Character Rebalance - **** War Machine (James Rhodes) ****

No, I don't think it's helpful to be like "argh, you're all incompetent!" and I certainly don't think that this game is a trainwreck. I do though wish that we could stop getting one step forward, two steps back changes to characters though. I'm not sure how a rebalance like this, where we get an acknowledgement that 9ap is to much for a red power, happens in the same week that a brand new 5* comes out with a 9ap red power. Like if we know that 9 is too much, and powers that do stuff on a delay are unpopular, let's stop introducing powers that cost that much and do stuff on a delay maybe? 

It does feel like the design philosophy has changed fundamentally of late. Characters like War Machine and Ghost Rider seemed to come from a time when it was important for a character to have an internal self-sufficiency or acceleration, like you really want to use the powers in this sequence, and they shouldn't require that you have a specific second or third character for it to do something. You wanted to fire hell ride to gather AP for Chain Whip or Damnation in that order, or you wanted to put War Machine's red down in the same turn as Gatling Gun so that all his attack tiles could drop in. I don't really think that's all that important for new characters anymore, and the people reviewing older characters who do it arent' as concerned about preserving that element of their essence for whatever reason when it comes time to rebalance. 

Obviously i'm not on this design team, so I can only speculate. I would be very surprised to find out that Sersi, Odin, Abigail, and Shang-Chi came from the same designer, or if they did, some of those characters were designed at 4:30pm on a friday when that person had someplace to be in the evening.

The most correct way to design a game like this would be to have powers that were "fun" designed without any fiction. You need fun mechanics that don't rely on the animation or flavor text to be fun. You can either have a huge grab bag of individual powers, or you can have a bunch of cards with 3 powers pre-grouped, or some combination of both, and then you can creatively skin them once you decide which characters you are going to roll out. Applying a fictional wrapper to a game mechanic is the easiest part of the process. As a professional game developer, i'm often approached by people who are like "i've got a great idea for a game..." and then they jump right in describing their story, and you have to be like "no you have a fiction you're describing, not a game." This game is still fun when you turn off animations for people, right? And nearly all of us skip the cut scenes? It is largely a very fun game. It's little things that stick out to me sometimes and make me go "huh. that doesn't seem better..." which is a far cry from "these people are the literal worst!"

Looking at community facing interviews where people who aren't on the dev team throw in their ideas and the developer has to nod and make it look like how things are done are not to be taken as gospel. That stuff is theater, and developers are generally very resentful of those outsiders coming in and being scope bombers they have to placate. Again, i'm not affiliated with this dev team, but that is the way it is in industry.

All we can do is help train any hypothetically new designers that are chipping in by informing them about the things that matter to us. Ideally in a non-toxic way.

tonypq said:

DAZ0273 said:

ThaRoadWarrior said:

No, I don't think it's helpful to be like "argh, you're all incompetent!" and I certainly don't think that this game is a trainwreck. I do though wish that we could stop getting one step forward, two steps back changes to characters though. I'm not sure how a rebalance like this, where we get an acknowledgement that 9ap is to much for a red power, happens in the same week that a brand new 5* comes out with a 9ap red power. Like if we know that 9 is too much, and powers that do stuff on a delay are unpopular, let's stop introducing powers that cost that much and do stuff on a delay maybe? 

Completely reasonable points.

And I just wanna say I don't mean to be dunking on @tonypq because much else he says in his post is fair and reasonable but then it all gets burned down with throwaway snarky comments. People have every right to scratch their heads and express dis-satisfaction or confusion. But being mean about it - I mean c'mon, Hound was just waiting to don his armour, it got a new coat of shine and everything!

I feel like you did a Shaq slam and break the backboard dunk me heh, jk. 

I'm not the only who's said the devs seem out of touch with the game. It certainly can be partly due to a rotation of different developers coming and going. Whatever it is would be nice if they got on the same page. 

As far as playing this train wreck if my alternate match 3 game would be Candy Crush, I'll continue to tread through the mud here with MPQ. We're obviously all passionate about this game being the forum nerds that we are. As much as there is with MPQ that irritates the heck out of me, unfortunately it's still in a category of it's own as far as a Marvel match 3 game goes. 

I'd just really like to see them get rebalancing right as well as character design. When there isn't much new content added aside from new characters, they really need to make sure each release and rebalance are spot on. 

Shaq slams that backboard in an affectionate way!

I was late and I lost a good chance to get the horse and the lance. Next time.
GRRR's hellsride was a counter for Ihulk? Seriously? To collect 9 green, fire hellsride, and wait to the repeaters to destroy green... GRRR was already dead on the 4th turn. A counter to thor? Thor needed a counter? Sinergy with sightclops? Is so good cyclops? Come on...
WM losing sinergy with carol... I'm sure carol will find new partners. There is hydra stomper saying hi. If it was the less used power, people weren't using him with carol that much.
Seeing usage data? No, thanks, I'd rather like more the forum contest, there was a time that I won.
I think WM rebalance is ok being a 4* character, this is something that is worth to remember. I think he will punch harder, even more his red and those good attack tiles. 

2 months passed since Phoenix rebalance. I would like those rebalances to be more regular, not tied with thematic days, and for more characters, specially for those really olds 5*s than behave like a buffed 4*. For all 5*s to al least could seem even.

ThaRoadWarrior said:

Since that power was doing 300% match damage on that, it benefitted from Sighclops' yellow, and you could use the AP to feed Sighclops red or green, and his hidden black if things went south. Anyway, now you can't, but my real point was that changing his fundamental design flavor makes him less interesting and his internal self synergy is now gone. 

Then now you've exposed the reason why they changed that power. 

I like all of the changes. Before War Machine had the niche of being decent against invisible and protect characters. Otherwise he wasn't one of the best damage dealers, and his use as a support character was poor, with red rarely making enough attack tiles to be worth using.

Red deals actual damage now. The attack tiles are still weak. Oh well. Probably still his worst power.
Blue is mostly the same. Good. It was his best power.
Green gets tiles destroyed much faster, speeding up his game greatly. If you cast red and green on the same turn, you can be guaranteed to get a bunch of attack tiles out. It was so disappointing before to get the countdowns stuck in the middle of special tiles, or removed by the other team before they could go off. It also destroys enemy tiles now.