Man… I keep thinking about the content creators that put out videos on the Root-Lock… if it was me I’d pull it all down and redo any Zemo related content that relies on this mechanism
Just to give some credit here, MSD did update the title of his video on the subject to say "No Sp3 Lock Anymore" not too long after it was changed. He's a real one.
I saw that and I have to agree. Really curious if others will follow suit. I do think the video probably needs to be redone though as it still contains the “bug”
I don't think he has to completely redo it. Maybe just edit in a disclaimer. The infinite lock could still be there as a good bit of fun or something
Man… I keep thinking about the content creators that put out videos on the Root-Lock… if it was me I’d pull it all down and redo any Zemo related content that relies on this mechanism
Just to give some credit here, MSD did update the title of his video on the subject to say "No Sp3 Lock Anymore" not too long after it was changed. He's a real one.
I saw that and I have to agree. Really curious if others will follow suit. I do think the video probably needs to be redone though as it still contains the “bug”
I don't think he has to completely redo it. Maybe just edit in a disclaimer. The infinite lock could still be there as a good bit of fun or something
I’m so grateful I recored both a Zemo and a Kraven lock… I’ll always be able to look back and remember the times when they were good…
I shared it. It was on the Trello board, at least since April.
That's still ages after the champs released. Not enough. Not to mention trello isn't as popular as forums. Least they could have done is put up a forum post since it's such a crucial bug. Or at least, you know, on the Baron Zemo rebalance post
About a year and 4 months. When was it reported? What usually happens in these cases is people don't report them when they're useful in some way. Root has had issues all along the way. Rintrah, for example. It's been known that he was taking no Damage. Even people pointing out that Root is bugged when they gave it the green light. Listen, I empathize with the OP and I appreciate how passionate they are, but I do not agree with RDTs for bug fixes. I didn't the last times they gave them out for it, and I don't now. They're for major intended changes to how a Champ is supposed to perform. There isn't any evidence, other than "That's how they worked." to support that. If it was a listed ability and it changed, fair enough. That's not what we have.
You should stop trying to argue this, they never sait Root is bugged even in your trollo board. They only mentioned Zemo by name. No one is opposing this change as long as they offer tickets for the now worse champion. What does it even matter to you, are you on some payroll what the hell?
Root is a mechanic. Not a Champion. If it was bugged and they fixed it, they can't just give Tickets for every Champ with Root. Perhaps a lack of communication, sure. I don't see notes in the Patch Notes. You benefitted from a bug for some time. Take it for what it is. I don't agree with giving Tickets. I don't make their decisions, though. So it's not up to me. I'm still not going to agree with it.
"You benefitted from a bug for some time. Take it for what it is. I don't agree with giving Tickets. I don't make their decisions, though. So it's not up to me. I'm still not going to agree with it."
Just to be clear, the players are not the ones who benefitted from the bug, Kabam did. They sold an awful lot of Zemo cavs, sig stones, and rank up materials that were put in to him as a result of this "bug".
If you're pushing the narrative that they did a Bait and Switch, that is as old as my presence on the Forum.
And what changed with the beta? Root has worked the same way since their original Kraven announcement until just days ago.
Betas are never the final word on how something is intended to work after release. That's why they have Betas.
You're right, and if they had mentioned at all at release that Root wasn't working as intended, there wouldn't be an issue. But they didn't. Not for over a year afterwards.
There is NO time limit on bugs.
You're still missing the point and I really don't understand what you're hoping to achieve. Nobody is hurt by players getting RDT's except for Kabam, and you yourself said they failed to communicate. They failed in many new and inventive ways with this one. It really feels like you're just here to argue.
That I disagree with. Frankly, I wish they were never introduced. Ever since, there have been countless requests for them, and they're completely counterproductive to the game itself. Ranking a Champ is meant to be a one-way process. Not a choice to revisit in the future. Everytime they're given, the precedent is fed for more in the future. My feelings are besides the point. I understand their use. Those cases should not come under bug fixes. Besides feeding that precedent, it just clouds the whole purpose of them and adds to confusion. I respect Kabam’s decisions because it's not mine to make, and I understand their reasoning. That doesn't mean I agree with every decision. I don't think they should have been given for bug fixes, and I sure don't think Christmas was a good idea. That's been my position over the years consistently. This is a situation I don't feel warrants them. It doesn't take a great amount of common sense to understand why Root preventing L3s is OP.
Moleman having True strike in frenzy was not in his ability and was also too OP They offered rank down tickets because they knew it was a bug due to their error Honestly it feels like you are just here to argue
I disagree. I'm not here to argue. They offered it because they knew a number of people Ranked him for that specific reason alone, and they took responsibility for the lack of communication. I get their intentions. Which is why I said I appreciate them extending it in this case. I still don't agree with RDTs for fixes. Never did. For good reason, too. It's a Pandora's Box. As we see here. Offer them in one case, people justify them in all cases, and the demand never ends.
Well they didn't communicate about Zemo too... People can r2 him for his root and bleeds but after that they only rank him intending to use him when they face a defender with immense amount of power gain and intend to use the Zemo lock to lock down the fight.
The Trello board they talk about is something more than 40% of the forum members don't know about and the forum is only representing ≤ 25% of the in-game community which means more than 75% of the community still doesn't know that Zemo is being "fixed"
As far as the person saying that it was posted on Recent Discussions... Well no one visits that side of Forums. Wanna know why?? Because every new update and bug fix is announced of GENERAL DISCUSSIONS or Update and bug fixes part of the forums.
In general, it's good practice to go to Recent Discussions. You mentioned Mole Man. I said I didn't support Tickets then, and I don't now. We are better off agreeing to disagree. My feelings are not going to change in this instance.
First, we want to apologize for this situation. It was not our intent to leave any of this information out of our release notes or make any changes silently. We do not purposely make silent changes to the game, but there are processes in place that, in this case, didn’t work and this information was not disseminated the way it should have been.
Instead of asking the Devs a bunch of questions, and then translating them into communications for you, I’ve asked the Developers directly to write something up, and share it with you. This covers why we made these changes, and where we messed up on the communication process.
History of the bug and identifying it:
Back in January as Zemo was heading out the door, someone made an offhand comment about how the defender’s heavy bias while rooted seemed really reliable in keeping the opponent from throwing specials, to the point where they couldn’t remember it ever not working. No AI bias should ever be 100%, and that was not the intent with which we had been building characters. Our engineers informed us that root fully special locked the defender, preventing all three special attacks, and always had.
This was a problem because there is a big difference between designing a character that reduces specials and grants openings, and designing a character that prevents them.
Zemo in particular had the most aggressive use of the mechanic yet, because we were evaluating it in the former terms and not the latter. As a team, we knew a change was necessary, but had to decide what change to pursue. There were some good arguments made in favor of removing the special lock entirely and leaning on the very high heavy bias already present, since that was the original intent behind the mechanic. We decided against this because, as we said earlier, no AI bias is ever 100% reliable, and instead chose the middle ground of leaving the AI bias alone, preserving the inability for the defender to throw Special Attack 1 or 2, and just unlocking their Special 3.
This account may cause some confusion because root didn’t use to cause the defender’s power bar to grey out, a visual we normally associate with special locks, and now does. This was an accidental knock-on of the prep we needed to do for the change, but the change below three bars is exclusively visual.
Some of you may also wonder why defenders could break out of Spider-Man (Sorcerer Supreme)’s root before if root prevented all specials, and that’s actually because there was a 0.1s delay before his root activated to allow for VFX to kick in, during which the defender could activate a special because of the way Special 3 animations work. We have actually replaced this delay with an invisible special lock to make his root mechanic more consistent with other characters and easier to use.
How did we Miss This?
First, we announced that Zemo was bugged via the Trello board as quickly as we could. This is why we have created that board, so we can share identified bugs as soon as we know about them, regardless of if we know what the resolution will be. At the time, we were still having conversations about how broad the fix needed to be, and so the listed bug only referred to Zemo.
At the time, we were unaware of the extent to which players were relying on the existing interaction to use Kraven, or we would’ve mentioned him by name as well. It was very much our mistake for not understanding that, and we apologize.
When we did ultimately make the call that we were going to be fixing all root effects, we should have updated that post, but didn’t have systems in place for doing so. We’ll be amending our internal tracking process to make sure that the Trello board is better up to date with new developments going forward.
Second, we decided not to discuss this in Zemo’s rebalancing post because we sincerely did not consider it to be part of his rebalancing process. This is, in retrospect, another mistake on our part. “Root-locking” the opponent was never one of his goals, most players weren’t doing it anyway, and we weren’t holding the outliers against him when evaluating his data, so it didn’t factor into whether we considered him balanced or not. Additionally, we considered the bug public knowledge due to the Trello board.
Lastly, we missed this change in the most recent patch notes. Writing patch notes is a very collaborative process that requires many different teams working together, and it’s easy for something to slip through the cracks. We will be re-evaluating the way in which we collect information for our patch notes in the future to help ensure that something like this doesn’t slip through the cracks again.
Root in the Future
Moving forward, this is how we intend for all Root effects to function unless otherwise specified, and will be expanding the in-game glossary to clarify as much.
Rooted defenders will be more likely to perform heavy attacks and unable to activate Special Attack 1 or 2, and any root that does not match this behavior should be considered to be bugged unless stated otherwise.
Dealing with the Current Situation
Because this bug was publicly announced via the Trello board during the 3-month window where Zemo was subject to change, we do not plan to issue any rank-down tickets for him, nor do we plan to offer any for Spider-Man, who is actually stronger after this change than before.
However, because Kraven is an older Champions and was not mentioned as affected by this bug in the past, we do plan to offer rank-down tickets to anyone with a ranked up 5 or 6-star Kraven as of the time of this post. Only those that have ranked up Kraven prior to this message going live (2:30pm PT on July 14, 2023) will receive those Rank Down tickets, so please do not rank up Kraven expecting a Rank Down ticket in the future. We plan for these to go out before the end of the month.
Once again, we want to apologize for our misunderstanding around Kraven and for the failures in communication, and will be making process changes to prevent repeats.
First, we want to apologize for this situation. It was not our intent to leave any of this information out of our release notes or make any changes silently. We do not purposely make silent changes to the game, but there are processes in place that, in this case, didn’t work and this information was not disseminated the way it should have been.
Instead of asking the Devs a bunch of questions, and then translating them into communications for you, I’ve asked the Developers directly to write something up, and share it with you. This covers why we made these changes, and where we messed up on the communication process.
History of the bug and identifying it:
Back in January as Zemo was heading out the door, someone made an offhand comment about how the defender’s heavy bias while rooted seemed really reliable in keeping the opponent from throwing specials, to the point where they couldn’t remember it ever not working. No AI bias should ever be 100%, and that was not the intent with which we had been building characters. Our engineers informed us that root fully special locked the defender, preventing all three special attacks, and always had.
This was a problem because there is a big difference between designing a character that reduces specials and grants openings, and designing a character that prevents them.
Zemo in particular had the most aggressive use of the mechanic yet, because we were evaluating it in the former terms and not the latter. As a team, we knew a change was necessary, but had to decide what change to pursue. There were some good arguments made in favor of removing the special lock entirely and leaning on the very high heavy bias already present, since that was the original intent behind the mechanic. We decided against this because, as we said earlier, no AI bias is ever 100% reliable, and instead chose the middle ground of leaving the AI bias alone, preserving the inability for the defender to throw Special Attack 1 or 2, and just unlocking their Special 3.
This account may cause some confusion because root didn’t use to cause the defender’s power bar to grey out, a visual we normally associate with special locks, and now does. This was an accidental knock-on of the prep we needed to do for the change, but the change below three bars is exclusively visual.
Some of you may also wonder why defenders could break out of Spider-Man (Sorcerer Supreme)’s root before if root prevented all specials, and that’s actually because there was a 0.1s delay before his root activated to allow for VFX to kick in, during which the defender could activate a special because of the way Special 3 animations work. We have actually replaced this delay with an invisible special lock to make his root mechanic more consistent with other characters and easier to use.
How did we Miss This?
First, we announced that Zemo was bugged via the Trello board as quickly as we could. This is why we have created that board, so we can share identified bugs as soon as we know about them, regardless of if we know what the resolution will be. At the time, we were still having conversations about how broad the fix needed to be, and so the listed bug only referred to Zemo.
At the time, we were unaware of the extent to which players were relying on the existing interaction to use Kraven, or we would’ve mentioned him by name as well. It was very much our mistake for not understanding that, and we apologize.
When we did ultimately make the call that we were going to be fixing all root effects, we should have updated that post, but didn’t have systems in place for doing so. We’ll be amending our internal tracking process to make sure that the Trello board is better up to date with new developments going forward.
Second, we decided not to discuss this in Zemo’s rebalancing post because we sincerely did not consider it to be part of his rebalancing process. This is, in retrospect, another mistake on our part. “Root-locking” the opponent was never one of his goals, most players weren’t doing it anyway, and we weren’t holding the outliers against him when evaluating his data, so it didn’t factor into whether we considered him balanced or not. Additionally, we considered the bug public knowledge due to the Trello board.
Lastly, we missed this change in the most recent patch notes. Writing patch notes is a very collaborative process that requires many different teams working together, and it’s easy for something to slip through the cracks. We will be re-evaluating the way in which we collect information for our patch notes in the future to help ensure that something like this doesn’t slip through the cracks again.
Root in the Future
Moving forward, this is how we intend for all Root effects to function unless otherwise specified, and will be expanding the in-game glossary to clarify as much.
Rooted defenders will be more likely to perform heavy attacks and unable to activate Special Attack 1 or 2, and any root that does not match this behavior should be considered to be bugged unless stated otherwise.
Dealing with the Current Situation
Because this bug was publicly announced via the Trello board during the 3-month window where Zemo was subject to change, we do not plan to issue any rank-down tickets for him, nor do we plan to offer any for Spider-Man, who is actually stronger after this change than before.
However, because Kraven is an older Champions and was not mentioned as affected by this bug in the past, we do plan to offer rank-down tickets to anyone with a ranked up 5 or 6-star Kraven as of the time of this post. Only those that have ranked up Kraven prior to this message going live (2:30pm PT on July 14, 2023) will receive those Rank Down tickets, so please do not rank up Kraven expecting a Rank Down ticket in the future. We plan for these to go out before the end of the month.
Once again, we want to apologize for our misunderstanding around Kraven and for the failures in communication, and will be making process changes to prevent repeats.
A lot to dig through on root issue, however my issue whatever changes were made affected his prestige. How do you may ask, well Zemo and Dooms prestige is now identical so what do you say to the landers that ranked zemo to r5 because he had the upper hand in the prestige race?
Okay wait, i dont have Zemo at 6* but i have my 5* max ranked ASAP cos i love him so all these long list of english means you guys didnt consider what most players had invested in ranking him up to MAX.
This is totally unacceptable and i hope you guys rethink or come up with something better
First, we want to apologize for this situation. It was not our intent to leave any of this information out of our release notes or make any changes silently. We do not purposely make silent changes to the game, but there are processes in place that, in this case, didn’t work and this information was not disseminated the way it should have been.
Instead of asking the Devs a bunch of questions, and then translating them into communications for you, I’ve asked the Developers directly to write something up, and share it with you. This covers why we made these changes, and where we messed up on the communication process.
History of the bug and identifying it:
Back in January as Zemo was heading out the door, someone made an offhand comment about how the defender’s heavy bias while rooted seemed really reliable in keeping the opponent from throwing specials, to the point where they couldn’t remember it ever not working. No AI bias should ever be 100%, and that was not the intent with which we had been building characters. Our engineers informed us that root fully special locked the defender, preventing all three special attacks, and always had.
This was a problem because there is a big difference between designing a character that reduces specials and grants openings, and designing a character that prevents them.
Zemo in particular had the most aggressive use of the mechanic yet, because we were evaluating it in the former terms and not the latter. As a team, we knew a change was necessary, but had to decide what change to pursue. There were some good arguments made in favor of removing the special lock entirely and leaning on the very high heavy bias already present, since that was the original intent behind the mechanic. We decided against this because, as we said earlier, no AI bias is ever 100% reliable, and instead chose the middle ground of leaving the AI bias alone, preserving the inability for the defender to throw Special Attack 1 or 2, and just unlocking their Special 3.
This account may cause some confusion because root didn’t use to cause the defender’s power bar to grey out, a visual we normally associate with special locks, and now does. This was an accidental knock-on of the prep we needed to do for the change, but the change below three bars is exclusively visual.
Some of you may also wonder why defenders could break out of Spider-Man (Sorcerer Supreme)’s root before if root prevented all specials, and that’s actually because there was a 0.1s delay before his root activated to allow for VFX to kick in, during which the defender could activate a special because of the way Special 3 animations work. We have actually replaced this delay with an invisible special lock to make his root mechanic more consistent with other characters and easier to use.
How did we Miss This?
First, we announced that Zemo was bugged via the Trello board as quickly as we could. This is why we have created that board, so we can share identified bugs as soon as we know about them, regardless of if we know what the resolution will be. At the time, we were still having conversations about how broad the fix needed to be, and so the listed bug only referred to Zemo.
At the time, we were unaware of the extent to which players were relying on the existing interaction to use Kraven, or we would’ve mentioned him by name as well. It was very much our mistake for not understanding that, and we apologize.
When we did ultimately make the call that we were going to be fixing all root effects, we should have updated that post, but didn’t have systems in place for doing so. We’ll be amending our internal tracking process to make sure that the Trello board is better up to date with new developments going forward.
Second, we decided not to discuss this in Zemo’s rebalancing post because we sincerely did not consider it to be part of his rebalancing process. This is, in retrospect, another mistake on our part. “Root-locking” the opponent was never one of his goals, most players weren’t doing it anyway, and we weren’t holding the outliers against him when evaluating his data, so it didn’t factor into whether we considered him balanced or not. Additionally, we considered the bug public knowledge due to the Trello board.
Lastly, we missed this change in the most recent patch notes. Writing patch notes is a very collaborative process that requires many different teams working together, and it’s easy for something to slip through the cracks. We will be re-evaluating the way in which we collect information for our patch notes in the future to help ensure that something like this doesn’t slip through the cracks again.
Root in the Future
Moving forward, this is how we intend for all Root effects to function unless otherwise specified, and will be expanding the in-game glossary to clarify as much.
Rooted defenders will be more likely to perform heavy attacks and unable to activate Special Attack 1 or 2, and any root that does not match this behavior should be considered to be bugged unless stated otherwise.
Dealing with the Current Situation
Because this bug was publicly announced via the Trello board during the 3-month window where Zemo was subject to change, we do not plan to issue any rank-down tickets for him, nor do we plan to offer any for Spider-Man, who is actually stronger after this change than before.
However, because Kraven is an older Champions and was not mentioned as affected by this bug in the past, we do plan to offer rank-down tickets to anyone with a ranked up 5 or 6-star Kraven as of the time of this post. Only those that have ranked up Kraven prior to this message going live (2:30pm PT on July 14, 2023) will receive those Rank Down tickets, so please do not rank up Kraven expecting a Rank Down ticket in the future. We plan for these to go out before the end of the month.
Once again, we want to apologize for our misunderstanding around Kraven and for the failures in communication, and will be making process changes to prevent repeats.
First, we want to apologize for this situation. It was not our intent to leave any of this information out of our release notes or make any changes silently. We do not purposely make silent changes to the game, but there are processes in place that, in this case, didn’t work and this information was not disseminated the way it should have been.
Instead of asking the Devs a bunch of questions, and then translating them into communications for you, I’ve asked the Developers directly to write something up, and share it with you. This covers why we made these changes, and where we messed up on the communication process.
History of the bug and identifying it:
Back in January as Zemo was heading out the door, someone made an offhand comment about how the defender’s heavy bias while rooted seemed really reliable in keeping the opponent from throwing specials, to the point where they couldn’t remember it ever not working. No AI bias should ever be 100%, and that was not the intent with which we had been building characters. Our engineers informed us that root fully special locked the defender, preventing all three special attacks, and always had.
This was a problem because there is a big difference between designing a character that reduces specials and grants openings, and designing a character that prevents them.
Zemo in particular had the most aggressive use of the mechanic yet, because we were evaluating it in the former terms and not the latter. As a team, we knew a change was necessary, but had to decide what change to pursue. There were some good arguments made in favor of removing the special lock entirely and leaning on the very high heavy bias already present, since that was the original intent behind the mechanic. We decided against this because, as we said earlier, no AI bias is ever 100% reliable, and instead chose the middle ground of leaving the AI bias alone, preserving the inability for the defender to throw Special Attack 1 or 2, and just unlocking their Special 3.
This account may cause some confusion because root didn’t use to cause the defender’s power bar to grey out, a visual we normally associate with special locks, and now does. This was an accidental knock-on of the prep we needed to do for the change, but the change below three bars is exclusively visual.
Some of you may also wonder why defenders could break out of Spider-Man (Sorcerer Supreme)’s root before if root prevented all specials, and that’s actually because there was a 0.1s delay before his root activated to allow for VFX to kick in, during which the defender could activate a special because of the way Special 3 animations work. We have actually replaced this delay with an invisible special lock to make his root mechanic more consistent with other characters and easier to use.
How did we Miss This?
First, we announced that Zemo was bugged via the Trello board as quickly as we could. This is why we have created that board, so we can share identified bugs as soon as we know about them, regardless of if we know what the resolution will be. At the time, we were still having conversations about how broad the fix needed to be, and so the listed bug only referred to Zemo.
At the time, we were unaware of the extent to which players were relying on the existing interaction to use Kraven, or we would’ve mentioned him by name as well. It was very much our mistake for not understanding that, and we apologize.
When we did ultimately make the call that we were going to be fixing all root effects, we should have updated that post, but didn’t have systems in place for doing so. We’ll be amending our internal tracking process to make sure that the Trello board is better up to date with new developments going forward.
Second, we decided not to discuss this in Zemo’s rebalancing post because we sincerely did not consider it to be part of his rebalancing process. This is, in retrospect, another mistake on our part. “Root-locking” the opponent was never one of his goals, most players weren’t doing it anyway, and we weren’t holding the outliers against him when evaluating his data, so it didn’t factor into whether we considered him balanced or not. Additionally, we considered the bug public knowledge due to the Trello board.
Lastly, we missed this change in the most recent patch notes. Writing patch notes is a very collaborative process that requires many different teams working together, and it’s easy for something to slip through the cracks. We will be re-evaluating the way in which we collect information for our patch notes in the future to help ensure that something like this doesn’t slip through the cracks again.
Root in the Future
Moving forward, this is how we intend for all Root effects to function unless otherwise specified, and will be expanding the in-game glossary to clarify as much.
Rooted defenders will be more likely to perform heavy attacks and unable to activate Special Attack 1 or 2, and any root that does not match this behavior should be considered to be bugged unless stated otherwise.
Dealing with the Current Situation
Because this bug was publicly announced via the Trello board during the 3-month window where Zemo was subject to change, we do not plan to issue any rank-down tickets for him, nor do we plan to offer any for Spider-Man, who is actually stronger after this change than before.
However, because Kraven is an older Champions and was not mentioned as affected by this bug in the past, we do plan to offer rank-down tickets to anyone with a ranked up 5 or 6-star Kraven as of the time of this post. Only those that have ranked up Kraven prior to this message going live (2:30pm PT on July 14, 2023) will receive those Rank Down tickets, so please do not rank up Kraven expecting a Rank Down ticket in the future. We plan for these to go out before the end of the month.
Once again, we want to apologize for our misunderstanding around Kraven and for the failures in communication, and will be making process changes to prevent repeats.
A lot to dig through on root issue, however my issue whatever changes were made affected his prestige. How do you may ask, well Zemo and Dooms prestige is now identical so what do you say to the landers that ranked zemo to r5 because he had the upper hand in the prestige race?
How does it matter if someone ranked Zemo for prestige or not? Zemo's prestige is not being altered so this is a non-issue.
First, we want to apologize for this situation. It was not our intent to leave any of this information out of our release notes or make any changes silently. We do not purposely make silent changes to the game, but there are processes in place that, in this case, didn’t work and this information was not disseminated the way it should have been.
Instead of asking the Devs a bunch of questions, and then translating them into communications for you, I’ve asked the Developers directly to write something up, and share it with you. This covers why we made these changes, and where we messed up on the communication process.
History of the bug and identifying it:
Back in January as Zemo was heading out the door, someone made an offhand comment about how the defender’s heavy bias while rooted seemed really reliable in keeping the opponent from throwing specials, to the point where they couldn’t remember it ever not working. No AI bias should ever be 100%, and that was not the intent with which we had been building characters. Our engineers informed us that root fully special locked the defender, preventing all three special attacks, and always had.
This was a problem because there is a big difference between designing a character that reduces specials and grants openings, and designing a character that prevents them.
Zemo in particular had the most aggressive use of the mechanic yet, because we were evaluating it in the former terms and not the latter. As a team, we knew a change was necessary, but had to decide what change to pursue. There were some good arguments made in favor of removing the special lock entirely and leaning on the very high heavy bias already present, since that was the original intent behind the mechanic. We decided against this because, as we said earlier, no AI bias is ever 100% reliable, and instead chose the middle ground of leaving the AI bias alone, preserving the inability for the defender to throw Special Attack 1 or 2, and just unlocking their Special 3.
This account may cause some confusion because root didn’t use to cause the defender’s power bar to grey out, a visual we normally associate with special locks, and now does. This was an accidental knock-on of the prep we needed to do for the change, but the change below three bars is exclusively visual.
Some of you may also wonder why defenders could break out of Spider-Man (Sorcerer Supreme)’s root before if root prevented all specials, and that’s actually because there was a 0.1s delay before his root activated to allow for VFX to kick in, during which the defender could activate a special because of the way Special 3 animations work. We have actually replaced this delay with an invisible special lock to make his root mechanic more consistent with other characters and easier to use.
How did we Miss This?
First, we announced that Zemo was bugged via the Trello board as quickly as we could. This is why we have created that board, so we can share identified bugs as soon as we know about them, regardless of if we know what the resolution will be. At the time, we were still having conversations about how broad the fix needed to be, and so the listed bug only referred to Zemo.
At the time, we were unaware of the extent to which players were relying on the existing interaction to use Kraven, or we would’ve mentioned him by name as well. It was very much our mistake for not understanding that, and we apologize.
When we did ultimately make the call that we were going to be fixing all root effects, we should have updated that post, but didn’t have systems in place for doing so. We’ll be amending our internal tracking process to make sure that the Trello board is better up to date with new developments going forward.
Second, we decided not to discuss this in Zemo’s rebalancing post because we sincerely did not consider it to be part of his rebalancing process. This is, in retrospect, another mistake on our part. “Root-locking” the opponent was never one of his goals, most players weren’t doing it anyway, and we weren’t holding the outliers against him when evaluating his data, so it didn’t factor into whether we considered him balanced or not. Additionally, we considered the bug public knowledge due to the Trello board.
Lastly, we missed this change in the most recent patch notes. Writing patch notes is a very collaborative process that requires many different teams working together, and it’s easy for something to slip through the cracks. We will be re-evaluating the way in which we collect information for our patch notes in the future to help ensure that something like this doesn’t slip through the cracks again.
Root in the Future
Moving forward, this is how we intend for all Root effects to function unless otherwise specified, and will be expanding the in-game glossary to clarify as much.
Rooted defenders will be more likely to perform heavy attacks and unable to activate Special Attack 1 or 2, and any root that does not match this behavior should be considered to be bugged unless stated otherwise.
Dealing with the Current Situation
Because this bug was publicly announced via the Trello board during the 3-month window where Zemo was subject to change, we do not plan to issue any rank-down tickets for him, nor do we plan to offer any for Spider-Man, who is actually stronger after this change than before.
However, because Kraven is an older Champions and was not mentioned as affected by this bug in the past, we do plan to offer rank-down tickets to anyone with a ranked up 5 or 6-star Kraven as of the time of this post. Only those that have ranked up Kraven prior to this message going live (2:30pm PT on July 14, 2023) will receive those Rank Down tickets, so please do not rank up Kraven expecting a Rank Down ticket in the future. We plan for these to go out before the end of the month.
Once again, we want to apologize for our misunderstanding around Kraven and for the failures in communication, and will be making process changes to prevent repeats.
First, we want to apologize for this situation. It was not our intent to leave any of this information out of our release notes or make any changes silently. We do not purposely make silent changes to the game, but there are processes in place that, in this case, didn’t work and this information was not disseminated the way it should have been.
Instead of asking the Devs a bunch of questions, and then translating them into communications for you, I’ve asked the Developers directly to write something up, and share it with you. This covers why we made these changes, and where we messed up on the communication process.
History of the bug and identifying it:
Back in January as Zemo was heading out the door, someone made an offhand comment about how the defender’s heavy bias while rooted seemed really reliable in keeping the opponent from throwing specials, to the point where they couldn’t remember it ever not working. No AI bias should ever be 100%, and that was not the intent with which we had been building characters. Our engineers informed us that root fully special locked the defender, preventing all three special attacks, and always had.
This was a problem because there is a big difference between designing a character that reduces specials and grants openings, and designing a character that prevents them.
Zemo in particular had the most aggressive use of the mechanic yet, because we were evaluating it in the former terms and not the latter. As a team, we knew a change was necessary, but had to decide what change to pursue. There were some good arguments made in favor of removing the special lock entirely and leaning on the very high heavy bias already present, since that was the original intent behind the mechanic. We decided against this because, as we said earlier, no AI bias is ever 100% reliable, and instead chose the middle ground of leaving the AI bias alone, preserving the inability for the defender to throw Special Attack 1 or 2, and just unlocking their Special 3.
This account may cause some confusion because root didn’t use to cause the defender’s power bar to grey out, a visual we normally associate with special locks, and now does. This was an accidental knock-on of the prep we needed to do for the change, but the change below three bars is exclusively visual.
Some of you may also wonder why defenders could break out of Spider-Man (Sorcerer Supreme)’s root before if root prevented all specials, and that’s actually because there was a 0.1s delay before his root activated to allow for VFX to kick in, during which the defender could activate a special because of the way Special 3 animations work. We have actually replaced this delay with an invisible special lock to make his root mechanic more consistent with other characters and easier to use.
How did we Miss This?
First, we announced that Zemo was bugged via the Trello board as quickly as we could. This is why we have created that board, so we can share identified bugs as soon as we know about them, regardless of if we know what the resolution will be. At the time, we were still having conversations about how broad the fix needed to be, and so the listed bug only referred to Zemo.
At the time, we were unaware of the extent to which players were relying on the existing interaction to use Kraven, or we would’ve mentioned him by name as well. It was very much our mistake for not understanding that, and we apologize.
When we did ultimately make the call that we were going to be fixing all root effects, we should have updated that post, but didn’t have systems in place for doing so. We’ll be amending our internal tracking process to make sure that the Trello board is better up to date with new developments going forward.
Second, we decided not to discuss this in Zemo’s rebalancing post because we sincerely did not consider it to be part of his rebalancing process. This is, in retrospect, another mistake on our part. “Root-locking” the opponent was never one of his goals, most players weren’t doing it anyway, and we weren’t holding the outliers against him when evaluating his data, so it didn’t factor into whether we considered him balanced or not. Additionally, we considered the bug public knowledge due to the Trello board.
Lastly, we missed this change in the most recent patch notes. Writing patch notes is a very collaborative process that requires many different teams working together, and it’s easy for something to slip through the cracks. We will be re-evaluating the way in which we collect information for our patch notes in the future to help ensure that something like this doesn’t slip through the cracks again.
Root in the Future
Moving forward, this is how we intend for all Root effects to function unless otherwise specified, and will be expanding the in-game glossary to clarify as much.
Rooted defenders will be more likely to perform heavy attacks and unable to activate Special Attack 1 or 2, and any root that does not match this behavior should be considered to be bugged unless stated otherwise.
Dealing with the Current Situation
Because this bug was publicly announced via the Trello board during the 3-month window where Zemo was subject to change, we do not plan to issue any rank-down tickets for him, nor do we plan to offer any for Spider-Man, who is actually stronger after this change than before.
However, because Kraven is an older Champions and was not mentioned as affected by this bug in the past, we do plan to offer rank-down tickets to anyone with a ranked up 5 or 6-star Kraven as of the time of this post. Only those that have ranked up Kraven prior to this message going live (2:30pm PT on July 14, 2023) will receive those Rank Down tickets, so please do not rank up Kraven expecting a Rank Down ticket in the future. We plan for these to go out before the end of the month.
Once again, we want to apologize for our misunderstanding around Kraven and for the failures in communication, and will be making process changes to prevent repeats.
A lot to dig through on root issue, however my issue whatever changes were made affected his prestige. How do you may ask, well Zemo and Dooms prestige is now identical so what do you say to the landers that ranked zemo to r5 because he had the upper hand in the prestige race?
How does it matter if someone ranked Zemo for prestige or not? Zemo's prestige is not being altered so this is a non-issue.
It sounds like they're saying Zemo's prestige was altered due to the change. No idea how true that is, but huge if that's the case
First, we want to apologize for this situation. It was not our intent to leave any of this information out of our release notes or make any changes silently. We do not purposely make silent changes to the game, but there are processes in place that, in this case, didn’t work and this information was not disseminated the way it should have been.
Instead of asking the Devs a bunch of questions, and then translating them into communications for you, I’ve asked the Developers directly to write something up, and share it with you. This covers why we made these changes, and where we messed up on the communication process.
History of the bug and identifying it:
Back in January as Zemo was heading out the door, someone made an offhand comment about how the defender’s heavy bias while rooted seemed really reliable in keeping the opponent from throwing specials, to the point where they couldn’t remember it ever not working. No AI bias should ever be 100%, and that was not the intent with which we had been building characters. Our engineers informed us that root fully special locked the defender, preventing all three special attacks, and always had.
This was a problem because there is a big difference between designing a character that reduces specials and grants openings, and designing a character that prevents them.
Zemo in particular had the most aggressive use of the mechanic yet, because we were evaluating it in the former terms and not the latter. As a team, we knew a change was necessary, but had to decide what change to pursue. There were some good arguments made in favor of removing the special lock entirely and leaning on the very high heavy bias already present, since that was the original intent behind the mechanic. We decided against this because, as we said earlier, no AI bias is ever 100% reliable, and instead chose the middle ground of leaving the AI bias alone, preserving the inability for the defender to throw Special Attack 1 or 2, and just unlocking their Special 3.
This account may cause some confusion because root didn’t use to cause the defender’s power bar to grey out, a visual we normally associate with special locks, and now does. This was an accidental knock-on of the prep we needed to do for the change, but the change below three bars is exclusively visual.
Some of you may also wonder why defenders could break out of Spider-Man (Sorcerer Supreme)’s root before if root prevented all specials, and that’s actually because there was a 0.1s delay before his root activated to allow for VFX to kick in, during which the defender could activate a special because of the way Special 3 animations work. We have actually replaced this delay with an invisible special lock to make his root mechanic more consistent with other characters and easier to use.
How did we Miss This?
First, we announced that Zemo was bugged via the Trello board as quickly as we could. This is why we have created that board, so we can share identified bugs as soon as we know about them, regardless of if we know what the resolution will be. At the time, we were still having conversations about how broad the fix needed to be, and so the listed bug only referred to Zemo.
At the time, we were unaware of the extent to which players were relying on the existing interaction to use Kraven, or we would’ve mentioned him by name as well. It was very much our mistake for not understanding that, and we apologize.
When we did ultimately make the call that we were going to be fixing all root effects, we should have updated that post, but didn’t have systems in place for doing so. We’ll be amending our internal tracking process to make sure that the Trello board is better up to date with new developments going forward.
Second, we decided not to discuss this in Zemo’s rebalancing post because we sincerely did not consider it to be part of his rebalancing process. This is, in retrospect, another mistake on our part. “Root-locking” the opponent was never one of his goals, most players weren’t doing it anyway, and we weren’t holding the outliers against him when evaluating his data, so it didn’t factor into whether we considered him balanced or not. Additionally, we considered the bug public knowledge due to the Trello board.
Lastly, we missed this change in the most recent patch notes. Writing patch notes is a very collaborative process that requires many different teams working together, and it’s easy for something to slip through the cracks. We will be re-evaluating the way in which we collect information for our patch notes in the future to help ensure that something like this doesn’t slip through the cracks again.
Root in the Future
Moving forward, this is how we intend for all Root effects to function unless otherwise specified, and will be expanding the in-game glossary to clarify as much.
Rooted defenders will be more likely to perform heavy attacks and unable to activate Special Attack 1 or 2, and any root that does not match this behavior should be considered to be bugged unless stated otherwise.
Dealing with the Current Situation
Because this bug was publicly announced via the Trello board during the 3-month window where Zemo was subject to change, we do not plan to issue any rank-down tickets for him, nor do we plan to offer any for Spider-Man, who is actually stronger after this change than before.
However, because Kraven is an older Champions and was not mentioned as affected by this bug in the past, we do plan to offer rank-down tickets to anyone with a ranked up 5 or 6-star Kraven as of the time of this post. Only those that have ranked up Kraven prior to this message going live (2:30pm PT on July 14, 2023) will receive those Rank Down tickets, so please do not rank up Kraven expecting a Rank Down ticket in the future. We plan for these to go out before the end of the month.
Once again, we want to apologize for our misunderstanding around Kraven and for the failures in communication, and will be making process changes to prevent repeats.
First, we want to apologize for this situation. It was not our intent to leave any of this information out of our release notes or make any changes silently. We do not purposely make silent changes to the game, but there are processes in place that, in this case, didn’t work and this information was not disseminated the way it should have been.
Instead of asking the Devs a bunch of questions, and then translating them into communications for you, I’ve asked the Developers directly to write something up, and share it with you. This covers why we made these changes, and where we messed up on the communication process.
History of the bug and identifying it:
Back in January as Zemo was heading out the door, someone made an offhand comment about how the defender’s heavy bias while rooted seemed really reliable in keeping the opponent from throwing specials, to the point where they couldn’t remember it ever not working. No AI bias should ever be 100%, and that was not the intent with which we had been building characters. Our engineers informed us that root fully special locked the defender, preventing all three special attacks, and always had.
This was a problem because there is a big difference between designing a character that reduces specials and grants openings, and designing a character that prevents them.
Zemo in particular had the most aggressive use of the mechanic yet, because we were evaluating it in the former terms and not the latter. As a team, we knew a change was necessary, but had to decide what change to pursue. There were some good arguments made in favor of removing the special lock entirely and leaning on the very high heavy bias already present, since that was the original intent behind the mechanic. We decided against this because, as we said earlier, no AI bias is ever 100% reliable, and instead chose the middle ground of leaving the AI bias alone, preserving the inability for the defender to throw Special Attack 1 or 2, and just unlocking their Special 3.
This account may cause some confusion because root didn’t use to cause the defender’s power bar to grey out, a visual we normally associate with special locks, and now does. This was an accidental knock-on of the prep we needed to do for the change, but the change below three bars is exclusively visual.
Some of you may also wonder why defenders could break out of Spider-Man (Sorcerer Supreme)’s root before if root prevented all specials, and that’s actually because there was a 0.1s delay before his root activated to allow for VFX to kick in, during which the defender could activate a special because of the way Special 3 animations work. We have actually replaced this delay with an invisible special lock to make his root mechanic more consistent with other characters and easier to use.
How did we Miss This?
First, we announced that Zemo was bugged via the Trello board as quickly as we could. This is why we have created that board, so we can share identified bugs as soon as we know about them, regardless of if we know what the resolution will be. At the time, we were still having conversations about how broad the fix needed to be, and so the listed bug only referred to Zemo.
At the time, we were unaware of the extent to which players were relying on the existing interaction to use Kraven, or we would’ve mentioned him by name as well. It was very much our mistake for not understanding that, and we apologize.
When we did ultimately make the call that we were going to be fixing all root effects, we should have updated that post, but didn’t have systems in place for doing so. We’ll be amending our internal tracking process to make sure that the Trello board is better up to date with new developments going forward.
Second, we decided not to discuss this in Zemo’s rebalancing post because we sincerely did not consider it to be part of his rebalancing process. This is, in retrospect, another mistake on our part. “Root-locking” the opponent was never one of his goals, most players weren’t doing it anyway, and we weren’t holding the outliers against him when evaluating his data, so it didn’t factor into whether we considered him balanced or not. Additionally, we considered the bug public knowledge due to the Trello board.
Lastly, we missed this change in the most recent patch notes. Writing patch notes is a very collaborative process that requires many different teams working together, and it’s easy for something to slip through the cracks. We will be re-evaluating the way in which we collect information for our patch notes in the future to help ensure that something like this doesn’t slip through the cracks again.
Root in the Future
Moving forward, this is how we intend for all Root effects to function unless otherwise specified, and will be expanding the in-game glossary to clarify as much.
Rooted defenders will be more likely to perform heavy attacks and unable to activate Special Attack 1 or 2, and any root that does not match this behavior should be considered to be bugged unless stated otherwise.
Dealing with the Current Situation
Because this bug was publicly announced via the Trello board during the 3-month window where Zemo was subject to change, we do not plan to issue any rank-down tickets for him, nor do we plan to offer any for Spider-Man, who is actually stronger after this change than before.
However, because Kraven is an older Champions and was not mentioned as affected by this bug in the past, we do plan to offer rank-down tickets to anyone with a ranked up 5 or 6-star Kraven as of the time of this post. Only those that have ranked up Kraven prior to this message going live (2:30pm PT on July 14, 2023) will receive those Rank Down tickets, so please do not rank up Kraven expecting a Rank Down ticket in the future. We plan for these to go out before the end of the month.
Once again, we want to apologize for our misunderstanding around Kraven and for the failures in communication, and will be making process changes to prevent repeats.
A lot to dig through on root issue, however my issue whatever changes were made affected his prestige. How do you may ask, well Zemo and Dooms prestige is now identical so what do you say to the landers that ranked zemo to r5 because he had the upper hand in the prestige race?
How does it matter if someone ranked Zemo for prestige or not? Zemo's prestige is not being altered so this is a non-issue.
It sounds like they're saying Zemo's prestige was altered due to the change. No idea how true that is, but huge if that's the case
I think they're saying that the change doesn't matter because his prestige is still good
Perfect solution from the amazing team. Thank you guys! The next time please say that it's a bug at your jira board and nothing more. Never mind that no one know about your jira and also don't have access to this. It's our problem.
Overall i‘m not a fan of this whole situation and really i don‘t understand why no RDTs will go out for Zemo. Kabam missed so much Communication and just a node on the Trello board let them feel save? This os wrong and absolutly nothing what the community deserves.
Perfect solution from the amazing team. Thank you guys! The next time please say that it's a bug at your jira board and nothing more. Never mind that no one know about your jira and also don't have access to this. It's our problem.
PM fault, right? Yeah, it was in the backlog for 19 months and now it was time to make some small quality of life improvements, why not along with the Zemo nerf
Anyone looking to relive the Glory days of the Root Lock before taking their Kraven down later this month, it still works just fine in RoL. Since they can't throw their sp3 anyways, they're just prevented from throwing all three specials while rooted.
Anyone looking to relive the Glory days of the Root Lock before taking their Kraven down later this month, it still works just fine in RoL. Since they can't throw their sp3 anyways, they're just prevented from throwing all three specials while rooted.
Anyone looking to relive the Glory days of the Root Lock before taking their Kraven down later this month, it still works just fine in RoL. Since they can't throw their sp3 anyways, they're just prevented from throwing all three specials while rooted.
I shared it. It was on the Trello board, at least since April.
That's still ages after the champs released. Not enough. Not to mention trello isn't as popular as forums. Least they could have done is put up a forum post since it's such a crucial bug. Or at least, you know, on the Baron Zemo rebalance post
About a year and 4 months. When was it reported? What usually happens in these cases is people don't report them when they're useful in some way. Root has had issues all along the way. Rintrah, for example. It's been known that he was taking no Damage. Even people pointing out that Root is bugged when they gave it the green light. Listen, I empathize with the OP and I appreciate how passionate they are, but I do not agree with RDTs for bug fixes. I didn't the last times they gave them out for it, and I don't now. They're for major intended changes to how a Champ is supposed to perform. There isn't any evidence, other than "That's how they worked." to support that. If it was a listed ability and it changed, fair enough. That's not what we have.
You should stop trying to argue this, they never sait Root is bugged even in your trollo board. They only mentioned Zemo by name. No one is opposing this change as long as they offer tickets for the now worse champion. What does it even matter to you, are you on some payroll what the hell?
Root is a mechanic. Not a Champion. If it was bugged and they fixed it, they can't just give Tickets for every Champ with Root. Perhaps a lack of communication, sure. I don't see notes in the Patch Notes. You benefitted from a bug for some time. Take it for what it is. I don't agree with giving Tickets. I don't make their decisions, though. So it's not up to me. I'm still not going to agree with it.
"You benefitted from a bug for some time. Take it for what it is. I don't agree with giving Tickets. I don't make their decisions, though. So it's not up to me. I'm still not going to agree with it."
Just to be clear, the players are not the ones who benefitted from the bug, Kabam did. They sold an awful lot of Zemo cavs, sig stones, and rank up materials that were put in to him as a result of this "bug".
If you're pushing the narrative that they did a Bait and Switch, that is as old as my presence on the Forum.
And what changed with the beta? Root has worked the same way since their original Kraven announcement until just days ago.
Betas are never the final word on how something is intended to work after release. That's why they have Betas.
You're right, and if they had mentioned at all at release that Root wasn't working as intended, there wouldn't be an issue. But they didn't. Not for over a year afterwards.
There is NO time limit on bugs.
You're still missing the point and I really don't understand what you're hoping to achieve. Nobody is hurt by players getting RDT's except for Kabam, and you yourself said they failed to communicate. They failed in many new and inventive ways with this one. It really feels like you're just here to argue.
That I disagree with. Frankly, I wish they were never introduced. Ever since, there have been countless requests for them, and they're completely counterproductive to the game itself. Ranking a Champ is meant to be a one-way process. Not a choice to revisit in the future. Everytime they're given, the precedent is fed for more in the future. My feelings are besides the point. I understand their use. Those cases should not come under bug fixes. Besides feeding that precedent, it just clouds the whole purpose of them and adds to confusion. I respect Kabam’s decisions because it's not mine to make, and I understand their reasoning. That doesn't mean I agree with every decision. I don't think they should have been given for bug fixes, and I sure don't think Christmas was a good idea. That's been my position over the years consistently. This is a situation I don't feel warrants them. It doesn't take a great amount of common sense to understand why Root preventing L3s is OP.
Moleman having True strike in frenzy was not in his ability and was also too OP They offered rank down tickets because they knew it was a bug due to their error Honestly it feels like you are just here to argue
I disagree. I'm not here to argue. They offered it because they knew a number of people Ranked him for that specific reason alone, and they took responsibility for the lack of communication. I get their intentions. Which is why I said I appreciate them extending it in this case. I still don't agree with RDTs for fixes. Never did. For good reason, too. It's a Pandora's Box. As we see here. Offer them in one case, people justify them in all cases, and the demand never ends.
Well they didn't communicate about Zemo too... People can r2 him for his root and bleeds but after that they only rank him intending to use him when they face a defender with immense amount of power gain and intend to use the Zemo lock to lock down the fight.
The Trello board they talk about is something more than 40% of the forum members don't know about and the forum is only representing ≤ 25% of the in-game community which means more than 75% of the community still doesn't know that Zemo is being "fixed"
As far as the person saying that it was posted on Recent Discussions... Well no one visits that side of Forums. Wanna know why?? Because every new update and bug fix is announced of GENERAL DISCUSSIONS or Update and bug fixes part of the forums.
In general, it's good practice to go to Recent Discussions. You mentioned Mole Man. I said I didn't support Tickets then, and I don't now. We are better off agreeing to disagree. My feelings are not going to change in this instance.
It's a good practice not a widely practiced one
Anyways it looks like Kabam hasn't taken away the rewards from many people who have opened those bugged mythic crystals, so I might leave by month end anyways The way they try to sweep things under the rug is outrageous
This just feels like such BS. Ive been playing pretty much since inception, and at least $10k in… but i’m completely done. The BS is never ending. I just can’t anymore…free to play it is
This just feels like such BS. Ive been playing pretty much since inception, and at least $10k in… but i’m completely done. The BS is never ending. I just can’t anymore…free to play it is
Oh man….featured crystals and early release bundles just took a serious hit. Can’t imagine anyone wants to spend additional resources on new champs after this debacle.
Oh man….featured crystals and early release bundles just took a serious hit. Can’t imagine anyone wants to spend additional resources on new champs after this debacle.
I can’t even add up all the money I’ve spent opening featured’s, never again.
Good rule if thumb is to wait 3 years before any rank up.
I honestly don’t know where I land on the RDT issue, however I can completely understand the ire right now. I would argue, @KabamMike, that the team should rethink this one for two reasons. One, Kabam made this move right after the July 4th deals, which historically has been used by players to spend for resources to advance specific characters (and marketed by Kabam as an opportunity to do so). It just looks gross doing this right after one of your big paydays. Two, y’all need to buy some community goodwill right now. The number of bugs, goofs, gaffes and issues in the game is at all-time high. Fall on your sword once or twice. It’s not going to throw the Earth of its Axis, nor is it going to hurt your bottom line. In fact, it might help your bottom line.
First, we want to apologize for this situation. It was not our intent to leave any of this information out of our release notes or make any changes silently. We do not purposely make silent changes to the game, but there are processes in place that, in this case, didn’t work and this information was not disseminated the way it should have been.
Instead of asking the Devs a bunch of questions, and then translating them into communications for you, I’ve asked the Developers directly to write something up, and share it with you. This covers why we made these changes, and where we messed up on the communication process.
History of the bug and identifying it:
Back in January as Zemo was heading out the door, someone made an offhand comment about how the defender’s heavy bias while rooted seemed really reliable in keeping the opponent from throwing specials, to the point where they couldn’t remember it ever not working. No AI bias should ever be 100%, and that was not the intent with which we had been building characters. Our engineers informed us that root fully special locked the defender, preventing all three special attacks, and always had.
This was a problem because there is a big difference between designing a character that reduces specials and grants openings, and designing a character that prevents them.
Zemo in particular had the most aggressive use of the mechanic yet, because we were evaluating it in the former terms and not the latter. As a team, we knew a change was necessary, but had to decide what change to pursue. There were some good arguments made in favor of removing the special lock entirely and leaning on the very high heavy bias already present, since that was the original intent behind the mechanic. We decided against this because, as we said earlier, no AI bias is ever 100% reliable, and instead chose the middle ground of leaving the AI bias alone, preserving the inability for the defender to throw Special Attack 1 or 2, and just unlocking their Special 3.
This account may cause some confusion because root didn’t use to cause the defender’s power bar to grey out, a visual we normally associate with special locks, and now does. This was an accidental knock-on of the prep we needed to do for the change, but the change below three bars is exclusively visual.
Some of you may also wonder why defenders could break out of Spider-Man (Sorcerer Supreme)’s root before if root prevented all specials, and that’s actually because there was a 0.1s delay before his root activated to allow for VFX to kick in, during which the defender could activate a special because of the way Special 3 animations work. We have actually replaced this delay with an invisible special lock to make his root mechanic more consistent with other characters and easier to use.
How did we Miss This?
First, we announced that Zemo was bugged via the Trello board as quickly as we could. This is why we have created that board, so we can share identified bugs as soon as we know about them, regardless of if we know what the resolution will be. At the time, we were still having conversations about how broad the fix needed to be, and so the listed bug only referred to Zemo.
At the time, we were unaware of the extent to which players were relying on the existing interaction to use Kraven, or we would’ve mentioned him by name as well. It was very much our mistake for not understanding that, and we apologize.
When we did ultimately make the call that we were going to be fixing all root effects, we should have updated that post, but didn’t have systems in place for doing so. We’ll be amending our internal tracking process to make sure that the Trello board is better up to date with new developments going forward.
Second, we decided not to discuss this in Zemo’s rebalancing post because we sincerely did not consider it to be part of his rebalancing process. This is, in retrospect, another mistake on our part. “Root-locking” the opponent was never one of his goals, most players weren’t doing it anyway, and we weren’t holding the outliers against him when evaluating his data, so it didn’t factor into whether we considered him balanced or not. Additionally, we considered the bug public knowledge due to the Trello board.
Lastly, we missed this change in the most recent patch notes. Writing patch notes is a very collaborative process that requires many different teams working together, and it’s easy for something to slip through the cracks. We will be re-evaluating the way in which we collect information for our patch notes in the future to help ensure that something like this doesn’t slip through the cracks again.
Root in the Future
Moving forward, this is how we intend for all Root effects to function unless otherwise specified, and will be expanding the in-game glossary to clarify as much.
Rooted defenders will be more likely to perform heavy attacks and unable to activate Special Attack 1 or 2, and any root that does not match this behavior should be considered to be bugged unless stated otherwise.
Dealing with the Current Situation
Because this bug was publicly announced via the Trello board during the 3-month window where Zemo was subject to change, we do not plan to issue any rank-down tickets for him, nor do we plan to offer any for Spider-Man, who is actually stronger after this change than before.
However, because Kraven is an older Champions and was not mentioned as affected by this bug in the past, we do plan to offer rank-down tickets to anyone with a ranked up 5 or 6-star Kraven as of the time of this post. Only those that have ranked up Kraven prior to this message going live (2:30pm PT on July 14, 2023) will receive those Rank Down tickets, so please do not rank up Kraven expecting a Rank Down ticket in the future. We plan for these to go out before the end of the month.
Once again, we want to apologize for our misunderstanding around Kraven and for the failures in communication, and will be making process changes to prevent repeats.
Hey, Miike. Again. Well, you screwed up once again. Yes, it happens. But why drown yourself further with ridiculous statements? Admit the mistake, tell the players how you compensate for it and move on. There were a bunch of different arguments in different posts, including your own deep dive. As it seems to me, at the moment you have two solutions: to return the mechanics to what it was and leave it in its old form (which you are not going to do here, according to reports), or give out ran down tickets, returning the sig stones and awakening (if they were used). You did the same for the Mole, but his changes were less significant. It is not necessary to refer to some trello, about which 99% of players hear for the first time. There are three communication channels that people follow - forum/YouTube/game. Have respect for the players and they will have it for you. But the way you behave in situations of your mistakes, that you correct something only under someone else's pressure is a bad step for reputation.
People are forgetting that is like the second time a silent rug pull has happened in what? 2, 3 weeks?
This is a very nasty habit to get into, at least with cases such as Mole Man, Ultron even back to She-Hulk's heavy nerf, you let us know in advance even though the changes were controversial.
Also I am rather baffled that Zemo isn't getting RDTs despite the fact that he is the main victim. The fact that he's up for rebalancing next shouldn't change a thing, you guys have stated that you aren't going to bring the Zemo lock back. As much as I hate to say it, almost no one really uses Kraven, in fact most people would agree towards the idea of him getting buffed.
I don't understand why there's still a struggle with these things. You guys have pulled it off before and I'm struggling to find a reason why you can't pull it off this time.
Awesome! Zemo does less damage then most skill champs & now a huge piece of his kit is gone... making him about worthless!! Jackpoooottt.
I'm glad they posted a false bug (like he stated above, root has ALWAYS worked this way!), on a site almost no one uses (theyre addressing this on the forums though? Like they shouldve on his rebalancing), to address the (made up) issue while also continuing to charge real people real money to get him.
Timed it just after spring cleaning & 4th of July sales to maximize profits on a very popular new champ...
I mean it is understandable to fix it because this mechanics allows simple farming by conteolling the AI at 100% but I think they have to gove us RDT or a rework
Comments
You mentioned Mole Man. I said I didn't support Tickets then, and I don't now. We are better off agreeing to disagree. My feelings are not going to change in this instance.
so all these long list of english means you guys didnt consider what most players had invested in ranking him up to MAX.
This is totally unacceptable and i hope you guys rethink or come up with something better
The next time please say that it's a bug at your jira board and nothing more. Never mind that no one know about your jira and also don't have access to this. It's our problem.
Last Month was the 8.3 Beta and the Zemolock worked fine there.
Overall i‘m not a fan of this whole situation and really i don‘t understand why no RDTs will go out for Zemo.
Kabam missed so much Communication and just a node on the Trello board let them feel save?
This os wrong and absolutly nothing what the community deserves.
Anyone looking to relive the Glory days of the Root Lock before taking their Kraven down later this month, it still works just fine in RoL. Since they can't throw their sp3 anyways, they're just prevented from throwing all three specials while rooted.
Anyways it looks like Kabam hasn't taken away the rewards from many people who have opened those bugged mythic crystals, so I might leave by month end anyways
The way they try to sweep things under the rug is outrageous
Beyond tired of the bait and switch nonsense.
Good rule if thumb is to wait 3 years before any rank up.
We are killing champions,have fun
Well, you screwed up once again. Yes, it happens. But why drown yourself further with ridiculous statements? Admit the mistake, tell the players how you compensate for it and move on. There were a bunch of different arguments in different posts, including your own deep dive. As it seems to me, at the moment you have two solutions: to return the mechanics to what it was and leave it in its old form (which you are not going to do here, according to reports), or give out ran down tickets, returning the sig stones and awakening (if they were used). You did the same for the Mole, but his changes were less significant. It is not necessary to refer to some trello, about which 99% of players hear for the first time. There are three communication channels that people follow - forum/YouTube/game. Have respect for the players and they will have it for you. But the way you behave in situations of your mistakes, that you correct something only under someone else's pressure is a bad step for reputation.
This is a very nasty habit to get into, at least with cases such as Mole Man, Ultron even back to She-Hulk's heavy nerf, you let us know in advance even though the changes were controversial.
Also I am rather baffled that Zemo isn't getting RDTs despite the fact that he is the main victim. The fact that he's up for rebalancing next shouldn't change a thing, you guys have stated that you aren't going to bring the Zemo lock back. As much as I hate to say it, almost no one really uses Kraven, in fact most people would agree towards the idea of him getting buffed.
I don't understand why there's still a struggle with these things. You guys have pulled it off before and I'm struggling to find a reason why you can't pull it off this time.
I'm glad they posted a false bug (like he stated above, root has ALWAYS worked this way!), on a site almost no one uses (theyre addressing this on the forums though? Like they shouldve on his rebalancing), to address the (made up) issue while also continuing to charge real people real money to get him.
Timed it just after spring cleaning & 4th of July sales to maximize profits on a very popular new champ...
Nothing shady about this at all...