Re: The Root Situation
Kabam Miike
Moderator Moderator › Posts: 8,269
Hey everybody,
As many of you might know, there was recently a Bug fix that went out without the level of communication necessary that affected how Champions react when rooted.
First, we want to apologize for this situation. It was not our intent to leave any of this information out of our release notes or make any changes silently. We do not purposely make silent changes to the game, but there are processes in place that, in this case, didn’t work, and this information was not disseminated the way it should have been.
Instead of asking the Devs a bunch of questions, and then translating them into communications for you, I’ve asked the Developers directly to write something up, and share it with you. This covers why we made these changes, and where we messed up on the communication process.
This was a problem because there is a big difference between designing a character that reduces specials and grants openings, and designing a character that prevents them.
Zemo in particular had the most aggressive use of the mechanic yet, because we were evaluating it in the former terms and not the latter. As a team, we knew a change was necessary, but had to decide what change to pursue. There were some good arguments made in favor of removing the special lock entirely and leaning on the very high heavy bias already present, since that was the original intent behind the mechanic. We decided against this because, as we said earlier, no AI bias is ever 100% reliable, and instead chose the middle ground of leaving the AI bias alone, preserving the inability for the defender to throw Special Attack 1 or 2, and just unlocking their Special 3.
This account may cause some confusion because root didn’t use to cause the defender’s power bar to grey out, a visual we normally associate with special locks, and now does. This was an accidental knock-on of the prep we needed to do for the change, but the change below three bars is exclusively visual.
Some of you may also wonder why defenders could break out of Spider-Man (Sorcerer Supreme)’s root before if root prevented all specials, and that’s actually because there was a 0.1s delay before his root activated to allow for VFX to kick in, during which the defender could activate a special because of the way Special 3 animations work. We have actually replaced this delay with an invisible special lock to make his root mechanic more consistent with other characters and easier to use.
At the time, we were unaware of the extent to which players were relying on the existing interaction to use Kraven, or we would’ve mentioned him by name as well. It was very much our mistake for not understanding that, and we apologize.
When we did ultimately make the call that we were going to be fixing all root effects, we should have updated that post, but didn’t have systems in place for doing so. We’ll be amending our internal tracking process to make sure that the Trello board is better up to date with new developments going forward.
Second, we decided not to discuss this in Zemo’s rebalancing post because we sincerely did not consider it to be part of his rebalancing process. This is, in retrospect, another mistake on our part. “Root-locking” the opponent was never one of his goals, most players weren’t doing it anyway, and we weren’t holding the outliers against him when evaluating his data, so it didn’t factor into whether we considered him balanced or not. Additionally, we considered the bug public knowledge due to the Trello board.
Lastly, we missed this change in the most recent patch notes. Writing patch notes is a very collaborative process that requires many different teams working together, and it’s easy for something to slip through the cracks. We will be re-evaluating the way in which we collect information for our patch notes in the future to help ensure that something like this doesn’t slip through the cracks again.
Rooted defenders will be more likely to perform heavy attacks and unable to activate Special Attack 1 or 2, and any root that does not match this behavior should be considered to be bugged unless stated otherwise.Dealing with the Current Situation
Because this bug was publicly announced via the Trello board during the 3-month window where Zemo was subject to change, we do not plan to issue any rank-down tickets for him, nor do we plan to offer any for Spider-Man, who is actually stronger after this change than before.
However, because Kraven is an older Champions and was not mentioned as affected by this bug in the past, we do plan to offer rank-down tickets to anyone with a ranked up 5 or 6-star Kraven as of the time of this post. Only those that have ranked up Kraven prior to this message going live (2:30pm PT on July 14, 2023) will receive those Rank Down tickets, so please do not rank up Kraven expecting a Rank Down ticket in the future. We plan for these to go out before the end of the month.
Once again, we want to apologize for our misunderstanding around Kraven and for the failures in communication, and will be making process changes to prevent repeats.
As many of you might know, there was recently a Bug fix that went out without the level of communication necessary that affected how Champions react when rooted.
First, we want to apologize for this situation. It was not our intent to leave any of this information out of our release notes or make any changes silently. We do not purposely make silent changes to the game, but there are processes in place that, in this case, didn’t work, and this information was not disseminated the way it should have been.
Instead of asking the Devs a bunch of questions, and then translating them into communications for you, I’ve asked the Developers directly to write something up, and share it with you. This covers why we made these changes, and where we messed up on the communication process.
History of the bug and identifying it:
Back in January as Zemo was heading out the door, someone made an offhand comment about how the defender’s heavy bias while rooted seemed really reliable in keeping the opponent from throwing specials, to the point where they couldn’t remember it ever not working. No AI bias should ever be 100%, and that was not the intent with which we had been building characters. Our engineers informed us that root fully special locked the defender, preventing all three special attacks, and always had.This was a problem because there is a big difference between designing a character that reduces specials and grants openings, and designing a character that prevents them.
Zemo in particular had the most aggressive use of the mechanic yet, because we were evaluating it in the former terms and not the latter. As a team, we knew a change was necessary, but had to decide what change to pursue. There were some good arguments made in favor of removing the special lock entirely and leaning on the very high heavy bias already present, since that was the original intent behind the mechanic. We decided against this because, as we said earlier, no AI bias is ever 100% reliable, and instead chose the middle ground of leaving the AI bias alone, preserving the inability for the defender to throw Special Attack 1 or 2, and just unlocking their Special 3.
This account may cause some confusion because root didn’t use to cause the defender’s power bar to grey out, a visual we normally associate with special locks, and now does. This was an accidental knock-on of the prep we needed to do for the change, but the change below three bars is exclusively visual.
Some of you may also wonder why defenders could break out of Spider-Man (Sorcerer Supreme)’s root before if root prevented all specials, and that’s actually because there was a 0.1s delay before his root activated to allow for VFX to kick in, during which the defender could activate a special because of the way Special 3 animations work. We have actually replaced this delay with an invisible special lock to make his root mechanic more consistent with other characters and easier to use.
How did we Miss This?
First, we announced that Zemo was bugged via the Trello board as quickly as we could. This is why we have created that board, so we can share identified bugs as soon as we know about them, regardless of if we know what the resolution will be. At the time, we were still having conversations about how broad the fix needed to be, and so the listed bug only referred to Zemo.At the time, we were unaware of the extent to which players were relying on the existing interaction to use Kraven, or we would’ve mentioned him by name as well. It was very much our mistake for not understanding that, and we apologize.
When we did ultimately make the call that we were going to be fixing all root effects, we should have updated that post, but didn’t have systems in place for doing so. We’ll be amending our internal tracking process to make sure that the Trello board is better up to date with new developments going forward.
Second, we decided not to discuss this in Zemo’s rebalancing post because we sincerely did not consider it to be part of his rebalancing process. This is, in retrospect, another mistake on our part. “Root-locking” the opponent was never one of his goals, most players weren’t doing it anyway, and we weren’t holding the outliers against him when evaluating his data, so it didn’t factor into whether we considered him balanced or not. Additionally, we considered the bug public knowledge due to the Trello board.
Lastly, we missed this change in the most recent patch notes. Writing patch notes is a very collaborative process that requires many different teams working together, and it’s easy for something to slip through the cracks. We will be re-evaluating the way in which we collect information for our patch notes in the future to help ensure that something like this doesn’t slip through the cracks again.
Root in the Future
Moving forward, this is how we intend for all Root effects to function unless otherwise specified, and will be expanding the in-game glossary to clarify as much.Rooted defenders will be more likely to perform heavy attacks and unable to activate Special Attack 1 or 2, and any root that does not match this behavior should be considered to be bugged unless stated otherwise.
Dealing with the Current Situation
Because this bug was publicly announced via the Trello board during the 3-month window where Zemo was subject to change, we do not plan to issue any rank-down tickets for him, nor do we plan to offer any for Spider-Man, who is actually stronger after this change than before. However, because Kraven is an older Champions and was not mentioned as affected by this bug in the past, we do plan to offer rank-down tickets to anyone with a ranked up 5 or 6-star Kraven as of the time of this post. Only those that have ranked up Kraven prior to this message going live (2:30pm PT on July 14, 2023) will receive those Rank Down tickets, so please do not rank up Kraven expecting a Rank Down ticket in the future. We plan for these to go out before the end of the month.
Once again, we want to apologize for our misunderstanding around Kraven and for the failures in communication, and will be making process changes to prevent repeats.
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