Are there ever going to be character re-balances again?

Rockwell75
Rockwell75 Posts: 268 Mover and Shaker
in MPQ General Discussion
Or should I just give up hope of 5* Wasp ever being usable?
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Comments

  • ABaker84
    ABaker84 Posts: 90 Match Maker
    The last update did note "character balance changes" to coincide with the anniversary, but I have not seen anything in regards to which characters
  • wymtime
    wymtime Posts: 3,759 Chairperson of the Boards
    They are going to balance 1* iron man so he is more usable for beginning players.  The devs feel every other tier is fine.
  • JHawkInc
    JHawkInc Posts: 2,605 Chairperson of the Boards
    ABaker84 said:
    The last update did note "character balance changes" to coincide with the anniversary, but I have not seen anything in regards to which characters
    To the best of my knowledge, they put that in almost every patch, because it includes things like when Vulture's blue was broken and wasn't generating AP, and in R161 they fixed it. It doesn't specifically refer to the bigger rebalances we used to get in the Season Update threads, the kind that had a System Reboot event run with them. It refers to all changes, which includes the tiny bugfixes and tweaks.
  • LifeofAgony
    LifeofAgony Posts: 690 Critical Contributor
    It’s been about a year since any changes were made outside of Gambit,  Some have had broken mechanics fixed, but there’s been basically nothing else.  Many 5s still ages away from being useful.  Plenty of trash in the 3/4 tier.  It’s pretty clear from their inaction that they don’t care so much about this.  If it’s not a new release or a support, it probably doesn’t rate at this point.
  • Dougfresh413
    Dougfresh413 Posts: 125 Tile Toppler
    I bring this up every time they post a survey for us.  It is my #1 suggestion to improve this game.  I love MPQ, but please stop spending so much time and energy on releasing new characters every other week and instead spend that effort on re-balancing the existing characters.  We all see the problem -- dilution is out of control and required character nodes make it necessary for us to roster each character. 
  • barrok
    barrok Posts: 37 Just Dropped In
    How much money do you think they make by re-balancing characters? My guess is it is a net loss for them. New characters at least generate some revenue. 

    What would be awesome is if they combined the two. For ever new character they tweak an existing. They could even 'relate' them, by adjusting a 3* to work well with the new 4*. 
  • The rockett
    The rockett Posts: 2,016 Chairperson of the Boards
    barrok said:
    How much money do you think they make by re-balancing characters? My guess is it is a net loss for them. New characters at least generate some revenue. 

    What would be awesome is if they combined the two. For ever new character they tweak an existing. They could even 'relate' them, by adjusting a 3* to work well with the new 4*. 
    This suggestion had been made before. For the 5* tier, buff 3-5* at the same time.  How about PHX, Doc Ock and Banner.  Then you can make a special store with them for the buff. 

    As a side note, not only are we at the 5 year anniversary we are at the 1 year anniversary as well. Last time a buff was done.  Happy times.  
  • moss04
    moss04 Posts: 147 Tile Toppler
    edited October 2018
    They are in full survival mode and can only focus time on things that might earn money.  Rebalances will only be done if not doing them threatens the entire balance of the game like with Gambit.
  • guzktgui
    guzktgui Posts: 35 Just Dropped In
    Speaking about money, they keep asking why you would not recommend MPQ to a friend, one reason is that there are more than 200 characters but you only use 10...
  • barrok
    barrok Posts: 37 Just Dropped In
    edited October 2018
    guzktgui said:
    Speaking about money, they keep asking why you would not recommend MPQ to a friend, one reason is that there are more than 200 characters but you only use 10...
    To be fair, that is almost any game. 

    Watch pros play Dota. Watch pros play Magic the Gathering. We as humans are good at min-maxing, so inevitably we lean towards the strongest characters. It would be darn near impossible to create 170 characters that are equally balanced (on both individual power level and "combo" potential). 

    edit: also, with "essentials" they kind of do force you to play other characters.
  • Thanos
    Thanos Posts: 722 Critical Contributor
    barrok said:
    guzktgui said:
    Speaking about money, they keep asking why you would not recommend MPQ to a friend, one reason is that there are more than 200 characters but you only use 10...
    To be fair, that is almost any game. 

    Watch pros play Dota. Watch pros play Magic the Gathering. We as humans are good at min-maxing, so inevitably we lean towards the strongest characters. It would be darn near impossible to create 170 characters that are equally balanced (on both individual power level and "combo" potential). 

    edit: also, with "essentials" they kind of do force you to play other characters.
    I usually just play around the essential.
  • Rockwell75
    Rockwell75 Posts: 268 Mover and Shaker
    edited October 2018
    barrok said:
    How much money do you think they make by re-balancing characters?
    On the flip side how much are they losing by not?  I've invested way more time and money into this game than I would like to admit and I'm at the point where the only thing motivating me is building 5* characters.  I've dedicated all my efforts in the last couple months to finishing Okoye and the game instead has overloaded me with covers for a useless 5* character (Wasp).  There is no excuse for a character at that tier to be that big of a dud and knowing I can invest so much into something and be left with nothing to show for it is seriously killing my desire to carry on (whereas if they gave Wasp a much needed buff it would go a long way to taking the edge off). 
  • barrok
    barrok Posts: 37 Just Dropped In
    edited October 2018
    But you are looking at it backwards rockwell, at least compared to what we are talking about.

    I am asking how much would they make by re balancing characters... not how much good will they would make by re balancing characters.

    You already spent your money. They got that from you. Regardless of what they do with the characters they already have your money. That is the reason why re balancing is a difficult thing to do in development. Even if the character needs it, it is still time/money spent on a character that already exists (and that they already got your money for)

    Could they lose future money from you by not rebalancing? Sure... but these games seem to care more about what they got from you, rather than what they could get in the future.

    Edit: 100% agree about Wasp though. No 5* should suck so bad. The rarity alone should guarantee that they are all at least good. 
  • The rockett
    The rockett Posts: 2,016 Chairperson of the Boards
    barrok said:
    But you are looking at it backwards rockwell, at least compared to what we are talking about.

    I am asking how much would they make by re balancing characters... not how much good will they would make by re balancing characters.

    You already spent your money. They got that from you. Regardless of what they do with the characters they already have your money. That is the reason why re balancing is a difficult thing to do in development. Even if the character needs it, it is still time/money spent on a character that already exists (and that they already got your money for)

    Could they lose future money from you by not rebalancing? Sure... but these games seem to care more about what they got from you, rather than what they could get in the future.

    Edit: 100% agree about Wasp though. No 5* should suck so bad. The rarity alone should guarantee that they are all at least good. 
    See Banner and Doc Ock.  They were terrible before wasp and still are. 
  • JHawkInc
    JHawkInc Posts: 2,605 Chairperson of the Boards
    guzktgui said:
    Speaking about money, they keep asking why you would not recommend MPQ to a friend, one reason is that there are more than 200 characters but you only use 10...
    I started playing Contest of Champions in my spare time, solely to earn Marvel Insider points so I can redeem them for HP in MPQ. There are a lot of things I think MPQ does better, but the one thing I like from Contest is the Arena, solely because it encourages you to use your entire roster. Use a team, they're down for 90 minutes. You can spend (their equivalent of) HP to refresh that, but you're better off just jumping to the next characters on your roster and using them. I mostly play the 1*-2* Arena, and have some 50 characters in that range, and I use almost all of them on my first pass through Arena, then when they refresh later I come back and use my top 12-15 or so to keep my win streak going. And that's more because those top characters are higher levels than the rest than anything else (if they were all the same level, I'd use all of them, you know? so there's a benefit to continuing to level those 1*s and 2*s even though my strongest characters are 3*s and I'm starting to collect some 4*s worth leveling as well).
  • HoundofShadow
    HoundofShadow Posts: 8,004 Chairperson of the Boards
    I don't see the argument of not being able to use your other 100+ roster, unless you are purely focusing on speed in PvE. Of course, that got to be some kind of sacrifice. There's always a choice, but you chose speed over variety. Stop blaming the devs.

    As for balancing, for every character that you buffed, another character will move down the lower tier. Not every character is meant to be in the top tier in clearing PvE or PvP. Some are just meant to be used differently than just high damage attack and quick ap gaining abilities.

    For the call to 5* buffing, it seems like the characters must have similar match damage, which brings buffing older 5* match damage to newer 5*'. Then, characters are compared based on damage/ap. If a certain character damage/ap is lower than other character, then this charcter need a buff.

    Why not just ask the devs to turn the characters into such a way that all characters attack are based on the player's level and attributes? The level or attributes are divided into 5 tiers.
    You have 5 fixed match damage and damage/ap ranking. if you bring 5* into the match, all your 5* will have the same ap/damage and match damage. In that way, everything is balanced and you can bring any character you want.


  • Rockwell75
    Rockwell75 Posts: 268 Mover and Shaker
    There's always a choice, but you chose speed over variety. Stop blaming the devs.

    As for balancing, for every character that you buffed, another character will move down the lower tier. Not every character is meant to be in the top tier in clearing PvE or PvP. Some are just meant to be used differently than just high damage attack and quick ap gaining abilities.
    To your first statement-- it's not really a choice.  The need for speed is part of the game's design, both for obtaining top rewards (in PVP and PVE) but also for dealing with the drudgery of the grind.  When I moved to 5s I thought "I can still play with my 4s if I want variety" but once I experienced the sheer speed and efficiency of top 5s there was absolutely no way I could go back to using 4s.  There's nobody else to blame but the devs as they are the ones who designed a game that emphatically rewards relying on the top 1% of characters.

    To your second point nobody is  (or at least I'm not) saying that some characters shouldn't be better than others...the point is rather that some characters are so bad that some extra TLC is needed.  I would argue this is less true about characters that fell victim to power creep (Phoenix, Surfer) and more about characters who were tinykitty right out of the gate (most recently Wasp).  The should be more quality control on the 5* tier-- the players who have struggled and invested long and hard to get there deserve it imho...and are more likely to keep spending.
  • NeonBlue
    NeonBlue Posts: 142 Tile Toppler
    edited October 2018
    When you have damn near 200 characters, buffing across the board is unfeasible. It's the same argument I have with my League of Legends friends. They always ask for Riot to "buff instead of nerf" so that every character is "balanced" but then they have to buff 200 characters when they can just nerf like 5. In both ways, balance is achieved but one path takes a lot more effort than the other.

    In this case, I'm okay with them just nerfing whoever is overused every few months. If you're worried about your investments getting nerfed, then don't invest in the absolute strongest teams. That should be the tradeoff, so that people can balance strength with the risk of nerfs. I wonder if as many people would still invest in Thorkoye if D3 followed this trend. 
  • wymtime
    wymtime Posts: 3,759 Chairperson of the Boards
    NeonBlue said:
    When you have damn near 200 characters, buffing across the board is unfeasible. It's the same argument I have with my League of Legends friends. They always ask for Riot to "buff instead of nerf" so that every character is "balanced" but then they have to buff 200 characters when they can just nerf like 5. In both ways, balance is achieved but one path takes a lot more effort than the other.

    In this case, I'm okay with them just nerfing whoever is overused every few months. If you're worried about your investments getting nerfed, then don't invest in the absolute strongest teams. That should be the tradeoff, so that people can balance strength with the risk of nerfs. I wonder if as many people would still invest in Thorkoye if D3 followed this trend. 
    At one point in time they buffed the entire 3* tier by increase the health for all but 4 3*.  Then when champ rewards came out hey nerfed the entire 3* tier by reducing the damage across the board for 3* based on level.  I think balancing a couple of characters every other month isn’t too much to ask.  They should actually focus on the new characters like Wasp and Loki and see how players play test them and how they effect the game.  Slight adjustments to new characters to make them balanced should be reasonable.
  • Twomp_thaDJ
    Twomp_thaDJ Posts: 237 Tile Toppler
    The did just rebalance gambit.. for better or worse they did do one recently 

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