Baltias wrote: atomzed wrote: GandalfWhite wrote: Fairly new to the game (~ 60 days) and this is the first character I bought covers for that's been nerfed. Say what you want about General Motors' poor business model, but no one ever awoke to find their Corvette replaced with a Chevette because the former was 'just too powerful'. The perennial catch 22 situation in gaming. If you don't balance the characters, ppl complain "P2W!". If you do balance the characters, ppl complain " why you nerf!" Like many had mentioned many many times, instead of stupidly nerfing covers that are working as intended, which are only a few, D3P should BUFF the covers that are working pathetically, which are many. So, instead of spending more effort to BUFF the many uberly useless covers, D3P opts for the easy way out to nerf the few. Human nature? Probably. What reasonable dev would do? Absolutely not.
atomzed wrote: GandalfWhite wrote: Fairly new to the game (~ 60 days) and this is the first character I bought covers for that's been nerfed. Say what you want about General Motors' poor business model, but no one ever awoke to find their Corvette replaced with a Chevette because the former was 'just too powerful'. The perennial catch 22 situation in gaming. If you don't balance the characters, ppl complain "P2W!". If you do balance the characters, ppl complain " why you nerf!"
GandalfWhite wrote: Fairly new to the game (~ 60 days) and this is the first character I bought covers for that's been nerfed. Say what you want about General Motors' poor business model, but no one ever awoke to find their Corvette replaced with a Chevette because the former was 'just too powerful'.
GandalfWhite wrote: I've filed a complaint with my state's Attorney General's office; this is internet fraud.
adamLmpq wrote: GandalfWhite wrote: I've filed a complaint with my state's Attorney General's office; this is internet fraud. I'm interested to see how this turns out. Side question: if ~$20 hits you hard enough to file such a complaint, how can you afford the device on which to play this game?
Phantron wrote: adamLmpq wrote: GandalfWhite wrote: I've filed a complaint with my state's Attorney General's office; this is internet fraud. I'm interested to see how this turns out. Side question: if ~$20 hits you hard enough to file such a complaint, how can you afford the device on which to play this game? If people didn't always have this attitude there might actually be a recourse against destruction of virtual wealth. I remember seeing an article of a guy filing a suit to recover his baggage fee of $20 that an airline asked him to pay when they lost his baggage, so he sued them and cost like $75 to get his $20 back. Of course all these internet wizards told him he'd never win and that it'd cost more than whatever he's getting back (he's not asking for the baggage to be reimbursed, because that'd actually be hard), but he said that studies show a monkey will never do such a thing but a human will and we need more humans than monkeys, and he did win. And if we have more humans than monkeys people might not always get bent over backwards by EULA and similar things. Now I don't think a Daken nerf is going to be a catalyst for virtual property rights but the underlying idea isn't bad. There are probably better scenarios to try to make such a move, though.
atomzed wrote: I do understand the individual freedom to seek recourse for perceived injustice. But the perception that we "owned" the characters are an illusion. The typical user agreement will state that D3 maintains full ownership of the "properties". This is akin to the players, renting an apartment from D3. If D3 decided to renovate the rooms, and change out the carpet and tv, it is well within their rights to do so. If people are unhappy, we can always leave. But to demand that we have the rights to demand compensation.... I think it's stretching it. Edit:- the typical user rights are crafted to give them full ownership, because if they don't, they can't make any changes to it at all. No tweaks, no buffs and nerfs... even if the server is shut down, the customers can claim damages too. So the company *has* to retain full ownership.
Phantron wrote: atomzed wrote: I do understand the individual freedom to seek recourse for perceived injustice. But the perception that we "owned" the characters are an illusion. The typical user agreement will state that D3 maintains full ownership of the "properties". This is akin to the players, renting an apartment from D3. If D3 decided to renovate the rooms, and change out the carpet and tv, it is well within their rights to do so. If people are unhappy, we can always leave. But to demand that we have the rights to demand compensation.... I think it's stretching it. Edit:- the typical user rights are crafted to give them full ownership, because if they don't, they can't make any changes to it at all. No tweaks, no buffs and nerfs... even if the server is shut down, the customers can claim damages too. So the company *has* to retain full ownership. The company wants you to believe you don't own anything you paid money for, but that doesn't mean they're right. And even if your characters are just a service, you can clearly try to get your money back and more if there's reason to believe the service has unreasonably degraded compared to what's expected. If they slashed a digit off everyone's levels, isotope, and HP you should have a compelling case for that whatever you believe you were renting/owning/buying is certainly no longer what you have now and some due compensation is required. Now since people are indeed closer to monkeys than humans in this respect because it does take a lot more money to sue any company successfully compared to what you can expect to get back, they'll likely to continue to get away with it as long as they're not doing something as egregious as I described. Certainly anything that can be reasonably argued as mere incompetence, e.g., an argument like 'we were just dumb when we first designed Daken', would have little chance of actually winning in court. But I don't think game maker have some kind of ironclad clause to arbitarily change stuff people paid a lot of money for.
Baltias wrote: btw, where is such "contract" or "user agreement" located? I can find it every time I login, and certainly can't find it anywhere in the game. If this is a binding legal document, user should have a right to freely access it whenever they can within the software.
JCTthe3rd81 wrote: It's not the amount of money to me, it's the principle of the matter.
There's also a realistic interpretation to these events. D3P has made no attempt to hide it's goal is to average $1/day from every MPQ player. An 'overpowered' cover like Daken Classic will generate more sales than a moderate or underpowered cover. So, an unscrupulous business could make overpowered covers available, generate higher than average revenues, then reduce the powers of those covers to something that wouldn't have generated nearly as much sales or revenue.
Phantron wrote: We can certainly argue Daken, Sentry, and Thor seems to be designed to generate sales because there's nothing fair about their abilities/durability but it's still within what can be explained by incompetence.
Phaserhawk wrote: <snip> Take Daken for example. Perhaps instead of nerfing him completely, what if you made his weaknesses weaker, like his Heat. Instead of messing with # of tiles etc. which completely changes the character, why not say Heat does 4% damage of max life. That way it would take more than one Heal to override 2 Heats. <snip>
atomzed wrote: Phantron wrote: We can certainly argue Daken, Sentry, and Thor seems to be designed to generate sales because there's nothing fair about their abilities/durability but it's still within what can be explained by incompetence. I don't know, I don't think that Sentry is OP. He has a real bad drawback, as he deals a lot of dmg to the team. Under normal situation, without boosts or healing packs. his self dmg would have been a deterrence. Ldaken indeed got stronger because of the true healing change. But was he OP? He is strong but he's a strong support character and not the main offense. D3 do recognise that he is overly used, hence they are trying to rein him in. Lthor, I do think he is *too* strong. High HP, tiles generation and strong AoE. Which is why I am glad that the heroes released after him has been balanced (Mohawk storm, she hulk, Fury, Cpt Marvel). So in terms of character design, I am fairly confident in their decisions. The claims that they are releasing characters that are OP to generate cover sales, and then nerf ing them after... is plainly unfair. The health of Mohawk storm is so low that people has dissed her. She hulk, green ability has been criticized as useless. Fury yellow requires a lot of AP to be fully effective. They could have release more OP powers but they didn't, which shows to me that they are concerned about character balance and not just to release "chasy" characters. Also, if they wants to generate more sales for Ldaken, they would have not have 2 pvp with his covers as the rewards after he was released. Same for sentry. That's equivalent to at least 6 covers given for free (albeit to top 10%). In fact I bought zero covers for Ldaken and got my 5/5/3 Ldaken purely from tokens and rewards. I won't deny that some changes are due to bottom line, like the true healing change is for health pack sales (I don't think so), or the change to cover pack % is money grab (this I agree).... But to say that they deliberately released OP characters for sales, I would strongly do agree.
I was thinking that Healing & Heat should be altered to have a minimum required AP on hand before the Healing kicks in - the same way that Falcon requires a minimum AP on hand before Redwing takes flight. Daken is supposed to be addicted to "Heat" right? So he starts off a match and he's "craving" a hit - taking dmg/turn in game terms - until he gets that hit he needs - X Blue AP (5? probably 5). Let Chemical Reaction work in much the same way: if it still costs 5 Blue, that will likely be enough to push him back into Heat again, and it'll actually take away some of the Blue tiles on the board, making it harder each time to get back to a "normal" state - more or less like addiction, each time you get that hit it "takes"/"requires" a little bit more of you each time, and soon you "need" it just to feel normal.