An Analysis of Powered-Up Characters in Versus

Unknown

If this change goes forward, I predict the week x-force is buffed will see the biggest dip in players in this game's history,

Unknown

Unreallystic wrote:

This is where I struggle, I play (well played) fighting games religiously, as well as did “City of Heroes” for years, so I FULLY understand the difficulty that can be ‘balance changes’, but this game is NOT complex. It shouldn’t take a mammoth effort to re-align existing characters, often the issues surrounding the balance of a character are tied to things such as “AP needed”, “Dmg done”, or “board shake-up”. I look at Moonstone, her AP is simply WAY out of wack, or for the current AP, say her control changing power – should affect more tiles. It’s not difficult to make her more useful without breaking her. Sentry could be fixed by simply reducing the damage he does to hiw own team with Supernova. Increase the damage of Smash for Hulk. Increase punisher’s health, dmg on strikes, or make Molotov burn ‘faster’. It’s NOT rocket science.

“Yet it’s easier to make a new character”. Marinate on that, its easer to put together powers, playtest them, code, introduce them, etc – than it is to change a few parameters? THAT my friend is the cash grab. What’s so difficult about fixing Beast? His blue shouldn’t pop up in the same place, and should have higher numbers, end story. To make Falcon usable in PvP, make Birdstrike also drop strike tiles. Why havne’t they copied LCap’s numbers and ‘add-ons’ to regular Cap, like they did with Daken? It simply has no priority because it won’t make them as much money as introducing a ‘Red Hulk’ could.

Introduce a Red Hulk…
-Unreall

It's not that new characters are easier so much as they are a revenue stream. And they've show their reluctance to making small changes, unless it's an immediate upon release nerf like Black Panther or Iron Fist. Which means a new character and revising an old character are essentially just as difficult and the devs are on record as saying "character changes don't generate the positive feedback", so they make new characters mostly. I get it, but at some point they need to do a massive balance pass where they skip the new characters for like a month and just rework everything. And we need to be supportive of that.

Arimis_Thorn

I don't have an in depth analysis, but what I've found with the powered up characters is that whereas before I would hit The Wall of people above my weight class, I would spend hundreds of ISO skipping until I found someone I thought was remotely beatable. Now I'm actually able to use my wider boosted roster to at least make attempts with some success. It's entirely possible that I might have been able to compete before, but psychologically that wall of 240's just kept me away. Now I'm willing to at least try and in some cases educating myself that it's not as daunting as I may have thought.

MarvelDestiny

Colognoisseur wrote:

I am hopeful with this change because I think it can give the devs the right amount of data to make positive changes.
If this goes from being a test for one week and moves to something a little bit longer there will be clear winners and losers based on what is used.
As OP correctly states in this first week if buffed 3* Thor gets used over buffed 4*Fury by players who have both that will be an indication that the balance is off and the devs will be able to see this.
They have made a bunch of recent moves by not taking into account the way the players play. At least this gives them an opportunity to get their data from how people play instead of how they think players play.

And that's not just a step in the right direction, it's a huge leap forward.

Unknown

Would've been more interesting to see them boost the unplayed characters.

Beast
Shehulk
Doctor Octopus
Psylocke
Sentry
or Mystique post nerf.
etc

Instead they boosted the most powerful three stars there are. Patch + Loki? They chose to boost the combo and now all I see is Patch + Loki + Featured teams or maybe LThor + Hood + Featured teams.

How will it look when they boost the characters I listed and not the best 3* in the game?

Unknown

kerravon wrote:

Would've been more interesting to see them boost the unplayed characters.

Beast
Shehulk
Doctor Octopus
Psylocke
Sentry
or Mystique post nerf.
etc

Instead they boosted the most powerful three stars there are. Patch + Loki? They chose to boost the combo and now all I see is Patch + Loki + Featured teams or maybe LThor + Hood + Featured teams.

How will it look when they boost the characters I listed and not the best 3* in the game?

They're trying to collect data. If they boosted those guys it's quite likely they wouldn't be used at all and that wouldn't tell you whether the level boost was not enough, or that the characters boosted just sucks. By picking all the best characters it is clear that this boost is more than enough when it's on the powerhouse characters and does what they intend to. Of course a boost on Beast isn't going to make him more popular because he totally sucks. I hope people don't think devs are too stupid to figure out that putting Beast at level 280 isn't going to make him used more often, because if that's what you think then the game is obviously already a lost cause. I imagine going forward we'd see the top tier 3* boosted less often (unless it's a new guy, because boosted new guy = more cover sales), so for example Iron Fist, Luke Cage, and Cyclops might show up pretty often despite being likely overpowered with that buff, while someone like Thor who everyone knows is overpowered probably isn't returning to the boosted list anytime soon.

turul

Too many upvotes for NorthernPolarity's post will unfortunately make the devs think this pvp-buff system is a good idea.

But it actually REMOVES roster diversity.

It encourages to play the 20% of characters, which are buffed, making the unbuffed 80% of characters unoptimal. I cant play my wide selection of 3*'s because buffed-3*'s are getting overpowered. It forces me to use my A-team from an earlier point range.

So what would help roster diversity?

- Making same-rarity characters generally the same HP. We can bring more characters to the game if we aren't afraid of the enemy killing that character with a single move.

- Not destroying every OP character / combo: high-end teams could now consist of a wide selection: Patchneto / XF + 4Thor / Sentrybombing / etc.
Since we can only play a few matches while shield-hopping due to the flaws of the PVP-system, it is irrelevant of how broken a combo is, and in which way ( infinity turns / huge dmg output / etc )

- Giving buff randomly to 1/2 single characters to a fight, optional to play

- Giving you enhanced rewards if you play a randomly selected character

etc...

Xenoberyll

Trisul wrote:

Cryptobrancus wrote:

I am in that boat also. Would I be comfortable throwing 5-10 bucks at the game from time to time? Yes, but then I ask what I am getting for that amount and the game seems to say, "$5 you can't get anything of value for $5, how abouts you give me a 20 instead?, or we can get you something real nice for 100" And so I keep my 5 dollars and don't waste it on a trivial upgrade. If things had a better value/cost ratio I would cave in more often and they would get more out of me, as it is now, I have too many characters who would all be fun to play, but I have enough projects to be working on already to feel the need to jumpstart yet another iso sink. And no, not gonna buy iso at its pricepoint either...

Yeah iso's especially bad. I said this before, but if they increased iso yields to 10x the current amount, I'd probably drop $100 on it.

As is ISO is the worst deal availiable...pay 5 € to buy less than a level for your x-force? I stay far far away from that. Maybe they should change it to level ups...12/25/64/116/200 levels and i might be tempted.

Spoit

Honestly, I don't know how the marvel heroes devs are still staying in business by these metrics. Unlike MPQ, you only need to buy a hero once to have him permanently unlocked, and all you have to do to level them up is play the game with them. It takes way more work to create a character complete with modeling animations and voicework, and like 30 powers each instead of 3. And the vast majority of them cost about $10, which is less than even a single 3* cover, and they only release maybe once a month and a half or so.

And despite that, they still constantly go through and are systematically going through and buffing the older characters, twice as often as they release new ones.

LXSandman

Spoit wrote:

Honestly, I don't know how the marvel heroes devs are still staying in business by these metrics. Unlike MPQ, you only need to buy a hero once to have him permanently unlocked, and all you have to do to level them up is play the game with them. It takes way more work to create a character complete with modeling animations and voicework, and like 30 powers each instead of 3. And the vast majority of them cost about $10, which is less than even a single 3* cover, and they only release maybe once a month and a half or so.

And despite that, they still constantly go through and are systematically going through and buffing the older characters, twice as often as they release new ones.

You know it's funny because I was just thinking about how D3 should take a lesson from Gaz about how to run a game. Marvel Heroes is a fun game that doesn't feel overpriced.

Admittedly they have a different kind of revenue stream though. In Marvel Heroes it's all about the Hats (Costumes) which people can and will buy multiples of for the same character. In MPQ you only have to max out the character once and D3 won't make any more money from it at all. From that point of view it kind of makes sense not to bother with old characters at all.

Personally I prefer Gaz's style.

LXSandman

NighteyesGrisu

turul wrote:

Too many upvotes for NorthernPolarity's post will unfortunately make the devs think this pvp-buff system is a good idea.

But it actually REMOVES roster diversity.

It encourages to play the 20% of characters, which are buffed, making the unbuffed 80% of characters unoptimal. I cant play my wide selection of 3*'s because buffed-3*'s are getting overpowered. It forces me to use my A-team from an earlier point range.

So what would help roster diversity?

- Making same-rarity characters generally the same HP. We can bring more characters to the game if we aren't afraid of the enemy killing that character with a single move.

- Not destroying every OP character / combo: high-end teams could now consist of a wide selection: Patchneto / XF + 4Thor / Sentrybombing / etc.
Since we can only play a few matches while shield-hopping due to the flaws of the PVP-system, it is irrelevant of how broken a combo is, and in which way ( infinity turns / huge dmg output / etc )

- Giving buff randomly to 1/2 single characters to a fight, optional to play

- Giving you enhanced rewards if you play a randomly selected character

etc...

I disagree with you on the 'it removes diversity' point. That might be true, short-term but over the long term you'll see a lot different teams depneding on who's boosted. The diversity is limited within each week where char's are boosted, but fighting similar teams for a week and then get new ones certainly is preferrable to fighiing the same teams over and over again week after week.

I do agree with your suggestions for improvement though, especially the randomly selected character part. That sounds like a great idea (unless it ends up in selecting the current OP team like xf/ex-4thor and one filler...)

Unknown

kerravon wrote:

Would've been more interesting to see them boost the unplayed characters.

Beast
Shehulk
Doctor Octopus
Psylocke
Sentry
or Mystique post nerf.
etc

Instead they boosted the most powerful three stars there are. Patch + Loki? They chose to boost the combo and now all I see is Patch + Loki + Featured teams or maybe LThor + Hood + Featured teams.

How will it look when they boost the characters I listed and not the best 3* in the game?

Some of these characters I worry about, because they are so universally unplayed that no one has them leveled even if they have the covers. A featured buffed to 70 is not going to be any use to anyone and we will see an x-force/loaner explosion.

My 166 psylocke can't wait for her turn at 280 though, mmm yes.