I just have to discuss She Hulk for a moment.
Thewritingwoolf
Member Posts: 43 ★
Hey all,
I know some will roll their eyes at this post (I'm already expecting certain folks by name), but I just need to take a second to get this off my chest. For what it's worth, the nerf / bug fix / adjustment to She Hulk's mechanics were flat out wrong. And it's so interesting, because I guess I try to see the bigger picture of things, with the assumption that the players--without whom the game would not exist--are the main priority. Does this mean a game developer should give the players everything they want, when they want it? No, of course not. But actions must be reasonable.
For starters, I know I don't post a lot on these forums, because frankly I've seen a lot of duplicate articles saying more or less the same thing, and I'm trying NOT to be that whiny player who talks the talk but cannot walk the walk. I've been with MCOC for almost four years, and I won't lie when I say that this game has taken hold in my daily life (I really do love playing!). Yet I cannot seem to locate a logical reason for adjusting this champ. And it's especially frustrating given how EXCITED I've been while using She Hulk. I mean, for months I dreaded even saying her name let along using her in new, challenging content. Did I feel she made things too easy? No, and I'm certain my wallet would agree after finally 100% that horrific champion fight.
I know this post will be viewed and quickly forgotten among the other hundreds that will pop up in the next 48-72 hours. Yes, I understand that Rank Down tickets are coming--but does that truly mean anything when you've come to enjoy something? That's like a concert you've waited all year for getting canceled last-minute. Sure, you'll get your money back, but is that what really matters at the end of the day? I just find it so wild that a champ can have the same mechanics for almost two years, and then suddenly need a "fix" after players find a niche use for her.
I know I'll have the usual die-hards offer their rationales, which is fine, but I really want to hear from the players who are also feeling the mutual aggravation. I guess that's why they say misery loves company.
I know some will roll their eyes at this post (I'm already expecting certain folks by name), but I just need to take a second to get this off my chest. For what it's worth, the nerf / bug fix / adjustment to She Hulk's mechanics were flat out wrong. And it's so interesting, because I guess I try to see the bigger picture of things, with the assumption that the players--without whom the game would not exist--are the main priority. Does this mean a game developer should give the players everything they want, when they want it? No, of course not. But actions must be reasonable.
For starters, I know I don't post a lot on these forums, because frankly I've seen a lot of duplicate articles saying more or less the same thing, and I'm trying NOT to be that whiny player who talks the talk but cannot walk the walk. I've been with MCOC for almost four years, and I won't lie when I say that this game has taken hold in my daily life (I really do love playing!). Yet I cannot seem to locate a logical reason for adjusting this champ. And it's especially frustrating given how EXCITED I've been while using She Hulk. I mean, for months I dreaded even saying her name let along using her in new, challenging content. Did I feel she made things too easy? No, and I'm certain my wallet would agree after finally 100% that horrific champion fight.
I know this post will be viewed and quickly forgotten among the other hundreds that will pop up in the next 48-72 hours. Yes, I understand that Rank Down tickets are coming--but does that truly mean anything when you've come to enjoy something? That's like a concert you've waited all year for getting canceled last-minute. Sure, you'll get your money back, but is that what really matters at the end of the day? I just find it so wild that a champ can have the same mechanics for almost two years, and then suddenly need a "fix" after players find a niche use for her.
I know I'll have the usual die-hards offer their rationales, which is fine, but I really want to hear from the players who are also feeling the mutual aggravation. I guess that's why they say misery loves company.
11
Comments
And don't get me wrong, I'm not going to take the stance of "Kabam being money hungry, greedy, etc". I do think it's important for the developers to be as invested in the game as players are.
But to make such a drastic change solely based on players finally finding a niche use for a character? I don't think that's right at all. And I even took mine to Rank 5 (yes, it took great consideration)! I enjoyed the mechanics, much as I enjoy using Wasp's. This didn't make She Hulk any more of a 'cheat code' than some of the current god-tier champs.
Now tell me please how many bad matchups does ghost have? She wasn't game breaking. Great for some fights - yes, but not more. They could've decrease passive fury duration instead, but the very reason she was FUN to use is her heavy chaining
Best way it has been explained so far
As far as they knew, it wasn't an "issue" with She-Hulk; it was a feature.
I've always maintained, going all the way back to 12.0, that the question of rank down tickets comes down not to nerfs, because nerfs are always going to happen, or the severity of nerfs, because sometimes exploits happen, but the question of informed choice. The reason why players cannot rank down champions in general is because ranking up is an important in-game choice, and that choice only matters if it has consequences. Beyond that there's a critical issue of balancing veteran players against new players, but that's not relevant here.
Players are required to make rank up choices in an imperfect world where they don't necessarily know everything when they make that choice, and their situation will change over time, and the game itself will change over time. All of this is supposed to factor into your choices when you rank up: do you rank up now and get the benefits of the rank up, or do you wait and rank up later when you will have different, possibly better choices. Both having incomplete information and not knowing how the game will change in the future doesn't mean the choice is somehow unfair. As long as players are given a reasonable opportunity to know what is even reasonably knowable at the time they make their choice, that choice is fair.
The only time players should be allowed to reverse that kind of choice is when the choice presented is an unfair one, where they were explicitly misled in a material way they should not have been. And in my opinion She Hulk qualifies as that kind of problem because the change isn't a change Kabam is stating is just a natural part of the game evolution, which players have to accept. Kabam is stating that the change is intended to fix a bug that existed for the entire time the current iteration of the champion has existed.
Just that by itself would not make rank up choices unfair, because bugs are fixed all the time. But this bug is special in that it interacted very strongly with how the champion was updated. She Hulk was updated very publicly and very explicitly to make her more attractive. She wasn't just changed to fix bugs or issues, Kabam explicitly wanted players to play her more and rank her up more, because their data said She Hulk was underutilized.
*Even that* would not necessarily make the choice an unfair one, but on top of the bug pre-existing and on top of the bug strongly interacting with attempts by Kabam to sell players on the champion's benefits, the bug was reasonably obviously showcased publicly without Kabam saying anything about it. And that's where this becomes an unfair choice.
It is never that RDTs are warranted when X. It is that RDTs are NOT warranted when X. They are not warranted when champions' performance change due to changes in game content. They are not warranted when champions get simple bug fixes. They are not warranted when champions are altered to address obvious exploits. They are not warranted when champions are affected by game balance passes.
She Hulk was none of these. She Hulk was basically sold to the players as a champion with a certain set of abilities that happened to strongly benefit from a bug Kabam itself should have caught, should have noticed, actually inadvertently highlighted to the players, then decided to change, long after the fact. Even if the 6.2 Champion didn't exist, that would not change my opinion. In fact, 6.2 Champion actually slightly hurts the case for RDTs in my opinion, because RDTs are not justified simply to address how one single fight works in the game.
Whether this was a bug fix or addressing an exploit by itself doesn't matter. What matters is whether the change uncovers an unfair in-game choice. Kabam is admitting the choice presented to the players was never supposed to be offered: to rank up a champion with the taunt mechanics and slow mechanics She Hulk has combined with the ability to chain combos in a particular way. It is then a question of judgment as to whether the unfair choice was large enough to justify allowing players to reverse, because not all unfair choices are materially consequential.
It was not the player’s decision to remove the ability nor It was to give out RDT. Why should they be punished?
Just because they used her doesn’t mean they didn’t spend on clearing that fight or that that fight was the only one where they used her.
Should they also dive in and get back the units and revives used to clear all the fights where she was used? AQ, AW, 6.2.6, Variant? I mean it’s only logical that if you’re gonna take rewards away you should give resources used back.
In an imperfect world, you can't achieve perfect fairness, so you aim for the most reasonable approximation you can find. The players who used She Hulk on 6.2 did not deliberately use an exploit and they did not get any more rewards than they should have, so in an imperfect world they get to keep those rewards because the alternative of forcing them to rerun the content and having the rewards taken away is less palatable.
In an imperfect world, you also can't play the what-if game with perfect clarity. Of the players that used She Hulk, how many would have beaten the content anyway with something else? How many of them would have ranked something else up instead, and because of those rank ups how many would have gotten other rewards instead? How many would have used less resources in other content, how many might have altered the results of alliance war, how many would have had higher prestige for AQ? No one can answer these questions, so no one can really correctly unwind the results "fairly."
The biggest factor here is that She Hulk was once one of the WORST champions to land on a player's roster.
I'm not satisfied with the way this was implemented at all, but I do also understand why Kabam had to make this change from a financial point of view, just that we were informed too late.