Nerf.... some people (split from Cover Swap thread)

System

This discussion was created from comments split from: Introducing the All-New Cover Exchange System!.

BriMan2222

Well, it looks like some nerfs may be coming

entrailbucket

This week keeps getting better!

bluewolf

@BriMan2222 said:
Well, it looks like some nerfs may be coming

That was imo an ill advised response to my question about how a player would want to deal May and being “unable to be competitive” with now being unable to use free swaps to 550 her during a hoard break.

Nerf her? Somehow make a faster/anohet turn 0 character?

Nerfs would rug pull a bunch of new players and are a terrible idea. But the game meta is locked in for the most part. Boring/locks out new competitors who can’t catch up easily.

They’re between a rock and a hard place.

entrailbucket

They also revealed they were working on nerfs for m'Thor, May, and Polaris. Hopefully they can get those in before Christmas too!

WilliamK1983

Polaris I can get behind. Let the rest be.

Jonny1Punch

M'Thor, May & Chang are fine. Great on Offense, very mid (at best) on defense.

Polaris I can agree with.

DAZ0273

More than happy for them to nerf Polaris. If they made it so she doesn't create SAP tiles when enemy ones are matched that would be enough to slow her down I think.

Jane I am on the fence about. I don't see how you alter her without destroying the pure chaos of the character but we'll see,

I think after all this time Shang might as well stay as he is despite being OP on offence, he offers little on defence unless the AI gets lucky (normally from a Jane triggered cascade to deadly hands to the face).

I think May is a PVE issue? If anything the problem there is more to do with AP giving Supports?

How long before Agatha/Namor is in their sights? I am also seeing far too many ascended but not ascended fully Iron May's which is a sure sign she is badly broken too.

Lots of work to do but will they actually do it?

DAZ0273

@bluewolf said:

@BriMan2222 said:
Well, it looks like some nerfs may be coming

That was imo an ill advised response to my question about how a player would want to deal May and being “unable to be competitive” with now being unable to use free swaps to 550 her during a hoard break.

Nerf her? Somehow make a faster/anohet turn 0 character?

Nerfs would rug pull a bunch of new players and are a terrible idea. But the game meta is locked in for the most part. Boring/locks out new competitors who can’t catch up easily.

They’re between a rock and a hard place.

BCS seem to be very data/stats driven and those stats must have been telling them things they do not like. The fact they have been looking at this for months seems to suggest those stats are not turning into something that is pleasing them. Now this is out there probably best to get it over and done with rather than let speculation run riot in the playerbase. Like many other players Jane & Shang are my highest level characters but I haven't been actively chasing levels on them, they just got there organically. Now though I would definitely hit the pause button on those two. Likewise Polaris was my no.1 target to ascend but that now is up in the air.

So if we are gonna get nerfs then hit us with them ASAP so we can move on to concentrate on something else.

Nurielkun

@entrailbucket said:
They also revealed they were working on nerfs for m'Thor, May, and Polaris. Hopefully they can get those in before Christmas too!

For real? Where?

The only thing I have found on Discord is this text:

"MayBe? We've been poking at changes for May, Polaris, SC, MThor and a couple others for months now, but haven't pulled any triggers. It's been fun seeing data miners freak out a couple times though."

DAZ0273

@Nurielkun said:

@entrailbucket said:
They also revealed they were working on nerfs for m'Thor, May, and Polaris. Hopefully they can get those in before Christmas too!

For real? Where?

The only thing I have found on Discord is this text:

"MayBe? We've been poking at changes for May, Polaris, SC, MThor and a couple others for months now, but haven't pulled any triggers. It's been fun seeing data miners freak out a couple times though."

You don't spend time and resources on working on something for the sake of it. Their data clearly tells them these characters are outliers and as every MPQ Devs dream is "balance" in their game play they were obviously looking at this lot to help achieve that. Otherwise they have even less excuse as to why other things haven't been fixed or implented if they have time to bugger about with changes to existing characters that are never going in game.

Daredevil217

We will see if they actually nerf all of the top characters in the game that they oversold, people explicitly chased, that improved players’ clear times and quality of life. If so, I’m sure that will go over really well.

Also, I appreciate posting the actual quote but I think it’s important to add the very next two Ice posted for context:

"The sky is falling!" "Oh, it was just a test. Never mind."

“Never ever ever take data mined content as real”.

(Those feel kind of important lol).

Anyway, @Scofie would it be possible to take this discussion to any of the other nerf-X threads or start a new one? As per usual a troll post that has nothing to do with the topic derails the thread. I’m hoping devs are wanting to collect actual feedback on the new cover exchange system and splitting this topic could be helpful for them.

DAZ0273

@turbomoose said:
Is this going live today ?? I have a 4* I need to exchange, probably the only time I’ll use it but RNG isn’t giving me the one cover I need for this character so that I can ascend him

These sort of data pushes for the new R version are normally on a Tuesday I think?

Bzhai

The problem with MThor is when you pair her with Fantasticar. I have had to sit through almost 2 minutes of the enemy team passively matching tiles like a pinball machine without being able to do anything.

And this is on the second turn when her passive went off, after the dust settles they already have enough ap to fire all 3 of her powers, causing more cascades AND make a match. When Polaris or Shang Chi is their partner you might as well just shut off the game and go for a walk.

Rejoinder

@bluewolf said:
Nerfs would rug pull a bunch of new players and are a terrible idea.

New players will be fine, in the same way that they always were before May released. The community advice will be to favourite whatever is the next best team - and if that team is substantially worse than May or MThor&Polaris, then you couldn't ask for a better sign that they should be nerfed.

BriMan2222

With nerfs, the old dev team used to beat characters with the nerf bat like the guys in office space beat that copy machine. Unless I'm forgetting someone, the only nerf by the new devs has been chasm and it was a really good job imo.

They toned him down so he wasn't THE dominant character in the game, but is still very good. I still see him frequently in lightning round, sim, and sometimes in regular pvp. I would hope they would take the same approach to other characters and just tone them down a bit and see how that changes things rather than bury them.

Mthor, I think you could just change it so that her board shake only happens when she fires a power and not every turn for free and she would be successfully brought down a peg without killing her.

bluewolf

I remember a year ago when ice told us that new chase items were coming for PVP (not just the stones) so who knows about nerfs.

Time spent on nerfs offers little in the way of revenue except if some obvious old character becomes the chase and they offer a way to get them, or they push in a new meta character.

Chasm was nerfed because he was basically both required to not take hits in PVP and also people hated PVP so much when he was ubiquitous that they just stopped playing it.

All the metas are basically defeat-able although the stupid OR/Chasm/3-4 May team isn't worth it to me. If they want to make PVP more fun I'd rather see OR nerfed but then a whole lot of people will be mad about losing a PVE tool.

If it were easy to nerf without the risk of annoying a bunch of new and old players, they would have done it already to shake up the meta.

The only way to build anyone effectively once they aren't in Latests is shards plus spending or investing time and money; nerfing now means you are implicitly told both are possibly wasted.

DAZ0273

@bluewolf said:
I remember a year ago when ice told us that new chase items were coming for PVP (not just the stones) so who knows about nerfs.

Time spent on nerfs offers little in the way of revenue except if some obvious old character becomes the chase and they offer a way to get them, or they push in a new meta character.

Chasm was nerfed because he was basically both required to not take hits in PVP and also people hated PVP so much when he was ubiquitous that they just stopped playing it.

All the metas are basically defeat-able although the stupid OR/Chasm/3-4 May team isn't worth it to me. If they want to make PVP more fun I'd rather see OR nerfed but then a whole lot of people will be mad about losing a PVE tool.

If it were easy to nerf without the risk of annoying a bunch of new and old players, they would have done it already to shake up the meta.

The only way to build anyone effectively once they aren't in Latests is shards plus spending or investing time and money; nerfing now means you are implicitly told both are possibly wasted.

The Devs knew Chasm was a special case the minute they created him, they said so in a Q&A that he was designed that way. The reason they took so long to do anything about it can only be known to them.

They know that the metrics of the characters in questions position them as outliers but as you say, they have a playerbase heavilly invested in those characters. They probably should have acted ages ago coz now the band aid will hurt when ripped off. What they absolutely must NOT do is just ignore this. If the comment was throwaway then clarify that because otherwise players are going to be left in a situation where chasing these characters could end up being a complete dead end and that will result in many many more angry people.

SuperCarrot

What if they just had some characters restricted to just PVE or PVP?

entrailbucket

@DAZ0273 said:

@bluewolf said:
I remember a year ago when ice told us that new chase items were coming for PVP (not just the stones) so who knows about nerfs.

Time spent on nerfs offers little in the way of revenue except if some obvious old character becomes the chase and they offer a way to get them, or they push in a new meta character.

Chasm was nerfed because he was basically both required to not take hits in PVP and also people hated PVP so much when he was ubiquitous that they just stopped playing it.

All the metas are basically defeat-able although the stupid OR/Chasm/3-4 May team isn't worth it to me. If they want to make PVP more fun I'd rather see OR nerfed but then a whole lot of people will be mad about losing a PVE tool.

If it were easy to nerf without the risk of annoying a bunch of new and old players, they would have done it already to shake up the meta.

The only way to build anyone effectively once they aren't in Latests is shards plus spending or investing time and money; nerfing now means you are implicitly told both are possibly wasted.

The Devs knew Chasm was a special case the minute they created him, they said so in a Q&A that he was designed that way. The reason they took so long to do anything about it can only be known to them.

They know that the metrics of the characters in questions position them as outliers but as you say, they have a playerbase heavilly invested in those characters. They probably should have acted ages ago coz now the band aid will hurt when ripped off. What they absolutely must NOT do is just ignore this. If the comment was throwaway then clarify that because otherwise players are going to be left in a situation where chasing these characters could end up being a complete dead end and that will result in many many more angry people.

Leaving aside the question of whether they should or need to do anything, I think everyone can agree with the bit about acting faster, when they have to (or just choose to) act.

The cycle is always the same with these -- new character drops, character is very strong, high level players go all in, others are forced to catch up. The nerf only comes once the character has become completely ubiquitous, once most of the game has invested a bunch of resources.

I understand that it's really hard for them to act before that point, because they only look at things like usage and winrate. But if they could find SOME way to act faster, they'll spare a lot of players a lot of pain.

entrailbucket

To expand even further -- the problem is that they wait so long to act that the high level players have often moved on to whatever the NEXT thing is. So they really only end up hurting the much bigger group who's been forced to play catch up for however long.

The community's response to this is often "ok cool, just don't nerf anybody ever." This creates other problems though. You eventually end up in one of two situations:

In the first, the designers have to be so cautious about power level that they can't take any chances, because they absolutely cannot make a mistake. We saw this with Demiurge after the Gambit nerf -- all the new 5* were terrible for a really long time.

In the second, you have to keep power-creeping to get people to chase the new thing. That works for awhile, but as someone pointed out in another thread, how do you power-creep a guaranteed turn 0 win? Once that exists, how do you ever get anybody to spend money on anything new?