**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Options
Upcoming Cull Obsidian and Ebony Maw Balance Changes
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Do your jobs and do a better job balancing the champions before releasing them so this is not necessary.
She-Hulk aside, I think that in most cases where Kabam have released a champion that had what could be considered to be a broken mechanic - Mr Sinister Suicide abuse/NF/Cull's basically 1 hitting MEQ bosses - upon discovery they have hot fixed it, and I would think that very few people ranked up champions on the basis of an interaction that's clearly bugged.
I think that we should also consider the timeframes involved here. If there is a champion that's OP, and you know with a degree of certainty that it's going to be nerfed, you've probably got the better part of 6 months gameplay with an overpowered champion. In that time you can power through enough content to pretty much get the resources for another rank up.
I don't think there was very much disagreement that the way Kabam communicated these changes was poor. The question is what to do about it moving forward. Kabam seems to acknowledge in the interview that downstream balancing changes are a necessary part of the game, but the question was how to better communicate both the scope and direction of those changes, and how to better explain what prompts them in ways that can be understood with, and I quote "player-facing data." In other words, can they describe what their data mining tells them in ways the players can better understand without the benefit of the internal data mining.
It doesn't sound like they are abandoning champion post-live reviews or downstream balancing in general, nor does it sound like they are prepared to release their internal data to the players. Which means they can't address one of the core complaints regarding "long term" future uncertainty about if champions will be rebalanced or tuned post-launch. They seem to be primarily tackling the problem of "short term" uncertainty about what kinds of changes the players should expect, when they announce changes will happen, and the I guess you could call it "medium term" uncertainty about what prompts changes to happen so players can better predict when they are more or less likely to occur.
etc, nonsensical arguments ..., glad to see an actual Kabam dev set these people straight and admit that they should have shared more info with us including their findings, and WHY they felt he was "over the top".
That's all we've been asking for WRONG .. again ... just to make it clear (as I have on several previous occassions with you), YOU are the only one that keeps mentioning the term "CODE" .. everyone else is requesting the "DATA" (in direct regards to the dmg he deals, nothing more, nothing less).
*sigh*
An explanation is one thing. Showing data and "homework" is a ridiculous idea for Devs to have to do with a Player Base when it comes to their product. Kabam wants to be transparent and they want people to trust their decisions. I get it. People demanding it because they have changes planned is just ludicrous IMO. It's like holding decisions hostage.
They are making a choice to show it because they care about the Players and their trust. Not out of fear of financial loss. Big difference. They could just as easily be like a plethora of companies I could name that take feedback in, say nothing, and make their decisions. Those companies continue to thrive and make money just fine. I don't think people fully realize how fortunate this situation is. It is extremely rare to have a company take feedback into account as much as this game does. Very few do. As much as people feel they're not transparent or considerate, that's absolutely not the case. I'd say they go over and above. Therein lies the misconception with this attitude. People actually believe that with enough withholding and complaining, they can control anything that comes. Not all Players, of course. Many actually think they're in control of what happens to the game because they pay.
If you're asking me if it's a good thing they're sharing more, I agree. I'm not vindictive or malicious. I don't like to see people confused or scared. However, if you're asking me if it's mandatory, or that they MUST, that's a big no. There's a line between asking for more information and demanding it as if it's owed.
I get that people were upset, and that's where it came from. I'm talking about the idea that they must verify their decisions and data with Players. No, I don't think that's a must. Then again, I trust their intentions because I've had a fair understanding since it was announced.
One way to do that is to analyze the problem to try to determine what the cause of the problem is, and then to project forward to see how that root cause would impact players directly. For example, let's take a less controversial example. Suppose players thought Sparky was OP, but the devs' data said he wasn't. Instead of sharing the data, the devs could analyze the data to try to determine why the data didn't match players expectations. They could conclude that the reason why some players see way more damage output is because their data suggests players are not building poise as much as you'd think. And that might suggest that the problem is that building poise takes skill, and failure causes potentially huge damage or even death. So while 1% of the players are smashing things with high health and stacked poise, the other 99% are either below 50% health because they are getting smacked in the face or not trying to stack too much poise. The conclusion would be that Sparky has high damage *potential* but that potential costs a lot of skill, and that's what balances his performance.
If you then tell the players that Sparky isn't OP because while players can demonstrate huge damage output, in practice the game data seems to show that Sparky's damage is counter-balanced by a high skill threshold, and in practice some players are getting a lot of damage while most are not, that's something the players can at least reconcile with their own experiences and the data they can observe themselves. There's no "skill metric" datamining report per se that they are revealing to the players, that's an extrapolation of the data that Kabam could share without divulging proprietary data.
And before you start whining about needing to hear from the mid their players just stop. It's not the mid tier players who figured out how to beat anything with Quake w/o being touched or solo the Champion with She-Hulk.