I mentioned only the "inequality" part of your argument. When the poverty problem is solve, everyone is on equal status.
So, hey, just out of curiosity, can you address the other poster's argument? Do you think Jessica Jones and Chasm are equally good characters?
I know you think Apocalypse and Wasp are equivalent in power level, they just have different synergies, and are made for different kinds of players. Do you feel the same about Chasm and JJ?
I've just received warning for provoking other players. Lol. I'll stop.
@HoundofShadow said: I've just received warning for provoking other players. Lol. I'll stop.
It wasn't me! I enjoy being provoked! Provocation is how we learn things...
I'm getting banned soon if more players complain about me. At least there's still reddit.
@HoundofShadow said: I'm getting banned soon if more players complain about me. At least there's still reddit.
This conversation will all get deleted probably, but FYI we've fought a million times and I've never once complained about you. I've always found you to argue in good faith, even though you're 100% wrong about absolutely everything.
Haha u 2 make my day 😁
And apoc is far better than wasp in every way and his yellow makes whoever u team him with better aswel... the only way you would beat him with wasp is because the AI dosent use him properly.. I enjoy playing the game and enjoy trying different teams this is why I don't play for placement..playing for placement does limit u to a handful of characters andit takes the fun out of the game and turns it into a chore.. but that's just my opinion and everyone is different
Its not either or. Jessica Jones can be a good character and also not be equivalent to shang chi or chasm.
Probably that's because you are surpassing yourself each day. To compare world's wealth with MPQ and then to say what EB would opine about that topic, and finally claim that it's just a problem of happiness... Well, I'm spechless.
Thus the resulting tier'd listing we've gotten and experienced, but that doesn't really address the issue at hand, which is overall gameplay balance vs character strength in metric damage vs character synergy to create opportunity for wins. The more there's weight on one zone, there's a disparity with the others.
What I want the most is to get some sight lines from the dev's on their solutions to this. We can argue til we're blue in the face, but the result will only be the carpal tunnel we all get typing out our rants.
Where are the solutions to bring balance to the game again? We had a great balance before Chasm, and Magik and Jeff didn't bring enough to outweigh him, even together.
Balance is hard, and in a game like this it's really hard. It's not a super complicated game (although the mechanics of the PvE and PvP metagames are deceptively deep). MPQ has pretty much always been dominated by "one best team," because resources are scarce.
The best periods of balance we've had, in the nearly 10 years I've been playing competitively, have been with weekly boosts, where the "one best" team didn't completely outshine the boosted characters. There was generally not much variety within the week, but there was a new "best team" every week. This held true with boosted 5* pre-Chasm, and also with boosted 4* pre-Surfer.
Alternatives to weekly boosts get really difficult. Players are rational actors -- they're going to search out small edges and copy what others do. You see this in events like Balance of Power, where theoretically every character is equal. When you climb high enough you'll start to see the same teams over and over, as players learn what small advantages they can find and copy others.
So, the "just make everybody equally good" argument, while ideal, may not ever work, even assuming that it's actually possible (and I don't think it is possible -- there are simply too many variables to consider). I think weekly boosts may be the best we'll ever get.
I didn't advocate for making everyone equally good. And you're right, the weekly power ups and introduction of wins/points for progression was a huge relief to the balance of the game. But, now, we're seeing that balance lean away from the center again by the lack of proper evaluations, or response to playtested evaluations given by players.
@Alex502 said: I didn't advocate for making everyone equally good. And you're right, the weekly power ups and introduction of wins/points for progression was a huge relief to the balance of the game. But, now, we're seeing that balance lean away from the center again by the lack of proper evaluations, or response to playtested evaluations given by players.
Oh, no, "make everybody equally good" used to be MY argument, many years ago. I've seen it show up a few times since, and I'd love it, I just don't think it's possible anymore.
I realized I wrote like 10,000 words and managed to say nothing. In short: fix Chasm, continue weekly boosts, continue fixing the old terrible characters (this is going well), don't release any new terrible characters (honestly they've been pretty good here), and then monitor the metagame for outliers. I suspect Thor is going to become an issue if Chasm changes, and I'd keep a very close eye on Kang if I was them, too.
Balance isn't a thing you just do once. We've had it before and lost it quickly. It requires vigilance -- you have to fix power level mistakes (critically, both too good AND too weak) quickly, before rational advantage-seeking players optimize for them.
@HoundofShadow said: entrailbucket like to put argument on either extreme to prove his points. In his world, only two tiers exist: meta and trash/unusable when not boosted. Another way to look at his view is the "inequality" problem he wants to see solved in MPQ is like solving poverty issue around the world. There are only two classes of people: rich and poor. His solution to solving this is to take away all the rich people money and destroy it or give all the poor people around the world enough money to put them on equal status with the rich. He forgets that there is many paths to happiness. The poor and rich can both be happy and sad. When you say that human X who came from poor group can be happy in their lives, his counter would be are you saying that X has as much wealth as the rich? He's totally ignoring the journey. Maybe he's not interested in the journey, that's why his matches usually end in 30-45 seconds.
@HoundofShadow said: entrailbucket like to put argument on either extreme to prove his points. In his world, only two tiers exist: meta and trash/unusable when not boosted.
Another way to look at his view is the "inequality" problem he wants to see solved in MPQ is like solving poverty issue around the world. There are only two classes of people: rich and poor. His solution to solving this is to take away all the rich people money and destroy it or give all the poor people around the world enough money to put them on equal status with the rich.
He forgets that there is many paths to happiness. The poor and rich can both be happy and sad. When you say that human X who came from poor group can be happy in their lives, his counter would be are you saying that X has as much wealth as the rich? He's totally ignoring the journey. Maybe he's not interested in the journey, that's why his matches usually end in 30-45 seconds.
Other than speaking for EB and putting words in his mouth (which I hate and you’ve been asked by mods not to do), I really like this post/analogy (gave it a like). Mr. F loves him some Wasp. Based on his values, she may very well be the best character in the game. The fact that she can’t beat chasm, wins matches slowly, lacks synergy with other 5*s, etc. is inconsequential if you derive joy from “calling the swarm”.
Another analogy would be we go to the gym to play basketball and you go to win and I go to get exercise. Different goals. If you come away with a win and didn’t break a sweat, then the game has value, if I come away exhausted and have a hard-fought loss then I feel like the game was good.
The developers are also aware that there are different camps of players who have different values and so they don’t make every character for the meta chasers. I believe this is Hound’s assertion and he can correct me if I’m wrong.
I believe I’ve heard EB assert that this is a competitive game by nature (this is why we have leaderboards) and so if you have to use some metric to evaluate a character, winning quickly would be the best one. Evaluating the best character by a metric like “calls the most swarms” would be dumb as an objective measure. Though I’ve also heard him say “this is a dumb match 3 game that most players play on the toilet. 95% of players don’t care about the meta and will never champ a five star character” (not a direct quote, but something to this effect).
But if we have to use a metric to rank characters, and there is a class of characters that are clearly a cut above the rest within the same tier, then they make other characters in that tier obsolete. Why use someone who does 10,000 damage for 6 AP when you can use someone who does 20,000 damage for the same cost?
I like Hound’s analogy because he is saying that there are many ways to derive “happiness” but if the goal of the game is to “be the richest/fastest”, then by using that metric to evaluate, EB is right in that there are clear bests/worsts. It all depends on how you are evaluating the characters in what you’re looking for in your gaming experience.
The funny thing is, EB and hound are way more alike than they are different. Despite being on opposite sides of most issues, their posting styles and ways in which they formulate, their arguments, are almost identical. For both of you, you often write the same sound bites over and over again ad nauseam. Like you have 5 templates that you cut and paste in many threads. It’s the case of people who are so similar in that they cannot get along because they trigger each other.
Great take @Daredevil217
Polaris is a good example on the opposite side of your Wasp example. She’s objectively one of the best 4 stars. Still there are many examples on Reddit of people posting they don’t use Polaris because they hate here play style. For them, she’s clearly not ‘the best’
@Daredevil217 guilty as charged, on almost every point.
It's a symptom of being on Line forever, and having the same, repetitive arguments about this game with people I'm super friendly with and generally have known forever. That style may not translate too well to the forum. I'm aware of it, and hopefully you can agree that it's gotten a little bit better in the past few years.
I actually agree with Hound that players should set their own goals, and their happiness playing the game should have nothing to do with how good a character is. The problem is that I can't ever objectively rate how fun a character is for you, and "fun-ness" is a subjective quality. If Mr. F thinks Wasp is the most fun, good for him! I'm not going to engage in a prolonged debate with him about how fun she is, because I cannot possibly know what's fun for him, or change his mind about it.
I happen to think Big Wheel is super fun. I wouldn't try to construct an argument that he's the best character in the game, because he's not. In his case, I'm evaluating him on a subjective axis. When I evaluate characters here, I'm trying to rate characters in as objective a way as I can.
Of course there are inherent biases there, but I've been around the top of the competitive metagame for 10 years...I have a pretty good idea of what people are going to use. That analysis tends to be quite reductionist ("meta" or "trash") because, unfortunately, that's how the MPQ metagame operates. I really do wish it wasn't that way -- I'd love to see more Big Wheel, for example, but that's just not how any of this works in practice.
Plenty of Big Wheel Jane this week, rejoice!
Big Wheel is super fun. He works well as a third for many different pairs, but as a first or second he is terrible. Which is a shame since what he does is so cool and so different.
I agree. He is fun. He is a bit stressing because kind of shares same mechanism as SC. Now, his toolkit is a lot more complex than it seems. It can be fired when having a lot of speed points in order to deal damage, or in order to create cascades in a well thought move. Many times I've created a match 5 with his red, still it's pretty hard to figure out a 90 degrees clockwise move in the board. Still it's pretty satisfactory to do it well. But guess what? Playing in that puzzley way is not optimal and loses speed. So usually I leave him in the bench until next time I remember him.