Healing Compromise [With D3 Q&A]

Unknown

@yogi
You clearly do not understand 90% of Will ' s comments in that section. Seems everything went right over your head because with all your rebuttal comments it shows you missed the concept.

yogi_

Psykopathic wrote:

@yogi
You clearly do not understand 90% of Will ' s comments in that section. Seems everything went right over your head because with all your rebuttal comments it shows you missed the concept.

No, I totally understood what he said and his intentions. I've known what they've been trying to get at since it was announced. My point is that by taking something away, does not actually mean other features in fact become improvements - only slightly more apparent.

Unknown

yogi_ wrote:

My point is that by taking something away, does not actually mean other features in fact become improvements - only slightly more apparent.

We know that's your point. We just disagree with it.

yogi_

gamar wrote:

yogi_ wrote:

My point is that by taking something away, does not actually mean other features in fact become improvements - only slightly more apparent.

We know that's your point. We just disagree with it.

Great!

Edit - Upon further reflection, I have no clue what your disagreement is.

I'll explain the same thing a different way - You have 10 usable items. You take one away. The 9 other items remain the same. You keep using the other 9 items as before.

How can you disagree with that pretty logical progression?

Unknown

That really says it all. Knowing that someone hears me always makes me feel better. I may not get what I want, but hearing a rational explanation as to why, or even just an acknowledgement that I have been heard make me feel appreciated. I know you are very busy Will, but don't be a stranger. Your presence here today has made great strides towards customer satisfaction. Have a good one.

GuntherBlobel

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.

So, here's a good place for me to say thanks to Nonce and others for posting all those great ideas and polls here on the forum. I love them. They are the main reason I keep coming back to the forum. I've been particularly impressed because, until now, there was really no indication (that I could tell) that anyone at D3 even knew they existed... and yet, the good ideas and constructive feedback keeps coming. Thank you!

kensterr

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

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

@Nonce - You can do that or do an Emeryt.

@Demiurge_Will - Release 3* or 4* Dr Strange and have him as a true healer. The PVE stats will show how many people will grind to have him.

Unknown

I oppose any compromise. They ruined it, now they should restore it as it was.

Unknown

yogi_ wrote:

gamar wrote:

yogi_ wrote:

My point is that by taking something away, does not actually mean other features in fact become improvements - only slightly more apparent.

We know that's your point. We just disagree with it.

Great!

Edit - Upon further reflection, I have no clue what your disagreement is.

I'll explain the same thing a different way - You have 10 usable items. You take one away. The 9 other items remain the same. You keep using the other 9 items as before.

How can you disagree with that pretty logical progression?

You're playing rock, paper, scissors. Then you and your friends make a new rule that when someone uses rock, you flip a coin, and if it comes up tails rock loses to scissors.

Is scissors now better than it was before or is is it the same?

Unknown

yogi_ wrote:

I'll explain the same thing a different way - You have 10 usable items. You take one away. The 9 other items remain the same. You keep using the other 9 items as before.

How can you disagree with that pretty logical progression?

If there are 10 toys in front of you to play with and each one has cool features that none of the other do and you can pick 3 to play with, but toy number 10 has candy hidden inside it so all the kids only play with toy number 10 no matter what changes are made to the other nine toys.

If there were no bias each toy would get picked 10% of the time, and removing one toy would increase the percentage to ~11% per toy.
When toy number 10 has such a huge bias that 1-9 were really only being played with as second and third choices to go with toy number 10 then removing it really opens up quite a lot and all the other choices see much higher and balanced viability.

Especially since no one else gets the candy either.

Unknown

Cryptobrancus wrote:

If there are 10 toys in front of you to play with and each one has cool features that none of the other do and you can pick 3 to play with, but toy number 10 has candy hidden inside it so all the kids only play with toy number 10 no matter what changes are made to the other nine toys.

If there were no bias each toy would get picked 10% of the time, and removing one toy would increase the percentage to ~11% per toy.
When toy number 10 has such a huge bias that 1-9 were really only being played with as second and third choices to go with toy number 10 then removing it really opens up quite a lot and all the other choices see much higher and balanced viability.

Especially since no one else gets the candy either.

Yeah, and someone from outside may decide to help the children out by dropping a nuke on the room that annihilates toy#10 and most of the environment around it -- then pose as savior despite no children ever asked for that, and he was wide aware of that too.


Heil HYDRA!

Unknown

gamar wrote:

You're playing rock, paper, scissors. Then you and your friends make a new rule that when someone uses rock, you flip a coin, and if it comes up tails rock loses to scissors.

Is scissors now better than it was before or is is it the same?

I hate to break it to you, but this analogy is a total flop for a number of reasons.

1. MPQ is not heavily matchup-based. Oh sure, there are a few matchups you might want to change up (if your team depends on Daken for strike tiles to do any real damage, you don't want to face up against Falcon, for example; if your enemy is running Hulk/Ares/Thor you probably want to pick OBW+Tank instead of Mags/Storm because it's really hard to burst down that much health and you need to try to play a longer game) but in RPS, the matchup is everything. Even in version with 10 symbols, changing one matchup fundamentally modifies how the entire game works.

2. RPS has no tiers. If I nerf bagman, is OBW technically better? Only by the very most technical means. Because nobody uses bagman - in essence she'd be just as good. Rock is just as good as paper is just as good as scissors. But in MPQ, you cannot generalize like that at all.

3. RPS has no synergy. If I nerf MNMagneto, is everyone else better by comparison? No! In fact, another character goes from "Moderately decent" to "bad". And can you even figure out the change to true healing's effect on things? OBW is weaker... So the other top 2*s should be stronger by comparison, right? But Ares, Thor, and Wolverine kind of bank on OBW to fill out the rainbow - without her, they're relatively more valuable but actually weaker! At the same time, though, Ares "gains" more from this than Thor does, because of how Sunder interacts with temp healing...

The comparison is fatally flawed. In complex, multifaceted games, we therefore tend to determine whether or not something is a nerf not by its effect on the metagame, but on its effect on the affected parties. Sure, if you got rid of Sagat's Tiger Shot, Zangief is better, but classifying it as a buff to Zangief as a result is just silly. It's a nerf.

Unknown

@Will

Can you explain the reasoning behind removing one brainless <1 min-per-win combo but reintroducing another brainless <1 min-P2W combo six months later?

Thanks for your time

Unknown

gobstopper wrote:

@Will

Can you explain the reasoning behind removing one brainless <1 min-per-win combo but reintroducing another brainless <1 min-P2W combo six months later?

Thanks for your time

gobstopper wrote:

another brainless <1 min-P2W combo

gobstopper wrote:

<1 min-P2W combo

gobstopper wrote:

P2W

The answer was in the question!

Unknown

Here's my 2 cents on the thing. My background is in software, and I've done some game development.

- The good, upfront

Healing was a broken mechanic, and needed to be fixed.

Games need tension. That comes in many forms, but generally - your player has limited resources, and his/her job is to allocate those resources most effectively. If you've ever played Contra with the 99 lives code, you know it's a very different experience than without it. The tension can be frustrating in the short term ("agh! game over again!") but satisfying in the long term ("YES I BEAT IT FINALLY"). So ultimately healing needed to go - it ruined a central tension in the game. Your characters' health is your limited resource; healing made that resource infinite.

Also bearing mention: from an extremely high level, the f2p model employed by d3 in this game is the "refilling bucket" model. You have a bucket with limited capacity - when depleted, it gradually refills over time with the resource you need to continue playing. You can pay money to circumvent this limitation. Regardless of how I personally feel about it, this is their chosen business model. Gameplay that trivially circumvents this business model is just fundamentally broken. I can't fault d3 at all for addressing it.

- The bad

You'll notice all of the above is "meta" discussion - derived from knowledge you and I possess from outside of the game. What I don't care for at all is the gameplay experience of True Healing when you take all this meta knowledge away.

Say I'm a new player, who has never experienced pre-nerf healing. Why is some of my health transparent? Once I figure that out - why is some health restoration temporary, and other permanent? How can I tell which kind of healing a given character has? (again, without applying meta knowledge) None of this is explained to me in-game, of course. This should be explained better to the player, both textually and UI-wise.

This is perhaps nitpicky, but I'm just warming up to the bad stuff.

- PR

Let's state something up front. Players really don't like it when you take something away from them. The longer they've had it, and the more powerful it is, the more they're going to (deeply) resent you when you take it away from them. It doesn't matter at all if you're ultimately doing the player a favor by taking their candy away from them - they are going to hate you for taking it. Some subset of people is going to be angry enough to stop playing your game entirely.

So when you decide to do it, you need serious damage control up and running before, during, and after. You need to prep the player beforehand to soften the blow, you need to provide some carrot with the stick when you deliver the bad news, and you need to provide counseling afterwards to the player to let him know you're listening to his/her concerns.

Few if any of these things actually happened. There was a brief advance forum post by IceX (not nearly good enough), and the change itself was a massive nerf to a powerful gameplay strategy with no concession given to the player. Admittedly there are some devs on the forums doing some damage control, so the after part may get a passing grade. I'm not sure the "this was good for you, you'll see" line they're taking is making any players feel better, but I won't get into that.

Ultimately this is a huge public relations SNAFU. D3 needs to understand that positively interacting with its player base is a fundamental part of doing business.

- What I would have done

Again, going with the before, during, and after paradigm:

• Way more warning for the playerbase. Explain the why of the change, not just the what. If you can convince some people up front that you're doing The Right Thing and have Their Best Interests in Mind, those people won't be mad at you later.
• Make the nerf have some upside, too. This change was a massive downgrade to the old ability with no upside, and is very unintuitive to boot. Scrap the whole True Healing concept of "temporary" health. Instead make skills like OBW blue give you armor - a separate life pool that must be depleted before your characters start taking damage again. This is both highly intuitive (if other games have done it, players will get it) and more interesting. If you put up armor at full health, it actually works fine, unlike the old healing in which you needed to wait to take damage first. See, we're giving you something while we take other stuff away.
• Better damage control afterwards. It's fine to explain in the broad sense why the change was necessary, but players need more. They need empathy. Players need to know that *you* understand the seriousness of the change you just made, they need to know that you understand how bad it feels to have something taken away, but still that you have their best interests in mind.

So.. yeah. Work on your PR, guys. Make it someone (or someones') primary job to positively interact with the playerbase for some number of hours per day. It's just good business.

Unknown

Then again, what made THIS very massively unwanted and unwelcome change MORE important to go ahead with instead of thw ton of welcome and requested changes? That would ACTUALLY would have been FOR the players?

CNash

roippi wrote:

Few if any of these things actually happened. There was a brief advance forum post by IceX (not nearly good enough), and the change itself was a massive nerf to a powerful gameplay strategy with no concession given to the player. Admittedly there are some devs on the forums doing some damage control, so the after part may get a passing grade. I'm not sure the "this was good for you, you'll see" line they're taking is making any players feel better, but I won't get into that.

You're forgetting the decreased healing times that were hastily added as a concession after the thread exploded with negative responses. So there was a "carrot", but it arrived after the "stick" had been announced.

roippi wrote:

[*] Make the nerf have some upside, too. This change was a massive downgrade to the old ability with no upside, and is very unintuitive to boot. Scrap the whole True Healing concept of "temporary" health. Instead make skills like OBW blue give you armor - a separate life pool that must be depleted before your characters start taking damage again. This is both highly intuitive (if other games have done it, players will get it) and more interesting. If you put up armor at full health, it actually works fine, unlike the old healing in which you needed to wait to take damage first. See, we're giving you something while we take other stuff away.

A thousand times this. Leaving it as "temporary healing" is unintuitive and doesn't accurately describe how the new mechanic functions. I wholeheartedly support the "armor" idea, even if it was limited to only being available once you've lost health (so the total value could never be more than MaxHealth-CurrentHealth), or otherwise limited based on the character's max health (for example, 20%).

Unknown

Psykopathic wrote:

@yogi
You clearly do not understand 90% of Will ' s comments in that section. Seems everything went right over your head because with all your rebuttal comments it shows you missed the concept.

Nope Yogi is actually spot on.

Health packs didn't get buffed they simply became more necessary. They don't do anything more than they ever did, they just became something you have to use where you didn't before.

Protect tiles are again no more useful than they were. If people could power through content on the back of protect tiles they would obviously have done so instead of prologue healing. They are only really useful to any significant degree if you've tanked and are facing fights you can polish off fairly easily AND confidently go into at reduced health. If you're facing equal level fights then your protect tiles are about as useful as ever (not very at all). Best evidence being the amazing and utter lack of protect tile heroes i've seen in PvP. You could argue there's more of a role for protect tiles in PvE as long as the content is a lowish level compared to your roster but that was no less true before the changes.

Stuns are exactly the same as ever and remain pretty useless in PvP aside from the ever popular MMN + Storm which is exactly NO better than it was before the change. They are at best situationally impactful in PvE since you can't stun lock fights. I don't think the rare occasions where you can use your stun to hold off an enemy to down it before an ability fires off that would have otherwise landed is even worth considering.

Self healing heroes are able to win the same fights they could before, come out in the same position health-wise as before and are generally as lackluster on PvP defence as before (is anyone skipping Patch + Laken + Featured?). Their utility for early climbing has been "buffed" if you're not getting retaliated/hit or are so early on that incoming hits are worth far less than gains BUT they could do EXACTLY THE SAME before. People just didn't feel the need to.

Strategic play (no idea **** that's supposed to mean. I can only imagine playing when your health packs refresh) has not been buffed. It works exactly the same as before. VOLUME play in one go (by choice or neccessity) has been completely gutted (nerfed doesn't do it justice) UNLESS you have a solid 3* roster (mine is a decent example) then you don't need to be "strategic" and can play how you like.

The only way you can say any of that is a buff is to make the rather bizarre choice to compare those items not to their previous state but to claim they are somehow buffed compared to the NEW baseline you've established by making a change. That's a complete nonsense of an argument. It's a bit like opening a shop where everything costs $1, increasing the price of 90% of your items to $2 and then claiming the last 10% of items got cheaper (buffed) rather than all the things you changed getting more expensive (nerfed).

OFC what Demiurge_Will presumably meant wasn't "buffed" so much as relatively more useful/important but that change comes ENTIRELY from EVERY other item in the game becoming that little bit less useful because of the healing change, not any kind of buff and some of it (protect tiles) still aren't worth using most of the time.

Unknown

....aaaaand missed another chance to get an actual answer about the huge amount of 5am finish times for Europe.

Unknown

Demiurge_Will wrote:

papa07 wrote:

Demiurge_Will wrote:

(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)

Speaking of rewards rework, while I appreciate the lowering of the 3* threshold from top50 to top100, I find the removal of the alliance hp reward to be much more significant. Where before a top 2500 alliance received 50 hp, now only the top 250 receive that. This is a determental policy to the development of the 2 star and transitioning players, as you need a 20 person alliance to get those hp now.

Any thoughts of opening this back up again?

We moved those Hero Points to the progression rewards so that folks can get them whether or not they're in an alliance.

Appreciate your time, but that's not really true from the 2* perspective.

Pre-True Healing, I would max at 800 about half the time and 700 the other half. Post-True Healing, I have maxed at 600 only twice.

That means that under your hp changes, Pre-TH, I would earn about 75 hp on average. Post-TH, I earn about 35 hp. Despite scoring 100-200 points less, I am consistently placing higher, so I am more effective compared to the field than I was before.

While the target scores may have worked initially (Pre-TH), those hp rewards are no longer in reach for the developing players. This makes it harder to expand the roster for the diversity that is necessary, without paying for hp.