I just have to discuss She Hulk for a moment.

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.

Comments

Aleor

adjustment is definitely not the word. No word on other champs doing the same thing is also very disturbing for me

Thewritingwoolf

Absolutely.

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.

Thewritingwoolf

Also: I think this would've come as less of a blow if they'd noticed this apparent 'bug' during the BETA / development phases. The fact that it occurred AFTER players finally found a use for a once-garbage level champ is really, really disheartening.

rockstar323

I don't understand how anyone can claim she didn't make thing easy. I have her as a r1 4*, never tried the "bug" until after the announcement of the "fix". First time trying, after watching a video on how to do it, I was able to pin RoL CM in the corner and take her down to around 60% until I got bored and quit. You can just keep building furies until you're doing massive damage because the AI will keep throwing specials after like 2 furies. Obviously it won't work in every scenario but for the ones it does, the fight is over as soon as you get them into the corner.

Aleor

I don't understand how anyone can claim she didn't make thing easy. I have her as a r1 4*, never tried the "bug" until after the announcement of the "fix". First time trying, after watching a video on how to do it, I was able to pin RoL CM in the corner and take her down to around 60% until I got bored and quit. You can just keep building furies until you're doing massive damage because the AI will keep throwing specials after like 2 furies. Obviously it won't work in every scenario but for the ones it does, the fight is over as soon as you get them into the corner.

Any skill champ, any champ with difficult sp1, also keeping furies with smaller champs isn't easy.
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

Thewritingwoolf

See, that's something I enjoyed the most as well. It gave a nice variety to the usual parry + four hit combo / four hit combo + special. It was great playing with a new mechanic. A lot of other things could've been tweaked other than this ONE enjoyable aspect.

rockstar323

Ghost and, also because she gets mentioned, Quake require much more skill to use efficiently and not everyone can use them at full capacity. She-Hulk was basically MLLLH, dodge special, repeat. I know she doesn't work in every scenario, but barring certain nodes if the champ isn't Skill and has an L1 you can dodge and punish, which is the majority of the champs in the game, you can corner lock them the whole fight.

Thewritingwoolf

@rockstar323 I have to ask though, how does that affect you negatively? Not that I'm saying this is a bug--because, if this is, we can expect a lot to change down the road--but why take such a strong stance against it?

Xdonre

My major disappointment w/ the SH mod is that Kabam implements new content every month and quite frequently during the last year has introduced a fair amount of permanent new content...due to these periodic updates I persoanlly don't expect the game to be 100% bug free however I don't expect existing champion configurations to be modified due to Kabam not thoroughly testing their newer content...IMO if existing champions are not behaving as Kabam expected...Kabam should than consider modifying that newer content no matter how many additional man-hours it will entail...IMO now there is a valid concern that champions existing modes of operations can/will be modified when it Kabam deems that their current configurations can be too OP for future content...just my thoughts.

Blue_Eyed_Thing

I think anyone who took advantage of her in this bugged state should have to give back any rewards won using her, I mean fair is fair. You guys took advantage of an exploit and that should be punished.

shadow_lurker22

Best way it has been explained so far

Justin2524

There's a reason they call it the She-Hulk 'Cheese'.

TheBigE1980

I think anyone who took advantage of her in this bugged state should have to give back any rewards won using her, I mean fair is fair. You guys took advantage of an exploit and that should be punished.

Why? The people doing it didn't know it was an exploit. They did nothing wrong.

As far as they knew, it wasn't an "issue" with She-Hulk; it was a feature.

unknown

This content has been removed.

rockstar323

@rockstar323 I have to ask though, how does that affect you negatively? Not that I'm saying this is a bug--because, if this is, we can expect a lot to change down the road--but why take such a strong stance against it?

It doesn't affect me, I'm just pointing out that it was an easy mechanic to utilize and everyone using it should have expected this outcome. 6.2 Champion is arguably the hardest fight in the game, with a lot of BS mechanics, and very few workarounds. When people are clearing it with a r2 5* that's obviously a broken mechanic. They should have came out, said we didn't intend her to work this way, and made a change. Instead the try to push it through as a bug fix.

Blue_Eyed_Thing

I think anyone who took advantage of her in this bugged state should have to give back any rewards won using her, I mean fair is fair. You guys took advantage of an exploit and that should be punished.
Why? The people doing it didn't know it was an exploit. They did nothing wrong.

As far as they knew, it wasn't an "issue" with She-Hulk; it was a feature.

There have been many champs changed for the worse over the last couple of years. Hopefully, Kabam made an honest mistake and they go to change it you guys cry foul. So if Kabam should hit the reset for you people who ranked her up, why should you guys get to keep the stuff you won using a bugged she-hulk? You essentially got to use a high rank bugged champ for a couple of months then you get to rank her down and use those resource on a champ you hypothetically could have pulled using rewards you got while enjoying your bugged champ. This seems like an unfair advantage to me, and I think I'm not alone.

LeNoirFaineant

@rockstar323 I have to ask though, how does that affect you negatively? Not that I'm saying this is a bug--because, if this is, we can expect a lot to change down the road--but why take such a strong stance against it?
It doesn't affect me, I'm just pointing out that it was an easy mechanic to utilize and everyone using it should have expected this outcome. 6.2 Champion is arguably the hardest fight in the game, with a lot of BS mechanics, and very few workarounds. When people are clearing it with a r2 5* that's obviously a broken mechanic. They should have came out, said we didn't intend her to work this way, and made a change. Instead the try to push it through as a bug fix.

No, they shouldn't have. Many hard fights have easy counters. The final Ultron boss of act 5 can be killed by an unranked Loki. The old pre nerf act 4 short path Venom could be beaten by a 2* Ronan. The infamous Hydra Adaptoid could also be defeated by a 2* Ronan. Many hard fights have had cheese counters that weren't exploits. To say that people should have known that She Hulk's heavy, which hasn't changed since her release and is essentially the same as OML's, was a broken mechanic and should have expected this is wrong.

DNA3000

Imo giving out rank down tickets was just an extremely stupid move by kabam.

If it was unintentional like they said, a standpoint that seemingly didn't change, then people should not be compensated for them fixing an unintended interaction.

The way they've decided to handle it only creates a whole lot of confusion it seems.

At least choose a damn side. Either it was a bug that got fixed (be happy to get a middle finger), or it was a nessecary tweak to disable her ability to cheese content (rank down tickets).

Well, I advocated for them in this case, so I guess I fall into the category of extremely stupid designers.

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.

Onmix

I think anyone who took advantage of her in this bugged state should have to give back any rewards won using her, I mean fair is fair. You guys took advantage of an exploit and that should be punished.
Why? The people doing it didn't know it was an exploit. They did nothing wrong.

As far as they knew, it wasn't an "issue" with She-Hulk; it was a feature.
There have been many champs changed for the worse over the last couple of years. Hopefully, Kabam made an honest mistake and they go to change it you guys cry foul. So if Kabam should hit the reset for you people who ranked her up, why should you guys get to keep the stuff you won using a bugged she-hulk? You essentially got to use a high rank bugged champ for a couple of months then you get to rank her down and use those resource on a champ you hypothetically could have pulled using rewards you got while enjoying your bugged champ. This seems like an unfair advantage to me, and I think I'm not alone.

Why again? I mean I’m sure nobody who has cleared it would prefer for her to be nerfed. So besides removing a champion’s ability rendering her less effective you want tor take the hard earned rewards away?
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.

DNA3000

I think anyone who took advantage of her in this bugged state should have to give back any rewards won using her, I mean fair is fair. You guys took advantage of an exploit and that should be punished.
Why? The people doing it didn't know it was an exploit. They did nothing wrong.

As far as they knew, it wasn't an "issue" with She-Hulk; it was a feature.
There have been many champs changed for the worse over the last couple of years. Hopefully, Kabam made an honest mistake and they go to change it you guys cry foul. So if Kabam should hit the reset for you people who ranked her up, why should you guys get to keep the stuff you won using a bugged she-hulk? You essentially got to use a high rank bugged champ for a couple of months then you get to rank her down and use those resource on a champ you hypothetically could have pulled using rewards you got while enjoying your bugged champ. This seems like an unfair advantage to me, and I think I'm not alone.

Because there's no reasonable way to address that. In general, we only take rewards away when players deliberately use exploits or when the rewards should not have been awarded at all. But there's no such thing as perfect fairness. Those players had an advantage others won't have. But they didn't know that. Conversely if we take the rewards away then those players will now have to do the content more times than others because they will have to rerun for rewards, and that's also not fair.

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."

Thewritingwoolf

@rockstar323 I have to ask though, how does that affect you negatively? Not that I'm saying this is a bug--because, if this is, we can expect a lot to change down the road--but why take such a strong stance against it?
It doesn't affect me, I'm just pointing out that it was an easy mechanic to utilize and everyone using it should have expected this outcome. 6.2 Champion is arguably the hardest fight in the game, with a lot of BS mechanics, and very few workarounds. When people are clearing it with a r2 5* that's obviously a broken mechanic. They should have came out, said we didn't intend her to work this way, and made a change. Instead the try to push it through as a bug fix.
No, they shouldn't have. Many hard fights have easy counters. The final Ultron boss of act 5 can be killed by an unranked Loki. The old pre nerf act 4 short path Venom could be beaten by a 2* Ronan. The infamous Hydra Adaptoid could also be defeated by a 2* Ronan. Many hard fights have had cheese counters that weren't exploits. To say that people should have known that She Hulk's heavy, which hasn't changed since her release and is essentially the same as OML's, was a broken mechanic and should have expected this is wrong.

This is a really, really good reply. I hadn't thought about Ultron, but you're 100% correct. I didn't have a 4/5* Loki when I reached the Act 5 boss, and had to resort to using a 3*. It was anything but easy, but it gave me a chance to tackle difficult content with a different approach. And I liked that. Honestly, I find being able to chain SH's heavy more enjoyable than the Slow effect that comes with it. It was just a cool feature compared to the usual mechanics we use on a day-to-day basis.

Koya_M0lek

@rockstar323 I have to ask though, how does that affect you negatively? Not that I'm saying this is a bug--because, if this is, we can expect a lot to change down the road--but why take such a strong stance against it?
It doesn't affect me, I'm just pointing out that it was an easy mechanic to utilize and everyone using it should have expected this outcome. 6.2 Champion is arguably the hardest fight in the game, with a lot of BS mechanics, and very few workarounds. When people are clearing it with a r2 5* that's obviously a broken mechanic. They should have came out, said we didn't intend her to work this way, and made a change. Instead the try to push it through as a bug fix.
No, they shouldn't have. Many hard fights have easy counters. The final Ultron boss of act 5 can be killed by an unranked Loki. The old pre nerf act 4 short path Venom could be beaten by a 2* Ronan. The infamous Hydra Adaptoid could also be defeated by a 2* Ronan. Many hard fights have had cheese counters that weren't exploits. To say that people should have known that She Hulk's heavy, which hasn't changed since her release and is essentially the same as OML's, was a broken mechanic and should have expected this is wrong.

Loki and ronan nerf incoming🤭

unknown

This content has been removed.

Thewritingwoolf

My question here is:

What is the reason for make ridiculous BETA test with the community?

Right, this is an extremely valid question. How could She Hulk pass both a development phase AND a BETA testing with nobody noticing this apparent 'bug'? The whole point of a BETA period, in my mind, is to see how a champion will be improved before release (with potential to change, of course). So why release someone, then go back on what was given to the community?

The biggest factor here is that She Hulk was once one of the WORST champions to land on a player's roster.

Lormif

My question here is:

What is the reason for make ridiculous BETA test with the community?
Right, this is an extremely valid question. How could She Hulk pass both a development phase AND a BETA testing with nobody noticing this apparent 'bug'? The whole point of a BETA period, in my mind, is to see how a champion will be improved before release (with potential to change, of course). So why release someone, then go back on what was given to the community?

The biggest factor here is that She Hulk was once one of the WORST champions to land on a player's roster.

To see how it will be improved. The beta test was there to test new functionality, not old functionality.

unknown

This content has been removed.

unknown

This content has been removed.

Lormif

@Lormif how is a company not aware about this bug for 3 years? There are numerous videos and other information on her that says she could chain into a heavy. Did they not notice this? That’s pretty dumb of them not to.

How is any company not aware of any bug for 3 or more years. Specter/meltdown, one of the most devastating bugs to hit computers was not discovered for 3 decades. When people think something is working properly they will not report it as a bug so it goes unnoticed.

FreeToPlay_21

The way this situation was handled was terrible, but the more I think about it, the heavy attack chaining was kinda overpowered. People were cheesing through 6.2 The Champion boss with an R2 5* She Hulk. That's insane.

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.