**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.
Comments
I’d agree and be fine with 15k shards for Nexus crystals. I do also think they need to increase shards rewards across the board.
Variant 4 keeps being brought up in this thread and that makes sense. It was so fun being able to use app those different champs to clear it. I know most of what I suggested would never happen. While it would make a better game in my opinion, it won’t make Kabam more money. We all know it’s money first, game quality second.
What eats up a ton of resources is all the wrapper that goes around a project like this. It takes time to convince your development manager, your producer, your fellow developers that Red Skull should be the next priority. Everyone else has their own. It takes time to convince them that a stat boost actually does the right thing in general, and it is worth pursuing that kind of change. It takes time to review that change: how it would affect RS's offense, how it would affect his performance as a defender, at all levels of the game. It takes time to decide if it should be 10% or 20% or 30%; if it should be a special attack boost or an attack rating boost or an ability boost. Then it takes time to schedule rolling that change into the next set of spreadsheet uipdates. It takes time to test them, and to collect internal data on the change, and validate it seems to be having the targeted effect.
That's how you end up with a champion update taking six to ten months. It is a couple hours of actually making the actual change, and hundreds of hours of everything else. So if the difference between tweaking RS's attack rating or doing a complete update is the difference between eight months and eight months and two hours, would you really do the small tweak? Or would you decide if you're going to burn all that time anyway, you might as well do a more extensive update?
Also, there's the self selection situation. I remember in another game where someone was explaining how long it took to fix an animation, and a player said they didn't need to do all that work, they could just do X and Y and just "settle" for that being good enough. I had to point out that most of the people who thought like him, who were willing to settle for a broken but passable animation, don't decide to become professional animators.
People who think a small tweak to RS would be perfectly fine tend, statistically speaking, to not become game developers. If you're a game developer, and you want to do small tweaks to things that will still take months of operational procedures to get done, and you still are willing to give it a try, you're likely to be completely surrounded by coworkers who fundamentally think you're crazy, because that would run counter to their base personality. Game developers want to develop games. When given the opportunity to create something, they are going to take it. If you're the guy who says "let's just tweak RS attack and call it a day" how often do you think you're going to be assigned the task of updating champs? There are bound to be lots of other developers who want a chance to do something more than that, and they are much more likely to get the next such project. Because you just wasted an opportunity to be a game creator.
BRING BACK THE OLD FEATURED CRYSTALS AND ALSO MAKE 4 STAR VERSIONS OF THEM
Isn’t that part of what the extensive testing process we’ve been told about is designed to accomplish?
It continues to befuddle me that a content creator can play with a champ for a few hours and draw significant conclusions about its utility. And yet champs get pumped out after months of lead time that serve little function in game for anyone beyond a rudimentary level.
Dr. Zola
Book 2 does not have to be a direct linear progression of Book 1 for it to add value to the progressional aspect of the content. If the challenge is sufficient it should not matter who you use from your roster. The problem with starting the new book with the top of your roster is that it doesn’t help you grow your roster only to expand it and those are different things.
I believe that a great deal of the lingering, underlying tension in this game comes from kits in older characters that are lacking 2020-level DPS, but since I won’t quit the game over it, again, I will yield the point.
I am not saying that a character has to hit as hard as a fully ramped-up Proxima Midnight but as the owner of a 5/65 Nova who plays the kit pretty well, let’s just say I am baffled at why his kit’s DPS is like it is
No champion is good or bad because of attack rating. Or for that matter because of bleed, or miss, or stun, or whatever. Those are "primitives" in the game, used to build champions. But building champions with discrete abilities and mechanics is like building software by writing it in assembly language. Of course its going to take forever to think about, to implement, and to test carefully. But I don't think about champions in terms of their discrete abilities, and I don't think most other players do either. We think about them in terms of power control and burst damage and ramp up damage and things like that. I would spend time, and it could take a while, building up a set of tools that would allow developers to assemble champions from bigger chunks. Champs would get some ramp up and stun, or power control and healing, or whatever. And then you could spice it up with some discrete mechanics. Kind of like writing a program in Python, but adding some C for some special optimizations.
If a champ is busted, don't look at the little things, look at the big things. Look at the big chunks of what they are supposed to be. If a champ that is power control + healing and some other stuff underperforms, don't spend time looking at the other stuff, look at the power control and the healing. Scale those things according to the scaling rules you formulated when you made those building blocks in the first place. "Heealing" isn't just health recovery whatever: it is designed to work in a few specific ways with specific standard rules. You don't have to follow them religiously, but when it comes to a sudden need to rebalance, the rules are the fast way to do it. And since the rules have, in a sense, been "pre-approved" you can expedite the changes. You're just following a pre-approved standard to slide the champion up or down a scale.
This is a massive oversimplification, but this idea of taking the little things and creating "metablocks" of bigger things that comprise how a champion works is an idea I know will work having seen it work, but it takes a lot of complex analysis to make it work. And then you have to retrofit it throughout the game. That too would take a ton of time, but there are analysis tricks that can accelerate the process. But that ventures into some mathy places.
What I would like for Kabam to take from this, my perspective only — and people can literally search my post history and see that I consistently defend Kabam’s right and responsibility to make money for its ownership and to pay the salaries of its employees — is that at some point, this game’s pendulum swung too far the other way and needs to shift back toward “fun” and at a bare minimum “character releases must be effective in Endgame content.”
Again: If buffing older characters simply isn’t gonna happen, then the new releases have to be able to clear the content being released in the present and near future.
RNG is a fundamental of the game? OK. Great. But that doesn’t really work with 170-plus characters and niche nodes. The characters released in the present have to meet a standard of combined DPS and utility that allows us to complete the content that is released.
Seriously — what are we supposed to do with Mole Man? AW Defense means nothing to me when I am trying to clear a lane in Act 6 — I am not even in an alliance with other members.
No one is saying every character has to be able to solo every lane. But how does a character get released that simply can’t be used when you are the guys tuning the content?
That is all I am asking for, honestly. The gates and 4-star restrictions and attack values and brutal node combinations maybe — maybe — wouldn’t be so bad if the fights weren’t such that trying to do it with Mole Man or Terrax didn’t seem impossible because of DPS
But the resounding frustrations surround rewards, randomization, diluted champion pools (with so many unusable options that only hinder progress and demoralize some of the most loyal "summoners"). This has been echoed on the forums, in chat streams, on nearly every content-creator's platforms.... and this is not a new issue. For YEARS the frustration has been an ever-present feature of this game and has been ignored. Each new underwhelming champion (evidenced by the last 10 released) only further accentuates this problem in the game. Old champions have no use, most new champions have no use. there are only a handful of "fun" champions... and a handful of "useful" champions... and those two subsets have little intersection. Yet the union/intersection of those two subsets are drown in the depths of champions that simply have no purpose whatsoever in MCoC in 2020.
Our voices as players have fallen on deaf ears, our content creators who represent our community have voiced our concerns, and again these major demotivational aspects are left unaddressed. As difficult it has been for all of us to watch great players and friends reach their limit and step-away (especially recent examples like our Alliance-mate Seatin)... it is completely understandable. Even if their purpose is solely for their own mental/physical health, they represent a trend that has been present for far too long... and has gone un-recognized by the game development staff. Long ago, many of us reached our limits of hope... and it is further exacerbated by watching the big dominoes falling all around us (long-time players leaving alliances, content-creators stepping back, players contemplating retirement, game-chats focusing on playing other games during the MCoC stagnation).
1) They couldn’t afford him.
2) Champ descriptions would all be 5,000 words long
Dr. Zola
Even Sparky is held is less regard today than when he was first released, because his damage doesn't come with enough utility. He certainly has more utility than Star Lord did, but champs like Doom, Nick Fury, and Stealth Suit Spidey that have more situational utility tend to be more highly valued.
I think the current meta-view hasn't come all the way to this point yet, but it is continuing to move towards valuing champions based not on their raw ability, but rather their situational value. A champ doesn't have to be the best at anything, what matters is are they good enough in enough situations. Is the champ good against Biohazard, regardless of *how* they are good. Are they good against Act 6 nodes, against AW paths, or on Map 7? In how many different situations that you're going to face in the game is this champ good enough to get on the team. Netflix Daredevil is horrible when judged on that standard. But Star Lord isn't actually all that much better.
it is true that many older champs are deficient in damage as well, and many of the revamps greatly improved their damage. But I think the most successful updates increased damage alongside improving utility. Luke Cage had damage increased, but he also had his indestructible improved and his debuffs ramped up. Venom had some damage increase, but i would say his utility increased far more.
As the game content gets more complex, the kit necessary to be a reasonable attacker also becomes more complex, and I think the early champs simply lack the necessary tools in most cases to serve reasonable functions in a lot of higher content. Pure damage only gets you so far most of the time. I think that's also part of what makes them difficult to update. Many of them don't even have any tools to improve: they might as well have no abilities at all. You're practically creating a new champ, at least in terms of abilities.
I don’t need Star-Lord today. I can quibble with a few points, but honestly, your post is fair.