This is a pointless cover. Half of the stuff mentioned is useless to summoner and will make no difference in the game or gameplay. Instead here's a thought.
We've been dealing with control issues for months with no hope in sight. Alliance wars haven't been working properly as well. How bout fixing that stuff first and foremost then work on some of the less desirable champs that could use some help in the game.
We don't need a stupid rating system of champs. As a community we generally do our own form of rating so that we don't get scammed by kabam releases. The new champs will never perform like they do as eq bosses so we just read past to see what they actually do.
Here's another thought how bout removing 3* champs from some crystals for being throne breaker. I didn't bust out a pile to continue getting crappy 3* pulls and im sure anyone else that's in this position would agree.
I'm sure there will be piles of help and availability once mroc shuts down.
Nerfs went horribly last time. If people don’t feel safe getting new champs and upgrading champs in general in fear of nerfs, where’s the enjoyment out of that?
My main question. If I take a champion to r3/4 as a 6* or r5 as a 5* and it's determined that they're too powerful and get tuned down. Are we gonna get the ever elusive and always glorious rank down tickets. Not generic ones but specific to the champs like you did with Namor and Carl O'Cinnamon?
So now we will have some official "Tier List" of champions or what? If so That sounds a bit boring and primitive. Let the community and players judge the champions and their place in the game without giving some "official" hierarchy between them. Also, all these essay sounds like a justification to slow down the champions buffing process... That buff thing was one of the most exciting things in the game now that also slowed down apparently.
My biggest concern is how often the champion spotlights don't really high light a champions strengths. To me it's pretty clear that kabam doesn't recognize the potential of champs that are released or assume they're more effective than they actually are... This new rating system seems kind of... Idk. Worthless.
So here’s my list of champions that are pretty useless in the game. There’s more that would ideally need a buff as well, but I have no idea why the focus is not on buffing these as quickly as possible. Then we’d start to see some balance to the game.
Abomination, Captain America, Captain America WW2, Ant Man, Hulk, Rhino, Sentry, Spider-Man, Agent Venom, Black Widow, Daredevil, Elektra, Korg, Moon Knight, Punisher, Winter Soldier, Beast, Cyclops Blue, Cyclops Red, Deadpool X Force, Nightcrawler, Storm, Iron Patriot (still trash for me), Green Goblin, Iron Man, Iron Patriot, Psycho Man (confirmed value buff), Red Skull, Rocket, Yondu, Black Bolt, Captain Marvel, Drax, Gamora (still trash for me), Groot, Heimdall, Ms Marvell, Nova (still trash for me), Phoenix, Ronan, Spider-Man Symbiote, Superior Iron Man, Thor, Dr Strange, Iron Fist, Immortal Iron Fist, Juggernaut, Loki, Mordo, Jane Foster, Unstoppable Colossus
Did you mean to say Civil Warrior when you wrote ‘Iron Patriot (still trash for me)’?
Ah good catch. Looks like I added in Iron Patriot twice. The first one should have been Civil Warrior. I actually chose from a 6* Nexus Civil Warrior prior to his buff being announced. The other choices were awful so thought I go for him in the hope he’d get a good buff. He did not.
So from 4 reworks/month to 2 reworks/month to 1 rework/month and you still haven't updated a single OG champ (significantly) (OG Spiderman/Superior Iron man/ Iron man/ ALL of the Guardians of galaxy - poor Groot-) and you have no plans to update them anytime soon from the look of it in the near future...
You're right, but everyone already has the OGs. No money to be made buffing champs already available in most summoner's rosters...
For a company on thin ice with the community for the past year, has been losing money, and just cancelled an entire game, you actually couldn't have picked a worse time to bring up nerfing champions. It's impressive how off the mark that is right now.
So much wasted energy. I call shens that people use Namor or Cull as much as they did before their nerfs. The only reason people call them in off the bench anymore is because the nerfs didn't totally break them, just made them worse overall, Namor still 100% reflects bs damage and Cull still stacks a ton of useful-strength easy to apply armor breaks even though his damage is worse. How often do those situations occur though? Every 6 months? Maybe?
Unless you're keeping it 100% real and giving out a ton of 0 - 1 scores, the rating system is a waste of time. What new player is going to use either Cyclops with a cumulative 1.3? At least now they might accidentally use one of the champs they've heard of before but don't yet know that they suck compared to a c-list rando. Putting a low score on them assures they won't get used.
Throw a quick value buff on some of those champs that still suck! Off the top with an obvious example, why aren't you bumping up Heimdall and Mordo's buff values? Getting some more damage on a bunch of noodle champs or some utility that won't break the game because it's within the boundaries of an existing champ would be so much easier. I don't understand why you want to do way too much no one asked for while simultaneously not enough of what we've repeatedly asked for. Re-use some of the mechanics that you worked so hard on and crank out some parity. Take a little from here and a little from there and suddenly someone might really want to use OG Cap or Iron Man.
Okay, I've got a warmer-than-room-temperature take here:
I am not opposed to the idea of champion nerfs. I like the idea of Kabam being able to go wild in champion creation and then dial it back as needed.
Now, where I do have an issue is that champions will be sold to the community prior to their retuning. There will be preview bundles and featured cavalier crystals and, notably, featured 5* and 6* crystal pools that run their full duration prior to the six-month review window taking place.
If Kabam wants to make a beta server for initial champion testing prior to release to catch any big or potentially game-breaking issues, that would be something I could a million percent get on board with. That sounds great! But letting players burn shards, units, or real dollars on a champion that isn't fully built yet... that does not sit well. At all. I would have to consider going back to exclusively the basic pool because the featured pool champions may be subject to negative review.
As for the deceleration of old champion reworks... I am immensely saddened by that. I know the team has finite time and resources, but the reworks were what I most looked forward to on a month to month basis. Not having that is really going to diminish my excitement with a new monthly patch. Just going to get a new standard EQ and SQ and two champions that I might see on my roster in half a year's time.
@Kabam Miike you guys should check out karatemikes video -https://youtu.be/OGHfGx6BKho. They way he rated the Champs were spot on. He even rated Champs that have value in different content in the game. I would be on board with you guys using him to rate Champs to help with balancing.
I like Karate Mike and he puts out good content, as does many others in the community but we don't need this rating system 'by Kabam'... Community already does it. Plenty of tier lists, etc out there to check out if someone wants some additional input to who they could invest in the game that they have on their roster. Kabam should focus its time and resources elsewhere.
There is way too much negativity here. I hate when something new to the game is disliked so much. This is a neat idea, Definitly gonna be interesting how you rate the heroes.
I will wait and see it come to the game before I make my finale opinion. Looking forward to changes.
Disappointed that buffs are going down even more, hopefully you put out some really good buffs then. Hope the new champion tune ups turn out good.
Will wait and see how it turns out! Looking forward to it!
This just seems like a big waste of time. The rating are going to be so subjective. Maybe the Damage rating can be based on player data, but there are still so many different situations that impact it: synergies, awakened abilities, ramp-ups, skill-level required, and probably a dozen other things. Putting one number to all of that doesn’t even make sense. Let alone trying to rate utility or ease of use.
Please spend less time on all of this nonsense and just make progress buffing all the garbage champs in this game. There are way too many of them.
@Kabam Miike you guys should check out karatemikes video -https://youtu.be/OGHfGx6BKho. They way he rated the Champs were spot on. He even rated Champs that have value in different content in the game. I would be on board with you guys using him to rate Champs to help with balancing.
I like Karate Mike and he puts out good content, as does many others in the community but we don't need this rating system 'by Kabam'... Community already does it. Plenty of tier lists, etc out there to check out if someone wants some additional input to who they could invest in the game that they have on their roster. Kabam should focus its time and resources elsewhere.
This rating system will cut down on "Is this champ any good?" posts throughout the internet. Those wondering can look in-game, get a quick, "No, they suck" and keep it moving. Yay?
The more I think of this the more it feels like this is just a doubling down on using the live production environment as a test server. Don’t we deal with enough bugs already?
The saddest part of this, and what is going unsaid, is that Kabam is finally admitting to they cannot balance champs BEFORE release and instead have finally admitted that their best employees are the unpaid players of the game. If they could, then the old buff cadence would work just fine. Instead, the breaks get put on because of incompetence.
As for the rating system, I'm still skeptical, especially if you think hercules doesn't have utility.
I did make a joke about this, but here's my opinion on this one. Take this for whatever it is worth. I do not believe that the rating system is intended to state that Hercules has low utility, as most players would define utility. I think that rating is meant to say "Hercules was intended by design to have very few abilities that we ordinarily define to be utility abilities, as exclusive from damage and survivability." And he doesn't. The fact that people think Hercules as a champion in total has strong utility doesn't mean he's broken. It just means players value his overall utility more than the raw numbers.
The point to the ratings becomes more important when a champ fails to perform well in-game. If that happens, we can then look to the design ratings to see where he fell short. We might immediately say "she needs more damage" (like we always do) but if we see that the champion's design rating was 3/5 damage and 5/5 utility, we could then focus more on how her utility is falling short. Or maybe the design had 4/5 utility and 4/5 survivability, and we could try to focus our feedback on how the champ's survivability was too low for a champ with average damage.
The point to the design ratings is to tell us what the devs intended for the champ, so that the players and the devs could be on the same page when it came to seeing where the champion might be falling short. They can't all be 5/5 damage champs, they can't all be 5/5 utility champs. Someone has to be average, someone has to be below average (that's inherent in the definition of average). But no champ should be average or below average everywhere. There should be places they are weak, and places they are strong. The ratings tell us what the target was. It isn't intended to *define* how the champ should perform in all cases.
At least, that's how I see how the ratings should function. Whether they do or not is of course not up to me.
So basically long:short; we can’t even fulfill 2 year old promises to you, so allow us to release this new dumpster fire that will try to make you forget about our previously unfulfilled commitments. Oh and while you’re hopefully looking at this shiny object over here, we’re also openly telling you that we’re going to go ahead and nerf champions whenever we feel like it after we squeeze your wallets through Cavalier or other crystals and say “oh oops that champion isn’t functioning as intended”.
You guys may as well just come out and say you’re bent on burying this game 6 feet under.
This game isn’t going to last forever, and maybe it’s viewed as sunk cost — it’s an older game, now.
I don’t know what will be the end of this game. I do know this: Players genuinely looked forward to buffs each month. Now those are being cut down.
It’s definitely not easy to get 5/6-star rarities of characters released in the same calendar year. Not saying it’s impossible. Just saying that with more than 200 characters or so in the game…man. I don’t know.
I said this recently: I don’t understand Kabam and how they approach things. I really don’t.
So basically long:short; we can’t even fulfill 2 year old promises to you, so allow us to release this new dumpster fire that will try to make you forget about our previously unfulfilled commitments. Oh and while you’re hopefully looking at this shiny object over here, we’re also openly telling you that we’re going to go ahead and nerf champions whenever we feel like it after we squeeze your wallets through Cavalier or other crystals and say “oh oops that champion isn’t functioning as intended”.
You guys may as well just come out and say you’re bent on burying this game 6 feet under.
This game isn’t going to last forever, and maybe it’s viewed as sunk cost — it’s an older game, now.
I don’t know what will be the end of this game. I do know this: Players genuinely looked forward to buffs each month. Now those are being cut down.
It’s definitely not easy to get 5/6-star rarities of characters released in the same calendar year. Not saying it’s impossible. Just saying that with more than 200 characters or so in the game…man. I don’t know.
I said this recently: I don’t understand Kabam and how they approach things. I really don’t.
As for the rating system, I'm still skeptical, especially if you think hercules doesn't have utility.
I did make a joke about this, but here's my opinion on this one. Take this for whatever it is worth. I do not believe that the rating system is intended to state that Hercules has low utility, as most players would define utility. I think that rating is meant to say "Hercules was intended by design to have very few abilities that we ordinarily define to be utility abilities, as exclusive from damage and survivability." And he doesn't. The fact that people think Hercules as a champion in total has strong utility doesn't mean he's broken. It just means players value his overall utility more than the raw numbers.
The point to the ratings becomes more important when a champ fails to perform well in-game. If that happens, we can then look to the design ratings to see where he fell short. We might immediately say "she needs more damage" (like we always do) but if we see that the champion's design rating was 3/5 damage and 5/5 utility, we could then focus more on how her utility is falling short. Or maybe the design had 4/5 utility and 4/5 survivability, and we could try to focus our feedback on how the champ's survivability was too low for a champ with average damage.
The point to the design ratings is to tell us what the devs intended for the champ, so that the players and the devs could be on the same page when it came to seeing where the champion might be falling short. They can't all be 5/5 damage champs, they can't all be 5/5 utility champs. Someone has to be average, someone has to be below average (that's inherent in the definition of average). But no champ should be average or below average everywhere. There should be places they are weak, and places they are strong. The ratings tell us what the target was. It isn't intended to *define* how the champ should perform in all cases.
At least, that's how I see how the ratings should function. Whether they do or not is of course not up to me.
I'm kinda honored that THE DNA3000 responded to me. I see what you're saying and I get that not every champ can have CGR damage or excel at everything. I understand that the ratings are meant to tell us what kabam was going for. I'm really just annoyed about them changing the buff cadence and this rating system just seemed like effort that could be used elsewhere.
So basically long:short; we can’t even fulfill 2 year old promises to you, so allow us to release this new dumpster fire that will try to make you forget about our previously unfulfilled commitments. Oh and while you’re hopefully looking at this shiny object over here, we’re also openly telling you that we’re going to go ahead and nerf champions whenever we feel like it after we squeeze your wallets through Cavalier or other crystals and say “oh oops that champion isn’t functioning as intended”.
You guys may as well just come out and say you’re bent on burying this game 6 feet under.
This game isn’t going to last forever, and maybe it’s viewed as sunk cost — it’s an older game, now.
I don’t know what will be the end of this game. I do know this: Players genuinely looked forward to buffs each month. Now those are being cut down.
It’s definitely not easy to get 5/6-star rarities of characters released in the same calendar year. Not saying it’s impossible. Just saying that with more than 200 characters or so in the game…man. I don’t know.
I said this recently: I don’t understand Kabam and how they approach things. I really don’t.
This game is not a sunk cost lol😂😂
Honest question: Would you explain how you feel that this game, seven years in, isn’t sunk cost?
As for the rating system, I'm still skeptical, especially if you think hercules doesn't have utility.
I did make a joke about this, but here's my opinion on this one. Take this for whatever it is worth. I do not believe that the rating system is intended to state that Hercules has low utility, as most players would define utility. I think that rating is meant to say "Hercules was intended by design to have very few abilities that we ordinarily define to be utility abilities, as exclusive from damage and survivability." And he doesn't. The fact that people think Hercules as a champion in total has strong utility doesn't mean he's broken. It just means players value his overall utility more than the raw numbers.
The point to the ratings becomes more important when a champ fails to perform well in-game. If that happens, we can then look to the design ratings to see where he fell short. We might immediately say "she needs more damage" (like we always do) but if we see that the champion's design rating was 3/5 damage and 5/5 utility, we could then focus more on how her utility is falling short. Or maybe the design had 4/5 utility and 4/5 survivability, and we could try to focus our feedback on how the champ's survivability was too low for a champ with average damage.
The point to the design ratings is to tell us what the devs intended for the champ, so that the players and the devs could be on the same page when it came to seeing where the champion might be falling short. They can't all be 5/5 damage champs, they can't all be 5/5 utility champs. Someone has to be average, someone has to be below average (that's inherent in the definition of average). But no champ should be average or below average everywhere. There should be places they are weak, and places they are strong. The ratings tell us what the target was. It isn't intended to *define* how the champ should perform in all cases.
At least, that's how I see how the ratings should function. Whether they do or not is of course not up to me.
It's going to take so much effort to make this rating system worth using by a sizeable chunk of players or even getting it to a state where they'd bother to release it. It's going to raise so many questions, like at what point one aspect bleeds into another, so when does big damage become a utility? When does utility become survivability? Is Namor's 100% reflect a utility, survivability, or damage? What about Offense, Defense, Synergy considerations? I can't see that it's worth the effort compared to being more efficient with existing champ buffs (RE👏USE👏 ABILITY 👏ASSETS👏! I have faith they can do it if they pretend they're OG animations😂) and doing a better job with pre-release testing.
This just seems like a big waste of time. The rating are going to be so subjective. Maybe the Damage rating can be based on player data, but there are still so many different situations that impact it: synergies, awakened abilities, ramp-ups, skill-level required, and probably a dozen other things. Putting one number to all of that doesn’t even make sense. Let alone trying to rate utility or ease of use.
This seems to be a common misconception, or maybe I'm the one that's wrong here, but to clarify my position here my understanding is the devs aren't going to analyze every single champ and try to figure out what rating to give to them, like a player making a tier list. They are going to publish what the design intent was for that champ, or in the case of older champs for which that is no longer available they are going to try to retroactively publish what they believe the design intent was supposed to be. They aren't *measuring* champ damage to determine the rating. They are saying "this champ was intended to have high damage, this one was intended to have average damage, this one was intended to have below average damage." They are just doing that with numbers and not adjectives.
*Separately* they will be using the game metrics to try to get an idea whether the champ *meets* that design rating. But they have always done that, this isn't something they are starting to do now. They are just formalizing the structure for how they do that so they can better communicate this to the players.
The devs are *not* making a tier list, or a four point ratings list. It is probably a misnomer to even call it a rating. It is more of a target. The reason why I say this is because of this:
When we conducted tuning changes in the past, the majority of negative feedback from the community was due to the fact that these tuning changes were conducted in a vacuum. Players had a hard time understanding what was overpowered and underpowered and had no input into what was changing.
Now, with the rating system, players will be able to better judge if a Champion is in the right place, and be able to give feedback along the way while updates are being made.
In other words, this sounds like the devs will be tuning champs to match the ratings, not set the ratings to match the champs. So the rating has to be more of what the devs want, not what they know the champ is. The ratings are subjective in a sense, because I believe they express intent. But that's unavoidable with intent. The point is not for the rating to be an absolute measure of a champ's performance. I believe it is to communicate to the players what the devs are aiming for, so devs and players are on the same page.
Balancing after release will help a lot with things that can’t be predicted, like champs being ridiculously OP or just plain useless. OP champs sound like a good thing, but there are drawbacks, and let’s be honest. 99% of us won’t get a champ until at least 6 months after its release anyway.
The rating system I’m not a fan of. While the goal is good, there’s just no way you can narrow champs abilities down to five categories. It might be a necessary step because way too many champs get thrown out or looked past due to lack of big yellow numbers, but you might do well to expand it just a bit; specifically the utility branch.
Overall though, an honest effort and open communication with the customers driving this game is appreciated. Kudos on a great idea.
Comments
Instead here's a thought.
We've been dealing with control issues for months with no hope in sight. Alliance wars haven't been working properly as well. How bout fixing that stuff first and foremost then work on some of the less desirable champs that could use some help in the game.
We don't need a stupid rating system of champs. As a community we generally do our own form of rating so that we don't get scammed by kabam releases. The new champs will never perform like they do as eq bosses so we just read past to see what they actually do.
Here's another thought how bout removing 3* champs from some crystals for being throne breaker. I didn't bust out a pile to continue getting crappy 3* pulls and im sure anyone else that's in this position would agree.
I'm sure there will be piles of help and availability once mroc shuts down.
Unless you're keeping it 100% real and giving out a ton of 0 - 1 scores, the rating system is a waste of time. What new player is going to use either Cyclops with a cumulative 1.3? At least now they might accidentally use one of the champs they've heard of before but don't yet know that they suck compared to a c-list rando. Putting a low score on them assures they won't get used.
Throw a quick value buff on some of those champs that still suck! Off the top with an obvious example, why aren't you bumping up Heimdall and Mordo's buff values? Getting some more damage on a bunch of noodle champs or some utility that won't break the game because it's within the boundaries of an existing champ would be so much easier. I don't understand why you want to do way too much no one asked for while simultaneously not enough of what we've repeatedly asked for. Re-use some of the mechanics that you worked so hard on and crank out some parity. Take a little from here and a little from there and suddenly someone might really want to use OG Cap or Iron Man.
I am not opposed to the idea of champion nerfs. I like the idea of Kabam being able to go wild in champion creation and then dial it back as needed.
Now, where I do have an issue is that champions will be sold to the community prior to their retuning. There will be preview bundles and featured cavalier crystals and, notably, featured 5* and 6* crystal pools that run their full duration prior to the six-month review window taking place.
If Kabam wants to make a beta server for initial champion testing prior to release to catch any big or potentially game-breaking issues, that would be something I could a million percent get on board with. That sounds great! But letting players burn shards, units, or real dollars on a champion that isn't fully built yet... that does not sit well. At all. I would have to consider going back to exclusively the basic pool because the featured pool champions may be subject to negative review.
As for the deceleration of old champion reworks... I am immensely saddened by that. I know the team has finite time and resources, but the reworks were what I most looked forward to on a month to month basis. Not having that is really going to diminish my excitement with a new monthly patch. Just going to get a new standard EQ and SQ and two champions that I might see on my roster in half a year's time.
Kabam, nothing was wrong with the original buff schedule, why did you have to "fix" it.
I will wait and see it come to the game before I make my finale opinion. Looking forward to changes.
Disappointed that buffs are going down even more, hopefully you put out some really good buffs then. Hope the new champion tune ups turn out good.
Will wait and see how it turns out! Looking forward to it!
Please spend less time on all of this nonsense and just make progress buffing all the garbage champs in this game. There are way too many of them.
The point to the ratings becomes more important when a champ fails to perform well in-game. If that happens, we can then look to the design ratings to see where he fell short. We might immediately say "she needs more damage" (like we always do) but if we see that the champion's design rating was 3/5 damage and 5/5 utility, we could then focus more on how her utility is falling short. Or maybe the design had 4/5 utility and 4/5 survivability, and we could try to focus our feedback on how the champ's survivability was too low for a champ with average damage.
The point to the design ratings is to tell us what the devs intended for the champ, so that the players and the devs could be on the same page when it came to seeing where the champion might be falling short. They can't all be 5/5 damage champs, they can't all be 5/5 utility champs. Someone has to be average, someone has to be below average (that's inherent in the definition of average). But no champ should be average or below average everywhere. There should be places they are weak, and places they are strong. The ratings tell us what the target was. It isn't intended to *define* how the champ should perform in all cases.
At least, that's how I see how the ratings should function. Whether they do or not is of course not up to me.
I don’t know what will be the end of this game. I do know this: Players genuinely looked forward to buffs each month. Now those are being cut down.
It’s definitely not easy to get 5/6-star rarities of characters released in the same calendar year. Not saying it’s impossible. Just saying that with more than 200 characters or so in the game…man. I don’t know.
I said this recently: I don’t understand Kabam and how they approach things. I really don’t.
I can't see that it's worth the effort compared to being more efficient with existing champ buffs (RE👏USE👏 ABILITY 👏ASSETS👏! I have faith they can do it if they pretend they're OG animations😂) and doing a better job with pre-release testing.
*Separately* they will be using the game metrics to try to get an idea whether the champ *meets* that design rating. But they have always done that, this isn't something they are starting to do now. They are just formalizing the structure for how they do that so they can better communicate this to the players.
The devs are *not* making a tier list, or a four point ratings list. It is probably a misnomer to even call it a rating. It is more of a target. The reason why I say this is because of this:
In other words, this sounds like the devs will be tuning champs to match the ratings, not set the ratings to match the champs. So the rating has to be more of what the devs want, not what they know the champ is. The ratings are subjective in a sense, because I believe they express intent. But that's unavoidable with intent. The point is not for the rating to be an absolute measure of a champ's performance. I believe it is to communicate to the players what the devs are aiming for, so devs and players are on the same page.
Balancing after release will help a lot with things that can’t be predicted, like champs being ridiculously OP or just plain useless. OP champs sound like a good thing, but there are drawbacks, and let’s be honest. 99% of us won’t get a champ until at least 6 months after its release anyway.
The rating system I’m not a fan of. While the goal is good, there’s just no way you can narrow champs abilities down to five categories. It might be a necessary step because way too many champs get thrown out or looked past due to lack of big yellow numbers, but you might do well to expand it just a bit; specifically the utility branch.
Overall though, an honest effort and open communication with the customers driving this game is appreciated. Kudos on a great idea.