I'm not too experienced with Ronin's kit since I only have an r1 5*, but from reading the changes it looks like he gets a nice quality-of-life change. Instead of having to choose between evading an attack or keeping your cruelties, you now get to evade an attack while keeping 4/7 cruelties. That seems awesome, at least on paper. It sounds to me that you can now weave in evades into his playstyle, to gain that fury, without having to worry about losing too much damage. What you do lose, you can quickly gain back. The evade has the potential to be used as an offensive tool now, rather than strictly as a defensive one.
As I said, I don't have any personal experience of the champ but this seems like a nice little buff. Not the biggest, but it doesn't seem like he needs a big one.
Edit: as for the topic of this thread, no, I don't think we should do away with these kinds of buffs. I quite like some decent champions getting mostly QoL updates rather than just amazing new damage numbers or cool new utilities. That's perfectly fine, in my opinion. This feels very Masacre-esque, and I liked that buff.
Not really, personally I loved new Punisher 99 and Ebony Maw (and of course Angela). If tune-ups were more like that then I’m 100% on board
Angela and P99 were probably the ones they were talking about when they said theyve overdone them in the past
Kabam would be fewls if they believe they made a mistake with angela or p99's buff. Those 2 would probably have never made more than a few 6r3 rank ups but after the buff has increased. Problem is theres quite a few that doesnt understand very much the game economy. Their minor buff of the two helped the economy. So time spent has been rewarded. With Ronin's upcoming buff, I fear the "rewards" of their time spent isnt going to be much.
Is something better than nothing? Takes a special person to argue against that.
I'll play devils advocate. If you know you're not getting anything you can't be disappointed by not receiving anything. When you're expecting something, you can be either pleasantly surprised or bitterly disappointed.
Is something better than nothing? Takes a special person to argue against that.
I'll play devils advocate. If you know you're not getting anything you can't be disappointed by not receiving anything. When you're expecting something, you can be either pleasantly surprised or bitterly disappointed.
I'll play Devil's Prosecutor. "If I don't like it I'm fine with taking it away from everyone else whether I get anything back in return or not" is a pretty sociopathic position for a player of a massively multiplayer game.
I'll answer both these at the same time since I'm lazy.
(Before I start though, I have no abject feelings either way and have no actual personal feeling toward most buffs in general)
Tune ups as they currently stand are pretty insignificant with how Kabam seems to want to push them as buffs. They do very minor changes to otherwise okay or decent champs, for the most part. These types of tune ups I think they absolutely could do away with.
However a good example of a tune up was p2099. A below average champ who, with some adjustments to his numbers (and how his overdrive mechanic works), became an above average champ. These are the types of tune up buffs that should be focused on.
In the Ronin situation, they took an above average champ and made changes that are overall very minor. That I don't see as a benefit to the playerbase, nor as a good investment for Kabams workload. I doubt we'll see a marked uptick in Ronin usage even after the work they've put in.
However, taking champs that have a solid kit, but are lacking in terms of damage output (someone like Hood) should absolutely have a Value Only tune up to bring them in line with both the content is being released, and with other champs who favour utility over damage for the most part.
TL;DR for those that don't want to read. Do away with minor adjustments to already decent champs. Give bigger value updates to below average champs with utility that's already present.
The change to Ronin is significant with just a tiny tweak, wait for the game play.
*ask yourself if being able to recklessly dahs into your opponent while throwing out big bleeds and big yellow numbers sounds fun.
He could already achieve decent yellow numbers prior to this already. Again the point is why do minor adjustments to a decent champ, when they could focus on under average champs that need larger value only updates.
And now he’s able to put out bigger numbers while also being able to regularly evade which allows him to maintain a highly aggressive play style which he didn’t have before.
Why tweak a few numbers which took next to nothing instead of devoting countless hours to others? Smh
You realise the amount of time that both these numbers changes took would result in the same amount of work hours right? I've worked in the games industry for major developers and publishers, the actual numbers changes doesn't take long to put in, most of the time is spent on the testers seeing the interactions this has for the player while using the champ and defending against the champ, which that time is equal regardless of how major or minor a numbers increase is.
Maybe it’s not as evident to you as it is to me but when the buff guy has x allotted hours to improve champions and can use a small portion of those hours to tweak a few smaller things to one champion he can then use the remaining hours for those champions who need more of his attention while still lifting the floor up and increasing the desirability of the most champions as possible.
Ronin is cooler now and with more damage to boot. To bad so sad, Sorry you didn’t get what you wanted, this time. It’s something that will encourage more players to pick up and play the champion which is the goal here.
It doesn't take longer to change values whether it's smaller or bigger. It takes the exact same amount of time. That's a one dev job and no more than an hour of their time at most (unless they're really incapable).
The other members of the dev team would also work on the other buffs so it doesn't take time away either. That's how a dev team works. It's not one guy doing all the buffs. Once a change is made, they can push it out to the testers EXTREMELY fast (I've had days where I've had 4 new test builds come out in a single day that all needed their own full smoke-tests).
Your assumption is that this will make more people want to pick up Ronin, and my assumption is that the buff was so minor that we won't see a larger mark up in Ronin usage outside of those who want to see what changed and realise it's not much at all.
But please, I'd like to hear your experience on working in Games Development as a professional to prove me otherwise wrong.
I tire of your fallacious arguments. Here you have an argument from authority, your authority when the only authority is that of the Kabam Devs and office which you are not privy to.
Sorry you didn’t get what you wanted. Boohoo. Devil’s advocate? He should fire you, too emotionally invested imo.
Bro...he is right. Doesnt take someone capable more than an hour at most. And for the same someone who just worked on this minor ronin buff to redo or add something today that the playerbase wanted...itd take probably less than half and hour, if that.
Is something better than nothing? Takes a special person to argue against that.
I'll play devils advocate. If you know you're not getting anything you can't be disappointed by not receiving anything. When you're expecting something, you can be either pleasantly surprised or bitterly disappointed.
Is something better than nothing? Takes a special person to argue against that.
I'll play devils advocate. If you know you're not getting anything you can't be disappointed by not receiving anything. When you're expecting something, you can be either pleasantly surprised or bitterly disappointed.
I'll play Devil's Prosecutor. "If I don't like it I'm fine with taking it away from everyone else whether I get anything back in return or not" is a pretty sociopathic position for a player of a massively multiplayer game.
I'll answer both these at the same time since I'm lazy.
(Before I start though, I have no abject feelings either way and have no actual personal feeling toward most buffs in general)
Tune ups as they currently stand are pretty insignificant with how Kabam seems to want to push them as buffs. They do very minor changes to otherwise okay or decent champs, for the most part. These types of tune ups I think they absolutely could do away with.
However a good example of a tune up was p2099. A below average champ who, with some adjustments to his numbers (and how his overdrive mechanic works), became an above average champ. These are the types of tune up buffs that should be focused on.
In the Ronin situation, they took an above average champ and made changes that are overall very minor. That I don't see as a benefit to the playerbase, nor as a good investment for Kabams workload. I doubt we'll see a marked uptick in Ronin usage even after the work they've put in.
However, taking champs that have a solid kit, but are lacking in terms of damage output (someone like Hood) should absolutely have a Value Only tune up to bring them in line with both the content is being released, and with other champs who favour utility over damage for the most part.
TL;DR for those that don't want to read. Do away with minor adjustments to already decent champs. Give bigger value updates to below average champs with utility that's already present.
The change to Ronin is significant with just a tiny tweak, wait for the game play.
*ask yourself if being able to recklessly dahs into your opponent while throwing out big bleeds and big yellow numbers sounds fun.
He could already achieve decent yellow numbers prior to this already. Again the point is why do minor adjustments to a decent champ, when they could focus on under average champs that need larger value only updates.
And now he’s able to put out bigger numbers while also being able to regularly evade which allows him to maintain a highly aggressive play style which he didn’t have before.
Why tweak a few numbers which took next to nothing instead of devoting countless hours to others? Smh
You realise the amount of time that both these numbers changes took would result in the same amount of work hours right? I've worked in the games industry for major developers and publishers, the actual numbers changes doesn't take long to put in, most of the time is spent on the testers seeing the interactions this has for the player while using the champ and defending against the champ, which that time is equal regardless of how major or minor a numbers increase is.
As someone who has worked in the games industry, you should know that a) what players perceive performance to be and what the game developers data tells them performance is can often be very different and b) which things developers work on has less to do with the amount of time it takes to make the change itself, and more to do with the constellation of schedule and resource factors surrounding the change.
For example, the players might think champion A needs a buff way more than champion B because B is mediocre but A is horrible. But the devs might see in the actual player data that A does better in the hands of players than B, which matters more to the developers than which one appears to be better to vocal players. This could be because A is actually better and the players are wrong, or it could be because B has issues that don't affect vocal players but do affect average players. Take Stark Spiderman. It should seem obvious that his offensive performance would be high, but none of us knows if the data shows that. It could show his performance as much lower than we think, maybe not horrible but not as high as it seems on paper, because he also encourages a dangerous play style that gets him killed more often than most champs in the hands of the average player. This is exactly the sort of thing player communities tend to be blind to.
Even if we decide that A needs a buff more than B, lots of things could happen next. Maybe developer X understands A better than developer Y, so she is the logical choice to update A. We assign champ A to developer X, then developer X gets busy. Meanwhile developer Y gets assigned champion B, because they are busy and B is the lower priority champ anyway, then the project Y is working on gets stalled and they now have time to work on a champ update. So then B gets worked on how, while A gets stalled while X works on something else.
I've had some experience working with developers on simple and complex system changes. The time to change numbers is immaterial. I worked on a system design for a project that took about four months from start of project to go live. It took me about five hours to literally write down all the data for that project. It took me a week of analysis and thinking to decide how best to arrive at those numbers. It then took fifteen weeks for that to be reviewed, tested, re-reviewed, commented on, adjusted for feedback (the one change I made related to feedback took exactly fifteen minutes to implement on my side) retested, packaged, and pushed live. If someone else had started a project of similar scale, there would have been literally no way to predict which one would have gone live first. Seeing what goes live when tells you almost nothing about how the developers are initially prioritizing things. Schedules are often too dynamic and too fluid for that to be true.
And all of this makes a presumption, and that is that the devs know how much to change numbers before they start changing numbers. When they approach changing a champ, they don't know if small numerical changes will be enough or larger ones will be necessary. So it is impossible to sort the champions based on how big a numbers change they need. If they knew with any sort of accuracy how large the changes needed to be, they wouldn't have designed them too low in the first place. The fact that they are too low tells you the developers cannot tell just by looking at them how large the numbers should actually be. Honestly players can't tell either, but we can't convince them of that. But we can at least convince them that the devs can't tell, because by definition any champ whose numbers are too low is a champ the devs could not judge accurately just by looking at it.
Should Mole Man, Mister Fantastic, Terrax, Odin, Angela and Punisher 2099 be reverted back to the way they used to be?
Tune Up buffs can be outstanding for a ton of champions yet to be buffed.
I absolutely agree. Tune ups have been hugely beneficial to a lot of people’s rosters. Think about someone like Doc Oc getting a slight tune up, he could be even more useful than he already is. Or invisible woman, man thing, mr sinister. So many champions with interesting kits with a lot of potential that could be amazing with a good tuneup.
I just hope kabam aren’t too shy about bumping numbers of champs like this.
Is something better than nothing? Takes a special person to argue against that.
I'll play devils advocate. If you know you're not getting anything you can't be disappointed by not receiving anything. When you're expecting something, you can be either pleasantly surprised or bitterly disappointed.
Is something better than nothing? Takes a special person to argue against that.
I'll play devils advocate. If you know you're not getting anything you can't be disappointed by not receiving anything. When you're expecting something, you can be either pleasantly surprised or bitterly disappointed.
I'll play Devil's Prosecutor. "If I don't like it I'm fine with taking it away from everyone else whether I get anything back in return or not" is a pretty sociopathic position for a player of a massively multiplayer game.
I'll answer both these at the same time since I'm lazy.
(Before I start though, I have no abject feelings either way and have no actual personal feeling toward most buffs in general)
Tune ups as they currently stand are pretty insignificant with how Kabam seems to want to push them as buffs. They do very minor changes to otherwise okay or decent champs, for the most part. These types of tune ups I think they absolutely could do away with.
However a good example of a tune up was p2099. A below average champ who, with some adjustments to his numbers (and how his overdrive mechanic works), became an above average champ. These are the types of tune up buffs that should be focused on.
In the Ronin situation, they took an above average champ and made changes that are overall very minor. That I don't see as a benefit to the playerbase, nor as a good investment for Kabams workload. I doubt we'll see a marked uptick in Ronin usage even after the work they've put in.
However, taking champs that have a solid kit, but are lacking in terms of damage output (someone like Hood) should absolutely have a Value Only tune up to bring them in line with both the content is being released, and with other champs who favour utility over damage for the most part.
TL;DR for those that don't want to read. Do away with minor adjustments to already decent champs. Give bigger value updates to below average champs with utility that's already present.
The change to Ronin is significant with just a tiny tweak, wait for the game play.
*ask yourself if being able to recklessly dahs into your opponent while throwing out big bleeds and big yellow numbers sounds fun.
He could already achieve decent yellow numbers prior to this already. Again the point is why do minor adjustments to a decent champ, when they could focus on under average champs that need larger value only updates.
And now he’s able to put out bigger numbers while also being able to regularly evade which allows him to maintain a highly aggressive play style which he didn’t have before.
Why tweak a few numbers which took next to nothing instead of devoting countless hours to others? Smh
You realise the amount of time that both these numbers changes took would result in the same amount of work hours right? I've worked in the games industry for major developers and publishers, the actual numbers changes doesn't take long to put in, most of the time is spent on the testers seeing the interactions this has for the player while using the champ and defending against the champ, which that time is equal regardless of how major or minor a numbers increase is.
As someone who has worked in the games industry, you should know that a) what players perceive performance to be and what the game developers data tells them performance is can often be very different and b) which things developers work on has less to do with the amount of time it takes to make the change itself, and more to do with the constellation of schedule and resource factors surrounding the change.
For example, the players might think champion A needs a buff way more than champion B because B is mediocre but A is horrible. But the devs might see in the actual player data that A does better in the hands of players than B, which matters more to the developers than which one appears to be better to vocal players. This could be because A is actually better and the players are wrong, or it could be because B has issues that don't affect vocal players but do affect average players. Take Stark Spiderman. It should seem obvious that his offensive performance would be high, but none of us knows if the data shows that. It could show his performance as much lower than we think, maybe not horrible but not as high as it seems on paper, because he also encourages a dangerous play style that gets him killed more often than most champs in the hands of the average player. This is exactly the sort of thing player communities tend to be blind to.
Even if we decide that A needs a buff more than B, lots of things could happen next. Maybe developer X understands A better than developer Y, so she is the logical choice to update A. We assign champ A to developer X, then developer X gets busy. Meanwhile developer Y gets assigned champion B, because they are busy and B is the lower priority champ anyway, then the project Y is working on gets stalled and they now have time to work on a champ update. So then B gets worked on how, while A gets stalled while X works on something else.
I've had some experience working with developers on simple and complex system changes. The time to change numbers is immaterial. I worked on a system design for a project that took about four months from start of project to go live. It took me about five hours to literally write down all the data for that project. It took me a week of analysis and thinking to decide how best to arrive at those numbers. It then took fifteen weeks for that to be reviewed, tested, re-reviewed, commented on, adjusted for feedback (the one change I made related to feedback took exactly fifteen minutes to implement on my side) retested, packaged, and pushed live. If someone else had started a project of similar scale, there would have been literally no way to predict which one would have gone live first. Seeing what goes live when tells you almost nothing about how the developers are initially prioritizing things. Schedules are often too dynamic and too fluid for that to be true.
And all of this makes a presumption, and that is that the devs know how much to change numbers before they start changing numbers. When they approach changing a champ, they don't know if small numerical changes will be enough or larger ones will be necessary. So it is impossible to sort the champions based on how big a numbers change they need. If they knew with any sort of accuracy how large the changes needed to be, they wouldn't have designed them too low in the first place. The fact that they are too low tells you the developers cannot tell just by looking at them how large the numbers should actually be. Honestly players can't tell either, but we can't convince them of that. But we can at least convince them that the devs can't tell, because by definition any champ whose numbers are too low is a champ the devs could not judge accurately just by looking at it.
Yes, while a lot of what you said is true, my overall point still stands. We know that Kabam has the metrics on champion usage, they also are very aware of the kits available for each of their champions and which have been under performing from in relevant content (relevant here meaning not Arena fodder or Incursions which allows for all champions to be potentially broken and they are aware of that).
With the description of how you're portraying the work of the developers, it seems like you're under the assumption that they only have a small crew that would be working on the active development of the game. Usually when a developer is assigned to a task, their role is exactly that task until completed in which they send it back to the QA department for testing, and they don't tend to get pulled off it unless something requires the attention of a larger team to fix (say persistent charges) or something that's absolutely game breaking from a functional standpoint. But for a numerical change, as you stated later, it can take as little as 15 minutes to implement a change based on feedback.
Now I can understand the idea that a whole project can take months to complete, I've been on several large projects that were 6 months to a year of just the testing phase before the game launched, but comparing an adjustment to the whole cycle of a project is a bit insincere. A lot of the planning and production is done within the production team, who relay that information to the developers, who then pass on their builds to the QA teams, and it goes back up the chain. And yes, the time can vary massively of how long that can take, but even with a small team working in an Agile environment with the proper bug data base (such as Jira or Devsuite) can get those processes through much faster for small adjustments than what an entire project would take from planning to implementation. As a final point, at least in the games industry, schedules are very strict and not fluid, hence the massive crunch issues that larger development teams face for various reasons. (Nothing like being told you have 3 days to test two full games and their dlcs including every available story campaign in each of those. Yes. It happened. Yes. It was miserable.)
As for the final point, we do know they have a list of champs and for what kind of buffs they'll be receiving be it overhaul, tune up etc. From a personal standpoint and nothing more here, it would be nice if they would invest in tune ups that have a larger benefit for a champion that truly needs it in that list, rather than a Ronin who was already seen as balanced by the devs.
Is something better than nothing? Takes a special person to argue against that.
I'll play devils advocate. If you know you're not getting anything you can't be disappointed by not receiving anything. When you're expecting something, you can be either pleasantly surprised or bitterly disappointed.
Is something better than nothing? Takes a special person to argue against that.
I'll play devils advocate. If you know you're not getting anything you can't be disappointed by not receiving anything. When you're expecting something, you can be either pleasantly surprised or bitterly disappointed.
I'll play Devil's Prosecutor. "If I don't like it I'm fine with taking it away from everyone else whether I get anything back in return or not" is a pretty sociopathic position for a player of a massively multiplayer game.
I'll answer both these at the same time since I'm lazy.
(Before I start though, I have no abject feelings either way and have no actual personal feeling toward most buffs in general)
Tune ups as they currently stand are pretty insignificant with how Kabam seems to want to push them as buffs. They do very minor changes to otherwise okay or decent champs, for the most part. These types of tune ups I think they absolutely could do away with.
However a good example of a tune up was p2099. A below average champ who, with some adjustments to his numbers (and how his overdrive mechanic works), became an above average champ. These are the types of tune up buffs that should be focused on.
In the Ronin situation, they took an above average champ and made changes that are overall very minor. That I don't see as a benefit to the playerbase, nor as a good investment for Kabams workload. I doubt we'll see a marked uptick in Ronin usage even after the work they've put in.
However, taking champs that have a solid kit, but are lacking in terms of damage output (someone like Hood) should absolutely have a Value Only tune up to bring them in line with both the content is being released, and with other champs who favour utility over damage for the most part.
TL;DR for those that don't want to read. Do away with minor adjustments to already decent champs. Give bigger value updates to below average champs with utility that's already present.
The change to Ronin is significant with just a tiny tweak, wait for the game play.
*ask yourself if being able to recklessly dahs into your opponent while throwing out big bleeds and big yellow numbers sounds fun.
He could already achieve decent yellow numbers prior to this already. Again the point is why do minor adjustments to a decent champ, when they could focus on under average champs that need larger value only updates.
And now he’s able to put out bigger numbers while also being able to regularly evade which allows him to maintain a highly aggressive play style which he didn’t have before.
Why tweak a few numbers which took next to nothing instead of devoting countless hours to others? Smh
You realise the amount of time that both these numbers changes took would result in the same amount of work hours right? I've worked in the games industry for major developers and publishers, the actual numbers changes doesn't take long to put in, most of the time is spent on the testers seeing the interactions this has for the player while using the champ and defending against the champ, which that time is equal regardless of how major or minor a numbers increase is.
Maybe it’s not as evident to you as it is to me but when the buff guy has x allotted hours to improve champions and can use a small portion of those hours to tweak a few smaller things to one champion he can then use the remaining hours for those champions who need more of his attention while still lifting the floor up and increasing the desirability of the most champions as possible.
Ronin is cooler now and with more damage to boot. To bad so sad, Sorry you didn’t get what you wanted, this time. It’s something that will encourage more players to pick up and play the champion which is the goal here.
It doesn't take longer to change values whether it's smaller or bigger. It takes the exact same amount of time. That's a one dev job and no more than an hour of their time at most (unless they're really incapable).
The other members of the dev team would also work on the other buffs so it doesn't take time away either. That's how a dev team works. It's not one guy doing all the buffs. Once a change is made, they can push it out to the testers EXTREMELY fast (I've had days where I've had 4 new test builds come out in a single day that all needed their own full smoke-tests).
Your assumption is that this will make more people want to pick up Ronin, and my assumption is that the buff was so minor that we won't see a larger mark up in Ronin usage outside of those who want to see what changed and realise it's not much at all.
But please, I'd like to hear your experience on working in Games Development as a professional to prove me otherwise wrong.
I tire of your fallacious arguments. Here you have an argument from authority, your authority when the only authority is that of the Kabam Devs and office which you are not privy to.
Sorry you didn’t get what you wanted. Boohoo. Devil’s advocate? He should fire you, too emotionally invested imo.
Bro...he is right. Doesnt take someone capable more than an hour at most. And for the same someone who just worked on this minor ronin buff to redo or add something today that the playerbase wanted...itd take probably less than half and hour, if that.
Bro, he’s not. Those are some grand assumptions from top to bottom. Must’ve taken the same classes as the other guy when it comes to advocacy.
What makes you think Kabam are looking to cater their tweaks to your “player base”? Let’s be clear that is your description and your desire and you are backing it up with what you believe to be a majority of players.
That’s not what this is about in the slightest. This is about minimally tweaking a few things that makes players who are on the fence about a champion or have poo pooed them in the past take a second look and reconsider them because they are actually a good champion.
There has been at least one guy (I think many) who keep saying Torch’s tweak made him the “god tier” he is today. It did nothing for his strong match ups but what it did was make him easier to maintain and therefore more desirable to players for his sub optimal match ups.
That’s what they’ve done with Ronin here, they took a huge portion of the penalty away from playing him sub optimally while slightly bumping up his damage which is going to make playing him more enjoyable and allow players to feel less penalized when they miss an intercept and have to start back at zero.
This isn’t about creating the next Magneto, this is about giving players more agency in their decisions/options by tweaking a penalty within a characters kit.
It takes a special kind of person to say this shouldn’t be done for anyone at anytime. This is Ronin’s moment stop crapping on it because it didn’t meet your expectations.
It just seems to be a waste of time for the buff designers and players if they are going to make lackluster changes that barely benefit the champion. You might think I am overreacting but Kabam Miike said that from now on tuneups will be similar to this. No improvements were really made except barely adding to the damage Ronin has, which he didn't need. IMO they should do one moderate update and one overhaul, then next month have 2 moderates updates and one overhaul, and keep alternating. What do you guys think?
They already said that this is a specific team that's responsible for all the buffs so they wouldn't be working on other content.
Tuneups don’t need to go, they just need to be used more selectively. Ronin, Nova and arguably Masacre are examples of champs that needed more than a tuneup, Angela too. P99 and Moleman are examples of champs that just needed values.
I agree with your point, definitely not your examples.
Comments
As I said, I don't have any personal experience of the champ but this seems like a nice little buff. Not the biggest, but it doesn't seem like he needs a big one.
Edit: as for the topic of this thread, no, I don't think we should do away with these kinds of buffs. I quite like some decent champions getting mostly QoL updates rather than just amazing new damage numbers or cool new utilities. That's perfectly fine, in my opinion. This feels very Masacre-esque, and I liked that buff.
Tune Up buffs can be outstanding for a ton of champions yet to be buffed.
For example, the players might think champion A needs a buff way more than champion B because B is mediocre but A is horrible. But the devs might see in the actual player data that A does better in the hands of players than B, which matters more to the developers than which one appears to be better to vocal players. This could be because A is actually better and the players are wrong, or it could be because B has issues that don't affect vocal players but do affect average players. Take Stark Spiderman. It should seem obvious that his offensive performance would be high, but none of us knows if the data shows that. It could show his performance as much lower than we think, maybe not horrible but not as high as it seems on paper, because he also encourages a dangerous play style that gets him killed more often than most champs in the hands of the average player. This is exactly the sort of thing player communities tend to be blind to.
Even if we decide that A needs a buff more than B, lots of things could happen next. Maybe developer X understands A better than developer Y, so she is the logical choice to update A. We assign champ A to developer X, then developer X gets busy. Meanwhile developer Y gets assigned champion B, because they are busy and B is the lower priority champ anyway, then the project Y is working on gets stalled and they now have time to work on a champ update. So then B gets worked on how, while A gets stalled while X works on something else.
I've had some experience working with developers on simple and complex system changes. The time to change numbers is immaterial. I worked on a system design for a project that took about four months from start of project to go live. It took me about five hours to literally write down all the data for that project. It took me a week of analysis and thinking to decide how best to arrive at those numbers. It then took fifteen weeks for that to be reviewed, tested, re-reviewed, commented on, adjusted for feedback (the one change I made related to feedback took exactly fifteen minutes to implement on my side) retested, packaged, and pushed live. If someone else had started a project of similar scale, there would have been literally no way to predict which one would have gone live first. Seeing what goes live when tells you almost nothing about how the developers are initially prioritizing things. Schedules are often too dynamic and too fluid for that to be true.
And all of this makes a presumption, and that is that the devs know how much to change numbers before they start changing numbers. When they approach changing a champ, they don't know if small numerical changes will be enough or larger ones will be necessary. So it is impossible to sort the champions based on how big a numbers change they need. If they knew with any sort of accuracy how large the changes needed to be, they wouldn't have designed them too low in the first place. The fact that they are too low tells you the developers cannot tell just by looking at them how large the numbers should actually be. Honestly players can't tell either, but we can't convince them of that. But we can at least convince them that the devs can't tell, because by definition any champ whose numbers are too low is a champ the devs could not judge accurately just by looking at it.
I just hope kabam aren’t too shy about bumping numbers of champs like this.
With the description of how you're portraying the work of the developers, it seems like you're under the assumption that they only have a small crew that would be working on the active development of the game. Usually when a developer is assigned to a task, their role is exactly that task until completed in which they send it back to the QA department for testing, and they don't tend to get pulled off it unless something requires the attention of a larger team to fix (say persistent charges) or something that's absolutely game breaking from a functional standpoint. But for a numerical change, as you stated later, it can take as little as 15 minutes to implement a change based on feedback.
Now I can understand the idea that a whole project can take months to complete, I've been on several large projects that were 6 months to a year of just the testing phase before the game launched, but comparing an adjustment to the whole cycle of a project is a bit insincere. A lot of the planning and production is done within the production team, who relay that information to the developers, who then pass on their builds to the QA teams, and it goes back up the chain. And yes, the time can vary massively of how long that can take, but even with a small team working in an Agile environment with the proper bug data base (such as Jira or Devsuite) can get those processes through much faster for small adjustments than what an entire project would take from planning to implementation. As a final point, at least in the games industry, schedules are very strict and not fluid, hence the massive crunch issues that larger development teams face for various reasons. (Nothing like being told you have 3 days to test two full games and their dlcs including every available story campaign in each of those. Yes. It happened. Yes. It was miserable.)
As for the final point, we do know they have a list of champs and for what kind of buffs they'll be receiving be it overhaul, tune up etc. From a personal standpoint and nothing more here, it would be nice if they would invest in tune ups that have a larger benefit for a champion that truly needs it in that list, rather than a Ronin who was already seen as balanced by the devs.
What makes you think Kabam are looking to cater their tweaks to your “player base”? Let’s be clear that is your description and your desire and you are backing it up with what you believe to be a majority of players.
That’s not what this is about in the slightest. This is about minimally tweaking a few things that makes players who are on the fence about a champion or have poo pooed them in the past take a second look and reconsider them because they are actually a good champion.
There has been at least one guy (I think many) who keep saying Torch’s tweak made him the “god tier” he is today. It did nothing for his strong match ups but what it did was make him easier to maintain and therefore more desirable to players for his sub optimal match ups.
That’s what they’ve done with Ronin here, they took a huge portion of the penalty away from playing him sub optimally while slightly bumping up his damage which is going to make playing him more enjoyable and allow players to feel less penalized when they miss an intercept and have to start back at zero.
This isn’t about creating the next Magneto, this is about giving players more agency in their decisions/options by tweaking a penalty within a characters kit.
It takes a special kind of person to say this shouldn’t be done for anyone at anytime. This is Ronin’s moment stop crapping on it because it didn’t meet your expectations.