Why so extreme?

Druss

This is a genuine post that I would love someone in the know @ D3 to answer.

Why are all changes made recently so extreme? Why no subtlety?

For instance:

1) X-Force Nerf. I am of the opinion that X-Force needed a nerf but why a quadruple one? Making his green laughable, removing AP drain & steal and indirectly health nerfing him by boosting others health around him but his remaining the same.

2) Health boost. Ok again I admit some characters needed a health boost but again, why so extreme? - 6800 to 8670 is hardly a small percentage.

3) Rags Fiasco. Easy fix keeping Red & Green the same & adding a weakfish true healing blue would of seen Rags as OK, but instead we now have a character with 2 powers that are totally useless.

4) Refund policy. I brought the last 3 black X-Force covers 2 weeks ago to change my 5/2/5 configuration to the optimal 5/5/3. In order to rectify this I have to COMPLETELY sell X-Force. Why?

These points are just the tip of the iceberg as far as I'm concerned. X-Force being a great example - when introduced he was laughable ( 7 countdown healing tile - lol) then when re-balanced (the clue is in the word!) he was way OP now the pendulum swings back to laughable again, why no middle ground?

Lets hope whoever is orchestrating these changes never runs for office, World War 3 would be inevitable!

Heartburn

the same thing happened to 4thor all 3 skills nerfed at a time blue and yellow directly and red indirectly

Ludaa

1) It may benefit the game in some situations, but I have to believe they over do it simply to push buyers towards newer characters. In the case with XF, he was the most available, and the most powerful. Combined with their pitiful refund/sell policy it's a win/win for their accountants.

2) I'm still undecided on the health boost. It's basically adding 3 or 4 more turns to a match, increasing the chance the AI shoots something at you, right?

3) I have no clue how bad characters can still slip through after almost 2 years of feedback from forumites. It takes less than a day for some of the people here to breakdown the latest "Unknown's" skill set into Great/Mediocre/Quicksilver.

4) Their buyback and refund policy is totally anti-player. They should put a warning into every cover purchase a player makes. As soon as you drive it off the lot it loses value, and may be subject to a brick through the window courtesy of the Dealership.

Heartburn

nothing stopping them from giving players a full refund of HP there is no HP to money conversion their pocket books are safe but their future revenue is not safe, but maybe that will temper them with making bad nerfs.

Jonny1Punch

Great post Druss and I could not agree more the changes have been absurdly extreme and most feel highly unnecessary.

Instead of crippling these "legendary" heroes D3 could have made a small tweak or two and then asked for our feedback before proceeding further.

Thoress= 8 charged tiles down from 12 for power surge. BAM. Fixed. We are all happy.

XF= SS does not drain enemy AP. BAM. Fixed again your welcome.

Sentry= Raise the cost of World Rupture by three green AP. TRIPLE WHAMMY. Yeah it's that easy. Middle ground reached.

But no....... They go and nerf all 3 abilities into oblivion at no request of ours. IMO Thoress yellow could have used a major buff if anything lol.

And what's with all the recent nerfs of already **** heroes like bagsilver getting made even **** during there premier release event? Looks so sloppy and unprofessional, total rush job.

And as for the power creep we now have the new monster death machine known as " Professor Kingpin"..... How much time until they get funbalanced? And I'm pretty sure IW's green at max level does more Dmg then original XF green with similar shakeup and only slightly more expensive ( when used properly with blue ). Better nerf them all.

As for the health bumps....... All I can say is ****.

Doesn't anyone else find it troubling that squirrel girl,falcon and DD now have nearly 10K health on par with colossus and Thor territory ? How does that even make sense in the scope of the marvel universe? Nick Fury is human is he not? Yet he has more health then hulk and colossus? YIKES.

Hate to sound like a broken record but until we get some answers I think we should all be weary to accept these changes were made to benefit us.

As for the buyback policy: good god at least give us all our ISO back and a full HP refund. We are not asking for real money we simply want back what we put in. To give us these things would cost you nothing we are talking about virtual resources used to buy virtual items that hold no real world value in a game that could go belly up anytime. It's ridiculous we work so hard and only ask for exactly what we put in back.

And you can't give back the incredible amount of time and energy we spent and wasted working tirelessly to earn and level up these heroes.

Heartburn

what if nick fury had 7k life but his yellow was a life model decoy ability that trigger once guarenteed and required 10-15 yellow ap to recharge its use

Jonny1Punch

I have no idea what the hell you just said heartburn but whatever it is sign me up...... Because it already sounds better then most of D3s ideas lately. Did you hear that D3? Give us back our XTHOR and give fury a new life model decoy ability we demand it ASAP LMFAO.

Unknown

D3 has hardly any clue on balancing characters. They see the strenghts of them, see what is above avarage and can cause problems and instead of making it all avarage they make it WORSE than avarage, almost bottom of the ladder.

XF green was a bit too much, yes, but now you are better off using 2* wolverine red for damage, lol. Its almost same level of power than 2* cap's red.

Jonny1Punch

XF just went to the back of my rotation. He's like a mid level 3* now and I can't rely on him to do much. It sucks!

fmftint

I want to know how they get any solid data on the effects of all these changes when piled on top of each other

3/23 4Thor nerf
PVP multi character boosts
No multi character boosts
MMR changes
More MMR changes
Xforce nerf
4/17 Across the board health increase

All the above have come in the span of FOUR WEEKS

babinro

Excellent point...they certainly don't make changes in moderation.

Quicksilver is another example. Not only do they weaken BOTH skills but also increase the cost of both active skills. Was there no room to simply try one option and add the next if necessary?

If I had to guess the answer it's to actually minimize rage quitting and compensation efforts.
Imagine every 2 weeks getting popups of yet another XF nerf gradually weakening him in moderation.
People would FLIP OUT...every...single....time. A nerf is a nerf...I've yet to see any forum take them with grace in any game I've played.
Besides...for all we know the end result would still be the same for some/all of these characters.

simonsez

fmftint wrote:

I want to know how they get any solid data on the effects of all these changes when piled on top of each other

Didn't you read the "Be nice to each other" thread? The devs got some PMs saying the changes are good. Success!!

simonsez

ShionSinX wrote:

D3 has hardly any clue on balancing characters.

I'm starting to think "balancing" isn't the main goal. The main goal is rotating different characters to the top of the food chain. So lets all chase those KP and PX covers, max 'em out, and meet back here in 3 months for the next nerf-****-fest.

wymtime

Here is another idea for D3. Instead of just saying you can sell your character for HP how about placing those characters covers on sale. Take a look at Xforce. D3 feels he should be a 3,5,5 when everyone has him 5,5,3. His new yellow does almost the same damage as his old green. I would be willing to try this, but it would cost 5000HP to do it. How about placing his covers on sale for 1000HP each. The pros would be players could respect him if they have him covered and players who do not might be willing to buy HP to get more of his covers. This means D3 win, win. We get keep him useful and you might make some money.

For 3* I would suggest a sale of 600HP per cover. Now players who have let say She Hulk 5,3,5 can try her out at 4,4,5 or 3,5,5 or 5,5,3 if they want (red is still her best ability so why someone would only want 3 red I don't know).

A sale on covers would encourage people to buy, and respect this characters, possibly spend money on HP to do it. It will also let 2* players get into 3* land on characters you have just made better.

Overall D3 please stop punishing players for disagreeing with you on character changes. Selling for a full refund is nice, but the fact of the manor is we do not want to get rid of all of our characters. We played hard to get them, and want to keep them. Please take into consideration some more alternatives instead of all or nothing approach.

Unknown

Im still amazed that people are still actually buying into the devs spin on fairness and balancing.

Unknown

simonsez wrote:

ShionSinX wrote:

D3 has hardly any clue on balancing characters.

I'm starting to think "balancing" isn't the main goal. The main goal is rotating different characters to the top of the food chain. So lets all chase those KP and PX covers, max 'em out, and meet back here in 3 months for the next nerf-****-fest.

I will have to agree. And it seems they want the new characters on top, so people spend on them instead of taking the dust off some old characters. Maybe their biggest mistake was to overdo XF and whoever had him alredy just steamrolled everyone else then the others had to rush their way to the top again, and because 4*s are no joke to complete people had to spend a lot of money just to stay competitive.

Unknown

There is a game design philosophy where you intentionally make large, and likely excessive changes to balance, take the pain from players for the change then you gather data and proceed to rebalance them back again to hit the sweet spot. I believe the idea is to get nice clean data by making sure the difference is sufficiently big that ppl notice it rather than playing the same way by habit because the changes are small AND to manage expectations by getting the painful nerfing bit all over and done with in one hit rather than suffering death by a thousand cuts of criticism for every smaller nerf.

Other developers look to make small iterative changes to look for balance, presumably because it ensures you don't screw your game balance hard from excessive swings whilst waiting for rebalancing. Dota 2 works like that and IMO is immeasurably superior when it comes to balancing significantly differing abilities. Even then a few characters stand out at any given time whilst others are weak. Just not dominant vs worthless as we get in MPQ. An "overpowered" hero in Dota might have a 58% win rate as opposed to a perfectly balanced 50%... hardly Sentry bombing 8).

The trouble is D3 don't seem to ever get round to rebalancing the characters after their excessive nerf. How long has spidey been waiting now? Sentry? Poor old Rag finally got his rebalance and well... that went well?

It's like the employ the part of the philosophy where they over-nerf to ensure they did enough all in one go then think... well bugger it, that'll do!

(can you guess which philosophy I think is better? )

Unknown

bonfire01 wrote:

There is a game design philosophy where you intentionally make large, and likely excessive changes to balance, take the pain from players for the change then you gather data and proceed to rebalance them back again to hit the sweet spot. I believe the idea is to get nice clean data by making sure the difference is sufficiently big that ppl notice it rather than playing the same way by habit because the changes are small AND to manage expectations by getting the painful nerfing bit all over and done with in one hit rather than suffering death by a thousand cuts of criticism for every smaller nerf.

Other developers look to make small iterative changes to look for balance, presumably because it ensures you don't screw your game balance hard from excessive swings whilst waiting for rebalancing. Dota 2 works like that and IMO is immeasurably superior when it comes to balancing significantly differing abilities. Even then a few characters stand out at any given time whilst others are weak. Just not dominant vs worthless as we get in MPQ. An "overpowered" hero in Dota might have a 58% win rate as opposed to a perfectly balanced 50%... hardly Sentry bombing 8).

The trouble is D3 don't seem to ever get round to rebalancing the characters after their excessive nerf. How long has spidey been waiting now? Sentry? Poor old Rag finally got his rebalance and well... that went well?

It's like the employ the part of the philosophy where they over-nerf to ensure they did enough all in one go then think... well bugger it, that'll do!

(can you guess which philosophy I think is better? )

Just a note, but IIRC most games use the 55% win ratio as base, not 50%. Above 55% is bad, and under 45% is also bad, but for different sides of course.

Unknown

ShionSinX wrote:

Just a note, but IIRC most games use the 55% win ratio as base, not 50%. Above 55% is bad, and under 45% is also bad, but for different sides of course.

Oh yep, I know.... was just saying 50% would be considered perfect balance is all 8). Can't really apply that concept to MPQ though because the AI is terrible and players never actually play each other.....

simonsez

bonfire01 wrote:

Oh yep, I know.... was just saying 50% would be considered perfect balance is all 8). Can't really apply that concept to MPQ though because the AI is terrible and players never actually play each other.....

... and mostly because the event reward structure isn't built around a 50% win rate.

MarvelDestiny

bonfire01 wrote:

There is a game design philosophy where you intentionally make large, and likely excessive changes to balance, take the pain from players for the change then you gather data and proceed to rebalance them back again to hit the sweet spot. I believe the idea is to get nice clean data by making sure the difference is sufficiently big that ppl notice it rather than playing the same way by habit because the changes are small AND to manage expectations by getting the painful nerfing bit all over and done with in one hit rather than suffering death by a thousand cuts of criticism for every smaller nerf.

This sounds logical, but there is a flaw, at least in respect to D3: the changes are so extreme that players don't use them. This means little-to-no meaningful back-end data to find the sweet spot. This COULD account for XF going from weak to OP back to weak.

I want to believe the changes are a balancing act but more and more a clear policy of bait and switch is coming into focus. Just look at PX and KP. These two are obviously way above the current 4* norm and there's no way you can convince me the developers don't know that.