** Moonstone (Dark Avengers) **

Demiurge_Will

MarvelDestiny wrote:

Or to put it another way, you guys are taking away all our sprinkles. Yeah, plain ice cream is ok but it's so much better with all the good stuff mixed in. Where will it end? The CD manipulators are the juicy targets now, who'll be next? There will always be another complex coding issue rising to the top.

I look forward to seeing the new features you mention are being developed to replace all our sprinkles. You've done a good job with some of the recent additions. Contrary to popular opinion, I like the Maximoff's. And Hulkbuster is good too. I also like the variety in PVP teams (even if I'm not happy with scaling/mmr or all the boosted characters). In general, I see the direction you want to take the game and I like the destination. I am hopeful that the end result--an optimally balanced game--is both achievable and near.

TL;DR - The culture of coding simplification is ironically killing MPQ.

As you can tell from the recent character designs, we still want to make lots of characters with new colors of sprinkles, including colors that only some people like. We're taking out mauve sprinkles because people didn't eat them very often, and taking them out lets us serve aquamarine, feldspar, smaragdine, mikado, wenge, fulvous, eburnean, and green sprinkles.

This is the only recent character change (maybe the only one ever?) where reducing the potential for bugs was an important factor in the decision. Usually we try to fix the bugs instead of mucking with the ability (as we did with Moonstone for a long time).

We'll also continue to serve plain ice cream, because some people like that too.

Billigoat

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

Sounds like an okay change -- but there are many powers like this already in the game. All of the powers below are highly situational. If an opponent team puts out a lot of special tiles, they are useful. Otherwise, they are completely useless. All of these powers need to be reworked so that they can do something else when there aren't special tiles of the right sort on the board.


Daredevil
Radar Sense - 10
...
Doctor Octopus
Manipulation - 11
...
Falcon
Inspiration - PASSIVE
...
Loki
Trickery - 11
...
She-Hulk
Settlement - 9
...
Squirrel Girl
Nuts From Above - 9
...

I think it's worth noting that all of those examples are 3* characters. Maybe those situational moves should have an added effect, but as long as they do exist in the 3* realm, to me it's perfectly reasonable to introduce 2* players to that gameplay mechanic at an earlier start.

That being said, I do think it's frustrating to play as Loki or Daredevil and not be able to use my fully charged abilities, but shame on me for bringing a character into a match with enemies who don't use those types of attacks.

wymtime

Demiurge_Will wrote:

MarvelDestiny wrote:

Or to put it another way, you guys are taking away all our sprinkles. Yeah, plain ice cream is ok but it's so much better with all the good stuff mixed in. Where will it end? The CD manipulators are the juicy targets now, who'll be next? There will always be another complex coding issue rising to the top.

I look forward to seeing the new features you mention are being developed to replace all our sprinkles. You've done a good job with some of the recent additions. Contrary to popular opinion, I like the Maximoff's. And Hulkbuster is good too. I also like the variety in PVP teams (even if I'm not happy with scaling/mmr or all the boosted characters). In general, I see the direction you want to take the game and I like the destination. I am hopeful that the end result--an optimally balanced game--is both achievable and near.

TL;DR - The culture of coding simplification is ironically killing MPQ.

As you can tell from the recent character designs, we still want to make lots of characters with new colors of sprinkles, including colors that only some people like. We're taking out mauve sprinkles because people didn't eat them very often, and taking them out lets us serve aquamarine, feldspar, smaragdine, mikado, wenge, fulvous, eburnean, and green sprinkles.

This is the only recent character change (maybe the only one ever?) where reducing the potential for bugs was an important factor in the decision.

We'll also continue to serve plain ice cream, because some people like that too.

Will you also took away she hulks ability to take CD tiles. This was a big strength to her character. You have now limited who she can play against even more. Changing CD tiles is someone that can be a huge component to PVE with all the Goons players face. Taking away she hulks ability to change CD and moonstones has now limited the capabilities of these characters. I understand changing Moonstone for a glitch, but you also took away the best part of she-Hulks Blue. Also you made her blue changes 2 tiles since the enemy tile just stays the same. The balance of her character was she made 3 strike tiles out of none. Her new blue is not bad, but at level 5 it is just turns 2 enemy strike, attack, protect tiles. The third just stays the same. At level 5 she should either convert 3 to friendly or be able to convert CD to strike tiles.
Sorry for th vent but why did you take this power away from She Hulk?

Demiurge_Will

wymtime wrote:

Will you also took away she hulks ability to take CD tiles.

[...]

Sorry for th vent but why did you take this power away from She Hulk?

There were many situations where the old version of She-Hulk's Settlement could make things worse for you or be underwhelming. The new version plays more nicely with other abilities. Maintaining the ability to overwrite Countdown tiles doesn't really make sense with the way the ability now works (since tiles aren't already getting overwritten), and if we did squeeze it in there, it would mean we'd have to lower the bonus the ability gives to friendly tiles.

TLCstormz

Thanks for that explanation, Will. I'm thinking that people are upset about the principle of a 2* Moonstone getting "a better" ability than 3* Jenny From The Block had or has, in general.

Plus, again, we have to gave her so often in our outrageously scaled PvEs.

:+/

Unknown

Demiurge_Will wrote:

wymtime wrote:

Will you also took away she hulks ability to take CD tiles.

[...]

Sorry for th vent but why did you take this power away from She Hulk?

There were many situations where the old version of She-Hulk's Settlement could make things worse for you or be underwhelming. The new version plays more nicely with other abilities. Maintaining the ability to overwrite Countdown tiles doesn't really make sense with the way the ability now works (since tiles aren't already getting overwritten), and if we did squeeze it in there, it would mean we'd have to lower the bonus the ability gives to friendly tiles.

Now, see, answers like this are where you start to lose me. What caused Settlement to not play nice with others was the fact that it targeted friendly and enemy special tiles alike. You could have altered it to only target enemy special tiles and left its countdown effecting functionality intact. But you didn't. You chose to take it out and change the way it works. You also chose to change Doc Ock's power to no longer effect countdown tiles.

So how about a straight answer. Were the changes to these powers that removed their ability to effect countdown tiles done for the same reason as the change to Control Shift, i.e. that it caused too much development trouble? Because if so this represents a very serious problem. Countdown tiles are a core mechanic. Dealing with them is a major part of the game. If this is a systemic problem, not just a Control Shift problem, and if it's limiting your capacity to have powers that interact with countdown tiles because there are issues within the code, then it's probably time to fix your code. Taking away our tools to cope with countdowns and not giving us any new ones because it causes you some degree of difficulty isn't a very good solution.

IamTheDanger

I am in the small group that likes the change.

Having said that, i will say I wish there were more ways to deal with CD tiles. If taking control of them causes too many problems code wise, then what if we had more powers like Cap and Falcon that can just cover them up or get rid of them?

Heartburn

Why couldn't you do the same type of change with healing. Mainly one ability causing a problem, yet in that case you chose to dismantle the current system and remake it from the ground up, maybe just as bad as ragnarok 's remake, but where ragnarok ' s tweak was limited to himself, true heal affected all heroes.
At least in this case, you chose the least disruptive change. Baby steps I guess.

_RiO_

Thugpatrol wrote:

If this is a systemic problem, not just a Control Shift problem, and if it's limiting your capacity to have powers that interact with countdown tiles because there are issues within the code.

It's systemic; you can be almost 100% sure of that.

Are you familiar with the 'double countdown' bug? It neatly illustrates how much of a mess the game's current architecture for handling special tiles is. It works sort of like this: a countdown tile ticks down; something else on the board causes it to drop a few rows further down; then it ticks down again within the same turn.

This particular bug can happen because tiles with a timer effect are processed by sweeping across the board row-by-row, column-by-column. Presumably the same is true for attack tiles, defense tiles, etc. all of which are processed by getting their own sweep across the board. (Ever wondered why the game slows down tremendously when, e.g. , Storm covers the whole board in attack tiles? This is probably why...)

This means any skills interacting with a tile (be it regular or special) need to be sequenced very, very carefully and be woven into the processing for each tile by itself. And that is bound to produce a failure or two. At which point the developer has to apply a very specific band-aid to a very particular set of skills interacting with a tile. (Or not; like the mid-air exploding critical tile bug that's been around for 7+ months now...)


The whole mess could be solved by using a proper architecture such as an event queue/tree/graph that tracks tiles and skills and executes them in the correct order by design, rather than the naive series of successive board sweeps the game currently seems to be using.

wymtime

Demiurge_Will wrote:

wymtime wrote:

Will you also took away she hulks ability to take CD tiles.

[...]

Sorry for th vent but why did you take this power away from She Hulk?

There were many situations where the old version of She-Hulk's Settlement could make things worse for you or be underwhelming. The new version plays more nicely with other abilities. Maintaining the ability to overwrite Countdown tiles doesn't really make sense with the way the ability now works (since tiles aren't already getting overwritten), and if we did squeeze it in there, it would mean we'd have to lower the bonus the ability gives to friendly tiles.

Thanks for responding Will. I do have to agree with Thug Patrol in the fact that if you just changed her power to enemy tiles only it would have been solid. It would let her play the same as she is now only with more versatility. Now against goons she has 1 power and you have limited who she is effective against.

ErikPeter

Sounds good. Really, forum goers love to complain but this is fine. I'll have to put another rank into black to steal Threaten tiles now, which isn't too bad. That's all I've ever used it for anyway (and it will be much cheaper to do so!) She'll be more dangerous on defense now, something to consider when using strong strike tiles against her. These are all good things. (But could be an unintended 2* Thor buff.)

It would be awesome if you could also tweak her to .. how did you put it .. to have a clean, understandable upgrade path. It's a good power but "what color you affect" isn't easy to remember until it's maxed. I always breathe a sigh of relief when I get a special tile out, but sometimes her power isn't maxed and then I get hit for the damage unexpectedly.

Especially now that 3 ranks in black is no longer the obvious choice, we'll probably be taking it away from purple, which means I have to account for non-green special tiles. And probably non-blue ones. It's a weird, complicated piece of her character that will probably continue to cause confusion with many players (e.g. she still won't be too desirable). But she'll be a welcome relief to use against some other DA characters that spam special tiles (Daken, Bullseye).

ragnarady

I'd really prefer some side effect on new black if there are 0 of enemy special tiles, just like purple ability works; maybe, you should leave that 2-turns stun, it doesn't overpower her anyway.

GothicKratos

While I'll totally agree that the ideal of "taking a way we can deal with CD and not giving us a new way to do so" is a perfectly valid complaint......it's not a valid complaint with Moonstone.

When did you use Moonstone to tackle a goon node last? Need to check logs? I'll wait.

Anyways, this change is great for 2* players, whom did not really have a solid way to deal with Special Tiles, 2* Land still has plenty of board shake for CD Control, so there is at last that.

ErikPeter

Now now, I use Moonstone on the Big Enchilada every day or two (depending on roster); I generally use one or two Control Shifts over the course of the match.

Still I need to side with the lovers not the haters on this one. The big complaint is that it is situational and does nothing some of the time, right? Some math:

The old power can steal CDs from six 2* (which are all pretty solid CDs) and from about 20 3*, but many of those are worthless or nearly so; at least in no way justifiably worth 17 AP (Redwing, Trickery, Recharge, World Rupture, Arcane Incantation, Vision's powers, etc). So it's better against 2* in general, but much less effective against 3*.

Now 4 out of 13 playable 2*, and roughly half of the 3* characters (I counted 21 out of ..39?) create special tiles that can be stolen. . And, I can't stress this enough, it's just really great against Daken, essentially stealing effectiveness from two of his powers. I.e. New Moonstone's useful against most 95+ teams, and should be a viable transition character. You don't even need to pick your targets if she's paired with Patch or (rumored new character) that create enemy strike tiles to steal.

The new Moonstone will pwn most formats of PVE. Stealing CDs offers good advantage against mooks, but more and more mooks these days create special tiles (Ninjas, Ultron;) and the ones they create are generally TINY KITTY AMAZING; And even if you're just stealing weak ninja attack tiles, reflecting that damage every round adds up quick. I can only imagine the complaints and "Nerf Moonstone!" we'll hear when the mob realizes she can steal 3 Strength 450 Threaten tiles for the low, low price of 9 AP. Keep in mind that Ares is the only Dark Avenger with a CD to steal; now, you can steal the passive specials from Daken and Bullseye. For cheap. (Maybe it's a wash since you won't be able to use her on Moonstone nodes.)

Most importantly, it's hard to get 17 black in a match, and "Stuns 1 enemy for 2 turns" is a terrible, terrible deal at that price. True, old Control Shift always does something, but how often do you get your AP's worth?

tl;dr: "Usually great, but situational" is 100 times better than "Situationally great, but rarely useful"

optimus2861

I'd say it's fairly obvious that the current Control Shift must have broken with Vision's countdown tiles, which necessitated a fast change to her power rather than making Vision an exception to her power.

I'm not sure if anyone has given voice to this concern about the new Control Shift, but if not I'll do so.

Moonstone's Gravity Warp is a particularly annoying power to deal with when she's a boosted PvE adversary. It's cheap at just 8 AP, so she tends to spam it, and it's not uncommon for her to be paired with purple-generating goons. How did you counter that? By bringing Wolvie, Daken, Falcon, etc. A special tile generator, so that her Warp became effectively useless.

Well, now with Control Shift, she'll just steal your specials.

So you're damned if you do (ha! stole your protect tiles!) and damned if you don't (ha! Warp hits you for 1K+ damage, and that's at just level 94!).

Thanks, thanks a lot. I'm really not looking forward to facing her after this change.

sinnerjfl

Thugpatrol wrote:

So how about a straight answer. Were the changes to these powers that removed their ability to effect countdown tiles done for the same reason as the change to Control Shift, i.e. that it caused too much development trouble? Because if so this represents a very serious problem. Countdown tiles are a core mechanic. Dealing with them is a major part of the game. If this is a systemic problem, not just a Control Shift problem, and if it's limiting your capacity to have powers that interact with countdown tiles because there are issues within the code, then it's probably time to fix your code. Taking away our tools to cope with countdowns and not giving us any new ones because it causes you some degree of difficulty isn't a very good solution.

There's also another possibility and it could be that the devs do not intend us to be able to get rid of countdown tiles easily. They are one of the main sources of damage in PVE (snipers, pyros, maggias) and they hurt, a lot. Remember, this game must be as unfair as possible to counteract the stupidity of the AI (i.e. : goons feeding AP to Ares, maggia goons spamming 5 CD tiles at the same time). Health pack sales, etc etc

Maybe its cynical to think of it like that but it's becoming increasingly harder to not be cynical about this game and where the devs wants it to go.

Xenoberyll

JCTthe3rd81 wrote:

I am in the small group that likes the change.

i guess a lot more people would like it if it wasn't an improvement to a character you see only when you have to fight her in pve and scaling makes it more than hard enough already.

MarvelDestiny

ErikPeter wrote:

Now now, I use Moonstone on the Big Enchilada every day or two (depending on roster); I generally use one or two Control Shifts over the course of the match.

Still I need to side with the lovers not the haters on this one. The big complaint is that it is situational and does nothing some of the time, right? Some math:

The old power can steal CDs from six 2* (which are all pretty solid CDs) and from about 20 3*, but many of those are worthless or nearly so; at least in no way justifiably worth 17 AP (Redwing, Trickery, Recharge, World Rupture, Arcane Incantation, Vision's powers, etc). So it's better against 2* in general, but much less effective against 3*.

Now 4 out of 13 playable 2*, and roughly half of the 3* characters (I counted 21 out of ..39?) create special tiles that can be stolen. . And, I can't stress this enough, it's just really great against Daken, essentially stealing effectiveness from two of his powers. I.e. New Moonstone's useful against most 95+ teams, and should be a viable transition character. You don't even need to pick your targets if she's paired with Patch or (rumored new character) that create enemy strike tiles to steal.

The new Moonstone will pwn most formats of PVE. Stealing CDs offers good advantage against mooks, but more and more mooks these days create special tiles (Ninjas, Ultron;) and the ones they create are generally TINY KITTY AMAZING; And even if you're just stealing weak ninja attack tiles, reflecting that damage every round adds up quick. I can only imagine the complaints and "Nerf Moonstone!" we'll hear when the mob realizes she can steal 3 Strength 450 Threaten tiles for the low, low price of 9 AP. Keep in mind that Ares is the only Dark Avenger with a CD to steal; now, you can steal the passive specials from Daken and Bullseye. For cheap. (Maybe it's a wash since you won't be able to use her on Moonstone nodes.)

Most importantly, it's hard to get 17 black in a match, and "Stuns 1 enemy for 2 turns" is a terrible, terrible deal at that price. True, old Control Shift always does something, but how often do you get your AP's worth?

tl;dr: "Usually great, but situational" is 100 times better than "Situationally great, but rarely useful"

Awesome analysis, I agree that the change is an improvement. (I may decide to add her back onto my roster.) I would rather the cost of the original power be dropped than change it but, yes, this new power is definitely a winner.

Note: This may fly in the face of my previous posts but they were all about the overall coding issues and losing CD manipulation universally.

Btw Will, thanks so much for chatting with us about the change. The dialog means a great deal to us.

GothicKratos

MarvelDestiny wrote:

Btw Will, thanks so much for chatting with us about the change. The dialog means a great deal to us.

I meant to mention this myself. Thank you very much for giving us the information you did - and frankly for being frank. She was a pain in the **** to code around and it took away resources you could be using elsewhere. That's good in my books. Appreciate it! :]

Demiurge_Will

Thugpatrol wrote:

Were the changes to these powers that removed their ability to effect countdown tiles done for the same reason as the change to Control Shift, i.e. that it caused too much development trouble?

No.