**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.
Why is it so hard for me to navigate input issuess?
This is in part a response to the Kabam post Why is it so hard to navigate input issues? But it is also something I've been thinking about for a very long time, and I have touched upon it from time to time, but never all my thoughts all in one place. I think now's the time.
A few months after the input system issues first emerged, I mentioned a potential problem I started worrying about. Because the game was no longer functioning consistently as it used to, but relative to the players it was also not functioning consistently at all, what would this mean for players trying to adjust to this new situation? My worry was that because the game suddenly changed behavior in a very opaque way, players would not be able to simply correct for those changes. They would see that sometimes what they had been doing for years would work, and sometimes it wouldn't work. And rather than relearn a whole new game, they would instead lose confidence in what they had already learned without replacing it with the proper muscle and situational memory. And this would happen not just in the conscious mind, but in the deep muscle memory of the player that would not simply be rewritten.
That seems to be the case for me. To put it directly, I'm broken. And Kabam broke me.
Before the Unity engine upgrade, I *used* to know how to Parry. Meaning: I could Parry a champion I had prior experience with better than 95% of the time. I could learn to Parry a new champ within a few days to maybe a few weeks of seeing it. Once I got hit in the face a few times, I would learn the timing for Parrying that champ, and it would get permanently stored in muscle memory. If I didn't fight that champion for a long time for some reason, I could get "rusty" but a few more punches to the face and it would come back to me.
That's no longer true. I'd say my Parry accuracy is now 85-90% for the average champion, unless I fight them regularly. But even champs that were easy enough to Parry that I had a virtually 100% Parry rate against them I no longer have perfect Parry timing. I can go weeks without missing a Parry, but then miss five in one day.
And it is not just Parry. Back dash timing is like that, special chaining is like that, anything timing related is now like that. Whereas there was a time where there were some things I was really good at and other things I sucked at (it took a long time for me to learn intercepting and I'm still learning reparry) I now feel like all my standard timing skills are very brittle. They seem to work on some days, and simply fall apart on others.
I had one fight a few days ago in AQ where I missed a Parry, then tried to correct for that timing and missed the next one, then tried to flush my brain and just do it like I always do it and missed the third Parry. I *never* found the proper timing and eventually died. To a champion I have been fighting every day of AQ for like a year.
Is this me, or is this the game? Kabam says it is probably not the game, but they also say it is possible it might be. But that means there's two problems. First, I have no idea if my problems are problems with the game intermittently throwing me off, or just me having a bad day. Which means I have no way to know if I should just write off the problem or try to fix it. If I try to fix a problem that is not there, I will make it worse. And second, even if Kabam makes the game 100% perfect tomorrow, how will I know that? When will it be safe to tell my brain "if its broken, its you."
It will never be safe. I will never know that. Its been this way for years now. It has been this way for long enough that my brain has learned to not trust anything it sees in the game. And that's a problem, at least for me.
To be sure, this is not a problem that affects everyone equally. If you've just started playing the game, you have no prior mental scaffolding for this game. There's nothing that can get confused by the current rework. The current rework is all you will ever know. And top tier players can either relearn the game's new timing or ride out the problems because they are just that good: they see the problems, but they can either solve them themselves or make up for the occasional hiccough. And the super casual players that have been playing for years might not know anything is broken, because they never really spent enough time learning the old game with sufficient precision.
It is the players like me, who have been around for a long time, who have spent time learning how the game works, and have invested a lot of time trying to slowly sharpen their skills through tons and tons of repetition and experience and have struggled over time to turn themselves from average players into above average players due to that experience that might be seeing what I'm seeing. That built up something that can be broken in a way that can't be glued back together.
I'm not asking for compensation. I'm not asking Kabam to "fix" this problem, at least not in their current input system work. I don't think this *is* fixable in the current input system work. This is not me saying "here's a problem, and here's my solution." This is me expressing the idea that the input system calamity is not just about a broken piece of software that can be fixed. The war on input system glitches has casualties, and I think I'm one of them, and I think there are many more like me. While Kabam is trying to navigate the problem of fixing the input system, I think they are not fully acknowledging that the problems don't end for many players when the input system is fixed, if it is ever fully fixed. They'll still be broken. And frankly, if I knew how to fix it, I'd fix myself.
Maybe we're unavoidable and inevitable casualties of the problem. But we are just as much of a symptom of the problem as race conditions in the entity state table. And maybe there are crazy outside the box ideas that might help players like me. Maybe we need a rehab section of the game where Kabam can validate this fight with this champion verses that champion has been confirmed to have the correct timing for all sequences, and do this for a wide range of problematic champions, and then I can go in there like a tutorial and relearn how to play the game well enough to recapture that last 15% gameplay accuracy I lost without any doubt that if its broken, its me. Maybe we need a giant database of interactions known to be correct verses broken. I don't know: none of this seems practical, but who knows. How much resources should a game like this spend to fix a player like me? I don't have the answer to that question either.
It is hard for Kabam to navigate the input system problems, because they are a more complex technical challenge than they appear to be. But not to diminish those technical challenges, but it is ten times harder for me to navigate than it is for them. Given a choice, I would trade problems with them in a heartbeat. They are attempting to perform something akin to brain surgery on the game engine software. I'm attempting something akin to literal brain surgery on an actual brain while blindfolded. And a couple years on, I seem to be more qualified to do the former than the latter, because it seems I suck at the latter.
A few months after the input system issues first emerged, I mentioned a potential problem I started worrying about. Because the game was no longer functioning consistently as it used to, but relative to the players it was also not functioning consistently at all, what would this mean for players trying to adjust to this new situation? My worry was that because the game suddenly changed behavior in a very opaque way, players would not be able to simply correct for those changes. They would see that sometimes what they had been doing for years would work, and sometimes it wouldn't work. And rather than relearn a whole new game, they would instead lose confidence in what they had already learned without replacing it with the proper muscle and situational memory. And this would happen not just in the conscious mind, but in the deep muscle memory of the player that would not simply be rewritten.
That seems to be the case for me. To put it directly, I'm broken. And Kabam broke me.
Before the Unity engine upgrade, I *used* to know how to Parry. Meaning: I could Parry a champion I had prior experience with better than 95% of the time. I could learn to Parry a new champ within a few days to maybe a few weeks of seeing it. Once I got hit in the face a few times, I would learn the timing for Parrying that champ, and it would get permanently stored in muscle memory. If I didn't fight that champion for a long time for some reason, I could get "rusty" but a few more punches to the face and it would come back to me.
That's no longer true. I'd say my Parry accuracy is now 85-90% for the average champion, unless I fight them regularly. But even champs that were easy enough to Parry that I had a virtually 100% Parry rate against them I no longer have perfect Parry timing. I can go weeks without missing a Parry, but then miss five in one day.
And it is not just Parry. Back dash timing is like that, special chaining is like that, anything timing related is now like that. Whereas there was a time where there were some things I was really good at and other things I sucked at (it took a long time for me to learn intercepting and I'm still learning reparry) I now feel like all my standard timing skills are very brittle. They seem to work on some days, and simply fall apart on others.
I had one fight a few days ago in AQ where I missed a Parry, then tried to correct for that timing and missed the next one, then tried to flush my brain and just do it like I always do it and missed the third Parry. I *never* found the proper timing and eventually died. To a champion I have been fighting every day of AQ for like a year.
Is this me, or is this the game? Kabam says it is probably not the game, but they also say it is possible it might be. But that means there's two problems. First, I have no idea if my problems are problems with the game intermittently throwing me off, or just me having a bad day. Which means I have no way to know if I should just write off the problem or try to fix it. If I try to fix a problem that is not there, I will make it worse. And second, even if Kabam makes the game 100% perfect tomorrow, how will I know that? When will it be safe to tell my brain "if its broken, its you."
It will never be safe. I will never know that. Its been this way for years now. It has been this way for long enough that my brain has learned to not trust anything it sees in the game. And that's a problem, at least for me.
To be sure, this is not a problem that affects everyone equally. If you've just started playing the game, you have no prior mental scaffolding for this game. There's nothing that can get confused by the current rework. The current rework is all you will ever know. And top tier players can either relearn the game's new timing or ride out the problems because they are just that good: they see the problems, but they can either solve them themselves or make up for the occasional hiccough. And the super casual players that have been playing for years might not know anything is broken, because they never really spent enough time learning the old game with sufficient precision.
It is the players like me, who have been around for a long time, who have spent time learning how the game works, and have invested a lot of time trying to slowly sharpen their skills through tons and tons of repetition and experience and have struggled over time to turn themselves from average players into above average players due to that experience that might be seeing what I'm seeing. That built up something that can be broken in a way that can't be glued back together.
I'm not asking for compensation. I'm not asking Kabam to "fix" this problem, at least not in their current input system work. I don't think this *is* fixable in the current input system work. This is not me saying "here's a problem, and here's my solution." This is me expressing the idea that the input system calamity is not just about a broken piece of software that can be fixed. The war on input system glitches has casualties, and I think I'm one of them, and I think there are many more like me. While Kabam is trying to navigate the problem of fixing the input system, I think they are not fully acknowledging that the problems don't end for many players when the input system is fixed, if it is ever fully fixed. They'll still be broken. And frankly, if I knew how to fix it, I'd fix myself.
Maybe we're unavoidable and inevitable casualties of the problem. But we are just as much of a symptom of the problem as race conditions in the entity state table. And maybe there are crazy outside the box ideas that might help players like me. Maybe we need a rehab section of the game where Kabam can validate this fight with this champion verses that champion has been confirmed to have the correct timing for all sequences, and do this for a wide range of problematic champions, and then I can go in there like a tutorial and relearn how to play the game well enough to recapture that last 15% gameplay accuracy I lost without any doubt that if its broken, its me. Maybe we need a giant database of interactions known to be correct verses broken. I don't know: none of this seems practical, but who knows. How much resources should a game like this spend to fix a player like me? I don't have the answer to that question either.
It is hard for Kabam to navigate the input system problems, because they are a more complex technical challenge than they appear to be. But not to diminish those technical challenges, but it is ten times harder for me to navigate than it is for them. Given a choice, I would trade problems with them in a heartbeat. They are attempting to perform something akin to brain surgery on the game engine software. I'm attempting something akin to literal brain surgery on an actual brain while blindfolded. And a couple years on, I seem to be more qualified to do the former than the latter, because it seems I suck at the latter.
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Comments
Because if this was simply a singular timing adjustment then I have confidence that I could adjust to that. That’s something that is logical and makes sense. My timing is 1 millisecond off on parry, I need to relearn this. Shoot this is sports across the board. If I’m facing a 85 mph fastball I have to swing at a certain time, if it’s 95 mph I need to swing earlier. If that’s all this was it wouldn’t be much different and I could adjust.
But that’s not what we are experiencing. This isn’t an all inclusive list but we are seeing other things like.
-Sp3’s being thrown at 2.9 bars of power
-being hit in the face while a stun icon is showing
-specials being thrown in the middle of our combo chain
-inputs simply just not registering, at all, when our character is safely out of a hit box that should ban any actions.
These are not timing issues, these are systemic of something else. What? I honestly don’t know but it feels wrong to give them the same label, it feels like I’d be lying to myself if I were to do that.
Back to timing though, I feel like this is also off because over the last year I can track my face blocking spikes to monthly updates, it’s almost comical. Which means every month I have to figure out if it’s a curveball, knuckleball, slider or fastball and adjust my game play. That speaks to me like something is being continually tweaked and the transparency about this is opaque as mud. Because when there are comments on this, we are assured it isn’t, but that assurance fails the eye test, routinely. This isn’t just my experience though, if the forums are any indication it’s fairly routine and consistent amongst the community. But the way we experience his month to month is not a consistent experience across the community. Some months are better for knuckleball hitters and others are better for fastball hitters, and others better for curveball hitters.
So here we all are, feeling like beta testers but overly invested in this hobby and community so we stay… and every day we get angrier because it feels like we will never be told the truth. And it’s our consumables lost to these issues casting plenty to play less seriously and discouraging competition. Say what you want about BGs and it’s challenges but even if they make that utopia, it won’t matter if we can’t rely on the basic fight mechanics. And the mode will meet the same fate as the risk of low participation due to its grindy nature.
Hopefully higher minds prevail during this limbo and player cost becomes a consideration, otherwise the spiral continues until we reach the bottom… or maybe we get lucky and find stability in the game again. But it would be nice to see short term alleviation paid to this too
2. When time is messed up, its tricky to know what is and is not a timing problem. As we sometimes say in the general IT world, memory issues look like everything except memory issues. Because a glitch in memory can disrupt literally anything and show up as a problem over there, but ironically the one thing that's difficult to discover is a memory problem that isn't detected and autocorrected in the first place. When memory actually fails, you never know memory fails.
I don't know for a fact, but perhaps a problem with champs throwing specials before they have enough power is really them having enough power but the display not showing this in the proper order. Or maybe it is an actual combat engine process bug. Either way, I'm not saying player discombobulation happens often enough to explain all of them, just that it happens often enough to become a problem unto itself.
Or to put it another way, I'm not trying to make the case that most game problems are player hallucinations. I'm simply saying that once the game spikes my punch, I can't tell the difference between actual bugs and hallucinations accurately enough to know which ones to ignore.
unreliable
I agree with a lot of what was said here.
And it doesn't go without consequence either. As a result of the controls becoming less reliable, I am less likely to invest my time and money in the game.
It's a shame, but when one cannot confidently and consistently count on their inputs... in a fighting game that relies on split second inputs nonetheless... then you just stop having fun.
And that's upsetting after playing a game for 7 years.
Fighting Ultron prime act 7.4.1 power shield path
Using king groot so very very slow fight to gain power and do minimal damage.
Was having minimal to no input issues
At about 5-6 mins into the fight it’s like a switch flicked and instantly 3 out of 4 parry failing..but also failing to even register a block so getting nailed over and over again. The defender went very spastic Stutter attacks etc.
I wish I had recorded it. Was literally like the program/AI said this is taking to long and time for you to die
First time for me actually seeing a drastic change like that mid fight. I have had subtle changes mid fight but this was just crazy.
Damn that “Memory glitch” haha
I’m unaware of any improvements it made to the gameplay/game design aspects, so I can’t comment in that regard. On the other hand these input issues + all the noticeable bugs with the AI and recovery time spawned after this event, are noticeably worse as time progresses, and don’t seem to have a solution.
This broke a lot of stuff in a lot of games, but MCOC is especially timing sensitive like few games are that run on Unity. This forced them to change how time-sensitive event handling occurred. This was complicated by the fact that the old engine didn't do things in a predictable way. The old engine had actually implemented a way to account for the timing bug in a situationally sensitive way. In other words, when the bug would have caused wider problems, the game engine tried to compensate for that by adjusting the timing of the game on the fly. These adjustments meant that the old game did certain things in certain ways in certain situations, but would process the exact same data in a completely different way in the new engine that no longer had the bug, where upon all the tweaks made over the years to account for the bug's behavior would now be doing the wrong thing.
But just removing it all would not cause the game to do the right thing, because the old engine and the new engine would not do the same things even absent the tweaks.
Imagine if one day you went to your car and discovered someone took out all the US imperial bolts from it and replaced them with a pile of metric bolts (or vice versa). All you have to do is replace the missing bolts with a bunch of bolts that might not fit, because they are all subtly different sizes. Some of the bolts are now too small and cause rattling and damage. Others just don't fit at all. That's kind of what happened when Unity forced the engine upgrade on MCOC.
This was not a voluntary overhaul. This was a "rewrite the engine and break stuff or lose vendor support for the engine permanently" situation.
Incidentally, although the bug was with timing on the IOS platform, it could have been the cause of many Android problems over the years. That's because Unity on Android did not have the bug. But if you didn't know that and the two game clients shared a code base, then every time you tried to fix a game client bug that appeared on iOS you could have been inadvertently breaking it on Android - because remember Android would not necessarily need the "fix" being applied to correct the behavior on iOS. It is distinctly possible that the moment when Android became much more stable was when Kabam finally forked the game client and stopped propagating iOS "fixes" onto Android automatically. And that might have also been when they started to become aware that there was an issue with timing on Unity between the two platforms. I'm speculating here, but that seems to fit the rough timeline.
As to your "I may be broken" point. While the controls now are unreliable to say the least, If they do ever get to where they are consistent you may find that all the unreliability has helped you train better. It may end up that you can now more quickly adapt to new champion timing. I am just not sure how much hope I have for consistency returning.
Next they worked on defense. Every month, they used to change the Parry box. Every month, people would say they were having problems, but after a week, they learned the new distance.
I think they have now changed to continuously variable parry boxes.
You don't know the timing, because you can't.
Amen to all you said—which is why this is quite literally the month when I’ve found myself saying “probably time to move on.”
Dr. Zola
We saw it with the "perfect parry" mechanic and Shang Chi, Herc and OG BP and their special intercepts and now intimidate/infuriate champs like Hulkling, Mantis, and Valk. The timing is central to those kits working correct correctly and any tweaking of the coding might have caused unintended effects.
It's hard for me to not think that the AI gets tweaked to counter those effects in some way. An AI's behavior changes when close to a bar of power, become passive on certain nodes (I see you bane), but it also is impacted when champs who rely on intercepting or fast game play. Heck, taunt doesn't seem to working as well as it used to.
The game has evolved so much from years 1 to 8 and it has to in order to keep us interested. I, for one, just want a game that is reliable. The design of the champs have been stellar, but it has wreaked havoc on the coding and game mechanics. The coding is sensitive enough and the specialized kits the newer releases have had doesn't help.
They spend who knows how long designing something like gauntlet or abyss fully believing this was going to seriously challenge the top end players and keep them engaged for some time. Only to have the new content just get obliterated the first day. I imagine that would be frustrating but also incite them to continue to tweak the game to make it more difficult and challenging.
The problem then is that all the low to mid end players are collateral damage. Which is fine because they don’t spend near as much in all likelihood so if one of the quits the game out of frustration that’s acceptable loss. But if a huge whale quits cause it’s boring and to easy that is not acceptable. Makes sense to me and I imagine it’s a very fine line of balancing that kabaam is trying to attain..perhaps unsuccessfully.
But no easy task to get that perfect balance where everybody is happy and they still profit as a business.
My two cents
When a bug is in game that benefits players. (The boss hack in incursions that was higher) it gets fixed nerfed with in matter of hours or days. These bugs are not within game for longer then 2-3 days max
Bugs that negatively effect players or help kabam with making more money. These bugs takes weeks, months or as incase of input issues years to fix. Kabam response is oh we can’t duplicate it. We need more info. That line is a bunch of you know what. It shows that their developers and employees don’t play game. If they freaking did it wouldn’t take em months to find a duplicate bugs.
Also before you try to come back at me which I know you will cause that way you are and always do on every post. Keep in mind this
All updates have to be given to platforms 3 months in advanced. Kabam has 3 months from time they give the update to apple and google to find bugs. Now why don’t they actually use the ccp for what it was originally intended for which was to test champs content and to find bugs not use it as a marketing arm of their company
I still don't understand why they stop giving the compensation packages even though input issues are seemingly worse then before.
If you've ever been in a Battlegrounds match where you fight a defender and defeat it, only to have the game either crash completely or jump out of the fight, and when you return to the match your fight appears to have restarted, but with less time - that's a consequence of this fact. What happened was the BG match fight started on your device but contact with the BG instance server was lost, so the game servers were not informed of the fact that the fight started on your device. So the game servers believe you are still in the middle of loading the fight. When your game client finally crashes or you defeat the defender and end the fight, your game client cannot continue on and resets. It is at that point that the game server is informed you've entered the fight and instructs your phone to start the fight from the beginning, only with just a few seconds left on the clock (because the fight clock has been running all this time).
In the old days, I used to see this behavior when I would be playing the game and walk into an elevator where I would completely lose signal. The fight would continue on my device so long as the outage did not last too long.
Is there literally nothing being communicated between device and server during a fight?
I ask this not because I have any reason to doubt your assertion, but I would think there has to be some continual connection between device and server during a fight. Is there non-fight data being shared during a fight?
Dr. Zola
In other words, Kabam fixes all "player beneficial" bugs at different times. When it is fast, they are accused of fixing them fast because it benefitted the player. If they take long to fix it, players claim it isn't even a bug.
The only element of truth to this has to do with exploits. By definition, all exploits are player benefiting bugs, because who would exploit the game against their own interests? Economically material exploits have the highest priority to fix, because they can do the most damage. This is seen as Kabam focusing on player beneficial bugs, when they are actually focused on the highest game damaging bugs.
There are many instances of Kabam addressing bugs in content that would otherwise deprive players of rewards, and they often do so very quickly. Conversely, when they address bugs that allow unlimited farming, it can take them years to address those because they typically are not a high priority bug to fix. But do players say that Kabam allowed the bug to persist for a long time against their own economic interests? No: they are accused of fixing a bug that didn't need to be fixed because the fact that it had been around for a long time is supposed proof it isn't a bug that needed to be addressed at all.
This is 100% a perception problem, not an actual bias when it comes to addressing bugs.
I'm not sure why you believe this to be true, but it is not. Any Apple developer can tell you this: the typical approval time for app updates is within 72 hours, often sooner (cf: Submitting for Review). Depending on the complexity of the update and the workload at Apple, I've seen updates take a week to get approved. I have never heard of an MCOC update or any other app update take three months to be approved and released to the App Store servers.As to the CCP, the CCP is given access to the test server and to some degree the developers. However they are not paid employees of Kabam and how they choose to use those resources is not under the direct control of Kabam. Kabam doesn't "use" the CCP in any way. The CCP program is a collaboration between the content creators that would be creating content for the game anyway (which is why in general content creators must meet certain content creation prerequisites to join the program: they can't join unless they are already substantial content creators in their own right). The presumption is that granting this access will improve their ability to make the content they want to make, which will be automatically mutually beneficial.
There are content creators that are highly critical of Kabam and MCOC, at least at times. Provided they are not abusive or straight up lie about stuff, I have never seen a content creator restrained from being critical. And trying to make the CCP content creators into a "marketing arm" would backfire, as content creator audiences follow content creators for their authentic perspectives, whether that is good or bad, and would quickly tell if they were shilling against their normal positions (they get accused of doing that even when a potato bug with two active brain cells can tell they aren't, so they wouldn't get away with doing it deliberately).
If this has changed recently, I would not be aware of this, as this is something I don't specifically go looking for unless I have a specific need to do so. I'm trying to stay retired from my
criminal pastdays of applied reverse engineering experimentation. And it is always possible this could change in the future, as live telemetry would be one of the things I would implement to deal with cheaters in the game for a variety of reasons.It was just interesting to me that 2 fights that obviously were not synced to the server correctly went so smoothly. Anecdotal evidence at best I know. Maybe I should test killing my wifi during BG matches next time I go up a tier and losses don't matter.