Upcoming Test: Powered-Up Characters in Versus

Unknown

ark123 wrote:

If you think xforce is some sort of automatic I win button, you don't have one. He's really good, but he has low health, hit true healing is too slow to matter a lot of the time, and when the strongest color in the other team isn't green, he often won't do much damage.

He has the 4th highest health in the game, his green is low-cost and does exceptional damage on its own without needing the "free" green AP, and surgical strike does a ton of damage on its own and STILL gives you a ton of AP you can almost always use for another character's power for further absurd damage

I think you've confused X-Force for moStorm. X-Force is the one with "Sex + Violence" on his cover

Eddiemon

gamar wrote:

I think you've confused X-Force for moStorm. X-Force is the one with "Sex + Violence" on his cover

I get that vibe from Mo-Storm's cover too. I may need help.

Unknown

You know who had the 4th highest health in the game before the 4* tier was updated? Wolverine at 6800. Plus an every turn True Heal on top of that. It went Hulk, Thor, L.Cap, Wolverine. 10,960 isn't a ton of health in 4* land, it's just 1.6x a 6800 health character.

Rather than calling for nerfs on the perceived imbalance that is XF, demand a character with 1.6x the health of an 8500 character and a decent 4* damage ratio. If they released a couple 13,600 health characters XF's 10960 wouldn't look so big. Instead they've been releasing characters in the sub 8,000 health range like Prof X.

Unknown

Lerysh wrote:

You know who had the 4th highest health in the game before the 4* tier was updated? Wolverine at 6800. Plus an every turn True Heal on top of that. It went Hulk, Thor, L.Cap, Wolverine. 10,960 isn't a ton of health in 4* land, it's just 1.6x a 6800 health character.

Rather than calling for nerfs on the perceived imbalance that is XF, demand a character with 1.6x the health of an 8500 character and a decent 4* damage ratio. If they released a couple 13,600 health characters XF's 10960 wouldn't look so big. Instead they've been releasing characters in the sub 8,000 health range like Prof X.

Yeah and in a hypothetical game where everyone has 40,000 health X-Force would have low health. In THIS game, he definitely does not.

Unknown

I'm just saying, there are better things to be done than rework XF (again). One of those better things would be a 13,600 health hero with decent damage output at the 4* level (Iron Patriot or Kingpin comes to mind).

Eddiemon

Lerysh wrote:

Rather than calling for nerfs on the perceived imbalance that is XF, demand a character with 1.6x the health of an 8500 character and a decent 4* damage ratio. If they released a couple 13,600 health characters XF's 10960 wouldn't look so big. Instead they've been releasing characters in the sub 8,000 health range like Prof X.

I don't think we had degenerated to calling for nerfs. I think it is more whether other characters should be allowed to temporarily peak above X Force, or whether he should be benchmark strength in all events.

If he's the power benchmark that otehrs can't get above then he's pretty much mandatory. If you temporarily boost people above him then your mandatory competetive mixes change.

Nerfing him doesn't really change the argument, you just now have a different character who is the benchmark and who is mandatory unless you allow temporary boosts to go above the new benchmark character.

I think we somehow got derailed by someone claiming that X Force just wasn't that good really.

Eddiemon

Lerysh wrote:

I'm just saying, there are better things to be done than rework XF (again). One of those better things would be a 13,600 health hero with decent damage output at the 4* level (Iron Patriot or Kingpin comes to mind).

I suspect that D3 are trying to get away from the 'best character' model. It's great for income as a certain kind of player rushes in and buys a max, but then when balancing happens you get disgruntled customers and chargebacks and people claiming it's unprecedented.

Also people who used to have the 2 best characters are now disgruntled because they need to pay to upgrade.

Which is why a floating pool of buffs that do away with the concept of 'absolute best character' may be able to break the cycle. I don't think they are going to be able to get the peopel who rush purchase to bide their time and develop the character.

None of this is to say that creating a few more competetive 4*s isn't a good idea, as a separate action it's great, but it doesn't address the 'best character' issues we have today.

reckless442

Demiurge_Will wrote:

fmftint wrote:

Will we see an update on this? What the data looked like? Were the devs happy with what they saw? Will this become a permanent feature?

Still reviewing the data, but I can say that
- we're looking at toning down the magnitude of the weekly buffs for next time.
- it seemed to accomplish the goal of encouraging more variety in team composition really well.
- the 1.75x buff for a featured 3-star works much better than the 1.5x buff, in terms of striking a better balance between how powerful it is to have a good featured character and how powerful it is to have a good roster outside of the featured character. We'd been considering that change before we put together the weekly buff group test, and we'll be keeping that in events going forward.
- given all of the individual experiences of being able to score much higher or much less high than before, the score breakdown of these events is surprisingly typical.

How can you possibly say that the weekly buffs increased variety when you also nerfed 4Thor and eliminated Winfinite the same week? You have no way to control for the impact of those nerfs. People were going to have to find other options without 4Thor to combine with X-Force regardless of buffing other characters. Some would have gone for Fury (the next most-likely 4* they would have), but plenty would have gone with LThor, Hood, or Loki instead.

Unknown

Eddiemon wrote:

ark123 wrote:

If you think xforce is some sort of automatic I win button, you don't have one. He's really good, but he has low health, hit true healing is too slow to matter a lot of the time, and when the strongest color in the other team isn't green, he often won't do much damage.

So why do all the top teams run this terribly bad an ineffective character? Because they like the artwork?

Maybe it's because his black is often an insta-kill on an opponent character, because it depletes their most powerful AP reserve and if you are playing close to a rainbow team X-Force's partner now gets to use all the AP to do damage. Yeah technically as you said "he often won't do much damage" because he has enabled one of his partners to do the damage instead.

BUt no you keep pretending his black doesn't exist and that his other abilities are underpowered. Because apparently I'm the one who has never used this character.

I never said he wasn't good. He's very good. There's a giant gap between very good and "I win button".

I think you'll find that most people who say xforce is too good and will win every match are people who don't have one. I hulk bombed thousands of xforces dead before I had any viable 4*. And he was never boosted to 280.

Heartburn

Eddiemon wrote:

Lerysh wrote:

I'm just saying, there are better things to be done than rework XF (again). One of those better things would be a 13,600 health hero with decent damage output at the 4* level (Iron Patriot or Kingpin comes to mind).

I suspect that D3 are trying to get away from the 'best character' model. It's great for income as a certain kind of player rushes in and buys a max, but then when balancing happens you get disgruntled customers and chargebacks and people claiming it's unprecedented.

Also people who used to have the 2 best characters are now disgruntled because they need to pay to upgrade.

Which is why a floating pool of buffs that do away with the concept of 'absolute best character' may be able to break the cycle. I don't think they are going to be able to get the peopel who rush purchase to bide their time and develop the character.

None of this is to say that creating a few more competetive 4*s isn't a good idea, as a separate action it's great, but it doesn't address the 'best character' issues we have today.

I think people were not mad at 4thor's nerfs, just the extent of them. Most people thought they went too far. The second being it was really nerf heavy, when so many characters needed buffs. And the whole boosting idea for balance is just a cheap bandaid instead of really balancing the heroes to make most of them playable. They had to raise characters a whole tier to get some of them used.

Unknown

ark123 wrote:

Eddiemon wrote:

ark123 wrote:

If you think xforce is some sort of automatic I win button, you don't have one. He's really good, but he has low health, hit true healing is too slow to matter a lot of the time, and when the strongest color in the other team isn't green, he often won't do much damage.

So why do all the top teams run this terribly bad an ineffective character? Because they like the artwork?

Maybe it's because his black is often an insta-kill on an opponent character, because it depletes their most powerful AP reserve and if you are playing close to a rainbow team X-Force's partner now gets to use all the AP to do damage. Yeah technically as you said "he often won't do much damage" because he has enabled one of his partners to do the damage instead.

BUt no you keep pretending his black doesn't exist and that his other abilities are underpowered. Because apparently I'm the one who has never used this character.

I never said he wasn't good. He's very good. There's a giant gap between very good and "I win button".

I think you'll find that most people who say xforce is too good and will win every match are people who don't have one. I hulk bombed thousands of xforces dead before I had any viable 4*. And he was never boosted to 280.

Yeah, all the jealous noobs with our 1* rosters like me, Phantron, Eddiemon...

Demiurge_Will

reckless442 wrote:

Demiurge_Will wrote:

fmftint wrote:

Will we see an update on this? What the data looked like? Were the devs happy with what they saw? Will this become a permanent feature?

Still reviewing the data, but I can say that
- we're looking at toning down the magnitude of the weekly buffs for next time.
- it seemed to accomplish the goal of encouraging more variety in team composition really well.
- the 1.75x buff for a featured 3-star works much better than the 1.5x buff, in terms of striking a better balance between how powerful it is to have a good featured character and how powerful it is to have a good roster outside of the featured character. We'd been considering that change before we put together the weekly buff group test, and we'll be keeping that in events going forward.
- given all of the individual experiences of being able to score much higher or much less high than before, the score breakdown of these events is surprisingly typical.

How can you possibly say that the weekly buffs increased variety when you also nerfed 4Thor and eliminated Winfinite the same week?

The 3/23 character changes are the biggest reason why we're still reviewing the data. We can see how those changes affected Story events and compare that to the effect in Versus, and we have tons of qualitative feedback from players saying that the buffs changed who they used, but we can't measure with certainty how much of the change in strategy is due to the buffs until we run an event or two without them.

Unknown

simonsez wrote:

adds nothing to the conversation except a fan-boy shout-out to the other people who constantly derail conversations with their absurd false dichotomies.

Actually when he's poisoning the well by making the baseless claim that "most" people who think X-Force is too powerful are people who don't have one, pointing out that all the people he's arguing with have fully maxxed X-Forces is extremely relevant

Unknown

gamar wrote:

Yeah, all the jealous noobs with our 1* rosters like me, Phantron, Eddiemon...

Hmm who are people that make giant nonsensical posts that don't add anything to the conversation

Who are people that bore me

Who are people that think they own the truth

Ah I'm out of time

Unknown

gamar wrote:

simonsez wrote:

adds nothing to the conversation except a fan-boy shout-out to the other people who constantly derail conversations with their absurd false dichotomies.

Actually when he's poisoning the well by making the baseless claim that "most" people who think X-Force is too powerful are people who don't have one, pointing out that all the people he's arguing with have fully maxxed X-Forces is extremely relevant

Oh look someone read the Wikipedia article on fallacies

Unknown

There has to be some other way to add some variety to the pvp other than these ridiculous week long random character buffs. Maybe a themed pvp once a week during the season or something, there seems to be quite a few that are just sitting around unused? IDK

Of course you saw a little more variety in team composition, it basically breaks down to pray you have maxed two of whatever characters they buffed on a whim or your scores are garbage for an entire week. I was fortunate enough to have some of the key 3* maxed so this change didn't really affect me, but I will certainly be pretty bothered when I can't compete because you buffed IF/Cage/cyclops or something for a whole week or many weeks until that subset of characters comes back into rotation.
3*s are quite difficult to actually level and optimally cover in this game, this really seems like devaluing of a lot of playtime for people that spent months and months of game time building up a specific roster only to have that effort trumped by what ever randoms are OP that week.

- given all of the individual experiences of being able to score much higher or much less high than before,

I don't understand why this isn't concerning at all, that your changes basically destroyed a large number of players ability to score points.

Unknown

you forgot the second part of that sentence which was "scoring was pretty normal". Individual experience may vary, obviously, but if scores kept basically the same pace then the buff was working. People who had the characters clearly did well and those that didn't probably suffered but that's what rotating buffs will get you.

Unknown

Lerysh wrote:

you forgot the second part of that sentence which was "scoring was pretty normal". Individual experience may vary, obviously, but if scores kept basically the same pace then the buff was working. People who had the characters clearly did well and those that didn't probably suffered but that's what rotating buffs will get you.

I took that part of it to mean that the changes (surprisingly to them) equaled out because a lot of players were scoring higher and a lot were scoring much less. I don't see how it would be healthy for the game if the crowd of people that scored much less are going to basically be screwed for 4 out of 5 weeks of pvp scoring or however long it takes to rotate through a handful of 3*s in the buff q until the couple of viable characters most people have are usable.

Unknown

That would not be "surprisingly typical". Typical, I assumed, meant normal score ranges. Some players clearly swapped places but distribution was normal. For every guy who usually scores 625 making it to 1000 there was a guy who usually gets 1000 being stuck at 625.

More buff variety means more players have a shot at more rewards. Yes you might be locked out of the top 25 for 4 out of 5 weeks, but that 1 week you can probably score top 5. And the guys you don't have might be the guys this player does have so he does well in week 2 while you do well in week 3. Distribution of rewards goes out to more players, instead of the same people scoring in the top 25 all the time.

Unknown

Lerysh wrote:

More buff variety means more players have a shot at more rewards. Yes you might be locked out of the top 25 for 4 out of 5 weeks, but that 1 week you can probably score top 5. And the guys you don't have might be the guys this player does have so he does well in week 2 while you do well in week 3. Distribution of rewards goes out to more players, instead of the same people scoring in the top 25 all the time.

While the seems like a good idea on the surface to allow distribution of rewards to trickle amongst more players in that manner, I think this is the entirely wrong way to go about it. What really would be the purpose of playing for the weeks where you don't have a pair of viable buffed characters?

Roster building is long and tedious in this game. It doesn't really feel right that after what is probably many hundreds of hours of playing all of a sudden the specific way you constructed your roster it is no longer viable for long stretches of time? Pvp reward rotations take forever, lets say for instance the green xf reward comes up for 1k score like once every couple of months. In the non buff game state, almost any 3* roster can obtain this reward if they want. With this buffed character rotation that isn't possible. There is no way any 166 team would be able to wade through endless streams of 280 hood/lthor & patch/loki teams or whatever ridiculous wall there will be after 600pts. The pvp rewards recycle terribly slow, adding in the whole "well you better be lucky enough to have a pair of buffed guys or your screwed out of the cover you want for another couple months." just doesn't jive with competent game design, imo at least.

This game is very much a game of habit and I suspect that once people aren't motivated to log in for a couple days then they are gone for good. I certainly wouldn't have put any effort into playing over the last week if I was one of the players without patch/hood/lthor.