Get a Free 3-6 Star Baron Zemo this Week!
Log in to the Summoner's Market at https://store.playcontestofchampions.com/ and claim the Baron Zemo Selector between 10am PT November 24 and 10am PT on December 1st.
Proven and Below: 3-Star
Conqueror/Uncollected: 4-Star
Cavalier/Thronebreaker: 5-Star
Paragon/Valiant: 6-Star
You can only claim this Baron Zemo one time. The Baron Zemo is delivered as a selector, claiming it will require you to choose your rarity immediately. If you plan to change your Progression level during the Cyber Week event, we suggest you wait until you have made that change before claiming this selector.
Log in to the Summoner's Market at https://store.playcontestofchampions.com/ and claim the Baron Zemo Selector between 10am PT November 24 and 10am PT on December 1st.
Proven and Below: 3-Star
Conqueror/Uncollected: 4-Star
Cavalier/Thronebreaker: 5-Star
Paragon/Valiant: 6-Star
You can only claim this Baron Zemo one time. The Baron Zemo is delivered as a selector, claiming it will require you to choose your rarity immediately. If you plan to change your Progression level during the Cyber Week event, we suggest you wait until you have made that change before claiming this selector.
An Update to Balancing in MCOC!
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My real concern is: Of all the things they could be doing with the game and the community to improve it, they chose to pitch a this new idea to a community that is struggling and trying hang on to the game. This is where they failed imo. And if they didn't anticipate majority will dislike this idea especially at this time, then they are the real problem. Some of the issues many are having with the game will take some time to be solved, but have we had any recent updates on it. The problems we want solutions to and the other things we want in-game but it's taking forever, how are they compared to this new idea in execution? The one thing almost everyone liked, monthly buffs, we were starving what we get instead is no buffs but take this new idea (that has many concerns). I;m not sure if it was outlined in the roadmap but the timing is bad if you ask me and the condition of the community imo wasn't even prepared for receive and accept it. Then again, who are we not some premium clients.
That makes sense for most commercial or industrial products, because reliability, predictability, and dependability are core requirements of most such products. But they don't make as much sense in the context of games, particularly massively multiplayer progressional games, because those are not important metrics. I mean, at one level they are; at the mechanical level you want everything you design to function as designed and implemented. The game itself as a product should be reliable, predictable, and dependable. But the *gameplay* of a game when played by humans is not. In that respect, the way elements of a game function is more closely related to the rules of a sport than components of a product. The rules are not just intended to do what their letter of the law states. They are also intended to serve the higher purpose of either stabilizing or improving the game itself. Was (American) football broken before the pass interference rule? Was basketball broken before the shot clock was implemented? Is the reason why these two rules didn't originally exist because the people who designed the rules for those rules stupid? No: there was no way to know those games would need those rules until you actually watched humans play the game and saw how humans chose to evolve the meta of those games.
The ultimate requirements on the "products" of MCOC are three-fold; fun to play, desirable to chase, and generates rewards. Those are the "higher purpose" of champions. I know what X-23's bleeds do: that's obvious. And I have a pretty good idea what a new champion will do mechanically when I look at its abilities on paper. But those things are not performance in a game like this. Or to avoid the semantic quibbles, those performance metrics are not critical to balance. The higher tier performance metrics of how engaged players are with the champ, how much they spend in time and money to get them, and how much rewards they earn when they use them are the performance metrics that are critical to game balance. And it is those performance metrics that are the ones paper analysis is notoriously poor at predicting.
The rating system has a short term purpose and a long term purpose, and neither of them is intended to "rate" the champions globally, in the sense of which champ is better or worse. The long term purpose is to summarize the information in the champion spotlights, to serve as a starting point for beginning and casual players who do not want to deep dive champions. For those that just want a ten second summary of the champ, here you go: the champ has a lot of damage, a little utility, and it is moderately hard to learn to play effectively.
This of course doesn't encapsulate the in-game value of each champ accurately, nor could any short summary do so. But some players don't interact with the game on a level where anything except a short summary is acceptable. For players that want more than a superficial description of the champion, they can invest the time into reading the spotlights in more detail, or going to community resources.
All things being equal, Kabam's long term intent is for the ratings to accurately encapsulate the information they contain. They hope that eventually the data collected on the champion backs up those summary numbers so the players get what they expect when they play the champ. They don't expect those summary numbers to completely describe the champs, but they don't have to. If the champ rating system says the champ has 5/5 damage, all it is saying is the champ deals among the most damage in the game, all things being equal.
For a really old champ, Kabam can determine if a champ is in the top 20% of damage dealers, or the middle fifth of damage mitigators. It can back fill those ratings for champs that are old enough and well understood enough that both the data and player understanding would likely be in general agreement on the simple attributes of damage output, survivability, and ease of use. We're all going to be arguing about what "utility" means, but for these purposes it means "everything else." If there's something useful a champ has that cannot be described as damage or survivability, and it is not related to the skill level required to play the game, it is utility.
I believe there's an idea that these ratings are problematic because if Kabam gets them "wrong" then they'll nerf a champ that doesn't deserve to be nerfed. For existing champions, that's not going to happen, because that's not what the ratings are for. For old champs, the ratings *describe* the champs. If Kabam is going to nerf them, Kabam is going to nerf them. It doesn't matter what the ratings are. Conversely, if Kabam has no reason to nerf a champ, the ratings aren't going to change their minds. There's no "proper rating" for a champ. No one's rating is "too high."
However, things change for new champs. There is no pre-existing data for new champs. Kabam has no idea what the data says about the champion, because there's no data. Instead, in the short term the rating will be the developer *target* for the champ. Until they have data on the champ, the rating numbers tell us what Kabam was aiming for. In a perfect world, they'd hit the target every time. But in practice, that's not going to happen. As Kabam collects data on the champ, they may decide that the data says something different from what they wanted to do. They might have aimed for survivability being 3/5, but the data says the champ appears to be a 4/5 - it is in the top 40% of all champs. Now what?
Maybe nothing. Just because the champion "misses" the target, doesn't mean it is broken. For one thing, the targets are huge. A 4 out of 5 could include all champs that are between the 70 and 90 percentile. They might have been aiming for 80%, but a 72% is still perfectly fine, as is 89%. Only if the champ misses by so much that it is obviously broken too high or too low will the devs be compelled to act. And this has nothing to do with the rating system. The devs look at this stuff already, and were making evaluations like this before any formal system for quantifying it existed (this is a numerical example: I don't know how the values are going to be computed).
Eventually, the idea is that after the balancing phase when Kabam decides the champ doesn't need any adjustments, either the champion's data will back up the rating numbers or (presumably) the rating numbers will be amended to match the champion's data. But during the balancing phase, the ratings numbers communicate to us what the expected performance of the champion is, so we (the players with more knowledge and experience with the game) have an idea when a champion appears to not perform as advertised, so we aren't surprised if the devs make changes to the champion after launch during the balancing phase.
The champion rating system is just a structured method of communication. It doesn't define champion value, and it doesn't control when champions are adjusted. There's no such thing as a right or wrong number, or a too high number or too low number. The complaint that the rating system is bad because it is incomplete is missing the point of the rating system. All discussions of champion performance are incomplete. The developers need a way to summarize and encapsulate the way they are going to be communicating about champion performance, and this is their starting point. Without this, we're back to the devs saying "this was unintended." This tells us nothing. The champion rating system is a step forward, to give players more detail than the devs are not happy with a champ. Furthermore, the notion that Kabam shouldn't be making ratings systems is also missing the point. Kabam is trying to communicate their position about the champs. You might disagree with their position, but the point to the rating system is not to assert an opinion that everyone else is supposed to agree with, it is to communicate *their* position when it comes to balance. Their position is a thing we players need to know. They can make a rating system and tell us what the ratings are, or they can make a rating system and *not* tell us what the ratings are. But on what basis do we tell the devs not to quantify their design decisions and balancing processes? That's ludicrous: we can't do that. It is only to our benefit that they expose these numbers to us. Or we can tell them we don't want them, and they can keep them secret. Those are the only two options.
As for the rating system, IMO, it's just a waste of time unless it will be accompanied with other tools like an enhanced tag system and attribute search. That will help new and old players.
I also don’t understand why they pulled resources away from the buff program.. that was literally the one thing that everyone was unanimously excited about each month.
Also definitely agree with the fact that they should have their own testers. Don’t see why they need 6 months of player data. Set up unique tests and TDD it.
I should also specifically address the implication here of "throws out of balance." No one champion - or anything else - is usually so broken that it is capable of instantly breaking critical elements of the game. Rather, things can be sufficiently outside their intended performance envelope that they would cause, like the Matrix, an increasing escalating probability of failure.
A simpler example to explain is the notion of "game breaking rewards." We could double the 6* shards the game handed out and not "break" the game. However, we would be accelerating to the moment when the reward structures would not be able to accommodate that increase. The increase in 5* shards didn't break the game, but they mandated the release of 6* champions, whether players wanted them or not. An increase in 6* shards would force the devs hand when it came to 7* champs. Champs usually aren't "bullseyes" or "completely broken." Rather, there's the target, and the farther you are from the target (assuming you've picked the right target - that's a different topic) the more likely it is that the difference will accumulate into the game into eventual problems.
That's why games like this are so often primarily balanced around primary metrics like reward earning rates, not direct performance metrics like dps. Because no amount of dps can break a game directly, but there are rewards/time rates that can break the game. DPS can translate to rewards, but it is the rewards that are the issue, not the DPS to earn them. But the direct performance metrics can be useful - that's where expertise and experience can help. We know DPS tends to directly translate into rewards moreso than survivability, up to a point. We know ease of use has a significant impact on a mobile game that doesn't have a disproportionate percentage of hard core players. We can try to guess as best we can how the directly measurable attributes of a champion will end up affecting how the champion is perceived, how it is valued, how well it translates its performance into rewards.
But just as we can test a drill to see how that product performs intrinsically, we cannot tell which drill will improve carpenters' overall performance without testing with actual carpenters. We can guess, and a good designer's guesses will tend to be accurate more often, but we won't know if four out of five carpenters will prefer that drill until we let them use it for a while and see. Because it isn't about which drill is better. It is about which drill they think is better. That's what product testing can only approximate.
And they said EXTRA development time. They said buffs aren't going away, we just don't know what kinds they will be each month. That means there's 2 teams working on this. I know you clearly like going against Kabam, maybe you should try having some comprehension skills.
Wasn't the she hulk heavy fix done because too many players(Merced accounts) were going through the champion too fast?
Yes, they probably won't go and "fix" every champ released, they ll probably just nerf the good ones. I know I know, they didn't said that in the announcement, so it's not going to be like that, right?
Again, I get it, you need to believe what you believe so you can stay mad at Kabam. 12.0, She Hulk and Bishop we're the only times there were nerfs. There's not enough history to have the stance you do on nerfs because in 7 years it hasn't happened as much as you all are making it out to be.
When I say that devs balance based on average performance, that's in general. To be specific, the devs want the average performance of a specific champ as measured by a set of metrics to be within some range relative to the average performance of all champions. In other words, a champ might be better than other champs in some areas, but it shouldn't be overwhelmingly better than all other champs in all areas. Taken as a whole, that's probably the single most important balancing relationship the devs tune. But there are other constraints on champions besides average performance. A champ that is below average everywhere else, but could solo the Abyss in ten minutes is totally broken. In terms of average performance, the champ might be fine. It might even lag most other champions. And over the lifetime of a player's account, getting the Abyss rewards in ten minutes may not even average out to a very high reward boost over years. BUT we all know that's broken, and the devs know that's broken, because while averages are important, specific performance in specific important areas can be singularly important if they fall too much out of line.
To put it another way, taken as a whole we might judge a student who gets all Bs to have a similar academic performance to a student who gets mostly Bs, but a couple As and a C. One has the fewest low grades, the other has the most high grades. We might say one is better than the other, but they are at least similar. But we might decide that no amount of As compensates for a single F. The student with all As except for one F could potentially average out to a higher GPA than the student with all Bs (with enough grades), but that first student still failed something and that's significant over and above the averages.
There is performance that is too much for everyone to have, and then there's performance too much for anyone to have.