Not totally sure how this will play out. What I am sure of is that if one of my rank 5 5*’s gets nerfed, I’m quitting. Can’t imagine how my buddy would feel about his rank 3 6*’s.
Here you guys go again with something else that we didnt need in the game im done spending with you guys period..You guys always seem to make everything worse with the game... Instead of balance come out with new content or change chaacters special attack animations or something but this is trash.... My wallet is permanently close and will never ever spend with you guys again...
I have to Disagree. Balancing is necessary in all games like this, and we have lagged behind because we haven't had the ability to really communicate where a Champion should be before they're out in the wild, and this helps with that. It won't be perfect, which is also why we're integrating players into the change process as well.
Balancing only works if you don't sell champs. You can't nerf sold champs w/o huge compensation and backlash.
Balancing is a part of the game, and it's quite clearly explained in the ToS that they have the right to modify their product if they need to. We don't purchase to own. We lease permission to use their product. Having said that, they're not building a stonewall of "Sucks to be you.". They're taking into consideration the feelings of Players investing. That's saying something. The game is not a point-of-sale final product. It's an evolving network of moving parts.
Wrong. Champ monetization is the reason that they don't nerf champs and when they do they have to give huge compensation.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree with that perspective.
@Kabam Miike Just like majority of community I am disappointed with this move.. There are still ample no. Of champs who needs buff and slowing down buff program is just not right.. already the no. Of buffs came down from 4 to 3-2 and now no buffs.. and no guaranteed buff schedule going forward.. really?? So many outdated champs from 2015/2016/2017 are still waiting for buff and you want to focus on rebalancing new champs for 6 months..??
Why not take a voting on if community prefers new champs every month vs New buffed champs every month..
First, focus on buffing existing champs and then you can start to balance new releases.. until then we can live with 1 new release champ every month..
None taken, but why not look at their data and fix the numbers before releasing their product? We're their customer, not QA.
Because the data they look at is gameplay data, not champion implementation data. What they care about is not the numbers on the page, but rather how the champion performs when you hand it to a million different people, some of whom have super high skill and some that have trouble finding their own door to leave the house in the morning.
A program that only does one or the other is broken.
A champion that should be nerfed but isn't because that's supposedly better for the players is like a student who isn't punished for cheating in class because that is supposedly better for the students. The problem is the same: both are graded on a curve. The student who cheats improves their grades at the expense of every other student. The champion that isn't nerfed keeps their performance by reducing the performance of every other champion in the game, by increasing the relative difficulty of the content of the game to accommodate it.
That's just how content is implemented in games like this. Its all driven by metrics. Average performance metrics.
I can't argue with any of this because you're right, as usual, but balance goes both ways. The opening post is a charmingly worded essay on how players, if they continue playing and spending, are going to be paying them to be their beta testers.
So who's popping Cavs on the next SupeR OP God Tier question mark exclamation point champion? Or saving 400k shards for their feature? Or spending a year's worth of r4 catalysts? There is nothing balanced or charitable about champion acquisition, so why can't they meet us halfway?
If a champ is broken, go ahead and nerf them for the health of the game, but at least consider the health of the game when designing them so we don't feel like chumps after they change their mind.
In an ideal world, it would be nice if none of this happened. But we don't live in that world, and every MMO I've ever played has had this precise line of thought come up. Why make us pay to test your game?
Because it is a game as a service. We aren't playing a product, we're using a service. A product is a thing you can buy and you trust that what's in the box is what's described on the box, and regardless what's in the box won't change. But games as a service don't promise any of those things. They are like theme parks where the experience is different every time you go, and intentionally so. I'm not saying developers deliberately make mistakes or break their games just so the players can watch them fix it, but I am saying that it is a given in any game as a service that the service will constantly be changing. And those changes are not always going to be changes everyone likes. But those changes are not just practical necessities to be done only when absolutely necessary. That's not the mindset behind games as a service.
This is not unique to Kabam, and it isn't even uncommon. A lot of people seem to think that Kabam's situation is unique or special, that because Kabam does this, and that, and that, the rules should be different. But they aren't. Lots of games support themselves through microtransactions. Lots of games with balance concerns sell things that later are altered for balance reasons. *Most* games do not just refund people when this happens: that's actually the exception, not the rule. Most games tell their players that you aren't buying things, you're spending to use them, and they are subject to change, and that's part of what you sign up for when you play those games.
I'm not saying it is ideal when it happens, and of course you should try to avoid it whenever possible. but a game as a service is never complete. No individual thing in that game is ever complete. There's no final version, so in a sense the game is permanently in beta test. Nothing is permanently sacred. If a thing is not changed, the rules surrounding it might change, or the entire game around it might change. This is something players are supposed to accept up-front. Or not, and play games that are in fact not games as a service, that come in boxes, that the developer makes no statement about constantly changing.
There is an argument to be made that the best time to tweak champions is right after launching them. I've heard it said that this hurts free to play and more casual players, because they are less likely to possess the new champs and thus they will be less likely to benefit from any buffs that happen. Which is true to some extent. But the flip side is that the devs will be tweaking the champions when the fewest number of players possess them. We need players to play the champ or Kabam won't have data to analyze. But if we wait for *everyone* to have the champ, we're changing a champ that will alter the game experience for the largest number of players. Given an imperfect world, the best option is to rebalance them when the minimum number of players have the champ, such that there's enough data to make reasonable conclusions but before more players are impacted by those changes than necessary. And that moment is after the champ first starts to disseminate into the playerbase but before it is generally available for too long.
This places most of the burden on testing things, and perhaps dealing with changes, on the players who get the champs first. This is disproportionately the veteran players, the strongest players, the biggest spenders. They are the ones that will have to deal with the side effects of the balancing program the most. If you're one of those people, and I consider myself to be one of those people, it sucks. But this burden must fall somewhere, and we are the players in the best position to bear it. We're going to pay this balancing tax so the noobs and the casuals and the players least able to deal with it don't have to. Again, in an ideal world no one would have to pay it, but in this world I think the best of the bad alternatives is to do just that. The entire game is founded in a sense on this principle: those who can, pay for those who can't. This isn't fair, it just is.
What insurance to summoners who buy have for a champion that is more subject to being nerfed?
If a champion is more/less powerful then then rating after release. Would their new revealed power influence a change in rating. Or would the incorrect rating influence change in the champions kit?
There is no such thing as an Ideal rating. Every Champion will have different ratings depending on where we expect them to land with the abilities, etc.
You will be free to decide whether you want to chase a Champion or not based on these Ratings, knowing that there will be a chance that they are going to change if they don't feel like they're hitting their mark. Keep in mind that when we did this in the past, a majority of those updates were Buffs, with only 2 nerfs.
The Ratings are what is intended for these Champions, and if we find that they are not correct, we will be tweaking the Champions to match them.
That's the two problems right there:
1- You're gonna decide whether to buff/nerf a champ based on Your system and not on what the community want (since the factor "utility" is most of the times based on nodes, that Kabam also creates), and,
2- Every new champion from March forward, may be having a "re-balancing" six months after. Is it gonna be good? Bad? Who knows? And why try to get him early from arenas or crystals when there's no guarantee he ll stay the same after his "trial period"?
What insurance to summoners who buy have for a champion that is more subject to being nerfed?
If a champion is more/less powerful then then rating after release. Would their new revealed power influence a change in rating. Or would the incorrect rating influence change in the champions kit?
There is no such thing as an Ideal rating. Every Champion will have different ratings depending on where we expect them to land with the abilities, etc.
You will be free to decide whether you want to chase a Champion or not based on these Ratings, knowing that there will be a chance that they are going to change if they don't feel like they're hitting their mark. Keep in mind that when we did this in the past, a majority of those updates were Buffs, with only 2 nerfs.
The Ratings are what is intended for these Champions, and if we find that they are not correct, we will be tweaking the Champions to match them.
The rating system as presented is causing so many problems and confusion.
Instead of a 1 or 5 for Utility, where BWCV is clearly a 5 and OG Thor is clearly a 1, you could say BWCV has EXTREME utility whereas OG Thor's would be LIMITED.
Scaling from LIMITED INDIRECT DIRECT HIGH EXTREME
Then I think people would get a better idea of what you were going for and keeping the system positive. Not 1 which is equivalent to trash in a 1 - 5 scale, but you made OG Thor to have limited utility, and he does. Because he's trash. 😆
Here you guys go again with something else that we didnt need in the game im done spending with you guys period..You guys always seem to make everything worse with the game... Instead of balance come out with new content or change chaacters special attack animations or something but this is trash.... My wallet is permanently close and will never ever spend with you guys again...
Hard Disagree. Balancing is MANDATORY in all games like this, and we have lagged behind because we haven't had the ability to really communicate where a Champion should be before they're out in the wild, and this helps with that. It won't be perfect, which is also why we're integrating players into the change process as well.
If balancing is mandatory for game health, why are the devs not immediately going after Quake, Ghost, and Corvus? They have done more to imbalance the game than everyone else.
Good question. Why are the devs trying to refocus on rebalancing champions shortly after they come out rather than much later? Same answer. The longer a champion is, the harder it is to rebalance because the wider the impact is and the more entrenched the users of that champion are.
There are no absolute rules when it comes to game operation. Everything is a compromise between competing forces. There are absolutely no free lunches. Give the players less rewards and they will balk. Give them more rewards and you force downstream changes they won't like. Nerf a champ and you'll piss off some of your players. *Don't* nerf a champion and you'll anger others in a different, possibly invisible way.
Players often say that if the devs are supposed to do a thing, why don't they always do that thing: if they aren't supposed to do that thing why don't they never do that thing. Because every action they take helps something and hurts something else, and thus every action has to be calculated to do more good than harm. Reasonable intelligent people can disagree on where that line is, so no decision will ever be universally seen as the right one. For example, I argued strongly against the Guillotine 2.0 buff. I believe I was on solid grounds. The devs did it anyway not because they ignored me, not because they are stupid, and not because they are incompetent. They did it because they disagreed. It can be a tough pill to swallow, but sometimes that's all there is to it.
The devs know that if they nerf a champ, they will anger some players. If they don't, bad things happen to the game that ultimately worsen the game experience for some players. A dev can decide that nerfing Quake causes more harm to the game than good, but nerfing champion X four months after release does more good than harm. That's a judgment, and different people will disagree about whether that judgment is the right one. But whether it looks consistent from the outside or not, it is still a judgment they have to make based on what they think the right choice is at that time.
An overwhelming majority of people have not asked for this and simply do not want you spending time on it. Just look at the Disagree ratio on your original post. There are 4-5 YouTubers I can name off the top of my head that have their own tier/rating system. And let's be real, their assessments of the champions are likely to be far better than any rating system you guys come up with.
Will you listen to the gaming community or ignore them (yet again)?
P.S. There's no reason to discontinue buffing old champions, especially if you're asking the community to do the testing on all the new champs for you. If anything, that should free up resources.
That's part of the problem. Ratings by YouTubers are somewhat helpful and entertaining. They can help people gauge their choices. However, adhering to that religiously leads to confusion. The game team doesn't use the same model. Part of this is aligning their understanding with our own.
An overwhelming majority of people have not asked for this and simply do not want you spending time on it. Just look at the Disagree ratio on your original post. There are 4-5 YouTubers I can name off the top of my head that have their own tier/rating system. And let's be real, their assessments of the champions are likely to be far better than any rating system you guys come up with.
Will you listen to the gaming community or ignore them (yet again)?
P.S. There's no reason to discontinue buffing old champions, especially if you're asking the community to do the testing on all the new champs for you. If anything, that should free up resources.
While maybe not in this exact implementation, I think a lot of people have wanted to make sure that a new Champion they've been looking forward to had been better than what they got. I'm sure that many would have loved for something like this to be in place for somebody like Super Skrull when he was released. The bones are there, but his numbers need some juicing.
The numbers are not Assessments, they are visual interpretations of Data that show how Champions stack up in different aspects. This is not a Tier list, but a summary of their abilities to do damage, sustainability in a fight, and more.
We are not asking for anybody to be doing any testing. Players will continue to play as they always have, and we will collect Data exactly as we always have, but will now be actioning on that Data instead of just looking at it.
Since Kabam Mike closed my previous post(Classic Kabam). This is so far the dislikes they have on this, I think the wise decision for this would be forget about this idea and focus on actual things that matter. Not trying to be rude but if people don't like the idea why go through with it, you're wasting you're time and ours as well. If this idea ruins the many good champions I have, I think its time to move on from this game. I've dealt with the bugs, bad content, buggie content( remember V8 VP) and buggie AW. If they mess around with the best champs instead of the bad ones like I've said I'm done. Cause Namors nerf and Cull weren't even good things and I've barely seeing anyone using them so thats just straight up cap and means a bad sign. Feels like 12.0 will happen again with this.
Every new champion from March forward, may be having a "re-balancing" six months after. Is it gonna be good? Bad? Who knows? And why try to get him early from arenas or crystals when there's no guarantee he ll stay the same after his "trial period"?
Every time someone says this, I think to myself I can only hope people think this way. But they never do. If they did, then it would make it so much easier to snag the featured 6* champ. But while you can always find someone who gets upset by a game change and claims they will stop spending or stop grinding, the entire history of the game says that those claims are always a very small minority. Players still spend, crystals still spin, and arena grinders still grind.
If you're a player shooting for a champ right off the bat, you have already made peace with going for a champion before you know how it really performs and what its true potential is. Ikaris was not a super rare anomaly. That risk calculation is already factored into spending and grinding. Because of this program, *someone* will stop spending and *someone* will stop grinding, but they'll be replaced by other players that won't.
Maybe this time it will be different. People are hard to predict. But I won't be changing the way I approach the game, and my bet is not enough other people will do so for me to notice.
@Kabam Miike I have some questions/concerns about the plan moving forward.
1) The champion ratings system seems like a logistical nightmare. I see and understand your intentions with this system but there will be problems that need to be addressed. How will these ratings be measured? There is a possibility that these ratings will be subjective and arbitrary. Also, to put it nicely, Kabam and the player base have been known to disagree on champion quality (see guillotine buff criticism and Q/A responses). What happens when Kabam and the players inevitably disagree about a champion's rating?
2) The rebalance program has been done before and was not well received. I get the arguments in support of this program but why is Kabam insisting on a system that wasn't asked for? You mentioned super skrull but that can be addressed with a buff. Couldn't this be in connection to the champion buff program? which leads me to...
3) The champion buff program. This is what really gets me and a lot of others too. As evident by many responses in this thread, many will agree with me when I say that the Champion buff program was one of the best things MCOC has done in recent memory. It was a source of reliable excitement and hope that trash champs would be brought up to relevance. I understand that buffs will not completely stop but it is clear in the original post that buffs are taking a back seat to balancing. Why? Shouldn't improving our current champions, and by extension our experiences, be the priority? I've gotten the impression that people care more about buffed champions than newer champs because the average player won't get their hands on the new champ for months if not years. Balancing can and has been done through the champion buffs so why change? It just confuses me that Kabam would reduce and replace a system that is overwhelmingly supported with a system that is unwanted and disliked.
I ask this as a concerned fan who only wants what's best for the game. Thank you
For me even with the balance of new champs strategy, the new ranking system or any other idea would be welcome in the meantime they wouldn't have touched the old champs buff system, which really worked, it is really what keeps me playing this game, all this new measures do not have impact on new players, but in my case old player , thronebreaker with a bunch of useless 6* and stuck in act 7, it was what kept me waiting for the next month to come. So , really , disappointed.
I can see the Kabam mods though. Drawing straws as to who has to cover this xxshow. And the winner is....Kabam Miike. Everyone else sighs in relief.
Not being a whale that purchases a bunch of crack crystals as I call them, I think my disappointment is that with a couple extra resources, they could continue to buff 2 old characters a month. On the other end, people will just purchase less chances on the front end for new ones and wait until they roll back around a year later. Lost revenue. Guillotine proves that it isn't worth the risk, even though that was an older character. So rank down tokens should be given for that character ONLY if any nerf is made.
I think they need to reduce the time period for large adjustments to no more than a few months, so people know whether to even focus on featured crystals. They need adjusted before being put in the pool.
The more I think about it and review comments, if they want to add a chart on intended dps, who cares....they should already have been doing this at the beginning of their design phase before we even know about the character. Plop the chart they should already be doing anyway in the character notes.
Every new champion from March forward, may be having a "re-balancing" six months after. Is it gonna be good? Bad? Who knows? And why try to get him early from arenas or crystals when there's no guarantee he ll stay the same after his "trial period"?
Every time someone says this, I think to myself I can only hope people think this way. But they never do. If they did, then it would make it so much easier to snag the featured 6* champ. But while you can always find someone who gets upset by a game change and claims they will stop spending or stop grinding, the entire history of the game says that those claims are always a very small minority. Players still spend, crystals still spin, and arena grinders still grind.
If you're a player shooting for a champ right off the bat, you have already made peace with going for a champion before you know how it really performs and what its true potential is. Ikaris was not a super rare anomaly. That risk calculation is already factored into spending and grinding. Because of this program, *someone* will stop spending and *someone* will stop grinding, but they'll be replaced by other players that won't.
Maybe this time it will be different. People are hard to predict. But I won't be changing the way I approach the game, and my bet is not enough other people will do so for me to notice.
Speaking for myself, I won't stop spending, but I ll be less focused getting 6* featured crystals. And that means I won't be trying that hard to get 6* shards, new champions aside, everyone else can be found in regular 10k crystals. So I will buy one or two monthly offers less, (and absolutely no "1st appearance how it s called new champ crystal offer for 54 euros).
An overwhelming majority of people have not asked for this and simply do not want you spending time on it. Just look at the Disagree ratio on your original post. There are 4-5 YouTubers I can name off the top of my head that have their own tier/rating system. And let's be real, their assessments of the champions are likely to be far better than any rating system you guys come up with.
Will you listen to the gaming community or ignore them (yet again)?
P.S. There's no reason to discontinue buffing old champions, especially if you're asking the community to do the testing on all the new champs for you. If anything, that should free up resources.
While maybe not in this exact implementation, I think a lot of people have wanted to make sure that a new Champion they've been looking forward to had been better than what they got. I'm sure that many would have loved for something like this to be in place for somebody like Super Skrull when he was released. The bones are there, but his numbers need some juicing.
The numbers are not Assessments, they are visual interpretations of Data that show how Champions stack up in different aspects. This is not a Tier list, but a summary of their abilities to do damage, sustainability in a fight, and more.
We are not asking for anybody to be doing any testing. Players will continue to play as they always have, and we will collect Data exactly as we always have, but will now be actioning on that Data instead of just looking at it.
Miike, you're killing me, bud. Don't tell people you haven't been using the data for meaningful action all this time, because that's not the case. Maybe you guys need to contract with some people that are better and more nuanced at the game than your existing staff*. The biggest problem is that it shouldn't take months of assessments and collecting vast data sets to figure out how well a champ fits their intended role. Why is it that we can figure it out so quickly and it takes your staff so long? Sometimes you don't need Big Data when you control everything from the champs, to the environment. The only thing you don't control is us; but we can be simulated. Assume that you give your assessors access to all rarities and sig levels with a 100% full roster accessible. Top skilled players give assessments. Very low skilled noob players gives assessments. Mid-level players give assessments. Hopefully these people will give nuanced opinions from a broad set of viewpoints, otherwise why did you hire them? What are several million more points of data acquired over months really adding except more work for you all and frustrating uncertainty for your customers?
*Meaning able to play with a certain level of skill, know what their observations mean, and translate those to people with a higher or lower skill level in a variety of conditions. Some high level players suck at this and some low level player are great at it. It's an important skill to have in the team to maximize the effectiveness of your testing.
An overwhelming majority of people have not asked for this and simply do not want you spending time on it. Just look at the Disagree ratio on your original post. There are 4-5 YouTubers I can name off the top of my head that have their own tier/rating system. And let's be real, their assessments of the champions are likely to be far better than any rating system you guys come up with.
Will you listen to the gaming community or ignore them (yet again)?
P.S. There's no reason to discontinue buffing old champions, especially if you're asking the community to do the testing on all the new champs for you. If anything, that should free up resources.
While maybe not in this exact implementation, I think a lot of people have wanted to make sure that a new Champion they've been looking forward to had been better than what they got. I'm sure that many would have loved for something like this to be in place for somebody like Super Skrull when he was released. The bones are there, but his numbers need some juicing.
The numbers are not Assessments, they are visual interpretations of Data that show how Champions stack up in different aspects. This is not a Tier list, but a summary of their abilities to do damage, sustainability in a fight, and more.
We are not asking for anybody to be doing any testing. Players will continue to play as they always have, and we will collect Data exactly as we always have, but will now be actioning on that Data instead of just looking at it.
Miike, you're killing me, bud. Don't tell people you haven't been using the data for meaningful action all this time, because that's not the case. Maybe you guys need to contract with some people that are better and more nuanced at the game than your existing staff*. The biggest problem is that it shouldn't take months of assessments and collecting vast data sets to figure out how well a champ fits their intended role. Why is it that we can figure it out so quickly and it takes your staff so long? Sometimes you don't need Big Data when you control everything from the champs, to the environment. The only thing you don't control is us; but we can be simulated. Assume that you give your assessors access to all rarities and sig levels with a 100% full roster accessible. Top skilled players give assessments. Very low skilled noob players gives assessments. Mid-level players give assessments. Hopefully these people will give nuanced opinions from a broad set of viewpoints, otherwise why did you hire them? What are several million more points of data acquired over months really adding except more work for you all and frustrating uncertainty for your customers?
*Meaning able to play with a certain level of skill, know what their observations mean, and translate those to people with a higher or lower skill level in a variety of conditions. Some high level players suck at this and some low level player are great at it. It's an important skill to have in the team to maximize the effectiveness of your testing.
As an expert in this game, tell me: across all the players in the game, which champion performs better: Angela or Ghost. One of those champs is used more often, completes more content, dies less often, earns more rewards, costs less potions to run, gets ranked up more, in an overall sense generates more benefit to the players that use her.
It is easy to say which champ is "better" or "worse" on a spreadsheet or in a video. No game is balanced that way. Games are balanced based on actual performance, not what people *think* the performance should be.
If the data says Angela, a lot of people would say well, the data is wrong, the reason why Angela looks better is because people just aren't good with Ghost, but Ghost is *obviously* a much better champ. Those people are wrong. No champ is good in spite of their actual performance when used by the players of the game. A champ is only good *if* it performs well across all the players of the game.
All you have to do is ask any strong player, and they'll tell you Ghost is better, and it wouldn't take but a few seconds. The problem is those people have a 50% chance of being wrong because their expertise is on how to get the most out of a champion, not on how average people play champions. In fact, their expertise probably makes them less likely to get the answer right, because their opinions will be skewed by their experience.
@Kabam Miike so i think whats happening here is 2 fold. People are scared that Kabam will implement this and current champs in the game will get nerfed like 12.0. So upon roll out is that something the team is looking to do or is the focus strictly on new champs on release?
The second part is the disappointment of the lack of buffs. I think thats one of the best things the game team has done in a long time. It was a lot of fun watching youtubers leak the upcoming buffs and checking the roster and trying them out in ROL. I know its not over just slowing a bit.
Bonus. The qol of the bugs in game. The parry issues. The lag the dropped input the crashes. I think these things all came together in a storm and its hard for us to see the positives in this new move. I know for me if you talked to the team and let us know that our fav champs dont have nerfs incoming would be much appreciated.
. We have recently expanded our Balance Design team on Contest and brought in a beloved member of the community
Based on the available clues, I'd like to be the first to congratulate Ebony on his new role...
The person hired by Kabam outed themselves on twitter.
That comment didn't stay on the thread for long. I wonder why? 😇
Genuinely disappointed it's not you, by the way 🙁 But I guess it's good for the rest of us you can stay independent on the forums 👍
While there are certain advantages to being able to work professionally on a game you love, the poor sap now has deadlines I don't have. If something happens I don't like, I can just blame him. He can't just hit back.
When new champ comes out people have to heavy grind and spend for arena twice maybe
Or they spend a lot for cavs
Then tjose guys have to buy the risk that their champion gets nerf?
As someone who commonly does those arena grinds - and will continue to do them? Yup!
Not everyone has the same perspective as others to Champion acquisition. It's still worth it - so people will still grind. But hey, maybe they won't grind QUITE as hard and we'll see scores drop! I wouldn't complain about that!
Comments
Why not take a voting on if community prefers new champs every month vs New buffed champs every month..
First, focus on buffing existing champs and then you can start to balance new releases.. until then we can live with 1 new release champ every month..
In an ideal world, it would be nice if none of this happened. But we don't live in that world, and every MMO I've ever played has had this precise line of thought come up. Why make us pay to test your game?
Because it is a game as a service. We aren't playing a product, we're using a service. A product is a thing you can buy and you trust that what's in the box is what's described on the box, and regardless what's in the box won't change. But games as a service don't promise any of those things. They are like theme parks where the experience is different every time you go, and intentionally so. I'm not saying developers deliberately make mistakes or break their games just so the players can watch them fix it, but I am saying that it is a given in any game as a service that the service will constantly be changing. And those changes are not always going to be changes everyone likes. But those changes are not just practical necessities to be done only when absolutely necessary. That's not the mindset behind games as a service.
This is not unique to Kabam, and it isn't even uncommon. A lot of people seem to think that Kabam's situation is unique or special, that because Kabam does this, and that, and that, the rules should be different. But they aren't. Lots of games support themselves through microtransactions. Lots of games with balance concerns sell things that later are altered for balance reasons. *Most* games do not just refund people when this happens: that's actually the exception, not the rule. Most games tell their players that you aren't buying things, you're spending to use them, and they are subject to change, and that's part of what you sign up for when you play those games.
I'm not saying it is ideal when it happens, and of course you should try to avoid it whenever possible. but a game as a service is never complete. No individual thing in that game is ever complete. There's no final version, so in a sense the game is permanently in beta test. Nothing is permanently sacred. If a thing is not changed, the rules surrounding it might change, or the entire game around it might change. This is something players are supposed to accept up-front. Or not, and play games that are in fact not games as a service, that come in boxes, that the developer makes no statement about constantly changing.
There is an argument to be made that the best time to tweak champions is right after launching them. I've heard it said that this hurts free to play and more casual players, because they are less likely to possess the new champs and thus they will be less likely to benefit from any buffs that happen. Which is true to some extent. But the flip side is that the devs will be tweaking the champions when the fewest number of players possess them. We need players to play the champ or Kabam won't have data to analyze. But if we wait for *everyone* to have the champ, we're changing a champ that will alter the game experience for the largest number of players. Given an imperfect world, the best option is to rebalance them when the minimum number of players have the champ, such that there's enough data to make reasonable conclusions but before more players are impacted by those changes than necessary. And that moment is after the champ first starts to disseminate into the playerbase but before it is generally available for too long.
This places most of the burden on testing things, and perhaps dealing with changes, on the players who get the champs first. This is disproportionately the veteran players, the strongest players, the biggest spenders. They are the ones that will have to deal with the side effects of the balancing program the most. If you're one of those people, and I consider myself to be one of those people, it sucks. But this burden must fall somewhere, and we are the players in the best position to bear it. We're going to pay this balancing tax so the noobs and the casuals and the players least able to deal with it don't have to. Again, in an ideal world no one would have to pay it, but in this world I think the best of the bad alternatives is to do just that. The entire game is founded in a sense on this principle: those who can, pay for those who can't. This isn't fair, it just is.
1- You're gonna decide whether to buff/nerf a champ based on Your system and not on what the community want (since the factor "utility" is most of the times based on nodes, that Kabam also creates), and,
2- Every new champion from March forward, may be having a "re-balancing" six months after. Is it gonna be good? Bad? Who knows? And why try to get him early from arenas or crystals when there's no guarantee he ll stay the same after his "trial period"?
May be no budget for additional resource for one of the top grossing mobile game 🙃
Instead of a 1 or 5 for Utility, where BWCV is clearly a 5 and OG Thor is clearly a 1, you could say BWCV has EXTREME utility whereas OG Thor's would be LIMITED.
Scaling from
LIMITED INDIRECT DIRECT HIGH EXTREME
Then I think people would get a better idea of what you were going for and keeping the system positive. Not 1 which is equivalent to trash in a 1 - 5 scale, but you made OG Thor to have limited utility, and he does. Because he's trash. 😆
There are no absolute rules when it comes to game operation. Everything is a compromise between competing forces. There are absolutely no free lunches. Give the players less rewards and they will balk. Give them more rewards and you force downstream changes they won't like. Nerf a champ and you'll piss off some of your players. *Don't* nerf a champion and you'll anger others in a different, possibly invisible way.
Players often say that if the devs are supposed to do a thing, why don't they always do that thing: if they aren't supposed to do that thing why don't they never do that thing. Because every action they take helps something and hurts something else, and thus every action has to be calculated to do more good than harm. Reasonable intelligent people can disagree on where that line is, so no decision will ever be universally seen as the right one. For example, I argued strongly against the Guillotine 2.0 buff. I believe I was on solid grounds. The devs did it anyway not because they ignored me, not because they are stupid, and not because they are incompetent. They did it because they disagreed. It can be a tough pill to swallow, but sometimes that's all there is to it.
The devs know that if they nerf a champ, they will anger some players. If they don't, bad things happen to the game that ultimately worsen the game experience for some players. A dev can decide that nerfing Quake causes more harm to the game than good, but nerfing champion X four months after release does more good than harm. That's a judgment, and different people will disagree about whether that judgment is the right one. But whether it looks consistent from the outside or not, it is still a judgment they have to make based on what they think the right choice is at that time.
The numbers are not Assessments, they are visual interpretations of Data that show how Champions stack up in different aspects. This is not a Tier list, but a summary of their abilities to do damage, sustainability in a fight, and more.
We are not asking for anybody to be doing any testing. Players will continue to play as they always have, and we will collect Data exactly as we always have, but will now be actioning on that Data instead of just looking at it.
Since Kabam Mike closed my previous post(Classic Kabam). This is so far the dislikes they have on this, I think the wise decision for this would be forget about this idea and focus on actual things that matter. Not trying to be rude but if people don't like the idea why go through with it, you're wasting you're time and ours as well. If this idea ruins the many good champions I have, I think its time to move on from this game. I've dealt with the bugs, bad content, buggie content( remember V8 VP) and buggie AW. If they mess around with the best champs instead of the bad ones like I've said I'm done. Cause Namors nerf and Cull weren't even good things and I've barely seeing anyone using them so thats just straight up cap and means a bad sign. Feels like 12.0 will happen again with this.
If you're a player shooting for a champ right off the bat, you have already made peace with going for a champion before you know how it really performs and what its true potential is. Ikaris was not a super rare anomaly. That risk calculation is already factored into spending and grinding. Because of this program, *someone* will stop spending and *someone* will stop grinding, but they'll be replaced by other players that won't.
Maybe this time it will be different. People are hard to predict. But I won't be changing the way I approach the game, and my bet is not enough other people will do so for me to notice.
1) The champion ratings system seems like a logistical nightmare. I see and understand your intentions with this system but there will be problems that need to be addressed. How will these ratings be measured? There is a possibility that these ratings will be subjective and arbitrary. Also, to put it nicely, Kabam and the player base have been known to disagree on champion quality (see guillotine buff criticism and Q/A responses). What happens when Kabam and the players inevitably disagree about a champion's rating?
2) The rebalance program has been done before and was not well received. I get the arguments in support of this program but why is Kabam insisting on a system that wasn't asked for? You mentioned super skrull but that can be addressed with a buff. Couldn't this be in connection to the champion buff program? which leads me to...
3) The champion buff program. This is what really gets me and a lot of others too. As evident by many responses in this thread, many will agree with me when I say that the Champion buff program was one of the best things MCOC has done in recent memory. It was a source of reliable excitement and hope that trash champs would be brought up to relevance. I understand that buffs will not completely stop but it is clear in the original post that buffs are taking a back seat to balancing. Why? Shouldn't improving our current champions, and by extension our experiences, be the priority? I've gotten the impression that people care more about buffed champions than newer champs because the average player won't get their hands on the new champ for months if not years. Balancing can and has been done through the champion buffs so why change? It just confuses me that Kabam would reduce and replace a system that is overwhelmingly supported with a system that is unwanted and disliked.
I ask this as a concerned fan who only wants what's best for the game. Thank you
Not being a whale that purchases a bunch of crack crystals as I call them, I think my disappointment is that with a couple extra resources, they could continue to buff 2 old characters a month. On the other end, people will just purchase less chances on the front end for new ones and wait until they roll back around a year later. Lost revenue. Guillotine proves that it isn't worth the risk, even though that was an older character. So rank down tokens should be given for that character ONLY if any nerf is made.
I think they need to reduce the time period for large adjustments to no more than a few months, so people know whether to even focus on featured crystals. They need adjusted before being put in the pool.
The more I think about it and review comments, if they want to add a chart on intended dps, who cares....they should already have been doing this at the beginning of their design phase before we even know about the character. Plop the chart they should already be doing anyway in the character notes.
Maybe you guys need to contract with some people that are better and more nuanced at the game than your existing staff*. The biggest problem is that it shouldn't take months of assessments and collecting vast data sets to figure out how well a champ fits their intended role. Why is it that we can figure it out so quickly and it takes your staff so long? Sometimes you don't need Big Data when you control everything from the champs, to the environment. The only thing you don't control is us; but we can be simulated. Assume that you give your assessors access to all rarities and sig levels with a 100% full roster accessible. Top skilled players give assessments. Very low skilled noob players gives assessments. Mid-level players give assessments. Hopefully these people will give nuanced opinions from a broad set of viewpoints, otherwise why did you hire them? What are several million more points of data acquired over months really adding except more work for you all and frustrating uncertainty for your customers?
*Meaning able to play with a certain level of skill, know what their observations mean, and translate those to people with a higher or lower skill level in a variety of conditions. Some high level players suck at this and some low level player are great at it. It's an important skill to have in the team to maximize the effectiveness of your testing.
It is easy to say which champ is "better" or "worse" on a spreadsheet or in a video. No game is balanced that way. Games are balanced based on actual performance, not what people *think* the performance should be.
If the data says Angela, a lot of people would say well, the data is wrong, the reason why Angela looks better is because people just aren't good with Ghost, but Ghost is *obviously* a much better champ. Those people are wrong. No champ is good in spite of their actual performance when used by the players of the game. A champ is only good *if* it performs well across all the players of the game.
All you have to do is ask any strong player, and they'll tell you Ghost is better, and it wouldn't take but a few seconds. The problem is those people have a 50% chance of being wrong because their expertise is on how to get the most out of a champion, not on how average people play champions. In fact, their expertise probably makes them less likely to get the answer right, because their opinions will be skewed by their experience.
The second part is the disappointment of the lack of buffs. I think thats one of the best things the game team has done in a long time. It was a lot of fun watching youtubers leak the upcoming buffs and checking the roster and trying them out in ROL. I know its not over just slowing a bit.
Bonus. The qol of the bugs in game. The parry issues. The lag the dropped input the crashes. I think these things all came together in a storm and its hard for us to see the positives in this new move. I know for me if you talked to the team and let us know that our fav champs dont have nerfs incoming would be much appreciated.
Not everyone has the same perspective as others to Champion acquisition. It's still worth it - so people will still grind. But hey, maybe they won't grind QUITE as hard and we'll see scores drop! I wouldn't complain about that!