Courage and Assassin Masteries ( Possibly Attack Masteries in General ) Are Bugged

The video says it all!

Comments

We as a player base spend real money on these masteries which have been advertised to us as one thing I think that it is unacceptable to simply rewrite the description and call it a day I do not feel that this is treating your paying coustomers with the respect that we deserve. Please reconsider this tactic which I feel is in acceptable
Thank you
Kevin

Chris_This

Fyrintenimar wrote: »

Chris_This wrote: »

The fact that no one really knows for sure how things are actually "calculated" is alarming. Why does everything in this game have to be so complex? Its almost like we aren't supposed to figure this stuff out.

shady af.

To be fair to Kabam, whenever you update a program, there is a chance of unintended outcomes. As they add new mechanics, they don’t always react with existing masteries in the expected way.
I’ve seen similar issues pop up in other games as well. Whether it’s shady or not comes down to how they handle it now that the issue is revealed.

Good point. Don't they have a QA section? Every game developer I know of has a QA section who's sole purpose to test stuff. Seem like too many of these things fall through the cracks and get discovered months down the line.

On a side note, I feel like the game is becoming just to complicated with new character descriptions being ridiculously long. Also, buffs vs. passive buffs and their interaction with character abilities and when some trigger or not is just getting too much. Maybe it's just me...

allinashes

I don't particularly like the use of description errata as a means of resolving bugs when the interaction could be addressed. However, Kabam has indicated this is not necessarily an endpoint and they could consider changing it in the future.

This is not a bad place to be, with regards to the future of these masteries. But this is not the first time something like this has happened. The precedent is set at this point. Last time it was easy to shrug off if it wasn't your ox being gored, but you can't be incensed over this one if you were fine with that one. All the same general arguments for why the past one was fine apply here.

Mirage_Turtle

Wow! One day after making a video, he got the attention of the mods, got the team to review the data, they identifed the issue, and began work on a solution.

We need to get @DorkLessons to start making videos on some of the older bugs that have been swept under the rug. If you're reading Dave, I'd love to see inequity addressed. Please?

https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/comment/676459#Comment_676459

BigPoppaCBONE

Chris_This wrote: »

Fyrintenimar wrote: »

Chris_This wrote: »

The fact that no one really knows for sure how things are actually "calculated" is alarming. Why does everything in this game have to be so complex? Its almost like we aren't supposed to figure this stuff out.

shady af.

To be fair to Kabam, whenever you update a program, there is a chance of unintended outcomes. As they add new mechanics, they don’t always react with existing masteries in the expected way.
I’ve seen similar issues pop up in other games as well. Whether it’s shady or not comes down to how they handle it now that the issue is revealed.

Good point. Don't they have a QA section? Every game developer I know of has a QA section who's sole purpose to test stuff. Seem like too many of these things fall through the cracks and get discovered months down the line.

On a side note, I feel like the game is becoming just to complicated with new character descriptions being ridiculously long. Also, buffs vs. passive buffs and their interaction with character abilities and when some trigger or not is just getting too much. Maybe it's just me...

The champ ability descriptions seem really long because the old ones were painfully short. Adding more interactions and possible effects is good as it allows for differentiation between champs. They need to revisit old champs and flesh out what they can do so they aren’t so pitiful.

MEKA5

I'm pretty sure these masteries used to increase bleed damage and DoT...

Peacemaker4115

This is not good Kabam. We put real money to master assasin. Please fix this issue. Many players enjoyed it already while completing LOL, but the new players will have to suffer because of a bug or intentionally reprogrammed mastery.

th3motivatorrr

Personally I like double edge. I do a lot of arena and anything that saves me time and physical abuse of constant thumb tapping helps. I find it unhealthy on the carpals and thumbs to continually do the same motion over and over again. With that said, arena masteries need to be preprogrammed or saved and allow to be switched on and off through out the game at no cost after unlocking. Its a matter of health and safety at the end of the day.
1. Masteries need to be reworked as they have not changed since they were introduced, example physical resistance maxed 4/4 is 160.0. We are up against defenders with 8k to 13k attack. What is 160.0 in comparison.
2. Arena masteries, quest masteries, and war masteries need to be allowed to switched around free of cost
3. Arena masteries need to be reworked as it is a matter of health and safety to repeatedly do the same motions over and over again throughout the day
4. Since unstoppable mid combo is now a common thing, a mastery equivalent to unfazed needs to be added. when an enemy evades, your champ can go unstoppable. Something needs counter the unstoppable and their unstoppable timer needs be shortened
5. With new mechanics, masteries need to be updated to match those mechanics

My main concern is the health and safety of overuse injuries, and the fear of carpal tunnel syndrome that is associated with arena grinding. Arena masteries need to be reworked, either have the ability to be unlocked and saved and changed with no cost, have the fights end in 5 hits, autofight arena, anything that will improve overall public and safety

AIISupernatural

th3motivatorrr wrote: »

Personally I like double edge. I do a lot of arena and anything that saves me time and physical abuse of constant thumb tapping helps. I find it unhealthy on the carpals and thumbs to continually do the same motion over and over again. With that said, arena masteries need to be preprogrammed or saved and allow to be switched on and off through out the game at no cost after unlocking. Its a matter of health and safety at the end of the day.
1. Masteries need to be reworked as they have not changed since they were introduced, example physical resistance maxed 4/4 is 160.0. We are up against defenders with 8k to 13k attack. What is 160.0 in comparison.
2. Arena masteries, quest masteries, and war masteries need to be allowed to switched around free of cost
3. Arena masteries need to be reworked as it is a matter of health and safety to repeatedly do the same motions over and over again throughout the day
4. Since unstoppable mid combo is now a common thing, a mastery equivalent to unfazed needs to be added. when an enemy evades, your champ can go unstoppable. Something needs counter the unstoppable and their unstoppable timer needs be shortened
5. With new mechanics, masteries need to be updated to match those mechanics

My main concern is the health and safety of overuse injuries, and the fear of carpal tunnel syndrome that is associated with arena grinding. Arena masteries need to be reworked, either have the ability to be unlocked and saved and changed with no cost, have the fights end in 5 hits, autofight arena, anything that will improve overall public and safety

Masteries were changed from % to flat rates in the dreaded patch 12.0

Nito

There’s more going on here. Sometime in the last month or two, these masteries got bugged, and now that the community is finding out, instead of ADMITTING fault and being forthright, Kabam is just going to claim they always worked this way and that the mastery description is wrong. I know for a FACT Kabam is wrong. I used to always use my 5/65 gwenpool to farm potions in ROL, and I am 100% positive her bleeds (which is damage over time, which Kabam just claimed was not affected by these masteries) scales with both Courage and assassin. When I would drop below 50%, I always noticed increased bleed damage, and likewise when my opponent dropped into assassins range. Kabam is not being truthful. They accidentally bugged it, won’t admit to it, and now aren’t going to fix it but rather claim it was always this way. Despicable.

DNA3000

Kabam Miike wrote: »

This is because when these Masteries were created, we had no way to apply a bonus to any stat based on your real time health as it moved up and down. We had to check your current health each and every time we wanted to trigger that bonus. At the time, we also didn’t have any abilities like this that dealt damage without a hit.

Interesting. Would this be related to the old timey problem of Phoenix not reviving when killed by DoT?

caligarelinquo

There is an ethical dilemma here. But we all know our voices don't really matter much unless it's going to be lucrative for Kabam. That being said, lets just wait and see what happens. I hope one day all the lingering bugs get fixed: pure skill, inequity and other things that have been reported but not fixed. One thing is for sure, Kabam is good at making a game with content that gets a reaction out of its community, whether that's good or bad.

DNA3000

Tman0971 wrote: »

Tman0971 wrote: »

Kabam Miike wrote: »

MattMan wrote: »

So instead of updating the masteries to apply to all forms of “attack” to properly correct the issue, youre adding disclaimers to allow for some attacks to be excluded, seems like the easy way out.

Updating the Mastery is not out of the question, and something we might consider in the future. Because of just far reaching their effects are, updating the effectiveness of a Mastery can be pretty scary! It will take time for us to be able to assess the updated effect, and we have to do that before we can look at actually updating them.

@Kabam Miike
Developers have obviously figured out how to make SYNERGIES that grant attack boost of x% scale up for passive DoT (for example, quake with antman, YJ synergy, etc.) so why not update Courage, Assassin, and I assume Suicides, Glass Cannon and Lesser/Greater Strength do it as well instead of just changing the description?
The code is obviously there now, right?
Let's do the right thing here and get the masteries FIXED to reflect current game status vs. just sweeping it away with a wording change.

@Kabam Miike I retract this statement. I was missing the part about how Courage and Assassin are tied to your or your opponents health which requires constant calculation vs other masteries, synergies, or boosts that are flat value increase regardless of health.

That said... it's been many years since Courage and Assassin have been out - I would hope that the current code framework would have advanced enough by now to allow correct interaction between these two synergies and their subsequent attack boost.

The problem might be that there isn't enough time in the critical loop to perform these calculations without inducing a lot of random lag into the game client. That is almost certainly why the original implementation performed the calculations on hits rather than continuously. It is possible the current framework is even more vulnerable to do these calculations because the game has more potential calculations that would have to be performed, owing to more complex game mechanics that exist now as opposed to then.

Darkness275

No. You can't just re-write the description to describe the result you want.

People purchased these masteries with the understanding that they worked as described. It doesn't matter whether or not they ever worked that way - you sold a product with a basic description. It was then discovered that said product does not actually do what is described. This is called FALSE ADVERTISING.

You don't get to just change the description and claim that everything is okay and that people should continue loving you.

Honestly, I wasn't mad about Domino until now, because now it's a pattern. A pattern of falsely advertising things, profiting off them until you're caught and then turning around and saying "Oh it's cool, we will just re-write the description so that it says what it really does!"

saorps

Suddenly, I am not sure the real benefit of unlocking advanced masteries such as assassin.
I just expect Kabam understands that full assassin mastery is not cheap and it takes a lot of time and effort.
This effort should represent a real benefit to the player and work consistently.

borntohula

saorps wrote: »

Suddenly, I am not sure the real benefit of unlocking advanced masteries such as assassin.

Or Inequity and, quite possibly, Resonate. That the first one isn't working as per its description, was officially acknowledged just over a year ago. That didn't lead to a rewrite, refund or fix. In fact, Inequity is still being actively pushed in introductory texts for new champs. A lot of champs apparently benefit greatly from an expensive mastery that is fundamentally broken. As for Resonate, your guess is as good as mine.

Elraww

@DorkLessons @Kabam Miike

As it appears to me, this stuff is happening way more in the game, not just Courage and Assassin. See a few examples below. I didn't include ranks or levels of the champions, as these don't matter for this test.
All values are tested again RoL WS, and light attacks are non-critical.

Void
Without any synergy

Light attack: 392
Damage per tick for 1 debuff: 98

With 12% attack synergy (YW+AM)

Light attack: 445
Damage per tick for 1 debuff: 98

With 15% Mastermins synergy (Doc Oc+Modok)

Light attack: 392 (before 15 hit combo)
Light attack: 458 (after 15 hit combo)
Damage per tick for 1 debuff: 98 (both before and after 15 hit combo)

Black Panther
With 15% Mastermins synergy (BP+Beast)

Light attack: 72 (before 15 hit combo)
Light attack: 82 (after 15 hit combo)
Bleed per tick: 30 (before 15 hit combo)
Bleed per tick: 35 (after15 hit combo)

Archangel class advantage also might have played here
Without any synergy

Light attack: 509
Bleed per tick: 106
Poison per tick: 106
Neurotoxin per tick: 509

With 12% attack synergy (YW+AM)

Light attack: 550
Bleed per tick: 112
Poison per tick: 112
Neurotoxin per tick: 550

With 15% Mastermins synergy (Doc Oc+Modok)
Before 15 hit combo:

Light attack: 509
Bleed per tick: 106
Poison per tick: 106
Neurotoxin per tick: 509

After 15 hit combo:

Light attack: 560
Bleed per tick: 117
Poison per tick: 106
Neurotoxin per tick: 509

Sorry if the formatting is not correct, or if it looks messy.
But as you can see with Archangel, if he has a synergy that boosts his attack from the start of the fight, all his debuffs get increased accordingly. But with the Masterminds synergy, he first has to attain a certain combo to get the +15% attack, and here the poison and neurotoxin are NOT increased, while the bleed is increased.

If you need any further info or data, let me know.

Zuko_ILC

Elraww wrote: »

@DorkLessons @Kabam Miike

As it appears to me, this stuff is happening way more in the game, not just Courage and Assassin. See a few examples below. I didn't include ranks or levels of the champions, as these don't matter for this test.
All values are tested again RoL WS, and light attacks are non-critical.

Void
Without any synergy
Light attack: 392

Damage per tick for 1 debuff: 98

With 12% attack synergy (YW+AM)
Light attack: 445

Damage per tick for 1 debuff: 98

With 15% Mastermins synergy (Doc Oc+Modok)
Light attack: 392 (before 15 hit combo)

Light attack: 458 (after 15 hit combo)

Damage per tick for 1 debuff: 98 (both before and after 15 hit combo)

Black Panther
With 15% Mastermins synergy (BP+Beast)
Light attack: 72 (before 15 hit combo)

Light attack: 82 (after 15 hit combo)

Bleed per tick: 30 (before 15 hit combo)

Bleed per tick: 35 (after15 hit combo)

Archangel class advantage also might have played here
Without any synergy
Light attack: 509

Bleed per tick: 106

Poison per tick: 106

Neurotoxin per tick: 509

With 12% attack synergy (YW+AM)
Light attack: 550

Bleed per tick: 112

Poison per tick: 112

Neurotoxin per tick: 550

With 15% Mastermins synergy (Doc Oc+Modok)
Before 15 hit combo:
Light attack: 509

Bleed per tick: 106

Poison per tick: 106

Neurotoxin per tick: 509

After 15 hit combo:
Light attack: 560

Bleed per tick: 117

Poison per tick: 106

Neurotoxin per tick: 509

Sorry if the formatting is not correct, or if it looks messy.
But as you can see with Archangel, if he has a synergy that boosts his attack from the start of the fight, all his debuffs get increased accordingly. But with the Masterminds synergy, he first has to attain a certain combo to get the +15% attack, and here the poison and neurotoxin are NOT increased, while the bleed is increased.

If you need any further info or data, let me know.

I'd like to know why these masteries can't be fixed instead of nerfed.

Elraww

Not defending anyone here, and my knowledge of programming is pretty low, but my guess is that a fix ain’t as easy as some might think.
A lot of stuff going on. For example Archangel, he applies a bleed with a physical attack, than the poison with contact or physical (specials). However for Neurotoxin it’s different, he first applies a bleed, which is immediately converted into neurotoxin.
Still don’t get at with Masterminds synergy the bleeds do get increased, but not the poisons or neuros. I’ll do some testing later.

BradEnder

Kabam Miike wrote: »

Hey everybody,

Thank you Dave for taking the time to make this video! We’ve spoken to our team to find out what is going on, and can confirm that this isn’t a bug, but the result of the age of these masteries. These Masteries have been the same since they were first introduced.

Courage and Assassin do not raise your attack stat on their own, but boost your attack on every hit. They have never affected Damage Over Time Debuffs that proc’d off of something that does not hit the opponent.

This is because when these Masteries were created, we had no way to apply a bonus to any stat based on your real time health as it moved up and down. We had to check your current health each and every time we wanted to trigger that bonus. At the time, we also didn’t have any abilities like this that dealt damage without a hit.

We’re going to rewrite the description text to avoid any further confusion.

This is a seriously unethical thing to do. If you bought a product, and found out that it didn't do what it said it would, you wouldn't like that. If you then brought it to the manufacturer's attention and they said "oh we'll just change the packaging to say what it actually does" sure that fixes the issue for people who would have bought the product otherwise, but you're still left with a faulty item that you payed for and now can't return. At the very least you should refund the units to all those people who bought these masteries. People bought them thinking they would do one thing, when they actually did another. Refunds must be given out especially considering some people spent actual money on your falsely advertised items.

caligarelinquo

BradEnder wrote: »

Kabam Miike wrote: »

Hey everybody,

Thank you Dave for taking the time to make this video! We’ve spoken to our team to find out what is going on, and can confirm that this isn’t a bug, but the result of the age of these masteries. These Masteries have been the same since they were first introduced.

Courage and Assassin do not raise your attack stat on their own, but boost your attack on every hit. They have never affected Damage Over Time Debuffs that proc’d off of something that does not hit the opponent.

This is because when these Masteries were created, we had no way to apply a bonus to any stat based on your real time health as it moved up and down. We had to check your current health each and every time we wanted to trigger that bonus. At the time, we also didn’t have any abilities like this that dealt damage without a hit.

We’re going to rewrite the description text to avoid any further confusion.

This is a seriously unethical thing to do. If you bought a product, and found out that it didn't do what it said it would, you wouldn't like that. If you then brought it to the manufacturer's attention and they said "oh we'll just change the packaging to say what it actually does" sure that fixes the issue for people who would have bought the product otherwise, but you're still left with a faulty item that you payed for and now can't return. At the very least you should refund the units to all those people who bought these masteries. People bought them thinking they would do one thing, when they actually did another. Refunds must be given out especially considering some people spent actual money on your falsely advertised items.

Agreed.

Tman0971

DNA3000 wrote: »

Tman0971 wrote: »

Tman0971 wrote: »

Kabam Miike wrote: »

MattMan wrote: »

So instead of updating the masteries to apply to all forms of “attack” to properly correct the issue, youre adding disclaimers to allow for some attacks to be excluded, seems like the easy way out.

Updating the Mastery is not out of the question, and something we might consider in the future. Because of just far reaching their effects are, updating the effectiveness of a Mastery can be pretty scary! It will take time for us to be able to assess the updated effect, and we have to do that before we can look at actually updating them.

@Kabam Miike
Developers have obviously figured out how to make SYNERGIES that grant attack boost of x% scale up for passive DoT (for example, quake with antman, YJ synergy, etc.) so why not update Courage, Assassin, and I assume Suicides, Glass Cannon and Lesser/Greater Strength do it as well instead of just changing the description?
The code is obviously there now, right?
Let's do the right thing here and get the masteries FIXED to reflect current game status vs. just sweeping it away with a wording change.

@Kabam Miike I retract this statement. I was missing the part about how Courage and Assassin are tied to your or your opponents health which requires constant calculation vs other masteries, synergies, or boosts that are flat value increase regardless of health.

That said... it's been many years since Courage and Assassin have been out - I would hope that the current code framework would have advanced enough by now to allow correct interaction between these two synergies and their subsequent attack boost.

The problem might be that there isn't enough time in the critical loop to perform these calculations without inducing a lot of random lag into the game client. That is almost certainly why the original implementation performed the calculations on hits rather than continuously. It is possible the current framework is even more vulnerable to do these calculations because the game has more potential calculations that would have to be performed, owing to more complex game mechanics that exist now as opposed to then.

You mean MORE random lag, right?

unknown

This content has been removed.

DNA3000

BradEnder wrote: »

Kabam Miike wrote: »

Hey everybody,

Thank you Dave for taking the time to make this video! We’ve spoken to our team to find out what is going on, and can confirm that this isn’t a bug, but the result of the age of these masteries. These Masteries have been the same since they were first introduced.

Courage and Assassin do not raise your attack stat on their own, but boost your attack on every hit. They have never affected Damage Over Time Debuffs that proc’d off of something that does not hit the opponent.

This is because when these Masteries were created, we had no way to apply a bonus to any stat based on your real time health as it moved up and down. We had to check your current health each and every time we wanted to trigger that bonus. At the time, we also didn’t have any abilities like this that dealt damage without a hit.

We’re going to rewrite the description text to avoid any further confusion.

This is a seriously unethical thing to do. If you bought a product, and found out that it didn't do what it said it would, you wouldn't like that. If you then brought it to the manufacturer's attention and they said "oh we'll just change the packaging to say what it actually does" sure that fixes the issue for people who would have bought the product otherwise, but you're still left with a faulty item that you payed for and now can't return. At the very least you should refund the units to all those people who bought these masteries. People bought them thinking they would do one thing, when they actually did another. Refunds must be given out especially considering some people spent actual money on your falsely advertised items.

I don't think it is quite that simple for a lot of reasons. Setting aside all of the issues surrounding the fact that we don't "buy" anything in an online game and you're required to agree to a TOS that says things are allowed to change without notice or warning, there's the completely separate part that this seems to fall into the category of unfortunate implementation limitations. The descriptions were true at the time they were written, and it was only future developments of the game that altered the circumstances under which they had to operate that made the descriptions no longer fully accurate. That's extremely difficult to avoid in a game that evolves over time.

I believe the descriptions should be more accurate, and they should be revised when circumstances change, but this specific situation seems to have been mostly unavoidable. It should have been detected and corrected much earlier, but the actual discrepancy itself wasn't avoidable. That can't be cause for refunds in an online game: that is far too high of a burden to place on developers. Under those conditions, I would have simply vetoed the entire notion of champions like Domino that would have exposed the technical limitation to avoid the accusations of unethical behavior. And that kind of restraint on future development is extremely detrimental to the game as a whole.

borntohula

DNA3000 wrote: »

I believe the descriptions should be more accurate, and they should be revised when circumstances change, but this specific situation seems to have been mostly unavoidable. It should have been detected and corrected much earlier, but the actual discrepancy itself wasn't avoidable. That can't be cause for refunds in an online game: that is far too high of a burden to place on developers. Under those conditions, I would have simply vetoed the entire notion of champions like Domino that would have exposed the technical limitation to avoid the accusations of unethical behavior. And that kind of restraint on future development is extremely detrimental to the game as a whole.

That’s a nice, forgiving rant. Amen.

As far as I’m concerned though, it’s not so much about the inept mastery description, but about the fact that so many other in-game descriptions and bugs do not get fixed. Despite being brought to attention and, in some cases, being acknowledged. With Inequity - confirmed to be bugged by the developer well over a year ago - as the best example. Acknowledged to malfunction. Unaltered description. Zero official updates in a year. And still being actively pushed to unsuspecting players. E.g. in spotlights for champs that came out months after admitting the mastery isn’t working as advertised, such as Void and Cap IW.

That these particular two masteries were shown to be misfunctioning by a content creator (more power to him - good catch) seems to be the only reason it is even being graced with a response. Whether changing the description makes things right, is up for debate - I certainly don’t think so - but the underlying pattern of (a) rewriting history instead of fixing it straight away, so it matches what is advertised and sold, and (b) only doing so when someone ‘visible’ like Dave happens to notice something is amiss, is bothersome. It’s not so much about things not being ‘avoidable’ (your argument) but about the way those ‘unavoidable’ issues are dealt with. Which apparently boils down to ‘not at all’ if it’s not all over YouTube or by altering the description if it is.