All-New R69 Patch Notes - 1/19/15

GrumpySmurf1002

This seems like a rather casual answer to something that has existed for at least a year.

I appreciate not taking 400+ match damage any longer, but I wonder why now, and why unannounced before it hit.

Ducky

OnesOwnGrief wrote:

That moment when a poorly scaled Patch does 0 damage on red because minions lol. Unless of course they have it in which minions can't own tiles.

You do realize that enemy tile strength has nothing to do with Patches red, right?

Unknown

Being that I reported #2 in the bug section in July 2014, and it was not noticed until January 2015; I'll give you the heads up on another bug so it can be noticed in July 2015.

Passives are not working on the player's first turn. They work on the ai ' s first turn, just not players. Examples include patch yellow and cage red.

And yes, I also reported this one as well in the bugs section.

Pylgrim

stephen43084 wrote:

Being that I reported #2 in the bug section in July 2014, and it was not noticed until January 2015; I'll give you the heads up on another bug so it can be noticed in July 2015.

Passives are not working on the player's first turn. They work on the ai ' s first turn, just not players. Examples include patch yellow and cage red.

And yes, I also reported this one as well in the bugs section.

Pretty sure that works as designed. Every game that features turns has some benefits for the starting player and some benefits for the non-starting player. In MPQ starting player gets first pick of match which may be used to plan cascades, 5-matches or simply to get ahead in the colour you need.. Also, deal damage first. Non-starting player gets the first round of passive abilities triggering.

Mawtful wrote:

The forum is in quite a bit of disarray.

Haven't you learnt yet? These are exactly the sorts of changes that we'd like to have discussed BEFORE they appear in the game.

Yeah, sheez! And while we're at that they also need to discuss with us whenever they're taking a bathroom break and whether they should have carpool to work!

Unknown

Don't you think it's a bit disingenuous to refer to these changes as bug fixes? ISO-8 mutants have been around for almost an entire year, and Balance of Power has been around since last July. Why not just be straightforward and call them balance changes?

Dayv

gobstopper wrote:

Don't you think it's a bit disingenuous to refer to these changes as bug fixes? ISO-8 mutants have been around for almost an entire year, and Balance of Power has been around since last July. Why not just be straightforward and call them balance changes?

The Brotherhood change definitely seems like a bug fix to me. There's been threads about it before, they were inconsistent in a few ways.

Mawtful

gobstopper wrote:

Don't you think it's a bit disingenuous to refer to these changes as bug fixes? ISO-8 mutants have been around for almost an entire year, and Balance of Power has been around since last July. Why not just be straightforward and call them balance changes?

That's what I thought, but I'm getting dragged over hot coals for suggesting that demiurge were a bit slack in the communication department.

Vhailorx

I agree with other posters that this seems like an oddly significant change to a longstanding mechanic to be dropped on players with no prior notice. It's not as if the greater match-damage scaling for 1* and 2* was an unknown. I have seen posts to this effect on these forums for months. I think polarity's guide even explicitly says that 1*s scale faster than 2*s and 2*s scale faster than 3*s.

It seems basically impossible that this is a "bug" that the devs have just noticed.

All that being said, this change makes sense by and large and will be player friendly overall, since massive scaling appears frequently for ai teams in PVE. It may also slightly hurt 2*-3* transition players, whose buffed 2*s won't be quite as strong.

One lingering issue with leaving the goon match ratings as high as they are is a potentially significant change to "strongest color" abilities (e.g., surgical strike, nightstalker). The ai's strongest color will now be the goons in any match including a goon. So it will be harder to know ahead of time what colors those abilities will steal.

Unknown

Vhailorx wrote:

I agree with other posters that this seems like an oddly significant change to a longstanding mechanic to be dropped on players with no prior notice. It's not as if the greater match-damage scaling for 1* and 2* was an unknown. I have seen posts to this effect on these forums for months. I think polarity's guide even explicitly says that 1*s scale faster than 2*s and 2*s scale faster than 3*s.

It seems basically impossible that this is a "bug" that the devs have just noticed.

All that being said, this change makes sense by and large and will be player friendly overall, since massive scaling appears frequently for ai teams in PVE. It may also slightly hurt 2*-3* transition players, whose buffed 2*s won't be quite as strong.

One lingering issue with leaving the goon match ratings as high as they are is a potentially significant change to "strongest color" abilities (e.g., surgical strike, nightstalker). The ai's strongest color will now be the goons in any match including a goon. So it will be harder to know ahead of time what colors those abilities will steal.

For any ability that isn't Nightstalker the 'strongest color' of a goon is just whatever their top ability is. For Nightstalker it's just any color with an ability (including other goons) that are tied for highest match, though the previous data I collected on who gets tiebreaker between 1/2/3*s seem to be off after this patch so it's back to the drawing board there.

The more annoying issue is when you fight say, The Hood + 2 Dons at 395, you see The Hood make a green match 4, which isn't his strong color but you still took 1200 damage because it's using the goon's strength of 150. To be fair, these fights it's either way too easy (stun the lone villian) or way too hard (the above example would likely result in a turn 3 Twin Pistols and instantly killing anybody) that taking a 1200 match 4 is not a priority, but it still feels pretty weird.

kensterr

This patch broke the alliance chat function on my Xiaomi Mi3 running Android Kit Kat. Thank you Demiurge! Quitting the app and restarting it still gives me a blank alliance chat screen.

mischiefmaker

Not mentioned in the patch notes is that off-color scaling for 4* has been fixed as well -- it used to be that off-color tile damage actually went down at 210 and 245, from 11/11/10 to 11/10/10 and 11/10/9 respectively, but now stays at 11/11/10 the whole time.

This also means that the tile damage spreadsheet is no longer accurate for levels beyond the level cap. If folks would be so kind as to contribute their data, that would be lovely! Link is in my sig, but also here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... d=64247071

unimatrix

Why would devs drop such patch while a PVE is ongoing?
It screws up the rhythm that player has developed for the past 4 days or so of the PVE.
That could mean losing a cover or two for some people.

Simply great timing.

Bowgentle

unimatrix wrote:

Why would devs drop such patch while a PVE is ongoing?

Because, as I've been told when I complained in the past, there is _always_ a PVE running.
So it doesn't really matter when they drop stuff like that, it's always going to be bad timing.

Oldboy

I'm not a dev but i can make a guess why they fixed this 'bug' now. They have mentioned before that they do have a list of stuff to fix and look at and i'm guessing that after all the work of introducing new characters and whatnot, they managed to get around to fixing this. Also they might have had to test the match damage scaling first since it's a big change for *every* character.

As for introducing it now, i dont see why it should be a big issue. The enemy levels in the more valuable and difficult nodes are always higher than ours so by introducing this change they are actually making it less painful for us in terms of match damage. As for it affecting tanking, that will happen anyway regardless of the timing. One thing they might want to look at and introduce is the option of decreasing character levels so that we can adjust when changes like these take place.

Spoit

Bowgentle wrote:

unimatrix wrote:

Why would devs drop such patch while a PVE is ongoing?

Because, as I've been told when I complained in the past, there is _always_ a PVE running.
So it doesn't really matter when they drop stuff like that, it's always going to be bad timing.

And like I said the last few times, there's a world of difference between slotting it in during the last day or two of an event, compared to the opening hours of the next one. Especially since all the endings except for this upcoming one are aligned to the end of a pvp event too

DD-The-Mighty

Demiurge_Miles wrote:

2) Fixed a bug where the match damage of 1*, 2*, and 3* characters were scaling too aggressively when they were past their normal level range.

We noticed an issue that was happening when 1*, 2*, and 3* characters were scaled past their natural level cap (51+ for 1*, 95+ for 2*, 167+ for 3*). Their match damage was scaling far beyond their 4* counterparts. The effect was that in an event such as Balance of Power, 1* and 2* characters were matching for about 2x damage as compared to 4* characters. On top of that 1* and 2* characters that were scaled up in Story events were dealing far too much match damage (one of the worst offenders being Juggernaut).

As a result we've adjusted how characters scale when they're boosted past their natural level range. Their health and ability damage continue to scale up as before, but their match damage now grows at the same rate as a 4* character. The effect being that in Balance of Power, all characters will have roughly the same match damage. Note that this change does not affect minions, only playable characters.

Ok, you have finally addressed the out of control match damage of characters who were never designed to be that high of a level. Thanks.

Are you also planning to rebalanced their AP requirements to follow suit? You know full well you would NEVER design a level 100+ capable character to deal damage like Juggernaut and Ares. (like the former sentry) Lower match damage aside, their speed alone makes them broken when leveled past their originally designed cap.

simonsez

Demiurge_Miles wrote:

Their health and ability damage continue to scale up as before

Why? The ability damage is every bit as broken as the match damage was

Unknown

Spoit wrote:

Bowgentle wrote:

unimatrix wrote:

Why would devs drop such patch while a PVE is ongoing?

Because, as I've been told when I complained in the past, there is _always_ a PVE running.
So it doesn't really matter when they drop stuff like that, it's always going to be bad timing.

And like I said the last few times, there's a world of difference between slotting it in during the last day or two of an event, compared to the opening hours of the next one. Especially since all the endings except for this upcoming one are aligned to the end of a pvp event too

There's also a difference between dropping it during a new character PVE and an old character PVE.

Trisul

DuckyV wrote:

OnesOwnGrief wrote:

That moment when a poorly scaled Patch does 0 damage on red because minions lol. Unless of course they have it in which minions can't own tiles.

You do realize that enemy tile strength has nothing to do with Patches red, right?

Maybe he was referring to enemy Patch + feeders? Although I can't recall any node in any PvE that had that setup....

JVReal

My thoughts are that this is a good change. I noticed that brotherhood minions were feeding juggs green AP when they didn't use green AP themselves, thank you for that.
Scaling fix, thank you for that too.

If you could take a look at maybe identifying which minion owns which countdown tile, that would be appreciated. When 2 minions of the same type are both throwing out CD tiles, and 1 is expiring before the rest and I want to stun him/her... I don't know which one to stun. 2 Spies, 2 Grenadiers, perhaps assign them as Spy 1, Spy 2, and display ownership in the text of the tile description when you touch it to see who owns it, or maybe when you select a minion opponent as your target, his/her owned tiles glow so I know which one to target before the other. Nothing worse than guessing wrong and the 4 count tiles disappear as the 1 turn one remains.