scottee

^ And this is why the devs know more about making games than random forum complainers.

jojeda654

T2theMoney wrote:

On a side note, changing his yellow toa passive Spider Sense would be a good use of the lore around him. It could work something like a Hawkeye-Avoid / Falcon-Insipration combination, moving Spidey to the back and increasing a random strike/shield tile and/or taking time off of a random countdown timer, or some combination of all three.

That sounds almost exactly like his old skill. viewtopic.php?f=13&t=650&p=5612

Spider-Man (Classic) - Spider-Sense
Spider-Man's Purple ability has been updated to be more powerful overall with reduced Web tiles required to trigger.
Spider-Sense - Purple Passive
(PASSIVE) Spider-Man reacts to threats before they impact his team. Removes a random enemy Special tile every time Spider-Man is damaged for 10% of his max health with 5 or more Web tiles in play.
Level Upgrades
Level 2: Requires 4 or more Web tiles.
Level 3: Requires 3 or more Web tiles.
Level 4: Requires 2 or more Web tiles.
Level 5: Requires 1 or more Web tiles.

Unknown

And that is how you use flame retardant pants to shut down complaints. I am genuinely humbled, what a rare emotion to have.

Nonce, feel free to lock my silence thread.

Cragger

jojeda654 wrote:

T2theMoney wrote:

On a side note, changing his yellow toa passive Spider Sense would be a good use of the lore around him. It could work something like a Hawkeye-Avoid / Falcon-Insipration combination, moving Spidey to the back and increasing a random strike/shield tile and/or taking time off of a random countdown timer, or some combination of all three.

That sounds almost exactly like his old skill. viewtopic.php?f=13&t=650&p=5612

Spider-Man (Classic) - Spider-Sense
Spider-Man's Purple ability has been updated to be more powerful overall with reduced Web tiles required to trigger.
Spider-Sense - Purple Passive
(PASSIVE) Spider-Man reacts to threats before they impact his team. Removes a random enemy Special tile every time Spider-Man is damaged for 10% of his max health with 5 or more Web tiles in play.
Level Upgrades
Level 2: Requires 4 or more Web tiles.
Level 3: Requires 3 or more Web tiles.
Level 4: Requires 2 or more Web tiles.
Level 5: Requires 1 or more Web tiles.

Move it to Yellow, rename it Great Responsibility, done. Code and testing is already there.