**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Comments
Thank you.
If you watched the boring video, you can only imagine the tedium involved.
What y'all didn't see was me minimizing every 3 times to record them on my phone's memo pad.
This thread is not a total rant, we are just very politely asking for some more information from Kabam.
I won't tell any Kabam mod that they can't reply on a certain thread, but it kinda sucks they always respond to "look at my lucky pull" or "I just completed content X" kind of threads, but when we (politely) ask for some additional info, they completely ignore the entire thread like it doesn't even exist.
yes you have shown it to be inbalanced.
however,
in kabams fairness they make no attempt to say it has an even chance of being any of those numbers.
just as a PHC will always be a random champ between 2* and 4*.
almost always 2* almost never 4*.
ST almost always 3 almost never 6.
seems perfectly balanced.
fyi kabam = thanos. thinks they are heros, everyone else thinks they are villians.... LOL
Admittedly even though Sabretooth rolls 3 fairly often, it only takes him a couple fury to really gain some momentum and after the first fight he can pretty much shred anything, even bleed immune. I understand why they would want to weight his charges more heavily towards 3 and 4 because once you reach even 5 fury, each subsequent fight becomes less challenging, especially when you throw KM/BP, Domino, and Omega Red into the mix. They didn’t want him to steamroll every quest easily. They want fury to reset so you have to build them again.
In longer fights (like Variant and some tougher UC fights) you are capable of carrying over 7 fury per fight (I think 8 if it’s a mutant and you have SW/Mag synergy but don’t quote me on that. Testing for that is tough). This means you can almost max out his fury in 2 fights making him hit incredibly hard with no downside. Fury can’t be nullified after converted and he doesn’t need a high combo meter. He just destroys. Plus after he reaches the cap he can continue to convert fury each fight. I believe I hit around 24 fury in ROL when I landed on 0 charges which makes every fight incredibly fast. If you could do that with a 25% chance every time he rolls a charge between 3-6, it would be difficult to make content he can’t just breeze through. I would take a 6 charge Sabretooth over Blade any day of the week.
Not that I can think of. That is completely separate from the question of whether it is reasonable to jump to conclusions when it isn't stated. The fact that it isn't stated means players cannot know, and in general players should be informed.
It is precisely because I believe players should be accurately informed that I'm never going to simply allow without challenge the notion that when the text doesn't say, players are allowed to invent their own interpretation. These are conflicting positions. If you believe players should be informed where ever that is possible, you have to also believe players have a responsibility not to read into descriptions what isn't there. Otherwise, there's no reasonable way to follow the principle of best case information. Sometimes there is a very good game design reason for not stating certain things. Sometimes it is too complicated to offer a complete description of something. Best effort to document must begin and end with the text.
If we can't agree what is remotely reasonable when it comes to interpreting text descriptions, then there's no way to actually write reasonable descriptions. I believe the odds in this case should be stated, because that is important information about the champion and it isn't difficult to describe to the players and there's no valid reason to keep it a secret - it is a directly observable thing, it just takes a lot of effort to record and analyze those observations. That's a burden no player should have.
But if all text descriptions are subject to being misinterpreted in so dramatic a fashion as to read into the text meaning that is literally not there, then maybe it is better if Kabam says nothing. Because I actually believe it is better to be accused of being silent than to be misinterpreted.
Note: I am not accusing the OP of any of this. As I said several times, I think his own work and position are well thought out and generally informative. I just think players shouldn't have to do that work just to find out what a champion does.
I will leave it at this final comment, because I firmly believe @DNA3000 and I agree on far more than we disagree about this game, but the answer is transparency, and more importantly, quantitative transparency. If it’s a %, then put it in the description. If it’s a flat value, put it in. If random means 50-50 or 60-30-10, put it in. Be transparent and be explicit.
The corollary to that point is this: the forums are the primary avenue for communicating about the game. Be as transparent in the game as possible, but if there is miscommunication or misunderstanding, be an active presence on here to clear it up early and often.
Dr. Zola
On that I'm pretty sure we've always agreed. I do believe that while players do themselves a disservice by misinterpreting descriptions, it is Kabam that has the responsibility to document well. Players should try to meet them half way, but that can only happen if Kabam does their job correctly first. I think there's no disagreement that in this case, they did not.
There shouldn’t be a need for players to meet a developer halfway. We shouldn’t have to consult dictionaries, argue semantics or drag up mathematic formulas to gauge (let alone guess at) the meaning of any in-game description either.
If it can be stated in a transparent way, it should be. If it isn’t, that’s either due to a lack of care or an attempt to entice players to make incorrect assumptions.
In-game descriptions are a manual of sorts. If you buy, say, a drone that you have to assemble yourself, you’ll refer to the manual. If it turns out the manufacturer deliberately left key data out or obfuscated information, you wouldn’t be happy to ‘meet them halfway’. That’s just nonsense.
In fact, this analogy is slightly too lenient, because in the case of MCOC you also have to base purchasing decisions on similarly obscure descriptions. Some of which have been proven to be simply untrue. Such as the Inequity mastery description, which was acknowledged to be incorrect well over a year ago, yet never altered. Nor was the issue itself addressed.
You said this much better than I was planning. I'm dumbfounded buy some of the posts in this thread. Any normal person reading his description would think all of his charges are weighted equally. If experience from this game and others makes you assume different then you fall outside of the normal zone. The description is misleading at least or outright dishonest. We should expect better from a company we spend large amount of time, effort and possibly money on.
I suppose I could. Know any easily accessible ST?
Yeah, it wouldn't be a one day thing... plus, it's something to do with metric tonne of duel credits I have in my overflow.
Certainly, things can be possible even if completely improbable—for example, the AI pulling an Unstoppable buff three times in a fight triggered each time by Magik’s Sp2 (and thereby rendering said Sp2 ineffective).
I don’t expect any game team member to answer that question, especially since no one has ventured forth to address the question about Sabretooth’s charges.
But I will put it out there that it is my opinion an analysis of the way these “random” buff nodes operate would reveal a degree of “randomness” fairly similar to the “randomness” of Sabretooth’s charges.
Dr. Zola
All communication requires both sides to meet halfway. The notion that if the writer does his or her job correctly then no one can misinterpret what they are saying is both a naive expectation, and generally false. As evidenced by the fact that a lot of people seem to think "random" means "equi-distributed" even though that's not what it means here, that's not what it means in general, and there are literally an uncountable number of normal, every day, real world circumstances in which the average person would absolutely not assume that to be true.
I've done a lot of training over the years. I've seen a lot of ways to miscommunicate. I've seen an entire room full of people be unable to follow the instructions of a manual because literally none of them actually knew what a "space bar" was, because that is something that is actually neither documented nor generally labeled for people new to keyboards. I've had decades of experience correcting ambiguous or false documentation. The problem is very often on technical writers failing to target the right audience. But in this case, anyone who thinks random means equal distribution is simply wrong and they need to be corrected, the entire rest of the world isn't supposed to change the meaning of words to suit them.
A while back someone posted a complaint on the forums that basically boiled down to them thinking that "ability" meant "everything that happens in the game" and so conflated node buffs with champion abilities. Knowledgeable players knew better and corrected them. But I'll bet less than one percent of the playerbase actually knows precisely and correctly what the definition of "ability" is. Do we correct the players that have it wrong even though they are in the majority, or do we assume the majority gets to redefine the word and everyone else has to keep inventing new language until they get it right?
The fact that the game developers should document this better is irrelevant because it is orthogonal. If you believe that the majority is always correct when it comes to what words mean, then the developers don't have to document what abilities are. Abilities are whatever the majority of players think they are, and what they actually are becomes moot. And then discussion about the game breaks down, because the inmates take over the asylum of what anything means.
Only if Idiocracy is a documentary. And if it is, then the goal of producing proper documentation for the game is unnecessary, because all those normal people wouldn't know what to do with proper documentation. Eat it, maybe.
Wasn't a fan of that movie either. It's not about proper documentation, it's about misleading documentation. Two completely different things. From what I've read is we should have known better because Kabam would never give equal weight to the buffs because it's not "their way". So with every new champ we need to scour descriptions and do testing to figure out what was actually meant. This is a huge difference in possibilities of outcomes and we shouldn't expect an extra few words on the subject. It took them years to add in clarification on Gamora Assassination and Hawkeye's Hemorrhage.
If you are fine living in ambiguousness more power to you but I prefer more transparency and clarification.
Thank you, Not Sure.
If Hamin's guess on the percentages is correct, then the average number of charges is 3.75. That rounds down to three. You could argue that all values higher than three are a statistical bonus that we wouldn't get at all if randomness was removed.
You can't trivially argue that 3.75 rounds up to 4 either, because the random nature of the value itself is a (qualitative) reduction in its value. I think most people would agree that if the charges randomly averaged to four, a version that was simply always four would be qualitatively worth more. So if the randomness "value penalty" was as little as 0.26, that number rounds downward to three.
The general rule of thumb is that in most cases players get more on average when they get something randomly, and they get less on average when they get something predictably. Generally true for rewards, and generally true for game mechanics as well. And the reason is that game developers tend to judge randomness intuitively no different than players. Players prefer predictable rewards and benefits, so that means those are valued more than their quantitative value and random ones are valued less than their quantitative value. And thus random rewards are allowed to deliver higher value on average, because the developers perceive that value to be lower. In return, players analyze that behavior intuitively and not quantitatively, and thus rarely attempt to take advantage of this discrepancy.
It is like those slot machines that claim "more than 100% return." They actually do in fact return more than 100% of the money put into them. If, and this is a big If, players play in the mathematically optimal way. Nobody ever really does, because the optimal play is usually the one that players refuse to do because it "seems" wrong. In video poker, optimal play often requires throwing winning hands away for a chance at a better hand. People don't like to do that, so they cannot achieve the 100%+ return the slot machine allows.
We have proof the devs do this. This attitude was explicitly included in their explanation for why greater glory crystals cost more than twice the amount of glory crystals but contain only twice the rewards. Because according to Kabam, having all of the same class is worth more than having half of two different classes. That's a qualitative judgment that is quantitatively wrong, and so you pay more for what Kabam thinks is more valuable, and you pay less for what Kabam thinks is less valuable, even though the numbers say that's completely wrong. It doesn't get any simpler than 1+1=2, but Kabam (and most other game developers, and even sometimes the players) disagree.