What Do People Want To See From Reworks?
GroundedWisdom
Member Posts: 36,619 ★★★★★
*Disclaimer, this is not a petition to Kabam, or a reflection on my own views. It's occurred to me that there is a disconnect between expectations and outcomes, and I'd like to facilitate a conversation where people can voice what they are looking for.*
What do you hope for with the revisions of Champs, whether it's a larger rework or a values change? Be as specific as you like. Do you hope for something usable at your stage? Do you hope to see a new aspect to an old Champ? Is it a reason to dust off unused Champs?
What do you feel is best to get there? A Beta program for revisions? Communication of goals between Players and Kabam? What are your ideas to get there?
Please be respectful to one another and offer your own thoughts on what you are hoping for. It's not about getting what we want in this Thread. It's just about having an open dialogue to show where the divide is.
Speak freely, within the rules of the Forum.
What do you hope for with the revisions of Champs, whether it's a larger rework or a values change? Be as specific as you like. Do you hope for something usable at your stage? Do you hope to see a new aspect to an old Champ? Is it a reason to dust off unused Champs?
What do you feel is best to get there? A Beta program for revisions? Communication of goals between Players and Kabam? What are your ideas to get there?
Please be respectful to one another and offer your own thoughts on what you are hoping for. It's not about getting what we want in this Thread. It's just about having an open dialogue to show where the divide is.
Speak freely, within the rules of the Forum.
Post edited by Kabam Porthos on
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Comments
I think a reasonable expectation is that it makes older champs better, plain and simple, or slightly adjusts newer champs to fit into the meta. I don’t think every buff should be game changing, but it should make the champs useable at worst. Some of the buffs have been amazing, some good and some bad.
Having said all of that, this Psycho Man buff is a straight up slap in the face. We went 3 months with no buffs. Then they announced they were scaling back the buffs (for the 3rd time) but announced one for Psycho Man. At least it was something to look forward too. Then we get this. Not one single summoner will be using Psycho Man anymore or less than they were before. This “update” could’ve been done without any form of announcement and no one would have noticed. Honestly, the “buff” to Moon Knight a while back allowing his bleeds to stack made his more useable than this hyped and announced one to Psycho Man.
Disappointment is the best word I can use to describe this buff.
Imagine taking the fury mechanic on Howard the Duck (where they expire one by one) and apply that to Gamora. Boom…she’s instantly more applicable and less stressful.
I’ll never pretend to be a game developer and I sure can’t sit here and pretend like I’m smarter than anyone at Kabam. But I do know I spend hours a day playing around with champs in this game, and there are so many that are one generous buff away from being awesome to play.
From a conceptual level, I’d like the dev team to frame their intentions for an updated champ in a way most players can understand. The current game often demands situational counters—what is a specific update meant to do to make Champ X more useful and in which game contexts?
For example, is a champ meant primarily as a war defender, or an attacker, or a counter to certain nodes or classes of champs? Is it a power control champ or a raw damage champ or a support champ that provides utility? Is this just an all-around quester or mainly a AQ standout? So many updates feel like they are done with no clear, articulable goal in mind (or if there is a goal, it isn’t one that matters to players).
The Psycho-Man example is a decent one: what’s his purpose in the game? He has several abilities, but isn’t really near the top flight for any of them. Not a tricky defender, not a powerful attacker. No immunities, no regen, no special attributes. Apart from Mangog (another champ who needs help), his synergies underwhelm (Microverse characters synergy not bad, however).
Why Psycho-Man? That’s a question the team should have asked and answered while it was designing his buff (and if the answer was that there have to be weak champs in the crystals, too, well that’s not enough).
Side note: The recent failures of the update program aren’t unique to the update program. There’s a divide between player and developer and has been for a while. Communication has got to get better and it has to be two-way.
Dr. Zola
First, we have the “Let’s make this champion’s rotation less stressful” types of buffs. Mr. Fantastic is probably the best example of this. They took the utility of his kit and made it easier to use, while also giving him a slight damage bump. This was all accomplished via tweaking of numbers, but it was an extremely impactful buff. Did not require anything new or flashy.
Next we have the “This champion is a bit bare-bones in the current state of the game, let’s give them a new piece of kit” kind of approach. Angela is a prime example of this. Even pre-buff, Angela’s damage output was not bad at all. It’s just that it was pretty much all she had. Her buff, giving her a unique piece of utility in the game, immediately rocketed her into relevancy and a high opinion in the community.
I want to focus on the phrasing I used there, “relevancy.” I think that’s what a good buff should aim for. I don’t need or want every buffed champion to suddenly be on every top ten champions list or whatever, but I do want them to enter into conversations of “who is a viable counter for X challenge?” They don’t have to be the best, but they do have to be relevant to modern content.
For negative examples of this, we can look to Guillotine and Nova. Widely panned by the community, these two buffs have one major thing in common: they did not add relevancy to their kits. There is no piece of content where you could not bring those champions before their reworks where they are now viable. If you look at the Venn Diagram of fights that Guillotine was good for prior to her buff, and the fights she is good for after her buff, you get almost a perfect circle. She may arguably be *better* at those same fights now, but those fights were not terribly relevant for Act 6 and beyond. The same is true of Nova. There is nowhere he can go now that he couldn’t go before.
So that’s how I measure a good buff and a couple of the potential thought processes that can lead to that outcome. Obviously there are more ways than just the ones I listed, but I’m typing this while I’m at work so I should probably go back to my actual job.
To answer your question; I want Kabam to stop with these over conservative "buffs", and go back to what made people happy and wanting to spend, especially now that gas/food is sky rocketing. People won't have as much disposable income as before and have to think twice. Another story for another time though.
Guillotine and Psycho-Man are two prime examples of this. When the Guilly buff went live last year, a lot of people were left scratching their heads. It mostly felt like she'd had her abilities swapped around rather than significantly improved, with some of her most popular abilities being changed in a way that didn't resonate with people. I think she could have benefited greatly from Kabam explaining why they did the changes they made. Would that have made people fall in love with her? Maybe not (probably not), but at least it would have made us understand the changes better as well as her new place in the Contest.
I think Psycho-Man is in a similar category and could likewise benefit from an explanation as to why these specific changes were made and not others. I don't have him so I can't speak from any personal experience but the people I know who do have him have not seemed particularly impressed with the buff. I think a bit more communication could be good.
It seems like Kabam often just releases champions - both newly released ones and those newly buffed - into the wild and leaves it to the community to figure them out. Sometimes that takes a while, such as with Spidey 2099 and Miles, but we tend to get there as a community eventually and I do see the point with that approach. However, I think that especially very small changes to champions could be better spotlighted by Kabam so that people don't just outright dismiss the champions. I think that's in both our and Kabam's best interest.
Some reasoning for why certain changes were made would actually give some insight into what the intention was.
I am still not sure of the intention behind Guillotine's changes... and she still doesn't feel like a proper Mystic Champion.
Civil Warrior had potential, but his gameplay of maintaining furies is honestly a bit stressful.
A: To get cancelled.
I'd also like to see what should be easily programmable, a flat value increase for all of the trash OG champs like OG Iron Man, Iron Patriot, Deadpools, Groot, Doc. Strange, Cap America classic, etc. - where they just give them something like a flat 20-30% increase or more in health, attack, crit rate, crit damage, armor, block proficiency and sig value. Even if OG Iron Mat got a 20% increase across the board, he would not be game breaking or beyond god tier, but maybe he could become usable on occasion.
One thing I really feel has been missed on the few buffs that have been negatively received is that the problems that these champs have weren’t addressed or fixed. All of the buffs that were successful made changes that fixed the problems that had been identified with those champs pre-existing kits. These changes included adding damage, adding utility, or just tweaking numbers to make a champ’s rotation less stressful and easier to manage.
I just feel like there have been multiple buffs at this point where there’s a disconnect between what the player base thinks a champ needs and what the dev team thinks a champ needs. This disconnect and the lack of communication just becomes frustrating when we see these types of buffs come time after time. I really think that there should be a platform set up where we can give feedback on the current performance of champs, and identify areas where they could improve and actually give possible suggestions for improvements. I know we have the suggestions part of the forums, but it just feels like those are never taken into consideration or even looked at sometimes.
Primary goal should be to make such champs useful for some people which means they should either have very good damage output or a decent mix of damage & utility, alongwith at least average sustainability & moderately enjoyable playstyle
I’d also like to see less obstinate or punitive responses when buffs go wrong. Not many have gone wrong, but the response to the Guillotine update compared to the Hood’s update has been night and day. It seems like the Guilly update’s poor reception by the players warranted stubbornly digging in with a pretty condescending “we’re happy with it, deal with it” response. This was followed by what seems like a removal of the popular buff program, replaced by a Balancing Update that nobody wants or makes sense.
Poor communication and a lack of transparency seem to be the only values updated with the Psycho-man changes. It’s disappointing, to say the least.
Let me rephrase…. I would like the buffed champs to actually get meaningful changes that make them realistic to use in anything other than arena. Is that better?
Let me rephrase…. I would like the buffed champs to actually get meaningful changes that make them realistic to use in anything other than arena. Is that better?