**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
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An Update to Balancing in MCOC!
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Know the difference between high damage and ramp up. A.
If it’s a ramp UP damage champ. Then it should start with good/ok damage and get HIGHER if you can play their extra sketchy play style. The more risky or complicated play style should have higher reward.
If they are meant to have utility. Don’t bury it behind their sig/awakened ability. Put utility on the base kit and every sig just accentuates the base kit to make them more like themselves. When this isn’t the case. You immediately remove them from the “useful champs pile” for anyone except the top top players and the “lucky”. And you create a paradox where 6* Namor is a “bad roll” for a new player. Not only will the 6* not “do what he does” for a looooooong time. But now they will be less likely to invest resources into the 5*. Which they could use for their utility.
The next point actually has to do with content design. But it effects every single champ. Because this is how players gauge usefulness and damage.
Decide what level champs are supposed to be able to do X content. Legendary side quest for example. And stick to that. Now design every new champ up to that bar, then assure they can do it.
These things would negate 90% of your rebalances. And would cure complaints in most cases.
The other 10% are the champs we have now that are just terrible.
Let us test, evaluate, and provide feedback, before we have to grind, spend, or waste shards on a champion that may or may not be changed in the future.
If this is truly necessary to the game, let us help without making us open up our wallets or dedicating our time and resources to do so.
I believe there are other issues with the overall plan as outlined but they will be sorted in time.
So tell me, for the specified group of players encapsulated by the word "we" how it is you know quickly and without looking at months of data whether the champion fulfills the role you believe the champion was designed to fulfill? Given any two champs, Angela and Ghost, or War Machine and Cosmic Ghost Rider, or Namor and Storm Pyramid X, tell me how this group of players knows which one fits their intended role better than the other one. This is a skill you explicitly state some group of players possesses, implying this group includes yourself.
The *only* way I know how to do this precisely and consistently is to monitor the performance of the champion when a wide range of players plays the champion long enough to become reasonably proficient at playing them (to within the limits of their skill). It is possible to use judgment to guess, and those guesses might be right often, but I know of no way that judgment can improve except by cross checking it against the performance data, which no player has access to. Whatever their guesses might be, they have no avenue to improve significantly. As a practical matter, I have no way to even know who is better at it than any other, because I have no way to know who's closer and who's father away.
Multiple people including yourself have made the claim that this can be done without analyzing significant amounts of data. By what process are these apparently extremely proficient analysts arriving at their conclusions?
I wouldn't be so sure that Quake, Ghost, and Corvus would all be judged OP had they been released under the announced balancing program. In the first three to six months of release, how good did Quake look across the entire playerbase? For that matter, how good does she even look now?
We tend to judge champions by how good they look when the top tier players show off with them. But when Ghost first came out, almost no one really knew how to optimize her play. I will bet anything most players still don't know, or play her in a synergy team, or don't make mistakes that get them killed. I said the same thing about Sparky when he first came out. How many players can actually Quake with Quake consistently? If they can't, what's her performance when players play her conventionally?
Maybe they would have been rebalanced, maybe not. I don't think it is obvious. The most dangerous champs in the game are not the champs that MSD can solo the Abyss with. The most dangerous champs (to game balance) are the ones that grandma can solo Uncollected difficulty with while watching Jeopardy. Top tier performance balancing is a thing, but it is not the core thing, and it is done by a completely different process.
If Kabam is trying to answer the question of whether a champ is suitable for their intended purpose, they can make finding the answer significantly easier without wasting time on gathering data from large samples over a long period of time for no good reason.So tell me, for the specified group of players encapsulated by the word "we" how it is you know quickly and without looking at months of data whether the champion fulfills the role you believe the champion was designed to fulfill? Given any two champs, Angela and Ghost, or War Machine and Cosmic Ghost Rider, or Namor and Storm Pyramid X, tell me how this group of players knows which one fits their intended role better than the other one. This is a skill you explicitly state some group of players possesses, implying this group includes yourself.
The *only* way I know how to do this precisely and consistently is to monitor the performance of the champion when a wide range of players plays the champion long enough to become reasonably proficient at playing them (to within the limits of their skill). It is possible to use judgment to guess, and those guesses might be right often, but I know of no way that judgment can improve except by cross checking it against the performance data, which no player has access to. Whatever their guesses might be, they have no avenue to improve significantly. As a practical matter, I have no way to even know who is better at it than any other, because I have no way to know who's closer and who's father away.
Multiple people including yourself have made the claim that this can be done without analyzing significant amounts of data. By what process are these apparently extremely proficient analysts arriving at their conclusions?
Presumably Kabam knows the intended purpose of a champ. Should they waste time having their people play the champ in scenarios that won't help inform that decision? It isn't a Pre-Quake world anymore. Our testing and theirs has become more sophisticated given our experiences and the state of the game. Part of the problem with our testing quickly is that champs are a pain to acquire at all rarities to be thorough and that's a problem Kabam's testers wouldn't have.
I know there are separate teams that work on new champs and old champ reworks; but seriously, instead of giving us boring champs that no one has ever heard of or cared about, please repair the old champs that currently exist and plague our rosters.
The part about “when the players play it” is not optional. Ghost’s performance is not what you think it is, not what you get out of her, not what the YouTubers get out of her, and not what the Kabam devs get out for her. It’s what the player base as a whole gets out of her.
Saying you know what the performance of a champ is without actually observing a wide range of players playing it is like saying you know how the player base will vote on anything, so you don’t need to actually poll them.
To put it another way, how well the champ performs in the game when played by all the players isn’t *measuring* champion performance, and it isn’t *testing* champion performance. It *is* champion performance, period. You seem to think that the data they collect is unnecessary because expertise can analyze a champ’s performance just as well. But that assumes “performance” is something that needs to be uncovered, and a good tester can do that better than the average player. But that’s his problem: he’s better. That makes him wrong.
This is not a guess. This is not an opinion. This is simply how games like this work, and specifically how MCOC has worked since the beginning of time, and good luck to anyone who thinks they can redefine performance in the games industry. I discovered long ago I’m not going to live long enough to tackle that one.
line seems horrible in my opinion. Are they just gonna
release champs like Hercules and then 6 months later just
go "nah they are too strong, here are some rank down
tickets
It just feels like it will remove any excitement from a new
champion being powerful when you know they could most
likely get changed in 6 months.
their characters kits so in the middle of the project life they
want to... They could establish it now and all kits are set
and will not be impacted. NEW CHAMPIONS RELEASE are
subject to the re roll updates. It's not hard to be fair to the
community and change the direction of kits in the future.
This might actually be my last straw
Thank you for your time.
The part of your statement where you will be free to decide before chasing whether a champ is hitting their mark or not based on the rankings before chasing I don't get at all. So if you rank a champ 5 out of 5 for damage, how are we going to know if he is overpowered and going to get nerfed because he has too much damage (ie cull)? There's no way to honestly know. If you rank a champ as going to have 4 out of 5 damage what exactly are the parameters where he will then get nerfed for having too much (5 out of 5) damage? No one knows. It will create more confusion and the first time you nerf a champ you will lose alot of your customer base. I personally after reading this won't chase any crystals or rank up any champs past r2 until the trial period is over.
You guys took away for next few months and are slowing rest of the year the 1 thing alot of ppl were excited about which was to see which old champs are getting buffed.. I guess for you guys old champs don't drive up crystal sales as much as New ones so why concentrate on them. If you were actually listening to your base like you said you are you would realize this is the wrong approach. Just look at your like to dislike ratio. YOUR community is speaking! LISTEN.
If kitty pride or herc got released after March who here would feel safe chasing them or ranking them up? Not me.
I was really looking forward to Feb and the resumption of the buff program after a slow and dry January. It's only now that we are facing another month without buffs that I've raised how much it was keeping me playing.
In principle I don't have an issue with the rating system and balance programme. If anything, it seems like an internal scoring system for champs that Kabam are choosing to make public for purposes of debate and discussion. I don't think it should come at the cost of buffing older champions though.
The forum can be an echo chamber at times but in real terms I think Kabam need to do something for February to encourage player retention. I'm not necessarily talking about 5*/6* shards or anything like that. I'm taking about doing something more than they would do, but I'm not sure if it's too late to get anything substantial together that would qualify.