Trying to understand the concept of nerfing

rbdragon

I read the board quite a bit but don't comment all that often...but there's something that's been bugging me lately...

Why is there always a call to "nerf" a certain character? No matter what you do, there will always be 3 tiers of characters: Great (aka Very Strong or Overpowered), Good (aka Playable), and Poor (aka Barely Worth Having).

Let's take Sentry for example, as he's the current whipping boy on the board. Why does he need to be "nerfed?" World Rupture is the issue, but I don't think he needs to be nerfed, just tweaked. To me, if you nerf a character, you take him/her from overpowered to barely playable (see Spider-man). Sentry doesn't need this, but a simple tweak to WR would do wonders to help the balance in the game. Common suggestions that all make sense: have all countdown tiles explode at once so they interact with strike tiles only once instead of on each tile, increase the timer to allow for opponent matching, or simply increase the cost (11 or 12 perhaps). If one of these changes were made, Sentry would still be extremely powerful, but not insta-death/game breaking.

But let's suppose Sentry does get nerfed, then what? Next up - X-Force? He just got his abilities boosted, and now I've heard calls for him to be nerfed...it makes no sense to me!

There will always be a top dog, no matter how many times they "nerf" the strongest character(s).

I guess for me, it's semantics - the word nerf vs tweak....but I do see a big difference. Spider-man was nerfed. No character deserves that.

Unknown

I think "nerfing" did originally mean making someone unplayable but it usually used to refer to any downgrade in power now. When we say we want Sentry nerfed, we don't mean we want him to unplayable. He just needs to not be the center of the entire meta of the game.

Unknown

Magneto was nerfed but he's still a very good character.

Of course there's no guarantee any nerf wouldn't have unintended consequences. If we somehow already know this stuff we shouldn't have overpowered character like Sentry in the first place, but we still need to try.

Unknown

Nerfs are only necessary for mechanics that break the game. This is a STRATEGY match 3 game If you remove strategy from the equation - that breaks the game.

Stunning the other team forever = broken
Killing the other team in only a few matches = broken
winning every time in 60 seconds = broken
Endless turns = broken

Doing a little more damage than the next guys = not broken
4* being a little better than 3* = not broken

There will always be a worst, best, and average but as long as the character keeps true to the spirit of puzzle quest, they don't deserve a nerf.

As more and more people use characters in the 10-15k hp range, Hood won't seem quite as op as people make him out to be. If anything was changed for Hood, say require 1 more of a color before he can steal, he'd probably need health compensation as he's basically a defensive glass cannon right now.

The irony with the nerfs is that they were suppose to promote roster diversity and we still see the same 2 guys at the end of every pvp and we still have heroic pve. . .

Unknown

Nerf and Tweak mean the same thing. 99.999% of the time any change to a character can be considered a nerf (except for X-force). All their attempts to rebalance characters have come out the other end with the character in question moving down teirs from Great to Good or worse. Any change that makes a character less powerful is a nerf, plain an simple.

Spider-Man was nerfed pretty hard. The problem is he went from the very edge of "playable" after his stun change to completely unplayable with the True Heal change. He needs a boost now, as do most True Heal characters, but that doesn't mean he didn't need a nerf before. So he was tweaked twice, and it sent him down the list of usable characters to the very bottom.

Sentry probably does need a nerf, due to the speed he can destroy things. On par, with his abilities doing damage to your team and the cost being 15 AP he's technically "balanced" in a sense, but the fact that you can boost 9 of that 15 AP (4 green and 5 yellow) instead of only 6 boost to a single color means 2 matches and it's over. That's basically the broken bit.

X-Force will not be nerfed. Even if he is the top dog, he deserves to be there. 4* characters are very hard to get. They deserve to be "Great".

Unknown

X Force is probably the second best character in the game in straight up numbers and can often kill The Hood with a 3 match move but that didn't somehow made people abandoning The Hood, so unless there are going to be a lot of new characters on par with X Force's power having more HPs on characters does nothing to The Hood's prevalence. You'd need more guys who can do 5000 damage in 3 matches if not 2 matches to try to phase out The Hood but that'd have a rather profound effect on the rest of the game, like making anyone under 10K HP practically worthless.

Incidentally X Force is a good example of what can be considered as an acceptable powerful character. If not for the fact that there are practically no usable characters with blue or purple as highest match, he'd be just right for balance. Right now you'd probably need to make Surgical Strike not generate AP to make him balanced because the characters that can counter Surgical Strike do not exist (blue/purple highest match). Even black, which is a one way counter (okay for attacking but useless on defense), is quite rare (Daken/Punisher/Blade and that's it).

Unknown

A 'tweak' to world rupture would be, by its very nature, a nerf.

The connotation versus denotation of the word nerf is your issue.

When you think nerf, you think Ragnarok or Spiderman.

A change that takes a character from overpowered to useless.

That is not the intent of a nerf.

the point of a nerf is to take someone who is taking over the game by 1. defining the meta, 2. forcing you to play a certain way to beat just him and 3. splitting the roster into "viable" and "not viable" based on their interactions with him and make them merely strong.

Magneto, for example, was a good example of a proper nerf.

You take the best character in the game, nerf him. And then he is ranked the 12th best character in the game. He was no longer defining the meta and was no longer overpowered but is still plenty of strong to play.

NorthernPolarity

rbdragon wrote:

I read the board quite a bit but don't comment all that often...but there's something that's been bugging me lately...

Why is there always a call to "nerf" a certain character? No matter what you do, there will always be 3 tiers of characters: Great (aka Very Strong or Overpowered), Good (aka Playable), and Poor (aka Barely Worth Having).

Let's take Sentry for example, as he's the current whipping boy on the board. Why does he need to be "nerfed?" World Rupture is the issue, but I don't think he needs to be nerfed, just tweaked. To me, if you nerf a character, you take him/her from overpowered to barely playable (see Spider-man). Sentry doesn't need this, but a simple tweak to WR would do wonders to help the balance in the game. Common suggestions that all make sense: have all countdown tiles explode at once so they interact with strike tiles only once instead of on each tile, increase the timer to allow for opponent matching, or simply increase the cost (11 or 12 perhaps). If one of these changes were made, Sentry would still be extremely powerful, but not insta-death/game breaking.

But let's suppose Sentry does get nerfed, then what? Next up - X-Force? He just got his abilities boosted, and now I've heard calls for him to be nerfed...it makes no sense to me!

There will always be a top dog, no matter how many times they "nerf" the strongest character(s).

I guess for me, it's semantics - the word nerf vs tweak....but I do see a big difference. Spider-man was nerfed. No character deserves that.

1. The "there will always be a top dog" logic is pretty flawed. What if we had a character that said: "3 red AP: win the game?" By your logic, nerfing that character is pointless because "if hes nerfed, then another character will just take his place". The thing is that there is a theoretical max power that a character should be, since otherwise the game would be broken and warped by that character obsoleting literally every other character in the game, which is what we're seeing with Sentry.

2. As others have said, the word "nerf" means making a character weaker so that the character is more in line with what would be considered acceptable power levels. It does NOT mean throw the character in the gutter like Spidey or Rags, those were examples of bad nerfs. Mags is an example of a good nerf, as discussed earlier.

Unknown

I don't think Ragnarok was a good example because honestly there was no way a character with only 2 abilities and a 25 or so level cap deficit was ever going to be as good as a normal 3* unless his two abilities are way overpowered. Let's say you take away Sentry's red and cap him at 140, he'd suddenly go from stupidly overpowered to probably just top tier and maybe not even that high, and here I pick the the weakest ability even though there's no evidence that the two abilities of a 2 ability character is meant to be especially strong. If we assume the ability we take away from Sentry is random, then there's a 2/3 chance the new '2 ability Sentry' would be considered bottom tier if we take away either Sacrifice or World Rupture, and certainly taking away either eliminates his status as the top character of choice.

HailMary

Lerysh wrote:

All their attempts to rebalance characters have come out the other end with the character in question moving down teirs from Great to Good or worse. Any change that makes a character less powerful is a nerf, plain an simple.

Exceptions: XF, MHawk, 2* Daken.

Unknown

I think the best way to think about it is to think of older games. Lets take Magic: the Gathering, because there is a surprising number of similarities with this situation.

Magic was released as a free game, and the cards were given away. It was designed well, but a few cards, specifically the cards in a specific cycle, were problematic.

See, the designer had designed a cycle of cards giving each color (there are 5 plus artifacts in MTG) a card that did "something" times 3 for one mana. White gave you 3 life for one white, red dealt 3 damage for a red, blue gave you 3 cards for a blue, black gave you 3 black mana for one black, green added 3 toughness and power to a creature for one mana, and artifacts got the Black Lotus, a card for zero mana that gave you 3 mana of any color. Seemed fair and fun.

Except when Magic started growing, and it grew fast, people found out that it wasn't balanced at all. 3 life was basically useless in exchange for a card, 3 cards for one blue was ridiculously good, the others were "ok" and Black Lotus was a card that would basically win you the game if you had it in your opening hand. Even now, after around 14000 cards have been released, Black Lotus and Ancestral Recall are the two best magic cards ever printed. So much so that at a point EVERY SINGLE player had to play with them in his deck if he wanted to stand ANY chance at winning a big competition.

So for a while, even though there were five colors of magic cards, you only saw decks with a blue color base and artifacts. Everyone was playing variations on the same exact deck, and it was boring and the game became about who won the coin flip at the start of the match, since he could play his too-good cards before his opponent.

So they made it so you could only play with one of each card in your deck (down form 4 of each).

Immediately new decks started popping up. You suddenly had dozens of viable decks, some that even profited from not winning that initial coin flip (you get an extra card), some that were based on red and very quick, some that were based on green and used green creatures, and the game became way more complex (you had to know how to play against a ton of decks) but WAY WAY more fun.

So why am I telling you this?

Basically, the current Sentry+Hood strategy is the old Black Lotus+Ancestral Recall of Magic. This single strategy is just so superior to anything anyone can do with other characters that the entire game becomes about this. Developers have to dance around the combo - you can't have a pve node that gives out incredible rewards in exchange of beating it, since people will just Sentry bomb it to pieces and collect loot. You can't let people use their full rosters most of the time because the combo is too good - or if they can, you have to make the nodes need to be done over and over because that's the combo's only limitation - it hurts it's own guys. In pvp we all know what happened of course - if you want a top10 spot, you need these two specific guys in your composition. You don't check to see if you're bringing in Spider-Man because the opponent will do a lot of small damage which you can counter with protect tiles. You don't slot in falcon for a Dino so you can slowly ramp up damage. You don't plan for a draining strategy via blade or mystique. You Sentry bomb like everyone else.

TL;DR:

We need Sentry nerfed because he puts constraints in both what the developers can throw at us as challenges and our choice of viable pvp teams, creating a situation where the too-good character needs to be constantly accounted for.

Whenever a way-too-good strategy comes up, it needs to be tweaked for the good of the entire game. Does that mean some day changing x-force's black? I don't know, probably. Will people that bought his covers rage? Probably. But if a game is to survive in the long term (Magic has been around for 16 years), it needs to be done.

Edit - that was way more long winded than I intended it to be, sorry

Unknown

Eh.. Even Mawkeye was more of a lateral move at best. Sure speed shot is great when paired with MNM, but outside that his damage potential actually went down. If anything he went from Good to Good or OK to Good at best.

I will give you adding Chemical Reaction to Baby Daken is a Boost, but they also jiggered his strike tiles, and 3* Daken as well. Daken barely escaped the cave of nerf with his dual strike tile output in tact.

Unknown

Just to add, there is such a thing as a "right" way to nerf a character. cMags is a good example. Spider-man is an awful one.

Unknown

ark123 wrote:

I think the best way to think about it is to think of older games. Lets take Magic: the Gathering, because there is a surprising number of similarities with this situation.

Magic was released as a free game, and the cards were given away. It was designed well, but a few cards, specifically the cards in a specific cycle, were problematic.

See, the designer had designed a cycle of cards giving each color (there are 5 plus artifacts in MTG) a card that did "something" times 3 for one mana. White gave you 3 life for one white, red dealt 3 damage for a red, blue gave you 3 cards for a blue, black gave you 3 black mana for one black, green added 3 toughness and power to a creature for one mana, and artifacts got the Black Lotus, a card for zero mana that gave you 3 mana of any color. Seemed fair and fun.

Except when Magic started growing, and it grew fast, people found out that it wasn't balanced at all. 3 life was basically useless in exchange for a card, 3 cards for one blue was ridiculously good, the others were "ok" and Black Lotus was a card that would basically win you the game if you had it in your opening hand. Even now, after around 14000 cards have been released, Black Lotus and Ancestral Recall are the two best magic cards ever printed. So much so that at a point EVERY SINGLE player had to play with them in his deck if he wanted to stand ANY chance at winning a big competition.

So for a while, even though there were five colors of magic cards, you only saw decks with a blue color base and artifacts. Everyone was playing variations on the same exact deck, and it was boring and the game became about who won the coin flip at the start of the match, since he could play his too-good cards before his opponent.

So they made it so you could only play with one of each card in your deck (down form 4 of each).

Immediately new decks started popping up. You suddenly had dozens of viable decks, some that even profited from not winning that initial coin flip (you get an extra card), some that were based on red and very quick, some that were based on green and used green creatures, and the game became way more complex (you had to know how to play against a ton of decks) but WAY WAY more fun.

So why am I telling you this?

Basically, the current Sentry+Hood strategy is the old Black Lotus+Ancestral Recall of Magic. This single strategy is just so superior to anything anyone can do with other characters that the entire game becomes about this. Developers have to dance around the combo - you can't have a pve node that gives out incredible rewards in exchange of beating it, since people will just Sentry bomb it to pieces and collect loot. You can't let people use their full rosters most of the time because the combo is too good - or if they can, you have to make the nodes need to be done over and over because that's the combo's only limitation - it hurts it's own guys. In pvp we all know what happened of course - if you want a top10 spot, you need these two specific guys in your composition. You don't check to see if you're bringing in Spider-Man because the opponent will do a lot of small damage which you can counter with protect tiles. You don't slot in falcon for a Dino so you can slowly ramp up damage. You don't plan for a draining strategy via blade or mystique. You Sentry bomb like everyone else.

TL;DR:

We need Sentry nerfed because he puts constraints in both what the developers can throw at us as challenges and our choice of viable pvp teams, creating a situation where the too-good character needs to be constantly accounted for.

Whenever a way-too-good strategy comes up, it needs to be tweaked for the good of the entire game. Does that mean some day changing x-force's black? I don't know, probably. Will people that bought his covers rage? Probably. But if a game is to survive in the long term (Magic has been around for 16 years), it needs to be done.

14000 unique cards???? holy shi+

Didn't that game also require you to use cards within a certain set? sounds like heroics to me!

Unknown

LoreNYC wrote:

14000 unique cards???? holy shi+

Didn't that game also require you to use cards within a certain set? sounds like heroics to me!

I don't really keep track of all the variation of Magic but I think it goes like this:

Vintage - (almost) everything is allowed.
Standard set + everything minus the a set of really broken cards that's only allowed in Vintage
Standard set + the last 2 expansions
last expansion only

And I think that'd be more interesting variation than the current PvP we have, and it'd be relatively easy to implement say a 'season 8 roster' and those are the only characters you can use plus some standard guy. It's also a great way to let imbalance issue phase out. If there was a Sentry in MTG, he'd most definitely not be in the standard set so that means he'd only be playable in 2 out of the 4 major formats. Of course, they do ban cards that are way overpowered, but this mechanism allows you to keep some overpowered stuff around without destroying their value or making it mandatory to have them. Note that in MTG, Vintage is not considered any superior a format compared to any other, so while having Ancestral Recall would make you a Vintage champion compared to anyone who doesn't have it, that's only one type of event and if you want to be the best you got to know how to play without Ancestral Recall for all the other events where it's banned.

Unknown

LoreNYC wrote:

ark123 wrote:

SNIP

14000 unique cards???? holy shi+

Didn't that game also require you to use cards within a certain set? sounds like heroics to me!

Depends. If you want to play standard, you can use the cards from core set plus the ones from recent expansions (don't really remember how many).

Funny thing is that the top players don't own cards. Or, if they do, they own them in a big group of pros. It ends up being pretty cheap to play at the very top. "ok" players are the ones that get screwed having to buy a ton of cards

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

LoreNYC wrote:

14000 unique cards???? holy shi+

Didn't that game also require you to use cards within a certain set? sounds like heroics to me!

I don't really keep track of all the variation of Magic but I think it goes like this:

Vintage - (almost) everything is allowed.
Standard set + everything minus the a set of really broken cards that's only allowed in Vintage
Standard set + the last 2 expansions
last expansion only

And I think that'd be more interesting variation than the current PvP we have, and it'd be relatively easy to implement say a 'season 8 roster' and those are the only characters you can use plus some standard guy. It's also a great way to let imbalance issue phase out. If there was a Sentry in MTG, he'd most definitely not be in the standard set so that means he'd only be playable in 2 out of the 4 major formats. Of course, they do ban cards that are way overpowered, but this mechanism allows you to keep some overpowered stuff around without destroying their value or making it mandatory to have them. Note that in MTG, Vintage is not considered any superior a format compared to any other, so while having Ancestral Recall would make you a Vintage champion compared to anyone who doesn't have it, that's only one type of event and if you want to be the best you got to know how to play without Ancestral Recall for all the other events where it's banned.

Yep, it would be awesome to have a few characters rotate out of a pvp format.

rbdragon

I dunno - I guess I just always thought of nerf as a more harsh word than truly intended - my apologies...

Unknown

It's true there is nerf and then there is hit every bat on the nerf tree on the way down falling from the top. Nerf isn't always a bad thing, as in C.Mags case (explained above). Right now there is a clear "this is how you PvP" in high ranks that involves Sentry. There is no Rock to his Scissors at the moment. If Sentry had a viable counter, that worked both on offense and on defense, then perhaps he would fall out of favor, but he doesn't, or attempts to make one have fallen short.

mohio

I'll be the one person here that actually agrees with rbdragon. Nerf really should mean take a good/great/overpowered char and turn it into something basically unplayable. However as with many words (in English at least) colloquial use trumps original meaning. So now when the board says nerf they mean what all these other guys are saying. So there are degrees of nerfing and people only really want the lightest degree of nerfing and not the "nerf to oblivion" nerfing that perhaps was the original meaning of the term.

Unknown

I'm sure nerf originally does mean 'unplayable' since if your gun become a nerf gun it's almost certainly unusable for whatever you previously planned to do with it, but over time nerf seems to just mean anything that makes a character weaker.