Data please, Demiurge

CaptainFreaky

This is a love letter to Demiurge Will or Miles or IceX or anyone else...

You said that you were concerned that the Winfinite combo of MNM+Mystique was not fun b/c it was creating near-infinite combos.

In the past you've provided some great data - so here's my ask: How often exactly was Winfinite actually used in the last 60-90 days, and has it resulted in better average scores for those who used it? Assuming this is mostly a PVE thing, you can just give us data on that.

My contention is that this combo was used extremely narrowly to begin with - and so the nerf of MNM (which effects 2* players quite a bit) and the double nerf of Mystique (which already I'd bet isn't used terribly much - again some data would be nice here) wasn't necessary because it was only narrowly used. I realize this strategy been discussed on the forum quite a bit, but we also know that us forum folks represent a very small part of the player base.

I suspect that the number of players with a usable (eg 5-blue cover) Mystique for the combo is fairly small in the big scheme of things and the % of play with this combo is not exactly game breaking.

But, of course, I'm just guessing. I think the forum at large would like to know if this is such a wide scale problem that fixing it will be for the betterment of the game, or if, as some suspect, this was a bit more arbitrary, perhaps because some folks in your office have stumbled upon this strategy during off-hours playtime and decided you didn't like it from a mechanics standpoint.

In short - can you provide any data on the usage that the Winfinite team was getting, average length of mission clear for WInfinite vs. the average overall, average PVE score of players using Winifinte vs. average score of players with similar character inventories...whatever you can provide would be very well received here. And it will certainly help you come the March Q&A time frame as well (which I can imagine will be quite contentious).

DaveR4470

Ultimately, it doesn't matter.

The only important thing is that establishing a situation where your team can infinitely attack is an unintended and imbalancing mechanism in the game. It's an exploitable flaw in the construction of the characters that has demonstrable impacts on both the player using the team (who can beat nodes that, arguably, should not be beatable by those teams) and the "community" on which community scaling is based (by distorting the clearance rate of nodes). It's ultimately no different than the various World of Warcraft quirks over the years where, for example, standing in a particular place would clip you into the scenery and cause you to be untargetable by mobs or other players. It doesn't matter how many people use it, or how often it's used -- it's an unintended consequence that's a break in the game mechanics, and it was 100% inevitable that it would be fixed.