My toughts about Champion rebalance

veny

As you propably know, there is upcoming reballance of some characters.
Here are my thoughs about how deep this issue might go.

Character cant actually be balanced - No, you cant just say "this is the best character in game"... each hero has its weakneses and weak hero can make an awesome combo when used properly with another two heroes, or against specific enemy (f.e. Loki i barely use is great against Thing). Sure, there are exceptions... heroes that are weak no matter how do you make up your team.
The only thing that change this equilibrium is quality, which is another part of this problem.

Point of this game is clear - get better, earn better covers, final goal is to get 5*s to build an ultimate team. This part is well done, mainly because of championing - having 2*s helps you to get more 3*s. Having 3*s helps you to get more 4*s etc.
The only problem i see here is matchmaking for PvP and scalling for PvE. With them, weaker covers work like farm only - you barely use them in fight (except for DDQ). Its natural - why use poor 2* when you can obliterate your enemy with 4* or 5* covers way faster.
This can be fixed pretty easily. Some of my suggestions:
- Idle feature that would use surplus covers (you send hero, and he returns with loot after some time - could be part of some big feature f.e. base building)
- First win of a day - 1st time you win a fight with a character, you get some ISO (50, or 70) - This would motivate us to use different covers instead of having few favorite ones.
- Nodes for specific quality. Am i the only one who use 5*s even against poor level 10 foes in PvE?
- Same for PvP - you could choose whether to fight enemy with 2*s only or so. PvP now requires the most powerfull heroes from your roster, which makes rest of them completely useless.
- Achievement/challenge/mission system working on daily basis - Random daily based tasks like "use 2* Wolverine in fight to get 10XP" or "deal 5 000 damage with 3* Psylocke", pushing you to use old useless characters.


TL,DR:
Prioritizing of certain covers is not a problem of ballance. Ballance works pretty well - each cover has its pros and cons and there is no real gamebreaker, but i admit there are some weak covers that could use some care.
All in all, imballance is the problem of game, that pushes you to use the best and forcing you to leave weak covers behind.
There are many possible ways how to change it without nerfing/boosting characters - nodes requiring certain quality, features that would use old covers to idle/offline features (sending them to missions/raids etc.), or simple system that rewards you for using multiple different covers.

I am writing it here in discussions to... well, discuss it with you.
What do you think about this game? Do you think there are problems with ballance? Whats the origin of it? Should we care for imbalances that are not breaking game? Isnt it natural that most players use only small part of characters? Do you think motivated enough to use different covers, or do you think game should reward us more for owning covers we barely use?

We_are_Venom

You're tl;dr needs a tl;dr

aa25

I think you misunderstand the re-balancing campaign that is going on right now. (Or maybe, I misunderstand you.). In short, it is to balance characters within the same stars tier, not across the stars tiers. While your suggestions are very interesting as new game play modes, they doesn't address the pros/cons re-balancing campaign.

veny wrote:

Do you think there are problems with ballance?

Yes, I think there is. A BIG one as well. Especially, when in 4*/5* tiers you pretty much rely on you luck to progress.

veny wrote:

Should we care for imbalances that are not breaking game?

This imbalance thing, in my opinion, is game breaking. This is NOT the current state of the game, but you can imagine the consequence. For example, if only a few characters that are overwhelmingly better than the others, eventually, all the players will converge to running those few characters. At that point, to stay in the game, it is pretty rounded down to a question if you have those best characters. Again, this is just an extreme example, not the current real state of the game. The current state of the game, from a point of view of a 3* player, is quite far from that. My point is this type of imbalance should not be left alone.

veny wrote:

Isnt it natural that most players use only small part of characters?

It is natural that players tend to use only a small part of the characters which they like. But it is not natural that most of the player use the exact same set of characters over and over. And it's not good for the healthiness of the game that the reason why some characters are not used is simply because they are completely over-shadowed by other characters.

veny wrote:

Do you think motivated enough to use different covers, or do you think game should reward us more for owning covers we barely use?

This is a good topic for discussion by itself, but it has nothing to do (well, not directly) with the current re-balancing campaign.

Side note:

veny wrote:

Loki i barely use is great against Thing

Loki is a great character by himself. He is near a very top of my skip-this-team list in PvP. While his black can be a game changing, it is the least troublesome power of him. I am not sure if I hate his purple or his green more.

Cheers

veny

Thanks for your very nice reflection, lets sum it up:
Yes, i think ballance within same star tier is well done. Sure there are some better or worse covers and except for some (Awesome Hulk f.e.), usefulness of each cover depends on situation.

I am afraid that no matter what, there will always be some characters or at least combination of them.
My point was to focus more on players motivations to use different characters (like features i mentioned in my first post). I think that trying to achieve some kind of equilibrium is pointless in this game - you cant have 100 characters (= 300 different skills) and expect all combinations will be ballanced.

Few minutes ago i was doing SHIELD for Wasp. I have all 3* maxed, three 4* maxed and guess what - I used OML, some offensive 3*s (Magneto, Iron Man, Thor, Black Panther), than Winfinite combo (prof, scarlet, widow), some tricksters (Loki - i love him for green btw., Hood).

Reason why i use them is simple: PvP matches you with the best, so you use the best covers.
Why the hell we dont have PvP for 2*s only? Who would use 3*s or 2*s with roster full of 4 and 5*s?

You cant ballance the game that is focused on being the best, no matter what you do, sooner or later players will find another best combo.

That was the point of my idea - better motivate (or force them) players to use different covers, than seek for ballance that will be broken again.

Vhailorx

I LOVE the idea of an iso boost for the first match using each character everyday!

Demi wants us to build deep rosters, and this would be a great way to incentivize it while also helping players out with more iso

Maybe 100 iso for each character, or 500 iso for a 3-person team full of first-runners? And cap it at 5 or 10k a day, just to make sure thingss don't get out of hand.

Alternately the, the same thing could be accomplished by offering an xp bonus for each first-run character.

aa25

veny wrote:

Thanks for your very nice reflection, lets sum it up:
Yes, i think ballance within same star tier is well done. Sure there are some better or worse covers and except for some (Awesome Hulk f.e.), usefulness of each cover depends on situation.

I am afraid that no matter what, there will always be some characters or at least combination of them.
My point was to focus more on players motivations to use different characters (like features i mentioned in my first post). I think that trying to achieve some kind of equilibrium is pointless in this game - you cant have 100 characters (= 300 different skills) and expect all combinations will be ballanced.

Few minutes ago i was doing SHIELD for Wasp. I have all 3* maxed, three 4* maxed and guess what - I used OML, some offensive 3*s (Magneto, Iron Man, Thor, Black Panther), than Winfinite combo (prof, scarlet, widow), some tricksters (Loki - i love him for green btw., Hood).

Reason why i use them is simple: PvP matches you with the best, so you use the best covers.
Why the hell we dont have PvP for 2*s only? Who would use 3*s or 2*s with roster full of 4 and 5*s?

You cant ballance the game that is focused on being the best, no matter what you do, sooner or later players will find another best combo.

That was the point of my idea - better motivate (or force them) players to use different covers, than seek for ballance that will be broken again.

It looks like I misunderstood you (sorry about that ) Anyway, I totally agree that balancing the characters in the same star tier to the same baseline is very difficult and probably almost impossible. However, in my opinion, narrowing down difference between the best and the worst is still doable and should be done. Not only per character, but per power as well. Like Lcap's yellow which is, in my opinion, arguable one the worst abilities in 3* land, while Lcap overall is not a bad character at all (of course, you can argue that making his yellow better may make him overpower instead, but I just want to give an example). At the time i am writing this, I still don't know what the devs have planned and I don't want to make any speculation.

I really like the idea of having more option/reason to use the characters in your roster, especially, 2* only pvp or 4* only pvp. Heroic PvE is kind of doing this, but, in my opinion, poorly.

mohio

The problem with "balancing" characters really boils down to flaws in the basic game design. Due to PvP, and to a lesser extent PvE, scoring systems we are encouraged at all times to win as fast as possible. PvP has a small additional qualification of needing/wanting to choose your scariest defensive team so you don't take as many hits, but that usually boils down to using whoever's boosted cause their health is highest.

They can't make a true rock paper scissors metagame because losing that much isn't fun and they want to still let people use their favorite characters whenever they want. But ultimately the upper tier competitive people will settle into playing whatever they have that wins the fastest. They can "rebalance" all they want, and it will just mean people find the next fastest team. Until they fix the underlying issue of speed being #1-10 most important things in picking your team, they are not going to be able to have a truly balanced metagame (or balanced in their idea of play metrics, etc.).

Bishop

I don't know I just want them to make all the characters in the game useful/useable. One thing I think is over the top is championing 5*'s I don't think that should even be allowed, I don't think that is even necessary. But I do think all 5*'s should be better the the 4*'s and 4*s better the the 3*'s and so on (otherwise the * doesn't mean anything). Star Lord should be worth leveling, Cho should be worth leveling. There's got to be a better reason to spend ISO in something other then rewards. Otherwise it just sits on the bench takes a roster slot.

dsds

veny wrote:

Thanks for your very nice reflection, lets sum it up:
Yes, i think ballance within same star tier is well done. Sure there are some better or worse covers and except for some (Awesome Hulk f.e.), usefulness of each cover depends on situation.

I am afraid that no matter what, there will always be some characters or at least combination of them.
My point was to focus more on players motivations to use different characters (like features i mentioned in my first post). I think that trying to achieve some kind of equilibrium is pointless in this game - you cant have 100 characters (= 300 different skills) and expect all combinations will be ballanced.

I would agree with this. But it doesn't mean you should stop rebalancing. Also let's say that a new combo pops up. Is it that bad? If covers are random, then the people who got really bad pulls may benefit from the new combo because now they may have the new over powered characters maxed already and thus they can start to catch up to the ones who were fortunate enough to pull prof x, oml, jean grey, hulk buster, red hulk, etc.

I loved the im40 rebalance. He wasn't very useful before, but now he is great. IM40 is powerful but he has a glaring yellow weakness. Without yellow ap, he is practically useless. His blue drains yellow. Combined with the AI not knowing how to use him, you can easily beat a team with im40 no problem.

Crowl

Bishop wrote:

I don't know I just want them to make all the characters in the game useful/useable. One thing I think is over the top is championing 5*'s I don't think that should even be allowed, I don't think that is even necessary. But I do think all 5*'s should be better the the 4*'s and 4*s better the the 3*'s and so on (otherwise the * doesn't mean anything). Star Lord should be worth leveling, Cho should be worth leveling. There's got to be a better reason to spend ISO in something other then rewards. Otherwise it just sits on the bench takes a roster slot.

The first target for any rebalancing is that any character should be usable when boosted, you should not have to ignore them and go for other unboosted chars of the same tier, get this base level right to start with and then they can go from there.