Why these changes make me want to stop playing

El Satanno

If I can step away from all the niggling over details as to who and what should or shouldn't have been done to whoever, I think so far everyone is overlooking the most shrewd observation in Ark123's OP (bolded for emphasis):

ark123 wrote:

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.

Someone elsewhere (NorthernPolarity, maybe?) made a similar statement to the effect that in the absence of regular balance passes, it feels as if the devs don't really have a sense for what is and isn't balanced when they release these characters. The circumstantial evidence starts to pile up when we see that the most common "balance" changes made are those which negate grossly overpowered combinations. This seems to have reached a head with the pre-/release of Iron Fist and Professor X, the former hardly out of his wrapping paper, the latter not even available! Even granting that IceIX clearly stated that Xavier was subject to change, it doesn't do anything to shake the suspicion that after seeing all the possibly over-powered opportunities that rapidly surfaced on the forum, someone said "uh-oh," as Ark123 also stated.

The end result is that the only real plan we can see for the game is "release a new character every two weeks." This does not encourage a reasonable person to feel that investing money, time, or energy is a worthwhile endeavor. To draw another game analogy, it feels like the devs are playing Whac-a-mole here. We'd all feel better about staying with MPQ if they were playing chess.

So play chess, devs! Let us know that you're considering the long game by making changes across the board on a regular basis. Scale things up and down as people react, and don't just attack the most glaring violations of fair play with the kind of attacks that made poor Robert Reynolds a gold medalist in the Paralympics. Give us a monthly update that demonstrates you are working on more than just the next character. Give us the feeling that putting real money into this game won't feel like some arbitrary point on a scale between crapshoot and complete waste. Give us a reason to keep on playing!

Polares

This 4hor nerf to Power Surge is too much, they have destroyed her. Now Fury is way better (and other 3* like Luke Cage, IF or Cyclops). 19 AP to just do 7000 hps is too low.

They need to fix this 4hor nerf ASAP, right away, today, now. They should change the number of tiles to 8, or change tile damage from 725 to 1000 or more.

Unknown

konannfriends wrote:

turul wrote:

Dont forget they also destroyed Storm 1*/3*

Cascade queen into bottom tier useless.........

Yeah, but did anyone really think that 1* Storm wasn't OP, particularly her old MOTE?
1* Storm is still pretty solid.
3* Storm is weak in comparison to other 3*s.

1* Storm was my favourite character at one point. Then it was 2* MNMags, with Mystique a close second...

Unknown

El Satanno wrote:

If I can step away from all the niggling over details as to who and what should or shouldn't have been done to whoever, I think so far everyone is overlooking the most shrewd observation in Ark123's OP (bolded for emphasis):

ark123 wrote:

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.

Someone elsewhere (NorthernPolarity, maybe?) made a similar statement to the effect that in the absence of regular balance passes, it feels as if the devs don't really have a sense for what is and isn't balanced when they release these characters. The circumstantial evidence starts to pile up when we see that the most common "balance" changes made are those which negate grossly overpowered combinations. This seems to have reached a head with the pre-/release of Iron Fist and Professor X, the former hardly out of his wrapping paper, the latter not even available! Even granting that IceIX clearly stated that Xavier was subject to change, it doesn't do anything to shake the suspicion that after seeing all the possibly over-powered opportunities that rapidly surfaced on the forum, someone said "uh-oh," as Ark123 also stated.

The end result is that the only real plan we can see for the game is "release a new character every two weeks." This does not encourage a reasonable person to feel that investing money, time, or energy is a worthwhile endeavor. To draw another game analogy, it feels like the devs are playing Whac-a-mole here. We'd all feel better about staying with MPQ if they were playing chess.

So play chess, devs! Let us know that you're considering the long game by making changes across the board on a regular basis. Scale things up and down as people react, and don't just attack the most glaring violations of fair play with the kind of attacks that made poor Robert Reynolds a gold medalist in the Paralympics. Give us a monthly update that demonstrates you are working on more than just the next character. Give us the feeling that putting real money into this game won't feel like some arbitrary point on a scale between crapshoot and complete waste. Give us a reason to keep on playing!

Yeah I feel I really buried my argument there. Probably shouldn't have written this angry.

Yes, that was my main point. These changes basically destroyed any hopes I had that the devs actually have meetings where they discuss character interactions, offer up new game mechanics and think about the future. This is clearly just one guy or a small team who makes characters, releases them, then they read about the impact in the forums later. In the case of prof. X, I'd bet someone like IceX or Miles or one of the couple guys that actually check these tipped them off about the possibility of a problem.

That is my main issue. It's why it's been hard to grind the PvE. I have no real faith that any good character I grind my **** for won't be carelessly turned into a bad 3* as soon as the forum panics. The change to GT's yellow and Mystique just go to show that someone just said "oh these characters are the problem? nerf everything", with no real idea of why or how.

They need a beta server. They need player feedback for patches. Though I can see how that can be problematic if the only real order is "release a new character every week and a half, see what happens later, nerf whatever people are screaming about".

So I guess it really boils down to whether this is a "milk it for all it's worth before it burns out" project versus something like Magic The Gathering, planned to last for years.

Unknown

ark123 wrote:

So I guess it really boils down to whether this is a "milk it for all it's worth before it burns out" project versus something like Magic The Gathering, planned to last for years.

It's hard to plan a game like MTG from the start since MTG obviously didn't start thinking it was going to be the biggest CCG ever and at the start it was far more messed up than MPQ is. Now being the biggest CCG ever gives you resources and time to fix the mistake but it could've been prohibitive to started out like that.

That said, MPQ seems to be around for a while and looks at least profitable enough to start thinking about the long run.

In terms of balance I think the game has gotten far too big to test. You have roughly n^3 number of teams that you can form where n is the number of characters. After a certain point (and I'm sure we've passed it) it is not feasible for anyone to have enough knowledge of all the teams unless you do nothing but playing this game all day, which is not possible from a developer point of view. When they said they were rotating out characters, they should have taken this opportunity and eliminated characters from being used at all so that the balance issue becomes tractable. I'm thinking a model where all characters are always usable in non-competitive events and only characters in the current season token are usable for competitive events could work. Of course you're going to ask 'what non-competitive event?' and that's part of the problem in itself. The non-competitive portion of MPQ, if such a thing existed, could have more leeway to overpowered stuff just because AI can't complain about Thor being too good.

By the way, even if you completely ignore anything balance-wise, from a business point of view it wouldn't make sense to let a character like Thor or X Force stay overpowered for long because you can't expect every player to spend 2 years or $500 for covers and you will lose them if those characters are so strong to be perceived unbeatable. Anyone who is overwhelmingly powerful in a competitive environment is going to get brought down to earth in the long run unless the game has no plan of ever getting any new players. From the interviews it seems to me the team occasionally wants to try something 'cool' or 'fun' but usually finds out it's too good. Perhaps there should be some way overpowered character reserved only for non competitive stuff. I sure would like to team up with a Muscle in a non-competitive event, or learn from The Don who taught OBW and The Hood how to generate AP.

tanis3303

Phantron wrote:

In terms of balance I think the game has gotten far too big to test. You have roughly n^3 number of teams that you can form where n is the number of characters. After a certain point (and I'm sure we've passed it) it is not feasible for anyone to have enough knowledge of all the teams unless you do nothing but playing this game all day, which is not possible from a developer point of view. When they said they were rotating out characters, they should have taken this opportunity and eliminated characters from being used at all so that the balance issue becomes tractable. I'm thinking a model where all characters are always usable in non-competitive events and only characters in the current season token are usable for competitive events could work. Of course you're going to ask 'what non-competitive event?' and that's part of the problem in itself. The non-competitive portion of MPQ, if such a thing existed, could have more leeway to overpowered stuff just because AI can't complain about Thor being too good.

That's freakin brilliant! Make seasons act like the various formats in MtG, or even have a selection of 3 when the season starts. Un-nerf everyone you put in wheelchairs, maybe not all the way, but make them good again and offer a "standard" format that only allows the use of newer characters, a "modern" format that allows everyone but some of the OP characters to compete (so no xforce, no thor, no sentry, etc) and a "vintage" format where people can play whoever they want, enter at your own risk (and no proxies )

SnowcaTT

MtG tests YEARS ahead of releases now, it's very rare anything makes it into the hands of players that is an immediate problem.

With the constant releases that create very simple problems (no timer as a recent example), it's obvious they aren't play-testing at all. They really need a beta group to get some of these problems before they are released to the general population.

If they took the MtG model, play-tests (of fully covered/leveled characters) would have been done with both Charles and IF, and these problems would have been discovered before the players even saw the initial builds.