Nerfs, diversions, and you.

wirius

dragma wrote:

wirius wrote:

A few trolls now, excellent. I see my points are hitting home then. Instead of being able to address the points, you take your anger and inability to counter these claims by irrationally attacking the person who is making you uncomfortable. Hm. That merely confirms my points that people who are threatening to sue and blaming D3 for theft irrationally are emotionally immature people who blame D3 because these emotionally immature people feel bad. Thanks. You are the exact people I'm talking about, and prove my point wonderfully.

Its o.k. if you're unable to discuss rationally like many other people did in this thread. Not everyone has the ability to do so.

wirius, you had some excellent points, (I will have to upvote you on my phone, work has popups blocked.) But don't let the trolls make you post things like this, it is just more bait. Your argument is quite valid.

As for the EULA, it states that the company reserves the right to alter any of there content. Meaning they could change every characters powers to a 2 ap nuke if they so deemed. No bait and switch, no fraud.

Thanks for the concern Dragma. That is the only post I intend to throw to the trolls. If they disagree with this post, the only way to prove me wrong is to enter rational conversation or leave. Otherwise, they concede to me, and I'll simply smile at any such future posts.

fight4thedream

Please keep the thread on topic. wirius you bring up relevant points regarding D3's legal rights but you are also flame baiting. Continue to do so and I will lock this thread. I ask anyone who feels that wirius is trolling to please just ignore him or her. Please do not feed the trolls.Thank you.

wirius

No problem fight4thedream, thanks.

Unknown

I can't believe that the person is trying to bring reason to people who are raging is the one getting moderated. Such a sad state of affairs.

scottee

A lot of people see me as a D3 apologist, but I'm actually fully for people walking if they don't like what's happening in the game. I usually just try to see things from both points of view: "How does this affect me?" and "What was the devs rationale?" I think it's easy to think like a video game consumer, and harder to think like a video game designer.

I think the most difficult part is that video game consumers don't have any rights over the digital content they're enjoying. Was the IF situation pretty much bait & switch? Yes, even if the devs didn't intend it that way. The problem is that they're allowed to bait & switch all they want. A game can sell a million copies for $50, and take the servers down 6 months later if they want. I bought Team Fortress 2 relatively early on for $20, and less than 2 months later they made it free-to-play. I was never offered a refund, and instead, everyone got an in-game hat that was worthless. That was the start of the free-to-play revolution, and the rules haven't changed since.

So what consequences do developers face? Mass exodus. That's it. Either everyone leaves, or they don't. Usually after a big screw-up, developers don't have time to recover and they soon find their game dead. The question is if MPQ will figure it out fast enough.

For me, I don't think the current changes are bad. (Except it was too soon to nerf IF, even though everyone knows it's necessary. They should have let early adopters use him for at least 2 months.) I see all the rest of the changes as normal balance changes. I'll milk 4Thor and Winfinite to death until the change is enacted. Then I'll move on to something else.

That's the nature of the beast. The meta comes in cycles. Veterans have seen it happen plenty of times. Everyone adopts the most powerful strategy, then that strategy gets nerfed.
CStorm
Loki
Rag
2* Thorverine
Spidey
CMags
Sentry
4Thor
Winfinite

You adjust to the new meta and move on with life. I still find that cycle enjoyable. (Even as one who finally got CMags and Sentry working right before the nerf, and just got 4Thor maxed, again, right before the nerf. I lucked out in that I ended up not using HP on 3 IF purple covers, though I was really close.)

Unknown

I've been playing competitive games for a while now.

And in my time, I've learned one really important truth:

Popular stuff gets nerfed.

It's not a question of if, it's a question of when.

So when every single team in the top 5-10% were running Xforce Thor, you knew one or both of them were going to get nerfed.

That is why, in most games, I prefer playing lower popularity characters. Not only that, but I'm typically disappointed when my preferred characters are buffed and therefore gain popularity. Not because I'm a hipster or anything like that who wants to say they coined a character or strategy or whatever.

It's because I know there's no reason to invest time, money and resources into a character that will, invariably, be nerfed. So why learn how to use a character, only to have them nerfed and you need to find a new character to learn?

That said, that is generally not my approach in this game because, in most competitive games, if you master a bad character, you can beat people based on skill. Unfortunately, this game has nothing to do with skill because it isn't you controlling your characters on defense, it is the AI. Just like you aren't playing against other people, you're playing against the AI.

So yes, this game is different because you basically have to play the strongest characters in order to be "the best" unlike most competitive games. (for an example of someone using a low popularity character with great success, there is a Street Fighter player who plays Seth, one of the hardest and generally considered weakest characters in the game, Poongko, who regularly beats the players using the "OP" characters like Ryu.)

Similar scenarios occur in games like Dota and League of Legends, where a players' skill allows him to avoid the overpowered characters, thus keeping his play style consistent, rather than changing with the "flavor of the month" which is a term used to describe the current overpowered and overused character.

I imagine this game may be the first competitive game that a lot of users play (it is a casual phone game after all, not your typical scene for competitive gaming) so I kind of expect this reaction when any nerf is announced.

Everyone just needs to remember that if it is popular, it will eventually be nerfed. If you want, buy the character and get as many top 5/25/100 finishes as you can with that character before they are inevitably nerfed. Then consider those prizes you won as the offset to the nerf incurred. But never think that a company is okay with one or two characters making every other character in the game obsolete. That isn't good game design, nor is it a lasting model for profiteering.

I'm not trying to be condescending in this post (I'm not an old sage of competitive gaming by any means.) I just think these are principles in competitive gaming that I think everyone should know prior to investing money into the game.

Unknown

onimus wrote:

I've been playing competitive games for a while now.

And in my time, I've learned one really important truth:

Popular stuff gets nerfed.

It's not a question of if, it's a question of when.

This is incorrect. The order is turned around. Imbalanced characters/cards/classes/whatever become popular because of their imbalances. Well designed games, however, have a core of character/card/class/whatever that are very powerful but well balanced and change very little.

onimus wrote:

That said, that is generally not my approach in this game because, in most competitive games, if you master a bad character, you can beat people based on skill. Unfortunately, this game has nothing to do with skill because it isn't you controlling your characters on defense, it is the AI. Just like you aren't playing against other people, you're playing against the AI.

This is very often not the case. If a character/card/class/whatever is "too good" and a good player plays it, that good player will beat another good player playing "fair". Playing suboptimal characters doesn't make you special in any way. Champions use whatever tools they are handed to win.

onimus wrote:

Similar scenarios occur in games like Dota and League of Legends, where a players' skill allows him to avoid the overpowered characters, thus keeping his play style consistent, rather than changing with the "flavor of the month" which is a term used to describe the current overpowered and overused character.

A few core characters that were tweaked since their released continuously but always used heavily in the competitive scene:

LoL: renekton, annie, leblanc, Lee Sin, Tresh
Dota2: Juggernaut, Zeus, Shadow Shaman, Earthshaker, Warlock, Lion, Vengeful Spirit.

These are not used because they're "more fair". Very few people would choose to play "more fair, instead of better" when 5 million dollars are on the line, like in the annual Dota2 championship (International)

I could give you hundreds of examples in Magic - Some core cards have been around and heavily used for literally decades.

My point is that this idea that very good characters will always get nerfed is nonsense. When characters are well designed, they counter each other in a way that it makes it possible to play several of them competitively and win, and this is the single biggest problem this game has.

Until this nerf, I was under the impression that there was some sort of a master plan for the game, some sort of formula that they used to create each skill, and that they were slowly introducing elements to counter those skills, allowing for variety - say, defensive characters that inherently took less damage from skills of a color, or that actively blocked the use of AoE skills, or that directly countered draining, for instance - but this is not the case. There are even ways to incorporate unbalanced characters in balanced ways, say for instance a number of times someone could use xforce in an event (following the MTG formula of restricting incredibly powerful cards to one copy per deck, instead of the normal 4)

They just release characters willy-nilly and nerf whatever is evidently overpowered. But this is far, far from the only way to do this. It's merely the easiest.

Unknown

I have a feeling if this stuff went to court, D3 would win and the judge would write something like: "The court finds no evidence that the balance changes were done as a scam to lure customers into spending money and would like to remind users that it is possible for a million monkeys to accidentally came up with a good game so buyers beware." Of course, having such a statement would probably be just as bad as losing, so it wouldn't go to court anyway.

Nobody gets balance perfectly right but you can't just keep on get away with things that everyone told you is not remotely balanced. Like I said, if they hired me and I give you a 4* with 3 5 AP abilities that do 15000 damage, that'll probably sell like hotcakes and just because I am stupid and D3 fired me later doesn't mean they get to keep all the money that people obviously will spend to be competitive with this unbelievably broken character. Maybe if that character coincided with the 2 AP Thunderclap you can say, 'well back then we really didn't know what we're doing' but I hope we're out of that phase now.

Unknown

ark123 wrote:

onimus wrote:

I've been playing competitive games for a while now.

And in my time, I've learned one really important truth:

Popular stuff gets nerfed.

It's not a question of if, it's a question of when.

This is incorrect. The order is turned around. Imbalanced characters/cards/classes/whatever become popular because of their imbalances. Well designed games, however, have a core of character/card/class/whatever that are very powerful but well balanced and change very little.

I agree that overpowered characters are popular because they're overpowered. They're not overpowered because they're popular. In a competitive game where players are always looking for an advantage, they will pick the best. And then the normal players watch those competitive players and copy them. This is the cycle. Not very often do you see a popular character that is also bad.

And further to the point, being "strong" and being "transcendently strong" are not the same. Luke Cage is a good example of "strong." Has a clear role. Fills it perfectly. Offers strong abilities with few weaknesses. However, he is not on every single team. He is not so strong as to make the game one dimensional.

ark123 wrote:

onimus wrote:

That said, that is generally not my approach in this game because, in most competitive games, if you master a bad character, you can beat people based on skill. Unfortunately, this game has nothing to do with skill because it isn't you controlling your characters on defense, it is the AI. Just like you aren't playing against other people, you're playing against the AI.

This is very often not the case. If a character/card/class/whatever is "too good" and a good player plays it, that good player will beat another good player playing "fair". Playing suboptimal characters doesn't make you special in any way. Champions use whatever tools they are handed to win.

I can see why this could be taken the way you took it. What I meant was: a good player with a bad character is better than a bad player with a good character. This echoes throughout competitive gaming. But not this game because you don't control your character in real PVP situations, whereas in League, Magic, Dota, L5R, any game/card game in the world, you are playing as yourself versus someone else.

In the top tier competitive scene, yes the OP characters always dominate. They don't pick suboptimally just because they are good with a character. They find the best characters and become good with them. My apologies.

ark123 wrote:

onimus wrote:

Similar scenarios occur in games like Dota and League of Legends, where a players' skill allows him to avoid the overpowered characters, thus keeping his play style consistent, rather than changing with the "flavor of the month" which is a term used to describe the current overpowered and overused character.

A few core characters that were tweaked since their released continuously but always used heavily in the competitive scene:

LoL: renekton, annie, leblanc, Lee Sin, Tresh
Dota2: Juggernaut, Zeus, Shadow Shaman, Earthshaker, Warlock, Lion, Vengeful Spirit.

These are not used because they're "more fair". Very few people would choose to play "more fair, instead of better" when 5 million dollars are on the line, like in the annual Dota2 championship (International)

I could give you hundreds of examples in Magic - Some core cards have been around and heavily used for literally decades.

My point is that this idea that very good characters will always get nerfed is nonsense. When characters are well designed, they counter each other in a way that it makes it possible to play several of them competitively and win, and this is the single biggest problem this game has.

Again, I'm sorry for the misunderstanding. I was referring to the "bad player/good character < Good player/bad character" conundrum that is not represented in this game.

But you do bring up an interesting point. You see, for people who have never played League of Legends, Lee Sin is what is considered a "high skill cap" character. He is, when used correctly, incredibly powerful. He is a character that isn't overpowered because of his numbers, but because of what his base abilities do. For example, Surgical strike could do half the damage it does now, but it would still be an incredible ability purely for the AP drain/gain and board shake.

The point I was making was there will always be a flavor of the month and it will always be used. These characters you mention have seen competitive play consistently, but they have not consistently been an overwhelming favorite that is leaned on, even in the competitive scene. Some of them were the overwhelming favorite for a time. And then they were always nerfed. Because those characters are always nerfed.

Similarly, when you see Xforce Thor in every team that can afford them (IE, no one is ever putting one of those two on the bench if they own them) then you know there is a problem with balance.

ark123 wrote:

Until this nerf, I was under the impression that there was some sort of a master plan for the game, some sort of formula that they used to create each skill, and that they were slowly introducing elements to counter those skills, allowing for variety - say, defensive characters that inherently took less damage from skills of a color, or that actively blocked the use of AoE skills, or that directly countered draining, for instance - but this is not the case. There are even ways to incorporate unbalanced characters in balanced ways, say for instance a number of times someone could use xforce in an event (following the MTG formula of restricting incredibly powerful cards to one copy per deck, instead of the normal 4)

They just release characters willy-nilly and nerf whatever is evidently overpowered. But this is far, far from the only way to do this. It's merely the easiest.

I can only say this as a player, not a developer, but from what I can tell no gaming company actually knows what they're doing. Some do to a degree. But there are WAY too many variables to predict how exactly a new character will interact with the current meta, the current character pool and the overall game play in the game. Even experienced players have trouble with balance to this day, so how can gaming companies do any better?

Magic is one of the better balanced games I've ever played (although I haven't played it in a while), but even they have had banned cards, or errata'd cards appropriately that were too strong or considered crutches for decks. I can't speak for its present state, as I have no played it in a while, but I imagine those things still go on.

It would certainly be nice if there was an overall game plan, but my experience in competitive gaming has told me that most gaming companies make changes and wait and see the effects, and adjust accordingly.

One thing I have noticed is that players can be incredibly creative when it comes to team comps, deck builds and developing gimmicks. Good example is winfinite. 99% of the player base would have never thought to use it until one person came up with it one day and spread it across the community. This isn't something that D3 would have been able to predict.

Similarly, in a card game called L5R, there was a new version set to come out and based on the card previews alone, people were building insanely fast decks that could end games, with relative certainty, within turns. They had to errata that entire strategy because it was toxic to the game environment. Again, they couldn't have predicted that someone would see that specific combo and abuse it.

Game creators are not omnipotent nor are they able to tell the future. They just design things that they think are cool, nerf the potential combos that they foresee (Like Hood's yellow when paired with Thor's charged tiles, which they did nerf pre Thor release.).

But they cannot foresee everything.


Did D3 take too long to adjust Thor? Oh hell yea. Is it shady that they waited so long, forcing people to buy her in order to stay competitive? Double oh hell yea.

But you had to know it was coming. They weren't just going to allow overpowered characters take over the game and be happy about it. That was evident from their string of useless 4 stars coming out that Xforce and Thor are, in fact, the outliers, not the new normal.

That is precisely why I'd expect an Xforce nerf in the coming months.

Unknown

Oh I'm all for adjusting GT. Last pve I grinded the Deadly node 6 times scaled at 395 with Gt/Loki/Cage. That shouldn't really be easy to do.

But the point I'm making is that a company that had people paying attention would never tweak Power surge from 4 turns stun 12 charged tiles to 3 turn stun 5 charged tiles because it's basically admitting they have literally no idea whatsoever what they're doing. It's even stupider to release another character that produces charged tiles at the same time, since they just admitted they don't know how to use charged tiles very well.

This is what I find frustrating. This is why I'm never putting a single dollar into this game again. They clearly have no idea what they're doing, and don't care enough to learn.

Unknown

Just because people will always try to play the most powerful character doesn't mean how powerful the most powerful guy is doesn't matter. If we freeze the game at the time of Punisher and also include any further balance changes that affected characters back then but not including X Force (so no Magneto, Spiderman, etc), The Punisher is likely the strongest character out of that batch. So we'd see a lot of Punisher played, just like we did back when Punisher was one of the top characters. But since Punisher isn't on another tier compared to anyone else out there, even if you don't have him you can still be fairly competitive. If we're talking about a situation where the top dog leads by such a slim margin you'd also have people running other characters just because it's fun and if you only give up 5% power maybe it's worth it to you. But very few guys would run around with team that are 50% or more weaker which is what you'd be doing if you purposely didn't use the best characters right now.

Unknown

Goddess thor will still make more charged tiles with her blue power than Rags will with his blue power, his blue power shouldn't affect how she is played at all...

scottee

Cryptobrancus wrote:

Goddess thor will still make more charged tiles with her blue power than Rags will with his blue power, his blue power shouldn't affect how she is played at all...

There are more charged tile characters on the way...

Unknown

scottee wrote:

Cryptobrancus wrote:

Goddess thor will still make more charged tiles with her blue power than Rags will with his blue power, his blue power shouldn't affect how she is played at all...

There are more charged tile characters on the way...

Except that if they continue weighting charged tiles as they are, they're just going to release an endless string of worthless characters. Ragnarok's charged tile ability is laughable.

scottee

ark123 wrote:

scottee wrote:

Cryptobrancus wrote:

Goddess thor will still make more charged tiles with her blue power than Rags will with his blue power, his blue power shouldn't affect how she is played at all...

There are more charged tile characters on the way...

Except that if they continue weighting charged tiles as they are, they're just going to release an endless string of worthless characters. Ragnarok's charged tile ability is laughable.

And so you assume all future charged tile characters will be like Rag...

Unknown

scottee wrote:

ark123 wrote:

scottee wrote:

Cryptobrancus wrote:

Goddess thor will still make more charged tiles with her blue power than Rags will with his blue power, his blue power shouldn't affect how she is played at all...

There are more charged tile characters on the way...

Except that if they continue weighting charged tiles as they are, they're just going to release an endless string of worthless characters. Ragnarok's charged tile ability is laughable.

And so you assume all future charged tile characters will be like Rag...

Like Rag and nerfed GT, yes. The only two charged tile characters in the game.

scottee

ark123 wrote:

scottee wrote:

And so you assume all future charged tile characters will be like Rag...

Like Rag and nerfed GT, yes. The only two charged tile characters in the game.

I think people underestimate the multiplicative effect of having more than one charged tile character in a match. I'm not referring to Rags. When I have 4Thor against 4Thor, I often let the AI gather blue, while I gather red. Let them stun someone unimportant, and then Smite someone to death. If I don't bring my own 4Thor, Smite team-ups hilariously serve the same role.

It's incredibly likely Gambit is on the way, and that he will also have charged tiles as a main feature to play around (like 4Thor, but not Rags). I think we're in a lull period where charged tile synergy sucks for a while, and then it's going to ramp up like crazy.

RyanL24

This was a great thread to read. A very interesting situation.

For me, it all comes down to patience. Some people have to have the latest and greatest thing immediately for a variety of reasons which I will not delve into.

When you give your money to this game, you are purchasing entertainment. It's a game.

If you spent a bunch of money on IF, did you get what you paid for? YES! It may not have lasted as long as you would have liked, but... you can't sue a movie theater because you paid for a movie and it only lasted 1 hour. "Last week the movie I paid for was 2 hours long!" Now, you could reasonably say "I'll never pay to see a movie in a theater again!" and that would be perfectly acceptable. The good news is it will be out on DVD later in life. The bad news is... that will require patience. Which is in short supply these days.

Countless people HAD to be the first one to have an iPhone 6. And for a couple days they were greatly admired by their peers. "Wow, Bob has the brand new iPhone already. Wow!!1!" Sure, then Bob's iPhone bent and he may or may not have put it in the microwave for one reason or another. Of course Apple replaced his bent phone with a new one, but it takes a lot of time, energy and determination to be the first person with the latest phone (not to mention the time, energy and determination it takes to replace a broken phone)- none of which Bob got back. There are, and have always been, inherent risks involved with being the first one to own something.

We SHOULD be talking about disposable income. They call it that for a reason. If you can't afford to lose $1,000, you don't go to the casino with $1,000 (unless you do- then, my friend, you need help.) If you are spending your rent money or food money on a mobile app game, you have problems that no court can solve. Unless you receive court ordered therapy, that is.

So if you have a maxed IF that is getting nerfed, congratulations. You were able to buy not only entertainment, but also had the latest and greatest thing. We all looked at you with much admiration and thought "Wow, that guy is so cool, he already has that brand new character maxed". Good job. And hey, there are still 6 more days to enjoy that great feeling!

I don't know what it's like to be one of the best, the top tier, in a game with hundreds of thousands of players. That must be neat. Happily, I don't know what it's like to FEEL LIKE I HAVE TO be one of the best, the top tier, in a game with hundreds of thousands of players. That must be... depressing. As it is I can enjoy the game for what it is, without having to play while driving home or waking up at 3AM to play.

I haven't been playing too long, I only have one fully maxed 3* character. As far as I can tell, this round of nerfs is going to really mess up my go-to team of Storm-Magneto-Hawkeye. What am I going to do? Demand a refund? Sue somebody for damages? No. I'm going to adapt and overcome. And wait for the next round of nerfs and buffs- things which are inevitable in a game like this.

I checked it out, and the only thing that seems to be changing about IF is that he will convert a whopping TWO less tiles but issue the same amount of damage. I must be missing something based on the uproar.


Lastly, if the only thing in your life to get worked up over is a game changing your new favorite character, count your blessings my friend. If you have enough money to spend some of it on a phone game... Count. Your. Blessings. Seriously. Give it some thought.



P.S. Yes, I know, you don't have to tell me. They advertise the length of a movie before you pay for it. Was IF mishandled? Sure. Did anything illegal happen? No. Everybody should learn what they can from this experience, move on, and......... COUNT YOUR BLESSINGS! (Don't forget that part.)

Unknown

The problem with a mechanism like charged tile is that it's either way too weak or way too strong because you're talking about triple AP here. If you can reliably get your charged tile back it's awfully hard to lose, and if you cannot then what's the point to use up AP and not get anything out of it? It's a lot like Spiderman's old web tile mechanism where it used to be trivial to pile up insane web tiles and completely lock the game away. After the nerf it's pretty much impossible to accumulate them in any meaningful number, and while Spiderman wouldn't be too strong even if the game always had the maximum number of web tiles on the board, the fact that you can never get enough of them on just makes him all that much weaker. I think charged tile should be something like normal AP + triple damage and just do what a normal move should do while doing slightly less base damage. I think the triple damage is added to the base in crit (have to verify). Maybe we can get away with double AP, or even something like normal AP + 5 times the tile damage.

simonsez

scottee wrote:

And so you assume all future charged tile characters will be like Rag...

I assume the future ones will spam 10-12 charged tiles, so they can nerf them as soon as we're done buying up the covers.