Lockjaw Character Update (Live 12/16/21)

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Comments

  • HoundofShadow
    HoundofShadow Posts: 8,004 Chairperson of the Boards
    There's a few subset of pro-buff players, it seems.

    Camp 1: if it doesn't benefit me, it's a waste of time.
    Camp 2: any buff is good.
    Camp 3: if it's not a buff to characters I have in mind, it's a waste of time. (Variation of camp 1)
    And possibly more.

    With that being said, which group of players should buffs benefit? Clearly, it's impossible to make every player happy with buffs. Some players are unhappy when buff happens, while other are happy. 
  • ThaRoadWarrior
    ThaRoadWarrior Posts: 9,454 Chairperson of the Boards
    HoundofShadow said:
    There's a few subset of pro-buff players, it seems.

    Camp 1: if it doesn't benefit me, it's a waste of time.
    Camp 2: any buff is good.
    Camp 3: if it's not a buff to characters I have in mind, it's a waste of time. (Variation of camp 1)
    And possibly more.

    With that being said, which group of players should buffs benefit? Clearly, it's impossible to make every player happy with buffs. Some players are unhappy when buff happens, while other are happy. 
    No one should be unhappy with a basic buff like this one. I think something like happened to Ghost Rider was a mixed bag - a straight up number pump is hard to be sad about, but when you make a fundamental change to a power you'll start to split the camp.
  • ThaRoadWarrior
    ThaRoadWarrior Posts: 9,454 Chairperson of the Boards
    There are a lot more flying characters now than there were then, so you could make a case he still has a niche in the way Black suit Spider-Man has one. My archangel is still unchamped so it's hard for me to really evaluate him either way. I think his powers were DOA for stopping rampant AP gain at launch, so I agree it would have been a great time to do something about that for him.
  • HoundofShadow
    HoundofShadow Posts: 8,004 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited December 2021
    Lockjaw was picked to be buffed out of a list that dev had chosen. Some were not happy with the choice of character being buffed, that is, Lockjaw. That's the distinction. Buff, in general, is good. Who should be buffed first is where the problem lies in. Should dev do a in-game poll or should they rely on their metrics collected over the years?

    Edit: I remember players were unhappy when Mr Fantastic received the buff, instead of the Thing.
  • Tiger_Wong
    Tiger_Wong Posts: 1,057 Chairperson of the Boards
    Mr Fantastic’s “buff” sucked. He was better before. His blue was amazing and at least his black could serve a specific purpose. 
  • ThaRoadWarrior
    ThaRoadWarrior Posts: 9,454 Chairperson of the Boards
    Mr F got a “rebalance,” which was decidedly a reduction in power because he was too strong with c4rnage/Medusa at the time we all suspected. Why rebalances like that can’t just be a number tweak I don’t really know.
  • Bad
    Bad Posts: 3,146 Chairperson of the Boards
    Well, they know it all and they have their character list on all tiers, only thing lacking are resources. 
    I think it's better to have the option than not having it. And I think the best help is AP reduction. 
    It's only natural that old characters need a bit of help and it's always positive. 
    However happens that a lot of players want that character changing to being unplayed to being meta, and that it's to have a too much high level of expectation, that event never happens in any game.
  • HoundofShadow
    HoundofShadow Posts: 8,004 Chairperson of the Boards
    I remember another theory why Mr Fantastic was "rebalanced" was due to his synergy with Bishop. I'm not sure if anyone remembers that.

    Now, I find Mr Fantastic's new abilities useful in the era of Polaris. When context changes, things change. I think what make abilities useful is the context and available synergies at that point in time. We have probably seen a few cases like this over the years: "useless" characters become useful characters when certaim abilities get into the game.

    Anyway, the most important message in this entire thread is this:

    We've got a list of characters we'd like to take a look at and there are characters of all rarities on that list. *When* we get to them is a bit of a tougher thing. It's usually done when we have "spare" design time outside of other things being worked on, so while I personally would love to hit a half dozen characters a month till you couldn't decide who kicked more butt, time and dev constraints unfortunately take a front seat here.

    With the above message, we're going to get some obligatory requests like "stop releasing new characters so that players can catch up" or "buff older 5* to make veterans happy".  So, rebalancing/buffing older character is likely to be as frequent as Peggy Carter appearing as essentials, and that is, approximately twice a year.
  • JHawkInc
    JHawkInc Posts: 2,605 Chairperson of the Boards
    entrailbucket said:
    I think people are glad to see any rebalance because they hope that rebalances will continue.
    I totally agree with this idea, in theory.

    But what does that mean? There's no sense in hoping that rebalances will continue if they're never going to amount to anything. There was a point in time when I was definitely in the "anything is better than nothing" camp, but long term that just doesn't feel true. There's a whole lot of "anything" that is essentially equivalent to nothing. And "equivalent to nothing" isn't better than nothing, it's just the same.

    I want them to happen, and be worthwhile. But if they aren't worthwhile, I run out of reason to hope they continue.
  • DAZ0273
    DAZ0273 Posts: 10,275 Chairperson of the Boards
    Not to moan but the timing could have been a bit better on this I think - with it being the Holiday Season we have no room for his PvP so not a huge range of options to try newly trained Lockjaw out. I mean he still kind'a slobbers but I would have liked to have thrown him a stick.
  • DyingLegend
    DyingLegend Posts: 1,208 Chairperson of the Boards
    I don't really see the benefit in buffing a under used 4 Star. Sure i get that people maybe building rosters and what not.

    I would have preferred a change to Shield Rank, Daily rewards, Classic 5 Star acquisition changes, more feeders, ETC.

    A Lockjaw buff was the least of my concerns.....
  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 5,828 Chairperson of the Boards
    JHawkInc said:
    entrailbucket said:
    I think people are glad to see any rebalance because they hope that rebalances will continue.
    I totally agree with this idea, in theory.

    But what does that mean? There's no sense in hoping that rebalances will continue if they're never going to amount to anything. There was a point in time when I was definitely in the "anything is better than nothing" camp, but long term that just doesn't feel true. There's a whole lot of "anything" that is essentially equivalent to nothing. And "equivalent to nothing" isn't better than nothing, it's just the same.

    I want them to happen, and be worthwhile. But if they aren't worthwhile, I run out of reason to hope they continue.
    Yeah I don't know that I *agree* with that reasoning, I was just speculating about why people seem to think that.

    Like I said, if they're going to do relatively small updates like this one, they should just do a whole bunch at once.  They track all the usage metrics for everyone.  Adjust *all* the underused characters by the same factor across the board and see what happens.  (Say, increase all numbers by 10% and drop all AP costs by 1)  If that doesn't result in more usage, do it again. 

    I think they're afraid that doing something like that would result in an X-Force-style overbuff but...they're in total control of it.  This stuff doesn't need to be one and done.  If they were open to making frequent, small tweaks (both up, and, gasp! down) then none of it is a problem. 

    If you buff Lockjaw by 25% and he somehow goes from ignored to the #1 most used character, then next month nerf him by 5% and continue to monitor him for future corrections.

    Would it be nice to redesign underpowered characters from scratch?  Sure, but that's a lot of effort and it's probably not worthwhile given the huge number of characters that need some help.
  • dianetics
    dianetics Posts: 1,641 Chairperson of the Boards
    Lockjaw will see minimal usage increases. Power boosts don't increase his synergies and they really haven't changed his value in usage.
    I doubt we will see him jump into 5* tier, but he may have higher value in the 4* tier.
  • ThaRoadWarrior
    ThaRoadWarrior Posts: 9,454 Chairperson of the Boards
    What happens if this buff doesn’t affect his usage in a material way I wonder? Is the goal to get characters more play across the board?

    I will say that Shang-Chi has trivialized a lot of nodes, I’ll be real curious if we see Royal Family again shortly after this goes live.
  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 5,828 Chairperson of the Boards
    ThaRoadWarrior said:
    What happens if this buff doesn’t affect his usage in a material way I wonder? Is the goal to get characters more play across the board?

    I will say that Shang-Chi has trivialized a lot of nodes, I’ll be real curious if we see Royal Family again shortly after this goes live.
    I wish they would just come out and say that, because it'd settle a bunch of forum debates about their intentions, and there's absolutely no reason they can't just tell us.  But the post announcing this sure seems to indicate that this buff is happening because 1) Lockjaw has a very low usage rate, and 2) they consider that to be a problem.
  • HoundofShadow
    HoundofShadow Posts: 8,004 Chairperson of the Boards
    It's more likely that players have been feedbacking about buffing 4* or 5* characters who are the least used for years. So, here you go: Lockjaw, one of the least used on the list. Anyway, this will be a rare event, so there's not much to worry about. They have a certain usage % that they have in mind. So, the goal is  not to make them overpowered, but to boost the usage metric slightly. It'll only complicate matter if they tell us what the % for usage is because players are going to apply it to what they can see, and not what they can't see. For example, if they said the buff is to increase the overall usage from 2% to 3% , all 5* players' experiences will contradict that %. It's likely to be 0% to 0.0000000001% usage for them.

    So far, all the buffs, tweaks or rebalances (not including nerfs) since Dr Ock have been pretty much insignificant. The most useful ones are probably the tweak to Valkyrie's and TA Hulk's cds. So, if players still think that doing rebalances or reworks are going to freshen things up significantly, then there's probably going to be disappointment after disappoinment. Just be happy with the weekly 5* boost. 
  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 5,828 Chairperson of the Boards
    I couldn't care less about the specific numbers -- they'd be meaningless to me anyway.  I'm curious about whether they consider a low usage rate for a character to be a problem. 

    It sure sounds like it, based on the first post in this thread!
  • HoundofShadow
    HoundofShadow Posts: 8,004 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited December 2021
    That depends on how you define "problem". As far as urgency and priority is concerned, rebalancing/buffing characters is way down their to-do list because it's something they do if they've spare time. Here are the number of buffs/rebalances that they have done since 2018, not including nerfs:

    2018: 1 (Dr Ock)
    2019: 1 (Mr Fantastic)
    2020: 4 (Archangel, The Thing, Jubilee, The Hulk (Totally Awesome))
    2021: 2(5* Ghost Rider, Lockjaw)

    Hopefully, I didn't miss out anyone else.

    2020 seems like the year with the most number of buffs, but they happened along with the nerfs of WorthyCap and Bishop.

    So, that's an average of 2 buffs/rebalances a year. If they start doing a lot of rebalances/buffs more frequently, I think it's a claw for concern because it simply means they have a lot of spare time.
  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 5,828 Chairperson of the Boards
    You're still misunderstanding.  I would like to know the very basic answer to the very basic question, "Is it a problem that some characters have very low usage rates while others are very high?"  It's a yes or no question. 

    That's it.  Yes or no. 

    Not "what do you plan to do about it?" Not "when will you address it?"

    Do they consider it to be a problem, or is it intentional that some characters are unused?

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