gobstopper wrote: They don't tweak and balance existing characters because it makes more sense financially to keep pushing out new ones
LordWill wrote: They are never going to balance any character.
FaerieMyst wrote: Part of the problem is one of subjectivity. Who decides if a character is balanced or is worthless or is overpowered?
FaerieMyst wrote: Part of the problem is one of subjectivity. Who decides if a character is balanced or is worthless or is overpowered? We all play differently.
emaker27 wrote: FaerieMyst wrote: Part of the problem is one of subjectivity. Who decides if a character is balanced or is worthless or is overpowered? As the game developer, it becomes a lot less subjective since they have access to usage data. If only 1% of the player base uses Bagman, then he's probably worthless. If 75% of all veteran players use Magneto, then he may be overpowered. The majority of characters will still be subjective, but there will be outliers that should be addressed. And normally you can see the extremes in-game as a player. When Spiderman was OP, you saw him a lot. Bagman is worthless and you barely see him.
LordWill wrote: They are never going to balance any character. This is what you must accept and resign yourself to believe. Then if they ever do, a cold day in hell just happened.
Spoit wrote: Usage statistics and power are not necessarily linked though. Back during the thorverine days, IceIX said that Cap was a very solid 3rd place in usage numbers (in terms of 2*s, though that was probably overall, even with rags and spidey actually being useful), even with how terrible he is.
EternalLurker wrote: Spoit wrote: Usage statistics and power are not necessarily linked though. Back during the thorverine days, IceIX said that Cap was a very solid 3rd place in usage numbers (in terms of 2*s, though that was probably overall, even with rags and spidey actually being useful), even with how terrible he is. Usage statistics and power are totally linked. It's just that there are also other factors such as ease of obtainment, which is one that in particular skews Cap's numbers way up and always has.
IceIX wrote: Edit: These are older stats, see stats from 3/18/14 here. Let's see, what can I say without giving numbers away... - There are very slightly more regular Android players than iOS players overall. Regular being those that stick around for a while. - iOS is more spikey with new players joining more often then leaving as quickly, Android players stick more often, but come in more slowly. Platform app discovery issues? - Steam is our fastest growing segment (duh, brand new), with players being the most sticky there compared to either mobile platform. - Brazilians on Android love themselves some Puzzle Quest, beating out both the UK and Canada in total users. Not so many iOS Brazilians, but they're still high on the list of countries overall. - Android version 4.1.0 is by far the most popular OS to play the game on, followed by 4.2.0 and 4.3.0. - iOS users update their OSes much more often in comparison, with most users being on either 7.0.4 or 7.0.3. - The Nexus 7 is by far the most popular single Android device to play on. Samsung as a manufacturer dominates the pack though with tons of devices being very high up on the usage list across many models. - The vanilla iPhone 4 is the most popular iOS device, with the iPad 2 being the strongest tablet in use for either iOS or Android. - About 10% of our regular userbase overall is either jailbroken or full rooted, much higher than we were expecting. The vast majority of said users play perfectly nicely, unlike popular depictions of those users being natural pirates/cheaters. - The character with the most purchased ability upgrades (minus Tutorials) is Iron Man (Model 35). His Repulsor Blast wins out with over triple the upgrades of the next highest character's total upgrades, Storm (Modern). - Dropping 1 stars, the most purchased ability upgrade in total crown goes to Black Widow (Grey Suit), and the most purchased ability upgrade singly goes to Daken's Pheremone Rage. - Most popular character overall is Iron Man (Model 35), which should come as no surprise since he's used so often by everyone early game. - Stripping out 1 stars the top 5 used in order are: Thor, Storm (Classic), Iron Man (Model 40), Captain America, Wolverine (Astonishing). Devil Dinosaur ranks dead last. - The Lightning Round played most regularly is Hood's, followed by Ragnarok. The one participated in least is Doom's, with Loki being slightly higher in participation.
Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote: Balancing is programmatically easy to do. Lack of balance is ruining the game. Spending a lot of programming time for a power that is unusable is developmental insanity.
Paintsville wrote: Bump as I wait for some acknowledgement.
EternalLurker wrote: Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote: Balancing is programmatically easy to do. Lack of balance is ruining the game. Spending a lot of programming time for a power that is unusable is developmental insanity. Pretty sure you are massively overestimating what percentage of development manhours are in the raw coding. o_O That's almost never the biggest time sink in a large-scale project.
I am Zero wrote: EternalLurker wrote: Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote: Balancing is programmatically easy to do. Lack of balance is ruining the game. Spending a lot of programming time for a power that is unusable is developmental insanity. Pretty sure you are massively overestimating what percentage of development manhours are in the raw coding. o_O That's almost never the biggest time sink in a large-scale project. I think the framework is pretty much done. Adding new powers shouldn't be that hard if they've done a good job with the base framework. Their framework should make it easy for them to say, "Character A, Power 1, Level 1 = 1 strike tile, 5 cost" We've seen them have the ability to tweak powers without having to push out an update, so some of us would like to see them doing minor tweaks here and there. After a certain time period has passed, see if anything has gone crazy. For instance, instead of doing what they did to spiderman, they could've just added 1 to the cost of his blue power and then looked at the data after a few weeks. If they see that no change in usage has occurred, add another 1 to the base cost and collect data. Or lowering the cost for yelena's black by 4 and seeing if anyone started using her more. Little tweaks here and there to help balance the game without going crazy. Instead, we see posts about how changes were playtested internally and was deemed "good to go" by the testers which resulted in 60+ page posts from the player base about how the changes were too extreme, making that character useless in most situations. If they truly wanted roster diversity, they'd try to balance the characters little by little so that all characters are usable in more situations than they are now. Even though bagman is a joke, if they tweaked his numbers just a little bit, people would probably think more about the fights in which he'd be a very good support character instead of cannon fodder for tanking.