Gambit Character Update Details (6/26/18)

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Comments

  • Warbringa
    Warbringa Posts: 1,299 Chairperson of the Boards
    marshall said:
    At the end of the day, you want to upset the status quo, introduce further variety. Don't think he's as bad as people think. He will definitely not be top tier anymore, which is the goal. And we'll not have characters powers being introduced in an attempt to disrupt him specifically.

    We'll be back to a world of strategy and counterstrategy, as opposed to "bring your Gambit to the Gambit party".
    Actually their stated goal was that they wanted him to still be top tier but he now he will barely be mid tier.  It shows how little the devs understand finesse when it comes to nerfs.  It is always a better strategy to slowing fine tune a character downwards than cut them completely down like this nerf has done.
  • thedarkphoenix
    thedarkphoenix Posts: 557 Critical Contributor
    658_2 said:
    I have zero, ZERO, sympathy for those who who used the cp glitch to push their Gambits up.  It makes me happy that their choice is to either sell or live with 500+ mmr.   DESERVED
    And those who didnt?
  • 658_2
    658_2 Posts: 235 Tile Toppler
    edited June 2018
    thedarkphoenix said:
    658_2 said:
    I have zero, ZERO, sympathy for those who who used the cp glitch to push their Gambits up.  It makes me happy that their choice is to either sell or live with 500+ mmr.   DESERVED
    And those who didnt?
    It’s horrible.  I mentioned upthread how shady this nerf is after Digital Day.  They knew damn well how strong he was before DD.
  • Warbringa
    Warbringa Posts: 1,299 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited June 2018
    ramoramo86 said:
    Warbringa said:
    marshall said:
    At the end of the day, you want to upset the status quo, introduce further variety. Don't think he's as bad as people think. He will definitely not be top tier anymore, which is the goal. And we'll not have characters powers being introduced in an attempt to disrupt him specifically.

    We'll be back to a world of strategy and counterstrategy, as opposed to "bring your Gambit to the Gambit party".
    Actually their stated goal was that they wanted him to still be top tier but he now he will barely be mid tier.  It shows how little the devs understand finesse when it comes to nerfs.  It is always a better strategy to slowing fine tune a character downwards than cut them completely down like this nerf has done.
    //Removed Misinformation -Brigby
    I was simply pointing out that their statement (which you can find easily from Brigby's OP) is that they wanted him to still be top tier (that is what viable means in MPQ if anyone doesn't know) after the nerf.  Thus they either straight up lied or they are bad at nerfing characters.  I prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt that they are bad at nerfing characters but they might also have just straight lied in their statement too, that is a possibility.

    //Removed Misinformation -Brigby
  • JHawkInc
    JHawkInc Posts: 2,605 Chairperson of the Boards
    bluewolf said:
    Why leave Ock out of the tokens?  My possibilities:

    1.  As stated, perhaps he is just that bad.
    2.  A rework is planned and it would be better to have less of him “in the wild”.  They won’t tell us that up front.

    Anything else is wild speculation, like vaulting/retiring a 5 to cap the tier and try to control dilution.
    As someone with both him and Hulk champed (praise be to RNGesus), Banner should have been left out way before Doc Ock. Ock's certainly not great, but the stun and tentacles aren't too bad. Banner's main party tricks are punishing his team with enemy attack tiles and transforming into the worst Hulk in the game.
  • sirwookieechris
    sirwookieechris Posts: 131 Tile Toppler
    Dormammu said:
    While I don't have a horse in this race either way, I've always wondered why the developers do what they do when it comes to balancing characters. Instead of completely shredding a character into irrelevancy, which has been their tactic with almost all nerfs in the 5-year history of this wonderful game, why don't they do smaller tweaks more often?

    Other developers adjust things all the time, up and down. MMO's are excellent at this. Buffing here, reducing there. Sometimes they entirely reverse what they did from the previous adjustment. But the changes are usually small and frequent - occurring with every update - until a balance is found.

    Do they lack the resources to do this? Do they not have a reliable source of QA data?
    Because sometimes people don’t realize a characters true potential until enough time has passed. Agent venom is no where as bad as people made him sound a year ago.
  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 5,820 Chairperson of the Boards
    I could not be happier with this change, and this will make MPQ's meta far more balanced in the long run. 

    A few comments after reading this thread:

    Fix Thor next, please.  And don't wait 9 months to do it.

    When these guys nerf it almost always seems too heavy-handed.  This is generally because the characters they're nerfing are so far outside the norm that they require massive adjustments to be ok.  Gambit was so obnoxiously overpowered that they really did have to do a change of this magnitude, or he'd still be everywhere.

    For the people who are surprised by this...I'm sorry, but you just haven't been paying attention.  In the entire history of this game, the only wrong roster-building strategy is to chase whoever's the best *right now*.  Every single time there is a consensus "best character" or "the only one you need" that guy gets knocked down.  Gambit had been that for months now, so everyone should have known this was coming and planned for it.  Poor planning is not the devs' problem, it's yours.

    Lastly to the devs: please, please, please don't let problems like this go on so long in the future.  There were posts as far back as October asking for this.  My megathread was in November and it ran for like a whole month.  We knew he was a huge problem from the beginning.  If Gambit was changed back then, the bad PR you're getting right now would've been much much smaller and we wouldn't have had to live through the intervening months of nothing but Gambit.

  • Tony_Foot
    Tony_Foot Posts: 1,811 Chairperson of the Boards
    They release an op character that I happened to get lucky busting a hoard to get and it’s my poor planning?

    Understood, I will plan better in future. Just so I know when to Plan for the next gambit, when is the next amazon digital day?
  • Jaedenkaal
    Jaedenkaal Posts: 3,357 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited June 2018
    entrailbucket said:
    For the people who are surprised by this...I'm sorry, but you just haven't been paying attention.  In the entire history of this game, the only wrong roster-building strategy is to chase whoever's the best *right now*.  Every single time there is a consensus "best character" or "the only one you need" that guy gets knocked down.  Gambit had been that for months now, so everyone should have known this was coming and planned for it.  Poor planning is not the devs' problem, it's yours.

    Well that's not really fair. Leveling the character who's "best right now" is always the best short term strategy. Even if you knew that they were going to get nerfed into the ground 8 months from now, it would probably STILL be the best strategy to chase them as hard as possible. What's the alternative? Effectively stall your entire progression indefinitely? Only level "fair" characters? Now you're just losing ground to everyone who -is- chasing the top.

    Which is not to say I'm against this change, because I'm not. But I think its pointless to get angry just because you (not you specifically) invested a lot into Gambit, and now they're not the top character anymore. To keep the game moving, future releases would have to be at least competitive with Gambit, otherwise they wouldn't generate much interest at all.

    This -could- have been fixed by making all future releases just flat out better than gambit, but A) that also makes them flat out better than the entire rest of the game, and wouldn't even matter until there were 4 such characters that you had to choose between, and B ) at that point you'd still have invested X into Gambit, and he'd no longer be worth using. So you'd be in the same spot with Gambit, only now the entire rest of the game is totally irrelevant to you, and probably many others.

    That's clearly an even less sustainable game model than whatever we have now, so I agree with the devs, it would seem, that it's better for the health of the game to simply lower Gambit's power. That way, all the other characters that everyone may or may not have invested a lot into stay relevant for longer, instead of becoming even more pointless than they already are.  
  • Asmodaeus
    Asmodaeus Posts: 100 Tile Toppler
    entrailbucket said:

    Fix Thor next, please. 

    Can ppl please stop asking for this. I think we've had enough "fixing" for now. The devs have consistently shown they do surgery with a shotgun instead of a scalpel and with all of the recent moves, I fear the patient is soon to be DOA
  • fmftint
    fmftint Posts: 3,653 Chairperson of the Boards
    @Brigby
    Any word on what the token exchange ratio is going to be? 
  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 5,820 Chairperson of the Boards
    Tony_Foot said:
    They release an op character that I happened to get lucky busting a hoard to get and it’s my poor planning?

    Understood, I will plan better in future. Just so I know when to Plan for the next gambit, when is the next amazon digital day?
    Just so I'm clear: you hoarded a bunch of resources by accident, and then accidentally decided to cash them in when the most overpowered character in the history of the game was available?  If that's true, I apologize and I do feel sorry for you.

    As an aside, a lot of people seem to think that these guys are running some sort of comic-book-match-3 pump and dump scheme, where they trick people into buying stuff and then devalue it.  If you think that, *why are you still playing this game*?  If I thought that, I would go play any one of the literally millions of other games that are available, that aren't made by shady characters.  Vote with your feet, and your wallet.
  • Daredevil217
    Daredevil217 Posts: 3,965 Chairperson of the Boards
    You do know not everyone can just champ every character, right? It’s very very small percentage that play that much and spend that much. Saying “build up everyone” is great advice. Too bad things such as dilution, RNG, and strangleholds on resources are real things. 
  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 5,820 Chairperson of the Boards
    Daredevil217 said:
    You do know not everyone can just champ every character, right? It’s very very small percentage that play that much and spend that much. Saying “build up everyone” is great advice. Too bad things such as dilution, RNG, and strangleholds on resources are real things. 
    So your argument is that players who don't play very much or spend very much should be able to survive long-term at the very top of the metagame?  What incentive is there to play or spend at all then?
  • Jarvind
    Jarvind Posts: 1,684 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited June 2018
    While I am happy that Gambit's stranglehold on the game is finally being broken, it's profoundly disappointing to see him utterly crushed like this. This is Old Man Logan all over again; let him run rampant for ages, then nerf him so hard he becomes useless outside of his PVE essential nodes. Any two of the changes in this update would've been fine, but to hit ALL of his powers, including reducing his main power's damage AND increasing its cost by 40 percent?

    //Removed Insult -Brigby
  • Jaedenkaal
    Jaedenkaal Posts: 3,357 Chairperson of the Boards
    Jarvind said:
    While I am happy that Gambit's stranglehold on the game is finally being broken, it's profoundly disappointing to see him utterly crushed like this. This is Old Man Logan all over again; let him run rampant for ages, then nerf him so hard he becomes useless outside of his PVE essential nodes. Any two of the changes in this update would've been fine, but to hit ALL of his powers, including reducing his main power's damage AND increasing its cost by 40 percent?

    Good lord, you guys suck at game design. Brigby, please tell the relevant parties that they suck at game design. In those exact words, please.
    By which you mean, presumably, that you personally do not agree, in the strongest possible terms. In theory.
  • GrimSkald
    GrimSkald Posts: 2,639 Chairperson of the Boards
    entrailbucket said:
    Jaedenkaal said:
    entrailbucket said:
    For the people who are surprised by this...I'm sorry, but you just haven't been paying attention.  In the entire history of this game, the only wrong roster-building strategy is to chase whoever's the best *right now*.  Every single time there is a consensus "best character" or "the only one you need" that guy gets knocked down.  Gambit had been that for months now, so everyone should have known this was coming and planned for it.  Poor planning is not the devs' problem, it's yours.

    Well that's not really fair. Leveling the character who's "best right now" is always the best short term strategy. Even if you knew that they were going to get nerfed into the ground 8 months from now, it would probably STILL be the best strategy to chase them as hard as possible. What's the alternative? Effectively stall your entire progression indefinitely? Only level "fair" characters? Now you're just losing ground to everyone who -is- chasing the top.

    Which is not to say I'm against this change, because I'm not. But I think its pointless to get angry just because you (not you specifically) invested a lot into Gambit, and now they're not the top character anymore. To keep the game moving, future releases would have to be at least competitive with Gambit, otherwise they wouldn't generate much interest at all.

    This -could- have been fixed by making all future releases just flat out better than gambit, but A) that also makes them flat out better than the entire rest of the game, and wouldn't even matter until there were 4 such characters that you had to choose between, and B ) at that point you'd still have invested X into Gambit, and he'd no longer be worth using. So you'd be in the same spot with Gambit, only now the entire rest of the game is totally irrelevant to you, and probably many others.

    That's clearly an even less sustainable game model than whatever we have now, so I agree with the devs, it would seem, that it's better for the health of the game to simply lower Gambit's power. That way, all the other characters that everyone may or may not have invested a lot into stay relevant for longer, instead of becoming even more pointless than they already are.  
    Sometimes I forget that not everyone has been playing this game for 4 and a half years.

    This is what MPQ is, and it's always been like this, since day 1.  The players pick a guy that's the best, they only use that one guy, then that guy gets nerfed into oblivion and never used again.  When they nerfed Ragnarok we didn't even get an announcement, we just logged in one day and he mysteriously sucked.

    The meta changes very quickly, and it changes completely.  When one guy gets nerfed another one almost immediately shows up everywhere.  The only sustainable roster strategy is to ignore the short term completely and focus on building up everyone in the very very long term.  That way when whatever's next shows up, you're prepared.  You need to have a backup plan in place if you want to stay at the very top of the meta.
    I've been playing for well over three years and while I don't disagree with the last phrase (you've got to have a backup plan and focus on the long term,) I don't think they have nerfed an excessive number of characters.  I'll definitely say that all the characters they have nerfed they nerfed pretty excessively (with maybe one or two exceptions,) but overall they haven't hit that many. 

    A lot of people are saying "who's next?"  Hopefully, the answer is "nobody" - speaking for myself I don't think Thor is out of line with the rest of the characters.  But they may introduce someone new who's completely out of balance, or else combines with another character in a way that throws the game off.  I'm sure if that happens they'll nerf one or more characters...
  • kk3thess
    kk3thess Posts: 202 Tile Toppler
    Now it's time to Archangel to dominate the meta. Hold on to your hats!

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