What good balance means?

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Unknown
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edited January 2014 in MPQ General Discussion
No - this is not one more of the rag nerf posts.

In short my idea for good balance is fighting something different than thor and wolvie 90% of the time in pvp, a.k.a make all abilities useful. Not just having some chars usable ONLY for SPECIFIC tournaments. Now for example there is absolutely no doubt that the best build for wolvie is 5/3/5 thus no strategy about chosing where the extra 4 points from 3/3/3 will go. It's like "you have to do this and that" and not much freedom (to use your fav char for example).

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  • Unknown
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    In other competitive games where "builds" are used (say, Magic: the Gathering), balance is often a rock-paper-scissors setup for any current metagame.

    Sure there will be rogue builds, but any tournament season is dominated by 3 or so similar builds that cancel each other out. Player skills tend to trump building skills because builds are so similar.

    In such a small game as ours, the similarities are even more pronounced -- the variety comes down to character level, which evens out at the maximum.

    M:tG cycles out legal cards to refresh the competitive metagame. I see many similarities to what our game is going through and will perhaps continue to go through.

    Yes, it will drive consumption -- as it should, if it had any chance of living a long life, which in the best of cases, also involves maturity.
  • Eddiemon
    Eddiemon Posts: 1,470 Chairperson of the Boards
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    My 5/5/3 wolvie who normally has spidey as a team mate says hi!

    Good balance means there will always be a best team. The only way to avoid it is to start standardising everything so that every character has similar abilities. Which is boring.

    Moving the goalposts by having different buffed characters, character restrictions or even different environment tiles in tournaments is the best way of adding variety.

    And Thor and wolvie are 2* characters which makes them easier to acquire and level, but more powerful than 1*, so you would expect to see lots of them anyhow. Once magneto and spidey get acquired enough I would expect them to be more prevalent.
  • Unknown
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    Eddiemon wrote:
    Good balance means there will always be a best team. The only way to avoid it is to start standardising everything so that every character has similar abilities. Which is boring.
    Good balance means exactly that - there will always be best team, but I'd rather see best team of 4 stars rather than being almost forced to use thor and wolvie as a static pvp strategy because compared to them I can comfortably say that the other 2 star chars suck. Yes, 1 leader in each number of stars is great but other than that (which is the case) limits your options alot.

    The only good thing about thor and wolvie is that it helps you possible transition to 3 star team by leaving 3rd spot open. But as I said 90% of the teams I see are thor and wolvie and the other 10% include 3 star teams and very rarely 1 star teams.
  • Unknown
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    'Good balance' in the F2P devs mind is to make the game just hard enough and just annoying enough that the user feels compelled to spend money to bypass it.



    I
  • Unknown
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    Not a game where there's 30 characters but when asking who to spend HP the only answer is red Rags. Not a game where you can win in 2 turns.

    But hey, people love broken mechanics when it favours them.
  • Unknown
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    Lucky girl wrote:
    Good balance means exactly that - there will always be best team, but I'd rather see best team of 4 stars rather than being almost forced to use thor and wolvie as a static pvp strategy because compared to them I can comfortably say that the other 2 star chars suck.

    I think Original BW would beg to differ with you on that. AP stealing + healing allow for conservation of health packs and being able to stand up to larger teams by starving them so they can't get off abilities. I'm seeing her a LOT more in tourneys, and unless there's a Spidey on their team too, she's my first priority target to down.
  • Unknown
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    Actually, oBW is less broken, since her passive only steals blue, purple and black, and even with cheap purple she cannot fire it each turn. I prefer to take out damage dealer - usually Wolv - and after that to deal with oBW, since without heavy-hitters to spend stolen AP she's pretty weak and I can use this time to heal my own party.
  • Unknown
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    walkyourpath wrote:
    Lucky girl wrote:
    Good balance means exactly that - there will always be best team, but I'd rather see best team of 4 stars rather than being almost forced to use thor and wolvie as a static pvp strategy because compared to them I can comfortably say that the other 2 star chars suck.

    I think Original BW would beg to differ with you on that. AP stealing + healing allow for conservation of health packs and being able to stand up to larger teams by starving them so they can't get off abilities. I'm seeing her a LOT more in tourneys, and unless there's a Spidey on their team too, she's my first priority target to down.
    Now that I think of it you are right. I also start seeing her during and after widowmaker tourney. Before that I didn't encounter her even once! She is not bad at all, she just slipped my mind when going through all the 2 star chars. And I am thinking would she appear in teams at all if it wasn't the widowmaker tourney?
  • orions
    orions Posts: 9
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    I think that in a case we have here, being able to choose our roster before a fight, good balance would mean a lot more counters. For example, if I see that my next fight is going to be against A, B and C, I am going to choose my team accordingly. But if the next fight is for axample against B, D and F - I am going to respec my roster accordingly. This way would promote flexibility and a balanced roster, instead a simple "get wolv - get spidey - get rags - thank you" type of progression.
  • Unknown
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    Toxicadam wrote:
    'Good balance' in the F2P devs mind is to make the game just hard enough and just annoying enough that the user feels compelled to spend money to bypass it.



    I

    +1000000000000000000000000000000

    We had a good 3 month ride where you didn't need to spend money to be competitive. Devs saw that needed balancing.

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