October 17th Scorecard

JHawkInc

It's been a day, hasn't it? Let's look at a brief tally.

• No reduced skip fee in LRs. Bad, but we did get the reduced fee during anniversary, and these are double ISO to make up for a lack of double ISO during anniversary. Neutral overall. (0)
• Sneak Peak: regular PVP and Weekly Boost updates. PVE update says The Hunt is 3-day, meaning we only have to suffer through that horrible Florida sub for one day. I consider that a Good thing. (0+1=1)
• Nightcrawler Announcement. We knew it was coming, but yay Nightcrawler! That's a Good thing, right? (1+1=2)
• Shield Training Updates. So they didn't fix the problems people had. They increased rewards, but tied them harder to the required characters, so fewer people will get them. They required Rogue, the one 4* in the game least likely for players to have covered or leveled. And with no change to the Individual Training, sounds like they're throwing freebies at the 1% of the 1% for Nightcrawler, as even competitive players won't be able to cover him well enough to complete the event. So, one Good (rewards), three Bad (putting more rewards behind character cover/level requirements, requiring Rogue this close to release, requiring fully covered Nightcrawler in release window to complete). (2+1-3=0)
• X-Men and Nightcrawler Boosts. Team affiliation does something! And boosts have been changed... maybe for the first time ever since I started playing (outside of those times they rewarded boosts more often and people rolled their eyes and continued to mostly ignore boosts). Nightcrawler boosts feel weird, like a poor way to augment the New Character boost. Selling them for HP instead of ISO feels like a typical Dev "too stupid to know better" idea. They'd get further if they gave the boosts away and then just asked us to buy them lunch next week instead of trying to trick players into buying bad deals. One Good for Team Affiliations, one Neutral for the Nightcrawler-only boost (it's not bad, even if it is a little odd), one Bad for being money-grabbing fiends. (0+1+0-1=0)
• Time Season Updates. Rogue and Gambit into packs, Riri loses 3x bonus, typical, expected. Fury updated, but it feels like it'll move him from a "****" 4* to an "average" 4*, nothing groundbreaking. Psylocke's update extremely long overdue, always excited to see some polish applied to the 3* tier. Bewilder sounds more desirable, probably not more usable because it's still a 10-ap countdown. Then we have Win-Based progression. No word on fixing problems people had with it last time. A dump and run announcement at the end of the day. I'll go neutral on Fury because it feels like he's moved from "****" to "average" and he'll need another boost in less than a year. Good on Psylocke because the 3* tier is often neglected (probably another "**** to average" upgrade, but not enough is done to improve the 3* experience to keep those players around to the 4*/5* tiers, in my opinion). We'll ignore the pros/cons of Win-Based PVP and call it a Bad addition solely because they failed to address concerns from previous runs. That's... 0+0+1-1=0.

I'm sure people will disagree with my point distribution (it was done on a whim, hardly something robust enough to stand up to close scrutiny), but just a quick tally shows that we had SIX significant announcements today, and the devs managed to pack just as much bad news into them as they did good news. And that's the takeaway here.

Magic

A nice summary. Points were not needed in this as clearly you can't put the same weight on Nightcrawler boost or the Sneak peak article and Win-base shift for PvP. 

shardwick

I ain't even gonna be annoyed by Florida because Grocket is boosted. Bring it on. I'm neutral on most of the announcements. Would be interested in the Psylocke rework but I doubt that I would play with her much anyway. The only 3*s that I ever really use anymore are Deadpool, IM40 and Switch. Excited for win based progression, Nightcrawler and System Reboot.

Avalancher

Mad props JHawk, this is one of the best posts I have ever seen here. I tend to gloss over announcements and stumble through while only playing my favorite stuff, this helped me a lot.

Thank you.

broll

aesthetocyst said:

Methinks you skipped a digit on that last negative, the one that looks like: "∞"

Jarvind

aesthetocyst said:

So a one-time requiring a recent release to be quickly built is a "-3", while making a permanent alteration to an entire game mode that's nearly half the entire game (read: half player's income stream) is a "-1"?

The stakes in SHIELD training, even if the "build a 4* in 30 days" is to be an ongoing requirement, are dwarfed by the fundamental shift in PvP.

Methinks you skipped a digit on that last negative, the one that looks like: "∞"

Might wanna get your keyboard checked, your 8s are coming out sideways.

Devorer

my opinion on shield training:
The problem is not htem giving some free stuff to whales that we cannot achieve. I made it to 10 covers of rogue by being a little lucky and putting in the work to get all but one of her available covers in pve and pvp. And I am ok with not being able to finish the event and get the legendary token. I mean, do not get me wrong here, of course i strife to get every LT available to me to make some progress in my roster, but if they want to set that bar so high. well i will not jump through their hoops. if they do find people who do, great. it keeps the game going.
What my problem is how they advertise it, as a great opportunity to all players, while it really is nice for people with a well devoped roster (wehich i fortunately have) and people willing to spend A LOT (which i will not do), but is of little value to newer players and those with a lower developed roster.
I mean why the level requirement in the first place? this is new right? we always only had to have the required character, right?
They should really leave to us who we do want to level up and prioritize. and if people find a way to clear a difficult node with an underpowered char required or want to spend their whales points-reserve. then they should get their reward. (just like they force us to use the newest 5*s we likely have only a few covers to fight lvl 515 enemies, of course the npw implemented 5* boost helps a lot here)

JHawkInc

Magic said:

A nice summary. Points were not needed in this as clearly you can't put the same weight on Nightcrawler boost or the Sneak peak article and Win-base shift for PvP. 

It was a tally more than a point system. I didn't mean to put any weight on any of them, but rather count how many were positive vs negative, you know? 

shardwick said:

I ain't even gonna be annoyed by Florida because Grocket is boosted. Bring it on. I'm neutral on most of the announcements. Would be interested in the Psylocke rework but I doubt that I would play with her much anyway. The only 3*s that I ever really use anymore are Deadpool, IM40 and Switch. Excited for win based progression, Nightcrawler and System Reboot.

Whoops. I forgot System Reboot in my tally. That would have been worth another positive point. System Reboot is awesome.

aesthetocyst said:

So a one-time requiring a recent release to be quickly built is a "-3", while making a permanent alteration to an entire game mode that's nearly half the entire game (read: half player's income stream) is a "-1"?

The stakes in SHIELD training, even if the "build a 4* in 30 days" is to be an ongoing requirement, are dwarfed by the fundamental shift in PvP.

Methinks you skipped a digit on that last negative, the one that looks like: "∞"

It's a tally. Quantitative, not qualitative. None of it was given weight or a serious qualitative value. Trying to claim I said Shield Training is worse than the PVP shift is a gross misinterpretation of the data. I simply said it had more individual bad points, and at no point said how good or bad ANY of the points were. I called that out both in the start and end of my post.

JHawkInc

aesthetocyst said:

JHawkInc said: ... It's a tally. Quantitative ...

Right; you quantified what you qualified as "bad". You decided Shield training had 3 'bad' aspects, and that pvp changes had 2 neutral and one negative aspects. An attempt to pass off your subjective, qualitative opinions as a quantitative analysis. You even call your own counts of your own opinions "data" LOL

You're really hung up about PVP, because you keep talking about it more than I did. And you keep reacting to things I didn't actually say.

I didn't actually give PVP Changes any sort of qualifier at all. I deliberately avoided that can of worms. I gave a vague "negative" to the fact that they declared it "good to go" when the community still wasn't happy with it.

Jaedenkaal

JHawkInc said:

aesthetocyst said:

JHawkInc said: ... It's a tally. Quantitative ...

Right; you quantified what you qualified as "bad". You decided Shield training had 3 'bad' aspects, and that pvp changes had 2 neutral and one negative aspects. An attempt to pass off your subjective, qualitative opinions as a quantitative analysis. You even call your own counts of your own opinions "data" LOL

You're really hung up about PVP, because you keep talking about it more than I did. And you keep reacting to things I didn't actually say.

I didn't actually give PVP Changes any sort of qualifier at all. I deliberately avoided that can of worms. I gave a vague "negative" to the fact that they declared it "good to go" when the community still wasn't happy with it.

But you did arbitrarily divide Shield Training into 4 categories, and then arbitrarily weight them the same when tallying them. I guess D3 is 'lucky' you didn't decide to tally whether you liked, didn't like, or were neutral on each individual node in the event.