The game is evolving too slowly

Unknown

The most egregious cases of broken balance are so obvious that it's not worth anybody's time to talk about it. If you can't figure out how to fix some of this stuff you can at least permanently suspend Spiderman, Magento classic, and Thor 3* from all playing until you do. At least that way you wouldn't look like a greedy P2W cashgrab when the inevitable nerfs come in.

I see this happen in virtually every genre where devs, for whatever reason, can't figure out how to fix a problem and then try to solve it by pretending it's not there. Civilization 5 only recently addressed the fact that air units are unkillable (they can't be attacked and the only way to lose them if you send them out to attack while completely aware that they'd get killed by the counterattack instead of healing up). Really? It never occured to their devs in the past 3 years that having one of the most powerful unit in the game that cannot be killed doesn't eliminate any possibility of strategy? What excuse do you have for the pre nerf Ragnarok? How can the existence of such a character for longer than 3 days have any explanation beyond either hopelessly incompetent or hopelessly bureaucratic? We're not talking about someone like The Punisher, who is probably more powerful than he's intended but at least looks balanced on paper. We're talking about characters that should never made it past the conception stage and we got 2 of them released recently.

Nonce Equitaur 2

Halving the health points and damage of Punisher, Patch, Magneto, and Spiderman while doubling all their AP costs would have a serious effect on play and would generate player anger.

One or two minor character tweaks a week will not have much of an impact on play. Phantron is correct there.

But the cumulative effect over many weeks would show definite results. And if they did 20 minor character buffs, then not as many players would be angry when some minor nerfs came down.

All characters have potential to be overpowered. If all of Bagman's AP costs were dropped to 1, and he had insta-heal after battles, he'd quickly become one of the most used characters, due to his ability to shuffle tiles around.

Slow tweaks have the ability to stop when the character becomes good. I want more good characters in the game, and steady small buffs are the best way to do it.

Unknown

Small tweaks are fine for the characters that are not way overpowered. It might even be fine for characters who are way underpowered just because nobody pays too much attention to the latest development of Bagman.

But if you want to tweak someone like Spiderman slowly it'd probably look like:

Week 1: Blue cost increased by 1 for all levels
Week 3: Blue cost increased by 1 for all levels
Week 5: Healing reduced by 10%
Week 8: Blue cost increased by 1 for all levels
Week 40: Massive change that actually balances the character

These small tweaks also creates uncertainty. Let's say Thor has his damage reduced by 5% on all skills. If you've been on the fence on whether to dump a ton of money into him, does that mean now it's time to go all-in because you think they're done nerfing him, or should you wait some more? From looking at how Black Panther worked out, it seems like a lot of people decided to go all-in on him after his first black nerf, figuring that's got to be it for a while (and I did too, so not saying that's right or wrong). Well, if they nerf him again later (which they should), you'll have a lot of disappointed/angry users. The myth of boiling a frog by increasing the temperature is just that, a myth. If you paid $200 for a lazy Thor you'll still notice that he's nerfed whether it happened in one massive nerf that reduced all his damage by 50% or 10 minor nerfs that did 5% each, and I'd argue the latter is only more aggregavating because each time you're just going to think 'this is the last nerf right?'

On a slightly different subject, I do not like to suggest minor improvements because I do not have all the data. For all I know a level 230 IW might be a perfectly viable character who has no need for extra buffs. I don't think any player could even know something like that just because the cost it takes to get her to that level is prohibitive. So while I do think IW can use a bit more of a buff, I don't feel confident suggesting how to change a character that I am nowhere close to getting maxed. I got the feeling most of these changes are suggested by guys who never got a character to level 85/141, and I don't blame them since unless you're hacking you certainly can't afford to take every character to that level to just see if they work, and this applies to me too, as I have plenty of character that I think I have a good grasp but I just can't say how balanced they are without the ability to take them to 85/141.

Unknown

It just occurred to me that we really need some more test-drive kind of scenario like the first one in heroic Juggernaut, though that one is more like "Thor smashes Juggeranut". For example they should hand you a level 110 Ragnarok as a teamup character against 3 level 120 guys, and then you'd at least have some idea of whether the character is any good when maxed out. Or a level 230 IW against 3 141s.

Unknown

I agree, it can't be that hard to make minor adjustments frequently

Tannen

I do like the idea of regular "maintenance" buffs/nerfs -- seeing the game change as characters become more powerful would be awesome. At the same time, a small nerf would dent the pure rage that some people tend to get when they see their favourite character "nerfed to the ground"

At the same time, I don't know that it could happen in the current environment, given that from IceIX's posts there seems to be a lot of signoff involved, even for things that need to be fixed (see current ios7.1 bug).

It would be nice not to see teams that are only combinations of Punisher/Patch/CMag + Spidey/OBW + Other, but I have no idea how that would be achieved, as even with minor changes, those characters are where they are due to the fact that they're (slightly)? OP.

Another healer would mix things up a bit, however, even then, Spidey / OBW come with other utility abilities that make them awesome even besides the heals.

Unknown

Minor tweaks aren't going to vary what people use, at least not quickly. That's not a good way to judge if they're working. I'm not going to stop using a 141 punisher because his strike tiles goes down two points. There's a sunk cost component. It takes a massive nerf to get people to ditch a regular character (obviously talking about rag here)

Unknown

Impulse wrote:

Minor tweaks aren't going to vary what people use, at least not quickly. That's not a good way to judge if they're working. I'm not going to stop using a 141 punisher because his strike tiles goes down two points. There's a sunk cost component. It takes a massive nerf to get people to ditch a regular character (obviously talking about rag here)

This is also why they really should have 'test drive' events where you actually see what some of the other characters you'd never otherwise level can do. Like I mentioned above, it's possible that a level 230 IW is a perfectly viable character but we simply won't know for a very long time because nobody's crazy enough to just do it on blind faith.

There should also be some kind of dynamic adjustment overall. Let's say we sacrificed some tinykittens and the God of Balance gave us a list of all the changes that'd totally balance this game, but we were also told that in this new world, The Punisher is better than anyone else by at least a margin of 0.5%. Well, as long as people know that, you'd never have a reason to not use The Punisher, because 0.5% better is still 0.5% better, and someone's going to figure out who are the top 5 characters and at best you have some situational substitutions (e.g. Thor is always strong against Patch due to his ability to wipe away Berserker Rage tiles), and it doesn't matter if the top 5 are 50% stronger than the rest like they're right now, or if the top 5 are 0.5% better than the rest in some magically balanced world, because stronger is still stronger. Of course we're far from thinking about anything fancy like that when you have the top 5 that's clearly a tier above. The Punisher is probably the weakest out of the most commonly seen heroes, and even he is at least half a tier above the average 3* (otherwise you wouldn't see him so often).

optimiza

Phantron wrote:

The whole small changes one at a time is a copout. It makes the rather insane assumption that your existing balance was any good to begin with. I see this in virtually all games. Even if it's something where you push one button and the other guy dies for being on the wrong end of the balance you'll always hear about how they need to approach balance slowly because hitting one button to kill your opponent might not be totally unfair. I mean just look at how long pre nerf Ragnarok lasted in his original incarnation. And if the game is at a point only small changes are needed you can just have a usage adjustment, but right now it takes a lot more than that unless certain characters are permanently figthting at minus 50 levels.

I think this is a great conversation and I agree 100% with the idea that the game is evolving too slowly. However, I disagree about the small changes being a copout. Any healthy game (League of Legends is a prime example) will do regular balancing. If you play that game and look at the patch notes, the character changes are typically small (maybe a slightly different cooldown, small tweaks to range, etc.). If any underused characters are changed in this game, I would expect that the natural behavior would be that initially the people that have them will try them out with the balancing, see how it works, and then either abandon them if the changes are ineffective, or continue to use them at a higher frequency. These are all metrics that the devs can monitor and adjust accordingly. I think seemingly "small" changes, like simply having Moonstone be able to select tiles instead of picking one randomly, would really change the dynamic of how she works. In short, I (and I would imagine most other people) would enjoy this game more if more characters can be used in more competitive settings. Subsequently, variety = $$$!

Regarding your "test run" idea, I think that's a good one and something that should be tried in controlled PVE environments. Instead of having guest characters that people are forced to use, have guest characters that people have the option of using. This will quickly give the devs a large testing sample that they can't get from their in-house testing to see what people like and what works. I would personally love to see this during the event when a character is first offered, as opposed to after they are first offered. It'll also quickly let them know whether a character or ability is stupidly overpowered (*cough* BPBLACK *cough*). The original simulator was great for this. Aside from the scaling, that was the most fun I have had with this game to date.

I really want to see these more frequent changes happen. This is one of the very few F2P games that I have given money to, simply because I want it to succeed. I've been skipping the past few events though because the game just hasn't been that fun. I hope that changes soon.

Unknown

In terms of overall balance, the general theory of balance in Capcom VS games applies here (and also in stuff like LoL). When you've a game that is inherently impossible to be totally balanced (no one seriously believes all 36 heroes in the game are equally powerful), what you want is have enough of a selection on the top tier and then after that you're bascially just rearranging numbers. As long as you've say 10 viable choices at the top you don't care too much if the other 2500 combinations are totally unviable because there are 10 that are viable. Hopefully after you rearranged the numbers enough the number of viable options goes up but that's not really that important.

This is currently not true in the game. If you are handed a max level roster of every character right now I'm guessing you'll have 3 possible teams: Patch/Magneto/Spiderman, Thor/BP/Hulk, or something weird that involves The Hood. The only reason you even see some variety is because people don't have every character maxed out so they got to improvise with what they got.

If there are 10 viable characters then you'd have 120 possible team combinations. Half of those combinations probably wouldn't make any sense, but 60 usable teams is still a good number. Currently it's more like 5 (Magneto/Spiderman/Punisher/Thor/Patch).

Nonce Equitaur 2

Phantron wrote:

Currently it's more like 5 (Magneto/Spiderman/Punisher/Thor/Patch).

Okay .. you get those 5 guys. I'll pick from Venom, mStorm, cStorm, MagnetoMN, Bullseye, oBW, Psylocke, Black Panther, Hood, and BWGS -- with all powers as is, but all AP costs tweaked down to 1AP each.

On my turn, I do a match-3. Your characters do a match-3. Then my characters wipe the board multiple times, perhaps using Storm's AP generation, or perhaps using BP's claw attack on your whole team three times. Or perhaps Bullseye puts 6 critical tiles on the board for 7300 damage, twice. Whatever AP your team has have, oBW steals. The Hood used twin revolvers to gain 18 AP, and never stops.

With their AP costs reduced enough, any character can be vastly overpowered, even Bagman. However, that should not be done. Instead, all these other characters should be slightly strengthened. You already have The Hood as being borderline viable. I'd claim he's already there -- he's the first character I got to level 141. But I wouldn't mind a 10% increase in health points for him. That might not be enough for you, and that's fine. The key thing would be for D3 and players to see more variety.

Unknown

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

Phantron wrote:

Currently it's more like 5 (Magneto/Spiderman/Punisher/Thor/Patch).

Okay .. you get those 5 guys. I'll pick from Venom, mStorm, cStorm, MagnetoMN, Bullseye, oBW, Psylocke, Black Panther, Hood, and BWGS -- with all powers as is, but all AP costs tweaked down to 1AP each.

On my turn, I do a match-3. Your characters do a match-3. Then my characters wipe the board multiple times, perhaps using Storm's AP generation, or perhaps using BP's claw attack on your whole team three times. Or perhaps Bullseye puts 6 critical tiles on the board for 7300 damage, twice. Whatever AP your team has have, oBW steals. The Hood used twin revolvers to gain 18 AP, and never stops.

With their AP costs reduced enough, any character can be vastly overpowered, even Bagman. However, that should not be done. Instead, all these other characters should be slightly strengthened. You already have The Hood as being borderline viable. I'd claim he's already there -- he's the first character I got to level 141. But I wouldn't mind a 10% increase in health points for him. That might not be enough for you, and that's fine. The key thing would be for D3 and players to see more variety.

We're not talking about a situation where you let whoever designed pre nerf Ragnarok redo the character balances. Generally speaking the top tier list of characters in a game like this do not get expanded unless it's an accident or a very careful planning. You could make Bagman the same tier as The Punisher, but this isn't something you want to do because even The Punisher, who is probably the least broken out of the commonly seen high end characters, is still much stronger than the average 3*.

The Hood is hard to get a grasp on because he's probably overpowered but there isn't enough data of how he matches up at level 141 versus all the other powerhouses at level 141, due to a lack of availability. I didn't exclude him because I think he's weak but rather because he's a hard character to think about. It's easy to see how lazy Thor is definitely going to be a member of the top 5 once you get him to 141 even against other powerhouses. With The Hood, it's hard to say that because he needs some finesse and the most powerful team that involves him is probably not just him + 2 of the other strongest characters in the game. At any rate The Hood is hardly a model of balance, as he's a character who is limited by rarity, just like Magneto classic, except he's harder to figure out than Magneto classic.

Unknown

Reading through the whole thread it looks like the two side of the argument are:

Some small tweaks should be made more often until characters have a better balance and more team variety is possible.

or

Characters are so out of balance that it is impossible to fix them, the devs should just throw up their hands and do nothing.

I don't really know what effective argument is trying to be made here, but that's what this thread reads like.

Unknown

I'm not saying they should give up because things are broken. I'm saying they need to stop pretending changing Captain America's protect tile from strength 150 to 155 means anything when you've characters like Spiderman and Magneto running around, and if they won't do anything about these obviously broken characters they shouldn't waste their time pretending.

In virtually every genre of gaming the 'fix things slowly' is just a copout. You don't need to fix things slowly when a character has the equivalent of a Iwin button. Even a cursory look at high end PvP and PvE shows events dominated by the same 4-5 characters, and changing Psylocke's Bewilderment from 8 AP to 10 AP and then maybe to 9 AP isn't going to affect that dominance. There's nothing subtle about how overpowered some of the characters are. The only reason I can imagine it's not done right away is because they're afraid of a potential fallout, but the longer you let these overpowered characters out in the wild, the worse it's going to get. Again, how does the playerbase benefit for having pre nerf Raganrok around for as long as he did? Well, maybe the guys who bought him benefited, but how can that possibly have been good for the game outside of a P2W angle?