The game experienced a brief connectivity issue this morning. The team promptly fixed the issue and things are back to normal, thank you to everyone who passed along reports!
Upcoming Cull Obsidian and Ebony Maw Balance Changes
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People talk about ethics when it comes to purchases, but pointing out that it's their product is the only response to that. They're not selling something for ownership. In fact, they're explicit in the conditions on spending in the TOS. It can be modified in the future. You're not buying a product as-is. You're renting permission to use certain aspects of their product. That's a conditional rental. The condition is, you have no proprietary ownership to it, and they can change it for the well-being of their product.
As for the data, they're not going to divulge the raw data. They may, if they choose, provide a list of aspects they examined. They may not. If you're asking if there are any choices for purchase or Ranking that you can make which are guaranteed will never change, that guarantee doesn't exist. See TOS.
And this doesn't even scratch the surface of the issue of conflating communicating with editorializing. When you are a party to communicating directly with the developers of a game, you have to be extremely conscious of the difference between explaining a developer decision and defending a developer decision. If you fall into doing the latter when you're supposed to be doing the former, you can make the situation worse than if you did nothing at all. This is an incredibly difficult thing to do consistently.
And collectively, whomever is involved must have enough credibility to function, and ironically just talking to Kabam would damage every participant's credibility on day one. The content creators already get a lot of low-level flak for being in bed with Kabam, even though that's baseless. If the content creators know why Kabam does something, it can be much harder to criticise them about that thing: that's human nature. But what will that look like from the outside? It will look like a bunch of content creators got together with Kabam and the next day all of them simultaneously starting criticizing them much less.
This *can* work, and I've seen it work, and I would certainly give it a try if Kabam decided to do something like this. But it can also blow up in your face if you don't do it just right.
As for the NDA, I thought that was standard procedure for Kabam—even for non-CCP players who participate in advisory roles—or has that changed?
Dr. Zola
1) You can announce that Cull's block proficiency will be increased. Removing the fear of a nerf.
2) You can end the 3 month which is actually 6 month adjustment period ( which will go along way with community trust.)
3) Release the data that they use to determine a bug or what makes a champ too powerful
4)Make a defined set of rules that we can understand what constitutes a character adjustment moving forward.
Once again, when executing nerf, maybe Cull is not going to be my favorite cosmic champ, while having hyperion and Medusa unawakened. SO, will Kabam return me back my cosmic awakening 5* gem? Will return my almost 120 cosmic level up gems? I guess no way, so IMHO again, this is a very bad bad bad thing.
I've seen games with player advocacy groups that aren't covered by NDA. It is hard to say what Kabam's standard procedure would be in this situation, because I'm unaware of them using this kind of thing in any of their games. It is uncommon in general for any game, but it does sometimes work. They have a direct line to the developers, but in return they are expected to exercise restraint and discretion when using it, and serve to act as a high signal to noise channel between the players and the developers of the game. Because the communication is mostly an amplified and refined version of what players are talking about anyway in one direction and replies intended to be passed back to the player community in the other direction an NDA isn't necessary in these cases.
Edit: I should mention for completeness sake that of course you get the first miss for free: I meant continuing to hold block as the defender attacks should be avoided until you have concussion. My brain didn't remind me of this until after I posted.