**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.
Fix backdraft intercepts already
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Comments
What really ANNOYS me is the fact that this not just a change to AI behaviour (which I'd totally be fine with) but rather a change to AI's fundamental capabilities in combat situations. In ANY fair game the same rules should apply to all participants. Since in this game it is basically us (the community) fighting with our avatars (our champions) against Kabam's (AI) avatars, AI should not be able to do stuff with its champions which we could never do with ours.
The list does not stop at AI being able to f##k us up during backdrafts after a hit into AI's block. There are lots of other issues that (at least to me) seem connected to the underlying problem of certain tweaks to AI's CAPABILITIES (not just behaviour!) having been implemented within the last six months.
Some examples for AI being able to perform combat maneuvers we cannot:
1. AI is able to parry us after finishing a full 5-hit combo (e.g. MLLLM) or after two successive Medium Attacks INTO OUR BLOCK! We as players cannot do this due to being stuck in block animation just long enough to get punished with five hits in our champion's face right afterwards! Back in the days it was NORMAL for us to punish AI after it had just finished a combo with a Medium Attack into our block - nowadays you get punished for your attempt to punish something which AI always WILL succesfully punish if you are still naive enough to try it yourself.
2. AI is able to block Special Attacks that you tried to chain at the end of a combo.
3. AI is able to drop and raise block at a ridiculous speed thus we have that very fun and interactive experience of getting smacked in the face with specials while hitting our opponent's block. Building up Analysis charges with Sentinel is a lot of fun these days.
4. AI is able to parry stun(!) our heavy attacks! While this isn't actually an issue connected to reduced recovery time it is still at least annoying since from a tactical perspective it is just plain stupid to try and parry a heavy attack with a mastery (Stand Your Ground) that has only a 50% chance to succeed at resisting a heavy attack...! No human player would actually try this - but AI does exactly that and succeeds at parrying heavy attacks regularly during my arena runs. However, I have to admit: Parrying a heavy attack is actually something you CAN pull of - but every time when I did manage to parry stun my opponent this way it was definitely NOT INTENDED...
5. And FINALLY: AI is now (since at least patch V22.0) able to INSTANTLY follow our backdraft move after being hit into its block - try to do the same thing to punish AI hitting your own champion's block. It won't work.
Apart from that Magik is not the only champ being gimped by these changes to the fundamental rules of MCOC's combat system. ANY champion had been able to utilize backdraft intercepting against unblockable or stun immune opponents - especially by provoking enemy attacks after hitting AI's block! Power Control Champions such as Vision, Psylocke and Hawkeye have all been nerfed the same way Magik has been affected by this issue. And as long as you were able to effectively bait out specials and do backdraft intercepts during those phases in which AI had no full bar of power you could perform backdraft intercepts to their full extend WITH ANY CHAMPION - but not anymore.
I'm glad you emphasized DV hitting into Void's block and then being able to back up and intercept Void's attacks. This gets at something I've had a theory about but haven't commented on. This something is not related to MCOC AI actually countering intercepting techniques, which is the AI's rate of recovering from attacks potentially being decreased. I can think of a few ways this could have been done - decreasing the amount of time the AI stands still after players stop attacking without finishing combos, speeding up basic strike animations of MCOC AI, certain champions (e.g., Magik, Doctor Voodoo) having the speed of their basic strike animation slightly slowed or delaying the timing of those basic strike contact points, etc. I don't have game developer experience, so attempts on my part to verbalize specifics of what I mean by "rate of recovering from attacks potentially being decreased" are likely to be written poorly.
I've spoken to other players who use intercept champs very well about this weeks to months ago, like @xNig. A few updates back it felt like the AI was recovering from corner intercepting significantly faster than they previously did. I noticed this because I use Doctor Voodoo almost every time 4loki runs Map 7, and I was getting caught by the AI a lot more than usual when attempting to use him as shown in the video I posted above. I've changed how I used intercepting strategies to deal with whatever differences have occurred over time on this topic.
Furthermore, I don't attribute misinformation on this topic from people who work on MCOC to deception or ill-intent. The game is so much more advanced than it was when I first started playing. The more the game evolves, the more likely something will happen that does not become common knowledge to most MCOC employees for a long period of time. Two years ago, an extra node accidentally being added to Map 5 was considered a significant bug. Now we have bugs like Namor reflecting damage when Ghost phases his attacks, Corvus taking coldsnap damage against freezerburn because freezerburn's code for coldsnap debuffs is probably different than code for other sources of coldsnap debuffs, and Iceman's ice armor being stacked forever when it's staggered by champions like Symbiote Supreme.
IMO the best way to deal with this thread's topic and others I've mentioned in the previous paragraph is to create a permanent type of group like how some Kabam employees have previously arranged as closed betas. Select a mix of knowledgeable and skilled players to test out bugs and fixes to bugs and give them a first line of communication with MCOC developers. I guarantee that kind of relationship between the community and MCOC developers would immensely reduce the average rate of ongoing bugs in MCOC.
Like when you backdraft on the opponent while you are "hitting" them you have a frame advantage and it works all the time. Yet when you hit the block now you are now in "negative frames" and the AI takes its turn of "frame advantage" resulting in you getting hit.
This is actually pretty common in many Esport fighting games. The difference is none of those games use items, units, revives, potions, boosts...AW/AQ etc etc. They are just straight up fighting games meant to be competitive against real people in professional league tournaments.
That being said you can definitely create an argument/debate that the AI getting frame advantage in these situations is fair. The only problem I have with it is that it is not new knowledge. It's not some ground breaking fighting game thing. This has been out and known by developers in fighting games since the early 2000s. So to make a game and give the attacker frame advantage on blocked hits for 3+ years in a game designed around monetization. You need to stick with that.
Or announce that youre removing it....officially. TO EVERYONE....without this cat and mouse forum nonsense where we feel its being ignored or suppressed.
Could kabam benefit from a team of testers better then them. YES. Agreed. I bet there is a few CEO dollars with netmarble they could aquire for such a team and it would def benefit the game and their ability to stay on top of things.
But I have a feeling what the players have been calling backdraft intercept isn't a deliberate part of the way combat works. It is a combination of how the attack timing works in general and how the AI reacts to certain situations. And those things are going to evolve over time. The question is whether the game has to make every tactic discovered by the players always work. And I don't think that's the case in situations like this.
Something like the way attacks are allowed to chain into combo sequences is fairly foundational. You can make the argument that this type of thing shouldn't be changed without explicitly notifying the players, and there's some persistence of behavior that's required. But backdraft intercept appears to be a dynamic tactic that wasn't built into the game's mechanics, and only exists because the players themselves popularized and discussed it. I would bet that there are lots of "backdraft intercept-like" tactics that currently exist in the game that aren't widely known or discussed, just because no one has yet popularized them. I was doing backdraft intercepts long before I knew anyone was calling them anything, and for that matter long before I knew it was even a noteworthy thing.
There's this thing where you can do a medium once into a target up against a wall and then slide back without holding block when the AI has three bars of power that seems to increase the likelihood that the AI will try to attack with regular attacks instead of using his special three. If I make a video for this AI behavior and give it a catchy name, does that mean that Kabam will no longer have the right to change that behavior in the future? Because the AI isn't scripted: it seems to use weighted potentials, so any change in those could make this behavior vanish simply as a side effect, because it isn't a hard coded behavior, it seems to be emergent.
I don't think it can be the case that just because players discover a pattern to how the game works that Kabam is then required to preserve that pattern. There have to be some things that are core mechanics of the game that players should be able to rely upon, and other things that are just situational dynamic parts of the game that could change over time. And I don't think backdraft intercept is one of those fundamentals. Whether players rely on something is one half of the equation: whether they should reasonably do so is another. Relying on the AI working in a very specific way interacting with the way the combat timing works in a very specific way for a specific tactic to work seems to be on the other side of the line from relying on light, medium, and heavy attacks being usable in a specific sequence.
We are still looking at this but don't have any new information to share at this time.
Please keep the thread on topic and refrain from posting without adding any constructive information related to the issue just to bump the thread. Those types of posts will be removed according to the forum rules.
Thanks for understanding.
What do you need from us now? More vids showing this or what?
Plus, how do you document all emergent tactics in a game like this? Somehow, I'm pretty sure there are tactics in the game that neither the developers nor the players have even discovered yet.
I suspect this isn't the sort of thing that the devs are going to decide in a couple hours, or even a couple days.
So is this what your goal is Kabam? Hide you saying it wasnt intentional so we can have back and forth debates with these people again? If you want to remove backdraft intercepts on block just SAY IT and then face the consequence of nerfing Magik. (because you know it's coming)
And actually, what' I'm trying to explain is that backdraft intercept is not a frame advantage direct tactic. The technical details of frame advantage, which are something every rhythm fighting game must have, might affect backdraft intercept but frame advantage alone doesn't create the tactic. The execution of backdraft intercept isn't a "sequence" in the technical sense because it is broken up by an AI decision: the AI must choose to attack immediately. If it is defensive, say, and doesn't attack or holds block the tactic fails. Frame advantage can't help there.
For backdraft intercept to work the player must be able to end a combo sequence and initiate a movement action that occurs simultaneously with the AI choosing to dash forward or attack at the right moment, and then provided the player exits his action tail gate he can initiate an intercepting attack. So the specifics of frame advantage can influence this, but any sequence that requires the AI to make a specific decision is not a combo activity that frame advantage is designed to explicitly allow.
This is, in fact, commonplace knowledge. So I'm not sure what's being debated here at all.
That make sense? I mean there's plenty of videos showing it to you. Slow them down to frame by frame and you can literally see both characters attacking but only one character winning. The AI. Not you. You used to win.
If it was intended(which we know it isn't even though youre deleting that statement) you'll have to go in to every champ that it doesnt fail on and make it so it fails consistently....right? Sounds fair.
This pretty well ends the whole "they meant to do it" debate. If they meant to do it it would be across the board. So are you fixing backdrafts to work on block again or are you fixing every champ in the game to have it fail consistently?
Kabam, I'd like to respectfully suggest that you let us know if the above or something similar is happening w this. I can sympathize if this is an issue that is going to require specific champ timing reworks or whatever. I can accept that it will take time to fix. I can then patiently wait for said fix. In the meantime, I would continue to monitor this thread for updates, even if it's just you guys saying "We are making progress on this, thanks for hanging in there." I would feel so much better if you guys could officially acknowledge this as a bug, add it to the Known Issues thread, and give us assurance that it is being actively worked on.
As it stands now based on Mod comments not directly addressing this thread, I can only GUESS that you, Kabam, recognizes this is a bug?? If so, I would also assume you are actively working on it. And I would imagine that you probably have plenty of examples to work off of here in this thread without us having to continue to provide examples of this interaction. Maybe you guys are still deciding the cost/benefit of implementing a fix for this? Or was this change intentional?
All many of us are asking for is some communication from Kabam regarding this issue. I would think that at least letting us know if it is an intentional or unintentional change would be an easy question to answer. Digging into the reasons why this is happening and figuring out the fix seems like the hard part. I'm sorry, but the longer this goes on without a definitive statement from you guys, the more it reflects poorly on the company in my opinion. I feel strongly about this because I enjoy the game, but it has been less than enjoyable since April and I'm hanging on by a thread.
Thank you for your time and your consideration in this matter.
Remember while all this is going on and YOU know about the issue. Its ok for YOU. For the players who are clueless to this issue in the game...well those people are dying. Using items. Wasting resources...all so these guys get more time?....I dont buy it.
Regardless of how we got here, here's where we are. Kabam isn't going to discuss the problem with players if it turns out it is entangled in other problems more recently uncovered. No reasonable people would. But I assumed from discussion that it was important to figure out where we are now and how the process might move forward from here. But if your position is they took too long before, so they don't get to spend time now, I'm not sure who you believe would accept that position.
I'm not saying they were not too slow addressing this problem. I'm simply saying there's nothing you can do about the fact they were too slow addressing this problem. The only meaningful thing to discuss is what might be done about it now.
EDIT: Please remember that Gold and ISO are also valuable resources that we have to grind to get so please refund that as well as the catalyst, unlike what you did for the She-Hulk rank down tickets
From a developer point of view, the source is under revision control, and they certainly have the capability of bisecting the code to find the faulty commit(s). Simple enough to look at all the vids of before & after so the devs know exactly what is up, so, the issue here is, does Kabam want to spend the resources to fix this bug (and yes, it is a huge bug), or, do they just want to leave it be, and sweep it under the rug?
They should just come out and say what the issue(s) are. Saying no new information leaves everyone hanging, are the looking into it at all, or is it just not worth the resources to fix it?