An Update to Balancing in MCOC!

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  • GroundedWisdomGroundedWisdom Member Posts: 36,553 ★★★★★

    Cwhite318 said:

    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.
  • Psychic_2002Psychic_2002 Member Posts: 195
    I hope I get to be apart of the Beta server for the new rebalance
  • BigPoppaCBONEBigPoppaCBONE Member Posts: 2,402 ★★★★★

    Here are some questions for @Kabam Miike

    What is the Ideal rating for a champion?

    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. 😆
  • magnus_xixmagnus_xix Member Posts: 2,019 ★★★★★
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  • DNA3000DNA3000 Member, Guardian Posts: 19,640 Guardian
    thepiggy said:

    Cwhite318 said:

    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.
  • GroundedWisdomGroundedWisdom Member Posts: 36,553 ★★★★★
    caustic said:

    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.
  • DNA3000DNA3000 Member, Guardian Posts: 19,640 Guardian
    Searmenis said:

    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.
  • DNA3000DNA3000 Member, Guardian Posts: 19,640 Guardian

    MCOC Team said:

    .
    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.
  • Logan00Logan00 Member Posts: 636 ★★★
    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.
  • ChiliDogChiliDog Member Posts: 899 ★★★
    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.
  • SearmenisSearmenis Member Posts: 1,620 ★★★★★
    DNA3000 said:

    Searmenis said:

    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).
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  • DNA3000DNA3000 Member, Guardian Posts: 19,640 Guardian

    caustic said:

    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.
  • kenadroidkenadroid Member Posts: 541 ★★★
    Not sure if Kabam People will read this, but do make psycho-man's fury start at sp2, not the end of it. That way he can hit harder.
  • Kade7175Kade7175 Member Posts: 304 ★★
    @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.
  • DragonfeiDragonfei Member Posts: 263 ★★
    qartweli said:

    One question…

    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!
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