Did it get better...?

nihilium

OK, as a change to all the "I quit" threads here is a "Im thinking about comming back" thread lol


I stoped playing.. I think one or two seasons ago because there just was no motivation left for me to do any events.
Always the wrong rewards, only boring new charactes (that would never get more than 5-6 covers), the same events again and again and again...

Now Im wondering if it things changed by than.. and if it got better or.. worse v.v
(And is that lag new? I wasnt able to play 3 matches yesterday because it laged too much o.O)

It would be great if some ppl could comment on their view about the changes in the last 1-2 months

Spoit

It's been maintaining the same arc since around, like, February, so you should probably be able to extrapolate where it is around now if you were quiting a month or two ago.

They removed prologue healing because it was too tedious (but replaced it with TU dumping, which is at least twice as tedious, and much less useful), which was okay for a while, since it depressed scores a little bit in Season 3.

But in season 4, sharding is back with a vengance, and twice as bad as season 1's super gentle nudges. You're looking at around 1.2k to get top 10, like a minimum 1.4k to get top 5 (which they added back a 4th cover as well as a nice chunk of ISO to, which to be fair was a nice change)

Talking about TUs, they removed environmental points with another type of AP (which unlike everything else is effected by diminishing returns, so if you make a double match with it, you only get 2). Which means that instead of eating hotdogs, the AI is dropping world ruptures and the like on you, while you try to gather 20 AP to get rid of the balistic salvos you can't delete from your inventory.

Oh yeah, the inventory. Apparently boosts stopped dropping randomly.

atomzed

Spoit wrote:

It's been maintaining the same arc since around, like, February, so you should probably be able to extrapolate where it is around now if you were quiting a month or two ago.

They removed prologue healing because it was too tedious (but replaced it with TU dumping, which is at least twice as tedious, and much less useful), which was okay for a while, since it depressed scores a little bit in Season 3.

But in season 4, sharding is back with a vengance, and twice as bad as season 1's super gentle nudges. You're looking at around 1.2k to get top 10, like a minimum 1.4k to get top 5 (which they added back a 4th cover as well as a nice chunk of ISO to, which to be fair was a nice change)

Talking about TUs, they removed environmental points with another type of AP (which unlike everything else is effected by diminishing returns, so if you make a double match with it, you only get 2). Which means that instead of eating hotdogs, the AI is dropping world ruptures and the like on you, while you try to gather 20 AP to get rid of the balistic salvos you can't delete from your inventory.

Oh yeah, the inventory. Apparently boosts stopped dropping randomly.

Spoit got it spot on for most things...

I just add my 2 cents.
1) Season 4 has seen them giving more desirable covers. So far, no Rags, Loki, DD, Doom.... bec of that, I have been enjoying it more since those covers are what I need

2) AP or match boosts still drops... But at a much reduced rate. Someone (I think Lyrian) suggests that they are trying to cut down the boosts, and maybe even tsk it away from the game entirely. That may be a good thing, as it reduces the amount of shield hopping possible. It also emphasise on importance of roster diversity. (Though someone will say that it's to sell health packs, as they claimed with all changes).

nihilium

Thank you very much for the answers, they are a great help!

Some more questions I came about:

1) Did they actually change anything about the MMR thing? I remember it was AWFULL when I left (which was at the beginning of the 3rd Season, since I only have 2 Fury covers)

2) How do ppl play, now that healing is gone? I tried some matches, but due to someone always taking dmg one of my chars was down every 3 matches I made >.>
(before I quit I always healed with widow at the end of a match)

3) What are the most usefull characters atm, that rnt on the nerf list?
I usually played Punisher and because I was bored I pumped some lvls into my Panther. Sadly many chars Id like to play are missing covers *sigh*

4) Did they come around to offer any compensation for all those character changes?
I mean I really wanna play falcon (for example), but what use is buying his covers & spending ISO if they just change his colors/skills next week, without any announcements or reason.
This really bothered me already before I stoped playing and I have the feeling it only got worse ;___;

atomzed

1) Did they actually change anything about the MMR thing? I remember it was AWFULL when I left (which was at the beginning of the 3rd Season, since I only have 2 Fury covers)

As Spoit mentioned, it got better in Season 2 and 3, and it seems to be worse in Season 4.

2) How do ppl play, now that healing is gone? I tried some matches, but due to someone always taking dmg one of my chars was down every 3 matches I made >.>
(before I quit I always healed with widow at the end of a match)

Well, this is what they want ppl to avoid doing, prologue healing. Are you in 2* transition? Or 3* land? If you are in 2* it's going to be more difficult definitely. What I have seen is more 2* using a diversity of characters during pvp, and then shield up accordingly. Also use health packs sparingly and strategically.

Bec of the this change, patch and Ldaken have become more valuable too.

3) What are the most usefull characters atm, that rnt on the nerf list?
I usually played Punisher and because I was bored I pumped some lvls into my Panther. Sadly many chars Id like to play are missing covers *sigh*

Currently only cmag is on nerf list.

4) Did they come around to offer any compensation for all those character changes?
I mean I really wanna play falcon (for example), but what use is buying his covers & spending ISO if they just change his colors/skills next week, without any announcements or reason.
This really bothered me already before I stoped playing and I have the feeling it only got worse ;___;[/quote]

My personal opinion is that balancing is important. After spidey was nerfed (too harshly imo), pvp stabilised for a while (until sentry daken blitz came up). So there is always a chance character may be balanced.

If you do buy covers, you still get the maximum rewards before the character is nerfed. See it as an investment for you to get other characters covers, and don't feel so bad.

If you are really against balancing then I suggest you don't buy covers then.

nihilium

Im all for balancing, but imho they do many changes that rant nerfs of OP character but tweaks to lead the game in another direction/fix their own mistakes etc.
And while I have to agree with you on the profiting because of an OP chars because it gets nerfed I scared of them making not-OP charcters useless. Just because they think they need to change the way the game works or anything.

Thats why I asked for the best currently playable characters that WONT get hit with a nerf hammer anytime soon

Need to see if there are any that I actually have enough covers of to play them >.>
As for the 2*/3* thing, im somewhere inbetween.
I have some playable 3star chars but I refuse to lvlup most of them unless they explain how they calculate their MMR lmao
(what use if lvling ur chars if it just matches u with harder enemies? I wanna play with characters I actually like using, not rush after the currently OP team-combo v.v But It feels more and more like they wont EVER let u play what u like ...)

Unknown

nihilium wrote:

OK, as a change to all the "I quit" threads here is a "Im thinking about comming back" thread lol


I stoped playing.. I think one or two seasons ago because there just was no motivation left for me to do any events.
Always the wrong rewards, only boring new charactes (that would never get more than 5-6 covers), the same events again and again and again...

Now Im wondering if it things changed by than.. and if it got better or.. worse v.v
(And is that lag new? I wasnt able to play 3 matches yesterday because it laged too much o.O)

It would be great if some ppl could comment on their view about the changes in the last 1-2 months

I stopped playing for 2 months (except I played for the daily bonus each day) right after the lazy daken event. I came back a few weeks ago and it's worse than it was before. Spidey and OBW got nerfed and they recently added a new horrible feature "team up tiles and boosts", which sucks big time and ended up nerfing Storm. They tried to disguise the nerfs of Spidey and OBW under the title of "true healing". I rarely bother with PvP anymore since it's an awful grind against maxed out 3* and progressing has slowed down even more than it was months ago.

Unknown

nihilium wrote:

Thank you very much for the answers, they are a great help!

Some more questions I came about:

1) Did they actually change anything about the MMR thing? I remember it was AWFULL when I left (which was at the beginning of the 3rd Season, since I only have 2 Fury covers)

2) How do ppl play, now that healing is gone? I tried some matches, but due to someone always taking dmg one of my chars was down every 3 matches I made >.>
(before I quit I always healed with widow at the end of a match)

3) What are the most usefull characters atm, that rnt on the nerf list?
I usually played Punisher and because I was bored I pumped some lvls into my Panther. Sadly many chars Id like to play are missing covers *sigh*

4) Did they come around to offer any compensation for all those character changes?
I mean I really wanna play falcon (for example), but what use is buying his covers & spending ISO if they just change his colors/skills next week, without any announcements or reason.
This really bothered me already before I stoped playing and I have the feeling it only got worse ;___;

1. No, it's still god awful
2. People play less, a lot less.
3. Sentry, Lazy Thor, Lazy Daken. I guess. Not sure, I don't play too much anymore.
4. Hahahahahaha nah, no compensation for unannounced nerfs of Spidey, OBW and Storm.

Oh, and Spidey got nerfed twice in a span of 1-2 weeks, I believe.

Unknown

nihilium wrote:

I mean I really wanna play falcon (for example), but what use is buying his covers & spending ISO if they just change his colors/skills next week, without any announcements or reason.

Just to touch on this one point, and in no way is this meant to apply to any of the other changes they've made, but the reason and execution of the change to Falcon was pretty reasonable. His yellow is the main reason to use him, and when the buff it granted was percentage based there was no incentive to level him other than to jack up his hit points (and his protect tiles, yay?). Changing it to a set value that increased with level made a good deal of sense, and he's a useful character once you've invested in him (particularly paired with Lazy Daken).

Now Spidey on the other hand...not really an awesome job there.

HailMary

nihilium wrote:

Thank you very much for the answers, they are a great help!

Some more questions I came about:

1) Did they actually change anything about the MMR thing?

Not significantly, no. It's still annoying, but manageable.

nihilium wrote:

2) How do ppl play, now that healing is gone?

Solid 3* players play about the same. Many seem to actually like it. 2* players and 2*-3* transition players who use infrequent, long play sessions have seen their playtimes cut short.

nihilium wrote:

3) What are the most usefull characters atm, that rnt on the nerf list?

Current PVP top tier: Sentry, UDaken, LT, Patch (paired with CMags, though), Hood.
Current PVE top tier: Rogers, Falcon... and the usual PVP suspects.

nihilium wrote:

4) Did they come around to offer any compensation for all those character changes?

Nope. I'd generally play and level what you like, though. The big nerfs are usually announced, though the Storm change was out of the blue, as was the UDaken nerf, though the latter was terribly minor. I maxed out CMags after the nerf was announced as "coming at some point soonish maybe", and I've gotten a huge amount of use out of him so far.

Unknown

MikeHock wrote:

nihilium wrote:

Thank you very much for the answers, they are a great help!

Some more questions I came about:

1) Did they actually change anything about the MMR thing? I remember it was AWFULL when I left (which was at the beginning of the 3rd Season, since I only have 2 Fury covers)

2) How do ppl play, now that healing is gone? I tried some matches, but due to someone always taking dmg one of my chars was down every 3 matches I made >.>
(before I quit I always healed with widow at the end of a match)

3) What are the most usefull characters atm, that rnt on the nerf list?
I usually played Punisher and because I was bored I pumped some lvls into my Panther. Sadly many chars Id like to play are missing covers *sigh*

4) Did they come around to offer any compensation for all those character changes?
I mean I really wanna play falcon (for example), but what use is buying his covers & spending ISO if they just change his colors/skills next week, without any announcements or reason.
This really bothered me already before I stoped playing and I have the feeling it only got worse ;___;

1. No, it's still god awful
2. People play less, a lot less.
3. Sentry, Lazy Thor, Lazy Daken. I guess. Not sure, I don't play too much anymore.
4. Hahahahahaha nah, no compensation for unannounced nerfs of Spidey, OBW and Storm.

Oh, and Spidey got nerfed twice in a span of 1-2 weeks, I believe.

1) MMR: Sharding is now reached triple plush status, for unprecedented gentleness in pushing all of the players with 166 rosters into the same bracket. That said, the MMR distribution system has been tweaked to encourage sky-high scores. 900+ is a the barest minimum expected by a 3*** roster, which is inching towards 1000+. This causes a problem in which lies the answer your second question...

2) Play Style: Giant divide here. A player falls into one three camps now: (Best - 3/5/5/ Sentry), (Mid-tier: Patch/CMags combo), (Everyone else). If a player falls into the "Everyone Else" category, then True Healing has significantly cut down their playing time. For 3*** rosters, everyone is forced into either Patchneto or Sentry teams in a race to shield hop to avoid both enemy attackers as well as random devastating AI Team-Up World Ruptures/Supernovas/Rage of Panthers and so on, that almost randomly occur for no reason in each match to force health pack sales. Patchneto works up to 1000 or so, but Sentry in all of his overpoweredness dominates all now. He alone, can defeat endgame teams by himself. [Search the forums for WorldRunner's endeavors winning PvP brackets with a max Sentry/Bagman/loaner featured character; he did this twice]. North of 1000, PvP has completely devolved into players quickly "Sentry-bombing" opposing rosters and then reshielding before retaliations are possible. The end result is PvP placement being a matter of only how much a player is willing to spend on shield hopping and boosts to fuel Sentry. [See Bugpop's videos on the Sentry character thread to watch how Sentry annihilates any max level team in under 90 seconds every single match.]

3) Useful characters: For PvE; the nerf list hasn't changed over time, CMags is still in "someday soon" status. Most new characters push out silly amounts of damage because of power creep. Anyone released in the "Lazy" era is considerably more powerful than earlier characters. CMags and Steve Rogers still rule for board control. For PvP: See response to #2.

4) Spidey had enhanced sale value for awhile after the ATU nerf (which is long expired at this point). Since then, no forms of compensation have been granted for significant gameplay changes to characters.

Spoit

atomzed wrote:

Spoit wrote:

It's been maintaining the same arc since around, like, February, so you should probably be able to extrapolate where it is around now if you were quiting a month or two ago.

They removed prologue healing because it was too tedious (but replaced it with TU dumping, which is at least twice as tedious, and much less useful), which was okay for a while, since it depressed scores a little bit in Season 3.

But in season 4, sharding is back with a vengance, and twice as bad as season 1's super gentle nudges. You're looking at around 1.2k to get top 10, like a minimum 1.4k to get top 5 (which they added back a 4th cover as well as a nice chunk of ISO to, which to be fair was a nice change)

Talking about TUs, they removed environmental points with another type of AP (which unlike everything else is effected by diminishing returns, so if you make a double match with it, you only get 2). Which means that instead of eating hotdogs, the AI is dropping world ruptures and the like on you, while you try to gather 20 AP to get rid of the balistic salvos you can't delete from your inventory.

Oh yeah, the inventory. Apparently boosts stopped dropping randomly.

Spoit got it spot on for most things...

I just add my 2 cents.
1) Season 4 has seen them giving more desirable covers. So far, no Rags, Loki, DD, Doom.... bec of that, I have been enjoying it more since those covers are what I need

2) AP or match boosts still drops... But at a much reduced rate. Someone (I think Lyrian) suggests that they are trying to cut down the boosts, and maybe even tsk it away from the game entirely. That may be a good thing, as it reduces the amount of shield hopping possible. It also emphasise on importance of roster diversity. (Though someone will say that it's to sell health packs, as they claimed with all changes).

The bolded was what was said when they shifted them to costing HP to replenish. How is that working out again?

OnesOwnGrief

Well is they do remove Boosts, it will most certainly cut down Sentry's speed on offense. Couple that with the (halted) incoming change to Daken, it should balance out that combo a fair bit.
As for if the game got better? I enjoy it for what it is. Trying new combos out and not trying to Patchneto everything. I'll be happy when I start seeing defensive wins with a Daredevil team I'm working out.

atomzed

Spoit wrote:

atomzed wrote:

Spoit wrote:

It's been maintaining the same arc since around, like, February, so you should probably be able to extrapolate where it is around now if you were quiting a month or two ago.

They removed prologue healing because it was too tedious (but replaced it with TU dumping, which is at least twice as tedious, and much less useful), which was okay for a while, since it depressed scores a little bit in Season 3.

But in season 4, sharding is back with a vengance, and twice as bad as season 1's super gentle nudges. You're looking at around 1.2k to get top 10, like a minimum 1.4k to get top 5 (which they added back a 4th cover as well as a nice chunk of ISO to, which to be fair was a nice change)

Talking about TUs, they removed environmental points with another type of AP (which unlike everything else is effected by diminishing returns, so if you make a double match with it, you only get 2). Which means that instead of eating hotdogs, the AI is dropping world ruptures and the like on you, while you try to gather 20 AP to get rid of the balistic salvos you can't delete from your inventory.

Oh yeah, the inventory. Apparently boosts stopped dropping randomly.

Spoit got it spot on for most things...

I just add my 2 cents.
1) Season 4 has seen them giving more desirable covers. So far, no Rags, Loki, DD, Doom.... bec of that, I have been enjoying it more since those covers are what I need

2) AP or match boosts still drops... But at a much reduced rate. Someone (I think Lyrian) suggests that they are trying to cut down the boosts, and maybe even tsk it away from the game entirely. That may be a good thing, as it reduces the amount of shield hopping possible. It also emphasise on importance of roster diversity. (Though someone will say that it's to sell health packs, as they claimed with all changes).

The bolded was what was said when they shifted them to costing HP to replenish. How is that working out again?

Well, if they take it out *entirely*, there won't be any way of purchasing it (which is what I wrote and meant).

Truth be told, I do think that Mpq need ways of monetization and shields/ boosts are an ok way for that. I also feel that if someone wants to spend $2300 Euro on a game, he ought to have a huge advantage over me.

So while I want a game that is balanced, and a competitive meta (I.e. not just a bracket that I can win everytime), I also want their business to be sustainable.

Unknown

If you were bored with the game before it didn't get any worse or better for you to change your mind unless there's a new character that you really like. I think the game may have been a little bit overall because of stuff like more reasonable scaling (at least to most people) or that certain covers are no longer alliance exclusive, but I don't think it's anything big enough to change someone's mind on playing or quitting the game.