Lockjaw Character Update (Live 12/16/21)

HoundofShadow

I don't think the world is purely a yes/no or black/white. It is a problem, but it's not big enough to set aside time for it. It is intentional that not all characters are meta and they are comfortable with that. They answered questions about speed and meta 5-6 years back. You might say that 5-6 years old answers are outdated, but their actions of releasing non-meta characters ~80% of the time for the past many years confirmed that they are still comfortable with that.

https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/20612/mpq-community-q-a-3-december-answer-time

Q: At the top of the leaderboards, Versus is geared towards playing fast (to avoid being hit while unshielded) rather than playing creatively with diverse rosters. The 'fastest' teams dominate. Are you comfortable with this element of the game?

A: Yes and no: In any multiplayer game, high-end competition is going to be a somewhat different game than what most people are playing. There are fewer viable strategies and they’re typically a little less expressive and creative. We’re comfortable with the fact that some of the characters we release won’t find a role in that environment and are just there to be fun and interesting for folks that are less focused on being at the top. We do want the top of the leaderboards to be an interesting place to be, and intend to continue shaking things up with new characters and balance changes when we see a single team composition dominating. But speed will probably always be more important at the top than it is for most players.

ThaRoadWarrior

With an eye towards getting some of the lower used characters in the game up to par, we've turned our eye to the big puppy, Lockjaw. While this doggo doesn't need a big rework or large changes to his powers like Robbie Reyes recently did, he could still use some power ups. So here we go!

It’s so hard not to pick this apart lol. DID Robbie *need* a rework, or just a number pump? From my perspective he needed that a lot less than a mostly passive character like Lockjaw, but I would really be interested in how that was decided. I’m not pitchforks and torches curious, just regular curious.

but also I would like to say thank you for this unequivocal improvement to Lockjaw, whatever the motivation. I always wanted to find a use for him, never really could as a 4* player, probably still won’t now that I’m in 5* mmr in PVP, but I like it happening.

Kolence

HoundofShadow said:

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.

Did you not yet play in 2017, Hound? I'm pretty sure that was the year with the most buffs, but certainly with the most buffs that were a real improvement. For a time, we had latest 12 or 8 (or however many it was) 4-stars that were available to pull in the latest store, and Wasp, Riri and Mordo all got much much better, relatively quickly after their release, probably because of such restriction.

And Mr. Fantastic was very much a nerf. He only got (arguably) somewhat better on a very specific team (on which he was already a great 3rd wheel) and lost 2 or 3 moves/mechanics that are useful on more kinds of teams and with many more teammates.

HoundofShadow

I played in late 2017 where MEH still had the "New" tag. I read that they planned to do more buff regularly before that and they stopped doing it suddenly until Dr Ock's rework.

As for Mr Fantastic, I'm not going to debate whether it's a nerf or not because it depends on your playstyles. It's a rework because he's not overpowered like Gambit or Bishop in the first place.

ThaRoadWarrior

Mr F might have gotten a very early buff well in advance of BRB/Polaris entering the game, but he was pretty definitely less good after the rebalance at the time. That seemed pretty targeted at breaking the 4* invinci-team of r-f + Cardusa, which is for the best really. It was hard to beat at the tier, probably not for 5* players.

entrailbucket

HoundofShadow said:

I don't think the world is purely a yes/no or black/white. It is a problem, but it's not big enough to set aside time for it. It is intentional that not all characters are meta and they are comfortable with that. They answered questions about speed and meta 5-6 years back. You might say that 5-6 years old answers are outdated, but their actions of releasing non-meta characters ~80% of the time for the past many years confirmed that they are still comfortable with that.

https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/20612/mpq-community-q-a-3-december-answer-time

Q: At the top of the leaderboards, Versus is geared towards playing fast (to avoid being hit while unshielded) rather than playing creatively with diverse rosters. The 'fastest' teams dominate. Are you comfortable with this element of the game?

A: Yes and no: In any multiplayer game, high-end competition is going to be a somewhat different game than what most people are playing. There are fewer viable strategies and they’re typically a little less expressive and creative. We’re comfortable with the fact that some of the characters we release won’t find a role in that environment and are just there to be fun and interesting for folks that are less focused on being at the top. We do want the top of the leaderboards to be an interesting place to be, and intend to continue shaking things up with new characters and balance changes when we see a single team composition dominating. But speed will probably always be more important at the top than it is for most players.

That answer from 5 years ago doesn't really answer the yes or no question though.  Do they consider it a problem that Talos has a 0% usage rate, or is that ok?

Listen, I'm not going to quit or review bomb them or something over it, and if they don't want to tell us for whatever reason, that's fine.  The answer to this, and to many other questions like this, will have zero impact on how I play the game or how I strategize. 

I'd like to know because I find it interesting, because having the official answer would resolve about a thousand repetitive forum debates, and because there doesn't seem to be a good reason for stuff like this to be a secret.

Bad

Is it a problem that some characters have very low usage rates while others are very high?
Yes. It's a problem for us players. Because if there are too many characters not effective on game then we feel like rostering for nothing, characters on the bench, stop releases, etc...
This buff will mean absolutely nothing to a good group of players and it will mean a significant help to others. The last ones will increase his usage rate.
I hope they keep fixing characters with crazy expensive powers. If strange 5* changed his 14 AP faltine for 9 AP, how many thousands of players would be grateful?
Although basically no buff will change my playstyle I would be happy with things like these.

HoundofShadow

I remember that Cardusa + Fantastic or any variation of Mr Fantastic wasn't difficult to take down. Medusa + R4G or GotG or Carnage was a bigger headache. My memory remembers the link to Bishop and Fantastic more vividly, so I think what we have is different experiences due to our different in-game play day.

I'm not sure about the priority with wanting all characters to have equal or similar usages. What the dev is presenting to the players are choices. You aren't obligated to use all non-meta equally. As a matter of fact, their pitch is for the players to play with their favourite teams. Simply pick your favourite characters or playstyles out of the 200++ characters, use them and treat the rest as rewards. If playing all non-meta characters equally is important to the dev, everyone would have visual counters that tracks usage for each character, and players will be "punished" if they didn't hit a certain usage within a certain period of time, but that's not the case. Can you imagine they force every players to use each character 4 or 8 times a month just to satisfy their metrics? Who has the time to do that?

In the real world, you are presented with choices in the supermarket or clothing store or whereever. You are not obligated to eat, try or own everything available at least once there, and whether an item is a poor seller or not is not the customer's problem. Why spend your time thinking about ensuring equal usage of all characters when they don't interest you in the first place? I would rather they spend time standardising how powers work in the game than do buff or rebalances.

The dev has complete data of the usages of all characters and what we can see is merely a small subset of what's happening due to our mmr. Even if we combine what characters all players in Line groups and in the forums can see in pvps and pves, it still represents a small subset. 1000/100,000  is still only 1% of the data that they have. In-game players who don't participate in forums or other social media have proven that they can skew the results if they want to. For example, having OML or Dr Strange in Fan Favourite store where it "should be" <insert meta characters>.

entrailbucket

Who said anything about making the usage rates of every character equal, or forcing anyone to do anything at all?

ThaRoadWarrior

the original post on this thread said they have an eye on helping out the lesser used characters, so here is a buff to one of them and it’s different than the rework they gave another one. This isn’t players calling for anything, this is just some curiosity about how much usage rates matter to the dev team since it was just given as a reason for doing this is all.

DAZ0273

ThaRoadWarrior said:

the original post on this thread said they have an eye on helping out the lesser used characters, so here is a buff to one of them and it’s different than the rework they gave another one. This isn’t players calling for anything, this is just some curiosity about how much usage rates matter to the dev team since it was just given as a reason for doing this is all.

In order to help with that, it would be good to spotlight the character in game in tandem with this boost. They used to run the System Reboot thing where you could win a cover. I wouldn't even care about getting that myself but the event itself would give players an incentive to try Lockjaw out. Maybe they might like him more if they hardly noticed him before. 

HoundofShadow

What's the issue with characters not being played as much as you want?  Not every characters have to be played and be used.

I think this is just an opportunity for them to prepare players that rebalancing/reworking characters isn't a priority in the meantime and it is something that they do if they have spare time. Given the pretty packed movie and tv series next year, I doubt they have time for this unless they can sneak in some rebalances as part of the tie-in. But new character releases are still priority.

DAZ0273

HoundofShadow said:

What's the issue with characters not being played as much as you want?  Not every characters have to be played and be used.

I think this is just an opportunity for them to prepare players that rebalancing/reworking characters isn't a priority in the meantime and it is something that they do if they have spare time. Given the pretty packed movie and tv series next year, I doubt they have time for this unless they can sneak in some rebalances as part of the tie-in. But new character releases are still priority.

Who is this comment in response to?

I guess maybe you weren't around for System Reboot? They used to run that as a little limited side event when they rebalanced 4* characters to encourage people to try out the new version of the character. If I was the Devs I would want my hard work to at least be rewarded with people trying the characters new version. Nothing to do with "characters not being played as much as you want" - just common sense!

ThaRoadWarrior

HoundofShadow said:

What's the issue with characters not being played as much as you want?  

Re-Read the dev post that lead this article off that cites low usage as the reason this was done, and direct your question, which is our exact question, to the people who can answer it. 

HoundofShadow

I saw that reason but who knows, they might be testing our reactions to buffs. If this is something of big concern to them, they will definitely make it a regular event, rather than make it something that happens bi-annually.  

I don't mind they do System Reboot since I have never played that before, but we probably get 100 or 200 Lockjaw shards.

DAZ0273

HoundofShadow said:

I saw that reason but who knows, they might be testing our reactions to buffs. If this is something of big concern to them, they will definitely make it a regular event, rather than make it something that happens bi-annually.  

I don't mind they do System Reboot since I have never played that before, but we probably get 100 or 200 Lockjaw shards.

The reward wouldn't be the point to me, it just seems nonsense not to showcase your works. We haven't got room for a Lockjaw PvP to coincide with this rebalance. It just feels like a lost opportunity.

Forever and a day I could never understand why we never got new release 5* PvP so that players could try out the characters as loaners. They at least saw sense on that.

ThaRoadWarrior

System reboot used to have a pair of tracks like Gwen Prix, but you got to do both because rebalances came in simultaneous pairs in those days, and you got a cover for both at the end.

I do think it’s interesting that this time you are advocating not taking the devs at their word for why this character was adjusted, when historically in these conversations it was always “hey, they told you why OML got nerfed and people want to create their own theories.”

*edit- just went back to some old system reboot threads, and it doesn’t seem to have had two tracks, just two final nodes that required the rebalance character and gave a cover to them.

HoundofShadow

Because it was revealed that it's something they managed to find spare time for. It's as good as throwing us a bone to wrap up December plus all the movie and holiday tie-in. In this case, it could also be a way of letting players know that "we are aware of your feedbacks about rebalancing/buffing least used characters but due to time restraint, we can only do this much."

ThaRoadWarrior

That is the answer to “why do it now” as opposed to the question on the table we are actually asking: “does it matter if characters aren’t used often or ever?”

the fact there are limited characters in the game that exist to be trophies would have implied to me it does not, but this post says explicitly it matters at least a bit.

HoundofShadow

It matters to them and it's a problem that almost every games face this. 

I think it's similar to answering the question "Does saving the earth matter to you?" Your answer would likely to be yes, but chances are you are not going to set time aside specifically for it because you have other more urgent and important things to do in your life. If someone invite you to volunteer for such activities, you will probably answer, "Let me check if I've the time for it."

I think that's the same situation with rebalancing characters.