Why these changes make me want to stop playing

Unknown

This isn't an angry quitting post. This isn't a "how dare you" post. This is a post where I explain why these changes make me want to stop playing this game. I'll try to keep it short.

So I play a lot. I'm in a pretty big alliance, I'm involved with the community, I love the overall feel of the game. But the recent character changes strike me as amateurish, short sighted and clumsy.

1 - Posting Xavier's abilities before they were final, immediately nerfing him.

We're led to think that the characters are developed with a few things in mind. Interaction with characters, flavor (meaning how the character "feels"), and overall power among them. We've been talking about the mystique+mnmags interaction for a while now, and I think most of us were under the impression that you guys kept the combo in mind. When Professor X's abilities were revealed, it took seconds for people to think of how he would interact with said combo. Then people thought of other combos. Well clearly the people (though judging by how this is going, person) in charge of design decided to browse the forum for the first time in his life, read the thread, went into a panic, and designed to nerf it immediately.

2 - Nerfing Winfinite

Clearly soon after that guy the thread again, noticed people still were pointing out how broken the interaction with winfinite would be, and went through a few threads from the last month to find out what the combo entailed. That person then slapped his forehead, and decided he needed to bone up on how those characters worked, since he'd forgotten about them seconds after their release.

3 - Goddess

He then probably decided it might be a good idea to browse the general forums after random complaints, isolating the daily "xForce and Goddess needs to be nerfed" threads. Goddess would be easy to nerf, since she's a relatively new character, but the person nervously looked at the tab where he was putting the finishing touches on the IW rework, pondered about what it would look like if he was forced to nerf a character he had very recently reworked, thought about how much he liked his job, and decided to postpone the xf nerf for a while.

Now, to me, this (plus the Iron Fist nerf before the vast majority of people had enough covers to play him) point to a direction I've seen before. In Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2, blizzard put entirely too much weight on community feedback when those games were new, and made major, incredibly clumsy changes to the games as response. The result is that many people felt like sinking any significant amount of time into learning those games was a waste of time, since nothing could be relied on. This was particularly disastrous in Diablo 3, where there was a real money auction house, so changes would often ruin items people had paid real money for, sometimes a lot of money. It basically killed the hardcore community, who moved on to games where they felt the developers had an actual plan for the future of the game that wasn't "listen to the panic". The Diablo 3 team was later fired, and a new team was built, one that stuck to their guns substantially more, and made the game playable, but the game never had the same amount of players again.

I don't have a viable x-force. I do have a viable goddess, which I use with Loki, and that team allows me to play high level pvp. I fought hard for those GT covers. Hell, in the case of the first 5, they cost me sleepless nights grinding at that awful pve event.

These changes lock me out of high level pvp, and make me uncertain that any covers I commit for will be worth anything after a few days.

So this isn't goodbye. I'm still around. This isn't "F you". This is just "Stop and think about it, because in the past companies that did this destroyed their games and the good will of the community".

Thanks for your attention.

simonsez

ark123 wrote:

But the recent character changes strike me as amateurish, short sighted and clumsy.

You left out the Rags update, which is the most amateurish move of the whole bunch. His moveset now is a complete pile of suck. Which is awesome, since the only time we ever see him is on the opposite side in PvE

Unknown

simonsez wrote:

ark123 wrote:

But the recent character changes strike me as amateurish, short sighted and clumsy.

You left out the Rags update, which is the most amateurish move of the whole bunch. His moveset now is a complete pile of suck. Which is awesome, since the only time we ever see him is on the opposite side in PvE

I was mainly trying to say why right now I'm looking at the final Alaska grind and really having a hard time playing.

**** new characters are fine. They don't really do anything for the game or against it. It looks bad for the guy designing all these, but we've seen doc oc and beast, we know he sometimes designs these after a night of heavy drinking.

But this "nerf everything popular and see what happens" approach just kills entire games. I like this game. I don't want to stop playing.

DrStrange-616

My motivation is at an all-time low right now. The only thing that has me playing today is my alliance.

Consider the fun officially sucked.

scottee

ark123 wrote:

But this "nerf everything popular and see what happens" approach just kills entire games. I like this game. I don't want to stop playing.

"Popular" also happens to be "better than everything else in the game". The only thing still out of sync with everything else in terms of power is X-Force. A slight nerf on him would actually make the top level of characters all pretty close to equal.

Unknown

scottee wrote:

ark123 wrote:

But this "nerf everything popular and see what happens" approach just kills entire games. I like this game. I don't want to stop playing.

"Popular" also happens to be "better than everything else in the game". The only thing still out of sync with everything else in terms of power is X-Force. A slight nerf on him would actually make the top level of characters all pretty close to equal.

This is only accurate if your development team screws up with clockwork regularity. If characters were well thought out we wouldn't see them changed days after their release (or immediately before)

Unknown

I bought those IF purple covers yesterday and now it got nerfed the next day... Want my money back.

Unknown

While we are at it, can we stop calling i "winfinite". It doesn't always work even when boosted. You can often run **** boards with all yellow/green/red/TU and have no chance at any matches until substantially later in a game. Additionally, I know this is a shock, but enemy characters also can use and make crit matches off Mystique power so you can screw yourself. It would be awesome if this was a fool-proof combo with 100% success but seeing as they are killed off more often than not, that's not the case. But hey, at least we now know that pissing and moaning gets things accomplished here (except for things roster slot cost).

scottee

ricin wrote:

While we are at it, can we stop calling i "winfinite". It doesn't always work even when boosted. You can often run **** boards with all yellow/green/red/TU and have no chance at any matches until substantially later in a game. Additionally, I know this is a shock, but enemy characters also can use and make crit matches off Mystique power so you can screw yourself. It would be awesome if this was a fool-proof combo with 100% success but seeing as they are killed off more often than not, that's not the case. But hey, at least we now know that pissing and moaning gets things accomplished here (except for things roster slot cost).

I don't think I've ever lost with the combo and using +3 blue/purple. I'm pretty sure my win rate is 100%.

Unknown

akiratang wrote:

I bought those IF purple covers yesterday and now it got nerfed the next day... Want my money back.

You should submit a ticket to D3 and get ready to dispute your payment with ITunes, Google Play or whatever platform you use.

DaveR4470

I'm not surprised, or particularly upset, by the concept of removing Winfinite as an available option for players.

I do think, though, that the changes to eliminate it go overboard. The MNMags change isn't great (mainly because it also impacts the CStorm synergy), but at max level the additional red generation at least, in theory, gives you the potential to fire off his (somewhat underrated) Magnetic Flux. But as others have pointed out, Mystique was actually pretty well balanced, and the change to her is unnecessary and unbalancing.

Unknown

ark123 wrote:

I don't have a viable x-force. I do have a viable goddess, which I use with Loki, and that team allows me to play high level pvp. I fought hard for those GT covers. Hell, in the case of the first 5, they cost me sleepless nights grinding at that awful pve event.

These changes lock me out of high level pvp, and make me uncertain that any covers I commit for will be worth anything after a few days.

Don't think of it as losing your Goddess, think of all the loot you gained while using that broken character for all those events. This is no different from fixing Sentry, Patchneto, Spidey, original Thorverine, Rags. The game will go on, the good players will adapt and find the new broken place and abuse it for rewards until D3 catches up.

As for being locked out of high level PvP, people get up there with 166s all the time, so unless you only developed Goddess, you should be fine

iLL619

Cry babies crying about op characters kills games.. Smh adapt or .. **** that make your voice be heard in D3 forums!! They have to counter this fire they caused

Unknown

papa07 wrote:

ark123 wrote:

I don't have a viable x-force. I do have a viable goddess, which I use with Loki, and that team allows me to play high level pvp. I fought hard for those GT covers. Hell, in the case of the first 5, they cost me sleepless nights grinding at that awful pve event.

These changes lock me out of high level pvp, and make me uncertain that any covers I commit for will be worth anything after a few days.

Don't think of it as losing your Goddess, think of all the loot you gained while using that broken character for all those events. This is no different from fixing Sentry, Patchneto, Spidey, original Thorverine, Rags. The game will go on, the good players will adapt and find the new broken place and abuse it for rewards until D3 catches up.

As for being locked out of high level PvP, people get up there with 166s all the time, so unless you only developed Goddess, you should be fine

I've had enough covers and levels on her to make her viable for the last 3 events. My cage was 535, my GSBW is 535. I did get covers for the newly nerfed iron fist though.

Unknown

Had exactly the same idea, it seems someone went to the forum for the first time and got in panic
The changes to Xavier were stupid, why do you go through all the "I will hint the moves so you see how cool this 4* is" and then nerf it?

**** pve system with broken scaling and rewards + nerf of a character that wasnt even out yet + nerf of one of the only 2 4* ppl uses (because they made the others awful)

How that should motivate anyone to get a new 4*? they only install a general rant mood

Unknown

scottee wrote:

ark123 wrote:

But this "nerf everything popular and see what happens" approach just kills entire games. I like this game. I don't want to stop playing.

"Popular" also happens to be "better than everything else in the game". The only thing still out of sync with everything else in terms of power is X-Force. A slight nerf on him would actually make the top level of characters all pretty close to equal.

Someone has to be on top. If you play this never ending game of "nerf the popular combo" it only leads to hurt feelings on the part of people who buy covers and resentment by the player base for not seeing these things coming in the first place. XF can reign supreme in the damage per AP category for all I care. Someone always will. By not changing him you at least have some idea of what the goal is.

Bringing out the nerf bat and beating up on what's "popular" just leads to a new thing taking it's place. There will always be a best duo to PvP with, and there will always be gimmick trios for PvE. Therefore, you just piss off anyone who had the thing you just took away.

I personally feel most these changes are just flat not needed. "Winfinite" is hardly actually infinite, it backfires on non purple boards and leaves you stuck with 2 very fragile characters to try and get something going. And it's not like MNM Polarity Shift is the only tile conversion power in the game, it just happens to convert to a color needed to convert into the color it uses.

scottee

I agree that they shouldn't nerf something just because it's popular UNLESS balance changes are a regular thing, like maybe tweak a lot of numbers by a little each month to try to get parity. If they only nerf a couple times a year, it should be for good reason.

That said, I think Thor definitely needed a nerf.

Winfinite needed to be stopped as well. It was certainly infinite for me. I had a 100% win rate with it in PVE. Boost +3 purple/blue and you can start the combo on either color. How fast it works depends on who you bring with, BP and Xforce being the best.

Rags will be interesting. Breaks current combos, but Rags/Mystique/MnM might be the new infinite.

Unknown

I think Magneto's nerf makes him a better overall character. Who didn't think CStorm/MNMags combo wasn't OP? The truth is few cared because they were 2*, unless you got hit for 50 points by them in some random PVP.

I always hated 'winfinite' as the combo not always infinite nor a guaranteed win if you had a bad board, but I agree it had to eventually be nerfed. We had a good run of 4 months of Magstique; I'm just sad Mystique was overnerfed.

I don't think the nerfs were necessarily beating up what was popular; they were popular because they were OP. D3 just went too far again.

I really wished they had nerfed IF's purple before it was released and before people starting putting in the effort to win him, but I guess it wasn't obvious enough to them that it was broken despite many pages of ranting. At least with Professor X's nerf, they did it before people had put a whole week into trying to win him + hp to buy his covers.

Unknown

papa07 wrote:

ark123 wrote:

I don't have a viable x-force. I do have a viable goddess, which I use with Loki, and that team allows me to play high level pvp. I fought hard for those GT covers. Hell, in the case of the first 5, they cost me sleepless nights grinding at that awful pve event.

These changes lock me out of high level pvp, and make me uncertain that any covers I commit for will be worth anything after a few days.

Don't think of it as losing your Goddess, think of all the loot you gained while using that broken character for all those events. This is no different from fixing Sentry, Patchneto, Spidey, original Thorverine, Rags. The game will go on, the good players will adapt and find the new broken place and abuse it for rewards until D3 catches up.

As for being locked out of high level PvP, people get up there with 166s all the time, so unless you only developed Goddess, you should be fine

The Goddess nerf is TOTALLY different than all of those.

Sentry allowed you to win a game in 3 moves. Patchneto allowed you to win a game in 3 moves. Spiderman allowed you to win a game with 6 blue. Goddess took 19 AP to do 11,000 damage. That's not 3 moves.

Power Surge was too good. I get that. 3 turn stun and 5 charge tiles, fine, whatever. But now base damage on Smite needs to be upped. It's damage per AP always relied on charge tiles to be effective, and without those it's just a terrible way to spend AP on a super tank. Take the charge tiles down if you feel the speed offered by them is too much, but at least give us something to compensate Smite's damage with. And don't even get me started on the nerf to a skill no one uses reliably.

mohio

In response to the subject line of this post I'd like to offer my reasons for this as well. To me all these changes just highlight the fact that chasing after these new characters nonstop is pointless. And let's face it, the game doesn't really have much more to offer than that. So, if these are the things the devs are spending their time on as opposed to new content, then I'm not sure how much longer I'd like to stick around.

morph3us

I wonder if these changes are reflective of the pace of character release? Releasing a new character every two weeks can't possibly give them sufficient time to consider all of the possible combinations, nor overall game balance.

I think they need to slow down the pace of character release and make sure they're right, rather than rebalance post fact.