**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
We have not set an end-date for the new period, but we will update this banner when we have more information.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
We have not set an end-date for the new period, but we will update this banner when we have more information.
Comments
The questions that I wanted to see an answer to were just ignored and the safe questions got answered.
Very disappointing!
We vote for a buff and get a nerf instead. Please don't ever have a player choice buff vote again. Regret taking her to r2
Fans of Guillotine voted for her because they loved the character and her unique place in the Contest, wanted the buff to be the same plus a little extra utility or relevance to the wider contest. Players who have invested their hard earned and won rank up resources want to see their investment justified or at very least not undermined.
Kabam decided to buff not just on what she was, but what they wanted her to be. As an Attacker, Defender, level of utility, for veterans and new players. They have their own set of criteria.
Very often, the two things line up. In this case, and the original Hood buff, and a lesser extent the DDHK buff, they don't. And clearly from Kabam John's comments, there isn't going to be a rollback of significant change to the new Guillotine.
Summoners are entitled to ask for RDT. Kabam are entitled to say no, because they don't like issuing RDT as the end result would be people would go and rank up someone else and not play Guillotine ever again. The effort would be largely wasted. But, people won't want to use her because they don't like the buff and feel negatively about the champion so that effort is wasted anyways.
It's a bit of a pickle.
And to address that this buff was aimed toward lower level players: A lot of lower level players look up to higher level players for advise on who to rank up wether it be from looking at their profile, looking on Youtube, or asking them directly in the Global Chat. When higher level players are saying that Guillotine is bad, then the lower level players aren't going to want to use her either. Plus her new play style is way more stressful than her old play style and that doesn't seem to benefit newer players.
Totally agreed. I recently pulled guilly as a 5* but she's gonne be at R1 until she gets a proper buff that she deserves. I don't think kabam will give rank down tickets at all. So no hopes there.
Looking at her changes, I'm still not sure how her regen could possibly be the only problem.
After trying the rework, I was so disappointed I basically said "I'm not using her again, because even 'optimal' play won't be any different"
What I think about her rework, with more thought put in:
- Basic Attacks (Bleed)
Her chance to bleed is low, and further hampered by her crit rate being generally not high. In the very brief time I tried using her, bleeds were just too rare to be significant.
- Heavy Attack
Bleed Curse... despite its mystical sounding name is just a Bleed inflicted by a Heavy Attack, which creates more Bleeds on Special Attacks.
Unfortunately, this isn't exactly groundbreaking, considering another red-clad Champion also has a Bleed on heavy attacks which can create more bleeds (though on any critical hit at all). But for them, Bleed actually does something more.
With a name like "Bleed Curse", the least it could do was have some interaction with opponent buffs, rather than be a fancy Bleed debuff.
The most positive I can say about it is that it stacks. If you can get enough heavies in.
- Special Attacks
SP1's Pain Link? To be rather honest, I don't know much about what this is actually meant to do...
I think it's supposed to be a defensive ability, because I can't really think of any offensive application it has that a different champion wouldn't do better, since she still takes the damage. All of it. And heals only 2% of whatever damage she is reflecting onto her opponent...?
SP2's Spectre is... It's fine. It didn't need changing anyway. Pausing Spectre gives her something against those few Champions who have reduced Debuff duration, but as it is a debuff it is still prone to Tenacity and similar. Tenacity in general pretty much shuts her down but we won't go into that.
SP3... I don't really know here. Old Guillotine could deal massive chunks of damage with this if she managed to get enough souls, making for a spectacular fight ender, but... I can see if they thought this was too strong, even if arguably she did need a few synergies to reliably build Souls against high HP opponents.
The Degeneration new Guillotine has obviously lacks that same powerful feel (considering that it does 'a fair bit of damage over a long time' as opposed to 'an instant hit of massive percentage damage', and the base damage of her SP3 is... low. Really low.
- Souls
Speaking of souls, they're a bit easier to get now (I say this, but there's the problem of actually inflicting Bleeds), so that's nice - she doesn't require as many synergies. They also give some extra Attack now... which would be fine if her special attacks didn't spend them on "utility" that doesn't exactly feel worth the loss of damage.
- Awakened Ability
Her sig... gives an option against Bleed immune Champions (but not Champions who punish you for making them Bleed, which is... fine. There are other options.)
- Conclusion
All in all, she still doesn't feel like a proper Mystic Champion, her playstyle got a lot less interesting, her abilities got less interesting (when that 10% chance regen of old Guilly actually procced, it could give big numbers, which was one thing I liked - even if it was unreliable) and now she's honestly less appealing to me and I'm sure there are sadly many others who like her less now.
A grand shame.
We waited months for this buff and people were campaigning to vote for Guilly or Antman. The community was excited, and rightfully so. When you give people the option to weigh in, you cannot half-*ss it, then it’s better to not do any vote at all.
Guilly is a beloved character and many of us praise the work that went into her design, which makes this hurt so much more. Buffs are tough as hell to keep balanced, so please, if you aren’t confident a buff will be fantastic, you should not start a hype train for it.
To be clear, I don’t think this was intentional. I don’t think anybody at Kabam sat down and said “Let’s make this champion worse.” One of the biggest takeaways (that seems to have been largely missed) is that there’s a grand total of one person who is fully dedicated to champion buffs. Kabam John helps too, but he seems to be all over the company, so he can’t be putting that much time into this.
That’s wild to me. No wonder they dialed back the number of updates and why some of them have been so lackluster. That’s a ton of work for one person to do!! They have to come up with the idea, implement it, balance the numbers, reimplement, troubleshoot it, on and on it goes. Then do it again for the other champion that month. I’d hand in a Nova buff at that point too.
I don’t blame the individual devs who worked on this because I’m sure they are overtaxed. I think the MCoC team may be a lot smaller than I’d previously believed, which is worrisome in a lot of ways and explains why so much seems to slip through the cracks.
I hope this changes. I hope that the game team gets a proper allocation of resources and the help they need to make this game run smoothly and create champions we as a community can enjoy.
For a game of this size, that has lasted this long, and clearly has a very large number of active participants, I would have thought the basic ideas I have just mentioned wouldn't be necessary to say. Unfortunately, the Guillotine buff is just the tip of the ice berg of which beneath is an ever increasing array of in game issues and unlikable decisions which don't seem to be getting the necessary diligence before going live.
If Kabam doesn’t want to open such a discussion to the whole community (which would be understandable because that would generate an overwhelming amount of feedback and probably entail its own issues), they could use a separate platform for these discussions. They could use their survey system if that’s easier. But it’s clear that there is no shortage of players who love this game, understand the balance of it, and would be willing to chip in some free labor to see the characters they love done properly.
However, I also think most people who aren't familiar with the game development process aren't fully appreciating how pipelined and siloed the process generally is as well. I believe Kabam John mentioned that there's two people mostly working on updates but five to seven working on new champs. That makes it seem like they are dedicating far more resources to new champs. But most champion updates only touch numbers: they don't change models, animations, visual effects, sound design, or any of that stuff. Two people touching numbers and ability design is actually a comparable level of effort to seven people making whole new champions from scratch, if you are focusing on ability design itself. Not identical, but not as disparate as the numbers themselves make it seem.
Are they a bit slammed by the workload? Probably. They probably have a similar number of employees they had a couple years ago when we went through the whole "burnout/boredom" dev diary situation, and the developers accelerated content and champion updates and designs. They are doing more with the same resources. That time cannot materialize for free. Lots of things have to change. That's part of why they revamped the arenas: going from five to three lowered the internal costs of maintaining them, which frees resources to do other things.
This isn't to make excuses: I'm sure Kabam itself would say they have the same responsibility to deliver the best product they can regardless of the development situation. But there are practical limits on what can and cannot be done, and every push in one direction comes at a cost from somewhere else.
To be honest, I factored all of this into my original feedback on Guillotine. A lot of what I believe to be the flaws in Guillotine's update aren't the result of lack of time or rushed mistakes or a resource bottleneck. They are the result of unforced design decisions that made Guillotine more vulnerable to such things, and the *lazy* way of updating Guillotine would have almost certainly ended up better. I don't fault Kabam for taking risks: if they stop taking risks the game is going to stagnate, and if they are taking legitimate risks sometimes those risks will bite them. You have to be able to take the downside with the upside when you take calculated risks. But I believe the risks taken with Guillotine were not necessary risks, and the theoretical upside wasn't worth the downside.
Rarely if ever do I complain that the devs are overworked and underpaid, or lazy, or stupid. I always assume they are doing their best, and informed by data and process that I might be completely unaware of. When I complain, it is because the decisions I see appear wrong to be even when factoring all of that and then some, and they *still* seem wrong. I give the developers a lot of benefit of the doubt. Only when all of it fails to account for the issue do I strongly complain.
Communication is not about one side admitting their wrong while the other side talks. Communication is about the free exchange of ideas. Somewhere in there you hope that the free exchange of ideas gets people to think beyond their experience, and that sometimes causes people to learn something new. But you can't get there in one jump.
You don't change people's minds by getting them to admit they are wrong. You get them to change their minds by surrounding them with your best ideas, and hope that they recognize on their own that some of them are better than the ones they had.
An admission from Kabam that they were wrong with the Guilly update is worthless if they don't honestly believe it. It would be lip service to placate us, while they went back to doing what they were doing. Remember they don't work for us. They work for their supervisors, and through them for Kabam management, and through *them* for their Netmarble overlords. Being honest with us tells us something that might be useful. But they don't have to be honest. They can hide behind corporate messaging, or they can be completely silent. We can't force them to exposes their thinking to us. Most game developers do not do that with their playerbases.
If we want the developers to sit with us at the table and tell us what they were thinking, we can't tell them they said the wrong things. We have to distinguish disagreeing with their *position* while accepting that their *expression* of their position is at least honest.
I don't let them off the hook just because they agreed to do an AMA. However, I choose to take them at their word, and critique their position about the buff, which they so kindly helped me to understand. I thank them for honestly explaining their position, because it now gives me a clearer understanding of what to challenge, and how to challenge it directly. I can only try to change their minds if I know what their minds are, and guessing is not as good as knowing. I want them to *honestly* tell me why they think they are right, so I can try to prove to them that they are wrong. At the risk of sounding more confrontational than intended, honesty is radar: it tells me where to aim.
And reading a bit of the above... I agree, I don't blame any individual devs. I mean.. c'mon, the champion buff program has turned out some amazing results. Let's look at it like this... I just counted and 8 of my r3 6 stars are buffed characters. That's proof that the buff program has been a success on the whole. I do think it's very important to give appreciation for all the hard work that's gone into it.
Here's the thing. I'm not upset because I feel that Guillotine's buff was a huge miss. I'm upset at the response to our feedback. That's why I'm upset. It sucks to have the vote, wait months... only to actually feel that your champion (r2 before announcement of vote) is now worse instead of better. But... we're being told that we are wrong and our opinion won't be considered... when it was their idea to hold the dang vote in the first place.
I'm curious how much feedback was obtained from CCP members on this subject. And what it was.