Do the devs know what they're doing?

Bustapup

I've been playing this game since day one and over the years I've seen it become the most wildly unbalanced game I've ever played.

My question is, are the devs doing this on purpose or do they have no bloody idea how a new character is going to fit into game and what impact it will have?

Medusa was broken at the time, she became more broken with Polaris and then Jane came along and complete f***** up the whole thing.

We're in a position now where we have so many characters that are completely broken and OP in the right comps that can literally win on turn one, with the latest being Sidewinder.

Is this intentional or what?

concillado

Both yes and no, I believe. The reason for some "meta" characters are to disrupt the gameplay for all players. And yes us vets will always have the upper hand because of us having played so many years now and invested time and money into the game, thus giving us the upper hand in a well diversed roster + supports enabling us to make many different team and support constellations. Sry in advance for my long (ranting) answer.

concillado

On a side note the devs also occasionally rebalance some of the characters. Try and come up with suggestions on how they could balance some of the characters instead!

dianetics

Yes they know what they are doing.

The problem is there are like 400 characters in the game. It’s pretty difficult to balance and test every release.
I also guess the player base has a far better handle on all of the characters in the game.

I think they are probably more focused on releasing the new engine than anything else right now.

BCS has had a lot of well designed characters but they clearly have gone overboard on a few of them.

So we will see what they do for balance after the new engine.

entrailbucket

It's complicated.

If we want them to make strong characters, and we do, then they're going to make mistakes where they push someone too far. That's just the nature of the beast, and it's unavoidable.

The issue is that they never fix their mistakes, or if they do it's a year or two after the fact.

DAZ0273

This might be the first time I can remember anybody saying Medusa was broken. Her and Carnage had a bit of a thing for a bit (was Mr. F part of that too?) on SHIELD Sim.

Jane and Polaris are obviously broken but they are both apparently on the Devs radar for "rebalancing".

One of the problems seems to be that the Devs simply don't use the same metrics as us players do when looking at this stuff. Take Chasm - the Devs knew he was broken and so did we but what they didn't seem to grasp was how little fun Chasm was to play against OR with which matters nearly a much as how OP he was. They look through the metrics of is x character winning too many matches/being used by majority of players and then go from there. Both Jane and Polaris can still be pretty fun to use even if they are frustrating as enemies.

Sidewinder seems to be straight up a numbers mess up, if he doesn't get fixed I will be amazed.

The Devs biggest problem is that they react to this stuff far too slowly.

Codex

They need to create broken characters so they can sell the solutions.

Hence why ppl hoard knowing atleast 1-2 character per year will be broken/op.

entrailbucket

@Codex said:
They need to create broken characters so they can sell the solutions.

Hence why ppl hoard knowing atleast 1-2 character per year will be broken/op.

I can think of exactly one time they've ever given us a "solution" to a broken character (Scarlet Witch vs Hulk -- and that was the old devs).

I don't even think this would be a terrible plan for a mobile game, if they were doing it, but there's just no evidence that they're doing it.

DAZ0273

I dunno - more often than not the "solutions" never really worked. Archangel, Captain Jesus never slowed Gambit down, nothing worked against Chasm and even characters like Electro are only partial solutions to Omega Red. Probably the most complete shutdown of a meta was to iHulk/Okoye and I think it was entirely co-incidental that Switch and Colossus were in the same LL trio and had damage reduction powers rather than any planned shutdown.

Codex

@DAZ0273 said:
I dunno - more often than not the "solutions" never really worked. Archangel, Captain Jesus never slowed Gambit down, nothing worked against Chasm and even characters like Electro are only partial solutions to Omega Red. Probably the most complete shutdown of a meta was to iHulk/Okoye and I think it was entirely co-incidental that Switch and Colossus were in the same LL trio and had damage reduction powers rather than any planned shutdown.

I totally agree their solutions have not worked except for in ihulk case.

I guess I could have said, They create op characters and so that they can make multiple attempts to sell us a solution to a portion of the op characters kit.

entrailbucket

@Codex said:

@DAZ0273 said:
I dunno - more often than not the "solutions" never really worked. Archangel, Captain Jesus never slowed Gambit down, nothing worked against Chasm and even characters like Electro are only partial solutions to Omega Red. Probably the most complete shutdown of a meta was to iHulk/Okoye and I think it was entirely co-incidental that Switch and Colossus were in the same LL trio and had damage reduction powers rather than any planned shutdown.

I totally agree their solutions have not worked except for in ihulk case.

I guess I could have said, They create op characters and so that they can make multiple attempts to sell us a solution to a portion of the op characters kit.

Like a lot of conspiracy theories, this requires them to be both extremely intelligent and also extremely stupid. They're smart enough to implement this plan, nefariously creating purposely overpowered guys to drive sales, with the intent of later selling us the answers.

But they're too dumb to design good answers, and nobody buys the bad ones anyway. Did anyone spend significantly on Hit Monkey or Venomsaurus as Chasm counters?

And besides that, if they're smart enough to do this on purpose, then after the 3000th failure of the plan, why wouldn't they try something else?

Bzhai

I would say it's less of a consipiracy, more like priority being poured into the new engine in the past 1.5 years. I can understand the lack of manpower to balance the pvp landscape, but then they went and enabled supports.

Anyway Pandora's Box has been opened. When they do get to it I wanna see more counters to charge tiles and match damage. Sebastian Shaw seemed like a decent counter, but I never see him in pvp so he must not be very good ascended.

WhiteBomber

After 10 minutes of some real thought, I personally feel like there are actually only a few characters who are too good at what they do, and that the rest of them actually just aren't good enough.

Whether on offense, defense in PVE or PVP, I invalidate so, so many other characters:
1. IronMay
2. Sidewinder
3. GoldMay (only because of AP supports)
4. MThor
5. ShangChi (barely even OP in the new world, it's gotten that crazy)
6. Polaris
7. Maaaybe MBaku

These characters do what they do so well, there is no reason to ever choose others (even if they are easy to beat, like Polaris or MThor). They also have supports and supporting characters who send them to the moon, but without the cast above, the others are just good, or have good counters (ex: ORed, Namor3, Chasm etc.)

entrailbucket

@Bzhai said:
I would say it's less of a consipiracy, more like priority being poured into the new engine in the past 1.5 years. I can understand the lack of manpower to balance the pvp landscape, but then they went and enabled supports.

Anyway Pandora's Box has been opened. When they do get to it I wanna see more counters to charge tiles and match damage. Sebastian Shaw seemed like a decent counter, but I never see him in pvp so he must not be very good ascended.

The premise of the previous post was: the devs create overpowered characters purposely, so that we'll spend money chasing the answers to them.

If you're saying that is still their nefarious scheme, it's just on hold until they can do the engine or whatever, then why are they continuing to produce overpowered characters?

And again I ask, when have we ever gotten an effective answer to an overpowered character? If this is their plan, why has it been successful a grand total of one time?

And how do you even answer Sidewinder? Create a guy who can't be stunned that reduces all match damage to 0? That guy just breaks the game even worse!

sambrookjm

@entrailbucket said:
And how do you even answer Sidewinder? Create a guy who can't be stunned that reduces all match damage to 0? That guy just breaks the game even worse!

You mean something like M'baku's black "Can't be stunned reduce match damage" passive that's related to how damaged he is?

entrailbucket

@sambrookjm said:

@entrailbucket said:
And how do you even answer Sidewinder? Create a guy who can't be stunned that reduces all match damage to 0? That guy just breaks the game even worse!

You mean something like M'baku's black "Can't be stunned reduce match damage" passive that's related to how damaged he is?

Sure, except it's always on and it also applies to his teammates.

icarusmonkey

@entrailbucket said:

And how do you even answer Sidewinder? Create a guy who can't be stunned that reduces all match damage to 0? That guy just breaks the game even worse!

It would have to be something like reducing the enemy team's TeamUp AP regardless of how much they already have. Not guaranteed to win every time, but would directly counter what makes him OP. The only ability I can think of that works like that is 3* She Hulk's Green ability, but you can't choose which color gets reduced to 0. And she'll hardly survive long enough to you to fire it anyway.

As for the immunity from stuns, obvs there are already a few chars who can do that. If you want just anyone to have stun immunity, this seems like something that would be perfect for a support - simple yet effective without being game-breaking. (Though I can already guess it would have weird consequences for characters who stun themselves.)

DAZ0273

The Mind Stone has an ability which can make the user immune to stun and airbourne but obviously not an easy one to get currently.

BriMan2222

It’s actually the soul stone, and it’s doesn’t make the user immune to stun and airborne outright, it has a chance at turn start to create a countdown tile that makes the user immune while on the board. But, chasm will stun you at turn start nullifying that chance to happen.

entrailbucket

They need to pretty careful with stun immunity, because turning off some of the crazy passives via stun is keeping them in check. A support that makes literally anyone immune to stun just creates a totally new mess to clean up.

But that's my point. It's why I've never understood "give us counters to the overpowered guys." Something that actually counters Sidewinder effectively is just going to create some other mess somewhere else, that will then also need to be countered eventually. (I suppose I'd make an exception for the "nemesis" passive that we talked about briefly here -- "at the start of battle, if Sidewinder is on the enemy team, down him," but I really don't see them doing that ever.)

What else could they do? Hey, how about a passive that says "if an enemy would be sent away, down them instead?" That'd definitely be totally fine and not create any additional problems, right???

KGB

@icarusmonkey said:

@entrailbucket said:

And how do you even answer Sidewinder? Create a guy who can't be stunned that reduces all match damage to 0? That guy just breaks the game even worse!

It would have to be something like reducing the enemy team's TeamUp AP regardless of how much they already have. Not guaranteed to win every time, but would directly counter what makes him OP. The only ability I can think of that works like that is 3* She Hulk's Green ability, but you can't choose which color gets reduced to 0. And she'll hardly survive long enough to you to fire it anyway.

There are actually a lot of options that would help without completely breaking the game.

1) Rogue and Archangel have an ability to prevent AP gain. Lets say they created a 5 star Rogue who instead of needing to fire it as a power (as those two do) it was a passive: "At the start of the turn whenever one doesn't exist, Rogue creates a 3 turn Siphon CD that prevents any AP gain in this color (extend it to include TUs) while the CD exists". Let the player / AI pick the color to siphon each time. Now you can perpetually block TU gain (or some other color gain as needed) by repeatedly choosing the same color every time the CD is created (yes, the CD can be destroyed and TU gain can happen then but that's a reasonable tradeoff).

2) Okoye has a passive that drains her own team's TU AP when she's not in front. A similar passive could be created only this one would drain enemy TU AP when that character was NOT in front type condition (would have been great on Kilgrave who wants to be in the rear).

3) A new support (Nullifier?) that drains all AP to 0 at battle start for BOTH teams. Doing it for both teams makes it a double edged sword since you can't then start with AP either (from supports or boosts). This is more to deal with the free support AP gain than Sidewinder but would be a nice addition and increase strategy options as you'd need to decide whether you also wanted to do without starting AP.

KGB